David Bowie

Culture
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Chills

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Saw the documentary on the big screen last night. Tis a wonderful piece of film (documentary) making. Avoids the talking head approach too which worked really well

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https://twitter.com/rexchapman/status/1744425065377387004?s=46&t=YOfhVM10W0bcyIiYSLI3Wg

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Richard Grant

16 January 2025 6:00am GMT
If anyone was likely to find a lost musical treasure in Philadelphia, it was Max Ochester. At 14, he was selling hand-selected records to sample-hungry hip-hop stars including Pete Rock and Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest. Now 47, Ochester has devoted his life to digging up rare vinyl and studio tapes, reissuing albums, recording forgotten artists and preserving the illustrious musical history of his home city.

In the early summer of 2022, he received a tip from a vinyl collector that a large collection of reel-to-reel studio tapes was for sale in a foreclosed house in the Philadelphia suburbs. When Ochester arrived there, a woman led him through the unfurnished house to a sunroom at the back, where the tapes were packed into 40 cardboard boxes. Ochester looked inside a box that was open. He saw tapes marked ‘The Intruders’, ‘Billy Paul’, ‘The Ebonys’ – legendary Philadelphia soul artists from the 1970s. He was excited and paid a few thousand dollars for the collection. It took three laborious trips with his car to move the boxes to his warehouse.

As he went through the haul, he found a single box of unmarked two-inch multitrack tapes. They were in box files that looked like the ones used at Sigma Sound Studios, where most of the 1970s Philadelphia soul hits were recorded. Apart from the word ‘scrap’ in pencil on one of the box files, nothing was written on the tapes, and Ochester assumed they were blank. They sat in the warehouse for two years, until June 2024, when Ochester went to Philadelphia’s Elm Street Studios to record one of his artists with producer/sound engineer Brendan McGeehan.

‘I took a couple of the tapes with me, because I was going to tape over them,’ Ochester says. Multitrack analogue tape is expensive and it’s commonplace for producers and engineers to reuse it, especially when they’re after an old-school sound, but when the tapes are decades old you have to bake them in an oven at low heat, or else they get gummy and start coming apart.

‘We baked them overnight and then Brendan threw them up on the reel-to-reel,’ says Ochester. ‘I just wanted to check there was nothing on the tapes before I erased them.’

Max Ochester: ‘I think Bowie fans and scholars should hear what I have.’ Credit: Michael Barker

The first tape had some funky disco jams. Ochester wasn’t much impressed. On the second tape, he and McGeehan heard a band playing an up-tempo R&B groove with a catchy little guitar riff. It was reminiscent of the riff on David Bowie’s song Fame. When the vocals came in, they recognised Luther Vandross as the singer and the song as a cover of Foot Stompin’ by The Flares.

Then the band started playing Can You Hear Me from David Bowie’s Young Americans album with Vandross singing the lead vocal. ‘That’s when I was just like, holy f—k, what do I have?’ says Ochester. ‘Because I knew it was a Bowie song. And I knew that Luther sang on Young Americans.’

The next song was a fast, romping version of the song Young Americans with no vocals and the distinctive sound of Bowie’s saxophone player David Sanborn wailing away on his alto horn. Now Ochester felt certain that he had a tape from the Young Americans recording sessions at Sigma Sound Studios in 1974. Then came a funky bluesy jam, dominated by Bowie’s guitarist on those sessions, the great Carlos Alomar. While Ochester and McGeehan were listening to the fragile 50-year-old tape, thrilled and astounded, an analogue-to-digital converter was making a copy of it.

Afterwards Ochester called his friend Aaron Levinson, a Philadelphia DJ, record collector, Grammy Award-winning music producer and musical encyclopedia in human form. In the late 1990s, while he was working at the label Rykodisc in New York, Levinson had access to the master tapes of the entire Bowie catalogue, and got to know them well, including all the alternate takes and out-takes that never made it on to an album.

