50 years ago today, I saw David Bowie live in New Haven, Connecticut. For me, that night still matters.

To put it in context: Bowie was on what was called his Isolar tour. “Isolar” was a word he invented, it seems. It carries connotations of isolation; it is also an anagram of “sailor,” the name he appeared under much later when he started an internet bulletin board, bowienet. “Isolar” also became one of the names Bowie used for publishing his music; it was part of the long process of distancing himself from MainMan, if you know anything about that. The tour was sometimes referred to as “the Thin White Duke tour” after the character Bowie was constructing and performing as at the time, and was sometimes called “the Station to Station tour,” after the album it was meant to support.

According to setlist.fm, a very useful website that has filled in some fuzziness in my memory, Bowie opened with “Station to Station,” and segued into “Suffragette City, which included near the end Bowie singing the line “wham bam thank you ma’am” while performing a boxing move that I feel obligated to attempt to replicate each time I hear that song.  Then came “Fame,” and I also remember how that song ended—with the line “What’s your name” heavily echoed, and Bowie pointing to a specific spot in the audience. I remember feeling that—even though we were mostly behind the state and thus seeing Bowie at best in profile, feeling as if he was pointing directly at me. My first writing about David Bowie, which came on the heels of his unexpected death in 2016, talked a lot about David Bowie’s pointing; this was the first time I’d experienced its magic in person.

Then he went for a slow ballad, “Word on a Wing,” which wasn’t much to my taste, not only because it was slow but also because it was strongly and I thought very sentimentally religious.  But he quickly sped things up again with his recent “Stay” and a cover of a Velvet Underground tune, “I’m Waiting for the Man.” This is the point in the concert I actually don’t remember, but this may be because I didn’t know the Velvet Underground yet; it was the following year that I got my first album of theirs, which was the live 1969 double album.

Bowie then sang “Queen Bitch” and “Life on Mars?,” two of my favorites from the Hunky Dory album. Then the major songs came fast: “Five Years,” “Panic in Detroit,” and “Changes,” the latter of which brought us back to Hunky Dory. That album was from the faraway time of 1971 (things moved fast in the 1970s; that seemed like ancient history…even though my own first Bowie album as 1974’s David Live and I’d had to work to fill in the albums from previous years. From then till 2016 I bought every David Bowie album within a week of its release). This was followed by the very recent “TVC15” and the fairly recent song “Diamond Dogs.” He played “Rebel Rebel” and the already classic “Jean Genie” as encores, and then it was over.

There had been no opening act. Bowie instead set out to teach his audience, as he often did. In this case he was quite deliberately shaping our taste, educating us about the music he was listening to and the movies he was watching. As we filed in, he played the latest album by Kraftwerk, a German “krautrock” band that to many in the US was famous for one song, “Autobahn.” The song was mostly instrumental, with repeated lyrics in German: “Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n auf der Autobahn,” which basically meant “We’re driving, driving, driving on the highway.” The song started with the sound of a car starting and then a keyboard playing two notes that sounded much like a horn beeping, before sequenced synthesizers entered, punctuated by a zooming sound as if another car were passing. It was like nothing else on the radio.

Kraftwerk had a new and even stranger album after Autobahn that it was touring to support, titled Radio-Activity. I didn’t know at the time that Bowie had asked Kraftwerk to tour with him and they had declined, that this album-playing—which seemed odd even to me then—was a substitute for other plans that had gone awry. Nor did I know that Station to Station was heavily influenced by Kraftwerk and perhaps even more by other  bands from the Düsseldorf scene such as Neu! (the exclamation point was part of their name). The album—and the concert—were Bowie’s own combination of the rhythms produced by the D.A.M. Trio (Dennis Davis, Carlos Alomar, and George Murray, all of whom were New York based Black musicians and came out of jazz and funk music. Despite or more likely because of that experience, they were very capable of working with (and sometimes interestingly against) Bowie’s German-inflected styles, as became even more evident as they all worked on all three albums in what has come to be called Bowie’s “Berlin Trilogy” and beyond. At any rate, the DAM trio fit flawlessly into Bowie’s touring band, “Raw Moon.” But again, I didn’t know any of that at the time. I could tell, even without a lot of experience of live music, that I was listening to a very tight and creative band.

