This CD was unavailable for many years. It is superbly remastered with fantastic classics, the best being "Station To Station", "Heroes" (a rousing guitar piece) and all the "Ziggy Stardust" classics. If you've ever wondered how a slow song like "Warsawza" could have ever been good in concert - just take a listen. It's hypnotizing! This double CD used to be tough to find, but this new remastered editon is fantastic - it is a welcome addition to Bowie's 'live' material. The addition of "Stay" and "Be My Wife" are more than welcome!

I purchased both "David Live" and "Stage" on the date of their rerelease. The remastering of "Stage" points out why "David Live" was such a disappointment, and why my value judgement of "Stage" is two stars higher than "David Live."

Vocally, on "Stage," David is in terrific form. His singing sounds effortless and unaffected, even when he bangs his way through Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's "Alabama Song." The songs include Bowie at one of his artistic peak periods, with the albums "Low" "Heroes" and "Station to Station" informing the language of his music at the time. He also had two incredible guitarists on this tour, Carlos Alomar and Adrian Belew. Roger Powell (on loan from Todd Rundgren and Utopia) put the life into Bowie/Eno synthesizer epics like "Art Decade" and "Warszawa." Engineer Tony Visconti - as he states in the new disc's liner notes - approached recording "Stage" as if he were miking a studio album. And to that end, the horrific technical glitches that so mar "David Live" are completely absent from this album.

An additional benefit is the restoration of the concert's running order to include to leftover songs "Stay" and "Be My Wife." These repairs makes "Stage" flow more organically than the original album did. When you think of Bowie in concert from the late seventies, this is probably what you would have imagined. From the ominous opening of "Warszawa" to the sing-along catchiness at the end of "TVC-15," "Stage" is prime David Bowie. Highly recommended, and infinitely better than "David Live."

As anyone familiar with the trajectory of Bowie's career would know, the threshold he crossed with Fripp and Eno and the trio of records they did took Bowie out of, not just his addictions, but his pop-star status and placed him squarely in the serious artist with something to say. This tour flexed those new muscles with such conviction that it is almost hard to believe that the Bowie on LIVE AT THE TOWER is the same guy here.
This is about when I stopped dismissing him as a chic-star. His music had something more to it besides the glamour. The star of this recording, however, is not Bowie, Belew, Alomar or any of the other superlative musicians. It is Tony Visconti. His engineering and production skills advanced the art of the LIVE recording with this disc as it had not ever been advanced before. Quite a statement when you review the material, the musicians and the performance. But make no mistake about it, the effort made to record this was of the highest calibre and Visconti delivered a Live recording for the ages.
Visconti wrote the liner notes for this re-master and they are informative, to say the least. Narrowly escaping the money-grubbing clutches of Madison Square Garden, the shows were recorded eslewhere and Visconti captured the audience as brilliantly as he did Bowie. This set absolutely crackles with surprise and energy. Visconti remains one of Bowie's trusted producers and with good reason. He knows what David is looking for and he finds it. Enjoy this remaster. It is positively terrific and it should merit Visconti's inclusion in any producer and engineer's Hall of Fame.

Aside from the fact that this tour recording captured Bowie at his finest "stage" of his career (with his best touring band by far), it also should serve as a blueprint for further re-releases from singers or bands of the era.

The re-mastering is extraoridnary and blows the old RCA vinly and even the Ryco reissue out of the water. Restoring the original running order of the songs is also a bonus as is the two tracks never before released......Dennis Davis was a monster drummer and Adrian Belew was so far advanced for his time it's scary-wonderful to listen to his playing now.

In short this is like a time capsule which allows you to go back in time to 1978 and listen to one of the worlds most influential artists at arguably his creative peak backed by one awesome and compelling band......all in state of the art digital sound circa 2005.

I can't say enough about this album. Simply the best.

The thing that normally makes Bowie live albums (both major label releases and bootlegs) so worthwhile is Bowie's experimentation with new arrangements and re-interpretations. Of all of the live Bowie recordings, Stage stays the closest to the original studio versions, and yet is a real gem.

There are exceptions, like "What in the World" which begins at an odd, leisurely tempo then suddenly bursts into a high energy head-long rush that reveals the brilliance of both halves.

"Beauty and the Beast" and "Blackout" both benefit greatly from the energy of live performance. I much prefer these to the studio versions. "Stay" allows Adrian Belew to stretch out on guitar and deliver a solo that matches his best work with Talking Heads and King Crimson. "Station to Station" is very satisfying, though the arrangement differs little from the original.

The album does have its low points. Despite a great performance by the band, Bowie's toss-off vocal on "Heroes" makes this the poorest version I've heard. And though Bowie turns in a brilliant job on "Ziggy Stardust" the keyboard heavy backing weakens it. "TVC15" comes off a little rushed. And I could do without "Alabama Song" altogether.

But the live versions of Bowie's envelope pushing atmospheric and ambient pieces are brilliant. The Ziggy Stardust pieces (with the exception of the title track) are better than the live versions with the original Spiders from Mars.

Bowie's live albums go way beyond merely a document of the live event; they are valid albums in their own right. The vinyl version took advantage of this by making each side into an short coherent album (combining all of the instrumentals together on one side for example), rather than reproducing the running order of the show. In the CD form, it's easy to rearrange this album into a more satisfying sequence, or simply let it play as a concert.

Recorded right in the middle of his most adventurous period (the mid point between "Low"/"Heroes" and "Lodger"/"Scary Monsters") Bowie shows off both his artistic talent and his musicianship on Stage. It makes a nice counter point to Bowie the performer on David Live. And the guitar/synth dominated band (featuring Belew and Carlos Alomar) on Stage stands as a brilliant contrast to the keyboard and sax heavy David Live line-up.