When Ochester told him that he had a studio tape from the Young Americans sessions, Levinson immediately assumed it was a back-up copy, or ‘safety’, of tapes that were already known about. Asked why he jumped to this conclusion, Levinson says, ‘Because the likelihood of finding original, unreleased David Bowie studio recordings, that no one has ever heard before, from 50 years ago, is almost zero.’

It took Ochester several months before he listened to any of the other unmarked tapes in that box, and this was mainly because he operates on a slim budget. Studios charge hundreds of dollars to digitise an analogue tape, and Ochester knew that Toby Seay, who runs the Drexel University Audio Archives in Philadelphia, could do it for free. It also seemed appropriate to go there, because the Drexel archives house a large collection of Sigma Studio tapes, including three Bowie recordings from Young Americans that have been studied extensively by Bowie scholars. Ochester waited until Seay returned to work after some time off. They baked two tapes over a weekend and sat down to listen to them, and digitise them, on a Monday morning.

The collection of Sigma recordings housed in the Drexel Archives is a treasure trove of music history Credit: Michael Barker

The first tape opened with the unmistakable voice of David Bowie singing Bruce Springsteen’s It’s Hard To Be a Saint in The City, with Carlos Alomar playing something very close to the Fame riff on guitar. As the band went through several takes, Ochester could hear how Alomar had reworked and improved the riff that he had devised on Foot Stompin’. Ochester called Levinson again and said, ‘I have Bowie singing the Springsteen song It’s Hard to Be a Saint.’ Levinson said, ‘Yeah, Bowie recorded that song a few times. Ryko put one on the Sound and Vision box set.’

Ochester said, ‘Yeah, but he’s singing it over Fame. Have you heard that before?’

Levinson said, ‘Hold on, wait a second. What?’

At Rykodisc, Levinson had listened to all the known Bowie versions of the song, and none of them was sung over the Fame riff. Now, for the first time, he became convinced that Ochester really did have a miracle find. ‘My first thought was, “Only Max. Who else but Max?,”’ says Levinson. ‘Obsessive music collectors are called “diggers” but Max is on another level. He’s an earth mover, a backhoe, an excavating machine.’

On the next tape, Ochester heard studio chatter between Bowie and producer Tony Visconti – Bowie with his south London accent and Visconti, who’s from Brooklyn, affecting a London accent. Then came three intensely moving and beautiful takes of the ballad Win, with the song stripped down to its bare bones, the lyrics slightly different and Bowie singing at his most tender and passionate. The final track was a work-in-progress version of Fascination.

All three of Ochester’s tapes are unmixed, so they lack the final polish and special effects that we’re accustomed to hearing when we listen to music. Levinson calls them ‘compositional sketches’. The sound quality is excellent, but the songs are still raw and unfinished. You can hear Bowie and the musicians trying things out, coming up with new ideas, going through the process of song creation. For Ochester and Levinson, it was particularly interesting to hear Fame evolving in Philadelphia, five months before the famous 1975 recording session in New York with John Lennon and Carlos Alomar that supposedly birthed the song.

‘What Max has is an incredible document of one of the most important pop records ever – as it’s being made,’ says Levinson. ‘This is a priceless find.’

While recording the album, Bowie was charming and gracious but he looked unhealthy and outlandish

On a sub-zero winter morning, three sound engineers who worked at Sigma in the 1970s come filing through the doors into the warmth of Elm Street Studios. They’re here to talk about the recording of Young Americans 50 years ago and listen to Ochester’s tapes. The engineers, legendary in their field, are Dirk Devlin, Jim Gallagher and Pete Humphreys, who was the assistant on the Young Americans sessions in August 1974. (Carl Paruolo, the lead engineer, died in 2013.) ‘Bowie came to Sigma because he loved Philly soul, and he wanted some of the magic to rub off on him,’ says Humphreys. Bowie, the great shapeshifter of popular music, had tired of his various glam-rock personas, and was ready to reinvent himself as a white soul singer.

