Some shows are amazing, defining, life changing. Those are the ones that stay with you forever, the memories that you hold onto for the rest of your life. But there are some shows that aren't nearly as good, and some shows that are disappointments even though you had hoped for more. My first time seeing David Bowie was definitely a disappointment.
There's no question that Bowie is well remembered for his creatively fertile and groundbreaking work in the seventies, but much of what he did in the eighties benefits from selective memory and revisionist history. Undoubtedly "Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)" released in 1980 is the greatest album ever made, and surely "Let's Dance" was a huge pop breakthrough all around the world. But after that point the eighties are a largely forgettable period in his back catalog. There's a valid argument that during this time Bowie was coasting on past achievements, throwing out the occasional single or soundtrack to remind us that he was still around, but there was little if any artistry to compare to his earlier years. Even though I considered him one of my heroes, I can speak from experience that it was hard to be a David Bowie fan in the eighties.
In 1987 Bowie released "Never Let Me Down", which is arguably the most forgettable album in his back catalog. Actually I'm probably being rather charitable in saying that it's forgettable, but I feel a certain loyalty as a fan to defend it, despite it's being ridiculously crappy. To support the release of the album Bowie announced his biggest, boldest, most theatrical extravaganza ever, and it was coming to Toronto. And even though I knew at the time that he had been coasting in terms of new music, this was also the first opportunity I had ever had to see my hero live, and I wasn't going to miss it.
The show was announced for late August at CNE Stadium, and there were some logistical challenges I needed to overcome to get there. Since I was working full time at the record store that summer I couldn't take off a week to line up for concert tickets, so I decided the best course of action was to wheedle and cajole and beg my district supervisor to get me tickets for the show. And somehow it worked. I was a low level cashier in a suburban shopping mall and my district supervisor probably couldn't even remember my name, but he came through and got me tickets to see David Bowie which was pretty damn cool. Thank you district supervisor, there will always be a special place in my heart for you helping me out.
So with tickets in hand, my friend Anton and I headed to CNE Stadium to see David Bowie. To reiterate what I may have shared in past entries, CNE Stadium was a huge baseball stadium in the middle of the Canadian National Exhibition fairgrounds (the Ex) that seated about 70,000 people. It was big. The CNE gounds are down by Lake Ontario, so by the time the sun goes down it can get pretty cold in late August, and as with most stadiums it was an open air venue so there wouldn't be much protection from the elements. I didn't really think to worry about that, but I probably should have.
The concert was scheduled during the same time as the Ex, so Anton and I went down a little early to check out the midway. The Ex is a Toronto tradition, a yearly event that runs over the last few weeks of August until Labour Day, signalling the end of summer and ushering in the return of school and the September doldrums. It's a typical carnival, there's a midway with rides, and people trying to sell you stuff. There's always some crazy new food to eat that has to be grosser and more repellent than last year's gross and repellent crazy food (I think they were promoting chocolate flavoured pulled pork bacon poutine hamburger pizzas a couple of years ago, but I may be remembering that wrong...), and there are those little powdered donuts that everybody loves. Many people go to the Ex just to eat the little powdered donuts, they're kind of a big thing. Anyway, Anton and I went early so we could check out the Ex, and we paid a visit to a friend of ours who had a summer job as a barker at one of the shooting games where you tried to hit a bunch of targets so you could win a stuffed rabbit or something. The Ex had been open for a week by that point, maybe two, and our friend was quite excited to tell us about how somebody had taken a shit behind his booth that morning. In retrospect I realize in the movie of my life this would be an instance of foreshadowing...
Eventually after we'd eaten powdered donuts and talked about shit with our friend (both figuratively and literally), Anton and I headed to the stadium to find our seats. We were on the open side of the venue in the upper bleachers about two sections away from the stage, two rows down from the edge of the upper wall. Ultimately this meant that we were close to the stage, but way way way up in the sky. It was better than being at the other end of the stadium, or even worse, in the last section of the floors, and I was pretty happy when I realized that the distance we had would allow us to better appreciate the spectacle of the show. In keeping with the title of the tour the stage looked like a great big spider (a Glass Spider to be precise). A large head and abdomen hung over the stage facing the audience and long legs were draped down on either side. Underneath were a series of ramps and scaffolding, and a large video screen in the back with smaller video screens to the left and right (perfect for close up viewing for those of us who weren't in the first few rows).
It should be pointed out that as with most big stadium shows, David Bowie had a pair of opening acts. The first was a Canadian band called the Northern Pikes who had a couple of radio hits at the time and were on the same label as Bowie. The Northern Pikes would go on to do a few more albums and actually developed a fairly decent following in Canada in the years to come, and I mean honestly, you've just released your first album and you're playing stadiums with David Bowie? That's pretty fucking impressive. I was happy to see them on the bill. Good on you Northern Pikes, good on you.
