FOUR BOWIES WALK INTO A FUNHOUSE

Buzz Drainpipe reviews Live Santa Monica ’72, I’m Only Dancing (The Soul Tour 74), Welcome to the Blackout (Live London ’78) and Glass Spider (Live Montreal ’87)

There is no such thing as a David Bowie live album.

There are only crime-scene photographs of various David Bowies caught impersonating one another.

That distinction becomes wonderfully obvious if you play these four records in order. Fifteen years, four bands, four ideas about what a stage is for, and one increasingly suspicious fellow named David Jones standing somewhere behind the curtain watching his inventions breed.

The funhouse mirror is the catalogue itself.

Every few years Bowie walks past it again. Ziggy looks back. Major Tom floats through the glass. The Diamond Dogs scratch at the frame. The Thin White Duke appears briefly in the reflection and pretends he was only passing through. And every time Bowie plays an old song, he does not preserve it.

He cross-examines it.

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MIRROR ONE: LIVE SANTA MONICA ’72

This is Bowie before Bowie has figured out that Bowie can be destroyed.

Recorded during the American Ziggy campaign, Santa Monica ’72 catches Bowie and the Spiders from Mars while the operation is still magnificently hungry.

And hungry is the word.

This thing does not strut. It lunges.

Mick Ronson’s guitar comes through the speakers carrying a brick. Woody Woodmansey drums as though the building has twelve minutes left on its permit. Trevor Bolder does the sacred bass-player job of making lunacy sound structurally sound.

And Bowie?

Bowie still sounds delighted that David Bowie exists.

That is what makes Santa Monica unique.

Later Bowies will regard earlier Bowies with amusement, contempt, affection, embarrassment, archaeological curiosity. Not this one. This man has just discovered the machine and is flooring it down the freeway with the instruction manual flapping out the window.

“Ziggy Stardust” isn’t mythology yet. It’s current events.

“Moonage Daydream” hasn’t entered the museum. It’s still radioactive.

“The Width of a Circle” expands until glam rock starts threatening to become some prehistoric religion involving Marshall amplifiers and municipal fire codes.

Even the quieter material retains that wonderful early-Bowie contradiction: fragility presented with total theatrical confidence.

Here is the first mirror.

Bowie looks into it and sees exactly what he hopes to see.

That will never happen again.

FUNHOUSE DISTORTION: 2/10
Mostly a clean mirror. The alarming thing is how quickly he will smash it.

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MIRROR TWO: I’M ONLY DANCING (THE SOUL TOUR 74)

Two years.

That’s all.

Except suddenly Ziggy has been repossessed by the bank.

I’m Only Dancing was recorded principally in Detroit in October 1974, with its encores coming from Nashville the following month, during the late-1974 Soul Tour.

Listen to it immediately after Santa Monica and you may experience the musical equivalent of discovering your old neighborhood has become a foreign embassy.

The addresses are familiar.

Nothing else is.

Bowie has discovered rhythm as solvent.

The great achievement of this band is that it doesn’t merely add funk to the old songs. That would be Vegas work. Instead, it subjects Bowie's catalogue to new physical laws.

The guitar is no longer necessarily king.

There are horns.

There are voices answering voices.

There are grooves that seem less interested in where a song begins and ends than in whether the entire room can be persuaded to move three inches to the left.

And suddenly you understand something fundamental about Bowie:

He isn't primarily changing costumes.

He is changing syntax.

The 1972 Bowie says, Behold this song.

The 1974 Bowie says, What happens if I remove the load-bearing wall?

This is why the period feels so dangerous. The man has achieved the thing most performers spend their lives trying to achieve, a recognizable star identity, and immediately begins feeding it through an industrial shredder.

There is something almost rude about it.

Imagine buying tickets to see Dracula and discovering halfway through that Dracula has become Curtis Mayfield.

And liking it better.

Here the funhouse mirror has begun bending at the edges. Bowie looks into it and Ziggy is still there, except Ziggy suddenly has a horn section and knows where the one is.

FUNHOUSE DISTORTION: 7/10
Previous model successfully melted down for parts.

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MIRROR THREE: WELCOME TO THE BLACKOUT (LIVE LONDON ’78)

Now things get interesting.

Welcome to the Blackout documents Bowie's 1978 Isolar II performances at Earl’s Court in London, recorded across June 30 and July 1.

The screaming orange creature from 1972 has become a man who appears to have arrived directly from an international conference on rectangles.

And the music is immense.

Not immense in the 1974 revue sense.

Architecturally immense.

This Bowie has been to Berlin. He has discovered that absence can be arranged. He understands that leaving three feet of empty space in a song can be more terrifying than filling it with another guitar.

The band feels less like an entourage than an electrical grid.

