The Man Who Sold (Out) the World

Try as one might, it was hard to find a flaw in David Bowie's performance at the Orpheum on Tuesday night. Augmented by a first-rate sound and lighting system, a high-spirited Bowie pulled off an exciting and inspired twohour performance.

Taking the audience nearly by surprise, Bowie, looking about 20 years younger than he ought to, ran out suddenly on stage accompanied solely by an acoustic guitar around his neck. He launched into an old chestnut, "Quicksand," and as the audience roared their approval, the other musicians took the stage and entered the song on cue. Throughout the evening, Bowie drew largely on his impressive and extensive back catalog, and the crowd responded enthusiastically to new treatments of such classics as "The Man Who Sold the World," "Fashion" and "Under Pressure." Not until the sixth song did Bowie play a selection from his latest album, Earthling. Although that song-along with several recent works-did not quite stand up to the best of his more time tested tunes, Bowie's energy and enthusiastic stage theatrics more than made up for any deficiency in his songs.

In fact, Bowie seemed in particularly high spirits throughout the show and his attitude proved infectious. Several times he paused between songs to banter and joke with the audience, at one point asking the thronging masses to give all their names at once. As soon as the din died down, he responded: "Well, I think I got most of them." Stalwart, silent pianist Mike Garson was introduced as being "134 years old."

Several times, Bowie played saxophone, and at one point he threw a pair of enormous balloons designed to look like eyeballs into the crowd. A cover of an old Chicago blues standard, "Baby What You Want Me To Do," segued seamlessly into Bowie's own "Jean Genie." Stone-faced, kilt-wearing guitarist Reeves Gabrels provided perhaps the biggest laughs of the night when, in the middle of a particularly incendiary version of the faux-disco rocker "Stay," he reached over to the nearby Bowie and casually licked his ear. The elegant, artistic stage design also proved interesting-a set of three giant eggs at times served as warped projection screens for videos of faces and flashing colors. The drapes behind the scene doubled as backdrops for clips ranging in content from run-of-the-mill computer graphics to S & M.

Bowie was aided tremendously by the sheer skill of his backing musicians. The band-in Bowie's opinion, his best band in over two decades-has now been playing long enough together to develop a real sense of coherence and musical unity. Particular highlights included Mike Garson's short, jazz-inflected keyboard solos, and the startling firepower of Reeves Gabrels' guitar.

In the middle of an extended, five-song encore, Bowie played "Dead Man Walking" off his latest album. During the course of a brilliant two hours at the Orpheum, David Bowie proved he was anything but that.