You’ve got your transmission and your live albums…
Ahead of the 5.1 listening party at Abbey Road and despite a spoiler being posted by a BowieNetter on a Bowie fansite’s MBs, I thought I’d give a little tease of what’s to come to those of you that don’t want the complete contents of the forthcoming new versions of David Live and Stage revealed in their entirety just yet.
It seems from a post from an antipodean BowieNetter on our own MBs that some territories have jumped the gun and are already selling the releases. We expect that kind of behaviour in Holland and even Ireland, but Australia!? };-) Oh well, spilt milk.
I know many of you prefer to get the full impact of each package when you buy them, so I apologise in advance for lessening that impact a tiny bit with some of Dagmar‘s stunning pictures and a few of Tony Visconti‘s words from each of the packages.
First up, a small excerpt from TV’s notes for David Live, followed by the same from Stage, both accompanied by Dagmar’s beautiful shots…
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Excerpt from David Live sleeve notes by Tony Visconti.
This project started after we chose Electric Lady Studios in New York just to listen what was on the multi-tracks. We loved the spirit of concerts, the performances were lively and the vibe was right. But there were some technical problems, which were no reflection on the engineer, Keith Harwood. Anything can happen during a live recording and it usually does. There is no luxury of a take two. We would have to make this album a mixture of both nights. The drums were sounding good, but the bass was very thin sounding. The percussionist?s microphones had picked up everyone else?s instruments and the backing singers and horn players were often sporadically off microphone due to excitement, I guess.
But David?s vocals sounded wonderful, which was reason enough to make this project work. It was obvious that some things needed fixing. There was too much instrument spillage on their mix and their blend could?ve been better (they were ?locked? on one audio track, so rebalancing was impossible). Geoffrey and Gui sang their original parts in a few hours, but we used as much as the original vocals as possible. Some of the horn parts were also re-recorded because of technical difficulties. I have been asked if David?s voice had been overdubbed in some cases, because it didn?t always match up with bootlegs of the Tower show. We did not fix David?s lead vocals, so those bootlegs must be from an alternate night. David Live is David ? live!
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Excerpt from Stage sleeve notes by Tony Visconti.
The only ‘cheating’ I am guilty of was cutting into the middle of “Station To Station” with a section from another night and city. The beginning and end are from Boston but the middle is from Providence. The possibility of making such edits was planned from the time I set up the sound for the first show. After I made an initial band set up, complete with equalization, dynamic processing and track assignment, I instructed my crew never to change anything on the console from show to show, and to always to use the same exact microphones. After each show a big X was made across the console in white tape, with a written warning that anyone who touches the console would be castrated.
Enormous credit goes to drummer Dennis Davis for consistently playing the same tempo from night to night, making such an edit possible. My reason for the edit was because “Station To Station” was over eight minutes long and we didn’t have one great complete take for one reason or another. They were all good takes, but I needed a great one! The Boston/Providence/Boston solution worked like a dream.
We made a drastic decision to put the album in a very different running order than the live performance. We assembled the tracks in a sort of chronological order, as they were originally recorded, from Ziggy Stardust to “Heroes” (our most recent album). David loved the idea. The Brian Eno ambient compositions took up one of the four sides of vinyl exclusively. After many years of living with Stage as it was, we have decided (with some persuasion from members of Bowienet, David’s website community) to restore the original order of the concert. This present running order now includes two bonus tracks, “Stay” and “Be My Wife.” They were excellent performances but were left off the original album because of vinyl’s timing restraints (twenty minutes maximum a side, for rock).
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Many thanx to both Tony and Dagmar for bringing both these projects back to life.