“And once there were sunbirds to soar with”
As you know, Live Nassau Coliseum ’76 is currently the selected album from the upcoming David Bowie – Who Can I Be Now? (1974 – 1976) box set.
Recorded live at the Nassau Coliseum Uniondale, NY, U.S.A., 23rd March, 1976, the album is the official document of the Isolar/Station To Station tour.
Bowie’s band for the shows (collectively known as Raw Moon) consisted of: Carlos Alomar (rhythm guitar), Stacy Heydon (lead guitar), Dennis Davis (drums and percussion), George Murray (bass) and Tony Kaye (keyboards and synthesisers). Bowie himself also played saxophone on occasion.
Andy Barding (big cheese contributor for Cygnet Committee), has dashed off a few observations regarding this particular recording…
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Way back in the 1970s if you wanted to hear David Bowie singing live you had to, well, queue up outside a town hall and hopefully get a gig ticket.
Because while the BBC had done a great job of sampling Bowie and his early band styles through radio sessions, actual live broadcasts remained rare.
Maybe it was the controversial iron fist of his then management company MainMan that was putting the brakes on broadcasts? Who knows… but while his musical contemporaries were seemingly getting the live concert FM treatment week after week, Bowie was not. His fans may have felt shortchanged by that, especially when a live Ziggy and the Spiders special was announced for Radio Luxembourg in 1972… then cancelled.
Little wonder, then, that when a full gig at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium hit the Californian FM airwaves on October 20, 1972, it was an immediate and utter sensation. A succession of illegal vinyl bootlegs featuring that set followed very quickly, with the most devoted fans shelling out megabucks for these shady discs. And so it continued, right up to its official release, way after time, in 2008.
The same thing happened in 1976, while Bowie was dragging his Thin White Duke character across Canada and the US on the first stage of a huge tour.
The concert at Uniondale, 20 miles East of New York City, was recorded live and then edited into an hour-plus programme that was syndicated across the world. And like its West Coast predecessor, it was a smash – yes, even the extended Sandy Nelson-inspired drum solo during ‘Panic In Detroit’!
Bootlegs inevitably followed, again, with a variety of titles, covers, wrongly-spelt song titles, coloured vinyl editions and picture discs. For those caught up in the fascination of bootlegs it became an expensive hobby. Until, again, the set got an official and enhanced release, complete with missing tunes from the original edit, in 2010.
The radio broadcast from Nassau Coliseum may have sounded just like any other 1976 Bowie show – but those lucky enough to attend that actual concert were in on a costume secret. This was one of only a handful of gigs where Bowie eschewed his usual stagewear of white shirt and black waistcoat (with a stylish packet of French cigarettes poking out of one pocket, for good measure).
For half of the gig, Bowie wore just a white shirt and black trousers. For the remainder, he wore a black hooded sweatshirt… a kind of 70s version of the hoodie. Oh, and as we hear in David’s own band introduction from that show, lead guitarist Stacy Heydon wore a red shirt that night!
But that’s just clothes. At the end of the day, the Uniondale Nassau Coliseum gig remains a powerful live classic. A snapshot of an artist in the process of giving it great gusto, with a hard rocking band that was hard to beat.
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Thanks Andy and congratulations on your recent tying of the knot.
Listen to Live Nassau Coliseum ’76 now via the WCIBN playlist: http://smarturl.it/Bowie7476PL
#WCIBNBox #WhoCanIBeNowBox #BowieS2S #LiveNassau #ThinWhiteDuke