But everything David Bowie did seemed deliberate, original, and under his control, even though I learned later that more things were out of control in his world than I could imagine. Bowie was suffering from the psychosis associated with consuming large quantities of cocaine—blurting offensive things endorsing fascism (perhaps as the “nasty”–his word–character the Thin White Duke, but seemingly as himself) and seeing bodies fly by windows during interview. But none of these psychoses affected the professionalism of his immaculate performance. Iggy Pop said later that he accompanied Bowie on much of this tour to learn precisely that from him—how to perform perfectly even while doing huge quantities of drugs. Don’t try that at home, kids.  

But I was still ready to learn other things from David Bowie, even when he did what was to the 14-year-old me the most bewildering of things; he showed a movie. It must have been on some kind of translucent screen, since we were behind the stage and still saw its images clearly. I had no idea what this film was at the time, but I do remember it as a silent film, and recall seeing a priest being pulled across the ground atop a large piano, ants crawling out of a man’s hand and what appeared to be a woman’s eyeball being sliced in half. Not only did I have no idea what I was seeing; I had read that Bowie was to be in a movie (The Man Who Fell to Earth, which came out that very week in London but did not reach the US till May of that year…and I honestly don’t remember when I saw it for the first time). So I assumed that he was playing the main character in this film, and that I was watching a movie, however odd, that David Bowie had made.

I was very wrong. It was years later that I discovered, in a film history class, that what we were seeing was a surrealist film made by Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel long before David Bowie was born called Un Chien Andalou, usually translated as The Andalusian Dog. I have a memory of shouting out something like “I’ve seen this movie before” in the middle of a class screening, which probably did not go over well with other students. I still don’t know how Bowie found this particular film, but I do know that he was just a couple of years before this event close friends with Amanda Lear, who had been Salvador Dali’s companion and confidante. Close enough that she took him to see German Expressionist films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which strongly influenced the set Bowie performed in for part of the Diamond Dogs tour, and that she served as an MC for parts of Bowie’s first performance on US television in what was named The Nineteen-Eighty Floor Show.

At any rate, after the film was shown, the New Haven Coliseum went dark, and then the huge room was filled with the sounds of a train, generated by guitarists Earl Slick and/or Carlos Alomar. This was the opening sound effect of the 10-minute-long song “Station to Station,” but was bewildering and disorienting to me at the time. I did recognize the two heavy chords that, after at least a minute of those train sounds, started to be played, and joined the cheering when Bowie himself finally appeared under a harsh white spotlight at least three and a half-minutes into the song. He sang the opening line of the song—“The return of the thin white duke/throwing darts in lovers eyes”…..and we were off.

It is perhaps worth saying that this was my first full concert. Earlier that year I and my friend Aram—who also came to the Bowie show with me–had gone to a David Bromberg concert at an  auditorium not far from my home, at Southern Connecticut State College (now University), but I had promised my parents that I’d be home by a certain time, and thus I had to leave after the opening act. All I recall from that performance of Myles and Lenny (I remember them being billed as “The Myles and Lenny Folk-Rock Band,” but I can find no evidence online that they ever appeared under that name) is that somebody on stage smoked a joint, which was an action beyond my 13-or14 year old imagination…though soon it would not be. It is also interesting that I can find no record of this performance online, even though Bromberg was from the area.

So I left that show before the main act ever appeared, but I apparently made no such restrictive promises before I went to see David Bowie, because I was able to stay for the whole show. I went with my good friends Aram, Athene, and Hyla (For the only time in my life I had a friendship circle in which “Glenn” was the least unusual name!), none of whom were as affected by the experience as I was. It is also worth knowing that Bowie had very recently been arrested in Rochester, NY, for marijuana possession. Did I know this at the time? I don’t think so. I certainly didn’t know that Iggy Pop was very likely backstage that evening. And that the next performance, at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, would be recorded, appear for years as a bootleg, and finally get released officially as part of the Who Can I Be Now? box set of Bowie’s work from 1974-1976, and I believe part of the deluxe extended release of the Station to Station album. The set list was the same over those two nights, so it is possible to hear again something very similar to the music we heard in New Haven…

…But not to replicate the experience, which is what, again, I remember most clearly. That opening, that film, that transition…and the way Bowie pointed