The second opener was Duran Duran, and in hindsight it makes perfect sense that they did. Duran Duran were huge stars in their own right at the time, really talented musicians with awesome songs who probably could have sold out CNE Stadium on their own. But they were also heavily influenced by Bowie, a band who had grown up listening to his music, watching his videos, paying attention to what he was doing and giving it their own twist and style. I'm not suggesting that Duran Duran were Bowie clones, certainly they had enough going on themselves to warrant their success, but there was no question they owed a significant debt to Bowie for his inspiration and it made perfect sense that they would share a stage with him that night. I don't think I'd be out of line saying that Duran Duran were just as excited to be there as the audience was.
At the time Duran Duran were on a comeback of sorts, having lost two members since their last album, and there was a feeling that they had something to prove with their new material. Thanks to some slick production from Nile Rodgers (who had coincidentally produced the "Let's Dance" album among many other enormous successes), their latest album "Notorious" had set the stage for a new, more mature sound for the band, and everything clicked together for them on that tour. I'll admit that I don't remember if they opened with A View to a Kill or Notorious, but they started the set with one and played the other right after. Monstrous drums and slithering guitar lines echoed around the stadium and it was all pretty awesome. They played a number of songs from the new album, Meet El Presidente, Skin Trade, others, along with Election Day from the Arcadia album and Some Like it Hot by The Powerstation (side projects from the band during a between album hiatus), and I thought that was kind of cool.
They closed the set with Hungry Like the Wolf and The Reflex, and really they couldn't have made a better choice. There's always been a particular appreciation for The Reflex in Toronto (the video was filmed here), and it sounded particularly amazing that evening. A good opening act should get the audience excited and revved up for the main act, and Duran Duran were an awesome opening act that evening.
After Duran Duran's set there was a brief break, and then the lights went down and the stadium exploded with the roar of me and 69,999 other David Bowie fans. The spider stage was lit with a dark blue glow and long time Bowie guitarist Carlos Alomar stomped out to the front of the stage doing this crazy guitar work that could only be played with the advantage of hundreds of years of practice and twelve fingers. He swailed away for a few minutes before he was interrupted by a voice yelling for him to shut up, and then suddenly the stage lights came on and a bunch of people rappelled down from the top of the spider, all with their own spotlights just in case we needed to know that this was something important.
At first I thought they were the band, but nooooooo, we would discover very quickly that they were not the band, they were dancers! As they hit the floor they started strutting and dancing and shouting about "Fixing hose pipes to cars" and "The Wrong Stuff!" I've never really figured out what they were on about, but it was delivered with an air of gravitas that has stayed with me for many years, and I have every faith that it was all very important. They picked up drums and started to play a vocal and percussion version of Up the Hill Backwards from "Scary Monsters". Opening the show with an obscure single from my favorite album? Yes, please!
And then everything went completely dark and a spotlight lit the spider's abdomen, just as Bowie began to recite the opening monologue to Glass Spider. There was an air of fantasy and magic and Tolkien and general geekery to what he was saying that was- OHMYGOD, DAVID BOWIE WAS COMING OUT OF THE SPIDER'S ABDOMEN IN A RED SUIT ON A CHAIR AND OMGOMGOMG!!!!!11!!1!!!!!
Ahem. Yes. David Bowie was lowered from the spider's abdomen wearing the best looking red suit ever, sitting in a silver chair while he recited the opening monologue from Glass Spider into a toy telephone. I realize the absurdity of this last sentence, but it was pretty fucking cool at the time, because there was my hero in person on stage in this fabulous red suit, and damn it all, it was pretty fucking cool.
(In the interest of full disclosure I feel it necessary to note that Bowie had a mullet during this period. It was the eighties and such was the time, and such was the style. We will not discuss this particular fashion tragedy again, and for the purpose of our discussion I want you to focus on the fabulous red suit he wore that night. Not the mullet. Never the mullet.)
So Glass Spider is playing and Bowie is singing and there was this whole big dramatic introduction for Peter Frampton who was playing guitar on the tour, and dancers, and lights and Bowie, and the whole audience, myself included, were getting some pretty serious feels from the whole experience.
But as exciting as the moment was, there was something that wasn't quite right about it. The truth is, as much as I was excited about seeing my hero, I didn't really want to hear this song. It wasn't a song that connected with me, it was... just a silly song from his new album that I really couldn't care less about, made significant only by the fact that it was introducing the show. So I waited for the next song.
Which was the latest single Day In, Day Out. I didn't mind that one, but to be honest I much preferred the flipside of the single, Julie. Regardless, it only made sense that he would play the new single early in the set, that's often what happens at shows, it's a way to keep the audience pumped and I've since seen it done hundreds of times. Admittedly it was kind of flabby live, but, ummmm, well, it's never really been one of his best songs so I was willing to forgive the flabbyness.
