diamond dogs tour setlist

The band was slightly re-arranged for September. David Bowie (vocals), Mike Garson (piano, Mellotron), Carlos Alomar (guitar), Earl Slick (lead guitar), Doug Rauch (bass guitar), Greg Errico (drums), Pablo Rosario (percussion), David Sanborn (alto sax, flute), Richard Grando (baritone sax, flute), Michael Kamen (electric piano, Moog, oboe), Geoffrey MacCormack (aka Warren Peace), Ava Cherry, Gui Andrisano, Robin Clark, Anthony Hinton, Diane Sumler and Luther Vandross (vocal backings).

According to Tony Zanetta (MainMan Vice President) a total of seven shows were cancelled between 16th September & 5th October - there is some confusion over which dates were postponed. *There was a two week rehearsal at Studio Instrument Rentals (SIR Rehearsal Studios), 6465 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, Los Angeles, before resuming the tour.

THE SOUL/PHILLY DOGS TOUR The second leg of 'The Year Of The Diamond Dogs' Tour became known as the 'Soul' or 'Philly' Dogs Tour restarted on the 5th October 1974. The re-arranged line-up now named David Bowie and The Mike Garson Band consisted of: David Bowie (vocals, 12-string acoustic guitar, harmonica), Mike Garson (piano, Mellotron), Carlos Alomar (guitar), Earl Slick (lead guitar), Emir Ksasan (bass), Dennis Davis (drums), Pablo Rosario (percussion), David Sanborn (alto sax, flute), Richard Grando (baritone sax, flute), Michael Kamen (electric piano, Moog, oboe), Geoffrey MacCormack (aka Warren Peace), Ava Cherry, Robin Clark, Jean Fineberg, Anthony Hinton, Diane Sumler and Luther Vandross (vocal backings).

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Live: Universal Amphitheatre, Los Angeles

David Bowie performed at Los Angeles’ Universal Amphitheatre on 5 September 1974.

This was the 35th date of the Diamond Dogs Tour, which had kicked off in Montreal on 14 June , and the fourth of seven consecutive sold-out nights at the venue.

Bowie had decided to ditch the elaborate Hunger City stage set, but was convinced by manager Tony Defries to retain it for the LA shows.

The musical director was Michael Kamen, who also played electric piano, Moog synthesizer, and oboe. Earl Slick and Carlos Alomar played guitar, and Mike Garson was on piano and Mellotron. The bass guitarist was Doug Rauch, and the drummer was Greg Errico.

The backing singers were Ava Cherry, Robin Clark, Geoff MacCormack (billed as Warren Peace), Gui Andrisano, Luther Vandross, Diane Sumler, and Anthony Hinton. The line-up was completed by David Sanborn and Richard Grando on saxophone and flute, and percussionist Pablo Rosario.

I had a little group at that time and I brought two of the singers [Sumler and Hinton] with me. It was the group that ended up being Luther on Atlantic Records. I told Bowie I wouldn’t leave my group at home to go on the road, so he said, ‘Well, bring them because I really want you.’

This show was filmed in its entirety by the BBC, for the 1975 Omnibus documentary Cracked Actor . Performances of ‘Cracked Actor’ , ‘Time’ , ‘Sweet Thing’ , ‘Moonage Daydream’ , ‘Diamond Dogs’ , ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide’ , ‘Aladdin Sane’ , and ‘John, I’m Only Dancing (Again)’ appeared in the documentary.

While in LA Bowie stayed at the Beverly Wilshire hotel. His band members stayed at the Sunset Marquis.

Bowie returned to the Universal Amphitheatre on 12 and 13 September 1997 , during the Earthling Tour. The 5,200-seat venue closed in September 2013 and was demolished to make way for the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios Hollywood.

The setlist

• ‘Rebel Rebel’
• ‘Moonage Daydream’
• ‘Sweet Thing’
• ‘Candidate’
• ‘Sweet Thing (Reprise)’
• ‘Suffragette City’
• ‘Aladdin Sane’
• ‘All The Young Dudes’
• ‘Cracked Actor’
• ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll With Me’
• ‘Knock On Wood’
• ‘It’s Gonna Be Me’
• ‘Space Oddity’
• ‘Future Legend’
• ‘Diamond Dogs’
• ‘Big Brother’
• ‘Chant Of The Ever Circling Skeletal Family’
• ‘The Jean Genie’
• ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide’
• ‘John, I’m Only Dancing (Again)’

Also on this day...

• 1990: Live: Stadion Maksimir, Zagreb
• 1983: Live: Memorial Auditorium, Buffalo
• 1972: Live: Top Rank Suite, Sunderland
• 1965: Live: Davie Jones and the Lower Third, Pavilion Ballroom, Bournemouth

Want more? Visit the David Bowie history section .

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David Bowie: The making of Diamond Dogs and the iconic tour that failed

Diamond Dogs marked the point at which David Bowie began to shed his glam-rock skin. He then embarked on one of rock's most expensive – and dangerous – tours

Released in the summer of 1974, Diamond Dogs found David Bowie navigating the dog days of the glam-rock era – a hot and sultry period before the cultural weather broke. Having surfed and defined the pop zeitgeist about as well as any individual star since Elvis Presley , he was now cresting the last stretch of a wave as it came crashing into shore. 

Diamond Dogs was a resounding commercial success – No.1 in the UK, No.5 in the US. But the album was marked down at the time. “A rather grandiose mood piece… It’s okay, you know, but is it really necessary?” was the NME’s verdict. And, retrospectively, it tends to get brushed aside in the grand sweep of things as a transitional album, marking the point in Bowie’s artistic timeline at which he was shedding his glam-rock skin and stepping into his role as the ‘plastic soul’ man of his next studio album Young Americans . ( NME later revised its opinion and, in 2013, rated Diamond Dogs one of “The 500 Greatest Albums of all Time” – albeit ranked at No.447, a long way behind many of his other albums.) 

Bowie himself was quick to recognise the record’s limitations. “It was not a concept album,” he told Robert Hilburn in September 1974. “It was a collection of things. And I didn’t have a band. So that’s where the tension came in. I couldn’t believe I had finished it when I did. I had done so much of it myself. I never want to be in that position again. It was frightening trying to make an album with no support behind you. I was very much on my own. It was my most difficult album. It was a relief that it did so well.” 

Whatever the sense of “tension”, both musically and personally, which overshadowed the making of Diamond Dogs , the album is nevertheless a remarkably pure distillation of Bowie’s genius. Indeed, if you are looking for a collection of recordings that stands as a monument to Bowie’s across-the-board prowess as a songwriter, singer, guitarist, saxophonist, keyboard player, producer and allround media maven, there is no other album in his entire catalogue that compares to Diamond Dogs . Transitional or not, it remains as true an expression of his artistry on every front as anything he ever released.

The album was recorded in London, mostly at Olympic Studios, and Hilversum in the Netherlands, between December 1973 and February 1974. Having famously disbanded the Spiders From Mars live on stage at Hammersmith Odeon the previous July, Bowie’s first challenge was to fill the guitar genius-shaped hole left in his musical life by the departure of Mick Ronson . In a defiant display of ambition and bravado, Bowie resolved to do the job himself. 

“I knew that the guitar playing had to be more than okay,” he said, looking back in 1997. “That couple of months I spent putting [ Diamond Dogs ] together before I went into the studio was probably the only time in my life where I really buckled down to learn the stuff I needed to have on the album. I’d actually practise two hours a day.” 

Having also dispensed with the services of longstanding producer Ken Scott, Bowie’s initial plan was not only to produce the album but also to play every instrument himself – perhaps reaching the point at which ambition gave way to hubris. 

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Wiser counsel prevailed and he found a new rhythm section comprising session bass player Herbie Flowers (the man responsible for the swooping bass line on Lou Reed ’s Walk On The Wild Side ) and drummer Tony Newman (best known for his stint in the Jeff Beck Group). Pianist Mike Garson and drummer Aynsley Dunbar, who had both contributed to Pin Ups, the album of cover versions which Bowie had somehow slotted into his schedule and released in October 1973, were also brought in.

All sorts of grand ideas were floated in the build up to Diamond Dogs . Bowie had spoken of his intention to mount a “full-scale rock musical” re-telling the story of Ziggy Stardust. He’d also let it be known that he was planning to write and direct a musical production for TV of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four , one of his favourite novels. 

“I’d failed to obtain the theatrical rights from George Orwell’s widow,” Bowie told the Mail On Sunday in 2008. “And having written three or more songs for it already, I did a fast about-face and recobbled the idea into Diamond Dogs : teen punks on rusty skates living on the roofs of the dystopian Hunger City; a post-apocalyptic landscape.” 

The scene is set on the opening number, Future Legend , a brief, howling, growling, synthesised soundtrack with a voiceover from Bowie introducing us to a ghastly, ruined cityscape where ‘ Fleas the size of rats sucked on rats the size of cats/ And ten thousand peoploids split into small tribes… ’ The recitation ends with the jarring proclamation: ‘ This ain’t rock and roll. This is genocide! ’ The title track, which follows, actually sounds a lot more like rock’n’roll than mass murder – with an influence that owed a noticeable debt to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards . 

As chance would have it, the Rolling Stones were in Olympic Studios recording their album It’s Only Rock’n’Roll at the same time as Bowie was working on Diamond Dogs . Olympic’s in-house engineer, Keith Harwood, who engineered Diamond Dogs , had previously worked on several Stones albums. 

And if the general fraternising that went on during the course of the sessions wasn’t enough to reinforce the connection, Bowie and his then-wife Angie (Angela Barnett) had recently moved into a grand terraced house in Chelsea where they were now near neighbours of Mick and Bianca Jagger, with whom they socialised. Indeed, according to the American singer and model Ava Cherry , who stayed in the house for a time with David and Angie, there was a lot more than socialising going on. 

“Mick Jagger knew David, and I was friends with both of them,” Cherry told Bowie biographer Dylan Jones. “So all three of us used to hang out a lot, and yes we did have some fun together.” 

According to Cherry, at the end of one party in New York, everyone had left apart from her, Bowie and Jagger. “So it just ended up with the three of us sleeping together. That was it. And we had a wonderful time and we had a lot of fun.”

Diamond Dogs performed disappointingly when released as a single in June 1974 (after the album was released) in the UK, where it peaked at No.21. Far more resonant and enduring as a flagship track for the album was Rebel Rebel – the song that most clearly marked both the end of an era for Bowie and the jumping off point for Diamond Dogs.  

Recorded on December 27, 1973, Rebel Rebel was the first song of the sessions and the last song that Bowie recorded at Trident Studios in Soho where he had recorded the majority of his work since 1968. Released as a single in the UK in February 1974, ahead of the album, Rebel Rebel reached No.5 and remains one of Bowie’s touchstone songs. 

The lyric is as pertinent today – maybe even more so – as it was almost 50 years ago: ‘ You’ve got your mother in a whirl, cos she’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl. ’ And the riff is a masterpiece: simple, original and instantly recognisable in the way that only a handful of pop-rock riffs – Sweet Jane, Jumping Jack Flash, You Really Got Me – could ever truly claim to be. Did Bowie really come up with that and play it completely off his own bat? 

