Gail Ann Dorsey, David Bowie and the 1995 Outside Tour
First, news about the near-term future—Gail Ann Dorsey is going to be my guest for my weekly interview this upcoming Saturday. Wooooooo! Bowie’s long-time collaborator has a new album, The Appearance of Life, in the works. We talk about that, and of course her work with Bowie…
…which started 31 years ago when she joined the Outside tour. I saw the show when it came to the Pittsburgh area, exactly 31 years ago yesterday, two days before 1. Outside was released. That’s a photo of my ticket above—I saved it all these years. If it seems like there’s a film over it, that’s because it has been in a photo book all these years and I’m afraid to try to take it out. Photo books, do you remember those? Not the kind from Shutterstock that prints the photos on the page, but one in which you put photos in the book? That’s what we did back in 1995.
What we didn’t do is take pictures with our phones at concerts. Apparently, it didn’t occur to me to bring a camera to the concert at all. Or any concert—I was looking through that photo book and found tickets to some great shows I was seeing then (and also some not-so-great shows), but no photos. In fact, I couldn’t find a good photo online of Bowie with Gail on stage during the entire tour. I found some photos and some videos, but none that I thought were both good and really showed them together. There are plenty from ensuing tours, and I’m sure some exist, but I couldn’t find a good one from ‘95.
I could, however, find this YouTube post of what appears to be a concert video from the tour:
The world has changed. The democratization of documentation hadn’t quite taken hold, but the future has been able to reach back and cannibalize the media of the time. If you didn’t get to see one of these concerts, like, for instance, if you were not alive yet, this gets you closer to the concert than you could have gotten in 1995 if you had been around but simply hadn’t gone. Because there was no YouTube.
Anyway, one of the reasons that I’m guessing there aren’t any good photos around of Bowie and Gail is because she wasn’t the news. The news was Nine Inch Nails. Nine Inch Nails opened for Bowie, and their set bled into his. Bowie joined and his band replaced them gradually, so the first five songs from the set featured Bowie with either the full band or elements of it.
I remember being astonished that a significant number of younger fans simply left when Nine Inch Nails was fully replaced. Trent Reznor and his band were the hot commodities, while, I guess, Bowie was old hat. Plus, Bowie wasn’t even performing his greatest hits. The album he was promoting, 1. Outside, was two days away from being released. “The problem,” wrote critic Tony Norman for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “was, with the exception of “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” few were familiar with the songs.”
Those who left were a step or more behind Bowie. The “old hat” they were abandoning might have been the Never Let Me Down or even greatest hits Bowie of years back. They were leaving an artist performing songs he had not released yet— in other words, he was too new for them!
As a side note, while the absence of yet-to-be-invented phones that take digital pictures made for fewer online images from these concerts, the writing of local newspaper music critics from the time apparently can be found. Such critics are becoming rarer and rarer. 31 years from now, plenty of photos from even obscure concerts will be easy to come by, but not so much text from a professionally written newspaper review. Actually, just to show what that was like, I’m going to include the text of that full review below.
And if you read it, you might notice that it doesn’t mention Gail Ann Dorsey. Why should it? She was new to Bowie’s band—she didn’t perform on the album. And apparently she didn’t do in Pittsburgh what would soon make her an unforgettable collaborator—she didn’t sing the Freddie Mercury part in “Under Pressure,” which, contrary to my memory, they didn’t perform that night.
Memory is a funny thing. I remember them doing the song together at this concert. I’ve seen them since, and I am probably conflating memories. Or I’m thinking of video clips of them doing it together. Anyway, once you see it, it is impossible to forget Gail Ann Dorsey.
Gail was the bassist, sure. And obviously she’s great at that, but her voice is strong enough to take the Freddie farkin’ Mercury part in “Under Pressure!” Later, she’d do some other amazing things with her voice, for instance on songs like “Dead Man Walking” (1997) and “If You Can See Me” (2013), which I ask her about in the interview. And, once again, thanks to the magic of YouTube, here’s a clip of her singing “Outside” some time during that 1995 tour, with Bowie singing backup and taking an on-stage smoke break:
But back to memory—I don’t remember thinking that the new songs detracted from the concert. I can’t place myself back and access the feeling I had of hearing them, presumably for the first time. 1. Outside would go on to become one of my favorite Bowie albums. I am pretty sure that it is in the top five of Bowie albums I have listened to over the past three decades, in terms of how many times I’ve listened to it. In 2026, it is hard to remember what it was like not knowing these songs.
I do remember liking the hard edge which was established out of the gate by Bowie performing with Nine Inch Nails. I remember being elated by the concert. By 1995, I had seen Bowie when he took the Glass Spider tour to Toronto in 1987, and the Sound and Vision tour to Hartford, Connecticut in 1990. So, it had been a while since I saw him live, and as much as I liked those two previous concerts, I had the distinct feeling that this one was more forward-facing.
