David Bowie on the “undisputed king” of soul music
Although David Bowie fully immersed himself in soul music in the mid-1970s, the genre heavily influenced much of his career. Notably, Bowie’s 1972 breakout masterpiece The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars contained ‘Soul Love’, which, like several moments on the album, was inspired by the soul music of Ben E. King, among other heroes of Bowie’s youth.
Bowie continued to explore soul-infused glam rock throughout Aladdin Sane, Pin Ups and Diamond Dogs but took his deepest dive in 1975’s Young Americans. The divisive album heard Bowie’s vocals at their most soulful and the instrumentals at their funkiest. Danceable rhythms may well have ousted some of Ziggy Stardust’s artistic depth, but the record certainly had its moments, including the unlikely John Lennon collaboration, ‘Fame’.
Besides ‘Fame’ and the groovy title track, which together comprised the album’s single release quota, other highlights included ‘Right’, ‘Win’ and a cover of Lennon’s Let It Be contribution, ‘Across the Universe’. Intriguingly, liaisons with a former Beatle eclipsed another collaboration with a young Luther Vandross, ‘Fascination’.
“I wrote one of the songs on the album,” Vandross, who had been present at the Young Americans sessions, noted in a 1982 interview with The Black Collegian Magazine. “Bowie overheard it and said, ‘I want to record that. Do you mind?’ When I did it, it was called ‘Funky Music’. Bowie changed it to ‘Fascination’. He said he didn’t want to be so presumptuous as to say ‘funky music’ since he was a rock artist. He said, ‘Do you mind?’ And I said, ‘You’re David Bowie, I live at home with my mother, you can do what you like.'”
Vandross subsequently achieved fame in his own right and became an ongoing inspiration to Bowie. However, Bowie’s fascination with soul music had been triggered many years before by funk pioneer James Brown. While sifting through his 2,500-piece vinyl collection and picking out a few favourites to discuss with Vanity Fair in 2003, Bowie remembered how Brown’s 1963 live album, The Apollo Theatre Presents: In Person! The James Brown Show, inspired his teenage soul embrace.
“My old schoolmate Geoff MacCormack brought this around to my house one afternoon, breathless and overexcited,” Bowie remembered. “‘You have never, in your life, heard anything like this,’ he said. I made a trip to see Jane Greene that very afternoon.”
Continuing, Bowie revealed that the album helped him to shape The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. “Two of the songs on this album, ‘Try Me’ and ‘Lost Someone’, became loose inspirations for Ziggy’s ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’. Brown’s Apollo performance still stands for me as one of the most exciting live albums ever. Soul music now had an undisputed king.”
Listen to ‘Try Me’ from James Brown’s 1963 live album below.