“He had the riff about seventy-five per cent sorted out,” recalled Alan Parker, a session guitarist credited for his contribution to one track (1984) on the album. “He wanted it a bit like a Stones riff and he played it to me as such, and I then tinkered around with it. I said: ‘Well, what if we did this and that and made it sound more clangy and put some bends in it?’ And he said: ‘Yeah, I love that, that’s fine.’” 

Whatever Parker’s contribution to the sculpting and performing of the song behind the scenes, Bowie is the sole writer and guitarist listed on the credits. While Rebel Rebel and the title track echoed the triumphs of Bowie’s glam-rock past, the rest of the album offered a tantalising glimpse of the future-Bowie that was yet to fully materialise. 

At the heart of Side 1 is the three-piece song suite Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise) , which was originally intended to be the centrepiece for the would-be stage production of Nineteen Eighty-Four . It is a yearning yet chilling sequence, with lyrics rendered as a collage of bittersweet images and ideas. ‘ I guess we could cruise down one more time, with you by my side it should be fine/We’ll buy some drugs and watch a band, then jump in the river holding hands .’

The sequence is notable for its intensely detailed arrangement – brought to life not least by Bowie’s contributions on saxophone and guitar. The end of the Reprise section (which runs into Rebel Rebel ) has him conjuring a screeching, crunching, overdriven guitar noise that prefigured the industrial sounds that Earl Slick would later develop on Station To Station and Reeves Gabrels would take to another level on the Tin Machine albums. Bowie wrote the lyrics for these and other songs on Diamond Dogs using the ‘cut-up’ method popularised by the ‘beat’ writer and literary figurehead William Burroughs. 

“You write down a paragraph or two describing several different subjects,” Bowie explained. “Creating a kind of story ingredients list, I suppose. And then cut the sentences into four- or five-word sections; mix ’em up and reconnect them. You can get some pretty interesting idea combinations like this.” 

While the mood and subject matter of the songs on Side 2 is clearly derived from the nightmarish gloom of Orwell’s novel, it is impossible to know where and how these cut-ups might have been made or what the precise meaning is. ‘ We’re today’s scrambled creatures, locked in tomorrow’s double feature, heaven’s on the pillow, its silence competes with hell/It’s a twenty-four-hour service guaranteed to make you tell… ’ Bowie sings mournfully on We Are The Dead . It certainly soundslike a bad trip.

The comparatively jaunty music on tracks such as Rock’N’Roll With Me and Big Brother sounds like it should be part of a stage musical – as indeed it was originally intended to be. The Rocky Horror Show , which opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1973, was on the way to becoming a cult phenomenon at the time Bowie was writing the album and there was a lot of musical theatricality in the air. 

There was also evidence of the looming switch of musical pace and persona that Bowie would effect on his next album, Young Americans – most obviously represented in the track 1984 , which took its inspiration from the wah-wah guitar and string arrangements of Isaac Hayes’s soundtrack to the 1971 film Shaft . 

“When we worked on the song 1984 he was already referencing Barry White,” said Ken Scott, who had produced an earlier recording of the song as part of the Aladdin Sane sessions in January 1973. “He wanted the hi-hat and the strings to sound like they would be on a Barry White album. He was already anticipating the sound of Young Americans.” 

The faintly shocking, sci-fi cover artwork by the Belgian artist Guy Peellaert, featuring a picture of Bowie with his lower body transformed into that of a dog complete with genitalia (airbrushed from most versions at the time) became instantly iconic. Bowie got the idea after Mick Jagger told him that Peellaert was designing the sleeve of the forthcoming Stones album It’s Only Rock’N’Roll . 

“I immediately rushed out and got Guy Peellaert to do my cover too,” Bowie admitted later. When It’s Only Rock’N’Roll was released several months after Diamond Dogs , everyone assumed the Stones had copied Bowie. “He [Jagger] never forgave me for that!” Bowie said.

The spectacular and technically ambitious tour to promote Diamond Dogs set new standards for theatrical invention and sheer scale of endeavour. According to the Bowie chronicler Nicholas Pegg the stage set “was more elaborate than any previously attempted for a rock tour and cost an unprecedented $250,000… A giant backdrop depicted the nightmarish Hunger City skyline, tilted in jagged perspective. To either side stood two massive aluminium skyscrapers, linked by a moving bridge which would rise and fall during the show. The specialist props, run by hydraulic mechanisms and early forms of computer control, were to be built from scratch.” 

The early reviews were delirious. The reviewer from Melody Maker described it as “a combination of contemporary music and theatre that is several years ahead of its time… a completely new concept in rock theatre – the most original spectacle in rock I have ever seen.” 

According to Bowie: “It was truly the first real rock and roll theatrical show that made any sense.” But he nevertheless remembered the tour as “quite an unbelievable headache”. 

At times, the sheer ambition of the staging threatened to outstrip the technical knowhow. With cranes and cherry-pickers and bits of staging flying around, there was little margin for error.

According to stage manager Nick Russiyan, “David was in great danger physically and could have gotten electrocuted or killed.” There was a disconnect too between the sophisticated musicianship of the new stage band – featuring guitarists Carlos Alomar and Earl Slick – and the rough edges of the original Diamond Dogs recording, played by Bowie himself. 

“That album had a quality of obsession with what I wanted to get over,” Bowie later reflected. “They played it too well and with too much fluidity. So to me Diamond Dogs was never played well on stage, or at least never with the sensibility that the album had.” 

Despite the positive reaction, the production was scaled back dramatically after the first leg and morphed into the so-called Soul Tour, with a set-list featuring material from Bowie’s forthcoming album Young Americans (released in 1975). 

“I threw the set away and came back with a completely different show,” Bowie later recalled. “They were supposed to be selling the entire show on this spectacular set, and the kids would come and there was no set, no nothing, and there I was singing soul music.” 

“ Diamond Dogs was a weird period because everything that David had done up to that point suddenly exploded,” said guitarist Earl Slick. “It was like a nuclear explosion… Bowiemania… Then he decided to just abandon the whole thing. Diamond Dogs is probably one of the most iconic things he did in his entire career but… it [the tour] didn’t even make the WestCoast.” 

“It was pretty obvious that David was taking coke,” recalled Jayne County, the American proto-punk glam-rocker who was signed to Bowie’s management firm MainMan at that time. “He became very skeletal in his appearance and began rattling off speeches that sounded meaningless to the rest of us… He began to get paranoid… accusing people of ripping him off and stealing his drugs.” 

“ Diamond Dogs scared me because I was mutating into something I just didn’t believe in any more, and the dreadful thing was, it was so easy,” Bowie said, looking back in 2008. “The Diamond Dogs period was just an extension of Aladdin Sane , which in itself was just an extrapolation of Ziggy Stardust. 

“But by the time of Diamond Dogs that persona had started to feel claustrophobic, and I needed a change… Diamond Dogs was making me sick, both physically and creatively, and I was shifting into melodrama."

Musician since the 1970s and music writer since the 1980s. Pop and rock correspondent of The Times of London (1985-2015) and columnist in Rolling Stone and Billboard magazines. Contributor to Q magazine, Kerrang!, Mojo, The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph , et al. Formerly drummer in TV Smith’s Explorers, London Zoo, Laughing Sam’s Dice and others. Currently singer, songwriter and guitarist with the David Sinclair Four (DS4). His sixth album as bandleader, Apropos Blues , is released 2 September 2022 on Critical Discs/Proper.

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Who Can I Be Now? How David Bowie Spent 1974

David Bowie in September of 1974 onstage in Los Angeles. Terry O'Neill/Getty Images hide caption

David Bowie in September of 1974 onstage in Los Angeles.

To say that 1974 was a year of change and challenge for David Bowie and his fans is an understatement as extreme as the lurid outfits he'd worn as his just-abandoned alter ego, Ziggy Stardust. The incubator for the evolution was Bowie's U.S. tour that year, which began in Montreal on June 14 — 40 years ago this weekend.

In July of 1973, at the peak of his success, Bowie unexpectedly retired Ziggy — the character and vehicle he'd ridden to fame after nearly a decade of trying. In the months that followed, he abandoned his band, his home and the city (London) and country that spawned him. By the spring of 1974, he'd ditched the zipper haircut, platform heels and vivid glam fashions that he, more than anyone, had brought to the mainstream. And by the end of that year he'd basically abandoned rock 'n' roll altogether.

While the Beatles had acclimated the even-then largely complacent rock audience to changes of sound and vision, at the fateful age of 27, Bowie — fueled by exploding creativity, success and not least the white powder to which he'd become addicted — would try the patience of even his most dedicated fans, producing music that wasn't dauntingly strange and experimental (that would come later), but instead too normal and everyday for many of his fans: the R&B that saturated FM radio at the time. That style might have seemed exotic to a Brit, but it was the exact sound that most American rock fans were trying to escape.

That the two studio albums associated with the tour — Diamond Dogs , released in March of '74 was already a departure, being musically more subtle than its comparatively garish predecessor, Aladdin Sane , and Young Americans , put out a year later and featuring Bowie's first U.S. No. 1 single, "Fame" — made him into a star in America is perhaps the strangest twist of all.

The 73-date tour also underwent a stylistic change every bit as tectonic as the one Bowie's music was undergoing. At its outset, the Diamond Dogs tour was by far the most extravagant and expensive rock outing ever mounted: designed by Broadway veterans Jules Fisher and Mark Ravitz and choreographed by Toni Basil, it featured a towering set depicting the post-apocalyptic city in which the loosely conceptual album was based. It included a catwalk that lowered from the rafters to stage level and a cherry-picker that lofted Bowie 40 feet above the first dozen rows of the audience (and occasionally failed to bring him back). But after 10 weeks of shows, due to expense or boredom, he abandoned the set and the setlist, going for a more stripped-down presentation and an overhauled R&B sound.

"I sunk myself back into the music that I considered the bedrock of all popular music: R&B and soul," Bowie recalled to writer David Buckley years later. "I guess from the outside it seemed to be a pretty drastic move. I think I probably lost as many fans as I gained new ones."

It's one of the most drastic image/sound changes in the modern era, and it was just the beginning of the transformations Bowie would make over the next several years. Over the course of the tour, Bowie would drive himself, his band and his audience to the brink: himself to the edge of exhaustion via the physical challenges of the show, overwork and drug abuse; his band to the brink of its musical abilities, energy and salary requirements; his audience to the brink of its patience.

"I went to the Diamond Dogs show [in June] expecting something like Ziggy Stardust," said fan John Neilson, who caught both incarnations of the tour in Detroit. "And then in October I expected to see something like Diamond Dogs, and it was the soul revue. It might as well have been a completely different artist."

The basis for the tour and its initial extravagant set lay in Diamond Dogs ' post-apocalyptic world of street urchins and nefarious characters, like Halloween Jack; the album was the end result of an unsuccessful attempt to create a rock musical from George Orwell's 1984 , which had been blocked by Orwell's widow. While the album — and its classic lead single, "Rebel Rebel," which was finishing a Top 5 run in the U.K. at the time Bowie arrived in New York on April 11 — retained elements of the aborted musical, like Ziggy Stardust , it's a loose concept album not bound to a straight storyline; the songs act as signposts around which listeners can create their own narrative.

