How Los Angeles Made David Bowie Even Crazier
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Los Angeles, a city that has fueled the dreams and delusions of countless artists, proved to be an especially chaotic chapter in David Bowie’s life. While the glitz and glamour drew many in, for Bowie, the city’s allure quickly spiraled into something more sinister. Far from a haven of inspiration, LA became the backdrop of his psychological unravelling.
The chaos wasn’t entirely unexpected. As Joni Mitchell once joked, the craziest people in America live in California, and the craziest Californians live in LA. Bowie was eccentric by nature, but in LA, even he couldn’t keep up. Rather than blending in, he stood out as someone who was already too far gone—even for a city teeming with eccentrics.
What started as a stop on the rock ‘n’ roll carousel turned into a descent into a personal hell. Bowie was already dabbling with the occult, battling drug addiction, and struggling with fame, but LA magnified everything. If he was spiraling before, Los Angeles gave him gravity to speed things up.
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When the Weird Turn Pro
Bowie’s life in LA during the mid-1970s was, by many accounts, completely off the rails. Fuelled by a near-constant intake of cocaine and a diet limited to bell peppers and milk, his physical and mental health began to deteriorate. In a city obsessed with image and illusion, Bowie’s already fragile psyche found little grounding.
He famously hired a white witch to exorcise demons from his swimming pool, which he believed was haunted. The pool, he claimed, bubbled like a possessed cauldron. The story sounds like something out of a surreal horror movie, but to Bowie, it was very real. In his mind, LA was less a place and more a haunted stage built on ancient curses and bad vibes.
The situation was compounded by his obsession with dark mysticism and Nazi occultism, fueled by stacks of esoteric books and sleepless nights. Bowie began hallucinating around the clock, convinced that forces beyond his control were manipulating his life. The line between delusion and reality blurred, and LA, with its hollow promises, only deepened the fracture.
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The Hollywood Illusion
Los Angeles represented both a playground and a trap. Bowie was simultaneously seduced by the city’s power to instantly create icons and repulsed by its plastic veneer. He famously quipped, “I’m an instant star, just add water,” acknowledging the superficial ease of fame while also mocking its emptiness.
This duality gnawed at him. He loved the speed, the spectacle, the sense of importance—but he also saw through the illusion. Unlike other stars who leaned into the fantasy, Bowie remained painfully aware of how fake it all was. That awareness didn’t protect him; it only intensified his paranoia and depression.
As he drifted through this contradictory landscape, Bowie’s mental state deteriorated further. He was physically in LA, but mentally trapped in a surreal performance of Hollywood horror. The promises of reinvention and success began to look more like a soul-stealing script that he had unwillingly agreed to perform in.
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Paranoia, Isolation, and Collapse
Bowie later admitted that his time in LA brought on the worst bout of manic depression in his life. He described feeling like his psyche had shattered, plagued by hallucinations and dread. The Manson murders had taken place near his residence, adding an extra layer of true crime paranoia to his imagined horrors.
The culture of fame, exploitation, and unchecked indulgence proved poisonous. LA’s industry machine was more interested in what Bowie could produce than what he was suffering. While he spiraled, the city kept spinning, indifferent to his unraveling. It wasn’t long before he completely disconnected from reality.
His biographer David Buckley described this period as Bowie living in a cocoon, cut off from the real world. But in LA, the “real world” is a slippery concept to begin with. Bowie didn’t just fall into madness—he walked into a mirage and realized too late that there was no way out but to leave.
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Final Exit and Lasting Scars
By 1977, Bowie’s view of Los Angeles had turned entirely venomous. He called it “the most vile piss-pot in the world” and likened the city to a corrupt movie script. His final verdict was even more scathing: LA should be wiped off the face of the earth. For Bowie, the city was beyond redemption.
Even his collaborator Brian Eno, known for being adaptable, couldn’t last long in LA. Bowie envied Eno for getting out early. It took Bowie years to recover from the damage done in the Hollywood hills. But escape didn’t mean forgetting—he carried the trauma of that period well into his later life and art.
In the end, Los Angeles didn’t make Bowie crazy—it just amplified what was already simmering beneath the surface. The city of angels didn’t break him, but it certainly tested how much madness even a Starman could handle before crashing back to Earth.
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