David Bowie in Vancouver, August 12, 1983: Good Souvenir of a Compelling Performer

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a PBS special, alas cut down to fit in those abominable “phedge breaks” by which American public television has to demean itself to beg for money from its viewers instead of having a guaranteed revenue stream from TV set licenses the way the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and other public TV networks in civilized countries do. The show was a concert given by David Bowie in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on August 12, 1983 as part of the “Serious Moonlight” tour, a year-long progress throughout the world to promote his first album for EMI, Let’s Dance. EMI had lured him from his long-term home at RCA Victor with a huge contract offer that was then the biggest ever given to a solo artist (though eventually Prince would get a bigger one from Warner Bros. and then Michael Jackson would get a still larger one from CBS-Sony), and for Bowie’s first EMI album he knew the company’s executives were expecting a blockbuster commercial release, not an experimental album like Low. So he ramped up the energy level of his music and presented himself as a dance-music artist – though he’d already begun doing that as early as 1975 with the Young Americans album (which was when I started losing interest in Bowie after I’d collected his first eight albums fanatically).

The original concert film featured 19 songs (counting the medley of “Fashion” and “Let’s Dance” as one song), of which 13 made the PBS cut: “Look Back in Anger,” “Heroes,” :Golden Years,” the “Fashion/Let’s Dance” medley, “Cat People” (Bowie’s theme song from the 1982 Paul Schrader remake of the 1942 Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur masterpiece that went whole-hog in showing exactly the kind of horror Lewton and Tourneur had famously made subtle and shadowy), “China Girl,” “Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps” (which this time around I found myself wondering if it had inspired Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” – the moods of the two are qu9ite close), “Rebel Rebel,” ”Cracked Actor,” “Ashes to Ashes,” “Space Oddity” (the only song from Bowie’s 1960’s work included), “Young Americans” and “Fame,” the last a mid-1970’s song Bowie co-wrote with John Lennon. The song was an expression of both men’s disenchantment with fame and the media fishbowl it forces you to live in, and it wasn’t the only song Bowie and Lennon co-wrote: the year before “Fame” they had got together for a song called “Rock ‘n’ Roll with Me,” but most people didn’t realize it was a Bowie/Lennon collaboration because Lennon took his writing credit under the pseudonym “Peace.” I remember getting an argry phone call from my ex-girlfriend Cat in 1990 when she and I, in our separate homes, had just finished watching a John Lennon memorial tribute and she was incensed that instead of doing a Lennon song, Bowie had come out and done what she described as “a crappy song of his own.” I had to explain to her that Bowie and Lennon had co-written “Fame,” and for that reason it was exactly the song I had expected to hear him do.

The KPBS commentators who MC’d the pledge breaks talked about how Bowie was going through one of his famous reinventions of himself and presenting himself as a dance-music artist; as I noted above, he’d actually begun to do that well before this album and tour (at least eight years before!), but what that meant in practice was that he ramped up the energy level of his music and avoided his softer, subtler songs. I had seen the Rolling Stones do the same thing in a 2006 concert in Buenos Aires that was also the subject of a concert film of which PBS showed a truncated version, though to my mind Bowie is a more interesting performer than Mick Jagger and he was in excellent physical shape here, dancing around and showing surprising agility for a man who nearly killed himself with cocaine eight years earlier. (Bowie said in many interviews that living in Los Angeles, with its heavy-duty drug culture, nearly killed him, and moving to Berlin, Germany, where he made some of his most memorable music, saved his life.) Amazingly, the set list included nothing from his third album, The Man Who Sold the World (1970), or from his fifth album – his commercial breakthrough – Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972). (For Bowie to do a tour and include nothing from Ziggy Stardust would have been like the Beatles reuniting for a concert and playing nothing from Sgt. Pepper.)

On the televised version there was nothing from the equally marvelous album he did between those, Hunky Dory (1971), though one of that album’s most beautiful songs, “Life on Mars?,” was left out of the telecast but included in the complete version we were told we could access on PBS’s premium streaming service, “Passport.” (Is there a reason why three of the four U.S. TV networks have given their streaming services names beginning with “P” – PBS’s Passport, NBC’s Peacock and CBS’s Paramount Plus? The only network that hasn’t is ABC, which since it’s a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Corporation calls its streaming service “Disney Plus.”) There was also an infuriating bit of the Puritanical censorship the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) imposes on American TV; in the song “Cracked Actor” (a marvelously twisted piece about a 50-something closeted Gay ex-movie star and the hustler he’s trying to pick up) the line “Suck, baby, suck” was bleeped out every time it occurred. The one time I saw David Bowie live was on the Ziggy Stardust tour at San Francisco’s Winterland, and the Serious Moonlight tour was (if this document is any indication) a good deal less transgressive or interesting, but it was still David Bowie at least near the top of his form, even though I don’t always think he was the best interpreter of his own songs.

Though Bowie wrote “Heroes” I’ve always liked Nico’s version even better, and while he does a good job on the “Cat People” theme (for which he wrote the music and disco producer Giorgio Moroder, Donna Summer’s mentor, the music), Tina Turner gave electrifying live performances of the song in the early 1980’s when she was frantically concertizing around the world to pay the huge amount of debt ($12 million in missed concert fees and penalties) she’d incurred when she finally walked out of her abusive marriage to Ike Turner. Maybe that experience gave her special insight when she roared out the song’s line, “Putting out the fire with gasoline!”