David Bowie in February 1974 in the Netherlands. Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns hide caption

David Bowie in February 1974 in the Netherlands.

"I had in my mind this kind of half Wild Boys/1984 world, and there were these ragamuffins, but they were a bit more violent than ragamuffins," Bowie told Buckley. "They'd taken over this barren city, this city that was falling apart. ... I had the Diamond Dogs living in the streets. They were all little Johnny Rottens and Sid Viciouses, really."

That storyline carried over to the show. Framed by towering skyscrapers, Bowie moved from one elaborate scenario to another: He performed "Sweet Thing" from the catwalk as it gradually lowered to the stage floor; was projected over the audience via the cherry-picker as he sang "Space Oddity" into a red telephone microphone; French-kissed a skull during "Cracked Actor"; sang "Time" behind a giant hand festooned with blinking light bulbs that dropped to reveal Bowie inside a neon light box; performed an elaborate walking mime during "Aladdin Sane" very reminiscent of Michael Jackson's world-famous Moonwalk, unveiled a decade later (Jackson attended one of Bowie's shows in Los Angeles in September). The Ziggy-era platforms and costumes were replaced by a suave new Bowie, clad in an Yves St. Laurent suit and flat shoes, with a bright orange but calm soul-boy haircut.

Bowie's new band was equally state of the art. Herbie Flowers — who'd worked with Bowie since the mid-'60s and played the timeless bassline on Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" — and drummer Tony Newman were veteran British session musicians who'd played on Diamond Dogs . Virtuoso pianist Michael Garson and backing singer Geoff MacCormack (aka Warren Peace) remained from Bowie's 1973 band. Classically trained New Yorker Michael Kamen — a future Grammy-winning and Oscar-nominated film composer whose scoring work for the Joffrey Ballet had impressed Bowie — was enlisted as musical director. Kamen brought along two musicians from his former rock bands: future superstar jazz saxophonist David Sanborn and 22-year-old guitarist Earl Slick, who would work with Bowie many times in the coming decades, and also performed on John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Double Fantasy .

The latter got a call from Kamen one day in April and was told he'd be hearing from an important musician he refused to identify.

"I get a phone call from the Bowie people the next day and they set up an audition — which is the weirdest f- - -ing thing I've ever done in my life," Slick, who speaks in a Brooklynese as rapid-fire as his solos, recalls. "David's personal assistant meets me at RCA Studios in New York, and she walks me not to the control room, which is dark, but into the main studio. I get out my guitar and I hear a voice with an American accent saying, 'Hey, how ya doin'? Put the headphones on. We're gonna play you some tracks, just play along.' I say, 'What key are they in?' He says, 'Don't worry about it.' And he just starts rolling tape! I'm playing over tracks from Diamond Dogs , which [hadn't been released yet] — I've never heard these songs, I don't know what I'm doing.

"I'm out there for maybe 15 minutes and there's a little bit of chatter between me and this American guy — who turns out to be [longtime Bowie producer] Tony Visconti — and about two minutes later Bowie walks in," he continues. "We hung out for about half an hour, fiddling around with guitars. His assistant says, 'We'll call you in the next couple weeks.' But the phone rang the next day and they said, 'If you want it, you got it.' "

Over the following weeks, the band — filled out by saxophonist Richard Grando, percussionist Pablo Rosario and backing singer Gui Andrisano — worked up radically new arrangements of Bowie's catalog, which were strongly influenced by New York City nightlife. Bowie had become friends with guitarist Carlos Alomar — a veteran of James Brown's and Wilson Pickett's bands, as well as the Apollo Theater's house band — who took the singer to the Apollo and elsewhere to see The Temptations, The Spinners and Marvin Gaye; he also hit Latin clubs and other nightspots in the city's budding disco scene, as well as rock haunts like Max's Kansas City.

That influence was immediately felt not just in the soul covers the band played on the first leg of the tour — Eddie Floyd's 1966 classic "Knock on Wood," the Ohio Players' 1968 song "Here Today and Gone Tomorrow" — but also in the reinventions of Bowie's catalog, which went far beyond the blistering power-trio rock of the Ziggy era. "Aladdin Sane" received a Latin treatment driven by Garson's manic piano; "Jean Genie" slowed to a lounge crawl on the verses and completely dispensed with its signature riff; even the brand-new "Rebel Rebel" got a looser tempo and jazzy backing vocals.

"He was hanging out a lot in New York," fan Kathy Miller recalls. "I remember seeing him and his entourage snowed in during a blizzard at a [April 22] New York Dolls show at Kenny's Castaways, and friends of mine saw him at Puerto Rican discos, black discos. So it was not such a shock to New Yorkers that he gravitated toward that kind of music."

After dress rehearsals at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, N.Y. — "Two days? Maybe more, because that was one complicated f- - -ing thing," Slick says — the entire production headed up the Northway to Montreal for the first of what would ultimately be 30 dates of the initial leg of the Diamond Dogs tour. Not surprisingly, the opening night had more than a few rough spots. The sound system was distorted, and the catwalk plummeted dangerously to the stage floor with Bowie on it, a problem that happened more than once.

The kinks were gradually worked out and the tour carried on across the Northeast and South, playing major venues — Cleveland's Public Auditorium for two nights, Detroit's Cobo Hall, Nashville's Municipal Auditorium — but also many smaller, less-likely markets and theaters, like Charleston, W.Va.; Dayton and Toledo, Ohio; Norfolk, Va. While most nights went off without a hitch, the complexity of the set continued to cause problems.

At the Norfolk show, Rob Holland, then 14, recalls, "I remember the cherry-picker got stuck: It moved for a minute and then it moved again to the side of the stage, but then it got stuck and he had to get off of it."

On at least one other night, the cherry-picker extended to its full length but failed to retract, leaving Bowie stranded over the audience. "When he finished the song he had to shimmy along the [cherry-picker's hydraulic] arm back to the stage," Tony Visconti writes in the David Live liner notes. "Members of the audience were standing on their seats trying to grab him and pull him down. On that night, this was perceived as part of the show: David made it seem to look that way, climbing back in a dramatic, purposeful way."

While many were dazzled by the stage and the theatrics, some weren't so impressed. "I really liked the set, but I've always felt it would have been a much better show if they had really exploited it, doing Diamond Dogs semi-theatrically and really using the staging," John Neilson says. "He did use it for 'Sweet Thing,' but the rest of the time it just sorta loomed in the background. It was a kind of wasted opportunity."

Brad Elvis, formerly of The Elvis Brothers and currently in The Romantics and The Handcuffs, caught shows in Cleveland and Toledo, Ohio. "It got a good reaction, but it wasn't like pandemonium," he remembers. He and a couple of friends did, however, spend time with Bowie and band members at a hotel-room party after the Toledo show — where he witnessed the growing R&B influence firsthand.

"There were about five other people in this cramped little room, and they had this big boombox," he says. "Kind of dancey R&B was playing, and one of the [backing singers] was showing Bowie these dance moves. Everybody's dancing, having fun, getting loose, except us — we're watching, wide-eyed."

David Bowie onstage at Madison Square Garden in New York City on July 20, 1974. Ron Galella/WireImage hide caption

David Bowie onstage at Madison Square Garden in New York City on July 20, 1974.

Occasionally parts of the set would be too large for a venue, forcing the crew to scale down the show, but only once on the tour's first leg did Bowie perform without it completely. En route to Tampa, Fla., one of the drivers was stung by a bee and crashed a truck carrying key elements of the set into a swamp. Cancellation was considered but "David would not hear of it," according to an announcement made to the crowd, and the show proceeded. During the set Bowie apologized for it not being "the show I'd hoped to bring you" and played a rare encore.

As the tour's first leg reached its home stretch in mid-July, with a run of six shows at Philadelphia's fabled Tower Theater, the show was beset by a problem that had nothing to do with technology. Eager to get a live album on the market before the tour concluded, Bowie's then-manager, Tony Defries, arranged to have the Tower shows recorded. Live recordings ordinarily entitle the musicians to a much higher fee than Bowie's touring group was receiving (Slick recalls getting $300 per week), but Defries attempted to sidestep that issue.

"Back in the day, if you were recording, there were two microphones on everything: one would go to the [venue's] sound, and one would go to the [mobile recording] truck," Slick says. "At sound check, I didn't think anything of it, but Herbie picked up on it right away. Tony Defries was one of the biggest f- - -ing shysters on the planet, and [earlier that day] I had gotten a letter pushed under my hotel door offering me $300 basically to give my rights over. Not long after that, Herbie is on the phone with everybody saying, 'This is bulls- - -, we're not gonna do this.' Basically, with Herbie being the spokesperson, we said we ain't going onstage until we get an agreement for X amount of money, period. They agreed to it, we signed it — and we didn't get paid, so we sued David. We won, but it took a long, long time to get the money. I know David pitched a serious fit on Herbie, and I think he was kinda s- - - -y for a couple of days, but then everybody got past it."

Still, the bad vibes come through on David Live , released in the fall. Bowie's voice is strained, and the band, while competent, played better on other nights of the tour, as bootleg evidence shows.

The tour wrapped with two nights at Madison Square Garden, Bowie's first performances at the venue.

"The stage show got a lot of advance buzz," Kathy Miller remembers. "We couldn't wait to see this set, and it really lived up to the expectations, it was gorgeous. But the [cherry-picker] reminded me of a telephone repairman — it was not glamorous; it was actually very Spinal Tap ! It looked dangerous and rickety — there really was a sense of, 'Oh, my God, is this going to work?'"

The shows were a triumph, and an after party was held at The Plaza, during which Bowie, Mick Jagger and Bette Midler reportedly disappeared into a walk-in closet for an hour.

"It was quite an unbelievable, unbelievable headache, that tour, but it was spectacular," Bowie told Buckley. "It was truly the first real rock 'n' roll theatrical show that made any sense. A lot of people feel it has never been bettered. It was something else, it really was."

Despite its enormous expense and problems, the tour helped drive Diamond Dogs to No. 5 in the U.S. — by far his highest chart position at the time.

In early August, many of the band members gathered in Philadelphia to begin work on the album that would become Young Americans , which is where the R&B transformation truly took hold.

While Bowie had originally intended to work with the house band at the city's Sigma Sound — which had spawned hits by The O'Jays, Lou Rawls, The Three Degrees and Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes — they were unavailable due to a scheduling conflict, and he brought in several members of his touring band, as well as some key new collaborators who would play a huge role in the album: Alomar; his wife, soul singer Robin Clark; and a young friend, future R&B superstar Luther Vandross. The latter two, along for the ride, were playfully riffing on one of the songs in the studio; Bowie loved it and had them sing on nearly every song. It was the first high-profile work of Vandross' career.

Although Bowie was raised on American R&B, like most British musicians of his generation — and he'd even performed James Brown's "You Got to Have a Job" during the Ziggy Stardust era — the resulting sessions produced music that resembled nothing he had ever done before. Alomar, Sanborn and the singers became Bowie's primary musical foils, often working in a soulful call-and-response role with him on songs like "Fascination" (a rewrite of Vandross' composition "Funky Music"), "Somebody Up There Likes Me" and the title track. Bowie, fueled by cocaine, taxed the energy of the musicians by working largely from 11 p.m. until late the following morning.

