Diamond Dogs Tour
| Tour by David Bowie | |
Bowie performing at the Charlotte Coliseum in Charlotte, North Carolina on 5 July 1974
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| Associated album | Diamond Dogs |
|---|---|
| Start date | 14 June 1974 |
| End date | 2 December 1974 |
| Legs | 3 |
| No. of shows | 73 |
| David Bowie concert chronology | |
The Diamond Dogs Tour was a concert tour by David Bowie in North America in 1974 to promote the studio album Diamond Dogs (1974). The end of the tour was also called The Soul Tour, which included some songs from the forthcoming album Young Americans (1975).
Two months of rehearsals were required to get the tour ready, in part due to the elaborate set & props required for the show (reported to cost $275,000 per set, or about $1,340,000 today). Originally the tour was planned to appear in a city for five nights before moving on to the next city, but that plan was abandoned early on. The tour started in June 1974 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada as the "Diamond Dogs Tour" (although producer Tony DeFries demanded the tour be referred to as "The Year of the Diamond Dogs" when speaking with the press). Bowie recorded radio and television commercials for the tour, which played in advance of the tour's arrival in each city. The tour took the month of August 1974 off, during which time Bowie began recording his follow-up studio album, Young Americans. On 10 October 1974, after the tour had resumed, Bowie abandoned the extravagant theatrical set and re-branded the tour "The Soul Tour", which would continue through the end of the North American leg in December.
In 1987, Bowie recalled how difficult the tour was early on before changing it into the 'Soul Tour', saying "I was in a bad state of mind to have attempted that. It was pretty exciting, but I was so blocked [laughs], so stoned during the entire thing that I'm amazed I lasted with it even that one trip across America before I ditched it."
The set for the theatrical Diamond Dogs tour was designed by Mark Ravitz, who would go on to design sets for artists such as KISS, Whitney Houston and the Backstreet Boys, as well as for Bowie's 1987 Glass Spider Tour. The set was built to resemble a city (called "Hunger City"), weighed 6 tons and was incorporated over 20,000 moving parts including a variety of props (such as streetlamps, chairs and catwalks). The props themselves weren't ready for use until a mere 6 days before the show opened, which led to a variety of technical problems during the tour: a movable catwalk collapsed once during the tour with Bowie on it. The set was at least partially based on work by German artist George Grosz. In 1990, while preparing for this Sound+Vision Tour, Bowie recalled the difficulties faced by the show, saying it "was good fun and dangerous, with the equipment breaking down and the bridges falling apart on stage. I kept getting stuck out over the audience's heads, on the hydraulic cherry picker, after the finish of 'Space Oddity.'"
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