Cocaine Bowie on Soul Train! A legendary train-wreck of a performance. Bowie built up enough street cred with Young Americans and Station To Station to get booked on Soul Train, a show aimed at black audiences and generally featuring black artists. He didn’t exactly blow it (hahaha!) but he was twitchy, incoherent and had trouble with the lip-sync. In hindsight it’s shockingly obvious how strung out he was, but at the time I guess everything was chalked up to ‘just David Bowie being weird’. In this clip he’s actually quite sufficiently ambulatory, but I posted another one earlier which features the striking, tell-tale teeth grinding that’s familiar to anyone who’s ever been under the influence of stimulating chemicals of the illegal variety. Compare now with the total mastery and cool confidence of an 80′s performance. The cleaned-up Serious Moonlight Bowie blows (hahahaha!) his Thin White Duke self out of the water. As for the song, by the way, I doubt that it’s really Bowie’s last-ditch attempt to win back the love of his ex-wife Angela, despite what she claims. Though he does repeatedly address someone as ‘angel’, it’s probably a vague term of endearment and Angela is giving herself way too much credit, as usual. Given that he already wasn’t in love with her when they got married, and by the mid-seventies couldn’t abide being in the same room with her, he probably wasn’t spending time thinking up tunes to warm her heart with.
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