David Bowie
David Live

THE REVIEW

In 1974, David Bowie, having closed the Ziggy era and dismissed the Spiders from Mars, released Diamond Dogs, an album initially conceived to be the musical adaptation of George Orwell's novel 1984. Due to the lack of permission from Orwell's heirs, the actual album produced alternates the last glam sparks with soul ballads and disco temptations, all seasoned with the post-apocalyptic lyrics conceived for the aborted musical.

The stage adaptation of the whole thing is a show where the scenic part is not secondary to the musical one: dancers, choreographies, circus-like numbers, sets that change throughout the evening, a desire to amaze at all costs with a performance where individual songs serve the narrative context and are not just a simple parade of hits.

It's logical, then, that "David Live," recorded in Philadelphia in July 1974, suffers from the lack of the visual component and should be considered an incomplete testimony of one of the first examples of a multimedia show, a pop art form that would become common at least a decade later.

However, the album, Bowie's first official live recording, is fascinating precisely because it represents a peculiar episode in his discography: not a greatest hits, as mentioned, but a funky reworking of the repertoire's songs that lend themselves best to the treatment, with a sound distinctly different from the unadorned rock of Diamond Dogs that characterizes itself as a preview of the plastic soul of Young Americans.

The new band is composed of formidable soloists, led by Michael Kamen, who would become famous for the arrangements on The Wall by Pink Floyd and the soundtracks of successful films in the '80s and '90s. The only survivor of the Spiders from Mars is pianist Mike Garson, who here is free to embellish the tracks with Latin or free-jazz echoes. However, the trump card is the brass section (the saxophones of Richard Grando and David Sanborn and Kamen's oboe) which embellish (or weigh down, depending on the school of thought) some tracks.

Even the most seasoned tracks are obsessively reworked with the new mood: the experiment works best with a de-glammed and languid soul ballad version of All the Young Dudes, with a Latin-jazz version of Aladdin Sane, with the intense Panic in Detroit; it fails (at least in my opinion) with the crooner parody of Jean Genie and the ridiculous embellishments on Width of a Circle.

In short, a document of the brief American infatuation of the future white duke, and a testament to his ability to cannibalize musical genres and make them his own with a unique aesthetic and musical sensitivity.

P.S. Printed several times over the years, it was enriched and improved (both in sound and graphic design) in the 2005 version, for which Tony Visconti recounts having partially removed the added vocal and instrumental overdubs to provide a more faithful picture of the performance.