Carlos Alomar had a guitar riff. He had developed it for “Footstompin'” — a cover of the Flairs’ 1961 R&B hit that he and Bowie had been performing during the Philly Dogs shows. It was a funky, flickering lick. He knew it had history in R&B, and that his version of it was part of that tradition rather than a personal invention. In January 1975, at Electric Lady Studios in New York, David Bowie and John Lennon were recording “Across the Universe” when an impromptu session produced something new. Alomar put that riff — the “Footstompin'” lick — into the session. What happened next is one of popular music’s more specifically documented creative accidents: Bowie and Lennon started working around the riff, Lennon contributed the title and the specific vocal approach, and “Fame” came out of the session. “Fame” gave David Bowie his first US number one single. The writing credit went three ways: Bowie, Alomar, Lennon. The funky guitar riffs were later copied for James Brown’s 1975 recording “Hot (I Need to be Loved, Loved, Loved)” — which means that James Brown heard the riff that Carlos Alomar developed for “Footstompin’,” that Alomar recycled into “Fame,” and liked it enough to use it for his own record. A riff that passed from a 1961 Flairs recording through a Philly Dogs cover through “Fame” through James Brown. This is how the soul-funk guitar tradition actually works: the vocabulary is shared, accumulated, recirculated, and every application is a contribution to the tradition rather than a departure from it. The guitar on “Fame” is a Gibson ES-335 through a Fender Twin Reverb. Alomar knew what setup he needed. The riff knew where it needed to go.
Carlos Alomar was born on May 7, 1951, in Puerto Rico, and grew up in New York City’s Spanish Harlem after his family moved there when he was young. He began playing guitar at ten and became the youngest guitarist in the history of Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater at seventeen — a biographical detail that places him in the specific lineage of the African-American musical institution that has been the proving ground for American popular music talent across generations. He performed at the Apollo’s Amateur Night and joined the house band Listen My Brother around age fifteen, appeared on Sesame Street in 1970 as part of the Apollo ensemble, and was gigging with James Brown and the Main Ingredient before he was twenty. Luther Vandross was his best friend at fifteen — “I met Robin through him,” Robin Clark being the singer who became Alomar’s wife and who brought Luther to the Bowie sessions. This is the specific social network that produced “Young Americans” and “Fame”: a group of young New York musicians who had grown up together in the same world, who brought each other into each other’s professional opportunities, and who collectively made some of the most celebrated music of the mid-1970s.
The Bowie partnership — which began at RCA Studios in 1974 and lasted thirty years as Bowie’s music director, rhythm guitarist, and collaborative creative partner — is one of the more consequential and more sustained guitarist-artist relationships in rock history. Young Americans (1975), Station to Station (1976), Low (1977), “Heroes” (1977), Lodger (1979), Scary Monsters and Super Creeps (1980): the core of Bowie’s most celebrated catalog, and Alomar was the rhythm guitar foundation and musical director of all of it. “His ability to play R&B, Philly soul, hard rock, and ambient music made him invaluable — and perfectly suited to keep pace with Bowie’s ever-evolving musical personas.” The Berlin Trilogy — the three albums made with Brian Eno in Hansa Studios in Berlin — are the specific creative peak of the partnership and among the most influential rock recordings of the 1970s. Alomar’s rhythm guitar is the functional anchor of those recordings: the sound of a musician who can adapt completely to whatever the specific musical context requires while maintaining the foundational rhythmic intelligence that the tracks need.
