Despite his success, he could still be in awe of his idols. When the opportunity to meet John Lennon arose that year, Bowie was beside himself.
“Oh hell, he was one of the major influences on my musical life,” Bowie said in an interview recorded in the 1980s. “I mean, I just thought he was the very best of what could be done with rock and roll, and also ideas.
“I felt such kin to him in as much as that he would rifle the avant-garde and look for ideas that were so on the outside, on the periphery of what was the mainstream — and then apply them in a functional manner to something that was considered populist and make it work. He would take the most odd idea and make it work for the masses.
“And I thought that was just so admirable. I mean, that was like making artwork for the people and not sort of having it as an elitist thing. There was just so much about him that I admired. He was tremendous, you know?”
And along the way, he picked up some priceless advice from Lennon about songwriting.
“I’ll never forget something John Lennon told me,” he recalled in a 1983 interview, in which he reflected on Lennon’s death three years earlier. “We were talking about writing, and I would always admire the way he used to cut through so much of the bullshit and just come straight to the point with what he wanted to say.
“He said, ‘It’s very easy, all this. All you have to do is say what you mean, make it rhyme, put a backbeat to it. I keep coming back to that principle.”
Bowie added that “Fame” came about in just that way.
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.'”
