During the first part of my music writing career, which lasted from the late ‘70s to the mid-‘80s, I worked at two different daily newspapers, and wrote a lot of concert reviews on deadline. This usually meant writing the review the same night as the show, sometimes while I was still at the concert venue, and getting the review to the newspaper’s editorial offices so it could go into the next day’s newspaper.

At that time, there were no cellphones and no portable computers, which meant that filing a concert review from outside the office was always an adventure. To illustrate what this was like, I would like to share with you a story of one such adventure: the night I didn’t meet David Bowie.

To set the scene for this story, I’ll give you some context. When I began working at newspapers, the paper was  put together by printers working in the print shop. They put metal type and images on full-size frames which were then sprayed with ink and used to print each page of the newspaper. Not too long after I started, the very first computers were introduced to the newsroom, and as computer technology developed, text and images could be composed online and then sent to the presses. This meant that most (eventually all) of the printers’ jobs would be obsolete, and they would be out of work.

However, the printers at my newspaper saw this coming. They had negotiated a clause in their collective agreement that basically said anyone whose job disappeared due to technological change had to be offered a comparable job. Since printing was a fairly specialized trade, there wasn’t a lot of directly comparable work elsewhere in the company. But management apparently thought, well, printers work with type, and anyone can type on a keyboard. So one of the jobs that the printers were given was the job of copy taker.

I was a copy taker for a while, and it was a tough job. When a reporter couldn’t get back to the office to file their story in person before deadline, they would phone the office, and read their story over the phone to a copy taker. The copy taker would type the story (initially on paper, and then, as things changed, on a computer) and submit the story to the editors to put in the paper. Copy taking was really hard to do well, because you had to type fast – the writers and editors were working on tight deadlines – and because often the reporter would be calling from somewhere noisy, and you had to make sure you were accurately capturing what they were saying. Plus, some reporters did not like to be questioned about details or grammar, even if there was an obvious mistake in what they had read to you.

The printers who were given jobs as copy takers were….a mixed bunch. They were all nice guys (all of them were guys), and some were excellent typists and careful listeners. When you got one of those guys, you felt sure that your story would show up in the paper the way you had written it. Others, however, were literally hunt-and-peck typists that didn’t pay careful attention and frequently got things wrong. This was a particular worry for myself and the other arts writers, because often we were covering artists or performers with uncommon names. If you got one of the copy takers who was prone to mistakes and who typed very sloooowly, you could be desperately spelling the same name for them three or four times, while watching the clock tick ever closer to your deadline.

In August, 1983, David Bowie played BC Place in Vancouver, on a bill that also featured Peter Gabriel and the Tubes. This show was a huge deal, not only because Bowie was on a career high with the Let’s Dance album, but also because it was one of the first big concerts at the new stadium. The reviewers and other media representatives at the concert were allowed to sit in the press box that was used by sports reporters during BC Lions football games. This of course caused a lot of snarky speculation as to whether the sportswriters got seats as comfortable as the ones we had, how much food they consumed during each game, and what sort of messes they left behind.

My deadline that night was before the concert was scheduled to end – partway through David Bowie’s set. In situations like that, you wrote something about what the artist did in the first part of their performance, without actually saying that you only saw that part, and you prayed very hard that they didn’t do something awful later on, like fall off the stage or forget the words of a song. However, as nice as the BC Place press box was, it was very noisy – especially with the music blasting from the stage not too far away – and the only outside phone line in the place was right next to the balcony that opened onto the whole stadium. I buttonholed one of the friendly BC Place staff and explained that I would have to file my story during the evening, and was there a quieter phone somewhere nearby that I could use? The staffer opened a door to a smaller empty room that adjoined the press box, where there was a phone sitting on a table, and told me that I was welcome to use that phone whenever I needed to.

The concert started, the Tubes rocked, Peter Gabriel rocked. Because of the timing of the show, I had arranged with my editor that I would phone in the first part of my review after Gabriel’s set, and then phone in the rest after Bowie had been on stage for a while. So after Gabriel finished, I scribbled out a quick draft of what I wanted to say, went into the other room, closed the door, and phoned the office.

