Live Nassau Coliseum ‘76

With ’74 tour document David Live proving to be a critically-derided personality crisis and ’78’s Stage largely shrugged at for failing to reconcile his new sounds and his old material, it falls to this late-emerging curio to provide the best live-concert reckoning with David Bowie’s chameleonic tendencies in the mid ’70s. First released in 2010 as a deluxe Station to Station bonus add-on before earning its own release a year after Bowie’s passing, Live Nassau Coliseum ’76 is appealing enough just from providing some of the best concert renditions of Station to Station‘s material imaginable. Four of its five originals (with “Golden Years” a near-inexplicable setlist omission) are played with a free-flowing momentum and transformative intensity that sends 10,000 volts through the titular opener’s motorik churn, turns the disco-panic ultravamp “Stay” into an uncontrollable conflagration, finally approaches the redemption that the despairing prayers of “Word on a Wing” hinges on, and makes the reverse-Ringu surrealism of “TVC 15” sound even more jauntily bewildering by playing up the New Orleans R&B strain of its retrofuture sonics. But while his then-recent Young Americans material might’ve also sounded dynamite in this transitional space between plastic soul and Berlin Trilogy experimentation, the counterintuitive move to revisit Bowie’s supposedly discarded glam-rock breakthroughs turns out to be an even more inspired choice. The subtly re-tuned but still blood-pumping punk-adjacent versions of “Suffragette City,” “Diamond Dogs” and an especially iconoclastic boogie-warping jam-sesh in finale “The Jean Genie” show that while he might have shaken off some of the glitter, Bowie had little interest in fully discarding his past. He just figured, correctly, that he had a duty — and the imagination — to figure out how to make that recent past sound like the immediate future.