Tara Key of underground rockers Antietam told us about her Bowie experience...
Tara Key: I was and always will be a Bowie freak. In the Year of the Diamond Dogs, summer, 1974, I was living in N.Y.C., attending art school and on my own for the first time at age 16. Not long after my June arrival I saw in the Village Voice that the Diamond Dogs Tour was coming to town and RCA Records was running a David Bowie Lookalike contest. I entered, was one of the winners, and did a bizarre photo shoot for the Philadelphia Inquirer at RCA with other winners.
The prizes for winning were all of his albums (which I already owned and gave away to curry favor among my classmates) and floor seats to the first night of a two-night stand at Madison Square Garden. (I already had nosebleed seats for both nights.) Music is always at its most potent when the songs plus the surroundings plus youth and excitement all dovetail. I had been to quite a few concerts by this time, but this spectacle was impossible to beat. He sounded great and his staging, skits for each number, coming out of the sky in a giant hand, roaming the stage like a sleek leopard— all indelible.
A postscript: After I returned to Kentucky, that fall I saw Bowie on the second half of the tour, the very night, in Indianapolis, when he ditched the glam and launched the Soul Tour. Our carload of Ziggy wannabes was devastated by his new Thin White Duke direction, weeping all the way back to Louisville; betrayed, makeup running, looking like discarded clowns.
A half-century later, in 2024, I tracked down the PR guy from RCA who was responsible for the lookalike contest. He confessed to me that everyone who entered the contest won—all seven of us—robbing me of one of my most cherished lifetime achievements. His remarks in that 1974 article, disparaging the contest winners, raised the ire of RCA and Bowie’s people, and almost cost him his job. But he listened to Antietam after that and reported that he loved our music!
Antietam's album The Counting Game is out now.
