Wow - this is so cool!

The story behind the video (shown in the full description below the video) is really interesting, too.

Thanks so much for posting this, hippybear! I'm very happy to get to see this.
posted by kristi at 12:14 PM on May 9

I "got into" Bowie over this album. I was 15. This was "late Bowie" and all the cooler kids and hip young adults thought it was trash, DB selling out, the MTV years yadda yadda yadda. But I loved it (and so did millions of others) and 40 years later it holds up. Turns out, too, that it was more middle Bowie than late, and man was he productive thereafter. I look forward to watching this, never got to see him live.
posted by chavenet at 2:06 PM on May 9

This period may not have been his best work, but hot damn is it good pop music.

It seems awfully suspicious that our current timeline went all to hell right after David Bowie returned to his home planet in January of 2016.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 3:17 PM on May 9 [3 favorites]

At the time of this album, discovering white pop against a childhood backdrop of Motown and 70s R&B (*), Bowie felt like one of the "dead and embarrassing hand of the 70s weighing on the youth of today" bunch, like Genesis or the Stones. If we are being honest, "put on your red shoes and dance the blues" is an almost impossibly terrible lyric. But there was a lot worse out there, and he ended up aging better than most. I didn't, and don't, really give a damn about male (especially) androgyny as an aesthetic, so I was dead to that whole spectacle, but over the years I've grown to really appreciate the 70s material musically.

(*) There was an imaginative late-night DJ where I grew up whose shows forged the link between 70s black music and house music and all kinds of crazy stuff coming out of Europe, the man single-handedly responsible for me not growing up into a mere classical music nerd, and I'm sure he would've played older Bowie, but somehow I don't remember it.
posted by praemunire at 3:57 PM on May 9

all the cooler kids and hip young adults thought it was trash, DB selling out, the MTV years yadda yadda yadda.

I could be way off base here, but I always had the sense that Bowie knew exactly what he was doing during this period and it was as much a commentary or statement about the state of pop music at the time as it was just straight forward pop music itself.

Either way, this is a treat, thanks hippybear.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 4:19 PM on May 9

I always had the sense that Bowie knew exactly what he was doing during this period

The Wikipedia article about the Let's Dance album has some background as to why he chose Rogers as a producer and what he was planning on doing with this album.

I don't know why anyone would refer to this as Bowie's weaker period when he had three songs off it that have become classics of the rock genre. That rare for any artist off of any album, truly.

The Wikipedia article about the tour has a lot of background that is quite interesting, including how Stevie Ray Vaughan, whose guitar playing is heavily featured on the album, was kicked off the tour due to his drug habits during a time after Bowie's Thin White Duke period and he was particularly susceptible to relapse.

This is a really interesting time for Bowie because he's newly sober, decided he wants to have hits, gets hits, and then feels immediately trapped by hits leading to him releasing Never Let Me Down and me going to see The Glass Spider Tour which is both a high and a low in my concert attending life. High because Bowie, low because it was total shit.

Anyway, the concert is pretty fascinating. He's doing a theater show concert long before theater show concerts were really happening. I need to watch it again.
posted by hippybear at 4:35 PM on May 9 [1 favorite]

I remember hearing at the time (on the radio, so shrug) that SRV left to focus on Double Trouble, I just assumed because I heard it at the time that was the case, but this is an interesting wrinkle, I guess!
posted by stevil at 5:14 PM on May 9

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