Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

would tell me, “so these mixtures of jazz and
classical and rock started coming together. Here I
was superimposing that on his music, but it worked
with his belief systems, his mind, his philosophy and
his aesthetic. I just was playing how I felt. I really
didn’t know his music.”
With the lineup complete and the tour about to
launch, Defries began writing audacious clauses into
the venue contracts. The largest grand piano in each
city would have to be provided by the promoter at
every venue. If it wasn’t at least nine feet in diameter,
the show would be canceled. While the Bowies
traveled to Cleveland via a private Greyhound bus,
the Cleveland Music Hall promoters scrambled to
meet Defries’s demand.
“They couldn’t find one that was a certain number
of inches,” Childers tells me. “Tony told me, ‘Well,
then cancel the show.’ I said, ‘They can’t get a bigger
piano. It’s not like they won’t give it to us, they don’t
have it.’ He said, ‘Cancel the show. That’s our rules.
Cancel the show; they should have had that piano.’
And I refused to cancel the show because first of all I
wanted there to be a show, but second of all I didn’t
know what was coming but I knew this show was
sold out and I talked to the DJs and people and I
knew they were very enthusiastic. So the sound was
great, the audience was up for it, it was packed.”
David Bowie played his first proper American
concert date at the 3, 500-capacity Cleveland Music
Hall on September 22, 1972. With Lindsay Kemp
and his dancers left behind in London, Bowie and