David Bowie Stole a ‘Brilliant’ Line From John Lennon, and Lennon Called Him Out for It

David Bowie looked to John Lennon as an inspiration and a mentor. He admired the other man’s music and writing. Bowie even appreciated his jokes, so much so that he lifted one from him. He explained that he began using a response that Lennon gave to a fan. When he accidentally used it on Lennon, the former Beatle called him out. 

David Bowie admired John Lennon

Bowie was an avid fan of Lennon’s work, and, despite his own level of success, he was terrified to meet the other musician. Music producer Tony Visconti arranged a meeting between them, and Bowie was too afraid to speak.

“About one in the morning I knocked on the door and for about the next two hours, John Lennon and David weren’t speaking to each other,” Visconti told The Guardian. “Instead, David was sitting on the floor with an art pad and a charcoal and he was sketching things and he was completely ignoring Lennon.”

Eventually, they bonded when Lennon started drawing caricatures of Bowie. In his commencement speech for Berklee College of Music, Bowie said that he considered Lennon his greatest mentor.

“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 artforms, often producing something extremely beautiful, very powerful and imbued with strangeness.”

David Bowie said he began using a quote from John Lennon 

Bowie joined Lennon on a trip to Hong Kong, where he witnessed an interaction between Lennon and a fan.

“Towards the end of the 70s, a group of us went off to Hong Kong on a holiday and John was in, sort of, house-husband mode and wanted to show Sean [Lennon] the world,” Bowie said. “And during one of our expeditions on the back streets a kid comes running up to him and says, ‘Are you John Lennon?’ And he said, ‘No but I wish I had his money.’ Which I promptly stole for myself.”

Bowie thought it would be a “brilliant” way to avoid lengthy interactions with fans and started using it. It backfired a bit, though, when he accidentally used it on Lennon. 

“I was back in New York a couple of months later in Soho, downtown, and a voice pipes up in my ear, ‘Are you David Bowie?'” he explained. “And I said, ‘No, but I wish I had his money.’ ‘You lying bastard. You wish you had my money.’ It was John Lennon.”

The former Beatle once devastated the other musician 

Bowie found Lennon’s joking call out funny, but a gentle suggestion from the musician once devastated him. One night, Lennon, his girlfriend May Pang, Paul McCartney, and Linda McCartney visited Bowie. He played his album, Young Americans, on repeat throughout the night. 

“When it was over, he played it again,” Pang wrote in her book Loving John. “I could see Paul getting restless. ‘Can we hear a different album?’ he asked. David ignored him, and when he began to play it a third time, John said, ‘It’s great. Do you have any other albums that might be of interest?'”

Bowie quietly agreed and then left the room. Later, he called Lennon to explain how much the request had hurt him.

“They talked quietly for a while,” Pang wrote, “and when John got off the phone, he told me, ‘David really did feel hurt when I asked him to change the record. He was very upset. I kept tellin’ him I didn’t mean it that way.’ John was very distressed by David’s reaction.”