David Bowie, who died Sunday at 69 after a battle with cancer, never really had much of a connection to DC like he did with, say Berlin. But local Bowie fans, who don’t feel like sitting in freezing cold Meridian Hill Park on Monday night to listen to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, can still celebrate his legacy with video footage from two of the singer’s performances at the Capital Centre from the 1970s and ’80s.
The first clip, taken from the third leg of the Diamond Dogs Tour in 1974, features three song snippets: “John, I’m Only Dancing” and “Suffragette City” from Ziggy Stardust, as well as “Can You Hear Me” from the then-unreleased Young Americans. The concert showcases one of the more interesting transitional phases in Bowie’s career—at this point the glam years had been replaced by an interest in soul and R&B, but simultaneously burgeoning was Bowie’s cocaine-loving, avant-garde persona “The Thin White Duke.”
The second video—a full concert from 1987—shows Bowie in greatest-hits mode, performing a career-spanning set that included early rock cuts (“Rebel Rebel,” “All the Madmen”) and later new-wave hits (“Let’s Dance,” “Blue Jean”). Still on display, though, are the theatrics that color his 1974 performance.