By this point it was getting pretty cold up in the bleachers. The sun had gone down and the wind had been blowing in off the lake, and we were about ten or fifteen stories off the ground, so it made for a rather uncomfortable experience. I was glad that I had a hoodie, but it was getting pretty chilly...
By the third song I knew something was wrong. Bang Bang was an Iggy Pop song that Bowie had covered on "Never Let Me Down" and it's one of the least objectionable parts of the album and gets delivered with a certain flare that honours the original. Live, it was weak. And it was made even worse by Bowie pulling a fan out of the audience who proceeded to be this amazing dancer and ended up performing throughout the show. And that pissed me off. It wasn't a spontaneous moment, she wasn't a random person from the audience that just happened to be a really awesome dancer, she was a plant that was part of the show, something staged to create the illusion of coolness. That same amazing dancer got pulled up on stage every night, and the spontaneity of the moment, the excitement of being drawn into Bowie's world? Lies. Cheap and manipulative lies.
That's the point where I started to get disappointed. And as the night wore on, it got steadily colder and the show got steadily worse, until eventually I was actually quite sad and hurt. It wasn't just the fact that Bowie was pandering to the audience with weak versions of songs that didn't mean anything to me. It was the fact that there was no heart in what he was doing. There was no connection between the songs he was playing that night and the music I had listened to for all those years that had helped define who I was. This show was Cheap Theatre. Worse, it was Cheap Vegas Theatre, faux style without substance played in a stadium where any detail and nuance were being lost on the audience because of the vast space between us all.
But of course, sometimes you just have to see the worst, so I stayed. And I sat through more songs that didn't mean anything to me like Absolute Beginners and Never Let Me Down. I sat through a version of China Girl that had been sucked dry of any sensuality, a bloated version of Rebel Rebel that stumbled and fell where other live versions I'd heard on record strutted and posed, a version of Let's Dance that completely ignored it's apocalyptic undertones, and a lacklustre run through Fame that was filled with ridiculous dance moves. The lyrical irony of that last one wasn't lost on me.
It should be noted though that not everything about the show was crap. There were a few songs and a handful of shining moments that made it almost interesting, and a couple that were actually pretty awesome. As stated earlier, I'm quite fond of Loving the Alien, and it was given an interesting live take here. I was impressed by the selection of All the Madmen and Big Brother (including a reworked Chant of the Ever-Circling Skeletal Family) which were surprising choices for a tour that was so hits driven. Sons of the Silent Age was a nice addition to the set list as well (though I found the whole rubbery dance piece associated with it kind of distracting). Best of all, there was a great version of Fashion where Bowie was literally thrown across the stage by the dancers in a primitive take on Edouard Locke's manic dance style, culminating with him ending up perched on a scaffold where he sang Scary Monsters while the dancers and band made scary faces amid a steady pulse of strobe lights. Definitely Fashion and Scary Monsters were the highlight of the night for me, raw, passionate, and so much more true than anything else that had been played that evening. And in some ways that made the experience better, but in other ways it also made things worse because those few brief moments of goodness emphasized how very much I disliked the rest of the show.
There was an encore of Blue Jean and Modern Love, and
the night that I saw the show Bowie didn't play Time with the metal wings that
have been immortalized in so many pictures from that tour. And as the lights came up Anton and I made our way out of the Stadium, through the crowds, across the parking lot to the subway platform where we waited with 69,998 other people to get home. I was pretty miserable. I felt disappointed, I felt ripped off, and worst of all I felt like David Bowie had let me down.
I thought about it a lot, and it eventually dawned on me that the show was lacking in passion and enthusiasm. And really, passion and enthusiasm are at the heart of any performance. Maybe it was just this show, maybe it was the whole tour, but it very much seemed like Bowie was just going through the motions, like he had lost any connection with the reality of his fans (i.e., ME) and what his music meant to them. The show I saw wasn't about making art or magic or anything cool that mattered in my mind, it just seemed so obviously to be a pretentious grab for cash on the back of his previous artistic success. It was sooooooo disappointing and so upsetting, and in many ways I felt betrayed by that disconnection.
It was pretty devastating, and I spent the rest of the summer pretty bummed out in that particular angsty way that only teenagers and music obsessives can feel, and being both at the time I was hit doubly hard with the angst. But eventually I got over it. I can't remember when it happened, a couple of months later maybe, but eventually I went back to all the albums I had listened to so many times before and found that the music was just as good as I remembered, and it still made me smile the same way it had before. I may have been disappointed by the Glass Spider Tour, but I still appreciated Bowie's music, and that's an appreciation and enjoyment that have stayed with me to this day.
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