His own characterization of his development is the most honest and most revealing statement of his musical identity: “I’m a soulful kind of little R&B guitar player, playing a little R&B twin reverb amplifier with a 335. I’m not the Marshall Stack kind of player. Then suddenly something happens. I meet Adrian Belew, next thing I know, I’m hammering. I hear Fripp. Now I know how to control feedback. I hear some other guitar players. I got open tunings under my belt. Open tunings, the four B tunings of the Louisiana Bayou. I play synthesizer-guitar. Half of the stuff that you hear me playing after a certain album, that’s all synthesizer-guitar. What you think you’re hearing is not a synthesizer.” The trajectory described here — from the soulful R&B guitarist with the 335 and the Twin to the experimental rock musician learning to hammer and control feedback from Adrian Belew and Robert Fripp, to the synthesizer-guitarist whose guitar sounds like a synthesizer — is the specific creative arc of a musician who adapted completely to Bowie’s ever-evolving musical vision while maintaining the rhythmic intelligence and the soulful grounding that brought him to Bowie’s attention in the first place. The Twin Reverb and the ES-335 are where he started. The synthesizer-guitar is where the Bowie years took him.
He co-wrote “Fame” with David Bowie and John Lennon. He is the rhythm guitar foundation of the Berlin Trilogy. He married Robin Clark, who sang backup for Bowie. His best friend at fifteen was Luther Vandross. He was the youngest guitarist in the history of the Apollo Theater. He played guitar on Sesame Street. He developed the riff that James Brown copied. This is the Carlos Alomar biography: a Puerto Rican kid from Spanish Harlem who became the rhythmic and musical foundation of David Bowie’s most celebrated creative decade and who adapted his guitar playing to every new direction Bowie’s art required, from Philly soul to glam to ambient electronic music to hard rock and back again, for thirty years.
Background: Apollo Theater at 17, the Bowie Partnership, and the Berlin Trilogy
The Apollo Theater history is the specific professional context that established Alomar’s musical identity before the Bowie partnership: the youngest guitarist in the institution’s history, performing in the house band that had backed generations of American soul and R&B artists in the specific demanding context of the Harlem stage. The Apollo audience is legendarily unforgiving — performers who don’t deliver are booed off the stage, and the standard expected by the Apollo audience is the standard of the most demanding popular music performance tradition in America. Being the youngest guitarist in the Apollo’s history is not a curiosity of age; it is a confirmation of musical quality at the highest available standard.
The social network that produced the Bowie breakthrough is as important as the musical quality: Luther Vandross as best friend at fifteen, Robin Clark as wife and vocal collaborator, the specific connections at RCA Recording Studios where Alomar became the in-house guitarist. The meeting with Bowie at RCA in 1974 was not a chance encounter but the specific result of being in the right professional position — the RCA in-house guitarist — at the moment that Bowie was looking for the specific musical direction that Young Americans represented. Bowie heard Alomar’s playing at RCA and recognized immediately what he needed: the soulful, rhythmically intelligent guitarist who could provide the Philly soul foundation for the new direction. Alomar provided it, and then went on to provide whatever each subsequent Bowie direction required.
The “Young Americans” recording at Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia — the studio associated with the Sound of Philadelphia production approach of Gamble & Huff — is the specific recording context from which the Alomar-Bowie creative partnership emerged. “The great thing about David is that he lets you work out your own problems,” Alomar recalled. “We’d jam, he’d add something, we’d come back, discuss. Maybe there was something nuanced someone did that we didn’t catch, but it would be, ‘Hey, we like that. Maybe there’s this Latin thing we can do on Young Americans. Yeah, let’s try that.’ We’d develop grooves.” This collaborative approach — Bowie as creative director who recognized and amplified what the musicians were developing rather than imposing a fixed vision — is the specific creative method that produced the “Young Americans” sound, and it continued through the Berlin Trilogy and beyond.
The Berlin Trilogy’s specific creative context — Hansa Studios in Berlin, Brian Eno as co-producer and creative collaborator, the experimental electronic music approach of Low, “Heroes,” and Lodger — required a complete adaptation of Alomar’s musical identity from the soulful R&B guitarist of the Philly sessions to the experimental rock musician of the Berlin context. The presence of Adrian Belew and Robert Fripp as lead guitarists on the Berlin and Scary Monsters recordings gave Alomar specific new techniques to absorb: “I meet Adrian Belew, next thing I know, I’m hammering. I hear Fripp. Now I know how to control feedback.” This is the specific educational opportunity of being the rhythm guitarist in a band with two of the most technically innovative lead guitarists in rock: you absorb what they do, you adapt it to your own musical vocabulary, and you become a more complete musician in the process.
