Album Reviews

You had to be there, and I was.

Not at this Santa Monica, California performance from October 20th 1972, but at Bowie’s legendary September 28th Carnegie Hall appearance as well as at shows in Boston (Music Hall, October, 1st), Chicago (Auditorium Theater, October 7th), and Detroit (Fisher Theater, October 8th). Iggy Pop sat a few seats away at that one (and stayed in room 405 at the St. Regis Hotel that night).

I got to fly on the plane, stay in the hotels and eat a meal or two with the entourage. I even got to dance with David Bowie dressed in full Ziggy mufti at the pioneering gay bar “The Other Side.” Well, I didn’t dance with him, I danced next to him with a girl friend of mine at the record release party for the ...Ziggy Stardust... album held, some would say cynically and exploitatively, at the gay bar.

Despite the gay/androgynous image Bowie sought to project at the time, he kept a low profile on the road trip, traveling with his then wife Angela (the “Angie” in the Stones song), listed on the tour manifest as “Mr. and Mrs. Jones” (suite 418, St. Regis).

Carnegie Hall was the ideal venue for a first encounter with both the evangelical stage show and the decadent early Bowie audience that made quite clear to members of the Woodstock generation in attendance that the scene had moved on. Way on! Maybe to another planet.

Black fingernail polished, stick-thin vampiras, girls who might be guys and guys who might be girls and some who weren’t sure what they were, or at least what they wanted to be were out in force that night.

Had you looked around before the lights went down on what had become the place to be and be seen that evening (thanks to Bowie’s manager Tony DeFries and RCA Records publicist Stu Ginsberg (room 404 at Detroit’s St. Regis Hotel) both of whom had injected the city’s publicity veins with coked-up hype about an obscure British rocker only the few fans of a minor hit called “Space Oddity” had ever heard of) you might have seen Andy Warhol and Truman Capote among the glitterati. You also would have seen a lot of music journalists, if you knew what they looked like.

I was among them, and though I really tried to maintain my journalistic dispassion that evening, it was impossible. My faulty memory tells me that when Bowie implored the audience to “give us your hands” at the end of “Rock and Roll Suicide,” I found myself reluctantly but obediently raising mine. However, a check of the set list indicates that he didn’t sing it that night, but he did on this album and so probably did at one of the other shows, so that’s probably where I raised my hands.

Bowie was suffering from a bad case of the flu that evening and his performance was not among his best, which is why the recording made that evening was never released, but with no reference against which to judge it, it was impossible to know.

The next day at a press conference held in RCA’s famed but now demolished midtown studio (it’s now an IRS office), Bowie looked ghostly pale and even thinner than the stick pins in the previous evening’s audience. He answered questions in the self-effacing/self-absorbed mumbly tone very popular among rock stars of that time. The picture I have of that press conference shows me sitting in the front row scribbling notes that I wish I still had.

The thirty two year old memories have long since faded from long continuous loops into short sharp flashes: I recollect that the late Mick Ronson’s (room 421) dyed blond hair had turned green and fell out in patches after a swim in a hotel’s over-chlorinated pool. I also recall Ronson as being the friendliest, most talkative band member, with bassist Trevor Bolder and drummer Mick “Woody” Woodmansey being painfully shy (but not too shy since they were forced to share room 419).

I remember hotel corridors filled with weirdo-hanger on-ers and pretty boys lined up outside Bowie’s suite hoping to gain admittance and who knows what else. I recall a pre-show dinner one evening either in Chicago or Detroit, watching Bowie consume a surprisingly large amount of food (especially given his weight, or lack thereof) and then seeing him jumping around onstage in a tight fitting, colorful jumpsuit in what seemed like less than an hour later.

But mostly, I remember the music, the stagecraft and the nightly spectacle, beginning with the dramatic opening sequence audible on the bootleg double LP of this live radio broadcast but missing from this legitimate one.

The show began each evening with the unauthorized playing of Wendy Carlos’s synthesizer version of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” from the “A Clockwork Orange” soundtrack against a blackened stage. As the Beethoven climaxes, the band takes the stage in the darkness. The sound of the instruments being readied clashes against the “Ode to Joy” and as the recorded music fades, disorienting strobe lights pop the stage and after a split second of silence, the band breaks into “Hang Onto Yourself” and the audience gets its first good look at David Bowie A/K/A Ziggy Stardust.

