In the summer of 1974, as he was traveling across America on his mammoth Diamond Dogs arena-rock tour, David Bowie got deeply into soul music. By July, he was spiking his live sets with covers of the Ohio Players’ “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow” and Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood,” but he was even more interested in what was happening in dance clubs—particularly the new disco coming out of Philadelphia International Records. Bowie booked a mid-tour recording session at Sigma Sound, the studio where Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff were constructing the sound of Philadelphia. But he wasn’t working with Gamble and Huff, or indeed any of the studio’s house musicians: He had something else in mind.
The soul-inspired album that came out of the Sigma Sound recordings, Young Americans, was yet another new direction for an artist who staked his career on ceaselessly finding new directions. It was also the first time he’d made an album whose chief purpose was pleasure. There’s nothing like the apocalyptic visions of Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs on Young Americans; it’s as smart as anything he’d recorded before it, but also relaxed and limber-hipped enough for his hardcore fans’ less alienated big sisters and little brothers to get into. And it was the first of his records to feature Carlos Alomar, the ingenious rhythm guitarist who would become his live band’s musical director for more than a decade.
Bowie had met Alomar at a session early in the year, when he’d produced the Scottish pop singer Lulu’s covers of his own “The Man Who Sold the World” and “Watch That Man.” He drafted Alomar in to play at the Sigma Sound sessions, and Alomar brought along a couple of singers: his wife, Robin Clark, and his best friend, the then-unknown Luther Vandross. Always quick to recognize talent, Bowie immediately got Vandross and Clark in on the recording.
At those sessions, Bowie recorded enough songs for an album (reportedly meant to be called either “The Gouster” or, more cynically, “Shilling the Rubes”)—although it would’ve been very different from the Young Americans we know today. Its most radical gesture would have been “John, I’m Only Dancing (Again),” a rewritten and discofied version of a snarling, homoerotic glam-rock single from three years earlier. (Bowie didn’t actually release “John, I’m Only Dancing (Again)” until 1979; it was a minor hit in England and ended up on his Changestwobowie compilation.)
“Young Americans” the song was a hybrid of contemporary soul (the Vandross-led backup singers were all over it), the hyper-emotive ’50s singer Johnnie Ray, and—another recent obsession of Bowie’s—the up-and-coming New Jersey songwriter Bruce Springsteen, whose song “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” Bowie covered at Sigma Sound. It was also very current: Bowie sang “Do you remember President Nixon?” in the middle of a song he’d started recording three days after Nixon’s resignation.
After that initial burst of productivity, the Diamond Dogs tour resumed, now so deeply influenced by Philadelphia soul that it was nicknamed the “Philly Dogs” tour. Bowie ditched most of his elaborate stage design, and added an opening set by the “Mike Garson Band”—his own group, fronted by Vandross and Clark. (Their set included a terrific Vandross original, “Funky Music,” as well as a reworked version of Bowie’s hippie mantra “Memory of a Free Festival.”) One of the new additions to Bowie’s own set was a medley of the Flares’ “Foot Stompin’” and the old jazz standard “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,” powered by a funk riff Alomar had come up with.
When the group returned to the studio in November to try to get a little more uptempo oomph into the album, they unsuccessfully tried to record “Foot Stompin’.” They did, however, come up with two killer additions to Young Americans: Bowie’s dreamy, spiraling slow one “Win,” and his lyrical rewrite of Vandross’ “Funky Music” as the haunting “Fascination.”
Bowie had also befriended John Lennon around that time, and invited him along to play guitar on a cover of his Beatles-era song “Across the Universe” at a final session in January 1975. (Also present then, for the first time on a Bowie record: drummer Dennis Davis, who would go on to be the hidden rhythmic genius of all of his records up through 1980’s Scary Monsters.) “Across the Universe” is the album’s one genuine embarrassment, Vegas-y and bathetic. But bringing Lennon in yielded an unexpected dividend: Alomar’s “Foot Stompin’” riff, a bit of arrangement brainstorming from Lennon, and a sharp, bitter lyric from Bowie combined, very quickly, into the stunning funk track “Fame.” (Young Americans ended up being curiously Lennon-heavy: There’s even a slightly mangled line from “A Day in the Life” in the middle of “Young Americans.”)
“Fame” was a knockout, the song that gave Bowie his first American No. 1 single, and the soul world that he so admired took it to heart. By November 1975, it landed Bowie on Soul Train. (He wasn’t the first white solo performer to play the show, but he was close.) George Clinton, by his own admission, modified its groove into “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker).” And James Brown paid Bowie the ultimate backhanded compliment: The instrumental track of his 1976 single “Hot (I Need to Be Loved, Loved, Loved, Loved)” was a note-for-note duplicate of “Fame.”
In the context of Bowie’s flabbergasting ’70s, Young Americans is distinctly a transitional record. It doesn’t have the mad theatrical scope of Diamond Dogs or the formal audacity of Station to Station; at times, it comes off as an artist trying very hard to demonstrate how unpredictable he is. You couldn’t mistake it for an actual Philly soul record, although, like the LPs Bowie was devouring at the time, it often comes off as hits-plus-filler. Still, a good deal of the filler is lovely, and recording funk and disco in 1974 put him way ahead of the curve. While there had already been a handful of disco hits on the pop charts, no other established rock musician had yet tried to do anything similar, and Bowie pulled it off in a way that not only didn’t seem crass but gave Luther Vandross his big break.
The album was also a vehicle for Bowie to address one of his favorite topics—pop stardom—from a new angle, at a moment when it seemed likely to destroy him. (“Fame” shares its title with a Broadway show about Marilyn Monroe’s life that closed after one performance in November 1974; thanks to Bowie’s disastrous management deal at the time, its quarter-million-dollar loss effectively came out of his pocket.) When Bowie talked about lower-case fame with Tracey Emin in 2001, he was a bit more sanguine about it: “There is nothing there to covet.… I understand that it doesn’t even get you a Madonna ticket these days. So I won’t be recommending it to my offspring. Having influence is more rewarding for feeding ego.” He had nothing to worry about on that score.