The Rig: Carlos Alomar’s Guitars, Amps, and Effects
Guitars
Gibson ES-335 (Primary Guitar — Early Career and Bowie Sessions Foundation)
Carlos Alomar’s foundational guitar throughout the early career and into the Bowie sessions was the Gibson ES-335 — “In the early ’70s, I still used my Gibson ES-335, paired with a Fender Twin Reverb.” The ES-335’s semi-hollow construction — the solid center block surrounded by hollow wings with f-holes — provides the specific combination of acoustic resonance, warmth, and feedback control that the professional soul and R&B session context required. The ES-335 sustains more freely than a solid-body guitar, with the acoustic body resonance adding harmonic complexity to each note, while the center block prevents the uncontrolled feedback that a fully hollow archtop would produce at high volumes. “I loved the clean, powerful sound that setup gave me, which was perfect for the wide range of session work and commercials I was doing, which, at that time, was jazz and R&B.” The ES-335’s voice — warm, present, with the specific harmonic complexity of the semi-hollow construction — is the foundational guitar voice of the Young Americans and early Station to Station recordings, and the specific instrument that delivered the “Fame” riff to the Electric Lady Studios session with Bowie and Lennon.
Synthesizer-Guitar (Berlin Trilogy Era — Roland GR-Series and Equivalents)
“Half of the stuff that you hear me playing after a certain album, that’s all synthesizer-guitar. What you think you’re hearing is not a synthesizer.” This is the most technically specific and most surprising element of Alomar’s gear documentation: the synthesizer-guitar — a guitar-to-synthesizer interface that converts the guitar’s string vibrations into MIDI or analog synthesizer control signals — used extensively in the Berlin Trilogy era and beyond, producing sounds that listeners assume are keyboard synthesizers. The Roland GR-series guitar synthesizers of the late 1970s were among the first guitar-to-synthesizer systems of professional quality, enabling a guitarist to trigger synthesizer sound modules from the guitar without a keyboard. Alomar adopted this technology — consistent with the experimental electronic music context of the Eno-Bowie Berlin productions — and used it to produce guitar-based sounds that pass as keyboard synthesizers in the finished recordings. The synthesizer-guitar represents the furthest point of his technical evolution from the soulful R&B guitarist with the Twin Reverb and the 335: the guitar is still the instrument, but what it produces is not guitar sound.
Various Electric Guitars (Session Breadth — R&B, Rock, and Ambient)
Alomar’s session breadth — the ability to serve Philly soul, hard rock, ambient, and experimental contexts — required a guitar collection appropriate for each application. The ES-335’s semi-hollow warmth for soul and R&B applications; solid-body electrics for the harder rock passages of Station to Station and Scary Monsters; the synthesizer-guitar interface for the Berlin experimental context. His adaptability is the primary professional quality, and the guitar collection reflects the breadth of musical context that adaptability required.
Amps
Fender Twin Reverb (Primary — Early Career and Bowie Soul Sessions)
The Fender Twin Reverb is Alomar’s documented primary amplifier — “paired with a Fender Twin Reverb” for the ES-335-based work of the early career and Bowie soul sessions. “I’m a soulful kind of little R&B guitar player, playing a little R&B twin reverb amplifier with a 335.” The Twin Reverb’s specific character — high-powered 6L6-based clean tone with built-in spring reverb — provides the specific transparent, warm amplification of the soul guitar tradition: the guitar’s own character is amplified faithfully, the amp’s built-in reverb provides natural spatial dimension, and the clean headroom ensures that the playing’s dynamic nuance is preserved rather than compressed by amplifier saturation. The Twin Reverb is the correct amplifier for the soulful R&B guitarist. Alomar knew this from the beginning. The Taylor Reverb and the ES-335 is the complete signal chain for the Young Americans and early Bowie sessions.
