David Bowie 1973-03-10 Long Beach ,Arena – Long Five Years –
Sound Quality Rating
01 The Ode To Joy.ogg
02 Hang On To Yourself.ogg
03 Ziggy Stardust.ogg
04 Changes.ogg
05. Moonage Daydream.ogg
06 Panic In Detroit.ogg
07 Watch That Man.ogg
08 Aladdin Sane.ogg
09 My Death.ogg
10 The Width Of A Circle.ogg
11 Time.ogg
12 Five Years.ogg
13 Suffragette City.ogg
14 Rock’n’Roll Suicide.ogg. (from Kingston Poly 1972-05-06).
Label: No label
Audio Source: audience
Lineage : JBT
Total running time: 1:06:06
Sound Quality : reasonable sound quality ,audience recording – I’d give it SQ 7+
Attendance: 6.200
Artwork : by MossGarden
On an abnormally cold Saturday evening of March 10 1973, Bowie ventured on stage as Ziggy Stardust and thrilled punters with an adventurous 16 song set list to almost 6,200 fans and curiosity seekers.
At the time Bowie was a genuine one a kind. In an age where most, if not all his contemporaries were denim clad prog rockers the American market was perhaps still not ready for something as diverse as Ziggy Stardust.
It didn’t stop Bowie playing to the larger venues, thanks mainly to shrewd management and marketing
“Memories are fading. The view we had was pretty good. But by then, Bowie was such a mainstream megastar that the audience was noisy and a bit rowdy, especially compared to the Santa Monica show
of the year before, when the audience was too busy picking their jaws up from the floor to make even a peep. Ronson was the best part of the show, totally on fire. I felt that Bowie was either drugged out
or exhausted, but professional enough to pull off a reasonable performance. By the time he came out to solo for “My Death” I remember him kind of staring out into space as if his mind was on what to eat
from the hotel minibar later. Really not a bad show, but compared to Santa Monica 1972, which still sends electric jolts through my brain 42 years later, it was a bit of a letdown back then.
The funny thing is, Long Beach’s acoustics were so awful that it sounded like listening to the show through an earful of mud. The tape sounded 1000 times better than being there.
By the way, the bootlegger paid $100 for the tape. My understanding is that he butchered it because he, personally, didn’t care for Bowie and didn’t think it was worth putting out the whole concert as a double LP.
That’s how bootleggers were back in the innocent days of the 1970s, when their catalogs were governed more by personal taste than by greed.
Interesting about Cygnet Committee. But the original bootleg had an ugly “arsty-farsty” cover designed by a friend, consisting of a collage of photos (which he took at the show) and lettering cut out from newspapers.
Lord knows where the photos might be now.”
and to a question if he has any other recording of this period:
“Used to have plenty of tapes from many LA 1970s shows. No more. At one point I lost interest, and all my tapes, co-owned by a friend, were in his garage and ruined in a flood decades ago.”
It’s a pity that we obviously will never get the full show or a better version of the recording so grab this one here or get the untouched copies which have been upped to mwp not long ago.
I asked MossGarden if he would like to do a new CD cover for this and he was pleased to create one. The cover (front and back) is attached here and he surely will upload it to the mwp artwork sector.
The used photos are actually from the show.
David Bowie Tour Band – The Ziggy Stardust Tour
Crew