Devlin says, ‘Bowie first came to Sigma with Ava Cherry in July ’74, and I worked on those sessions.’ Cherry, an African-American model and singer, was Bowie’s girlfriend and back-up vocalist. While she was recording songs, Bowie was assessing the studio, the engineers, the sound of the room, the overall vibe. According to Gallagher, ‘He wanted to see if he felt comfortable at Sigma, with his drug taking and everything else. And he wanted to work with the house musicians to get the sound he was after.’

The 30-piece in-house band at Sigma was called MFSB (Mother, Father, Sister, Brother). In 1974 they were riding high with a number one hit titled T.S.O.P (The Sound of Philadelphia) with the Three Degrees on vocals. The song is a prime example of the distinctive Philly soul sound: lush strings and horns, a driving beat with a prominent hi-hat and seductive heartfelt vocals. Bowie adored the song, but to his disappointment MFSB declined to work with him, with the exception of conga player Larry Washington, and there has been widespread speculation that the African-American musicians didn’t want to give their sound away to a white Englishman. According to the Sigma engineers, that speculation is entirely false.

Gallagher says, ‘Bowie liked to work all night, fuelled by cocaine, and the musicians kept daytime hours. That might have been part of it.’ But the deciding factor, says Devlin to general agreement, was ‘money’. Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, the songwriting and production team at Sigma, wanted to produce Bowie’s album, says Devlin, because that’s what they did with the other artists who came to Sigma. ‘They wanted ownership. Main Man (Bowie’s management company) wouldn’t give them points, and they wouldn’t give them the right money. So Gamble and Huff said, “OK, good luck. And by the way, there’s a scheduling conflict so the musicians won’t be available.”’

Sigma Studios closed its doors in 2014 but is safe from demolition Credit: Michael Barker

Carlos Alomar, Bowie’s new friend and guitar hire, came to the rescue. A New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent, Alomar had played with James Brown when he was 15 and worked as a session musician on funk and soul records. He knew most of the top musicians in the genre and was able to recruit drummer Andy Newmark, who had played with Sly Stone, and Willie Weeks, who played bass on Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions. Alomar also invited his own wife Robin Clarke, a singer, and her friend Luther Vandross, a 23-year-old aspiring singer-songwriter. Bowie retained Mike Garson (keyboards) and David Sanborn (saxophone) from his Diamond Dogs touring band and flew in his long-time producer Tony Visconti from London to oversee the two-week recording sessions.

Dirk Devlin remembers Bowie showing up for work, around 11 at night, with the biggest bag of cocaine he had ever seen in his life. ‘He set it right down on the console.’ Bowie was charming and gracious, but he looked unhealthy and outlandish, with ghostly white skin, orange hair and shaved eyebrows. He weighed less than seven stone, because he was living on a diet of milk, cigarettes, red bell peppers and seven grams of cocaine a day. Later in life, Bowie described his cocaine addiction as the biggest regret of his life. Looking back at photographs of himself in 1974 and 1975, ravaged and skeletally thin, he commented, ‘How did I ever get to that state? How did I survive it?’

Despite his undernourishment and the astronomical quantities of cocaine he was using (Devlin mimics snort after snort after snort), Bowie was somehow able to create and perform with all his innate brilliance. He was focused and professional in the studio, and according to Humphreys, the assistant engineer, he made everyone feel comfortable, included and excited, ‘Those sessions were a joy. Nobody wanted to leave. We’d sleep for four hours and come racing back. David had a very clear overall perspective of what he wanted to do, yet he was still experimenting all the time. It was thrilling to be around that energy and creativity, and he was very pleasant too.’

Ava Cherry, a model and singer, was Bowie’s girlfriend and back-up vocalist Credit: Mirroxpix

Luther Vandross, who was completely unknown at the time, became a key figure during the recordings. While Bowie was sitting at the mixing board, sketching out a map of a song, he overheard Vandross and Robin Clarke working out a vocal harmony. ‘That’s a great idea,’ said Bowie. ‘Put that down.’

Vandross, Clarke and Ava Cherry were recruited as back-up singers on the album, and Vandross took charge of all the vocal arrangements. ‘David acquiesced so much to Luther,’ says Humphreys. ‘He saw how good he was, and just let him run with it.’ Devlin adds, ‘Bowie was a tremendous manipulator and user of people. He was tremendously good at assessing their potential for helping him.’

