The Sweet Thing / Candidate / Sweet Thing (Reprise) suite was originally from David Bowie's 1974 album, Diamond Dogs. It was subsequently performed on the 1974 tour, and was included on the David Live album.
As Chris O’Leary states at the beginning of his excellent essay on the subject, the suite is “The rotten heart of Diamond Dogs; a triptych where prostitutes are the only lovers left, where street hustlers double as politicians.” bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2010...
Many agree that the studio version of the Sweet Thing suite, from Diamond Dogs, is one of the finest things Bowie ever produced. Chris’s essay is really the last word on this musical masterpiece, so I’ll spare you my artless list of superlatives. However, I do feel inclined to say that Diamond Dogs was the first Bowie album I truly loved, from when I first became a fan, at about 12 years old. And the Sweet Thing suite was even then for me the obvious standout. Musically it appeared to me then, as now, something truly outstanding. And in my opinion it must contain one of Bowie finest vocal performances.
So then we get to the live performances. David Live was a disappointment to me, principally because I thought the versions of the Diamond Dog material did not match up the originals. But I got over that, and began to enjoy the ’74 live material judged on its own terms.
And so it is with this live version from L.A., that thankfully we have, in decent quality, due to the BBC who recorded and presumably mixed it.
Making this edit, I’ve listened to this performance for many hours, and I’ve grown to love it.
The playing is great, by all concerned. Particular mention must go to Mike Garson, who’s piano leads the way. His playing is beautiful here, grandiose in places, but equally nicely retrained elsewhere. It’s jazzy, but also solidly rocking out.
I’m guessing Bowie knew he could never scale the vocal heights of the studio version, so he wisely limits himself. But within those limits he really excels, I think. Listen to the touching way he sings, at 2:45 “I'm in your way, and I'll steal every moment, yeah”.
Compared to the studio version, the Candidate section takes much longer to start stomping it’s feet. But once it gets going, it’s great. And the finale of Candidate is electrifying,
As I wrote in the notes for “Cracked Actor - Live ‘74”, the video footage is (apart from Earl Slick’s guitar solo) is from the wonderful 1974 Alan Yentob BBC documentary, Cracked Actor. The in-concert material it contains is really well filmed, as one would expect from the BBC. Unfortunately, however it contains no complete song. Therefore some imagination and technology was required.
As I began the job of trying to reconstruct the suite in it’s entirety, despite there only being about half of it featured on the “Cracked Actor” documentary, I quickly came to realize the brilliance of Yentob’s idea of using the scenes of Bowie in the limo, cruising the streets at night. Merely the footage of Bowie high-up, on a fairly distant stage scaffolding, is perhaps not that interesting. Therefore interspersing it with those limo / street scenes, that are so evocative of the feel and the lyrics, was a great move.
And so I just expanded on that idea. And as I worked, something occurred to me. There is I think a big similarly in the footage and the vibe of Yentob’s Sweet Thing sequence, to Martin Scorsese’s 1976 movie, Taxi Driver: A paranoid drug addict, driving around seedy looking neon-lit streets at night, distanced / aloof / alone. And furthermore, the jazz of Mike Garson and David Sanborn’s playing is similar to Bernard Herman’s score and Tom Scott’s sax playing on the Taxi Driver soundtrack.
Interestingly, Yentob’s Cracked Actor, predates Taxi Driver by at least a year and a half. Which leads one to wonder - was Scorcese influenced by Cracked Actor? After all, another famous underground movie director of the day, Nicolas Roeg saw Cracked Actor. We know that because he says that after watching it, he knew immediately that he had found his alien, to star in The Man Who Fell To Earth.
So anyway, I hope you will forgive me for indulging myself in making this video a kinda mini homage to Taxi Driver?
Thanks for watching, I hope you dig it!
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