Washington Post - 12 November 1974
Bowie: Blending Drama And Rock David Bowie, the British rocker who out-flashed the snakes, surrealism and implicit transvestism of Alice Cooper and firmly ensconsed the flare of dress-up glamor in rock, had his Washington debut before 8,500 fans at the Capital Centre last night. It was a mixture of the old and the new Bowie. Remaining are the same concern for theatricality and dress and essentially the same songs he performed on his tour this summer, with their themes of alienation and rebellion. What's new is his band, in appearance a soul outfit, including a six-person vocal chorus, all but one of them black, and seven musicians with only the lead guitarist, saxophonist and pianist white. The group's opening half hour, without Bowie on stage, was decidedly rhythm 'n' blues: T-Bone Walker's "Stormy Monday" blues, a King Pleasure vocalised duet that included "I'm in the Mood for Love"; The Supremes "You Keep Me Hanging On" and the O'Jays "Love Train." But when Bowie strutted on stage, the tenor of the music shifted markedly. What had been soul quickly became rock and the strong, spirited though simple r 'n' b yielded to 75 slickly choreographed minutes when even the music seemed carved to fit with the stage image being projected. There's no denying Bowie's brilliance as a performer. His stage - pianos, drums, amplifiers, even floorboards - was totally white except for a six-foot, red lightning bolt embossed on the floor. His dress was smartly chic - gray tweed waist-length double-breasted jacket with heavily padded shoulders, a blue shirt with a blue and white polka dot tie, white pleated slacks with a small black scarf delicately tucked into a pocket, his blond hair swept back in a neat page boy. Every moment seemed precisely orchestrated, coming to a climax, perhaps, during the song "1984." The mammoth concrete sports palace darkened only to have four powerful beams of white light shot out into the audience. The band sounded a steamroller rhythm akin to the theme from the film "Shaft" and a bright foot-light projected Bowie's shadow - aping an advancing robot - on a 50-foot screen towering over the stage.	This kind of precision and vision ultimately makes Bowie interesting to watch. His imagination is wild, images of the city as a jungle and the planet as a huge battleground for science fiction confrontations ("Put your raygun to my head. Put your space mask next to mine..."). And he understands rock as a performing medium well enough to realize that a guitar solo at a concert like this is more important as an element of the drama than a musical statement. When Bowie placed his guitarist centrestage to solo on "Jean Genie" it didn't matter that what came out of his amplifier was a mindless series of loosely connected notes. The power and intensity of what was being played was a visceral attack and the applause that came after it went probably not as a salute to musicianship but rather as a necessary release of tension created by this well-planned machine-gun fire. Bowie knows the nature of the challenge in the battle campaign of rock. Still, it's interesting that Bowie didn't come close to selling out the 18,500-seat arena. What was novelty two years ago, considered by many to express the ultimate decadence of rock in Bowie's ambiguous sexuality, has become somewhat common place. In many ways it's parallel to long hair. The barbers in Bladensburg, who five years ago were threatening to shave heads, soon began styling hair any way their young customers wanted it - at a much higher price. And when you can see an 11-year old girl at the general store in the little Virginia hamlet of Bluemont wearing a David Bowie sweatshirt, you realize that yesterday's horror show is today's daytime television. TOM ZITO
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