So, now that I’m more than 20 years past my last Bowie concert, where does Pittsburgh ‘95 rank? I think of it as my second favorite, and have thought of it this way for a while. Glass Spider gets a bad rap—it was actually a great concert and an even greater spectacle. I likely wouldn’t be writing this blog post and talking to Gail Ann Dorsey but for that concert. I have good memories of Sound and Vision, (though today I think that greatest hits tour actually hurt Bowie’s career in the sense that it established him as a legacy act, when he really wasn’t). My very favorite concert was still years off—Bowie at Shea’s Performing Arts Center in Buffalo, 2004. But I think of Pittsburgh as my second favorite.
It would also begin what I think of today as the period of my Bowie. From that point on, I could afford tickets to shows and would anticipate new albums and listen to them over and over until the next one was released. He was putting them out at a pace of one every other year by the mid-90s, so once I felt like there was a groove, I was always at a point in a cycle of anticipation, payoff, stabilization, and then anticipation again for the cycle to begin again.
Gail Ann Dorsey was a central figure in this cycle. She and Reeves Gabrels were two of Bowie’s key collaborators during most of this period, but as I think about it, I saw Bowie live mostly after Reeves had left. But even when he was there, despite his essential and distinct guitar-playing, Bowie had the most on-stage chemistry with Gail. She cut a distinct figure, sometimes wearing a horse-tail and devil horns. She apparently wasn’t noteworthy enough to mention in the 1995 review, but in time she could not not be acknowledged. She would become a key part of the Bowie show, and a key part of my personal experiencing of David Bowie.
I’m lucky in many respects, including to have been able to see Bowie several times live. But today, I’m lucky that I live about an hour away from Gail, and have the opportunity to see her perform somewhat frequently. Oddly (or not), several of Bowie’s former collaborators live, like me, near the Hudson River (I’m expecting to see Donny McCaslin and then Gerry Leonard in concert in the coming days). I’ve written before about an incredible music and politics festival I attended this summer in Woodstock, Democracy Rocks 2, where Gail performed solo and also joined Natalie Merchant and Kate Pierson on stage. And I’m expecting to see her twice more in the next six months. Anyway, as I have said of others, one thing I can be grateful to Bowie for is introducing me to musicians like Gail Ann Dorsey, who keep on making great music.
That, and for some great memories.
Here’s one more video from 1995, of Bowie and his band on David Letterman, just a few days after the Pittsburgh concert:
And here’s the setlist from the concert. Note that the first five songs were performed with Nine Inch Nails. I mean, in retrospect, can you imagine a better setlist than this?
1. “Subterraneans”
2. “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)”
3. “Reptile”
4. “Hallo Spaceboy”
5. “Hurt”
6. “The Hearts Filthy Lesson”
7. “I’m Deranged”
8. “I Have Not Been to Oxford Town”
9. “We Prick You”
10. “The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (As Beauty)”
11. “A Small Plot of Land”
12. “Breaking Glass”
13. “Andy Warhol”
14. “The Man Who Sold the World”
15. “Outside”
16. “Jump They Say”
17. “Nite Flights”
18. “Joe the Lion”
And, finally, here is the entire review from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
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Bowie finds Nine Inch Nails a tough act to follow
By Tony Norman
Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Is there really such a thing as negative charisma? Rock veteran David Bowie and Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor certainly exuded something that could be called a terrible beauty at Coca-Cola Star Lake Amphitheatre Saturday night.
For the 13,022 people who turned out in the cold, Nine Inch Nails appeared to be the main attraction. The industrial band has been riding a wave of popularity ever since its hypnotic performance at Woodstock ’94.
Nine Inch Nails started the evening with grinding and incomprehensibly noisy versions of “Terrible Lies” and “March of the Pigs,” before showing some emotional range on a relatively thoughtful remix of “Eraser.”
The tail end of NIN’s set segued, without a break, neatly into Bowie’s, the bulk of which concentrated on material from his new album “Outside.”
Bowie, dressed in a white snake skin jacket that contrasted almost violently with NIN’s menacing black attire, strutted coolly on to stage to join Reznor for vocal duets on “Subterraneans,” “Scary Monsters,” “Reptile” and “Spaceboy.”
Ever the consummate showman, Bowie displayed a mastery and comfort with his new material that was truly inspiring. The problem was, with the exception of “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” few were familiar with the songs.
At times, the reception was positively tepid, but Bowie marched on, supremely confident in the worth of his highly conceptual and often grooveless material.
The audience’s mood picked up when Bowie performed “The Man Who Sold the World,” a song last covered by Nirvana.
Bowie turned in a highly theatrical performance of “Andy Warhol,” a gesture that may have been lost on the hometown that produced the artist.
Still new songs like “Small Plot of Land,” “Voyeur,” “Oxford Town” and “Outside” worked well live. Bowie was in good form even though less than generous with his sizeable back catalog.
There was very little evidence of mass defections after NIN left the stage as reported in reviews of the show in other cities, but the energy level did noticeably decrease.