A couple of scrapped David Bowie tapes from the 1974 Sigma Sessions in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania have been found, but they were almost erased. Max Ochester, a rare record collector and preserver of Philly music history, found the recordings in 2022 when he purchased a large lot of unpublished reel-to-reel tapes from a foreclosure sale. However, the tapes weren’t labeled, except for the word “scrap” penciled on one of the boxes.
Last June, Ochester was heading to Elm Street Studios to do some recording and decided to bring the tapes along, assuming they were blank. “I took a couple of the tapes with me, because I was going to tape over them,” he told the Telegraph recently. Ochester and producer Brennan McGeehan went through the process of priming the old tapes for the reel-to-reel, which involves baking them in an oven on low heat to prevent deterioration.
“We baked them overnight and then Brendan threw them up on the reel-to-reel,” Ochester explained. “I just wanted to check there was nothing on the tapes before I erased them.” However, when the tape started to play, Ochester heard something familiar.
First it was just a band playing some disco, then there was an R&B-style jam with a guitar riff reminiscent of the one in David Bowie’s song “Fame.” Then, Luther Vandross came in on vocals for a cover of “Foot Stompin’” by The Flares. Next, the band started playing “Can You Hear Me” from Bowie’s Young Americans album.
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Philly Record Collector Finds Rare Scrapped Recordings from 1974 David Bowie Sigma Sessions
“That’s when I was just like, holy f—k, what do I have?” said Ochester of the moment he heard that David Bowie song. “Because I knew it was a Bowie song. And I knew that Luther sang on Young Americans.”
Once the band played an instrumental take of “Young Americans,” with Bowie’s saxophonist David Sanborn distinctively wailing away on his alto, Ochester was sure he had something special. Here were scrapped recordings from David Bowie’s 1974 Sigma Sessions.
On another tape, Ochester had David Bowie singing the Bruce Springsteen song “It’s Hard to Be A Saint in the City.” There is a recording of Bowie singing Springsteen that was later released on the Sound and Vision box set, but no one had ever heard that song sung over the riff from “Fame.” That’s what Ochester had in his possession: completely unheard Bowie demos.
Sigma Studio Engineers Who Worked on Young Americans Came to Listen to the Newly Discovered Tapes
There’s so much more on the three scrapped tapes, like studio chatter between Bowie and producer Tony Visconti, as well as a rough take of “Fascination.” The tapes are a gold mine of Bowie history, and they would have gone completely unheard had it not been for Max Ochester giving them a listen on a whim.
Ochester and his friend Aaron Levinson listened to the tapes with three of the Sigma sound engineers who worked on Young Americans in 1974—Dirk Devlin, Jim Gallagher, and Pete Humphreys. Later, once they went through the three tapes, Ochester and Levinson asked why the tapes had never been heard and were unmarked. Allegedly, someone stole them.
Devlin elaborated. “It points to one of our deceased compatriots,” he said. “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.”
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