Though critical and popular perceptions hold that “a new album release by David Bowie is today looked on with as much awe as a release by the Beatles in the sixties,” John enjoys ribbing Bowie about his recent concept albums, including 1972’s multiplatinum The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, the story of a fictional rock star named Ziggy, one of Bowie’s many alter egos.

“What the bloody hell are you doing, Bowie? It’s all so negative, your shit. All this Diamond Dogs mutant crap. Ha, ha, ha.”

“What do you think of glam rock?” Bowie asks John.

“It’s just fooking rock and roll with lipstick,” he answers in his Liverpool accent.

“Very succinct, but not all that accurate,” Bowie says with a laugh.

Bowie’s latest evolution is a shift toward a style he’s calling “plastic soul,” the same phrase that Paul used in a different context in advance of Rubber Soul. Fascinated by the popular “sound of Philadelphia,” Bowie began recording his new album, Young Americans, at Sigma Sound Studios in that city. Now he’s returned to New York to finish it at the hallowed Electric Lady Studios, which Jimi Hendrix had opened for business in 1970, just three weeks before his death by accidental overdose.

Bowie hasn’t consulted his producer, Tony Visconti (who later marries May Pang), who’s departed for London under the impression that the album is complete, but he wants to add a cover of “Across the Universe”—the song John brought to the studio in early 1968 (eventually appearing on the final Beatles album, Let It Be), spurred by his irritation one night at his first wife, Cynthia.

“It’s so interesting,” John says about the songwriting. “‘Words are flying [sic] out like [sings] endless rain into a paper cup, they slither wildly as they slip away across the universe.’ Such an extraordinary meter and I can never repeat it! It’s not a matter of craftsmanship; it wrote itself.”

Bowie skips one part of the tune, eliminating the Sanskrit mantra “Jai guru deva om,” which John had learned from his studies with the maharishi and included in the original chorus.

John likes the cover (“I thought, great,” he says when he heard that Bowie wanted to cover it. “It’s one of my favorite songs, but I didn’t like my version of it”) and accepts Bowie’s invitation to collaborate. They talk for hours about the concept of fame, Bowie breaking down the paralyzing paradox of celebrity as “How much you want to be known before you are, and then when you are, how much you want the reverse: ‘I don’t want to do these interviews! I don’t want to have these photographs taken!’”

Bowie builds the rhythm around a guitar riff he’d originally earmarked for “Footstompin’” (his cover of the 1961 Flares song, which he eventually released on his 1995 album RarestOneBowie).