For Your Weekend Listening Pleasure: David Bowie and Stevie Ray and the Tour That Wasn't

By Robert Wilonsky Fri., Jun. 25 2010 at 6:15 PM

Categories: Music

I had intended to provide as this week's aural audio the entirety of Beck's redo of INXS's Kick, which features on guitar and vocals none other than Lake Highlands' own Annie Clark, or St. Vincent. (The formerly Dallas Observer Music Awards-nominated St. Vincent, Pete asks me to remind you as I direct your attention to the just-announced DOMA Showcase line-up.) Then I changed my mind during my the drive in to work, when my antiquated iPod, on shuffle, stopped on "Rebel, Rebel" -- David Bowie on vocals, natch, Stevie Ray Vaughan on guitar. Recorded in a Las Colinas studio on April 27, 1983. There are 30 more songs where that came from.

Said Bowie hisself in 2004, this collection of rehearsals, taken from a soundboard, is "a gem for those that can find it." It's never been all that hard to locate. It comes and goes. Last I saw it was in '07, when I recounted the tale of the tour that wasn't: "Serious Moonlight" in support of Let's Dance, for which the Oak Cliff native was to play lead guitar behind the Thin White Duke. Only, Bowie wanted Stevie Ray to quit Double Trouble, then on the verge of its coming-out after years in the trenches. Fat chance: "I'm sorry, I've worked for that a long time," SRV told an interviewer in '85. "Fame and this big tour is really not that important."

It's quite the odds-and-sods set list -- everything from the familiar ("Life on Mars," "Heroes," "Fashion," "Young Americans") to the soon-to-be-pop-hit ("China Girl," "Let's Dance," "Modern Love") to the obscure and even the unexpected Who and Velvet Underground covers. The version to which I direct your attention this evening is the full set -- all 31 tracks, 12 more than when last I stumbled across this gem.

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