Songs and Album Development
Bowie, having just signed with EMI records for a reported $17.5m, worked with Nile Rodgers to release a "commercially buoyant" new album that was described as "original party-funk cum big bass drum sound greater than the sum of its influences." The album's influences were described as Louis Jordan, the Asbury Jukes horn section, Bill Doggett, Earl Bostic and James Brown. Bowie spent a mere three days making demos for the album in New York before cutting the album, a rarity for Bowie who, for the previous few albums, usually showed up with little more than "a few ideas." Despite this, the album "was recorded, start to finish, including mixing, in 17 days" according to Rodgers.
Stevie Ray Vaughan, who met Bowie at the 1982 Montreux Jazz Festival, when discussing the album, said "to tell you the truth, I was not very familiar with David's music when he asked me to play on the sessions. ... David and I talked for hours and hours about our music, about funky Texas blues and its roots - I was amazed at how interested he was. At Montreux, he said something about being in touch and then tracked me down in California, months and months later."
Unusually, Bowie played no instruments on the album. "I don't play a damned thing. This was a singer's album."
A few years later, Bowie discussed his feelings on the track "Ricochet" (which Musician magazine called an "incendiary ballroom raveup") from this album:
| “ | I thought it was a great song, and the beat wasn't quite right. It didn't roll the way it should have, the syncopation was wrong. It had an ungainly gait; it should have flowed. ... Nile did his own thing to it, but it wasn't quite what I'd had in mind when I wrote the thing. | ” |
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—David Bowie, 1987 |
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Long-time collaborator Carlos Alomar, who had worked with Bowie since the mid-'70s and would continue to work with Bowie into the mid-'90s, was offered an "embarrassing" fee to play on the album, and refused to do so, although a year later (when working on Bowie's follow-up album, Tonight), he claimed that he didn't play on the album because Bowie only gave him two weeks' notice, and he was already booked with other work. Alomar did however play on the accompanying tour.
Bowie's studio follow-up to this album was 1984's Tonight.
Read more about this topic: Let's Dance (David Bowie album)
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