David Bowie Owed His First No. 1 Hit to None Other Than John Lennon

In 1964, David Bowie began releasing music, starting with his “Liza Jane” single. 11 years and more than 20 singles later, Bowie scored his first No. 1 single in the United States, with “Fame”. On his Young Americans album, Bowie wrote the song with John Lennon and Carlos Alomar.

A song about the double-edged sword that being a celebrity can be, “Fame” says, “Fame makes a man take things over / Fame lets him loose, hard to swallow / Fame puts you there where things are hollow / Fame /  Fame, it’s not your brain, it’s just the flame / That burns your change to keep you insane /  Fame.”

Fame may have been relatively new to Bowie, but it was familiar territory to Lennon as part of the Beatles. It’s Bowie who invited Lennon to the studio, where they began working on “Fame”. Lennon also sings and plays guitar on the song.

“We’d been talking about management, and it kind of came out of that. He was telling me, ‘You’re being shafted by your present manager,’” Bowie recalls with a laugh. “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 ‘n’ roll, and you should try to do it without it.”

What David Bowie Says About Writing “Fame”

When Bowie wrote “Fame”, he was coming to terms with the downside of success as a rock star, which is largely unknown to everyone but a celebrity.

“Fame itself, of course, doesn’t really afford you anything more than a good seat in a restaurant,” Bowie says. “That must be pretty well known by now. I’m just amazed how fame is being posited as the be all and end all, and how many of these young kids who are being foisted on the public have been talked into this idea that anything necessary to be famous is all right. It’s a sad state of affairs. However arrogant and ambitious I think we were in my generation, I think the idea was that if you do something really good, you’ll become famous. The emphasis on fame itself is something new.”

Sadly for Bowie, in later years, he found even more frustration with being a global superstar.

“Fame can take interesting men and thrust mediocrity upon them,” he says.

Alomar is Bowie’s guitar player, who came up with the riff in “Fame”. In 1990, the song appeared on the soundtrack for Pretty Woman.

Photo by John Lynn Kirk/Redferns/Hulton Archive/Getty Images