Iggy Pop and David Bowie: The Idiot Tour (March 21st- 23rd 1977)
This one undoubtedly takes the cake for me. This time period for Iggy and Bowie both were fucking flawless. Anyone who says otherwise needs to have something heavy and smelly glued to their face. They actually played three shows in three days, all at the Agora Ballroom. Iggy was heavily experimenting with a weirder tone than the Stooge's material under Bowie's musical wing, and Bowie was yet again reinventing himself musically in ways that paved the way for musicians all over the world. With Ricky Gardiner (who contributed to Bowie's Low album and Pop's Lust For Life album) and the Sales Brothers (who would later reunite with Bowie as his rhythm section for Tin Machine in 1989), these weirdos set off to make a whole new batch of noise. The songs had strange synth overtones as leads rather than screaming guitars, the vocals were lower range, and the drums made you want to fuck within minutes of hearing the grooves. This shit was good, real fucking good.
More interesting to me than who and what was played on this tour is that it was a once in a lifetime tour. Rare collaborations pulled off in a live situation is something worth remembering. In a perfect world, Bowie would do a few one off shows next year and play a few songs from this era.Sadly, the world we live in is anything but that.
- Novak