The man who changed his world: The musician David Bowie called his “greatest mentor”
In the world of music, it is nearly impossible for it to remain wholly unique. The threads that weave through the tapestry of pop culture are particularly tangled when it comes to rock and roll. So indelibly linked to the foundational stones of the genre, there are only a handful of artists who can attest to having enjoyed a career almost entirely bereft of obvious influences. David Bowie is one such musician.
Breaking out of his role as a struggling folk artist with the extra-terrestrial ‘Space Oddity’, transforming into the rock persona Ziggy Stardust, helping to deliver some of the best albums of the 1970s, traversing the world of pop with Just Dance, returning to a band structure with Tin Machine before delivering perhaps the ultimate goodbye with Blackstar, Bowie’s career is almost untouchable. However, to think of it as without influence is to miss the point entirely.
The truth is, while certainly unique, Bowie’s vision was entirely coloured by the cultural references he surrounded himself with. Whether it was kabuki theatre, the lyrical structures of William S. Burroughs or the art of mime, Bowie was a crucible of conflicting ideas, bubbling towards one another and delivering a cocktail of cultural revolution. The singer was not without his musical influences, too.
Scott Walker, Marc Bolan, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and Bob Dylan are all names that Bowie would consider among his favourite musicians. As he grew into his role as a rock and roll elder statesman, Bowie never lost his vision for the evolution of music and would routinely label other bands as the future of the art form, calling both Pixies and Devo two heroes of progression.
But among all of those acts, there was one man who stood head and shoulders above the rest: John Lennon. Lennon, the leader of The Beatles, has an all-encompassing influence over popular culture. It is impossible to remove the work he created with the quartet from the world of music and equally as difficult to imagine a time in which David Bowie, working as an aspiring young folk artist, wasn’t tremendously shaped by the band’s records. For a generation of artists, Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr completely changed the landscape of music. But, for Bowie, things went a little further.
Speaking to the Berkeley College of Music in 1999, Bowie remembered the legendary figure with sincere fondness: “It’s impossible for me to talk about popular music without mentioning probably my greatest mentor, John Lennon,” he said. “I guess he defined for me, at any rate, how one could twist and turn the fabric of pop and imbue it with elements from other art forms, often producing something extremely beautiful, very powerful and imbued with strangeness.”
To be thought of as a mentor to Bowie is perhaps the greatest compliment Lennon could’ve been paid, despite the singer also calling him: “He [Lennon] was probably one of the brightest, quickest-witted, earnestly socialist men I’ve ever met in my life.” But it’s a fair proclamation. Not only did Lennon offer up a way forward for Bowie with his actions, but he also actively involved himself in the singer’s work, providing the backing vocals for his hit single ‘Fame’.
It was during these sessions that he also provided the advice that would shape Bowie’s career for years to come. The song was a notably pointed arrow aimed at the heart of Bowie’s management and sharpened by the bespectacled Beatle. As Bowie told Bill DeMain in 2003: “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’ (laughs),” explained the singer acknowledging Lennon’s natural bluntness. “That was basically the line. And John was the guy who opened me up to the idea that all management is crap.”
Lennon acted as a real mentor as he advised Bowie that he “did without managers, and started getting people in to do specific jobs for me, rather than signing myself away to one guy forever.” Bowie continues: “I started to realise that if you’re bright, you kind of know your worth, and if you’re creative, you know what you want to do and where you want to go in that way.”
There is much to love and loathe about John Lennon, but his impact on music is undeniable. That impact isn’t resigned to the music he put out or the interviews he gave but the hundreds of game-changing acts he inspired, including his mentee, David Bowie.