[concerts] David Bowie, Rosemont Theatre (01/13/2004)

There's a obvious conflict in trying to objectively gauge something's worth when you actually have to pay for it. First off, you're predisposed to like it, because you were willing to shell out cash. Second, especially if it was expensive, you're going to be looking for justification for making the purchase.

Why is this relevant? Tickets for David Bowie's Reality tour cost nearly $100. For someone of rather dubious recent employment history, this is an awful lot of money. So it would be understandable if I were to resist any indication that I might not have gotten my money's worth.

I needn't have been so concerned, but a lot of that has to do with invoking the first part of the hypothesis. I believe in what Bowie is doing, and has done over his long and storied career, so I'm going to be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Heck, I even tried listening to Tin Machine.

All of this is a long and painful introduction to what I'm trying to say here: Bowie was magnificent in concert. If I can be half that vibrant and charismatic at age 57, my life will have been successful. Songs ranged from nearly every period of his career, except maybe the aformentioned and much-maligned Tin Machine. This allowed for interesting juxtapositions like the thematic similarities between the old ("Life on Mars" from 1971's Aladdin Sane) and the new ("The Loneliest Guy" from his most recent Reality). It also provided the climactic point of the show, with the set-closing segue from the eerily prescient 1997 offering "I'm Afraid of Americans" to the classic "Heroes," with Bowie connecting the dots as the two sides to every story. Powerful, powerful stuff.

With a few exceptions, the material was as familiar as old furniture, which is always going to be one of the reasons for the warm fuzzies on the way out of the theatre (and given the outside temperature, those warm fuzzies certainly came in handy). You had the audience singing along on "All The Young Dudes" and "Suffragette City," but maybe not so much on "China Girl," which Bowie turned over to the crowd after their success on "Dudes," but took back after we sorta blew it. Bowie then turned a balance-impaired microphone stand to his advantage for the end of the 1983 single, exhorting "oh, baby, just you shut your mouth" from his knees at the front of the stage.

Which brings me to one of those odd little music-geek observations I'm prone to make. God bless the invention of wireless in-ear monitors. The abject lack of clutter on stage allowed Bowie to roam the entirety of the proscenium and the elevated tier behind the stage, in front of a projection screen that seemed at times to have dropped into Window screen saver mode. Okay, that last part was a little mean, but maybe I'm just being a teeny bit bitter because my balcony seats didn't afford a full view of the stage, with drummer Sterling Campbell and half of that back stage well out of sight.

Speaking of Campbell, the band could be a little schizophrenic at times. For many of the songs, guitarist Earl Slick seemed the only one really digging into the music, but then bassist Gail Ann Dorsey would reinvest herself, and her hips, into holding down the bottom, or hold her own covering the late Freddie Mercury's vocal lines on "Under Pressure." And second guitarist Gerry Leonard seemed nearly invisible until creating the complex loops of "Sunday," which eventually grew to post-Roger Waters Pink Floydian grandeur, for whatever that's worth, or the mutant dobro sounds of Bowie's recent cover of Jonathan Richman's "Pablo Picasso."

Some of the forays into the mid-90s Reeves Gabrels-era songs met with mixed results, as the relentless drums-and-bass grooves proved maybe a bit too intense for a, how shall we say, more mature audience. But that's the cost of entry for the show -- just because the public wasn't quite as receptive to an album doesn't mean an artist is going to ignore it completely out of hand, something Bowie explicitly acknowledged when introducing Earthling's "The Battle of Britain" to the handful of people in the crowd who acknowledged that they had the album.

As he stated in interviews leading up to the show, David Bowie is having fun touring, and part of that fun is poking fun at himself for the public's reception of some of his past efforts. And when he can back that up with the kind of show that opened the three-night stand in Chicago, I'm certainly not one to argue.