Various Amplifiers (Bowie Tour and Session Evolution)
The progression from the twin reverb-centric approach of the early career to the more experimental amplification contexts of the Berlin Trilogy and subsequent Bowie recordings reflects the same adaptation process that produced the synthesizer-guitar. Different recording contexts — the Hansa Studios ambient approaches of Low and “Heroes,” the more aggressive rock of Station to Station and Scary Monsters — required different amplification approaches. The Marshall stack that the Berlin Trilogy lead guitarists used (Fripp and Belew both used Marshall or Marshall-derived amplification) provided a different tonal context from the Fender Twin, and Alomar’s absorption of what the lead guitarists were doing included the amplification context in which they were doing it.
Effects
Wah-Wah (Post-Shaft Addition — “I Heard Isaac Hayes and Started Incorporating Wah”)
“Initially, I didn’t use many effects, just a little amp reverb. I focused on getting the right tone directly from my guitar and amp. However, as the decade progressed, I heard Shaft by Isaac Hayes so I started incorporating a wah-wah.” The specific catalyst — the Isaac Hayes “Shaft” wah-guitar — is the same commercial moment that converted many late-1960s and early-1970s guitar players from the clean approach to the wah approach: the specific funky, expressive wah-wah guitar of the blaxploitation film score tradition that “Shaft” defined and that subsequent soul-funk productions emulated. Alomar heard it, recognized it as something he wanted in his vocabulary, and incorporated it. The wah’s addition to his signal chain also expanded the rhythmic possibilities of the ES-335-and-Twin setup: the wah’s frequency filtering adds rhythmic and tonal variety to the clean soul guitar approach without requiring the amplifier’s character to change.
Open Tunings (Technique — Louisiana Bayou Traditions)
“I got open tunings under my belt. Open tunings, the four B tunings of the Louisiana Bayou. The original slave tunings gave us the minor pentatonic.” Alomar’s incorporation of open tunings — absorbed from the encounters with other guitarists and musical traditions as Bowie’s work expanded his musical world — adds another dimension to the specific guitar vocabulary. The “four B tunings of the Louisiana Bayou” reference the specific regional open tuning traditions of the Louisiana blues and swamp rock tradition — the same open-tuning heritage that Ron Wood’s copper pipe slide work and Sonny Landreth’s open E approach draw from. For a Puerto Rican R&B guitarist from Spanish Harlem, the Louisiana bayou tuning tradition represents a specific absorbed musical world that the Bowie partnership’s breadth of musical exploration made available.
Guitar Synthesis / Synthesizer-Guitar (Berlin Era — MIDI Control)
The synthesizer-guitar approach — detailed in the guitar section — represents the most technically distinct element of Alomar’s effects vocabulary. The guitar-to-synthesizer interface converts string vibrations to electronic control signals, triggering synthesizer sound modules that produce sounds entirely unlike standard guitar tone. “What you think you’re hearing is not a synthesizer” — or rather, what you think you’re hearing as keyboard synthesizer is actually guitar played through a synthesizer interface. This is the specific contribution of the Eno-Bowie experimental context: it gave Alomar a new technical vocabulary (the synthesizer-guitar) that expanded what the guitar could express in the specific ambient-electronic context of the Berlin recordings.
Feedback Control (Fripp Influence — Learned on the Job)
“I hear Fripp. Now I know how to control feedback.” Robert Fripp’s specific approach to feedback control — the precise management of the guitar’s sustained resonance at the threshold of amplifier saturation — is one of the more technically sophisticated elements of the rock guitar vocabulary, requiring the specific understanding of how the guitar’s physical position relative to the amplifier affects the frequency and character of the feedback cycle. Alomar learned this in the context of working alongside Fripp on the Berlin recordings — absorbing by proximity the specific techniques that produced the ambient, sustaining guitar textures of Low and “Heroes.”
