The reviews were ecstatic. A Toronto critic described the opening concert as "the most spectacular rock show I have ever seen", while the Winnipeg Free Press hailed it as "unique and brilliant". The Owen Sound Sun-Times hailed Bowie's "perfect, precision-honed showmanship", while Melody Maker reported to British readers that Bowie's "far-reaching imagination has created a combination of contemporary music and theatre that is several years ahead of its time...a completely new concept in rock theatre - the most original spectacle in rock I have ever seen."

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However, the initial month of concerts took its toll. The technical demands were immense - for the opening night the scenery took 32 hours to erect, and thereafter the 15 roadies were supplemented by a 20-man union crew recruited at each venue. Nonetheless there were mechanical problems: the cherry-picker malfunctioned during one of the early concerts, leaving David with no option but to perform the next half-dozen numbers suspended in mid-air. On the way to Tampa, Florida, a bee flew into the cabin of one of the transport lorries and stung the driver, who swerved off the road and into a swamp. Crisis was transformed into triumph as the show's announcer declared, "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. The concert you're going to see tonight is not the show we had planned for you. Due to an unfortunate road accident, half of our stage scenery, costumes, lighting equipment, is in a local swamp fifteen miles north of here. There was talk of cancelling tonight's performance, but David Bowie would not hear of it." The cheers that greeted the announcement heralded a terrific performance which ended in a twenty-minute standing ovation and the only encore of the tour.

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The atmosphere backstage, however, was becoming overwrought. Members of the band noted that the collaborative and friendly atmosphere that had prevailed during rehearsals gradually evaporated on the road. A particular bone of contention was the band's resentment at being obscured behind the scenery. "They kept saying, 'We don't like playing behind these bleeding screens!'" David recounted two years later, "and I said, 'Well, you've got to, because I haven't got any parts for you - I don't want people to see you playing, because it doesn't look like a street if there's a bass amp stuck in the middle,' but it was very hard to convince them of that." Matters weren't helped by the two-tier boarding arrangements: while David, Defries and a select clique stayed in deluxe hotel suites, the remainder of the band was consigned to Holiday Inns. David's personal retinue, meanwhile, had been swelled by the arrival of Tony Mascia, a Bronx Italian and former sparring partner of Rocky Marciano, who backed up Stuey George's security duties and drove David's limousine. He would remain on the Bowie pay-roll long after the disintegration of MainMan.

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In his Melody Maker review Chris Charlesworth remarked that Bowie's stage presence was far removed from the finely judged simpatico of the Ziggy concerts: "Not once does he address the audience or even allude to their presence, other than an odd grin," he wrote, adding that as a result Bowie seemed like "some kind of magical being", dripping with "almost total arrogance". Although this was a deliberate theatrical effect, it appears that it had begun to follow David offstage. As he later averred, cocaine had wrought a major change in his disposition. Ava Cherry told the Gillmans: "When I first met David, he didn't do drugs. When I first went to England, he would hardly smoke a joint. His personality was altogether different, he was sweet and kind and loving, I loved him so much. When we got to America people started coming on the tours and bringing lots of coke around and of course we were all doing it. But David has an extreme personality, so his capacity was much greater than anyone else's. He would start to change his personality sometimes. It didn't affect his music or how he created, but it would affect how he would react to people, those who really liked him and cared about him." According to Michael Kamen, "One minute he would be a wonderful sweet friend, somebody who was easy to talk to and fool around with. The next minute he was somebody who would burn through you with their eyes. It was a quite sudden switch." With the mood swings came the obvious physical evidence that David's habit was affecting him adversely. Cocaine suppresses appetite and dehydrates the body, and during the tour David's already slender frame became gaunt in the extreme.

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According to Angela Bowie, who witnessed the tail-end of the tour, cocaine was also affecting David on stage. His performance, she writes in her memoir, "was erratic. Sometimes, when the coke was working for him, he was brilliant...Other times...he missed cues and forgot moves and botched things up in all kinds of ways." Even so, she admits that "his voice stayed strong" and that "the show was a knockout".

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Matters came to a head when Herbie Flowers led a band revolt over payment for the David Live album. The band had not been informed of the plan to record any shows - according to Earl Slick, the first they knew of it was finding "extra mikes everywhere" at the Philadelphia soundcheck - and they turned to Flowers as their spokesman. "Probably David asked me to do the Diamond Dogs tour because he knew it was going to be a long, long tour and he needed somebody he could socialise with," Flowers told Jerry Hopkins, "And we got on very well for a while, until through seniority I became like the trade union representative for the musicians...when we heard they were going to record a live album, I confronted David about it."

