Diamond Dogs Tour


The Diamond Dogs Tour was a concert tour by David Bowie in North America in 1974 to promote the studio album Diamond Dogs. The end of the tour was also called The Soul Tour, which included some songs from the forthcoming album Young Americans.

Tour preparation and details

Two months of rehearsals were required to get the tour ready, in part due to the elaborate set & props required for the show. Originally the tour was planned to appear in a city for five nights before moving on to the next city, but that plan was abandoned early on. The tour started in June 1974 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada as the "Diamond Dogs Tour". Bowie recorded radio and television commercials for the tour, which played in advance of the tour's arrival in each city. The tour took the month of August 1974 off, during which time Bowie began recording his follow-up studio album, Young Americans. On 10 October 1974, after the tour had resumed, Bowie abandoned the extravagant theatrical set and re-branded the tour "The Soul Tour", which would continue through the end of the North American leg in December.
In 1987, Bowie recalled how difficult the tour was early on before changing it into the 'Soul Tour', saying "I was in a bad state of mind to have attempted that. It was pretty exciting, but I was so blocked , so stoned during the entire thing that I'm amazed I lasted with it even that one trip across America before I ditched it."

Set design

The set for the theatrical Diamond Dogs tour was designed by Mark Ravitz, who would go on to design sets for artists such as KISS, Whitney Houston and the Backstreet Boys, as well as for Bowie's 1987 Glass Spider Tour. The set was built to resemble a city, weighed 6 tons and incorporated over 20,000 moving parts including a variety of props. The props themselves weren't ready for use until a mere 6 days before the show opened, which led to a variety of technical problems during the tour: a movable catwalk collapsed once during the tour with Bowie on it. The set was at least partially based on work by German artist George Grosz. In 1990, while preparing for his Sound+Vision Tour, Bowie recalled the difficulties faced by the show, saying it "was good fun and dangerous, with the equipment breaking down and the bridges falling apart on stage. I kept getting stuck out over the audience's heads, on the hydraulic cherry picker, after the finish of 'Space Oddity.'"
Other props worked as expected: for the song "Big Brother", Bowie sang while atop a multi-mirrored glass "asylum", emerging during the next song sitting in the palm of a giant hand covered in small light bulbs.
The show in Tampa, Florida, was performed without any of the stage props because the truck driver driving those components ended up in a highway ditch after being stung by a bee.
In 1987, while preparing for the Glass Spider Tour, Bowie recalled about the extraordinary nature of the set he used during this tour, saying "We had four skyscrapers on stage, with bridges that went backwards and forward and would go up and down. The whole thing was built on a city pretext. I had dancers working with me and it was choreographed and was a real fantastic musical event. I thoroughly enjoyed working like that.

Live recordings

MainMan, Bowie's management team, planned to cull a live album from the July 1974 performances at the Tower Theater just outside Philadelphia. When the band learned of this, they demanded to be paid a standard recording fee of $5000 per musician in addition to their normal pay or they would refuse to perform. They were given checks hours before show time, and the concert recording went on as planned.
A Portrait in Flesh, a bootleg of the September 5, 1974 show in Los Angeles was released in Australia.
An official version of the 5 September 1974 show at Los Angeles' Universal Amphitheatre, mixed by Tony Visconti in 2016, was first released as Cracked Actor , a 3-LP set, for Record Store Day on 22 April 2017. The set was later released on CD and digital formats in June 2017.
An official Live LP and CD recorded during the iconic last stage of the tour - known as The Soul Tour - will be released on Record Store Day 2020. The 2-LP and 2-CD set is titled "I’M ONLY DANCING ".

Band

June–July:
September:
"The Soul/Philly Dogs Tour" – October–December:
From David Bowie
From The Man Who Sold the World
From Hunky Dory
From The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
From Aladdin Sane
From Pin Ups
From Diamond Dogs
From Young Americans
Other songs