Hammering Technique (Adrian Belew Influence — Tapping)
“I meet Adrian Belew, next thing I know, I’m hammering.” The hammering/tapping technique — the left-hand hammer-on and right-hand tap approach that produces legato, sustained note sequences without pick attack — was absorbed from working alongside Adrian Belew on the Bowie tours and recordings of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Belew’s specific combination of hammering technique, unusual pitch bending, and experimental guitar textures was one of the more technically distinctive approaches in the rock guitar vocabulary of the period, and Alomar’s proximity to it expanded his own technical vocabulary in ways that the soulful R&B guitarist of the Twin Reverb era would not have developed independently.
The Alomar-Davis-Murray rhythm section — Carlos on guitar, Dennis Davis on drums, George Murray on bass — was the specific rhythmic unit that underpinned Bowie’s recordings from Young Americans through Scary Monsters and Super Creeps. This consistent rhythmic core is what gave the wildly varying musical approaches of the Bowie mid-period their underlying cohesion: however different Low’s ambient drone was from Station to Station’s extended funk-rock, however different “Heroes”‘ experimental electronics were from Lodger’s world-music references, the same rhythm section held everything together. The guitar in that section — the ES-335, the Twin Reverb, the wah and the open tunings and eventually the synthesizer-guitar — was always Alomar, always in service of the music, always staying adaptable. The rhythm section is the truth of any recording: it is where you find out who the musicians actually are, stripped of the lead guitar showcase and the vocal performance and the production gloss. What you find in Alomar is a musician who is genuinely, deeply soulful — the R&B tradition in his hands, the Pentecostal minister’s son who found his calling in the groove — and also genuinely adaptable to whatever musical universe he was asked to inhabit. David Bowie was very good at asking the right musicians to inhabit his musical universes. Carlos Alomar was very good at answering.
He also appeared on Sesame Street. This is the complete Carlos Alomar biography. The Apollo Theater at seventeen. Sesame Street in 1970. “Fame” with Bowie and Lennon. Robert Fripp teaching him to control feedback. Adrian Belew teaching him to hammer. The Louisiana Bayou open tunings. The synthesizer-guitar on the Berlin recordings. The soulful R&B guitarist with the 335 and the Twin, staying adaptable, working out his own problems, making David Bowie’s music sound like David Bowie’s music for thirty years. The riff is still playing.
Playing Style & Tone Philosophy
Carlos Alomar plays guitar as a musician whose primary identity is rhythmic and harmonic — the ensemble guitarist who understands that the rhythm guitar’s job is to lock in with the rhythm section, provide the harmonic framework for the vocalist and lead instruments, and make the band sound cohesive. This is the soul guitar tradition’s fundamental philosophy, and it is the approach that brought him to Bowie’s attention at RCA in 1974 and that sustained the thirty-year partnership through all of Bowie’s musical transformations. The adaptability — absorbing hammering from Belew, feedback control from Fripp, wah-wah from Isaac Hayes, open tunings from the Louisiana tradition, synthesizer-guitar from the technology of the late 1970s — is in service of this fundamental rhythmic and harmonic identity rather than a departure from it. He adapted because Bowie’s music required adaptation, and the foundational quality that made adaptation possible was the same soulful R&B musicianship that started with the ES-335 and the Twin Reverb.
“My key was always to stay adaptable and open to new sounds and techniques.” This is the complete philosophy in its most compressed form. The specific techniques varied — the soul rhythm of Young Americans, the harder rock of Station to Station, the ambient textures of the Berlin Trilogy, the synthesizer-guitar of the post-Berlin period — but the approach was consistent: listen to what the music requires, develop the technique necessary to provide it, and use the foundational rhythmic and harmonic intelligence of the soul guitar tradition as the ground from which all of it grows. The Twin Reverb and the ES-335 are the foundation. Everything else — the wah, the open tunings, the hammering, the feedback, the synthesizer-guitar — is what the music required next.