This is where Bowie's catalogue becomes genuinely haunted.

Because now when the older songs appear, they arrive as memories belonging to somebody else.

1972 Bowie played Ziggy songs because he was Ziggy.

1978 Bowie plays Ziggy songs because he remembers having once been a person who claimed to be Ziggy.

That extra layer changes everything.

The songs acquire quotation marks.

Not ironic quotation marks. Something stranger.

Historical quotation marks.

The performance keeps asking: Who owns a song after the person who wrote it has changed?

And Bowie's answer appears to be: nobody. Put it back on the table.

So the glam numbers live beside the Berlin material without anybody pretending fifteen different personalities form a tidy autobiography. The contradictions are the autobiography.

This may be the purest live Bowie of the four because it reveals that his great continuity was never any particular sound.

It was his willingness to make his previous certainty look ridiculous.

He has ceased staring into the mirror.

Now he is inspecting the silver backing.

FUNHOUSE DISTORTION: 9/10
The mirror has become an installation at a European art school and may require government funding.

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MIRROR FOUR: GLASS SPIDER (LIVE MONTREAL ’87)

And now, ladies and gentlemen, we arrive at the record everyone thinks they understand before pressing PLAY.

Stadium Bowie.

Big Bowie.

Corporate Bowie.

Hair Bowie.

The Glass Spider Bowie captured here comes from the enormous theatrical tour mounted around Never Let Me Down; the Montreal performance survives as Glass Spider (Live Montreal ’87).

Easy target.

Too easy.

Because the fascinating thing about Glass Spider is not whether 1987 Bowie has occasionally wandered into the fluorescent food court of the decade.

Of course he has.

The fascinating thing is that the old Bowie disease remains incurable.

There are synthesizers big enough to require zoning variances. Drums arrive wearing shoulder pads. Guitars occasionally sound as though they have been lacquered.

And inside all this expensive machinery is still that same peculiar intelligence going:

Yes, but what if we did THIS?

That is why Glass Spider deserves reconsideration.

The usual Bowie narrative wants the Eighties to function as punishment. He becomes enormously famous, loses the thread, eventually escapes.

Too neat.

The live evidence is more interesting.

This is Bowie discovering that scale itself can become material.

What happens when the man who once treated a 3,000-seat theater as Kabuki science fiction is handed a stadium?

Naturally, he builds a giant spider.

Of course he does.

And when the old songs enter this environment, the funhouse reaches maximum curvature.

Imagine 1972 Bowie seeing 1987 Bowie.

He would probably assume civilization had elected him emperor.

Imagine 1978 Bowie seeing 1987 Bowie.

He would immediately locate the nearest emergency exit.

But they are the same organism.

That is the point.

The 1987 arrangements sometimes inflate material that once benefited from tension and scarcity. Sure. There are moments where the technology appears to have hired Bowie rather than the reverse.

But listen longer.

The weirdness survives.

Not pristine weirdness.

Industrialized weirdness.

Mass-produced in a facility capable of seating 60,000.

And that may be more interesting than another tasteful victory lap would have been.

Because David Bowie attempting too much is always more revealing than David Bowie exercising good judgment.

FUNHOUSE DISTORTION: 11/10
Mirror now forty feet tall, hydraulically operated and insured by Lloyd’s of London.

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THE MAN IN ALL FOUR MIRRORS

Play these consecutively and something marvelous happens.

You stop hearing four periods.

You hear one argument conducted over fifteen years.

1972 asks:

Who could I become?

1974 asks:

Why should I remain him?

1978 asks:

What survives after I remove him?

1987 asks:

How large can this entire contraption become before it collapses?

And underneath every question is the same nervous little motor.

Curiosity.

That, more than glam, soul, Berlin, synthesizers, costumes, cocaine, theater, pop, guitars or hairstyles, may be the actual Bowie sound.

Other artists acquire a catalogue.

Bowie acquired a room full of previous selves.

Every tour required deciding which ones would be invited, which would be remodeled and which would be quietly murdered behind the loading dock.

So no, these aren't four live albums documenting the evolution of a performer.

They're four mirrors facing one another.

Santa Monica reflects Soul Tour.

Soul Tour reflects Earl’s Court.

Earl’s Court reflects Montreal.

Montreal sends the whole thing screaming backward through the glass until Ziggy is standing there again in 1972, guitar in hand, completely unaware that fifteen years later he'll be performing his own archaeological remains beneath a colossal illuminated spider.

And somewhere between those infinite reflections sits David Bowie.

Not changing identities.

Not escaping identities.

Doing something much stranger.

Learning that identity itself is an instrument.

And, naturally, refusing to play it the same way twice.

BUZZ DRAINPIPE
Crease Magazine, Department of Reflective Surfaces & Amplifier Damage