The copy taker who answered the phone – I’ll call him Sam – was an older fellow who was very slow and deliberate. This might have served him well as a typesetter in the print room, but these were not ideal qualities for a copy taker. I explained to Sam that the review would be coming in two parts, and that this was the first part. As I started to read, I realized that there was still a lot of noise coming from the press box. I stuck my finger in my ear, but I still couldn’t hear Sam all that well. So I crawled under the table and, scrunched up on my elbows and knees, continued reading to Sam.

First, Sam couldn’t understand why I wanted “David Bowie/Peter Gabriel/Tubes” in the first paragraph of the review, instead of “David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, and the Tubes”. Then he wanted to know if the opening act’s name was really the Tubes, and did they spell it like the regular kind of tubes. I tried to be patient with him, and it was admirable that he wanted to get things right, but this call was taking an exceptionally long time. Then we hit the paragraph where I had written that the Tubes’ sarcastic songs “sent up various segments of society”. Are you sure you mean “sent up”, Sam asked? What was this “up”? Did I mean “sent to”, except that didn’t make sense either? I may or may not have cracked at that point and said something along the lines of, this is my f***ing review and if I f***ing read it to you that way, that’s the way I want to say it. I’m not sure that things moved any more quickly after that exchange – I grumpily changed “sent up” to different wording that Sam understood – but eventually we finished. I promised to call back later with the rest of the review, hung up the phone, unfolded myself from under the table and dusted myself off, and went back into the press box.

As soon as I opened the door and stepped back into the larger room, I could tell that something big had happened. Everyone was chattering and excited, and looked somewhat dazed. Then someone who knew where I had been came over to me and said, “Guess what you missed?” I said I had no idea. “You missed David Bowie.” What, you mean he came out on the stage or something? “No. He came in here and shook hands with everyone and said hi.”

What?!?! Are you f***ing kidding me?!? I was crammed under a table in an empty room, arguing with Sam the copy taker on the phone, while *David Bowie* was in here meeting everyone?!? If I could literally have kicked myself, I would have done it at that very moment. So what was he like? I asked a few other people. He was very nice, everyone said, but his personal assistant [Coco Schwab] followed him really closely and gave this nasty look to anyone that she thought he was being too friendly with. That was kind of weird.

And then I found out that I had missed something else – an event that is now legendary in the history of Vancouver music writing. Just before Bowie’s tour began, he had fired Stevie Ray Vaughan, the guitarist on Let’s Dance, from his live band. Rumour had it that Bowie only paid his musicians the standard union rate for touring, and that Vaughan (one of the greatest guitar players ever) had dared to ask for more money, after which he was informed that his services were no longer needed. That night in the BC Place press box, as Bowie made his way through the crowd, one of the last people he got to was my newspaper colleague Neal Hall. Neal thought, not wrongly, that this would be a great opportunity to ask if the rumour about Vaughan’s firing was true, and after being introduced to Bowie, asked him that very question. Coco Schwab gave Neal a major stinkeye, snapped “What kind of question is that?” at him, and promptly marched Bowie out of the room.

Not too much later, while I was still sulking at my missed opportunity, Bowie strode on stage and launched into his set. After about five or six songs, I went back into the little room, crawled under the table, phoned Sam, and read him the rest of my review. Maybe because this part of the review involved only one artist with a relatively well-known name, and maybe because I tried not to use any complicated wording, this time was a lot more straightforward for Sam, and I was able to get out from under the table in time to see most of the rest of the show. And thankfully Bowie didn’t have any major onstage disasters during the rest of the set, while my review was on its way to being printed.

Bowie and his band came back to Vancouver a few months later. They did the same show twice, at a smaller arena, to be filmed for the Serious Moonlight tour DVD. I saw both performances, and I didn’t have to review either one. So I got to see the show all the way through, without having to duck out and spend an excruciatingly long time on the phone with a copy taker. That was nice, and I finally did get to appreciate what a thoroughly well thought-out and well-staged show it was. But I never did get to meet David Bowie.