Never-before-heard David Bowie recordings unearthed at Montco estate sale
Max Ochester discovered tapes recorded at Sigma Sound Studios for 'Young Americans,' including an unheard version of a Bruce Springsteen song. He's trying to get the music to the Bowie estate.
Back in 2022, when Max Ochester loaded up his car with 15 U-Haul boxes of reel-to-reel tapes he purchased at a Montgomery County estate sale, he had no idea he was carrying a new chapter of David Bowie’s Philadelphia music history in his hands.
It would be another two years before the Brewerytown Records owner, who specializes in unearthing Philly’s soul music past, would realize he unknowingly acquired master tapes that feature an early version of Bowie’s song “Fame” and a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City,” recorded a half century ago at Philly’s famed Sigma Sound Studios.
Ochester had been tipped that music of historical significance might be on offer at the foreclosed home. So when a woman showed him boxes labeled “The Intruders,” “Billy Paul,” and “The Ebonys” — artists who helped define the Sound of Philadelphia in the 1960s and 1970s — the purchase for a few thousand dollars felt like money well spent.
But as first reported by Richard Grant in London’s The Telegraph, it wasn’t until last June that Ochester had a reason to dig up the two unmarked boxes he had stored in a Bailey Street warehouse.
Sound engineer Brendan McGeehan was at Elm Street Studios in Conshohocken working on a new album by rediscovered Philly singer Ron Aikens when he asked Ochester if he had any old tape to bring in.
Working on a shoestring budget, Ochester brought what he considered scrap tapes to Elm Street with the intention of erasing and taping over them. “We baked them overnight,” a common practice to keep aged — and expensive — analog multitrack tape from falling apart, Ochester said in an interview this week.
The next day, they played the tapes to make sure they didn’t contain anything of interest. First up was an unremarkable instrumental funk track Ochester thought might be MFSB, Sigma house musicians who backed up artists like The O’Jays and Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes.
Soon though, Ochester and McGeehan realized that they had something entirely more mind-blowing on their hands.
The band was playing a cover of “Foot Stompin’,” the 1961 hit by the doo-wop group The Flares on which Carlos Alomar, the guitarist on Bowie’s 1975 Young Americans, based the riff for “Fame”.
At first Ochester couldn’t identify the vocalist. “It wasn’t Bowie singing,” he said. But it became clearer on the next track, “Can You Hear Me?”. It was Luther Vandross, the then little known future R&B star who handled vocal arrangements for Bowie on Young Americans and cowrote “Fascination.”
“That’s when I realized this had something to do with Young Americans,” said Ochester, speaking of the Bowie album that will celebrate its 50th anniversary with a deluxe reissue on March 7.
A few months later, Ochester brought the tapes to Toby Seay, director of the Drexel University Audio Archives, which houses the Sigma Sound Studios Collection, and a professor of Recording Arts and Music Production.
When they played a third tape, Seay and Ochester were treated to an even bigger stunner.
They heard Bowie counting off the start of a song which turned out to be the “Fame” music, but with the lyrics to Springsteen’s “Saint In the City.”
Bowie did record a version of that song from 1973’s Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. that was not heard until it came out on his 1989 Sound + Vision box set, released on the partly Ardmore-based Rykodisc label.
Springsteen visited Bowie during the Young Americans sessions in November 1974, a time when the Boss was (remarkably) so broke he had to borrow money from WMMR-FM (93.3) DJ Ed Sciaky to cover the bus trip from New Jersey.
But the version of “Saint” known to Bowie fans has nothing to do with “Fame.” What Ochester has stumbled upon is a significant new wrinkle in what’s known as Bowie’s “plastic soul” period.
The version of “Fame” and a cover of the Beatles’ “Across the Universe” on Young Americans were recorded in New York in January 1975, when Bowie was hanging out with his new BFF John Lennon.
Ochester’s discovery corrects history and shows that “Fame” — written by Bowie, Alomar, and Lennon — was actually born at Sigma, and is part of Bowie’s Philadelphia story.
“It’s really a proto-’Fame,’” says Aaron Levinson, the Grammy-winning Philly producer teaming with Ochester to spread the word about the Bowie tapes. “They’re working up the groove to ‘Fame.’ You can hear the signature guitar part. But what’s so interesting is Bowie is doing Springsteen over this!”
Ochester can’t recall the exact location of the estate sale, and doesn’t know who owned the foreclosed home or how the tapes got there.
“I was going to like four or five houses a week, buying collections, trying to recover from the pandemic. I was out all the time. I looked through my Google maps history, but I can’t remember where it was.”
“These aren’t tapes that people knew about. Max has discovered a new chapter in David Bowie’s life. All credit to him,” said Levinson, who owns Range Recording Studio in Ardmore.
So does a financial windfall await Ochester? Sadly not.
That’s not how the music business works. Levinson explains, “I said to Max, ‘You’re in this unique place, because you own a piece of tape, but you do not own the content. The intellectual property, you have no control over.’”
Ownership of that — the unheard music on the Philly Bowie tapes — will be controlled by Bowie’s record company and music publisher — the Warner Music Group and Warner Chappell publishing, and the Bowie estate.
Ochester and Levinson’s aim is to get the music to its rightful owners, and the duo hopes to donate the physical tapes to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. This spring, the V&A will open the David Bowie Centre with a collection of over 90,000 items.
They have contacted Alomar and longtime Bowie producer Tony Visconti, who helmed Young Americans, but have not heard back. They’ve started a Kickstarter aiming to compensate for time spent obsessing over the Bowie tapes, and to fund a trip to hand deliver the music to London. Aptly, it’s called “We Can Be Heroes (if only we return these tapes).”
“I’m not trying to blackmail anybody, or get any money out of the tapes themselves,” said Ochester, who has led the efforts to preserve the Sigma Sound building on North 12th Street in hopes of turning it into a museum.
“But the reason Bowie came to Philly was to be at Sigma and capture that sound. And that perfectly aligns with my mission of revitalizing Sigma and working with artists that never had the same chances Bowie did. So I can tell my story and say, ‘Look, Sigma is sitting here, and it’s empty, and we should do something with it.’ I want that attention.”
Levinson added: “We own what happened to us. The upshot of the whole experience is repatriation. How do we get this thing back to its home, where it’s brothers and sisters live? That’s the whole crux of the story.”