The Boston Globe - 15 November 1974
Bowie is trading on past, sliding into sunset David Bowie, the outrageous rock’n’roller, now a flaming forties fop, now the lead slink in a soul review, ever the calculating showman from last until tomorrow nights at the Music Hall. Okay, so I’ll get right down to what you really want to know, like what the bloke wore (a padded shouldered, tight fitting, gray doublebreasted jacket cut off at the waist: light gray, baggy pants, and sporting a walking stick), who he was with (the Mike Garson Band and singers War and Peace), and what his new bag is this time around (slick latin and r&b tinged soul). But if I wanted to be catty, I could say something on the order of “it didn’t take him too long to run out of ideas,” or something on that line to indicate that perhaps the glamorous Mr. Bowie’s time has come, preened in the spotlight awhile and then slid into a well choreographed sunset. Well, I wouldn't be far wrong. Bowie seems to be trading rather much on past reputations. He'd be hard pressed for an audience if he had emerged into the public's eye in the same manner he exhibited last night. But don't take my word for it, let's take the evening from the top and see what I mean. The Mike Garson Band and War and Peace started things off and (how can I say this without sounding too unkind) received a polite response from the well-groomed audience. Very slick soul with rotating combinations of the six War and Peace singers was their forte, and they touched all the stylistic bases from "Stormy Monday" to a sort of scat duet, to "Keep Me Hanging On" to a repetitive ditty called "Funky Music," but I got the uncomfortable feeling that I was watching the whole thing on the Merv Griffin Show.	After a short break, it was time for, what the off-stage announcer articulated in calculated excitement, David (slight pause). Opening with "Rebel Rebel" after a posturing, posing entrance, he moved along to a repetitive "Dancing," before getting a few ripples out of the placid crowd with the shuttering classic "Changes." "Young American," a new song, was, like all the new material, undistinguished. "1984" was the first echo of the outrageously staged productions of the past, but it was only an echo with merely harsh lights played on the audience and a stage light casting an immense shadow of Bowie on the simple white backdrop to suggest a totalitarian presense. Then back to the mundane with "Foot Stompin'" and the new "When You Rock'n'Roll With Me." It took the exuberant "Jean Genie" to get the unusually sedate audience moving, albeit rather nonchalantly, toward the stage, and some monumental crashing guitar to keep things going, but "Suffragette" and "Rock'n'Roll Suicide" finished things off nicely for the encore of "Diamond Dogs" featuring a wardrobe change to an army fatigue outfit with a red belt and a polo mallet accessory. David Bowie has enormous stage presence and no little amount of talent, but his slickness indicates too basic a superficiality for his influence to last. MICHAEL NICHOLSON
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