Bowie, Lennon, a mountain of cocaine and Young Americans

By editorial board on February 13, 2024

A night with David Bowie, John Lennon and a “mountain of cocaine.” It was December 1974 and (producer) Tony Visconti was with Bowie in New York recording material for the the singer’s Young Americans album.

“One night he left the studio early,” Visconti recalled during an appearance on The Bob Lefsetz Podcast. “He says, ‘I'm going to go back to my suite.’ He was in Hotel Pierre, and he said, ‘Lennon is coming by tonight.’ He goes, ‘I'm a bit frightened of him, a bit scared of him.’ He goes, ‘Would you mind coming after work, after you finish all your tidying ups and all that, would you mind coming over and kind of buffer the meeting?’”

Visconti jumped at the opportunity to meet Lennon and quickly agreed. After finishing his work at the studio around midnight, the producer caught a cab to Bowie’s hotel.

“I go up to David's suit and I knock on the door a lot and nobody answers. But I hear a lot of scuffling behind the door, and finally I don't know who answered, but I think it was Neil Aspinall, one of the minders of the Beatles,” Visconti recalled. “I said, ‘It's Tony. Tony Visconti. David asked me to come by tonight.’ He goes, ‘Yeah, OK. We were just a bit worried you might be the police.'”

David Bowie Thought It Would Be Embarrassing to Mention The Beatles When He Met John Lennon. “It’s impossible for me to talk about popular music without mentioning probably my greatest mentor, John Lennon,” he said in his commencement speech at the Berklee College of Music. “I guess he defined for me, at any rate, how one could twist and turn the fabric of pop and imbue it with elements from other art forms, often producing something extremely beautiful, very powerful and imbued with strangeness.”

“I walk into the main room and I saw a sight I'll never forget,” he explained. “On the floor was David and a beautiful Hispanic woman, really really beautiful, and between them there was like a mountain of cocaine. It was Mount Everest but about six inches high. You know, with ski slopes, it was like the real deal. And on the couch is my idol, John Lennon. I couldn't believe it.” (UCR)

Visconti soon grabbed a seat on the sofa next to Lennon and politely began asking him about various Beatles tunes. The two chatted about the song “A Hard Days Night,” but Bowie stayed out of the conversation.

“I had [Lennon] for a good hour. And then he's like looking over at David. You know, now David's being absolutely rude,” Visconti noted. “He's so frightened of John, he's not even looking up at John. He's just in with this girl, they're chopping lines away, and John had a few.”

“David picks up a pad, a sketch pad, and he's got some charcoal pencils or something like that, and he starts, you know, David was a great artist, and so was John. So David starts sketching a portrait of John, like a caricature," Visconti recalled. “And John says, ‘Hey, give us a piece of paper and give me a pencil,’ and John puts it on like a tea tray or something like that, and he starts doing David.”

“From this point onwards, it broke the ice,” Visconti continued. “I couldn't buffer anything. The drawing of each was very funny, and they picked it up and they showed each other the drawings and had a good laugh, and they'd start a few [again]. And then eventually David and John started talking to each other.”


David Bowie's Surreal First Encounters With 'Greatest Mentor' John Lennon Bowie remembered that he and Lennon “spent endless hours talking about fame, and what it’s like not having a life of your own anymore. How much you want to be known before you are, and then when you are, how much you want the reverse: ‘I don’t want to do these interviews! I don’t want to have these photographs taken!’ We wondered how that slow change takes place, and why it isn’t everything it should have been.”

 

 



The influence of the Young Americans album, the ripples and reassessments it initiated, were to prove incalculable, irreversible. Elton John, Roxy Music and Rod Stewart soon embraced soul or disco; throughout the 80s everyone from Talking Heads and Japan to ABC and the new romantics chose this strain of Bowie as their infection. Rock may not have expired, but it knew it had to learn some new moves. Another Bowie risk, intuition, perverse gamble, had, by accident or design, paid off handsomely.

 

‘His eyes didn’t look healthy but his voice might be better than on any other album’ – pianist Mike Garson and guitarist Carlos Alomar recall the sessions that featured soul greats like Luther Vandross and visitors John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen. Excerpt from The Indipendent - to read the full article click here

“I remember driving in the limos with him at that period of time and he’d have the headphones on listening to Aretha Franklin,” Garson says today. “He was already sucked into that universe. He told me that when he grew up in the Fifties and Sixties in London, he loved those black soul groups. He loved Little Richard, he thought he was a god. It was absolutely in him, like you can’t believe. He was consumed by that music.

Young Americans (1975), then, was the first time that Bowie showed the true artistic bravery that would come to define his career, risking it all to follow his heart into soul.

“Everything started at the Lulu sessions,” Alomar says today. “I invited him to come to my house because he was just 98 pounds and I’m talking about very translucent white skin, so he just looked like ‘you need a home-cooked meal’.

One day I heard the intercom and it was Bowie’s bodyguard saying ‘Mr Bowie is here to see Mr Alomar.’ Robin [Clark, Young Americans’ backing singer] and I and he had a great meal. We talked about everything. He was very interested in the Chitlin’ Circuit, the Apollo Theatre, Harlem and all that. We actually took him to the Apollo where I was playing with The Main Ingredient [fronted by Cuba Gooding Sr] and introduced him to Richard Pryor, who was hanging out.

 

 

The work rate of musicians used to laying down tracks in an afternoon, combined with Bowie’s increasing cocaine use making sleep seem for the weak, turned the sessions into round-the-clock affairs, with the band living virtually full-time in the studio.

Bowie did, however, seek outside approval for what he was doing. When he attempted to record a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City”, he invited Springsteen himself to stop by and hear it. ‘He was very shy,” Bowie wrote later. “I remember sitting in the corridor with him, talking about his lifestyle, which was a very Dylanesque – you know, moving from town to town with a guitar on his back … He didn’t like what we were doing,

 

 

 

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