For those still attempting to acclimate themselves to Bowie in a dress (on the U.K. cover of The Man Who Sold the World) or Bowie as Katherine Hepburn (on the cover of Hunky Dory), this carrot-topped, platform shoed anorexic spaceman-Bowie made those images seem tame by comparison.

On this legitimate release, KMET-FM on-air personality (and former Top 40 WMCA-AM “Good Guy” D.J.) B. Mitchell Reed’s radio intro replaces the Beethoven and there’s a deft, seamless edit from the announcement to the split second silence before the band begins its blast.

Why no “Ode to Joy?” I asked Wendy Carlos, who told me (and I’m paraphrasing) that under the circumstances and given its unauthorized use, she didn’t want to get involved in clearance hassles now.

That minor omission in no way takes away from the jolt provided by this double LP set, whether you saw that original Ziggy tour or not. For one thing, the sonics are much better here than on the original bootleg that I’ve owned and treasured since it was first released (is “released” appropriate for a boot?). While the sound is much improved, don’t expect audiophile sound quality, except as referenced against the sound of the original tape, to which I’m sure this is quite faithful.

The album’s sonic problems are caused by the Santa Monica Civic Center’s less than audiophile quality acoustics and by the difficulties involved in having what I assume was a “cold” miking and mixing of an unknown act (even Wally Heider’s remote crew weren’t miracle workers). There are numerous off-mike instrumental moments and some on-the-fly mediocre mixes punctuated by gaping sonic holes. But the elements come together beautifully on some tracks and overall (especially after living for 25+ years with the totally mediocre bootleg sound), the concert sound is remarkably transparent, clean and wide-band.

Sound quality aside, this is a vital performance by “Ziggy and The Spiders From Mars,” one that includes a great deal of pre-Ziggy Bowie material, allowing Bowie to introduce himself fully to the American audience. After the obvious concert openers “Hang On To Yourself” and “Ziggy Stardust,” the band segues into Hunky Dory’s classic “Changes,” (with the super-talented but oddly out-of-place Mike Garson on piano) the devastating “The Supermen” from The Man Who Sold The World and back to Hunky Dory’s “Life on Mars.”

Side two opens with the eerily prescient (we’ve got) “Five Years,” then looks back to Bowie’s debut album and “Space Oddity,” where the set hits a major snag. If you’re going to perform the song commit to it, don’t mock it. Yet that’s just what Bowie does, reducing a highly dramatic song to almost an inside joke as if he’s intent upon disowning it.

But that’s one of the only false notes Bowie sounds on this remarkable double LP set that chronicles a set list that’s at once coherent and schizophrenic. The cutsy-artsy “Andy Warhol” followed by the morbid ballad “My Death?” Bowie pulls it off. The epic homo-erotic “The Width of A Circle” into the V.U. influenced “Queen Bitch” followed by the almost cuddly “Moonage Daydream” and then the gay kitsch of “John I’m Only Dancing?” Bowie makes it work.

The concert winds down with a cover of V.U.’s “Waiting For the Man,” “The Jean Genie,” “Suffragette City” and finally the redemptive “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide.” Don’t be surprised to find yourself giving Ziggy your hands!

The double 180g LP, numbered, limited edition set, flawlessly pressed in Holland from what appears to be a DMM cut at Abbey Road, features a great cover photo from the show by Mick Rock (room 425 with then [don’t know about now] wife Sheila) inner sleeve photos by Jon Levicke (not on the original tour) and a pair of drawings from ’72 by George Underwood (room 420 with the Mrs.). There’s even a full-sized glossy “Ziggy Stardust” poster festooned with the corporate RCA logo of that era.

First rate packaging and pressing, sound quality superior to what anyone who owns the bootleg could possibly be expecting and of course a legendary performance that easily lives up to the hype add up to a musical and vinyl event not to be missed—at least by hardcore Bowie fans. Count me among them. Given that the set was mastered by Ted Jensen at Sterling Sound and the DMM cut was done at Abbey Road, you can bet the source was digital, but I’d bet (at least I hope) Jensen sent a high resolution file to Abbey Road. One thing’s for sure: there’s no way the CD packaging could possibly measure up to this double LP. Besides the only way to listen to a 1972 recording is on vinyl.

Now we need the triple LP boxed set of “Bowie: The Berlin Years” featuring Low, Heroesand the adventurous, chronically underappreciated The Lodger.