Bowie has just plain persevered so long that all the praise and all the bitching about him contantly shedding his old skin for a new one must seem by now like the distant buzz of locusts out in that bleak desert where they filmed “The Man Who Fell to Earth”.

The litany is distressingly time-consuming. He was born David Jones but had to change the name because a Monkee was using it. He doesn’t see things the way you and I do, not because his eyes are two different colours (they’re not), but because a schoolmate punched him in the peepers and one pupil stayed permanently dilated, throwing his depth perception out of whack.

He played lots of blues and all kinds of rock and was for awhile the Man Who Sold the World, wondering how he might become Bob Dylan or possibly Andy Warhol. The thunder from the Velvet Underground led him elsewhere and, with Lou Reed and Iggy Pop still puzzling over their next steps, David made glam all his own and became, by way of Arthur C Clarke, the androgynous Ziggy Stardust, with a band full of Spiders from Mars.

His wife Angie may or not have been a real wife, David may or may not have been bisexual, and his son Zowie was actually named Bertram or something. The makeup began to fray, so he shifted his focus to another whim, Orwell’s “1984″, and became a diamond dog in an gloomy alley of rats the size of cats.

Then he became a Young American, then a Thin White Duke, Philly Fame with Lennon, then a Hero riding a dolphin and then a Scary Monster, finally admitting that Major Tom had been a junkie all along. Let’s Dance, David said, and we did the disco. Then he wanted to sing rum-te-tum-tum with Bing Crosby, and it killed the old cardiganned crooner.

Bowie was the Elephant Man, choking on his own ivory. He searched in the Serious Moonlight and found another Spider, this one made of Glass. Then with Soupy Sales’ sons he invented a Tin Machine. He had The Hunger, he said Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, he was an Absolute Beginner lost in the Labyrinth. He was Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ and almost the Nicholson Joker in Batman. He was Warhol at last for Basquiat. He changed other boys’ lives besides mine in Mr Rice’s Secret. He was just silly in Zoolander.

Above all, best of all, he was Major Tom.

In those days rock stars always started their shows with a thunderous roar, all guns blasting to seize the stage. At the O’Keefe Centre, Bowie’s concert began with the strumming of an unseen acoustic guitar, two familiar chords. The roar came from the audience when he appeared, not onstage but high above it, sitting calmly in a sleekly moulded chair held aloft by a hydraulic crane. The lighting made sure that he seemed to be floating freely. The illusion was almost perfect. Somewhere someone was counting down. Ten … nine … eight …

“This is Ground Control to Major Tom,” David sang into a telephone, “you’ve really made the grade, and the papers want to know whose shirts you wear, now it’s time to leave the capsule — if you dare!”

The crowd was in orbit with him, goosebumps on every arm. This was a new sensation in concert-going. The stars looked very different today.

“For he-e-e-ere am I sitting in a tin can, far above the world, Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do.”

In minutes we’d gone a hundred thousand miles, Bowie’s spaceship knowing which way to go, but something had to go wrong. The music built to a crescendo and he bid his wife farewell.

“Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you — he-e-e-re am I …”

“Space Oddity” was by then already a very old song. Bowie had long since fallen to Earth and now, post-Apocalypse, most of the Spiders scurried off, he was lost in the urban decay of Hunger City, scrounging for escape while children scrounged for scraps of food — “We’ll buy some drugs and watch a band, and jump in the river holding hands.”

“And, in the death,” burbled the hair-raising opening narrative against a pulsing growl of keyboards, “as the last few corpses lay rotting on the slimy thoroughfare, the shutters lifted in inches, in temperance buildings high on Poacher’s Hill, and red mutant eyes gaze down on Hunger City. No more big wheels!

“Fleas the size of rats sucked on rats the size of cats, and 10,000 peoploids split into small tribes, coveting the highest of the sterile skyscrapers like packs of dogs assaulting the glass fronts of Love Me Avenue, ripping and rewrapping mink and shiny silver fox, now leg warmers. Family badge of sapphire and cracked emerald. Any day now — the Year of the Diamond Dogs!”

Bowie’s vision, played out on an elaborate, evocative, evolving set, was Broadway with the lights short-circuited by mutant greed and pestilence without preference. “This aint rock’n'roll,” he cried. “This is genocide!”

