David Bowie The Subterraneans Live at Montreux 2002

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The eleventh and final track of 1977's "Low" performed live in 2002 at Montreux. Bowie actually meandering on the sax live though, vying with Gail Ann Dorsey's ethereal vocal contribution, is mesmerising, the cream pay-off for me. When Low was released in January 1977, the journalist Wesley Strick asked an RCA “operative” what he thought of its second side. “It’s Avant Garde. It’s ambitious. Frankly, I think it needs more work,” he said. How about the LP closer, “Subterraneans”? “Religious,” he sighed.
The four near-instrumentals on Low‘s B-side literally were soundtrack music — “Subterraneans” has its origins in the score Bowie had composed in 1975 for The Man Who Fell to Earth (though Bowie later said that the “reverse bass part” is the only piece of the track directly taken from the scrapped soundtrack) — and Bowie cast the four pieces as incidental music for a tour of an imaginary Eastern Europe. He had only seen Poland and East Germany through the windows of a train or in short day trips. He used Communist Europe as a screen on which he projected the isolate’s visions and paranoiac observations of Low‘s “manic” side; it was a map of deliberate misreading, whole countries colonized by the imagination.
So “Subterraneans,” according to Bowie’s schema, was about the people remaining in East Berlin after the Wall was built, “the faint jazz saxophones representing the memory of what it was.” From 1949 through August 1961, some three million Germans went into the West via Berlin: it wasn’t just the intelligentsia or the professionals who left, but farmers (fleeing collectivisation) and laborers. Nearly 16% of the entire population of East Germany had escaped before the Wall was built. Those who were left behind, who were trapped behind the Wall, were something of a preterit —souls who didn’t make the cut, people consigned to a ghost life behind the curtain.
“Subterraneans” is sombre, delusive, beautiful; it’s a love song for the abandoned. Its title comes from Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novella The Subterraneans, whose title phrase was coined by Allen Ginsberg: “They are hip without being slick, they are intellectual as hell…they are very quiet, they are very Christlike.” Something like Bowie’s old Tibetans, his wild-eyed boys and supermen. Bowie ends his most depressive record with an attempted, broken reconciliation with the figures of his imagination.
It's fucking stunning.