David Bowie's "Young Americans"
His most important album

Bowie's transformation from mulleted glam alien to soulful crooner on 1975's Young Americans represents his first genuine stylistic experiment, and first real career risk. It was one which paid off spectacularly. While many of his peers were stagnating commercially and artistically, Young Americans spawned Bowie's first US No. 1 and secured him among the first white musicians featured on Soul Train. Even today, it remains one of his best-selling albums, with 7 million total shipped. I think it was a record which precipitated Bowie's best and worst instincts as an artist — laying the groundwork both for his commercial '80s output, but also giving him the confidence for truly radical reinvention.

The mid-'70s was awash with British artists flirting with African-American influences in inverse proportion to the decline of glam and hard rock. To illustrate this: by my estimation, the UK No. 1 single was glam-influenced during 31 of the 52 chart weeks in 1973. This was the year of Slade, Wizzard, Sweet, 10cc, etc. topping the charts. By 1976, there were basically none — and the number of soul-influenced weeks had increased from zero to eighteen.

This period acted as the first great filter of '60s musicians. The option seemed either to try and fail to convert to Americana, or make forgettable soft rock. (Punk needed a year or two.) Let us use the Beatles as a case study. Harrison made a terrible soul album in 1975 called Extra Texture, before converting to soft rock with 1976's 33 and 1/3. Ringo — who was actually extremely successful in the early '70s — had his first flop with 1976's Ringo's Rotogravure, another terrible soul-influenced album. He then doubled down with 1976's Ringo the Fourth, which was quite an early white disco album. It also flopped. John Lennon had fortunately stopped making music.

Beyond the Beatles, an example more relevant to Bowie is Marc Bolan of T. Rex. Bolan was in many ways the godfather of glam alongside Bowie. Although starting together as groovy folk singers and slowly developing glam together, it was Bolan who introduced the genre to a mass audience in 1971 when he sang UK No. 1 Hot Love on Top of the Pops, donning shiny overalls and glitter makeup. He went on to have ten UK top 10 singles between 1971 and 1973 and was, for a time, called “bigger than the Beatles.” In an important sense, he was glam — and so inevitably would die with it.

By 1974, glam — and, as if spiritually linked, Bolan himself — were starting to look a little unwell, and so he attempted to pivot. The album Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow, belonging to a genre Bolan baptised “Interstellar Supersoul,” was the predictably unsuccessful result. Not that I hate the record or anything, but it was essentially a standard T. Rex album with a load of strings on top and his wife, Gloria Jones, wailing in the background. From accumulated goodwill alone, the album peaked at 12 in the charts before dropping out in just three weeks. Bolan never really regained commercial or artistic viability again, and certainly never broke the American market as he had hoped.

Bowie very well could have gone through the same thing. He also, besides a folk hit or two, had essentially derived his success up to 1974 from feeding off and perpetuating the glam wave — scoring eight top tens from ’72 to ’74. Though he too felt the wind changing by ’74 and began to dabble in funk and soul to questionable effect. While remaining a fundamentally glam project, with big unalloyed glam singles like Rebel Rebel, Diamond Dogs' tracklist was bespeckled with new African-American influences — principally, the Shaft-feeling 1984 and backing-singer-filled Rock ’n’ Roll with Me. While I rather enjoy these influences — as in Bolan’s case, they contribute to a rock decadence which I personally find irresistible — there's with it a new sense of inauthenticity which isn’t entirely deliberate. They feel like Aladdin Sane in a polyester suit. An album exclusively of songs like them would be problematic indeed — if not for me, then for the public and critics.

Well, a release just like that kind of happened later in the year with David Live — a fascinating live album coinciding with the American Diamond Dogs tour of July 1974. It freeze-frames Bowie mid soul-inflection, having funked up all of his material for the stage — but without any justification why yet. The reviews were so brutal that Mick Jagger commented he would never record again if he got them. Some examples: “A weird and utterly incongruous melange of glitter sentiment, negritudinal trappings (yikes), cocaine ecstasy and Vegas schmaltz.” (Lester Bangs). “The artiste [is] at his laryngeal nadir, [the album is] mired in bullshit pessimism and arena-rock pandering — and the soul frills just make it worse.” (Robert Christgau). Part of the problem was that the soul stylings were perceived as mere “frills.” In spite of the side-parted hair and new plastic-y sheen over the songs, they continued to be played by the original, distinctly English Diamond Dogs band. Quite a band, with names like Herbie Flowers on bass and Earl Slick on guitar — but hardly genre-authentic.

