Stephen Dalton chats to Bowie guitarist and musical director Carlos Alomar about the heady Berlin years…
You only lose your Berlin virginity once—and for Carlos Alomar, David Bowie’s long-time guitarist and musical director, his first eye-opening trip to the city in its grungy bohemian heyday was a memorable experience. Today, Alomar has a six-decade global career as a rock & roll icon under his belt, but back in 1977, this Bronx-born son of a Puerto Rican preacherman had barely stepped foot out of his native New York City.
Arriving in former West Berlin to work on Bowie’s landmark Heroes album, Alomar’s extended stay is recalled as a wild whirlwind of late-night bars, 24-hour party people, and boozy trips to Romy Haag’s legendary transvestite club on Fuggerstrasse in Schöneberg. Work and life blended into a non-stop exotic cabaret.
“Oh my God! The speakeasies, the underground, the risqué burlesque-ness of it all,” he laughs. “I loved it. Romy’s place, everything. In America, our sensibilities are tuned to nine to five. We do not understand the sensibility of Europe, having brunch instead of lunch, and clubs not opening until two in the morning. It’s not America. It’s more like you’re living in The Village in America, but it’s called Berlin. It’s not debauchery or overindulgence. It’s the ability to entertain yourself in whatever manner you feel necessary.”
As Bowie’s most prolific collaborator, Alomar played on more of the late rock icon’s albums and tours than any other musician. He wrote songs too, including the hit song “Fame”, co-written with Bowie and John Lennon, Mick Jagger’s first solo effort (“She’s The Boss”) and Iggy Pop’s comeback hit “Sister Midnight.” Crucially, as founder of the all-black “D.A.M. trio”, alongside bass player George Murray and drummer Dennis Davis, Alomar brought funky swagger, jazzy texture and disco shimmer to Bowie’s most fertile period, spanning five golden years and six mighty albums, from Station to Station (1976) to Scary Monsters (1980).
At the heart of this hot creative streak, the D.A.M. trio joined Brian Eno, Tony Visconti, Robert Fripp and others on the fabled “Berlin trilogy” of boldly experimental albums that Bowie conceived during his late 1970s exile on main street, aka Hauptstrasse in Schöneberg. Low (1977), “Heroes” (1977) and Lodger (1979) were not all recorded in Berlin, but they were all made during Bowie’s intense love affair with the city where he settled in 1976, in part to escape a self-destructive spiral of cocaine addiction and occult obsession in LA. Each of these albums broke new sonic ground, from ambient electro-choral moodscapes to doomy synthesizer symphonies, chugging Krautrock homages to post-modern cut-up collages.
“They really captured, unlike anything else in that time, a sense of yearning for a future that we all knew would never come to pass,” Bowie told me in a 2001 interview. “Nothing else sounded like those a…