For the record

The story of recording Heroes, as told by co-producer/engineer Tony Visconti to Sound on Sound magazine. One of many interesting bits:

"David likes to do these backing tracks, he gets very enthusiastic about them," Visconti explains, "but we send the band away very quickly and maybe keep a person like Carlos [Alomar] for an extra day or two so that we can double-track some of his parts. With 'Heroes', on the other hand, we built the track over the course of an entire week of careful overdubbing. For instance, Brian [Eno] brought his EMS Synthi with him, which is a synthesizer built in a briefcase, and it has no real keyboard — it's got a kind of flat, plastic keyboard which Brian very rarely used. He used the joystick a lot, and the oscillator banks, and he would do live dialling — they look like combination-safe rotary knobs on the three oscillator banks. Brian goes down on record as saying that he's a non-musician — he even tried unsuccessfully to have that listed as his occupation on his British passport — and, like David, he thinks very radically and from a completely different space.

All facets are covered in detail, including what to do if you are stuck in cold-war-era Berlin without a cowbell and you, well, need more cowbell.

[When] the two men wanted to add a cowbell and didn't have one immediately to hand, they sufficed with an empty tape reel of the German variety; a metal plate on which the tape basically sits. The echoey result of David Bowie and Tony Visconti alternately bending it out of shape with a drumstick was achieved not using artificial reverb, but by miking it in the large room at Hansa.

I'm not an audiophile, but I'm guessing that even if Heroes isn't one of the best songs ever written (according to the story, it was barely "written" at all), it may rank as on of the most interesting recordings made in the analog era. Again, a guess: if one is inclined to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to listen to vinyl, the artistry of the recording is probably as important as the artistry of the composition and performance recorded.