Pitchfork

David Bowie is not a man one would expect to revel in the accidental. It is as much of a cliché to divine cold strategy in his every move as it is to pretend that strategy didn't exist for, say, Janis Joplin. For those preferring to see Bowie as a contortionist auto-Svengali, the main revelation of the reissued live albums David Live and Stage will be how unafraid of imperfections he could be. These panoramic snapshots of 1970s Bowie (David Live came out in 1974, with Stage following mere four years later) mostly sound-- surprise-- like a good rock band at work, not a collection of virtuoso day laborers supplicating at the feet of the Artiste.

For one thing, the singing remains gloriously unsweetened, not by studio overdubs for the original release nor by digital trickery-- save a spit polish of the highs and fattening of the lows-- this time. Bowie's is not exactly a golden throat, but by the mid-70s he could will his untrained voice into a soulful squeal, a come-hither lounge croon, and so on; he misses some notes but never the dramatic pitch of the line. He also used to be one of those singers who need half a set to get entirely comfortable on stage, and, as a result, Disc Two of both David Live and Stage is the stronger one by far. If by the beginning of each concert, Bowie simply performs the songs, by the end he is twisting them into entirely new creatures. David Live contains arguably the all-time greatest display of Bowie's voice as he lets loose on an r&b version of "Rock'n'Roll Suicide", festooned with James Brownian stops, croaks, pregnant pauses, and beat-chasing rephrasings, as well as a completely sudden detonation of a very, very high falsetto.

Both albums start, predictably, with some selections from albums Bowie was promoting at the time-- Diamond Dogs and Heroes, respectively, before launching into a great big chunk of Ziggy Stardust. Interestingly enough, there are no overlaps here (name another '70s rock act that produced two 22-song concert sets in four years without repeating a single number), but an almost-complete live version of Ziggy can be put together by combining the two, if desired. In the battle of the openers, Stage wins-- the damp gloom of "Warszawa" easily trumps the glam doom of "1984".

David Live is a more genial album, as its title indicates. It's loaded with Diamond Dogs material-- nobody's favorite Bowie album-- but works hard to ingratiate itself: there's "Space Oddity", "Changes", "Jean Genie", "All The Young Dudes". What a difference four years and a move to Berlin make: David of Stage doesn't appear to be the least bit concerned with what you'll think of it, or him. Recorded between Low and Lodger-- in the odd period that found the singer at his gauntest and most ashen-faced, listlessly flirting with Aryan imagery and ignoring the verse-chorus song form-- Stage is a challenging and idiosyncratic set. Some of the risks don't quite pay off: The cover of "Alabama Song" is just a bad idea through and through, its original Weillness matted with Jim Morrisson's greasy fingerprints. And some do-- the colossal trifecta of Station To Station's eponymous track, "Stay" and "TVC 15" comprise a powerful (and punishing) 20-minute concert-closing gambit. It's just like Bowie, of course, to make two mutually exclusive modes of engaging the arena-- as a party palace and as a horror-movie science lab-- fit together in a remarkably cohesive whole.

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