Forty-five years of David Bowie’s Young Americans, recorded at Philadelphia’s Sigma Sound Studio, produced by Tony Visconti.
I’d like to interrupt this day’s prime initiatives – all the talk of Harry & Meghan and the targeted $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package – to discuss something close to my heart and hopefully that of the dosage MAGAZINE audience. David Bowie’s Young Americans album is 45 years old, today.
Recently re-released on red vinyl through the Rhino Records label to commemorate the occasion, the Young Americans album – originally titled The Gouster, but changed, because how the hell could you explain that Chicago-based term for someone swankily dressed – not only turned a commercial tide for Bowie who suddenly found himself with big-selling singles in Fame and the album’s title track. Young Americans, like Let’s Dance nearly a decade after that, allowed him to delve deeply into the music of his youth. American-born, rough R&B and satiny soul.
And where better to find satiny soul – plush, lush strings, fulsome reeds and brass, deeply grooving rhythms – than the 1974 vintage sound of Gamble & Huff’s Sound of Philadelphia, and its recording studio home base, Sigma Sound on N. 12th Street.
With but only one Philly session cat to guide the recording sessions’ pulse, Larry Washington on congas, the Tony Visconti-produced recording featured a handful of greats toward the beginnings of their careers. David Sanborn. Luther Vandross and others. This was the start of Bowie’s next great band beyond his Spiders from Mars (Carlos Alomar, Dennis Davis, Earl Slick together with longtime Bowie pianist, Mike Garson).
The album welcomed contributions from music biz vets and heroes (Willie Weeks, John Lennon), and is the basis for a term that has come to mean more than something geared to local fandom in the “Sigma Kids,” the group of David devotees who hung outside the studio in the cold, only to be welcomed into the last nights’ post-session hang to meet, greet and hear early mixes. If you are an ambitious listener, there are more than a few outtake sites dedicated to the unfinished, more raw elements of Young Americans worth tracking down.
Though Bowie would eventually turn on his plastic soul Frankenstein as “the phoniest R&B I’ve ever heard. If I ever would have got my hands on that record when I was growing up I would have cracked it over my knee,” before admitting that “pretty good white, blue-eyed soul,” Young Americans – in this Bowie fanatical writer’s humble opinion – always ranks within his Top Ten for me. It might slide to the bottom of that ten, or crack the top 5, but it is always there.
To aid in Young Americans 45th celebration, the David Bowie store is running sales and highlighting the goofiest of “Fame” gear.
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