It was Vandross who came up with the hook for the album’s title song – ‘young Americans, young Americans, he wants the young American – all right!’ At some point during the sessions, Bowie heard Vandross’s song Funky Music (Is a Part of Me), and said, ‘I want to record that. Do you mind?’ To which Vandross responded, ‘You’re David Bowie. I live at home with my mother. You can do what you like.’ As a white Englishman, Bowie felt awkward singing, ‘Funky music is a part of me,’ so he kept the chord progression, wrote new lyrics hinting at his rampant cocaine and sex addiction ( ‘I’ve got to use her…’) and renamed the song Fascination.

When the time comes to hear Ochester’s tapes from those sessions, the Sigma engineers do not fall silent and listen reverentially. They keep up a running commentary, ‘That’s Carlos’, ‘The bass is out of tune, it’s sharp’, ‘That’s Sanborn’. Before the fast version of Young Americans, a voice says, ‘Take two’. Humphreys asks, ‘Who’s that?’ The others laugh and say, ‘That’s you, Pete. Fifty years ago.’

Pete Humphreys: ‘It was thrilling to be around that energy and creativity’ Credit: Michael Barker

Listening to the gorgeous stripped-down versions of Win, they talk over each other: ‘Oh, this is f—king great.’ ‘See how he changed the lyrics there?’ ‘Hear the room? He didn’t want to be shut away in the vocal booth.’ Gradually they fall silent and the music takes hold of them. ‘Beautiful,’ says Devlin as the last version fades away. Then they all start talking at once when Carlos Alomar starts ripping funky riffs on Fascination. ‘He was playing a 335.’ ‘His timing!’ ‘Listen to the background vocals, that’s three of them around one mic.’

Afterwards, when asked for his assessment of the tapes, Devlin uses the same word that Levinson used: ‘Priceless.’

Asked why the tapes are unmarked, he says, ‘Because they were stolen.’

Asked who might have stolen them, he pauses, looks at the other two, and says, ‘It points to one of our deceased compatriots. He was a squirrel. We knew for a fact that he had out-takes and tapes. He would stash them in the mic locker. We didn’t approve of the fact that he was taking people’s intellectual property home with him, but he wasn’t selling any of it. I think he just wanted to have it.’

Asked if the house where Ochester bought the tapes might have belonged to their deceased compatriot, Devlin says, ‘I’m not going to speculate. I have no idea how the tapes got there.’

The lost tapes Credit: Michael Barker

So you’ve found a priceless musical treasure. Now what are you going to do with it?

Ochester’s first thought was, ‘How do I make money off this? I spent money to get it, what is it worth?’ He has a wife and two children, and no salaried job or guaranteed income. He’s constantly trying to hustle up money for one music project or another, and there’s almost never enough of it. When his record store was put out of business by the pandemic in 2020, Ochester initiated a campaign to save the Sigma Studios building from demolition, and succeeded in getting it listed by the city of Philadelphia as a cultural historic landmark. He’s justifiably proud of this achievement, but it generated no income.

He thought about selling the tapes at auction to a private collector. He called an auction house in New Jersey and asked them for an appraisal. The man on the phone said, ‘I can’t give you an evaluation, but I can sell them for you.’ After talking to Levinson and mulling it over for a weekend, Ochester decided against it, ‘The tapes have too much historical value. If I put them in an auction, anybody who has deep pockets can just scoop them up, and they’re gone again.’ He also turned down an offer of $10,000 from bootleggers, not because he thought he could get more money elsewhere, but because it felt like the wrong thing to do.

Ochester wanted to contact Bowie’s record label, hoping for a finder’s fee, but Levinson counselled strongly against it, ‘They’ll just assert ownership, take what you have, and bury it. You won’t get a dime and the tapes will be gone.’

