The moment John Lennon kissed David Bowie following an embarrassing Aretha Franklin encounter
These days, David Bowie is remembered as one of the greatest musicians of all time, credited with pioneering the glam rock genre and helping transform popular music. His impact affected practically every musician who came after him, consciously or otherwise. Without Bowie, modern rock music would sound very different.
However, he wasn’t always the incredibly enigmatic performer he became known as. Behind his personas, such as his otherwordly Ziggy Stardust, Bowie often struggled with feeling “inadequate” and frequently doubted his musical abilities. In 1972, he was quoted saying: “Sometimes I don’t feel as if I’m a person at all. I’m just a collection of other people’s ideas”.
In 1997, he told Q magazine: “I had enormous self-image problems and very low self-esteem, which I hid behind obsessive writing and performing. I was driven to get through life very quickly. I really felt so utterly inadequate. I thought the work was the only thing of value.”
While Bowie was still in the infancy of his career, he feared that American audiences just didn’t understand his work. After releasing The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Bowie gained popularity in the United Kingdom but did less successfully in the United States.
Bowie ended up confiding in his new friend John Lennon while he was backstage at the Grammys in 1975. The pair had only met for the first time a few days before at a party hosted by Elizabeth Taylor. Bowie recalled their meeting in a speech at Berklee College of Music, stating: “So John was sort of [in Liverpool accent] ‘Oh, here comes another new one.’ And I was sort of, ‘It’s John Lennon! I don’t know what to say. Don’t mention the Beatles, you’ll look really stupid.’ And he said, ‘Hello, Dave.’ And I said, ‘I’ve got everything you’ve made — except The Beatles’.”
However, at the Grammys, an event would occur that left Bowie feeling simply embarrassed. Tasked with the job of presenting Aretha Franklin with an award, Bowie found himself humiliated when the iconic singer joked about him on stage.
He recalled the moment: “Before the show, I’d been telling John that I didn’t think America really got what I did, that I was misunderstood. Remember that I was in my 20s and out of my head,” Bowie said. “So the big moment came, and I ripped open the envelope and announced, ‘The winner is Aretha Franklin’.”
Yet, when Franklin stepped up to the stage, she made some comments that left Bowie feeling somewhat deflated. “Aretha steps forward and, with not so much as a glance in my direction, snatches the trophy out of my hands and says, ‘Thank you, everybody. I’m so happy I could even kiss David Bowie.’ Which she didn’t! And she promptly spun around, swanned off stage right. So I slunk off stage left.”
Luckily for Bowie, Lennon was there to often some comic relief to ease the embarrassment. “John bounds over and gives me a theatrical kiss and a hug and says, ‘See, Dave. America loves ya’. We pretty much got on like a house on fire after that.”
