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>> DAVID BOWIE :: YOUNG AMERICANS I arrive in Philadelphia from London around 8 PM. I've just finished a Thin Lizzy album and I am tired! I am rushed to Sigma Sound by limo. I am shown the control room, and can see a large band playing full tilt with Bowie walking around pensively among them. I am immediately intimidated because the band contains three musicians I am in complete awe of -- Andy Newmark on drums, Willy Weeks on bass and David Sanborn on sax. These are super session men, and I'm just a Brooklyn kid who did good in England! I ask the engineer, Carl Parullo, "Who is engineering?" I've never seen a console as funky as this -- it looks like it was handmade in someone's garage on weekends. He says, "You are!" He was originally selected to engineer by Bowie, having recorded many Philly hits, but he told me that Bowie wasn't pleased with the sound. Bowie told Carl, "Tony will be handling the recording once he arrives". David and the band had been recording their rehearsals for 3 days, and I could hear the problem he had with the sound. In those days, in America, engineers recorded "dry" and "flat", waiting for the mix to add the equalization, reverbs and special effects. But the British often recorded with the special effects right on the session! I was British-trained and David was used to this sound! So I rolled up my sleeves and got right into it. By 2 am we'd recorded our first official backing track -- "Young Americans." The session guys were great to record with. My fears were quickly dispelled. To contrast the "slickness" of Nemark, Weeks and Sanborn, David was trying out a gang of NYC kids from the Bronx, whose manager had sent in a demo tape weeks earlier. They were Carlos Alomar on guitar, his wife Robin Clark on vocals and their vocalist friend Luther Vandross! What a lineup! Mike Garson on piano was the only link left over from the Spiders From Mars days. It was agreed we had to record live, no overdubs! But David also wanted to record his vocals live in the same room! This presented a big problem because the instruments were much louder than his voice, so I had to rig up a special microphone technique which canceled the band but recorded his voice. This required two identical microphones placed electronically out of phase. In other words, the diaphragm of one mike is pushing when the other is pulling. The band's sound is picked up by the two mikes, but is out of phase and consequently canceled! David was told to sing only into the top mike so that his voice was not canceled! For the non-technically-minded this probably doesn't make any sense, but it saved the day, and what you hear on the recordings is about 85% "live" David Bowie. The sessions went swift as a breeze, and we often worked until after sunrise the next morning (which sometimes hurt). A small group of fans stood vigil outside the studio listening as hard as they could. On the last day David took pity on them and invited them in for an hour of listening. Part two of the album took place in New York. We didn't have enough songs recorded, so David wrote "Win", and turned one of Luther Vandross's songs, "Funky Music" into "Fascination" by changing the title and some of the lyrics. David Sanborn added some more sax to these and some of the Philly tracks. The day arrived that I was ready to take the tapes back to London to mix the album, tentatively called "The Gouster." On my last night in New York, David phones my hotel room and says that John Lennon is coming that evening and he's a little nervous to be left alone with him, could I come? I was over there in a flash! After ringing the doorbell many times I was finally let in. It seems that Lennon was a little nervous because he didn't have his alien's green card yet, and thought that I might be the police. Out of the bathroom walks John and his Chinese-American girlfriend, May Pang (who became my wife 13 years later). David sits on the floor and avoids eye contact with John, sketching on a notepad instead. I take this as a cue to begin to ask John Lennon at least 100 questions I always wanted to ask a Beatle, like, "What is that guitar chord at the beginning of "A Hard Day's Night?" He told me and we chatted away for hours. May and Beatles exec Neil Aspinall sat quietly for that time, as did singer Ava Cherry. David continued to sketch. Finally John said, "Let's see what you're drawing." They were portraits of John. John sat on the floor, picked up another pad and began sketching David. They finally broke the ice. A
week or so later I was in London mixing the album and I got a call
from David. "Er, Tony. I don't know how to tell you this but John
and I wrote a song together and we recorded and mixed it. It's called
"Fame." He explained that he went back to the studio and recorded
Lennon's "Across the Universe" for a lark and it turned out good enough
to include on Young Americans. |