“The great thing about David is that he lets you work out your own problems.” This collaborative creative method — Bowie providing the vision and the context, the musicians developing the specific solutions within that context — is the specific reason the partnership produced such consistent musical quality across such varied stylistic terrain. Alomar was not executing Bowie’s prescribed guitar parts; he was developing his own responses to Bowie’s musical direction. The “Fame” riff is the most concentrated example: a riff Alomar developed for a different song, recognized in a different session, and contributed to a collaboration with John Lennon that produced a number one single. The soulful R&B guitarist with the 335 and the Twin, working out his own problems in the specific creative context that David Bowie provided.
How to Sound Like Carlos Alomar
The Carlos Alomar Young Americans tone requires: a Gibson ES-335 (or equivalent semi-hollow, warm-toned guitar); a Fender Twin Reverb for clean amplification with minimal amp reverb; an optional wah-wah for the post-“Shaft” additions; and the rhythmic, harmonic intelligence of the soul guitar tradition — locking in with the rhythm section, supporting the vocal and harmonic content, making the arrangement cohere. The synthesizer-guitar requires a guitar-to-MIDI interface and appropriate sound modules for the Berlin Trilogy approximation.
| Control | Setting (0–10) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Fender Twin Reverb (Soul Sessions) | Volume: 5; Treble: 6; Bass: 5; Mid: 6; Reverb: 3 | “Clean, powerful sound” for the soul and R&B guitar foundation. The Twin at these settings provides the specific clean warmth of the Philadelphia soul sessions — enough volume for the guitar to project in the ensemble without pushing the amp toward saturation. Minimal reverb: present but not lush. The ES-335’s own acoustic resonance provides much of the spatial dimension. |
| Gibson ES-335 — Neck Pickup (Soul Rhythm) | Volume: 8; Tone: 7 | Neck pickup for the warm, full soul rhythm tone. Volume slightly back from full for the specific dynamic headroom that allows dig-in accents without the guitar over-compressing the Twin’s clean headroom. The ES-335’s neck humbucker provides the foundational warmth of the Young Americans sessions — full, present, harmonically rich. |
| Wah-Wah (Post-“Shaft” Addition) | Medium speed; rhythmic application | Used for rhythmic funk wah patterns — the chicken-scratch filter sweep of the soul-funk tradition that Alomar absorbed from Isaac Hayes’s “Shaft.” Set the wah for medium-paced heel-to-toe motion, locking the wah movement with the rhythm section’s groove. The wah adds the specific vocal, percussive quality of the Philly soul guitar to the ES-335’s foundational warmth. |
| Open Tunings (Louisiana Bayou Tradition) | Open D (D-A-D-F#-A-D) or Open G as starting point | The bayou open tunings that Alomar incorporated add specific harmonic possibilities. Open D and Open G are the most commonly associated with the Louisiana blues-bayou tradition. Each provides a full major chord on open strings and straight-bar major chords at every fret position — enabling the ringing, resonant quality that open-tuned guitar in the soul context provides. |
| Synthesizer-Guitar (Berlin Era) | Guitar-to-MIDI interface; soft sound module pads | For the Berlin Trilogy approximation: connect a guitar-to-MIDI interface (Roland GR-series or equivalent) to a sound module providing ambient pads, string sounds, and synthesizer textures. The technique of playing synthesizer sounds from guitar requires the same physical guitar approach (fretting, picking, muting) but produces completely different tonal output. “What you think you’re hearing is not a synthesizer.” |
| Rhythmic Intelligence (Primary) | Lock in; support; serve the arrangement | The most important element and the least equipment-dependent. Stay adaptable and open to new sounds and techniques. Lock the rhythm guitar in with the bass and drums — not playing independently but as part of the rhythmic unit. Support the harmonic content without competing with lead instruments. Make the band sound better. This is what Carlos Alomar did for David Bowie for thirty years. |
Influence & Legacy
Carlos Alomar’s influence on rock music is contained in the recordings he made as Bowie’s music director and rhythm guitarist across thirty years of Bowie’s most celebrated work. Young Americans, Station to Station, Low, “Heroes,” Lodger, Scary Monsters and Super Creeps — these are the recordings that defined Bowie’s most celebrated creative period, and they are also the recordings that document Alomar’s rhythmic and harmonic intelligence as the consistent foundation on which Bowie’s musical adventures were built. The lead guitarists changed — Earl Slick, Stacey Heydon, Ricky Gardiner, Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew — but the rhythm guitar stayed, because the rhythm guitar was where the music’s consistency lived.