(The album sessions, which resumed in November and again in January, featured two more star appearances. Bruce Springsteen, whom Bowie had admired since seeing a New York performance in 1972, visited the sessions but ultimately did not contribute to Bowie's cover of his "It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City." More fruitful was a visit from Bowie's new friend John Lennon, who was lured to the studio by being asked to contribute to Bowie's excruciatingly overblown cover of Lennon's "Across the Universe," but ended up co-writing "Fame" — a studio creation conjured from Bowie's cover of the Flares' 1961 R&B hit "Footstompin'.")

While he dismissed the album as "plastic" not long after its release, Bowie later recanted. "In 1976 I spouted some nonsense about the album being 'synthetic radio stuff.' I don't believe that for one moment now," he told Buckley. "I was living and breathing soul and R&B at this time. I listened to nothing else. It became America for me."

While Bowie's cocaine appetite was severe before the '74 tour began, it had escalated dramatically by the time dates resumed at the end of the summer. A brief second leg of the tour kicked off with a seven-night run at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, and it was at this time that director Alan Yentob interviewed Bowie and filmed the shows for the hourlong BBC documentary Cracked Actor . The Bowie on display there is an unsettling sight: fidgety, awkward and alarmingly thin and pale, he's intelligent but remote and removed; at other times he's in the throes of cocaine paranoia, wondering whether his car is being followed, sniffling and licking his gums. At one of the Universal concerts, captured on the A Portrait in Flesh bootleg, Bowie speaks to the crowd almost exclusively in a bizarre pseudo-Italian accent, making inscrutable jokes.

The Bowie that emerges in the documentary is so odd and otherworldly that it convinced Nicolas Roeg he'd found the perfect person to portray the alien in his forthcoming film The Man Who Fell to Earth , which would mark Bowie's feature-length debut the following year.

While the set and setlist were retained for the Universal shows and a few more Southwest dates, the show was completely re-conceived during a break over the second half of September. The city set was abandoned, and the new staging relied on dramatic lighting and clever use of silhouettes (a 50-foot shadow of Bowie was projected onto a screen behind the stage for "1984"). Bowie changed his wardrobe and hairstyle yet again, adopting a sweeping pompadour, jackets embellished with shoulder pads, a thick checkered tie, suspenders, baggy pants and occasionally a cane.

Most of all, the band was overhauled to re-create the Young Americans sound: Alomar, Vandross, Clark and three other singers who performed on "Young Americans" were brought on board; and Bowie recruited his fifth different rhythm section in a year's time: rock-solid drummer Dennis Davis (who, like Alomar, would be with Bowie for the rest of the decade) and bassist Emir Ksasan. Garson was made musical director, and Bowie's revamped backing band became the opening act for the tour, cruising through a 30-minute set of smooth takes on songs like "Stormy Monday," The O'Jays' "Love Train" and Vandross' "Funky Music" before concluding, strangest of all, with a lite-R&B treatment of Bowie's own "Memory of a Free Festival," a hippie anthem from his 1969 Space Oddity album. The crowds hated them.

While the Bowie set that followed kicked off reassuringly with either "Rebel Rebel" or "Space Oddity," it then headed straight into R&B and ballad territory: a funked up version of "John I'm Only Dancing," a samba-fied "Sorrow," "Changes." Rocked-up versions of "Moonage Daydream" and "Diamond Dogs" were thrown in, but a huge dollop of the unreleased Young Americans was aired on most nights — along with "Footstompin'," which would form the basis of "Fame" — before the shows concluded with a one-two punch of "Suffragette City" and "Rock and Roll Suicide."

The tour, beginning on Oct. 5 in St. Paul, Minn., soldiered across the Midwest, East and South over the ensuing seven weeks, setting up residencies in several cities — seven nights at New York's Radio City Music Hall, six in Detroit, three in Boston — before closing in Atlanta on Dec. 1. Bowie's precious voice, ravaged by cocaine abuse and months of touring, was hoarse on at least a few occasions. Audiences were nonplussed at best by the new production.

"I'd bought a really glam outfit: a top with bell sleeves, skin-tight jeans and mile-high, red-leather platform boots," recalls Lisa Seckler-Roode, who attended one of the Radio City shows. "People came dressed as Ziggy Stardust, with the Aladdin Sane lightning bolt on their faces. It was sort of like Wigstock: I remember the cops looking at the crowd and shaking their heads.

"But when Bowie came out in that suit," she sighs, "I mean, he looked glorious, but it was such a change that the crowd was totally thrown — the atmosphere was just, ' Huh? What's he doing now?' In retrospect it was a very bold move, but the initial reaction was really confused. I remember going to school the following Monday: 'How was the show?' 'It sucked!' "

Neilson recalls a similar reaction in Detroit. "The soul show threw everyone, since the album wasn't out yet and there was a lot of new material," he says. "The audience reaction was more polite than [hostile], for the most part, because obviously everyone loved Bowie and gave him the benefit of a doubt. But it was muted appreciation at best and probably some quiet disapproval."

At least one musician onstage shared the sentiment. "I gotta be honest with you, I wasn't terribly thrilled with it," says Slick, whose guitar roars out at a searing volume on bootlegs during the rare occasions he got the spotlight. "[During the opening set] there wasn't a whole lot for me to do. For the Bowie set I was back on it, but even with that, the way it was being played wasn't rock 'n' roll anymore."

Bowie's appearance on The Dick Cavett Show , taped early in November during the Radio City stint, is fascinating, mixing new, (relatively) old and obscure: The band charges through a fast "1984," Bowie straps on his Ziggy-era 12-string acoustic as the singers groove for "Young Americans," and concludes with the still-unreleased "Footstompin'."

While Bowie is in strong form, if a bit hoarse, when performing, his interview with Cavett could function as an anti-cocaine ad. He fidgets relentlessly with a cane he used as a prop during the performance, sniffles and appears completely ill at ease — at one point Cavett asks him if he's nervous. "Um ... oh, let's carry on talking," he replies. "Don't ask me that. Otherwise I'll wonder, you see. I'd rather not know if I'm nervous until ... " he trails off.

During the interview, he's perhaps most cogent when explaining his rationale for his new look and sound. "We did the Diamond Dogs tour and took it from New York to Los Angeles, and I felt that that was enough, really. Rather than come back with the same thing, I wanted to give myself an opportunity just to work with the band. ... I got a lot of fulfillment from working in productions like Diamond Dogs or Ziggy Stardust . But now that I'm working with just a band and singing, which is something I haven't done for years, I'm finding a new kind of fulfillment."

Judging from the reaction of fans and the tepid-to-negative reviews the show received, Bowie's audience was not yet ready for that new kind of fulfillment.

Somehow, from such unpromising origins, from such a turbulent, tumultuous, drug-addled year — one that saw Bowie poised for enormous success yet opting not just to challenge his audience but almost to defy it — after 73 concerts and against daunting odds, the tour helped accomplish the ultimate goal: breaking David Bowie in America. Diamond Dogs reached No. 5 on the Billboard charts. David Live went to No. 8. The Young Americans album hit No. 9, and the title track was his first U.S. Top 40 single, peaking at 29. And "Fame" was a global hit single, became Bowie's first U.S. No. 1 and made him into a superstar. In 1975, he relocated to Los Angeles, launched his movie career, and became an all-around entertainer who appeared on both Soul Train and Cher .

(Despite its now-legendary status, Bowie's 1974 tour is tragically ill-documented. Apart from fan-filmed super-8 footage, the only video documentation of the Hunger City set that has surfaced is Fisher and Ravitz discussing this scale model in the 1996 BBC documentary Hang on to Yourself . (the Cracked Actor documentary shows frustratingly little of the stage). Likewise, apart from a one-minute-long, professionally filmed segment from a Radio City show that aired in a VH1 Legends episode, no footage from the soul concerts has emerged, although the Cavett show at least documents some performances. While some sources say Bowie filmed rehearsals and the Garden shows, and the VH1 footage suggests there's more somewhere, Slick says he has no recollection of any shows being filmed.)

And while many, including this writer, consider Young Americans to be his weakest 1970s studio album, that is hardly an insult. In terms of influence, it's hard to know where to begin: Virtually every artist bearing a trace of white soul since its release — from Robert Palmer to Duran Duran, from George Michael to Robbie Williams and far beyond — owes more than a "sho'nuff" and some hair gel to it.

Ultimately, Young Americans and the Soul Tour were way stations: like everything Bowie had done before, he ingested and used them as a foundation for what came next. In this case, it was the pioneering ice-funk of Station to Station , arguably one of his two best albums, and one that paved the way not only for thousands of artists who were influenced by it, but also for the brilliant wave of experimentation that followed over the next five years: Low, Heroes, Lodger and Scary Monsters . But that's another story ...

Sources: David Buckley's stellar liner notes to the deluxe editions of Diamond Dogs and Young Americans , and Tony Visconti's for David Live ; Kevin Cann's David Bowie: Any Day Now, The London Years 1947-74 ; Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray's David Bowie: An Illustrated Record ; Chris Carter's " The Young American" site ; Chris O'Leary's " Pushing Ahead of the Dame" site ; and especially Roger Griffin's " Golden Years" site .

Special thanks to Ira Robbins, Jennifer Kennedy, Julian Stockton and especially everyone who took the time to be interviewed for this article.

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Every Madonna Tour, Ranked

Looking back on the Queen of Pop's groundbreaking concerts over the years.

By Sal Cinquemani

Sal Cinquemani

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In 1974, at the age of 15, Madonna snuck out of her father’s house in suburban Detroit to attend David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs Tour. She was summarily grounded for the summer, but the punishment was worth it. “I don’t think that I breathed for two hours. It was the most amazing show that I’d ever seen,” Madonna said during a speech inducting the Thin White Duke into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.

Madonna’s first two tours, 1985’s Virgin Tour and 1987’s Who’s That Girl World Tour, served as experiment labs for the burgeoning superstar. In 1990, her Blond Ambition World Tour revolutionized the pop concert. Drawing inspiration from Bowie’s theatricality, Prince’s cheeky flamboyance and Michael Jackson’s stage command, she offered audiences an immersive experience that went beyond conventional live performance.

Each of Madonna’s subsequent tours have pushed the boundaries even further, embracing technology for multimedia (and multi-sensory) presentations of her music. On the heels of her own induction into the Rock Hall of Fame in 2008, the singer’s Sticky & Sweet Tour became the highest grossing tour for a female artist in history – a record she held until 2023, when it was finally eclipsed by Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour, according to Billboard Boxscore.

Madonna could have hung up her corset long ago and she would still be one of the most successful live acts of all time. But she continues to push herself – and us. Her latest trek, the career-spanning Celebration Tour, will wrap up with a historic free show at Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on May 4. The concert will be broadcast live on TV Globo and will likely see Madonna performing for her biggest audience to date – more than 40 years into her career.

To get in on the celebration, we’ve ranked all 12 of Madonna’s boundary-busting tours.

