If you\u2019re looking to get some live David Bowie, the now-sanctioned live shows from the Nassau Coliseum on the Station To Station <\/i>tour and the Live In Santa Monica \u201972 <\/i>show from the Ziggy <\/i>tour are your best bets. For fans, the DVDs A Reality Tour <\/i>and Serious Moonlight <\/i>also are pretty darn good at showing Bowie\u2019s appeal in concert.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, for a long time, the two official live shows that existed were hardly representative of the artist, and for one as defining and creative as Bowie, this is unacceptable. David Live <\/i>was a mostly dull affair from the Diamond Dogs <\/i>tour, showing an artist tired of this glam rock sci-fi sound and looking to broaden his horizons; as such, it\u2019s perfunctory and slow, Bowie pretty much going through the motions. Stage<\/i>, the second official live double disc, is marginally more interesting because of its source material but still can\u2019t overcome its inessential nature.<\/p>\n
In 1978, Bowie was still living in Germany, having released the epochal Low <\/i>and Heroes <\/i>and working on Lodger<\/i>. Those discs are involving, brilliantly produced, and challenging Euro pop-rock with all the warmth of a freezer, not the sort of music that would translate that well to the live stage. Stage <\/i>bears this out, its first disc hitting the musical highlights from those two albums but not transcending them. \u00a0Simply put, there is no improvement over the originals, nor is there much marked difference, other than some run time and muscle added to \u201cBreaking Glass.\u201d And who decided the opening song <\/i>should be the morose instrumental dirge \u201cWarszawa,\u201d which sounds like it should be the background music to a film about the Holocaust?<\/p>\n
Granted, it\u2019s not easy to find live versions of \u201cBeauty And The Beast,\u201d \u201cSpeed Of Life,\u201d and \u201cBlack Out,\u201d the latter a great lost Heroes <\/i>track, so true fans of this era may be intrigued at the subtle changes. Others may fast forward to the second half of the show, in which Bowie plays \u2013 yet again \u2013 a swath of his big hits from the \u201870s because he has to. \u201cFame\u201d always sounds good and \u201cHang On To Yourself\u201d seems flown in from a different show entirely, so out of place and energetic it sounds. But it\u2019s just weird to hear a version of \u201cZiggy\u201d that somehow segues into the gloomy instrumental \u201cArt Decade,\u201d and it\u2019s unsettling at best. <\/p>\n
After a drunken and ill-advised version of \u201cAlabama Song,\u201d Bowie closes out the show with the three best songs from Station To Station<\/i>, including an intense version of the title song, \u201cTVC15,\u201d and a fantastic version of the overlooked \u201cStay,\u201d featuring some incredible bass guitar from George Murray. Guitarists Carlos Alomar and Adrian Belew are solid throughout as well; pity you have to sit through half of Ziggy <\/i>to get to this point.<\/p>\n
On a packaging note: the CD reissue presents the show in the actual chronological order it was played, with a handful of overplayed classic rock nuggets removed (\u201cJean Genie\u201d and \u201cSuffragette City\u201d among them) and the songs no longer faded out in between because, well, they didn\u2019t have to be. This is a marked improvement over the original vinyl version, as the real setlist makes more sense than the bastardized version and also includes \u201cStay\u201d and \u201cBe My Wife,\u201d which bump this up half a grade. Still, the original recording that miked up the band more than the crowd means the cheering fans are such a non-factor you may wonder if it is live at all.<\/p>\n
To be sure, this is for fans only, particularly of the late ’70s Bowie output, but even they will likely prefer the studio versions to these. For completists and rabid fans only, Stage <\/i>is fine in spurts but inessential overall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":32872,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[5671],"rating":[5619],"class_list":["post-44645","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-david-bowie","rating-rating-c"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/44645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/44645\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44645"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=44645"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=44645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}