#SERIOUS MOONLIGHT HOW TO#
#SERIOUS MOONLIGHT FULL#

This happened less that one week before the tour's opening night, and as a result, Vaughan's replacement Earl Slick spent the next few days in his hotel room, learning all of the 31 songs on the setlist. Bassist Carmine Rojas called Vaughan's release 'one of the most heartbreaking moments he had ever witnessed on the road, Stevie left standing on the sidewalk with his bags surrounding him.' Bowie, was who in Europe promoting the album and tour when the disagreement arose, did not have a say in Vaughan's departure.

#SERIOUS MOONLIGHT HOW TO#

Given that Bowie himself had moved to Berlin in the late 1970s to try and kick his own cocaine habit, Bowie and Vaughan's management failed to come to an agreement on how to temper the situation, and in the end Vaughan pulled out of the tour. Rehearsals moved to Las Calinas, Texas in April, where Bowie and Vaughan joined the band, but Vaughan showed up with a cocaine habit, a hard-partying wife and an entourage looking for easy access to drugs. Early rehearsals were held in Manhattan without Vaughan and Bowie, and were overseen by Alomar. Stevie Ray Vaughan, who had contributed guitar solos to six of the songs on Let's Dance and who was up and coming, was to join the tour, also to please the American audience. Tour rehearsals and musicians Įarl Slick November 1983 during the Serious Moonlight Tourīowie used the musicians he'd newly collaborated with on Let's Dance, along with some longer standing collaborators, including Carlos Alomar who was the designated tour band leader. Lighting the set were 40 Vari-Lites, some of which were set horizontally across the stage, which allowed them to 'create set-piece landscapes' for certain songs. The weight of one set (of which there were two) was 32 tons. The Serious Moonlight stage was deliberately given a vertical feeling (especially due to the columns) and an overall design that Bowie called a combination of classicism and modernism. Ravitz had designed the set for Bowie's 1974 Diamond Dogs Tour, and would work on Bowie's next touring set as well, the 1987 Glass Spider Tour. The design proposed by Boshier was an 'extravagant design reminiscent of the Diamond Dogs set with multiple platforms and levels, rotating prisms revealing different backdrop designs on each facet, and a gigantic cartoon figure of Bowie with a guitar', but this was rejected as too expensive, so instead Bowie worked with Mark Ravitz to come up with what was the final design, which included four giant columns (affectionately referred to as 'condoms') as well as a large moon and a giant hand. Initially, Bowie worked with Derek Boshier to design the stage for the tour, as Boshier had designed the artwork for the Let's Dance album itself.

#SERIOUS MOONLIGHT FULL#

His son Duncan Jones pointed out years later that 'Each round is approximately the same length as a song, so if you can get your cardio up enough to do a full 12 or so rounds, you’re ready to go!' Set design īowie used boxing (of which he was a fan) to get in shape for the tour.

The tour sold out at every venue it played. The largest crowd for a single show during the tour was 80,000 in Auckland, New Zealand, while the largest crowd for a festival date was 300,000 at the US 83 Festival in California. However, the success of Let's Dance caused unexpectedly high demand for tickets: there were 250,000 requests for 44,000 tickets at one show, for example, and as a result the tour was changed to instead play in a variety of larger outdoor and festival-style venues. This tour, designed to support Bowie's latest album Let's Dance, was initially designed to be a smaller tour, playing to the likes of sub-10,000-seat indoor venues around the world, similar to previous Bowie tours. Consequently, the Serious Moonlight Tour was Bowie's first tour in 5 years. However, the murder of John Lennon in December 1980 deeply affected Bowie and as a result, he cancelled his tour plans and withdrew to his home in Switzerland where he became a recluse and continued working. In 1980, David Bowie had released his album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), at the time expecting to support the album with a tour.

Serious moonlight