“Young American” made it clear that David Bowie could do everything
Yes, of course, the masterpiece “Ziggy Stardust” and “Aladdin Sae”, the albums of the consecration of the Glam Rock era that he had released between 1972 and 1973 felling in the role of the alien who fell on Earth, before making him “die” on stage with the legendary show at the Hammersmith Odeon in July of July of ’73.
Yes, of course, the displacement revisits of Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play”, “I Can’t Explain” of the Who and “Where Have All the Good Times Gone” which he had recorded in 1973 for the “Pin Ups” cover album. And yes, clear, the proto-punk turning of “Diamond Dogs”, the album he had released in 1974, baptizing this time another alter ego, Halloween Jack. But.If there was a moment in David Bowie’s career in which he became evident that the British artist could make his musical genre his own, bending him to his will, that moment coincides with the exit of “Young American”.
The genesis of the album
It was August 1974 when the voice of “Space Oddity” put himself in the lead to want to make an album by Black Music. And to do it not in the United Kingdom, but in the beating heart of black music, Philadelphiain the United States.
Since his first overseas visit, in January 1971, Bowie had said he had been attracted to what he himself considered the local “subculture”: from the Hollywood icon James Dean to rock’n’roll music (the Velvet Underground had inspired “Queen Bitch”, one of the songs of the album “Hunky Dory”), passing through the writers of the Beat Generation as Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. .Black Music returned to this category. When it was about to illustrate the project to his closest collaborators, Bowie used the term “Plastic Soul”, “plastic soul music”the expression with which the black musicians in the 1960s described the whites who played the blues. He called him this why – he explained – “My “Young American” was plastic, deliberately»: With the album, the singer -songwriter wanted to express the world view of a new generation of young people of Americans in the same way in which he had embodied the ideals of the Underground community of the United Kingdom until then.
The initial idea and the first difficulties
The operation was ambitious: Bowie’s intention was to go to record the disc ai Sigma Sound Studiosthe nerve center of the so -called scene Philadelphia Soulthe rooms founded a few years earlier by the sound engineer Joseph Tarsia and become the headquarters of the R&B Empire headed to Kenneth Gamble and Leon A. Huff, the duo of producers and authors behind successes such as those of Wilson Pickett, Nancy Wilson, Dusty Springfield and especially the legendary MFSB. The acronym stands for “Mother Father Sister Brother“: The group was a real superband that gathered about thirty shiftists from Sigma Sound Studios who at some point began to publish successful singles as a group, starting with the programmatic”
Tsop (The Sound of Philadelphia)“, Over a million copies sold in the United States. In the end, however, Bowie had to settle for having only one MFSB musician available: the Conga Larry Washington player. At that point he set up on the phone and called some musicians from New York to Philadelphia: they joined him The guitarist Carlos Alomar, the bassist Willie Weeks, the drummer Andy Newmark and the jazz saxophonist David Sanborntalent to whom he asked to play a musical genre outside his comfort zone (a move that would repeat forty years later, when he involved Donny McCaslin in the “Blackstar” session). With them too The choristers Ava Cherry, Luther Vandross and Alomar’s wife, Robinin addition to Mike Garson pianistthe last survivor of the Spiders Form Mars.
Dependence on cocaine
The sessions, coordinated by the manufacturer Tony Viscontithey left on 11 August 1974 and everything took place within two weeks, during which Bowie – in full dependence on cocaine – He immersed himself completely in soul music and invented a new alter ego, The Gouster, a term with which a trendy street boy is indicated. Visconti would remember: «It was agreed that we should have recorded live, no overdue. But David also wanted to record his live voice in the same room. This represented a big problem because the tools were much stronger than his voice, so he had to prepare a special microphone technique that canceled the band but recorded his voice. This required two identical microphones positioned electronically out of phase ».
Springsteen arrived in Harbar and the meeting with John Lennon
The recordings were so productive that several songs remained out of the disc: among these also a cover of “It’s hard to be a Saint in the city” by Bruce SpringsteenThat He arrived at the Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia from his Habsbury Park making the hitchhiking And that later he discovered that Bowie had not included his song on the album. On the album, on the other hand, a cover of “Across the Universe” ended which Bowie registered by chance after meeting John Lennonwhen to complete the album he moved from Philadelphia to the New York Record Plant. From that meeting was born “Hunger“, Destined to become the hit of the album:« After meeting in a New York club, we spent several nights to speak and get to know each other even before entering the studio.
That period of my life is not clear at all, a lot is really confused, but we have spent infinite hours talking about fame and what it means no longer having a life of its own – would have told Bowie – how much you want to be known before being it, and then when you are, how much you want the opposite “.
“Young American” He left March 7, 1975. The criticism boiled it like the album “With Bowie’s more commercial sound to date». But a new transformation was upon us: Berlin called.