The Virgin Tour (1985)

Madonna’s very first tour was propelled, like most things related to the queen, almost entirely on the strength of her sheer force of will — and, of course, her raw talent. A magnetic and skilled performer (that toss and catch of the tambourine!), Madonna sprinted through a relatively short setlist culled largely from her first two albums, dancing and belting out hits like “Into the Groove” and “Burning Up” like her rent was due yesterday. But she didn’t need to worry about paying the bills for long: When the tour kicked off in April 1985, she was playing modest theaters; two months later, she was performing to a sold-out crowd of Madonna wannabes at Madison Square Garden.

Who’s That Girl World Tour (1987)

Compared to the Virgin Tour just two years earlier, Madonna stepped up the production values, choreography and theatricality for her first world (and stadium) tour. Dramatic performances of “Papa Don’t Preach,” “Live to Tell” and her then-most recent No. 1 on the Hot 100, “Who’s That Girl,” hinted at what was to come on future tours in terms of spectacle and ambition. Though it was only her second tour, Who’s That Girl would become the last of Madonna’s shows to resemble a conventional pop-rock concert.

Re-Invention World Tour (2004)

Coming off of the commercial disappointment of her 2003 album American Life , Madonna returned to the place she’s always thrived: the stage. The Re-Invention Tour was nothing she hadn’t done before or wouldn’t do better in the future, but — for the first time in years — she was embracing her past, performing rocked-out renditions of early hits “Burning Up” and “Material Girl” with electric guitar in hand, and even reinventing a few fan favorites like “Hanky Panky” and “Deeper and Deeper.” As for the queen herself, she was in top form both vocally and physically.

Madame X Tour (2019-2020)

Part jukebox musical, part avant-garde performance art and part standup special, the Madame X Tour revolved around a James Baldwin quote… and a typewriter. Yes, Madame X is a stenographer. The tour took place in theaters and opera houses instead of the usual arenas, offering a more intimate and interactive experience. Highlights included a jazzy version of “Human Nature,” a neo-noir restaging of “Vogue” and a crowd sing-along to the resistance anthem “I Rise.”

Rebel Heart Tour (2015-2016)

A blend of Cirque du Soleil, Broadway and burlesque, the Rebel Heart Tour saw dancers swinging on 10-foot stilts, dressed as nuns on stripper poles and sliding down giant LED screens. As for Madonna, she seemed more at ease on stage than ever, playing the coy chanteuse a la Blond Ambition and strumming the ukulele to “True Blue” – the first time she’d performed the song in nearly three decades. In fact, Rebel Heart was heavier on the hits than any tour since Re-Invention, including a Latin-infused medley of classics “Dress You Up,” “Into the Groove” and “Lucky Star,” as well as a modern twist on “Material Girl.”

Sticky & Sweet Tour (2008-2009)

After a first act that didn’t quite live up to the lofty standards Madonna had previously set, the Sticky & Sweet Tour eventually hit its stride. The ‘Gypsy’ and ‘Rave’ segments in particular – including an electrifying rendition of “La Isla Bonita” featuring Ukrainian group Kolpakov Trio and a heavy metal version of “Hung Up,” which ended with Madonna shredding her guitar to Pantera’s “A New Level” – were as exhilarating as any of her previous tours’ best moments.

The Celebration Tour (2023-2024)

Madonna’s latest tour is the sight and sound of a legend fully embracing her legacy. With no new album to promote, the setlist is packed with so many iconic songs – including a handful she’s never performed on tour before, such as “Bedtime Story” and “Bad Girl” – that more than a dozen of her 28 top 5 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 had to be omitted. A musical recounting of the Queen of Pop’s life and career, the Celebration Tour touches on her rise to fame in New York, the AIDS crisis (via a stirring rendition of “Live to Tell”), the media backlash she suffered in the early ‘90s and her spiritual rebirth, in which she rises like an AI phoenix on a glowing cube and — quicker than a ray of light — soars above the crowd. Masterful.

Drowned World Tour (2001)

Pioneered by bands like U2, live concerts had moved closer to multimedia presentations in the years since The Girlie Show in 1993, and Madonna fully embraced the artistic potential that new technology allowed. For her first tour in eight years, Madonna pulled out all of the stops: smoke machines, acrobatic stunts, line-dancing, even Japanese anime. And with only a handful of older songs making the cut – including tour staples “Holiday” and “Human Nature” – she proved she was still laser-focused on the present… and the future.

The MDNA Tour (2012)

Coming on the heels of Madonna’s iconic halftime performance at Super Bowl XLVI, the maximalist MDNA Tour was one of her most ambitious, employing elaborate stage combat, slacklining, Tetris-style cubes that rose 16 feet above the stage and a backdrop of eight rotating video screens. It was also one of her most intense shows. At 54, Madonna was in peak form, performing intricate choreography in spiked stilettos nonstop for two hours straight. The only chance she had to take a breath was during a surprisingly poignant piano version of “Like a Virgin” … after which the air was literally squeezed from her lungs by a corset being tightened around her. 

The Girlie Show (1993)

Inspired by cabaret and classic Hollywood musicals, The Girlie Show was a visual tour-de-force. The second act, dubbed ‘Studio 54,’ rivaled the ‘Religious’ segment from Blond Ambition for sheer catharsis, with the freedom of the orgiastic disco era (“Deeper and Deeper”) juxtaposed with the subsequent AIDS crisis (“In This Life”), as well as a captivating fever dream of choreography set to a remix of “Justify My Love.” Madonna was in fine voice throughout, growling her way through “Express Yourself” and harmonizing beautifully on “Rain.” She’s never had a better live band, either — and even mused about collaborating with them on an album, though it sadly never materialized.

Blond Ambition World Tour (1990)

With its elaborate costumes (courtesy of French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier), Broadway-style sets (designed by Madonna’s brother Christopher Ciccone) and quasi-narrative arc, the Blond Ambition Tour is the blueprint – the mother of the modern pop concert. The show infamously found Madonna exorcising herself of the guilt of her Catholic upbringing. The ‘Religious’ segment, which began with the singer simulating masturbation and ended with her facing the judgment of the male authority figures in her life (her father, the Pope, God), is among the most audaciously conceived and impeccably executed moments of stagecraft in touring history.

Confessions Tour (2006)

The Confessions Tour snags the top spot on our list for two reasons. First, it served as a culmination of everything Madonna had learned from Blond Ambition through Re-Invention, combining spectacle, drama and good ol’ fashioned performance mojo. Like its namesake, 2005’s Grammy-winning Confessions on a Dance Floor , the show struck a deft balance between dance-party hedonism and intimate introspection. Madonna’s 2000 Hot 100 chart-topper “Music” was transformed into a roller-disco fantasia, while a haunting rendition of “Live to Tell” saw the veteran provocateur suspended from a giant disco-fied cross in order to shine a light on the plight of AIDS in Africa.

Most importantly, Confessions was Madonna’s most cohesive and consistently thrilling show to date. Musical director Stuart Price skillfully arranged and remixed early hits like “Erotica” and “Like a Virgin” to fit the Eurodisco aesthetic of Confessions . Plus, each act of the show was a visual and aural smorgasbord, from the opening equestrian segment, which found Madonna emerging from a giant glitter ball and commanding a stripper-poll-cum-carousel-horse, to the extended finale, which mashed up “Lucky Star” and “Hung Up” into a nearly 15-minute explosion of ear and eye candy.

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Blake Shelton did 2 songs with Gwen Stefani and goofed on Luke Bryan when tour hit Phoenix

A Blake Shelton concert is always a good time, and the country star’s concert in metro Phoenix on Saturday, March 23, was no exception.

The Back to the Honky Tonk Tour at Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Arizona, may not have fooled you into thinking the venue was an actual honky tonk, but Shelton did his best to make it feel like one, from all that neon signage in the videos behind him to his playful rapport and the boozy good-old-boy-next-door charisma that makes his such an entertaining presence, both on stage and in his starring role on NBC’s “The Voice” as the leader of Team Blake for 23 seasons.

Blake Shelton setlist 2024: Everything he - and Gwen Stefani! - sang in Phoenix

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When Gwen Stefani crashed the stage at the Blake Shelton concert

Of course, it didn’t hurt that he was joined on two duets by Gwen Stefani , who strolled onstage after her husband sang another of their hit duets without her, introducing “Happy Anywhere” with, “While you’re in the singing mood, it’s just me and y'all tonight. I've got a couple duets I can do if you guys will sing along with me. It's just me here. I hope you're not disappointed, but y’all got to be my Gwen Stefani for me tonight.”

After that song, Stefani hit the stage for “Nobody But You,” another of their hit duets.

Shelton took great joy in having tricked the crowd into thinking Glendale wasn’t getting a Stefani walk-on.

“Oh my God! I’ve been so excited about that all day,” he said with a grin. “ This is Gwen Stefani, by the way , everybody.”

They sounded great together, and Stefani, who looked amazing his shiny knee-high boots and a white fur coats over a shimmering mini-dress, stuck around for one more song, their latest single, “Purple Irises.”

'We're here for two reasons, to drink and celebrate country music'

Stefani’s guest appearance may have been the highlight of a night that felt like everything a reasonable person could’ve hoped for in a Shelton concert circa 2024, from the self-effacing humor he brings to interacting with the audience to a setlist packed with singalongs, dusting off early hit singles as timeless as “Austin” and “Ol’ Red” after getting the party started with the far more recent “Come Back as a Country Boy.”

It was after that opening song that Shelton told the crowd, “We’re here for two reasons tonight, to drink and celebrate country music. And let me tell you what we’re not here to do tonight, by the way. We are not here to vomit, no peeing in the aisles, no bull (expletive), no offended crybabies are allowed in here, and absolutely no talking about politics in here.”

Why Blake Shelton likes to think of Phoenix and Arizona as 'my favorite'

There was plenty of talk about his love of Arizona – “my favorite!” as he called it.

“This is my place, man,” Shelton said. “I’ve said it all along, man. Arizona is like my second home. I love it here, coming out here, doing concerts, seeing how you all get dressed up to come out to the country concert. Got your new cowboy hat on.”

Then, he noticed a guy whose hat was maybe not so new.

“You haven’t worn that one for a while, have you, man?” he asked. “That’s been on the scarecrow for a while, hasn’t it? It looks good on you, but it’s weathered. It’s weathered. Now look at hers, though. See her cowboy hat? Shaped perfectly. She’s perfect. And then you wore the scarecrow hat out here, man.”

It was all in good fun, and Shelton eventually dedicated his next song to scarecrow hat man.

“I want to play a song for this guy right here, man,” he said. “I like this guy right here.”

He returned to the Arizona theme a few songs later.

“Let’s just get this out of the way, man,” Shelton said. “Y’all may know that I’m a big Arizona Cardinals fan.”

That’s where his relationship with Arizona began, he said.

“Because I grew up in Oklahoma and we didn’t have an NFL team out there, so the Cardinals became my team. Since I’ve been coming out here, what I really have fallen in love with…,” Shelton said.

“And I’m not just saying this like other douchebag country singers who come out here and they’ll sing for y’all and they go, ‘Man, I love y’all.’ And you know they’re lying. They don’t care about y’all.”

Goofing on Luke Bryan and other country singers

That led into a funny bit about country stars making the audience sing.

“Luke Bryan does that (expletive),” he said, as the audience laughed. “Because he’s so high, he can’t remember the words to his own songs. He has to do those poses, too. With his hat on backwards. You don’t pay money to come hear yourself sing.”