“Fame” — the first Bowie US number one, the co-write with Lennon, the riff that James Brown copied — is the most concentrated documentary evidence of Alomar’s specific contribution: not just the rhythmic foundation but the creative intelligence that produced the specific guitar vocabulary at the center of the recording. A riff from “Footstompin’,” recycled in a session with John Lennon, becoming a number one single that James Brown then adapted for his own purposes. This is the soul guitar tradition’s specific relationship to originality: the vocabulary is shared, the application is personal, and the quality of the application is the measure of the musician’s contribution.
His solo album Dream Generator — one of the first instrumental records composed and performed on a guitar synthesizer — represents the most independent documentation of the synthesizer-guitar approach that the Berlin Trilogy recordings had introduced to the broader audience. The recording confirms both the technical capability and the compositional intelligence that the Bowie partnership had developed across the Berlin experiments.
For the broader soul and R&B guitar tradition that Alomar brought to the Bowie partnership, see Cornell Dupree’s Atlantic Records session approach at #60 — a parallel soul guitar tradition whose ES-335-and-Twin-Reverb foundation is identical to Alomar’s. The Berlin Trilogy’s experimental approach connects to Robert Fripp’s technique documented in the broader series — the guitarist whose feedback control Alomar absorbed on the Bowie recordings. And the “Fame” co-write with John Lennon places Alomar in the specific creative company of the Beatles-adjacent rock world that this series documents through multiple entries.
A riff from a Flairs cover. A session with John Lennon. A US number one. James Brown copies the riff. A Puerto Rican kid from Spanish Harlem who became the youngest guitarist in the history of the Apollo Theater, who married Robin Clark, whose best friend at fifteen was Luther Vandross, who heard Fripp and learned to control feedback, who heard Belew and started hammering, who heard Shaft and started using wah, who played synthesizer-guitar on David Bowie’s most experimental albums, who stayed adaptable and open for thirty years of Bowie’s musical evolution. “I’m a soulful kind of little R&B guitar player, playing a little R&B twin reverb amplifier with a 335.” He was. He is. The riff is still playing.
Frequently Asked Questions: Carlos Alomar Guitars & Gear
What guitar did Carlos Alomar use on “Fame” and “Young Americans”?
Carlos Alomar’s primary guitar during the Young Americans and early Bowie sessions was a Gibson ES-335 paired with a Fender Twin Reverb. “In the early ’70s, I still used my Gibson ES-335, paired with a Fender Twin Reverb. I loved the clean, powerful sound that setup gave me, which was perfect for the wide range of session work and commercials I was doing, which, at that time, was jazz and R&B.” The “Fame” riff — which he developed for “Footstompin'” and recycled in the Electric Lady Studios session with David Bowie and John Lennon — was played on this ES-335/Twin combination.
How was “Fame” created and what was Carlos Alomar’s contribution?
“Fame” emerged from an impromptu session at Electric Lady Studios in January 1975, when David Bowie and John Lennon were recording “Across the Universe.” Alomar put a guitar riff into the session — one he had originally developed for the Flairs cover “Footstompin'” during the Philly Dogs shows. Bowie and Lennon worked around the riff, Lennon contributed the title and vocal approach, and “Fame” emerged from the session. The writing credit went three ways: Bowie, Alomar, Lennon. “Fame” gave Bowie his first US number one single. The guitar riffs were later copied for James Brown’s 1975 recording “Hot (I Need to be Loved, Loved, Loved)” — confirming the riff’s place in the soul-funk tradition’s shared vocabulary.
