[Ed. Note: In light of David Bowie's passing, Pitchfork commissioned reviews of several of his classic albums.]
In the summer of 1974, as he was traveling across America on his mammoth Diamond Dogs arena-rock tour, David Bowie got deeply into soul music. By July, he was spiking his live sets with covers of the Ohio Players' "Here Today and Gone Tomorrow" and Eddie Floyd's "Knock on Wood," but he was even more interested in what was happening in dance clubs—particularly the new disco coming out of Philadelphia International Records. Bowie booked a mid-tour recording session at Sigma Sound, the studio where Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff were constructing the sound of Philadelphia. But he wasn't working with Gamble and Huff, or indeed any of the studio's house musicians: He had something else in mind.
The soul-inspired album that came out of the Sigma Sound recordings, Young Americans, was yet another new direction for an artist who staked his career on ceaselessly finding new directions. It was also the first time he’d made an album whose chief purpose was pleasure. There’s nothing like the apocalyptic visions of Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs on Young Americans; it’s as smart as anything he’d recorded before it, but also relaxed and limber-hipped enough for his hardcore fans’ less alienated big sisters and little brothers to get into. And it was the first of his records to feature Carlos Alomar, the ingenious rhythm guitarist who would become his live band’s musical director for more than a decade.
Bowie had met Alomar at a session early in the year, when he'd produced the Scottish pop singer Lulu's covers of his own "The Man Who Sold the World" and "Watch That Man." He drafted Alomar in to play at the Sigma Sound sessions, and Alomar brought along a couple of singers: his wife, Robin Clark, and his best friend, the then-unknown Luther Vandross. Always quick to recognize talent, Bowie immediately got Vandross and Clark in on the recording.
At those sessions, Bowie recorded enough songs for an album (reportedly meant to be called either "The Gouster" or, more cynically, "Shilling the Rubes")—although it would've been very different from the Young Americans we know today. Its most radical gesture would have been "John, I'm Only Dancing (Again)," a rewritten and discofied version of a snarling, homoerotic glam-rock single from three years earlier. (Bowie didn't actually release "John, I'm Only Dancing (Again)" until 1979; it was a minor hit in England and ended up on his Changestwobowie compilation.)