There’s always been a heavy dose of standup comedy in Shelton’s concerts, which is fine because he’s genuinely funny.

Blake Shelton's set included 19 songs that topped the country charts

And it’s doubtful anyone felt shortchanged by the 26 songs Shelton packed into his nearly two-hour performance between the punchlines.

That included such chart-topping highlights as “Austin,” “Some Beach,” “Home,” “Hillbilly Bone,” “Honey Bee,” “Sure Be Cool If You Did,” “Boys ‘Round Here,” “Mine Would Be You,” “Doin’ What She Likes,” “Neon Light,” “Sangria,” “Gonna,” “A Guy With A Girl,” “Every Time I Hear That Song,” “I’ll Name the Dogs,” “Nobody But You,” “Happy Anywhere,” a set-closing “God’s Country” and an encore performance of “God Gave Me You.”

Squeezing 19 songs that topped the country charts into a 26-song set is one surefire path to a crowd-pleasing concert.

But it wouldn’t have been nearly as effective if Shelton didn’t give those songs exactly what they needed as a singer, from moments as heartfelt as “Austin” and “Mine Would Be You” to his playful delivery of “Boys ‘Round Here,” “I’ll Name the Dogs” and “Some Beach.”

At 46 years of age, Shelton is still sounding great.

And the members of his touring band are versatile enough to underscore those vocals with the perfect part, including some show-stopping leads by guitarist Beau Tackett.

Dustin Lynch proved a perfect opener for a Blake Shelton tour

The night began with a crowd-pleasing set by Emily Ann Roberts, a former member of Team Blake on NBC’s “The Voice.”

Then Dustin Lynch hit the stage in his cowboy hat to greet the crowd with an upbeat performance of “Stars Like Confetti.”

“It’s our job to get you warmed up for the boss man, Mr. Blake Shelton,” he said.

And that’s exactly what he and his backing band did in the course of a hit-filled set that included a handful of his own chart-topping country singles, from “Where It’s At” and “Ridin’ Roads” to “Good Girl,” “Thinking ‘Bout You” and the set-closing “Small Town Boy.”

He had the audience shouting “Tequila” after slipping a bit of the Champs’ classic surf instrumental “Tequila” into his own “Tequila On a Boat” and threw it back to the ‘90s with Joe Diffie’s "Prop Me Up Beside the Jukebox (If I Die)."

The only downside of his set was a rewrite of the Dobie Gray hit “Drift Away” as “Chevrolet.” He and Jelly Roll rewrote it with a chorus that felt it was written for a truck commercial and trust me, they have both done better work.

“She said, ‘Gimme a dirt road, the windows down / Wanna get lost on the edge of town / In your Chevrolet.’ She said, ‘Gimme a six pack, some Brooks and Dunn / If you want a country girl, you just found one / Let's step away, yeah / In your Chevrolet.’”

Nah, man. That ain’t it.

He also earned big laughs for bringing out one of those hats with beer cans on the sides and presenting it to a fan down front named Greg, who was happy to oblige and drink beer from that hat as the audience chanted “Chug!”

“I’ve never seen someone so excited to drink beer,” Lynch said. “This man was made to drink beer.”

It was a fun set and a fitting way to warm the crowd up for “the boss man.”

Blake Shelton setlist 2024: Every song he played in Phoenix

Here’s every song Blake Shelton played at Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Arizona, on Saturday, March 23:

• “Come Back as a Country Boy”
• “A Guy With a Girl”
• “Every Time I Hear That Song”
• “Doin' What She Likes”
• “Neon Light”
• “I'll Name the Dogs”
• “Mine Would Be You”
• “Happy Anywhere”
• “Nobody But You”
• "Purple Irises"
• “Drink on It”
• “Some Beach”
• “Who Are You When I'm Not Looking”
• “The More I Drink”
• “Hell Right”
• “Sure Be Cool If You Did”
• “Honey Bee”
• “Hillbilly Bone”
• “Boys 'Round Here”
• “God's Country”
• “God Gave Me You”

Dustin Lynch setlist 2024: Every song he played in Phoenix

Here's every song Dustin Lynch played in Glendale, Arizona, when he opened for Blake Shelton's Back to the Honky Tonk Tour.

• “Stars Like Confetti”
• “Where It’s At”
• “Ridin’ Roads”
• “Tequila on a Boat” (with a snippet of “Tequila” by the Champs)
• “Honky Tonk Heartbreaker”
• “Cowboys and Angels”
• “Good Girl”
• “Chevrolet”
• “Prop Me Up Beside the Jukebox (If I Die)”
• “Thinking ‘Bout You”
• “Small Town Boy”

Reach the reporter at  [email protected]  or 602-444-4495. Follow him on X  @EdMasley .

Support local journalism.   Subscribe to azcentral.com today.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Blake Shelton did 2 songs with Gwen Stefani and goofed on Luke Bryan when tour hit Phoenix

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DAVID BOWIE’S DIAMOND DOGS 50TH ANNIVERSARY 

Photo by Terry O'Neill

On May 24, the exact day of its Golden Jubilee, David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs will be issued by Rhino as a limited edition 50th anniversary half-speed mastered LP and picture disc pressed from the same master. Diamond Dogs was recorded during January- February 1974 in London at Trident and Olympic studios and Ludolph studios in Nederhorst den Berg, Netherlands. Bowie produced the endeavor and Tony Visconti mixed it along with engineer, Keith Harwood. Besides his Diamond Dogs compositions and lead/background vocals, Bowie played lead guitar, saxophone, Mellotron and Moog synthesizer. The musician lineup included keyboardist Mike Garson, bassist Herbie Flowers, drummers Tony Newman and Aynsley Dunbar and guitarist Alan Parker on the “Rebel Rebel” and “1984” tracks.   

The writing of the album was influenced by Bowie not being able to secure the rights for a theatrical production of George Orwell’s 1984 and the work of William S. Burroughs, whom Bowie had interviewed for Rolling Stone in November 1973.

“To say that 1974 was a year of change and challenge for David Bowie and his fans is an understatement as extreme as the lurid outfits he'd worn as his just-abandoned alter ego, Ziggy Stardust,” wrote music journalist Jem Aswad in an article on NPR.org, Who Can I Be Now? How David Bowie Spent 1974, on June 14, 2014.

“In July of 1973, at the peak of his success, Bowie unexpectedly retired Ziggy — the character and vehicle he'd ridden to fame after nearly a decade of trying. And by the end of that year, he'd basically abandoned rock 'n' roll altogether. “That the two studio albums associated with the tour — Diamond Dogs, released in March of '74 was already a departure, being musically more subtle than its comparatively garish predecessor, Aladdin Sane, and Young Americans, put out a year later and featuring Bowie's first U.S. No. 1 single, "Fame" — made him into a star in America is perhaps the strangest twist of all.

“It's one of the most drastic image/sound changes in the modern era, and it was just the beginning of the transformations Bowie would make over the next several years,” summarized Aswad, who currently is the music editor of Variety. The songs on the Diamond Dogs album created an urban apocalyptic scenario with Bowie appearing on the cover as a controversial half-man, half-dog hybrid painted by the Belgian artist Guy Peellaert (Rock Dreams) from photos by the world-renowned photographer Terry O’Neill.

During 2010 I interviewed O’Neill about his sessions with Bowie.

“One day, Tony De Fries, who was Bowie’s manager at the time, rang up and said, ‘We’re doing this album called Diamond Dogs and I need you to shoot David like a dog in a studio and give the pictures to artist Guy Peellaert.’ “So, I take him into the studio and have him posing like a dog with his hands in front of him and all that thing. When I finished, I thought, ‘Well, I’ll take a couple of pictures with the dog.’ And just before I was about to start the roll of film this dog leaps up and I just took the picture. And Bowie didn’t even register what was going on. I mean, he was out of it a lot in those days,” underscored Terry. “Bowie used to ring me up all the time. I mean, I was sort of his photographer for a while on that Diamond Dogs tour. And in London when they were doing special things. Because they knew all the newspapers were desperate for pictures or they knew I could get pictures into newspapers. Bowie went along with it all and very cooperative and very appreciative. He is a guy who looks better in color than black and white.”

The first single from the album, “Rebel Rebel” reached No. 5 in the UK, and the album would also reach similar heights on both sides of the Atlantic, reaching No.1 in the UK and No. 5 in the US.       Since its release, tracks from Diamond Dogs have been covered by artists such as Beck, Tina Turner, Duran Duran, Def Leppard, Joan As Police Woman, Dead Or Alive and The Struts.    To promote the album, Bowie undertook his most theatrical and elaborate tour to date, which was captured on film by director Alan Yentob for the infamous BBC program Cracked Actor and the classic David Live album. Despite written promises to fans that the tour would reach the UK, it never did. For the second leg of the US tour, Bowie stripped back the show and started taking his material in a more soulful direction, which would be fully realized with the release of his next album, Young Americans .    This new 2024 pressing of Diamond Dogs was cut on a customized late Neumann VMS80 lathe with fully recapped electronics from 192kHz restored masters of the original master tapes, with no additional processing on transfer. The half-speed was cut by John Webber at AIR Studios. 

Diamond Dogs Track Listing Side One

• Future Legend 
• Diamond Dogs 
• Sweet Thing
•  Candidate 
• Sweet Thing (Reprise) 
• Rebel Rebel     Side Two
• Rock ’n’ Roll With Me 
• We Are The Dead 
• Big Brother
• Chant Of The Ever Circling Skeletal Family   In 2012 I interviewed engineer/record producer Ken Scott about Bowie’s use of piano on David’s 1971-1974 albums. Scott collaborated with Bowie on his 1971-1973 sonic explorations.
• “One of the things in looking back on the Aladdin Sane period that has fascinated me was that I didn’t realize it until recently, was the way piano changed David’s music. It occurred to me how a certain amount of David’s transformation, you take Hunky Dory which had Rick Wakeman on it, who is a fantastic, a bit more classically-oriented pianist, ‘Life On Mars,’ very good at rock ‘n’ roll but his training was more classical. His piano on ‘Life On Mars’ is unbelievable.
• “Then you go into Ziggy Stardust, with Bowie and Ronno playing. On Ziggy, it’s really simplistic because they weren’t pianists. Neither of them particularly awe-inspiring. So, the piano is very simple on Ziggy.

“But then you to Aladdin Sane and Mike Garson is on board, and it completely changes the whole feel of it. Now how much of that is pre-planned by David to move it into a different direction and how much is their effect on the way that we recorded I don’t know. The Beatles kind of grew by using different instruments. Bowie changed and grew by using different people playing. It’s bizarre. His use of keyboards really does sort of cover his growth and how he changed.”

Last decade keyboardist Mike Garson and I discussed Bowie. He spoke about his Latin jazz influence on Alladin Sane, supporting David’s lyrics, and playing live in Bowie’s bands.

