David Bowie – Cracked Actor – Live at the Universal Amphitheatre, L.A. 09/05/1974

A Nacho production.

Cracked Actor was originally a song from David Bowie’s 1973 album, Aladdin Sane. It was subsequently performed on the 1974 Diamond Dogs tour, and was included on the David Live album.

Like most of the older material played on that tour, Cracked Actor was rearranged to suit Bowie’s new “Soul Man” direction. Some of the rearrangements fared better than others, in my opinion. In the case of Cracked Actor, I love what they did with it, especially when the performance aspect is seen.

“For the 1974 Diamond Dogs tour Bowie removed “Cracked Actor” from its back-room origins and staged it entirely within an actor’s fevered mind: he wore a cape and sunglasses and sang to a skull in his hand, a la Hamlet, then French-kissed the skull… A curse on Los Angeles, “Cracked Actor” would rebound on Bowie: it became the title of a 1974 documentary chronicling Bowie living in LA at his lowest state, reduced to a jittery husk of a human being.”
– Chris O’Leary, from his superb blog, Pushing Ahead of the Dame https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/?s=Cracked+actor

I have been asked many times to create some videos for Bowie’s ’74 tour. There is very little material available, but I have gathered all the footage that’s out there, I think. Among the Super 8 stuff there are some possibilities, tho’ a lot of labor will be required.

In the meantime, I’ve taken the obvious easy road of first working on the footage from the 1974 Alan Yentob wonderful BBC documentary, Cracked Actor. The in concert material it contains is really well filmed, as one would expect from the BBC. Unfortunately, however it contains no complete song.

Therefore some imagination and technology is required. Here, I am more or less retreading what others have tried before, but not at this quality.

I do hope, those lovely people at the BBC will look kindly on this video, and my humble efforts with their fine material, and allow this video to be published here on my YouTube channel.
Hope they, and you dig it!

Do me an’ yerself a favor – watch it in HD with the sound UP LOUD!

Nacho, 10th July 2016.