The 1975 song that made David Bowie fire his managers
No one in their right mind was ever going to tell David Bowie how he was supposed to make music.
He was always keeping his audience on their toes whenever he made a new record, and even if the entire music industry was going in one direction, it wasn’t unusual for Bowie to pull a bait-and-switch and move in the exact opposite direction just to mess with some heads. He liked the idea of making music on his own terms, and that meant trying to do away with anyone who was trying to get in the way of him creating some of the most off-the-wall tracks that he could ever make.
But it’s not like someone like ‘The Starman’ was going to simply become one of the biggest stars in the world and not be told what to do every now and again. It was probably in his best interest not to make another record that sounded like vaudeville, like he did on his debut, but for someone who didn’t exactly have a hit to his name at that point, he was in no position to call the shots and tell all of his higher-ups that he was doing things on his own terms.
Then again, something funny happened when Ziggy Stardust took over the world. Not only was the album selling like gangbusters, but even a lot of Bowie’s early work was getting a boost as well. Do you understand how hard it is to be so omnipresent that a song like ‘The Laughing Gnome’ is able to chart? You have truly reached a higher level of stardom there, but Bowie could sense that there were a few more people breathing down his neck than he was comfortable with.
Every single musician has to deal with the dreaded managers that tell them what to do and schedule where they’re going to tour, but when making Young Americans, Bowie was already in the mood to change direction. He was already making a clear answer to Philly soul on the title track, but when performing songs like ‘Fame’, John Lennon came down to the studio with a lot more to offer than a bunch of decent guitar licks.
Lennon had already gone through some of the biggest ups and downs of the industry with The Beatles, and Bowie remembered him saying that he would be better off if he did away with all of his handlers, saying, “We’d been talking about management, and it kind of came out of that. He was telling me, ‘You’re being shafted by your present manager’. John was the guy who opened me up to the idea that all management is crap. That there’s no such thing as good management and you should try to do without it. It was at John’s instigation that I really did without managers, and started getting people in to do specific jobs for me, rather than signing myself away to one guy forever.”
That is a much more significant gamble than anyone probably realised, but it’s not like Bowie was ever suffering for it by any stretch. He was still trying to play by his rules, and it turned out that his audience was more than happy to go along for the ride, even if Bowie didn’t have the massive music moguls behind him. He didn’t need a Peter Grant or an Allen Klein next to him to become the biggest artist in the world, and he would spend the rest of his career proving why.
Granted, not all of his suggestions were exactly perfect from a business standpoint. There was a moment in the 1980s where Bowie realised that he had lost the plot trying to go for something closer to pop, but even when he made some of his more lacklustre albums with Tin Machine, it’s much more interesting for him to have taken a swing at something that he believed in rather than force himself to make something worth getting on the radio.
‘Fame’ may have already been about the dangers that can come from being in the public eye, but Bowie was looking for something more than just the attention from fans. His music needed to mean more than a couple of pop tunes, and going through his career, I don’t see someone who tried his best to make great pop songs. I see someone who tried everything he could to wow his audience, and that’s a lot more brave than anything a traditional pop star could do.
