The classic song David Bowie claimed to have “no story”
By 1975, David Bowie had already disposed of the qualities that had originally made him a superstar. Glam rock and sci-fi fascinations were no longer at the forefront of Bowie’s mind or personae. He had killed off both Major Tom and Ziggy Stardust, and now it was time to go to America. Bowie wanted to leap into the Philadelphia Soul sound of the time, resulting in his “plastic soul” masterpiece, Young Americans.
“My Young American was plastic, deliberately so, and it worked in a way I hadn’t really expected, inasmuch that it really made me a star in America, which is the most ironic, ridiculous part of the equation,” Bowie claimed in the book David Bowie: A Life. “Because while my invention was more plastic than anyone else’s, it obviously had some resonance. Plastic soul for anyone who wants it. We really worked hard to make that record come alive.”
While the album’s title track had some recognisable beats and narratives, Bowie claimed that there wasn’t any kind of major throughline to the song. “No story. Just young Americans,” Bowie told NME in 1975. “It’s about a newlywed couple who don’t know if they really like each other. Well, they do, but they don’t know if they do or don’t. It’s a bit of a predicament.”
The Young Americans album saw Bowie reunite with his longtime friend and musical partner Tony Visconti. “David and I were reunited socially after The Man Who Sold The World split up Hype (Woody Woodmansey, Mick Ronson and myself) in 1970,” Visconti said in the book Who Can I Be Now? “The ice was broken in 1973 when David and Angie invited my wife, Mary Hopkin, and I to see the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore show Behind The Fridge in the West End. We were on speaking terms again and kept up our renewed friendship via phone and the occasional visit to his flat in Chelsea.”
“I had just finished an album in London [Nightlife by Thin Lizzy] and flew to Philadelphia the very next day,” Visconti said. “All I wanted was to hit the bed in my hotel room, but I was taken, under orders, to Sigma Sound Studios instead. My friend and colleague David Bowie, who seemed abnormally very pale and thin, greeted me. He had amassed a band consisting of Mike Garson, Andy Newmark, Willie Weeks and Dave Sanborn. They had been there a few days prior to my arrival, and they were going through a new song called ‘Young Americans’.”
“I asked the house engineer, Carl Parulow, if he was the engineer, and he said, ‘No, you are!’ I wasn’t expecting this at all,” Visconti added. “I already felt jet lagged prior to really being jet-lagged (really, I was suffering from sleep deprivation), and all I expected to do that night was to let someone else do that job, the engineering. David took me aside and said he wasn’t pleased with the sounds, and I simply had to do the engineering. Okay, how could I refuse my dear friend?”
“David wanted to sing live in the room with the band, which meant the band would undesirably go down his vocal microphone. I applied a special technique that was only described to me, but I had never used before. I put up two identical vocal mics, one in front of his mouth and the other in front of his neck,” Visconti added. “They went through identical channel paths, except one was switched out-of-phase on purpose. The theory was if David sang only on the top mic, he would be in phase. The band went to both mics, and they would be out-of-phase and mostly cancelled. Damn it, it worked! A lot of David’s vocals in the final mixes were live because of this wacky idea.”
“At some point, it could have been later that night or the next afternoon, a new musician and two singers joined us. They were Carlos Alomar, Robin Clark and Luther Vandross,” Visconti observed. “They were quickly assimilated into the session as we started to put down serious takes of the song ‘Young Americans’. By late evening or early morning, we had it! What you hear was mainly a live take, with the exception of Dave Sanborn’s sax intro that was overdubbed.”
Check out ‘Young Americans’ down below.
