David Bowie 1974-06-17 Rochester ,War Memorial Auditorium – 17 June 74 Rochester –
Sound Quality Rating
101. 1984
102. Rebel Rebel
103. Moonage Daydream
104. Sweet Thing -> Candidate -> Sweet Thing (reprise)
105. Changes
106. Suffragette City
107. Aladdin Sane
108. All The Young Dudes
109. Cracked Actor
110. Rock’n’Roll With Me
111. Watch That Man
112. Drive In Saturday
113. Space Oddity
214. Future Legend -> Diamond Dogs
215. Panic In Detroit
216. Big Brother
217. Chant Of The Ever Circling Skeletal Family
218. Time
219. The Jean Genie
220. Rock & Roll Suicide
Label:
Audio Source: audience
Lineage 1: unknown generation tape TDK MA90
Lineage 2: unknown generation tape
Total running time: 1:37:54
Sound Quality : Much noise ,dull ,but still good listened to
Attendance: 9.200
Artwork: Yes
Matrix: of 2 different audience recordings of the same show:
Matrix 1. unknown generation tape TDK MA90 (nicmac)
Matrix 2. flac files 24/96 of unknown generation tape received by Steveboy
This is a very nice show (the 5th in total after the tour had started) and as it was meant as a theatrical or musical like event with a fixed dramaturgy Bowie is speaking not a word throughout the show, not even at the very end.
But the audience is very present on both recordings screaming and arguing all the time. Obviously many people stood up and went forward to be as close to the stage as possible. And this caused some guys near the tapers to repeatedly shout out their disfavour about that.
Especially during Drive In Saturday and Space Oddity the screaming peaks. Not only due to this these songs are a bit less enjoyable than the others but also because recording 1 has only very low volume on the right channel starting with Watch That Man to almost through whole
Space Oddity.
Tour band 1974 (June – July)
• David Bowie – vocals
• Michael Kamen – electric piano, Moog synthesizer, oboe, music director
• Earl Slick – guitar
• Mike Garson – piano, mellotron
• David Sanborn – alto saxophone, flute
• Richard Grando – baritone saxophone, flute
• Herbie Flowers – bass
• Tony Newman – drums
• Pablo Rosario – percussion
• Gui Andrisano – backing vocals
• Warren Peace – backing vocals
Toronto Star – 17 June 1974: Rock star
Bowie an appealing mystery
At one point during the first of his two O’Keefe Centre concerts last night, singer David Bowie danced to the edge of the stage where a girl was stretching her long arms in the air.
Her hands darted out, clutching at his pants, but Bowie danced away, remaining always beyond her reach.
It was as if no one would ever touch him, as if he wasn’t quite real.
Everything about Bowie’s appearance has this sense of unreality. The 6,400 tickets available for the two shows were sold out a month ago even though the top price was $6.80, there wasn’t a single word of advertising, and the 27-year-old Bowie himself is something of a mystery.
Yet it’s this mystery, with its hint of divine decadence, that makes him so appealing. Everywhere in the crowd outside the hall during the 30-minute delay before his first show began, you could see hints of his sexually ambiguous, futuristic style.
A couple of confusing gender strolled through the crowd, one dressed in a short, frilly pink slip, the other’s mouth smeared with frosted lip gloss. One girl, otherwise normally dressed, was wearing an enormous pair of bat’s wings. And elsewhere among the jeans and T-shirts you could see lilac lipstick, tangerine eyes, hair dyed Bowie’s rusty-red color, and the familiar Bowie lightning-bolt zigzag painted on people’s faces.
But even all this was nothing compared to Bowie’s show.
The set, taken more or less from the jacket design for his latest album, Diamond Dogs (RCA CPLI-0576) was filled with mis-shapen skyscrapers (plus one rather pornographic image) leaning eerily every which way.
One column on the left concealed a hoist that floated the singer through the air during a song about space. And high above the stage, a bridge with several lights emphasizing its bleakness completed the harrowing cityscape.
Despite the one hour and 40 minutes of solid satisfying rock, the show’s theme was the bombed-out future of George Orwell’s 1984. This, as Bowie’s voice intoned over some moaning electronic music, was where “fleas the size of rats sucked on rats the size of cats, and ten thousand peoploids split into small tribes, coveting the highest of the sterile skyscrapers.”
In all this, Bowie became a future Everyman who, in Sweet Thing, was hopelessly looking for love of any kind or who, in Big Brother, was cynically looking for a hero of any kind.
Bowie’s voice showed a remarkable flexibility and range of sounds coupled with his abilities as a dancer and a mime.
The show itself may have been a rock version of early Baroque opera, where the set often took precedence over the music, but Bowie knew exactly what to do.
In fact, he is undoubtedly the first rock star to actually use theatrics as part of a total presentation.
With his band on stage right, and two male singers-cum-dancers swirling around him, Bowie controlled everything, right in the moment when he was wheeled out inside a mirrored capsule that opened to show him off like some precious jewel.
At this point, with dozens of fans clustered at the front of the stage, their arms out-stretched, Bowie seemed like something from another planet. And this, of course, was exactly what he had planned.
PETER GODDARD
