“All the Young Dudes”

MOTT THE HOOPLE

When David Bowie got word that Mott the Hoople—a struggling British cult band at the time—was about to break up, he offered a song to keep them together. First, he suggested the supercharged “Suffragette City,” a song meant for his own upcoming album. But the band rejected that in favor of another tune, “All the Young Dudes,” an unrecorded ballad Bowie performed for them. “I knew that one was special,” Mott’s lead singer, Ian Hunter, told Billboard. Bowie even offered to produce the single, which cracked the U.S. Top 40. More than a hit, “Dudes” became an anthem for the era’s glam-rock style and the emerging gay rights movement, inspired by a same-gender sexual relationship in the lyric. That same year, Lou Reed scored a hit with the equally edgy “Walk on the Wild Side,” which name-checked Andy Warhol’s cast of underground stars. Together, those two songs made 1972 a watershed year for pop’s new sexual expressiveness.