Bowie shows in NYC and the UK, June '00

The June '00 Bowie shows were fab, both from our view and the reception/reviews we got from fans and press alike. Our first show was on June 16th at Roseland in New York City. This was an incredible night - the band was supercharged, the audience was psyched, the moon was full - whatever the reason, it was one of those rare instances where the anticipation of an event is actually fulfilled (in this case surpassed, in my opinion) by the event itself.

From the opening notes of 'Wild is the Wind' - a song which had never been performed live before, and truly surprised everyone - the feeling in the room was electric. In the setlist were a number of tunes not played live in quite some time - 'Golden Years', 'Ziggy Stardust', 'This Is Not America', 'Let's Dance', 'Starman', and the epic (and personal favorite) 'Station to Station'. A few songs had new arrangements - 'Heroes' and 'Life On Mars' - and others like 'Fame', 'Little Wonder', and 'Hallo Spaceboy' were adapted for the playing styles of the newer band members.

It is such a privilege to be performing with this group of people - the rhythm section of Gail Ann Dorsey (Bass) and Sterling Campbell (Drums); Bowie veterans Earl Slick (Guitar) and Mike Garson (Piano & Keys); Holly Palmer and Emm Gryner (backing vocals, percussion, keys, kitchen sink) and of course the reason we (and the audience) even bother to show up, LV/artiste extraordinaire David Bowie.

At times it didn't feel like the gig was happening, or I was even in it. When I'd first played live with David on the VH-1 Storytellers gig, I was petrified - I hadn't played out in years, and to be onstage with musicians of this cailbre, as well as being filmed......wow. On this night at Roseland, I couldn't imagine being anywhere else. When all the elements are there - the people, the atmosphere, the songs - a connection happens among musicians which is the greatest drug there is (for me, anyway). Cliche as it may sound, the whole becomes bigger than the sum of the parts.

I kept looking at Slick with a big sappy grin on my face, I'm sure. It took him a couple of tunes to get into it- he hadn't been onstage with David since 1983 or thereabouts - but after that he slipped right into it like an old shoe.

David put so much of himself into Friday's performance that the next night's gig had to be canceled, as the next morning he couldn't speak! The high from the previous night took a turn south. After the cancellation was announced a few of us band members combed the sidewalk outside of Roseland looking for friends and family we'd invited to the gig, and the fans confronted us.

Reactions were extreme.One girl was tearful - she'd come from upstate to see this show, and couldn't come back for the Monday gig as she had exams. Others were angry, demanding information about what had 'really' happened, thinking we were hiding some 'secret' reason for the cancellation! But for the most part, people were sad about David's laryngitis and wished him well.

My own family had shown up en masse - father, brother, cousins and such - so we retired to an Italian restaurant around the corner, where I saw fans linger for a few hours, maybe in the hope that the cancellation was some sort of elaborate ruse which would soon be shattered by the arrival of DB, and the faithful would be rewarded for the wait. Or, perhaps they just didn't know what to do with themselves. Neither did I.

The Monday night show (6/19) went off as planned, though we trimmed a few numbers which might have pushed David's voice a bit too far. It was a bit of a bummer not to play 'Ziggy' and 'Rebel Rebel', though we more than made up for it and nobody seemed to mind. We added two songs which will be on the upcoming album - 'I Dig Everything' and 'London Boys', both updates/remakes of songs David wrote in the mid 1960's in the period before 'Space Oddity'. This show was primarily for the Bowienet people, and they were of course a truly appreciative audience.

The next day we were off to London to settle in for a few gigs - a TV show (TFI Friday), a gig for a-whole-lot of people (anywhere from 80,000 to 100,000 at Glastonbury, depending on whom you believe) and a gig for a not-a-whole-lot of people (150 to 200 at the BBC).

We'd been thought the drill on the TFI show last fall, so we knew the routine - rehearse, dress rehearse, showtime. We needed to trim down the chosen tunes - ' Wild Is The Wind' and 'Starman' - to a time more TV-friendly, like 3:30. This was tricky for 'Wild Is The Wind', a song easily 6 minutes long, but a little butchery can go a long way. Again, our front of house mixer (in this case Steve Guest) and I would help the chaps in the truck get through the mix in rehearsal, and then hope for the best when the time came, which is the case with live TV- no after-the-fact fix-ups! David seemed in fine voice, though he'd been ill, bronchitis in this case. Sickness was something which began to plague us on this little trip....

The bus trip to the Glastonbury festival provided an opportunity for more of us to get ill. The trip from London to Glastonbury took between three and four hours, and in a bus with poor ventilation the opportunity was great for nasty germs and viruses to find willing and able hosts. David, Emm and I all came down with 'Glasto Bus Disorder', a nasty sort of upper respiratory infection which laid us out for days after. Still, Glastonbury itself was pretty cool. I'd never played a festival of this size before (I'd actually only played one before, as a fill-in bassist for Joan Osborne in '92, opening for the Spin Doctors. But that's another story....). We got there early and had time to walk around - we saw the Dandy Warhols play at the other stage, Willie Nelson on the main stage, and ran into some old friends and made some new ones backstage. We shared a backstage area with the Happy Mondays, which provided some interesting moments.

Still, after doing Wembley last fall - which was truly intense, it was the first time I'd ever played in front of a crowd of this magnitude - it didn't seem like completely new turf this time, so I wasn't particularly nervous. That's easy for me to say though, as I'm certainly not the focal point of all those cameras and music critics - that would certainly change things! By the time showtime came around - 10:30 - we were all a bit jumpy with anticipation.

The gig was fantastic, and we played great. David had the crowd roped in from song number one - you wouldn't think a ballad like 'Wild Is The Wind' would work as an opening song at a festival, and only a handful of artists could pull that off. It was mighty surreal watching an entire city of people jump up and down to 'Rebel Rebel' and sing along with 'Life on Mars'. I made sure to keep one of my in-ear monitors out so I could take it all in. By this gig Slick was right in there, up to all of his old tricks. Sterling had incredible focus, and of course Garson kept pulling out all sorts of goodies from his twisted musical sensibility. I managed to hurt myself during 'Ashes to Ashes' - it had been tricky playing this song since the bike accident, as it gives the right wrist quite a workout - and midway through the song I probably made some mighty interesting faces.

The stage was pretty large, which for me still takes some getting used to. I'm used to the smaller venues and being closer to the audience, so it felt like everyone was miles away - which isn't really helped by the in-ear monitors, which put you in your own world anyway.

We had a day to rest after this and on Tuesday we did our last show together, at the BBC Radio Theater. This was a pretty intimate gig, and all I can compare it to is playing in a high school auditorium - it was tiny, and the audience was about 3 feet away from us. I never really got that 'tuned' into this show - perhaps it was the Glasto illness creeping in, or the carpeting on the stage which inhibited movement a bit.

After it was through I thought that we did very well, but nothing special - certainly not as exciting a show as Glastonbury or Roseland. I was shown to be quite wrong later on, when I saw and heard the playback of this show......