Aaron Levinson: ‘The likelihood of finding original, unreleased David Bowie studio recordings, that no one has ever heard before, from 50 years ago, is almost zero’ Credit: Michael Barker

Through Toby Seay at the Drexel archives, Ochester contacted a well-connected Bowie scholar in London named Leah Kardos. She was excited to hear about the tapes and said they should go to Tony Visconti. Ochester emailed Visconti twice but heard nothing back. He also contacted Carlos Alomar, who replied, ‘Sounds like we’ve got something to talk about,’ and then stopped communicating.

Levinson, who knows Alomar and worked with him on an album called The Harlem Experiment, tried and failed to get a response.

‘This is speculation but we think that Visconti and Alomar went to the Bowie estate, told them what we have, and the estate told them not to respond,’ says Ochester. ‘The Bowie estate, I’ve heard, has a very aggressive lawyer. We think the estate is waiting for us to make a move and then they’ll pounce if they can. But it could also be that we’re so low down on their priority list that they don’t give a s—t.’

Ochester met with two lawyers, one of whom compared his predicament to being trapped in a box, ‘I own the tapes, as physical objects, but I don’t own the contents of the tapes, because I don’t own the music and publishing rights.’ Those rights have changed hands several times, and are now both owned by divisions of the Rhino Entertainment Company.

In Ochester’s most hopeful scenario, he will have some degree of continuing involvement while a producer, preferably Tony Visconti, mixes the multitrack recordings on the tapes into finished songs and then releases them to the public. ‘What I do is find lost and forgotten music and bring it back into the world,’ says Ochester. ‘I think Bowie fans and scholars should hear what I have.’

When Ochester and Levinson first learnt of the new David Bowie Centre at the Victoria & Albert East Storehouse, scheduled to open in London in September 2025 and containing 90,000 items from Bowie’s archive, it seemed like the perfect home for the tapes. Judging from the more recent online descriptions, however, it appears that the centre will be displaying artifacts for people to look at, not listen to.

Sooner or later, Ochester expects lawyers to contact him, ‘If they come in a nasty way, I’ll bring a lawyer in, and they can talk. I won’t even be there. If they come in a nice way, we can have a good conversation, because I’m not trying to extort money from them, or cash in, although I wouldn’t say no if they said, “Here’s 20 grand, we’re going to take these.”’

Ochester and Levinson have launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for a documentary film about the tapes and the recording sessions at Sigma, and for future travel and legal expenses. Both of them feel a strong sense of obligation to do the right thing with the tapes.

‘We want to get them home, to a place where they belong, with the right people, but we don’t know where that is yet,’ says Ochester.

‘They belong in London,’ concludes Levinson. ‘They were made in Philadelphia, they were inspired by the music in our city, but with Bowie, everything goes home to London.’

To support the Kickstarter, click here

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The Final Act is available to watch, looking forward to it. Interesting story here from Evans

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Ten Years since the great man left us

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Bowie was always a bit of a divisive figure for me. By all accounts his early stuff had a heavy input from Mick Ronson but he wasn’t credited for it. This includes his production of Transformer by Lou Reed.

He also was involved with Iggy Pop resulting in the cast off of the likes of Rick Acheston to bass for the third Stooges album.

But there could be different takes on these than that which have been reported,

You can’t argue with his output over a long period of time. He is also one of the few artists to be loved across the spectrum from alternative to pop: Clearly a legend.

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He wasn’t a true pioneer in he didn’t develop an original sound but he was certainly an influencer. He could take an emerging sound and make it popular and be gone to the next thing while mainstream was still imitating his previous work.

If you look at the Influence Let’s Dance had on the pop world- but it was Nile Rodgers’ who created that really.

His Drum n Bass experiment was a failure on this front

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All artists are derivative, but Bowie was a master of reinvention, both existing genres and his own earlier music. He started out in the 60s so plenty influence there like the Beatles and Velvet Underground in particular. Marc Bolan would have been a huge influence on the glam rock phase, Eno on the Berlin phase, Nile Rodgers as you said, etc.

Hunky Dory, Ziggy, Low and Scary Monsters are all absolute classics given the time they were released in.

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