Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

wail of “Let’s Dance”).
“Obviously going from being the head honcho on
my own tour to David’s tour, which was this huge
production, was interesting,” he says today. “I loved it
for the most part but sometimes the dancers would
keep stepping on my pedal. Once I was in the
middle of ‘Let’s Dance’ trying to do my best Stevie
and one of the dancers turned me off … Another
night during a very quiet number one of them turned
my fuzz box on. It totally blew the vibe. The dancers
were not my favorite things. I’ll never perform with
dancers again. I’ll have them green screened.” Big
eighties greed bled its way into the venue sizing as
well and exposed Bowie’s reach as a bit short. “Toni
had never directed a stadium show in her life,” says
Mark Ravitz, who again designed the set. “I don’t
recall a full rehearsal of the show top to bottom, so it
never had a total cohesiveness about it, despite all
the complexity of the dances. When Frampton
wanted to do something as an individual Bowie
came down on that. Bowie would get upset at me if I
told him he could do it. There were a lot of egos. A
lot of it just wasn’t as whole as some of the other
tours had been.”
“I want a performance to upset people to a certain
extent, to keep people interested so that they say,
‘Hey, you can do that stuff—I’m not quite sure what it
meant but it was really exciting,’” Bowie told the New
York Times, with typical prescience, shortly before
the tour played Giants Stadium in East Rutherford,
New Jersey. He would perform twenty-seven songs