“I never thought about the words consciously. He could have been humming. Now that he’s gone, I’m really hearing the lyrics, and the music and songs are so strong. I really believe his work on stage would have worked without the clothes and make up. I got an energy from him. I always loved performing so now every night I play every piece as something different.“

As far as the Latin influence, I had worked with Eddie Palmieri, plus I worked opposite Larry Harlow, [American salsa musician] earlier in the Catskills with Dave Leibman. I showed Bowie some stuff. “

Anything that I had done prior to working with David I could do on his sessions or in concerts. On that Aladdin Sane album and songs like ‘Aladdin Sane’ and ‘Time,’ Ken Scott was very involved in the high frequencies and EQ. An extraordinary producer, engineer and mixer. I worked with him and David at Trident, where the Beatles did some [1968] recording. It was two chords, an A and G chord, and done in one take. David's son, Duncan once admitted to me that he was petrified of my ‘Aladdin Sane’ piano solo and that they gave him nightmares. 

“David was an explorer and was locked into his music. In the 1972-1974, I was with David he fired five different bands and I was the only one he kept. Because I was able to change styles and go from the English rock to the avant-garde to the soul and gospel stuff. And that was the only reason he kept me and that we were friends. But he saw that I could go with him as he was ever-changing. And he knew as a jazz musician I was always looking and searching.

“Because I carried the spirit of what an improviser was. Lennie Tristano really didn’t allow me to play licks. I always had to play something fresh.”

I discovered “1984” from Diamond Dogs on an FM station as I interviewed Rod Stewart at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Rod remarked to me after listening to the opening guitar riff, “sounds like David has been listening to Isaac Hayes’ “Theme from Shaft.”

I attended every date of Bowie’s September 1974 booking at the Universal Ampitheater in Universal City, California. The stage repertoire presented his past, current and future musical direction.

The set list:

• Rebel Rebel
• Moonage Daydream
• Sweet Thing (Reprise)
• Suffragette City
• Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?)
• All the Young Dudes
• Cracked Actor
• Rock 'n' Roll With Me
• Knock on Wood
• It's Gonna Be Me
• Space Oddity
• Future Legend
• Diamond Dogs
• Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family
• The Jean Genie
• Rock 'n' Roll Suicide
• John, I'm Only Dancing

During his Diamond Dogs tour I spent half an hour with David at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. We talked about beat generation literature and R&B music while glimpsing at an episode of Soul Train on television. There was a commercial for a hair product, Afro Sheen. In Bowie’s “Young Americans” he sings “Blushing at all the Afro-Sheeners.” We both attended the local Al Green concert at the Universal Ampitheater. I gave Bowie a paperback copy of Ann Charters’ Jack Kerouac: A Biography knowing his Spiders from Mars band name was an homage to Kerouac’s On the Road: “exploding like spiders across the stars.”

Charter’s book is seen by his hotel bedside in the Omnibus Cracked Actor 1975 UK documentary which aired on the BBC 1 channel.     

On September 18, 1975 I interviewed David in Los Angeles at Television City inside the CBS studios on the corner of Fairfax Avenue and Beverly Boulevard. Bowie was taping the Cher TV show for a November 9th broadcast. I covered it for the now defunct Melody Maker in their October 25, 1976 issue.

“At age 29, David Bowie has finally conquered the United States. “Fame” has been number one for four weeks on most of the charts, and a grin crossed his lips when told of the song’s progress on the R&B listings. ‘I know!’

David had already shed the trappings of his Diamond Dogs album and ’74 tour. “The opening bars of ‘Young Americans’ begins and, just as the groove is established, the house band swings into Neil Diamond’s ‘Song Sung Blue,’ then ‘One,’ the Harry Nilsson tune, and Cher’s rendition of ‘Da Doo Ron Ron,’ the Phil Spector-produced Crystals classic, waxed at Gold Star Studios.

“An unexpected bonus was the fabulous voice of Darlene Love who provided backing vocals. The segment segued into ‘Wedding Bell Blues,’ a Laura Nyro song, the Chantels’ ‘Maybe,’ and the Beatles’ ‘Day Tripper.’ David performed Bill Withers’ ‘Ain’t No Sunshine,’ which segued into the Leiber and Stoller penned Coasters’ ‘Youngblood,’ and soon returned to ‘Young Americans.’ Bowie sang ‘Fame’ to a pre- recorded backtrack, and Cher joined on a duet of “Can You Hear Me” from the Young Americans LP. Afterwards, I was introduced to Cher. “I adored working with him and was delighted to have him on the show,” she beamed, behind her toothy smile. In my brief 1975 Melody Maker dialogue with Bowie, he commented on his just completed feature-length movie The Man Who Fell To Earth. Portions of the soundtrack was done at Cherokee studios on Fairfax. It was quite obvious that David had already departed visually, musically and emotionally from the self- imposed world of Ziggy Stardust character, and Diamond Dogs’ role into his ongoing multi-hyphenate journey.

“The difference between film acting and stage acting is enormous. On stage you are in total control, whereas in a film the actors are instruments of the director. I think a stage performance is more of a ceremony and one plays the high priest. But in a film, you are evoking a spirit within yourself. You feel a tremendous responsibility of having the power to bring something to life. For example, Major Tom in ‘Space Oddity.’”

In March 2024, I reminisced with poet and deejay Dr. James Cushing, writer/novelist Daniel Weizmann, and Marina Muhlfriedel, writer and keyboardist/vocalist in the bands Vivabeat and Backstage Pass about the impact and durability of Diamond Dogs 50 years after its initial retail release.

“Diamond Dogs pops in May ’74. Stacks of LPs at Tower Records vaporize like Star Trek effects,” reminisced Muhlfriedel. “I nab my copy and hustle home like every other self-respecting Bowie fan. Intrigued. I play it a few times but can’t bring myself to push Ziggy and Aladdin Sane further down my record pile to let it claim the top of the heap. Call me superficial, but along with the absolute unique genius that permeates everything, Bowie, I am enamored by his rock and roll prettiness, the guileless stretch of the imagination that is David Bowie, not just physically but in the elastic elegance of his songs—that gorgeous, sexy, theatrical quality even when playing rough.

“I’m caught up in the elation surrounding every Bowie release, but it takes a bit to wrap my head around this nightmare-apocalyptic thing,” confessed Marina. “The cover art puts me off—not pretty. It gives me the creeps. I read into the character—after Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, and maybe even Pin Ups’ Twig the Wonder Kid, Halloween Jack is nasty around the edges. It might take a while to warm to him.

“It’s June 1974, and turning 21 that week, I flash an authentic driver’s license at the dubious bartender at Rodney’s English Disco on Sunset. Proud of my legal beer, I join three friends on the dance floor, undulating to T. Rex’s ‘Bang a Gong.’ Purposely sparkly, a dab sweetly slutty, feeling so immodestly and undeniably fabulous, dancing our rhinestone hearts out, more with our mirrored reflections than each other. But Bowie is our highest deity — and when ‘Rebel Rebel’ kicks in next, I’m lifted, lost in loudly singing along. It sinks in that Diamond Dogs is just another incarnation of what will be an endless parade of Bowies to fall in love with.

“In the days that follow, 1984, Sweet Thing, and Rock n’ Roll with Me get way under my skin. The album takes a chance at new complexity, dare I say maturity. I come to love Bowie’s approach to playing so many of the instruments and not always having to be pretty. And for the next few months, Diamond Dogs finds its spot at the top of my record stack. Yeah, hot tramp, I love you so!”   “By the time Bowie released Diamond Dogs in 1974, the rock ‘concept album’ was had been a part of the landscape for seven years,” offered Dr. Cushing. “I’m talking about a collection of songs that announces itself as having an overall unity of some sort, not unlike the song cycles of the Romantic era. The first famous ones did something modern with the concept: they kept it loose, hiding it under a profusion of melody (Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper), or using it as a magnet for wide-ranging social criticism (We’re Only In It For The Money).

“The less successful ones imitated classical models of opera or musical theatre (Tommy), taking themselves too seriously in the process (Thick as a Brick). Bowie’s concept album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) was arguably the best concept album up until that time, blending the wide focus of Zappa with the anthemic energy of Lennon-McCartney. 

“Diamond Dogs was a different kind of concept album, one that had explicit reference to a pre-existing literary text, Orwell’s 1984, which the author’s widow had forbidden Bowie to adapt for a stage musical. This limitation actually worked to the album’s advantage, since it forced Bowie to use the concept loosely — like the band concert concept behind Sgt. Pepper. “He invented story elements (Halloween Jack, the romance between the boy and the Candidate) and used the novel essentially as raw material for collage. You wouldn’t get much of Orwell’s plot or characters from the songs called ‘1984’ or ‘We Are the Dead,’ but the whole album gives a sense of the doom hanging over the lives of Oceana’s citizens. That sense of doom is relieved in the album’s brightest moment, the hit single ‘Rebel Rebel,’ one of the most life-affirming rock hits of the decade.”  

“I think of Bowie as rock music's great Trojan Horse-- the fantasy costumes, the masks, the pyrotechnics were all a shell or a shield with which he snuck in his powerful vision of reality, the poetry of loneliness,” suggested Weizmann. “He himself said much later in his career, "What I mainly do is write about very personal and rather lonely feelings" and he was never more explicit than on the ‘Sweet Thing’/‘Candidate’/ ‘Sweet Thing (Reprise)’ section of Diamond Dogs. “Like a musical version of John Rechy's City of Night, the trilogy slips through the shadows of America at night, it's "darkcities" suffused with "one-night sex and cigarette smoke and rooms squashed in by loneliness."    “Early versions allegedly appear on Aladdin Sane sessions recorded at Trident in '73 as a musical one-act that Bowie referred to as ‘Tragic Moments.’ Like ‘Cracked Actor,’ the suite deals with a fleeting sexual relationship between an older person and a younger prostitute but this time from the younger person's POV, and it is a tragedy, a compassionate portrait on the level of Steely Dan's Gaucho, another exploited and homeless street person with no way out.    “Bowie's trilogy also contains one completely unforgettable image--one of the most arresting visions in all rock lyrics. After a seductive pickup in a doorway, on their way to a tryst, the couple saunters through the urban wreckage past bullet-proof masks of Manson and Muhammad Ali. What are these nightmare masks of violence and why are they papier-mache yet bullet- proof, the ultimate protection? Like Bowie's own masks, they hide the sweet thing, the vulnerable self, and the cheap thing called hope.”     I also discussed Diamond Dogs with the Singularity’s Julian Shah-Tayler, who records for David Chatfield’s Harmony Records, and Greg Franco, bandleader of Rough Church and Man’s Body. Both heard the memorable LP years after it was first issued. “I remember hearing Diamond Dogs for the first time as a young ‘goth’ kid and the song ‘Sweet Thing/Candidate (Reprise)’ was the doorway in to my ear: the high drama, the cutup technique of Burroughs being employed in the composition, the Orwell inception being a real draw to my inner philosophy, literature and music student. “Digging in to the whole album it unfolded as the defining funk/glam/art rock genre monster. An all-time favorite.”  

“Honestly, in 1974 I was way too young to be awareof Diamond Dogs except for "Rebel Rebel,’ remembers Greg Franco. “At 11 years old, I heard Bowie's ‘TVC15’ single b/w ‘We Are the Dead’ and then bought it at a North Hollywood JC Penny store. “It wasn't until the late 70's when, I had a full stereo of my own, and FM radio started kicking ass, that I finally went to full rock discovery mode, and started buying albums and living at record shops. “In 1979 my generations avant musical bent was coming of age just as Bowie's Lodger 1980 Scary Monsters showed up in the same groove as new wave and punk. It was then that my musical tastes had managed, so I could come to terms with all of Bowie's music.

