1975 · Behind the Songs
Funk, frustration and the biggest hit of Bowie’s American breakthrough.
“Fame” was David Bowie’s first American number one — and it was almost an accident. Built on a guitar riff by Carlos Alomar and finished in a New York studio with John Lennon in the room, it turned Bowie’s complicated feelings about stardom into three and a half minutes of lean, sharp funk.
The song grew out of the Young Americans sessions. Alomar’s riff — circular, insistent, impossible to sit still through — gave Bowie and Lennon something to spar with, and Lennon’s voice can be heard chanting the title deep in the mix. Bowie produced the track with Harry Maslin at Electric Lady Studios in New York, stripping his new plastic-soul sound down to drums, bass, riff and attitude.
Released as a single in the summer of 1975, “Fame” climbed to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 that September — Bowie’s first chart-topper in America, where it mattered most to him just then. It reached number 17 in Britain. The irony was not lost on its singer: a song about how hollow fame felt had made him more famous than ever.
What to listen for: Alomar’s riff, one of the great guitar hooks of the decade; the call-and-response between Bowie’s high, cutting shouts of the title and the groove underneath; and Lennon’s ghost in the backing vocals. Fifteen years later Bowie reworked it as “Fame ’90,” proof that the riff never really left him alone.