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 albums. Nothing else came close. If I never made another album it really wouldn’t matter now, my complete being is within those three. They are my DNA.”
Alomar was a vital presence on all three Berlin albums, and served as musical director on the accompanying 1978 tour. He remained a regular Bowie fixture, in the studio and on stage, for another 25 years. Still boyish and energised at 74, he continues to write, record and collaborate across a broad musical spectrum today. But he has not toured for decades, insisting his home life is “too calm and too fabulous” for such exertions. Since 2005, he has been Professor of Music & Technology at the Stevens Institute in Hoboken, New Jersey.
But Alomar recently broke his golden rule, consenting to go on the road one last time for the “Back to Berlin” tour. Reuniting with fellow D.A.M. veteran George Murray for their first joint performances in 45 years, these shows are intended to pay posthumous tribute to Bowie and Davis, both of whom died of cancer in 2016, just months apart. “I owe it to David, I owe it to the fans, I owe it to Dennis, I owe it to George,” Alomar says. “And last, I owe it to myself.”
The tour is also a testament to the enduring legacy of Bowie’s Berlin albums, which are still feted today as milestones in art-rock modernism. Alomar declines to reveal the full set list in our interview, but he promises a broad mix that spans the trilogy and beyond, with heavy emphasis on the powerhouse futuristic R&B that defined the D.A.M trio sound.
“Sorry y’all, there are no slow songs,” Alomar grins. “We don’t do Sorrow and Five Years and all those slow songs. They’re great classics, but it’s our time now. I don’t want to perform the greatest hits, I have to be mindful that I’m there to honour David Bowie’s legacy by performing songs that have never been done before. I’m there to honour Dennis Davis by performing songs that we performed on. And in a way, I’m honouring myself by waiting so damn long and finally saying: Carlos, what the hell is wrong with you? Get your ass on the road!”
Born in the Bronx in 1951, Alomar was already a seasoned session guitarist when he first met Bowie in New York in 1974. Though just 23, he had played with Roy Ayers, James Brown, Chuck Berry and many more. His first Bowie album was the luscious “plastic soul” project Young Americans in 1975, for which he enlisted his singer wife Robin Clark and childhood friend Luther Vandross on backing vocals. It was that album that spawned “Fame”, Bowie’s first US Number One hit single.
In the summer of 1977, the D.A.M. trio reconvened with Bowie at the famous Hansa Ton studios on Köthener Strasse in West Berlin to work on Heroes, their third album together after Station to Station and Low. The mood in the studio was positive, with Bowie and Eno trading Peter Cook and Dudley Moore comedy routines between electronic noodlings. Meanwhile. producer Tony Visconti was conducting an illicit affair with backing singer Antonia Maass that partly inspired the title track’s defiant, mock-heroic lyric.
The foundations for most tracks were laid down in a matter of days, prompting a normally exacting Eno to remark “Shit, it can’t be this easy”. Bowie and Visconti favoured one or two takes, with some rough edges left in the mix. The album’s darkly humorous, swashbuckling, boisterous energy sounded very different to Bowie’s previous album, the introverted inner-space odyssey Low, though Bowie himself insisted there was desperation behind the triumphalist swagger of “Heroes”.
“It’s louder and harder and played with more energy,” Bowie told me in 2001. “But lyrically it seems far more psychotic. By now I was living full time in Berlin so my own mood was good. Buoyant even. But those lyrics come from a nook in the unconscious. Still a lot of house cleaning going on, I feel.”
Nicknamed “the Hall by the Wall” by Bowie, Hansa Ton was close to the former Berlin Wall and its infamous “death strip” that divided the city’s capitalist West from the communist DDR. Alomar remembers looking out of the studio window at the nearby watchtowers, barbed wire, and bombed-out buildings: “a landscape that offers you nothing but nothing.” Witnessing the daily systematic oppression of East German citizens, he recalls, struck a particularly uneasy note with the D.A.M trio’s African-American members.
“How it disturbs you can be different than how it disturbs me,” Alomar explains. “Look, we don’t want to put a black and white thing in there, but we have to remember that sometimes the consciousness of a people that are enslaved is a little different than people that aren’t enslaved. We understand the subjectivity of being able to know that you were conquered. So we don’t look at these things the same way. You can look at it in a certain way that would say: I hope that never happens to me. I can put it in another way: it did happen to me.”
Overall, however, Alomar remembers late 1970s Berlin as a hugely creative, inspirational place. “Why? No outside stimulation from our homeland,” he says. “We were incommunicado and MIA from our loved ones, and from everybody. We were able to absorb everything that was put in front of us because we were running away from boredom. When Bowie says we’re going out, we are fucking going out! Where are we going? What the hell do you know? You don’t even know the names of the streets!”
Bowie later called Berlin his “clinic”, and would enthuse about the fresh sense of well-being that the city brought him: luxury food shopping at KaDeWe, browsing Die Brücke museum in Grunewald, carefree road trips to Southern Germany’s Black Forest, not to mention “long all-afternoon lunches at the Wannsee on winter days. The place had a glass roof and was surrounded by trees and still exuded an atmosphere of the long-gone Berlin of the Twenties.” Very Christopher Isherwood.
Meanwhile, Bowie and his entourage were also exploring the city’s darkened back street spots and late-night erogenous zones: the gay clubs and dive bars, Cafe Exil on Paul-Linke-Ufer in Kreuzberg, the Dschungel discotheque on Nürnberger Strasse in Schöneberg. Plus, of course, the legendary queer cabaret club Chez Romy Haag. All beacons of bohemian 1970s and 1980s Berlin. All long gone.
Plunged into this boozy, druggy, all-hours demi-monde with Bowie and Iggy as his tour guides, Alomar earned a reputation as a happily married, clean-living Buddhist. He claims the reality was a little more ambivalent—that he was simply more discreet and careful with his public image.
“While David Bowie was doing all these things, myself and my wife Robin were already Buddhist,” he says. “Now, let’s understand each other. We are not pure. I like smoking a joint. But I realised very early on: damn Carlos, you can’t even handle a joint! If I take two or three puffs, I’m good. If I can’t handle a joint, why the hell would I start doing anything else? So whether we did drugs or not, if I feel like going to my room to do something, I’m not ever going to let anybody see me sloppy.”
All the same, Alomar insists he embraced his hedonistic Berlin baptism with youthful enthusiasm, pushing at every open door, treating every invitation as a learning experience. “Every suggestion Bowie makes, you say yes,” Alomar grins. “Every suggestion a fan makes at Romy’s place, you say yes. You might never get home, ever. And then the odyssey begins. When we’re with David Bowie, we take the odyssey option.”