Rolling Stone (US) - 10 October 1974
Bowie: Time for Another Ch-Ch-Change LOS ANGELES…. David Bowie hadn't slept for 36 hours. He'd just gone through his rigorous show at the Universal Amphitheatre for the fourth night in a row (three to go), and he'd returned to the hotel to find a battlescarred Iggy Pop asleep in his bed. Now he lithely paced the living room and exuded the animal grace he sang of on Ziggy as he launched off on a speed-jive recital of a freaked-out moon-age daydream. He said that he comes up with one of these scripts every day, and he narrated it in an arrestingly manic rush, periodically springing from his chair to pace again, toying with an unlit cigarette for a solid half hour, ignoring the steak and potatoes that sat on the table beside him. He called it "a musical parody based on the mass death of tens of thousands of people," and it involves a mutant band called Impact whose star, one Cat Tastrophe, has a shocking effect on his immediate environment – when he -walks down the street old men collapse with heart attacks, children fall out of windows, shops explode and the roadway becomes a bloody battlefield of mangled steel. Cat himself is never touched. The punchline finally comes at an Impact concert, where accelerated aging is the day's disaster. When the teenage audience has become a dead heap of wrinkled flesh, the band's Warholish manager strolls onstage and asks, in a Truman Capote whine, "Well, should we give them an encore?" Bowie has always - been theatrical rock's straw hero. Somehow he found himself labelled a pioneer in a field in which he actually dabbled only minimally. On his first two U.S. tours, the extent of his theatre was a costume change every five minutes. On the tour that began earlier this summer and resumed that week in LA after a long intermission, he would suddenly and stunningly justify the theatrical tag with an elaborate presentation. And now, just as suddenly, it's going to change again. You could see it- happening at the Amphitheatre shows. The huge hand cradling Bowie inside the neon interior of a monolithic mirrored capsule, the astronaut's chair in which he floated over the stage during "Space Oddity," the movie lights, flashing camera, makeup man - and cocksucking skull that surrounded the "Cracked Actor," the frantic cubist skyline that loomed over it all the props were spectacular and effective. But the real moments, the screams and the hysterical assaults of the stage, were powered by Bowie himself and his mercurial parade of personalities the empty, pretty-boy movie star, the playful, lascivious bar crawler singing the legend of "The Jean Genie," and especially the unadorned, spontaneous David Bowie-as-entertainer with his audience in the palm of his hand.	The imminent change in Bowie's stage show is dictated by evolving musical interests, and the direction is becoming more and more pronounced. Eddie Floyd's Knock On Wood (which contains the Bowie-esque line, "Thunder, lightnin', the way you love me is frightnin' ") is in the show, and songs like Aladdin Sane, Changes, 1984," two new tunes: The Young American and It's Gonna Be Me, and particularly the extensively revised Bowie single, John, I'm Only Dancing, further reflect heavy involvement with black and Latin styles. According to the show's producer, Tony Zanetta, Bowie's long-smouldering interest in that sound surfaced during his long stay in New York in the spring, where he associated extensively with black and Puerto Rican musicians. Carlos Alomar played on some Lulu tracks he was mixing there, and Bowie's touring ensemble now includes former members of Santana and the Main Ingredient and several black backup vocalists, all of whom help transform the encore, John, I'm Only Dancing, into a Jackson Five-Graham Central Station rave-up. Accordingly, says Zanetta, the show that goes back on-the road October 5th (covering 20 cities-with at least two nights in nearly all of them) will be considerably altered. "The set's being redesigned," he says. "We want to use the essential elements of it, so we will be carrying the four towers with us and will keep the lighting in those towers, but we won't be using the bridge or any of the special effects. Basically, it'll be a much simpler thing. Originally, we were going to use this one for the whole tour, but once the first half finished and David started working on his new material, he felt that he would rather have something a little different, that he wanted to do something that was closer to the new material." "I've always thought that 'theatrical' wasn't the right word to describe David. I thought he was theatrical in that he was an extremely accomplished and professional performer and his abilities as a performer are those usually associated with the theatre rather than rock & roll.... What we did with this show was we created a really theatrical environment for him to work in. Which was interesting. Now, not so much because he's tired of that or sick of that, but because his music is changing and going in a slightly different direction, and because he wants to use more people, like lead vocalists, onstage, he's just interested in a different visual presentation." So for the moment Bowie has set a standard for those working at a coherent synthesis of theatre and rock. While they're at it, he's slipped out of his platform boots and into dancin' shoes as he boogaloos off into the final months of the Year of the Diamond Dogs. RICHARD CROMELIN