What is the synthesizer-guitar and how did Carlos Alomar use it?
“Half of the stuff that you hear me playing after a certain album, that’s all synthesizer-guitar. What you think you’re hearing is not a synthesizer.” The synthesizer-guitar is a guitar-to-synthesizer interface system — Roland GR-series or equivalent — that converts the guitar’s string vibrations to electronic control signals, triggering synthesizer sound modules to produce sounds that listeners perceive as keyboard synthesizers. Alomar adopted this technology during the Berlin Trilogy era and beyond, producing guitar-based sounds that pass as keyboard synthesizers in the finished recordings. His solo album Dream Generator was one of the first instrumental records composed and performed entirely on guitar synthesizer.
What influenced Carlos Alomar to use pedals and new techniques?
Alomar’s effects and technique evolution followed a clear trajectory of inspiration from colleagues. He initially used no effects beyond amp reverb. After hearing Isaac Hayes’s “Shaft,” he incorporated a wah-wah. Working alongside Adrian Belew on Bowie tours and recordings, he learned the hammering/tapping technique. Working alongside Robert Fripp, he learned to control feedback. Exposure to open tuning traditions expanded his harmonic vocabulary. The synthesizer-guitar was absorbed from the experimental electronic context of the Eno-Bowie Berlin productions. Each addition came from a specific musical encounter rather than from self-directed technical exploration: “My key was always to stay adaptable and open to new sounds and techniques.”
What was Carlos Alomar’s role in the Berlin Trilogy?
The Berlin Trilogy — Low (1977), “Heroes” (1977), and Lodger (1979) — was recorded primarily at Hansa Studios in Berlin with Brian Eno as co-producer. Alomar was the rhythm guitarist and music director throughout, providing the rhythmic and harmonic foundation on which Eno’s experimental electronic approaches and the lead guitarists’ (Robert Fripp on “Heroes,” various others) contributions were built. He absorbed new techniques from the lead guitarists he worked alongside during this period — hammering from Adrian Belew, feedback control from Fripp — expanding his technical vocabulary into the experimental rock territory that the Berlin recordings required. The rhythm guitar trio of Alomar/Dennis Davis/George Murray was the consistent rhythmic foundation through the mid-to-late 1970s Bowie recordings.
How did Carlos Alomar begin his career?
Carlos Alomar was born May 7, 1951, in Puerto Rico and raised in New York City’s Spanish Harlem. He began playing guitar at ten and became the youngest guitarist in the history of Harlem’s Apollo Theater at seventeen, joining the house band Listen My Brother around age fifteen. He appeared on Sesame Street in 1970 as part of the Apollo ensemble, gigged with James Brown and the Main Ingredient, and became the in-house guitarist at RCA Recording Studios. At RCA he met David Bowie in 1974, brought Luther Vandross and his wife Robin Clark to the Young Americans sessions, and began the thirty-year partnership that defined his career. Luther Vandross was his best friend at fifteen; Robin Clark became his wife; the Bowie partnership began at RCA in 1974.
Did Carlos Alomar write other songs besides “Fame”?
Carlos Alomar had co-writing credits on several Bowie recordings throughout the partnership. “Fame” is the most commercially significant, giving Bowie his first US number one single and co-written credit with Bowie and John Lennon. Alomar also composed his solo album Dream Generator, one of the first instrumental records performed on guitar synthesizer. His role as Bowie’s music director included arranging responsibilities across the recordings, and his compositional intelligence is embedded in the groove structures and arrangement decisions of the Bowie catalog even where formal co-writing credit wasn’t attached. His wife Robin Clark later became the lead female vocalist for Simple Minds during their global success with Once Upon a Time, an album on which Alomar also played guitar.
