Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

silk-screened paper skyscrapers, each one dripping
blood. At the climax of each show, Bowie would tear
them down, as if to lay waste to a dying city and, as
was becoming a recurring theme, start again. “It was
creative destruction,” Ravitz suggests. “Urban
decay.”
The set was built in New Jersey and shipped up to
Toronto, where tour rehearsals began in the late
winter of 1974. There, spectacular new devices like
the bridge (which would rise and fall hydraulically,
seemingly at Bowie’s whim) and a crane that would
place Bowie high above the audience during “Space
Oddity” were tested.
“It looked real,” Fisher says. “You saw a bridge
with streetlamps held up by two buildings. And it was
actually held up by steel cable and was an elevator
and could lower onstage. So this bridge lowered
while he was on it, under a streetlamp; he was
wearing a trench coat, on a rainy night. Like
Casablanca. One night in rehearsal, the bridge fell
very rapidly while he was on it. It was very scary. It
was frightening. It was a tech rehearsal in Toronto,
where we put the show together. It went very fast and
he jumped off at the bottom and we all ran to him and
he was okay. He said he was okay and he didn’t
break anything. It was a drop of maybe fifteen feet. It
wasn’t a free fall, but it was high speed. It really
crashed to the ground with him on it, very fast and
very, very scary for all of us.”
That spring MainMan issued a press release
formally announcing the tour. The touring band,