Remembering David Bowie’s First No. 1 Single and Its Co-Writer: John Lennon

During an interview with Bob Harris on the Old Grey Whistle Test that aired on April 18, 1975, John Lennon recalled meeting David Bowie before the two ended up writing a song together. “I got to know David through Mick [Jagger], really,” said Lennon. “Although I’d met him once before. And next minute, he says, ‘Hello, John, I’m doing ‘Across the Universe,’ do you want to come on down? So I said, ‘Alright, you know I live here. I’ll pop down. I played rhythm. We made this lick into a song, is what happened.”

At first, Bowie and Lennon planned to record a cover of The Flares’ 1961 song “Foot Stomping.” Bowie’s regular collaborator and James Brown guitarist Carlos Alomar already came up with a riff, but when they arrived at the studio, the jam session turned into something funkier, documenting Bowie’s real-life experience.

Co-written by Bowie, Lennon, and Alomar, and inspired by the sour relationship Bowie had with his former management, “Fame” addresses the ups and downs of fame and fortune.

Fame (fame) makes a man take things over
Fame (fame) lets him lose hard to swallow
Fame (fame) puts you there where things are hollow
Fame (fame)
Fame, not your brain, it’s just the flame
That puts your change to keep you sane (sane)
Fame (fame)
Fame (fame), what you like is in the limo
Fame (fame), what you get is no tomorrow
Fame (fame), what you need, you have to borrow
Fame (fame)Fame nein, it’s mine is just his line
To bind our time, it drives you to crime (crime)

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Is it any wonder I reject you first

Some of the lyrics were aimed directly at Bowie’s former manager, Tony Defries.

Is it any wonder I reject you first
Fame (fame) fame fame
Is it any wonder you are too cool to fool
Fame (fame)
Fame, bully for you, chilly for me
Got to get a rain check on pain
(Pain)

“We’d been talking about management, and it kind of came out of that,” said Bowie of coming up with the concept of the song with Lennon in a 2003 interview. “He was telling me, ‘You’re being shafted by your present manager’ (laughs). That was basically the line. And John was the guy who opened me up to the idea that all management is crap. That there’s no such thing as good management in rock and roll and you should try to do without it.”

Bowie added, “It was at John’s instigation that I really did without managers, and started getting people in to do specific jobs for me, rather than signing myself away to one guy forever and have him take a piece of everything that I earn—usually quite a large piece—and have him really not do very much.”

Recorded at Electric Lady Studio in New York City and released on Bowie’s ninth album, Young Americans, in 1975, “Fame” became David Bowie’s first No. 1 hit in the U.S. and Canada. During the Young American sessions, Lennon also played guitar and sang backing vocals on the track along with Bowie’s cover of the Beatles’ “Across the Universe.” 

On the title track, there’s another nod to the Beatles’ classic by Lennon, “A Day in the Life,” with the backing I heard the news today, oh boy.

In 1990, Bowie remixed “Fame” 15 years after its original release for his Sound+Vision tour as “Fame ’90.” 

Photo: Ellen Graham/Getty Images