As they pulled you out of the oxygen tent
You asked for the latest party
With your silicone hump and your 10-inch stump
Dressed like a priest you was
Todd Browning’s freak you was.

In the Year of the Scavenger, Season of the Bitch
Sashay on the boardwalk, scurry to the ditch
Just another future song, lonely little Keats
There’s gonna be sorrow, try and wake up tomorrow

Who-who-who
Call them the Diamond Dogs
Who-who-who
Call them the Diamond Dogs
Bow-wow, woof woof, bow-wow, wow
Call them the Diamond Dogs

Tony Basil choreographed the dance routines, keyboard player and oboist Michael Kamen led a suitably twisted band, with pianist Mike Garson from the Spiders, Herbie Flowers on bass, Tony Newman drumming, the fabulous Earl Slick on writhing guitar, David Sanborn and Richard Grando on sax and other wind instruments, Pablo Rosario on percussion and Warren Peace and Gui Andrisano singing backup.

Bowie tied knots in the tails of every tune, raced about and rolled around, pantomimed and snarled and laughed, shadow-boxed in boxing gloves for the pugnacious “Rebel, Rebel” and lurked in trenchcoat shadows for the darkly hopeful “When You Rock and Roll with Me”. This was grand theatre: “Sweet Thing” lilted to piano, “1984″ was daringly anthemic, melding flawlessly into “Candidate”, then rising again in reprise.

Toronto was only the third stop on the tour, after Montreal and Ottawa, and Bowie dusted the rust off a few more oldies for us, “Time”, “The Width of a Circle” and an acoustic version of “Drive-In Saturday”.

It was a triumphant performance, thankfully captured on vinyl with “David Live” and on film in Alan Yentob’s “Cracked Actor”, but you know how it is — you had to see the diamond dogs with your own eyes to believe they were real.

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Bowie had already been frightfully skinny when he pranced among the fleas and rats, so how he came up with the Thin White Duke persona after that I have no idea, other than the fact that David was hiccuping down the thin white lines as quickly as they could be aligned with Angie’s razor blade.

The “Station to Station” tour pulled into Maple Leaf Gardens in February 1976, Bowie shovelling in the coke to keep the locomotive going and an amazingly tight band — guitarists Carlos Alomar and Stacey Heydon, bassist George Murray, Tony Kaye on keyboards, Dennis Davis on percussion and drummer Dennis Davis — holding the caboose to the track.

For me, Bowie’s always a terrific performer, and he did play “Suffragette City”, Lou Reed’s “Waiting for the Man”, “Five Years” and even “Diamond Dogs”, and when he added “The Jean Genie” to the encore it was the first time he’d done the song on the tour. But this particular visit to Toronto was all about “Golden Years” and all that cheerful “Young Americans” crap, and that was just too disco for me.

When next we met our hero, he was lurking behind the keyboards at Iggy Pop’s show at Seneca College in March ‘77. This was the altruistic Bowie, providing not just ivorywork but also solid moral support to an old pal who’d Stooged out once too often and needed directions to find his way back to the spotlight. There were no lights on David at all during the show; you heard his backing vocals occasionally, but that was all. The Igmund rediscovered his balance and after that there was no stopping him. Job well done.

And by the time of our last get-together, in August ‘87 at the CNE Stadium, Bowie had piled up another embankment of great albums, not least of which were “Heroes” and “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)”. Unfortunately he’d also recorded “Let’s Dance”, so it was going to be a mixed bag, something like the bizarre throw-together he was wearing at the time.

There were indeed dancers again, and Carlos Alomar, and this time Peter Frampton had been signed up to boost the appeal quotient. Carmine Rojas handled bass, Alan Childs the drums, Erdal Kizilcay the keyboards, trumpet and violin and Richard Cottle more keyboards and a saxophone. This show, part of the Glass Spider tour, was wonderfully entertaining — we even got “All the Madmen”, “The Jean Genie” mixed in with “Satisfaction” and, shock of shocks, “All the Young Dudes”. But it was no triumph. I didn’t like to dance; I liked decadance.

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* See #8: The Tubes
* See #9: Pink Floyd
* See #10: Bob Marley
* See #11: Bob Dylan
* See #12: Heatwave
* See #13: Watkins Glen
* See #14: The Who
* See #15: Crosby, Stills Nash & Young
* COMING SOON: The Compleat Dorseyland Concert Directory