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David Bowie
Live / Stage
Virgin/EMI
The last in the Virgin reissue series of David Bowie long players are his two live releases from the mid-'70s, David Live which originally came out in 1974 and Stage released in 1978. These new reissues contain remixing, much ProTooling, original track orders and extra songs all eagerly brought to by producer extraordinaire Tony Visconti. Mr. V not only remixed David Live and Stage, he wrote all the liner notes chock full of recollections, explanations, and even a few excuses for what we have been listening to via these eight sides for the last 30 years.
Now Visconti ranks quite high on my all time favorite producer list for too may reasons to go into here… but Tony…what's up with this new David Live mix? I'll tell ya what's up…THE SAXOPHONE!!!! It should be retitled David SANBORN Live. I don't know if its because David Live has been ingrained in my skull since I was 14 years old or it's these crappy headphones but this new mix is sounding kinda funky—but not Young Americans funky if you know what I mean.
Still, David Live has always had a secure place in my heart, as this 1974 concert was my first of many Bowie shows I would attend. Even though I felt ripped off at the time (we got the prop-less soul version—no boxing gloves!) it was still a quite a gas to see the extremely Thin White Duke sniffling in the flesh.
It's swell to hear the songs in their original order and Earl Slick still nails Ronson's solos (dare I say it?) better than Ronno himself in more than a few places. Bowie's voice never falters once throughout the 21 tracks, which spanned his career from 1969 right up to the then-current Diamond Dogs album. Bowie has always said how much he hates this album, as did most critics. But what do David Bowie or critics know about rock 'n' roll?
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Before I was a happily married family man I lived in an apartment, which had a refrigerator that would lean horribly to the left. When you opened the door and looked in you got the feeling you were on a boat during a small storm. I cleverly solved this problem by placing my new copy of Bowie's Stage album strategically under the back corner of the fridge and it really balanced it nicely. Since I now have a proper and level refrigerator (w/ a spring water dispenser!) I decided to give a listen to my least favorite live album of the '70s, ironically performed by my favorite artist of that very decade. Not to be confused with the Thin White Duke's Station to Station tour a few years earlier, this was Bowie's big white baggie pants tour where he decided to play five songs in a row from his Ziggy Stardust album. Unfortunately his lineup at the time sounded like an Ultravox cover band doing their Bowie set at the prom. Yikes!
Much like the saxophone overload on David Live, Stage boasts big shot players like Roger Powell (Utopia) on synthesizers and Adrian Belew on lead guitar who are both very talented but equally annoying. Belew's playing is a bizarre combination of Eno's brain and Eddie Van Halen's fingers and after a short while you just want to scream SLOW THE FUCK DOWN SPARKY! Granted he's trying to cop the solo's of three greats in Mick Ronson, Earl Slick, and Robert Fripp but he must have driven Bowie zonkers after a while.
All the post Young Americans numbers fare much better and after some new Visconti sheen, Stage is sounding a little more like we always wished it did. In Belew's defense he nails the Low & Heroes tunes nicely and new bonus tracks "Stay" and "Be My Wife" round out both disc's with a little more meat—and not a saxophone in earshot!
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