In 1974, David Bowie was fresh off his reign as the glam-rock’s biggest act. After his breakthrough success that began with Ziggy Stardust and continued through Diamond Dogs, he was about to make a turn toward soul and funk with his next album, Young Americans.
Despite his success, he could still be in awe of his idols. When the opportunity to meet John Lennon arose that year, Bowie was beside himself.
Like millions of teens in the 1960s, he had been a Beatles fan. His own career began to take off in the mid 1960s, during which time he flirted with influences ranging from the Rolling Stones to the Who to Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd. But while Bowie never dabbled in the Beatles’ style of pop, but he was enamored of the group, and John Lennon in particular.
“Oh hell, he was one of the major influences on my musical life,” Bowie said in an interview recorded in the 1980s. “I mean, I just thought he was the very best of what could be done with rock and roll, and also ideas.
“I felt such kin to him in as much as that he would rifle the avant-garde and look for ideas that were so on the outside, on the periphery of what was the mainstream — and then apply them in a functional manner to something that was considered populist and make it work. He would take the most odd idea and make it work for the masses.
“And I thought that was just so admirable. I mean, that was like making artwork for the people and not sort of having it as an elitist thing. There was just so much about him that I admired. He was tremendous, you know?”
By 1974, Bowie had moved to New York, the same city to which Lennon had emigrated in 1971. It was perhaps inevitable the two would meet. It happened soon after at a party given by actress Elizabeth Taylor.
“I think we were polite with each other, in that kind of older-younger way,” Bowie recalled of their meeting.
As his longtime producer and friend Tony Visconti revealed in a 2021 interview with BBC Radio 4, Bowie was intimidated by the former Beatle.
“He was terrified of meeting John Lennon,” he recalled. When shortly after the party Lennon scheduled a visit to Bowie, the singer insisted Visconti come along “to buffer the situation.”
Bowie didn’t need to worry. Lennon was a fan.
"I must say, I admire him for the vast repertoire of talent the guy has, you know,” Lennon said in 1980. “I was never around when the Ziggy Stardust thing came, because I’d already left England while all that was going on, so I never really knew what he was… I think he’s great."
Visconti recalled that the meeting took place late in the day. When he arrived, he found Bowie on the floor sketching on an art pad with charcoal while Lennon sat nearby. Neither said much to the other for a couple of hours, when Lennon broke the silence by asking for a few sheets of paper so he could draw as well.
“So John started making caricatures of David, and David started doing the same of John and they kept swapping them,” Visconti said. “And then they started laughing and that broke the ice.”
Bowie recalled in a later interview how Lennon responded when he asked his opinion of glam rock.
“‘Yeah, it’s great,’” Bowie said, mimicking Lennon’s Liverpool accent. “‘But it’s just rock and roll with lipstick on.’
“And I was impressed as I was at virtually everything he said. He was probably one of the brightest, quickest witted, earnestly socialist men I’ve ever met in my life. Socialist in true definition, not in a fabricated political sense. But a real humanist.
“And a really spiteful sense of humor — which, of course, being English, I adored. I just thought we’d be buddies forever and we’d get on better and better and all that.”
The two artists collaborated soon after meeting. Bowie had just completed recording his album Young Americans in Philadelphia. But in January 1975, he and Lennon got together at New York City’s Electric Lady Studios to cut two more tracks for it: a cover of Lennon’s 1968 Beatles tune “Across the Universe” — included on the group's 1970 swan song, Let It Be — and a new song composed by Bowie, Lennon and Carlos Alomar, Bowie’s guitarist and the player behind the tune’s signature funk electric guitar riff. Titled “Fame,” it became Bowie’s first number-one single.
But Bowie got considerably more than a hit out of his collaboration. He got a friend for what little time remained in Lennon’s life.
And along the way, he picked up some priceless advice from Lennon about songwriting.
“I’ll never forget something John Lennon told me,” he recalled in a 1983 interview, in which he reflected on Lennon’s death three years earlier. “We were talking about writing, and I would always admire the way he used to cut through so much of the bullshit and just come straight to the point with what he wanted to say.
“He said, ‘It’s very easy, all this. All you have to do is say what you mean, make it rhyme, put a backbeat to it. I keep coming back to that principle.”
Bowie added that “Fame” came about in just that way.
“Yeah, absolutely. I mean it was so easy.
“John had an incredible charisma that made you cut through things. I can see the effect that he must have had on Paul McCartney. I’d imagine McCartney sorely misses that now.”