“So, I'm actually quite late to Diamond Dogs and looking back, I get a deeper understanding on where this one places in his entire career. “David Bowie was Batman, and The Joker,” concludes Franco. “50 years ago, he lived in this world deep into a decadent 70’s apocalyptic acid trip. He was done with Ziggy, obsessed with death and destruction, as always. “He creates a new character, Halloween Jack, a pre curser it seems now to the coming comic book Dark Knight. He seems to pine for ugliness, melancholy and vice. His voice on Diamond Dogs is his most desperate, he’s going down with the pirate ship.

“I particularly love ‘Sweet Thing.’ One of the true highlights for me is ‘We are The Dead.’ Bowie is always over the top, dramatic, and still mired in the dirty muck of it all, still he's dashing and sophisticated somehow. “He next went to Philly Soul sounds, Young Americans, and eventually to Low, but we see something here that he came back to over and over again, a landscape of his mind that he never seemed to escape.”  

(Harvey Kubernik is the author of 20 books, including 2009’s Canyon Of Dreams: The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon and 2014’s Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll In Los Angeles 1956-1972.  Other titles are on the Beatles, the Doors, Leonard Cohen and Neil Young.

Sterling/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik’s The Story Of The Band: From Big Pink To The Last Waltz. In 2021 they wrote Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child for Sterling/Barnes and Noble.

Otherworld Cottage Industries in 2020 published Harvey’s Docs That Rock, Music That Matters.

His writings are in The Rolling Stone Book Of The Beats, Drinking With Bukowski, The Ultimate Illustrated History Bob Marley and the Wailers, and in Andrew Loog Oldham’s autobiography, 2Stoned.

In 2023, ACC ART BOOKS LTD published THE ROLLING STONES: ICONS. Introduction is penned by Kubernik.

In 2017 Kubernik appeared at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, as part of their Distinguished Speakers Series. During 2006 Harvey spoke at the special hearings initiated by The Library of Congress held in Hollywood, California, discussing archiving practices and audiotape preservation. In 2020 The National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. exhibited Kubernik’s essay on the album The Band, which celebrated a 50 th anniversary in 2019).

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• April 7, 2024 Setlist

The Plague Setlist at Crowbar, Sydney, Australia

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Every Madonna Tour, Ranked

Looking back on the Queen of Pop’s groundbreaking concerts over the years.

In 1974, at the age of 15,  Madonna  snuck out of her father’s house in suburban Detroit to attend David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs Tour . She was summarily grounded for the summer, but the punishment was worth it. “I don’t think that I breathed for two hours. It was the most amazing show that I’d ever seen,” Madonna said during a speech inducting the Thin White Duke into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.

Madonna’s first two tours, 1985’s Virgin Tour and 1987’s Who’s That Girl World Tour , served as experiment labs for the burgeoning superstar. In 1990, her Blond Ambition World Tour revolutionized the pop concert. Drawing inspiration from Bowie’s theatricality, Prince’s cheeky flamboyance and Michael Jackson’s stage command, she offered audiences an immersive experience that went beyond conventional live performance.

Each of Madonna’s subsequent tours have pushed the boundaries even further, embracing technology for multimedia (and multi-sensory) presentations of her music. On the heels of her own induction into the Rock Hall of Fame in 2008, the singer’s Sticky & Sweet Tour became the highest grossing tour for a female artist in history – a record she held until 2023, when it was finally eclipsed by Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour , according to  Billboard Boxscore.

Madonna could have hung up her corset long ago and she would still be one of the most successful live acts of all time. But she continues to push herself – and us. Her latest trek, the career-spanning Celebration Tour , will wrap up with a historic free show at  Copacabana beach  in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on May 4. The concert will be broadcast live on TV Globo and will likely see Madonna performing for her biggest audience to date – more than 40 years into her career.

To get in on the celebration, we’ve ranked all 12 of Madonna’s boundary-busting tours.

12. The Virgin Tour (1985)

Madonna’s very first tour was propelled, like most things related to the queen, almost entirely on the strength of her sheer force of will — and, of course, her raw talent. A magnetic and skilled performer (that toss and catch of the tambourine!), Madonna sprinted through a relatively short setlist culled largely from her first two albums, dancing and belting out hits like Into the Groove and Burning Up like her rent was due yesterday. But she didn’t need to worry about paying the bills for long: When the tour kicked off in April 1985, she was playing modest theaters; two months later, she was performing to a sold-out crowd of Madonna wannabes at Madison Square Garden.

11. Who's That Girl World Tour

Compared to the Virgin Tour just two years earlier, Madonna stepped up the production values, choreography and theatricality for her first world (and stadium) tour. Dramatic performances of Papa Don’t Preach , Live to Tell and her then-most recent No. 1 on the Hot 100, Who’s That Girl , hinted at what was to come on future tours in terms of spectacle and ambition. Though it was only her second tour, Who’s That Girl would become the last of Madonna’s shows to resemble a conventional pop-rock concert.

10. Re-Invention World Tour (2004)

Coming off of the commercial disappointment of her 2003 album  American Life , Madonna returned to the place she’s always thrived: the stage. The Re-Invention Tour was nothing she hadn’t done before or wouldn’t do better in the future, but — for the first time in years — she was embracing her past, performing rocked-out renditions of early hits Burning Up and Material Girl with electric guitar in hand, and even reinventing a few fan favorites like Hanky Panky and Deeper and Deeper . As for the queen herself, she was in top form both vocally and physically.

9. Madame X Tour (2019-2020)

Part jukebox musical, part avant-garde performance art and part standup special, the Madame X Tour revolved around a James Baldwin quote… and a typewriter. Yes, Madame X is a stenographer. The tour took place in theaters and opera houses instead of the usual arenas, offering a more intimate and interactive experience. Highlights included a jazzy version of Human Nature , a neo-noir restaging of Vogue and a crowd sing-along to the resistance anthem I Rise .

8. Rebel Heart Tour (2015-2016)

A blend of Cirque du Soleil, Broadway and burlesque, the Rebel Heart Tour saw dancers swinging on 10-foot stilts, dressed as nuns on stripper poles and sliding down giant LED screens. As for Madonna, she seemed more at ease on stage than ever, playing the coy chanteuse a la Blond Ambition and strumming the ukulele to True Blue  – the first time she’d performed the song in nearly three decades. In fact, Rebel Heart was heavier on the hits than any tour since Re-Invention , including a Latin-infused medley of classics Dress You Up , Into the Groove and Lucky Star , as well as a modern twist on Material Girl .

7. Sticky & Sweet Tour (2008-2009)

After a first act that didn’t quite live up to the lofty standards Madonna had previously set, the Sticky & Sweet Tour eventually hit its stride. The ‘Gypsy’ and ‘Rave’ segments in particular – including an electrifying rendition of La Isla Bonita featuring Ukrainian group Kolpakov Trio and a heavy metal version of Hung Up , which ended with Madonna shredding her guitar to Pantera’s A New Level – were as exhilarating as any of her previous tours’ best moments.

6. The Celebration Tour (2023-2024)

Madonna’s latest tour is the sight and sound of a legend fully embracing her legacy. With no new album to promote, the setlist is packed with so many iconic songs – including a handful she’s never performed on tour before, such as Bedtime Story and Bad Girl  – that more than a dozen of her 28 top 5 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 had to be omitted. A musical recounting of the Queen of Pop’s life and career, the Celebration Tour touches on her rise to fame in New York, the AIDS crisis (via a stirring rendition of Live to Tell ), the media backlash she suffered in the early ‘90s and her spiritual rebirth, in which she rises like an AI phoenix on a glowing cube and — quicker than a ray of light — soars above the crowd. Masterful.

5. Drowned World Tour (2001)

Pioneered by bands like U2, live concerts had moved closer to multimedia presentations in the years since The Girlie Show in 1993, and Madonna fully embraced the artistic potential that new technology allowed. For her first tour in eight years, Madonna pulled out all of the stops: smoke machines, acrobatic stunts, line-dancing, even Japanese anime. And with only a handful of older songs making the cut – including tour staples Holiday and Human Nature  – she proved she was still laser-focused on the present… and the future.

4. The MDNA Tour (2012)

Coming on the heels of Madonna’s iconic halftime performance at Super Bowl XLVI, the maximalist MDNA Tour was one of her most ambitious, employing elaborate stage combat, slacklining, Tetris-style cubes that rose 16 feet above the stage and a backdrop of eight rotating video screens. It was also one of her most intense shows. At 54, Madonna was in peak form, performing intricate choreography in spiked stilettos nonstop for two hours straight. The only chance she had to take a breath was during a surprisingly poignant piano version of Like a Virgin  … after which the air was literally squeezed from her lungs by a corset being tightened around her. 

3. The Girlie Show (1993)

Inspired by cabaret and classic Hollywood musicals, The Girlie Show was a visual tour-de-force. The second act, dubbed ‘Studio 54,’ rivaled the ‘Religious’ segment from Blond Ambition for sheer catharsis, with the freedom of the orgiastic disco era ( Deeper and Deeper ) juxtaposed with the subsequent AIDS crisis ( In This Life ), as well as a captivating fever dream of choreography set to a remix of Justify My Love . Madonna was in fine voice throughout, growling her way through Express Yourself and harmonizing beautifully on Rain . She’s never had a better live band, either — and even mused about collaborating with them on an album, though it sadly never materialized.

2. Blond Ambition World Tour (1990)

With its elaborate costumes (courtesy of French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier), Broadway-style sets (designed by Madonna’s brother Christopher Ciccone) and quasi-narrative arc, the Blond Ambition Tour is the blueprint – the mother of the modern pop concert. The show infamously found Madonna exorcising herself of the guilt of her Catholic upbringing. The ‘Religious’ segment, which began with the singer simulating masturbation and ended with her facing the judgment of the male authority figures in her life (her father, the Pope, God), is among the most audaciously conceived and impeccably executed moments of stagecraft in touring history.

1. Confessions Tour (2006)

The Confessions Tour snags the top spot on our list for two reasons. First, it served as a culmination of everything Madonna had learned from Blond Ambition through Re-Invention , combining spectacle, drama and good ol’ fashioned performance mojo. Like its namesake, 2005’s Grammy-winning  Confessions on a Dance Floor , the show struck a deft balance between dance-party hedonism and intimate introspection. Madonna’s 2000 Hot 100 chart-topper Music was transformed into a roller-disco fantasia, while a haunting rendition of Live to Tell  saw the veteran provocateur suspended from a giant disco-fied cross in order to shine a light on the plight of AIDS in Africa.

Most importantly, Confessions was Madonna’s most cohesive and consistently thrilling show to date. Musical director Stuart Price skillfully arranged and remixed early hits like Erotica and Like a Virgin  to fit the Eurodisco aesthetic of Confessions . Plus, each act of the show was a visual and aural smorgasbord, from the opening equestrian segment, which found Madonna emerging from a giant glitter ball and commanding a stripper-poll-cum-carousel-horse, to the extended finale, which mashed up Lucky Star and Hung Up  into a nearly 15-minute explosion of ear and eye candy.

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