It was only during a one-month break in August, during which recording of 1975's Young Americans began in Philadelphia, that metamorphosis fully ran its course and much of the band was replaced with dyed-in-the-wool soul musicians. Carlos Alomar was now on guitar, coming from the Apollo Theatre house band. The gospel-tinged backing vocals — which became gradually more prominent during the tour (the number of singers tripling) — were arranged by a young Luther Vandross. Songs to be on Young Americans were folded into the set, purpose-designed for the new soul image. The shows themselves, for a time, continued to be a theatrical bonanza characteristic of glam excess — including giant hands spotted with light bulbs and temperamental motorised bridges (which tended to get stuck over the audience during Moonage Daydream). But by October, the chrysalis had completely burst open: the elaborate staging was scrapped, the band finalised with Dennis Davis on drums, and the tour rebranded as “The Soul Tour.” The new “Soul Man” persona was the true first in — and set the archetype for — a career defined by image makeovers. And it was he who was tasked with selling Young Americans to the American public.

He clearly did something right. The title-track lead single reached 28 on Billboard, representing a breakthrough in the United States — becoming his second-highest charting single since Space Oddity. It was Fame which became the No. 1, however. Christgau, having previously complained about Bowie’s dilettantism, changed his tune — calling the song “a real coup,” noting that “[James] Brown liked it so much that he quickly recorded Hot (I Need to Be Loved) over the same riff.” Which I had no idea about (and sure enough, it is the same riff). The album generally received positive reviews — certainly much more positive than the live album — and did very well in the States. Bowie had made it.

Beyond sales, the album represented Bowie's first sip of true international stardom fully acquired on his own terms. This shaped his artistic expectations for the next two decades. In an alternate world where his forays into Americana failed, and the album flopped, I hardly think Bowie would have had the confidence to attempt similarly head-turning makeovers like 1997's D'n'B Earthling. Or even reject commercialism entirely with 1977's experimental/ambient/kraut trilogy of Low, Heroes, and The Idiot. From somebody who had been defined by the fairly insular British glam rock of the early '70s, Young Americans proved to Bowie that he was an international force to whom no genres were off-limits. Instead, they were open to be stormed, plundered, and made to capitulate. And the public — well, it seemed at that time they were all too happy to go along. I find it remarkable that the follow-up to Young Americans, 1976's sleaze-funk Station to Station — an album often billed as extremely dark, made in a haze of cocaine, self-mythology, yada yada yada — still went on to produce one of Bowie’s best-performing singles in the US: Golden Years, which reached number 10 and remained on the Hot 100 for 21 weeks. This can only have reinforced any newfound confidence.

Aside from novel musical genres, 1976 also marked Bowie's first major foray into the medium of film. Director Nicolas Roeg had wanted Peter O'Toole to play the part of the alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth, but changed his mind after seeing the 1975 BBC documentary Cracked Actor, which depicts Bowie on tour in Los Angeles in full soul mode. The pop/film-star combo was long established as the most effective way into the hearts and minds of the masses — pretty much from the talkie's inception with 1927's The Jazz Singer — but of course reaching its peak with the likes of Sinatra, Elvis, and The Beatles. Now, I acknowledge that The Man Who Fell to Earth isn't exactly like A Hard Day’s Night or Purple Rain, but the point is that Bowie had achieved the calibre of celebrity where such a mould began to fit. He had opened the Grammys, had a duet with Cher, was constantly on women’s talk shows and doing interviews. Bowie at this point was going through the same motions as a Barry Manilow or David Cassidy, though with an admittedly preformative air.

In all these ways, the Young Americans period acted as a sort of dry run for 1983's Let's Dance. Even if he temporarily rejected it — or was at least more ambivalent — from 1977–80, the memory of American-scale celebrity lingered and informed his actions throughout Let's Dance's inception. There was a similar, though poppier, “Americanised” genre whiplash (hello Nile Rodgers), two new films (Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence and The Hunger — the former great, the latter less so), and TV appearances galore. The album was a huge success, selling over 10 million copies, spawning Bowie’s second and last US number one with the title track, as well as two more million-sellers with China Girl and Modern Love. Combined with the 96-show sellout Serious Moonlight tour, it was a uniquely busy year — and yet one with parallels to 1975. You can see why Carol Cooper of Record magazine called Let's Dance the “/Young Americans/ of the ’80s.”

The difference this time around was that, instead of making another Berlin trilogy, Bowie didn’t know when to stop. Things already started going off-course with the follow-up, 1984's Tonight. While the lead single, Blue Jean, was a moderate success — reaching No. 8 — the slightly embarrassing 30-minute music video showed that Bowie wanted Thriller-like numbers. Things got worse from there as Bowie got ever more desperate — with goblin films and duets with Jagger and the like — but I digress. My point is that underlying this behaviour was the perception that truly popular adulation was even a possibility. Let's Dance may have represented this inimitable model throughout the '80s, but without Young Americans, there would have been no Let’s Dance. And without Let’s Dance, there would be no Earthling — and a world without that 1997 rock/pop/electronic mashup would be a pretty pointless one. For that reason alone, Young Americans stands as Bowie’s most important record: the one where he proved he could survive anything — even being a pop star.