David Bowie

In the year of our Lord 1975, David Bowie was already a star. But he had never yet hit number 1 on the American charts. The breakthrough of the stardust alien on "The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars" had just propelled him to fifth place on the UK charts. Success had arrived, but the London dandy was restless, wary of his newfound celebrity, worried about becoming a prisoner of stardom. An anxiety that would often resurface throughout his nearly fifty-year career. "Fame itself doesn't really give you anything more than a good seat in a restaurant — he would tell Performing Songwriter — That should be obvious by now. What amazes me is how fame gets sold as the ultimate goal, and how many kids getting thrown out onto the market are convinced that whatever it takes to become famous is fine. It's a sad situation."

Then, almost by chance, along comes the song that will take him to the top of the charts. And, ironically enough, it's a biting reflection on fame and its distortions. To pull it off, though, he'll need a little help from a friend. And not just any friend.

David Bowie meets John Lennon in New York, where the former Beatle was living out his famous "lost weekend," the period of excess he spent away from Yoko Ono. The two decide to try a session together at the Electric Lady Studios, recording a cover of the Beatles' "Across The Universe." But the highlight of their collaboration will be a new song, reworked from the guitar riff that Carlos Alomar had come up with for the cover of "Footstompin'" during one of the Philly Dogs shows. At its core lies the very theme of the obsession with fame. Bowie would later recall that he and Lennon "spent hours and hours talking about fame, and what it means to no longer have a life of your own. About how much you want to be known before you are, and then, once it happens, how much you want the opposite."

Something sparks between the two of them. When Bowie invites Lennon to a jam session in early 1975, during the recording sessions for his album "Young Americans," the two of them keep coming back to that theme. Bowie improvises a rhyme between "fame" and "pain," over that unused funk riff of Alomar's. Lennon joins in almost immediately. "He had an acoustic guitar and plucked out a few notes here and there," Alomar would tell The Independent. The two friends keep working on the track, adding new verses and sounds, including Lennon's high-pitched backing vocals. Then, they decide to head out for dinner at a restaurant, while Alomar stays behind in the studio to keep working.

"They invited me to dinner. Who'd say no to that?" Alomar would recall. "But I had these guitar parts running through my head, and I couldn't afford to go to dinner with David Bowie and John Lennon, be a fanboy, and then forget them. Reluctantly, I said no and stayed in the studio."

Over dinner, John and David found themselves discussing yet again the double-edged nature of the fame they'd both achieved. And by the time they got back to the studio, the song had, in effect, already been born between Alomar's fingers. "To my great delight, when Bowie came back and heard everything I'd recorded, he simply said: 'The track's finished. I just want to add a small guitar part,'" the guitarist would later reveal. One of the most brilliant touches turned out to be reversing the acoustic part Lennon had played. "That's the sucking-in sound you hear at the start," Alomar would later explain to Mojo. "Then we added a huge reverb on David's riff. Like walking into an empty rec room with an amp and a guitar, and filling up the space."

The track was finished within a few hours. The result was "Fame," a funky-beat meditation on the fleeting nature of success: “Fama, ti mette lì dove le cose sono false/ Fama, non è il tuo cervello, è solo la fiamma/ Che brucia il tuo cambiamento per mantenerti pazzo…/ Fama, quello che ottieni è nessun domani/ Fama, quello di cui hai bisogno devi prenderlo in prestito”. Not exactly the sum of the two authors' immense talents, but the right song to crack the US charts wide open. With that Alomar riff so iconic it was even lifted by none other than James Brown for his single "Hot (I Need To Be Loved, Loved, Loved)."

"Fame" would become Bowie's first single to hit number 1 on the Billboard chart, and would drive sales of the entire "Young Americans" LP, sealing a happy, if fleeting, partnership: "I was thrilled to work with John, and he loved hanging out with my band, because we played old soul tunes and Stax-style stuff. John had a special energy, it was really exciting being around him," the future Thin White Duke would recall. Producer Tony Visconti, however, wasn't present during the recording sessions with Lennon - though he'd later ease that regret by finding his future wife in none other than the ex-Beatle's then-girlfriend, May Pang.

Perhaps even more than the artistic side of things, though, it was Bowie's management affairs that benefited from meeting Lennon. The ex-Beatle - at the time at odds with Allen Klein following the break-up of the Fab Four - pushed David to sever ties with manager Tony Defries, who not only disapproved of his new musical direction but, worse, had deceived him, leaving him with a massive pile of debts and bills to pay. "It was John who set me straight, made me realize I'd actually been very naive. I still thought it was essential to have someone else handle those things called contracts," he would recall.

This led to the start of legal proceedings to break away from Defries and MainMan, handled by attorney Michael Lippman. The case dragged on throughout 1975, becoming one of the most controversial legal battles in music business history, until a settlement was reached granting full rights to the new songs only from September 30, 1982, the expiry date of the original contract with Defries.

The rest is well-known history: the "plastic soul" turn of "Young Americans" and the end of the glam rock era. After Ziggy, the glamorous Bowie was officially laid to rest too. What rose from the ashes, phoenix-like, was a dandy who'd lost his platform boots, sequins and a good deal of mascara along the way, but who kept an ambiguous, unsettling look. His gaze now turned to a new musical frontier: the America of funk, rhythm'n'blues and the emerging disco sound. An America that had shed the sinister overtones described in "Aladdin Sane" and "Hunky Dory", going back to embodying "the land of a thousand dances." An artificial portrait of a soulman - starting with the cover, Eric Stephen Jacobs' photo heavily retouched with an airbrush - that would split critics and once again leave fans disoriented. While some would go so far as to call it "the first black soul record cut by a white musician," there'd be no shortage of detractors, quick to dismiss it as an exercise in style, devoid of any real emotional involvement. The artist himself, for that matter, wouldn't be kind to it either: "I don't listen to it much. I don't like it very much. It was just a phase," he'd reveal to Melody Maker in 1976. Though he'd later soften that judgment, in a 1990 interview with Q: "At that time I still had the trait of being an artist who expressed himself without much emotional involvement. But in retrospect that album was a decent example of blue-eyed soul."

Either way, Bowie had once again been ahead of his time, tearing down yet more barriers between genres: before long, hordes of white artists would jump on the disco music bandwagon, starting with the Bee Gees, infected by "Saturday Night Fever". But he, as usual, would already be somewhere else entirely.

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23/01/2026