Philly Stopover: Fans and Funk PHILADELPHIA…. La Bowie and his entourage made elegant camp here for two weeks before the start of the West Coast swing of his current tour. Pitching tents amid the staid and somewhat geriatric prestige of Rittenhouse Square's Hotel Barclay, the Bowie mob had come from its New York headquarters after booking some 120 hours of recording time at Sigma Sound Studios, home of the Gamble-Huff-Bell R&B empire and one of the busiest hitmaking studios in the country. Bowie's intention had been to record with the rhythm section from MFSB, Sigma's resident body whose TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia) had recently pinned Philly Funk to the top of the charts for an extended reign. However, some confusion over commitments left Bowie with only MFSB conga player Larry Washington. Bowie then recruited a New York crew: guitarist Carlos Alomar, bassist Willie Weeks, drummer Andy Newmark and saxophonist David Sanborne, in addition to his pianist, Mike Garson, and some rafter-razing gospel in the voices of Ava Cherry, Luther Vandross and Alomar's wife, Robin. Tony Visconti engineered the sessions and was assisted by Sigma's Carl Paruolo. Accompanied by his secretary, Corinne Schwab, and his bodyguard, Stuart George and frequently visited in the studio by wife Angela and son Zowie, both of whom had checked into the Barclay with him–Bowie made nightly journeys to Sigma. For a corps of ten "Bowiemaniacs" who maintained a sleep-out vigil in front of Sigma and who greeted, begged autographs and won kind words from their main man upon his entrances and exits (Bowie worked from the early evening into the late morning), the Sigma sessions were apparently as traumatic as they were God-sent. Bowie had decided that the faithful would be brought into the studio after completion of the album for a party. But that didn't happen until early in the morning of the final session, after Bowie had put in a long night of finishing touches some vocal fragments, a few overdubbed keyboard parts and some additional harmonies from Ava, Robin and Luther. The album, thanks to Bowie's organized approach he would prepare reams of precise arrangements during the day for efficient, methodical run-throughs at night had come together quickly and, it appeared, to the considerable satisfaction of all concerned. So much so that, by the final night, the atmosphere in Sigma's second-floor studio had depressurised to a state of genial calm.	The album, which Mike Garson has suggested Bowie call Somebody Up There Likes Me, arguably the strongest and most immediately engaging of the seven songs, seems far from the conceptual mosaicism of past efforts such as Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs, and is perhaps the first Bowie album you'll be able to dance to all the way through. Bowie's version of Philly Sound a slickly stylised, "discophonic" brand of urban soul pioneered at Sigma by Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff and Thom Bellis largely propelled by the soaring vocal backup of Ava, Luther and Robin, while behind them the instrumentalists produce a blistering rhythm. The songs range from a new, remarkably revamped version of John, I'm Only Dancing – once a straight-ahead rocker and now rhythmically expanded, ultraprogressive excursion- to new material in a superbly soulful vein. Apart from the obvious single, Somebody Up There Likes Me, there is an extended, magnificently punctuated torch song, It's Gonna Be Me, featuring an aching vocal from Bowie that should keep Al Green and Marvin Gaye on their toes; bouncy, high-humoured number, The Young American, written recently enough to treat Richard Nixon in the past tense, and the album's closer, Right! –an exhortation of the funk God. Bowie played the album for the ten blissed-out, formerly camped-out, devotees, who'd been ushered into the studio, finally, at 5AM by Stuart George. With wine, tears and adulation flowing around and from the blessed, Bowie was an affable host as he signed more autographs, apologised for the unfinished mix of the album and agreed to play it a second time, at which point the party erupted into dance. Bowie took centre floor with a foxy stomp. MATT DAMSKER
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