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"Herbie went nuts," recalled Mike Garson. "How can they do this without our permission? How come we're not getting paid? How come there's no contracts? We're not going on!" So we agreed that we weren't going on stage that night unless we got paid."

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There was a confrontation in David's dressing room an hour before the first Philadelphia concert, at which Flowers rejected Tony Defries's proposal that the band members should each receive the union rate of $70 for the live album. Instead Flowers demanded $5000 apiece, a figure agreed beforehand among the disgruntled musicians. Tensions ran high; legend has it that David threw a chair at Flowers during the scene, but Stuey George denied this: "He kicked the chair and it flew backwards," he told the Gillmans, "it wasn't directed at any person. David wouldn't actually get physical with anybody."

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The musicians won the day, and Defries was compelled to sign an agreement that they would receive $5000 each - although, in classic MainMan style, they would not see it for two years, and then only after launching legal proceedings. The Philadelphia concert began half an hour late and the atmosphere on stage was less than relaxed, but some considered the performance all the better for it: "When we went on stage," recalled Flowers, "the feeling of liberation in the band was glorious!"

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Even before this debacle, Bowie's relations with Tony Defries was rapidly deteriorating. If David was suffering delusions of grandeur they were as nothing compared with the Colonel Parker wonderland now inhabited by his manager, who had become aloof and unavailable even to David, while opening Swiss bank accounts and moving into the gold and futures markets. David, meanwhile, had at last begun to discover the extent to which he had allowed himself to be exploited. He had always mistakenly believed that he owned a 50 per cent share of the company, but as the Diamond Dogs tour unwound he finally realised the true nature of the contracts he had signed with Defries: he owned no portion of MainMan, and while Defries pocketed a full 50 per cent of Bowie's income, David received what remained of his 50 per cent after all company expenditure was deducted. In practice this could mean almost anything Defries wanted it to. "Some of the concert promoters began talking to David, telling him how much he was making," recalled Ava Cherry. "David was amazed when he heard the figures. He had no idea at all." Bowie was all too aware that the tour was losing money hand over fist, costing more to mount each night than it could possibly take at the box office, and he was making up the shortfall out of his personal allowance. In order to bail out the tour's running costs he had already abandoned plans to buy Richard Harris's London house; now, as he became increasingly aware of the true nature of MainMan, the writing appeared on the wall for Defries.

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By the time of the Philadelphia dates the show's tight script had already been sufficiently slackened to allow changes to the set: "Knock On Wood" replaced "Drive-In Saturday", and there was room for an Ohio Players cover, "Here Today, Gone Tomorrow". All the same, David was rapidly tiring of the show's lack of spontaneity.

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The Diamond Dogs tour never reached British shores, owing to the vast cost such an undertaking would have entailed. Tony Defries had initially attempted to sell the show to British promoters, and for a while a nine-day stint at the Wembley Empire Pool was mooted for autumn 1974, but to recoup the necessary costs the ticket prices would have had to begin at a prohibitive £7, unheard of at the time.

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But despite its comparatively short run of performances, the Diamond Dogs tour remains the stuff of legend. It was the first rock spectacle of its kind, redefining expectations of what was possible on the concert stage. Never before had a rock tour enlisted the services of a top theatrical designer, and many of the show's innovations - notably the cherry-picker and the hydraulic bridge - have since become commonplace. In 1976 Jules Fisher was hired to design a similarly ambitious set for The Rolling Stones ("They simply couldn't handle the kind of staging that Bowie had," he later recalled), while in the same year Mark Ravitz designed Kiss's Destroyer tour, which truly ushered in the age of pyrotechnic-fuelled stadium extravaganzas.

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In its genre-defining theatricality the tour was a triumph on many levels. Angela Bowie later wrote that "I don't think there's ever been anything to match Diamond Dogs. Plenty of shows have been bigger, the expenditure of effort and funds more conspicuous by far, but none has been brighter. None has tried to mean as much or succeeded in communicating its meaning as effectively." Toni Basil believed that "it was the greatest set I have ever seen, it was the greatest rock show I have ever seen...The show was phenomenal, and David was absolutely brilliant." Tony Visconti described the show as "one of the best things David has ever done on stage." The tour's coordinator Fran Pillersdorf told the Gillmans that Bowie "held the stage like Garland...He was the consummate showman. We were in an arena with thousands of screaming people, he was playing against a 45-foot set, and it was his show." For his part, Bowie recalled in 1993 that "It was quite an unbelievable, unbelievable headache, that tour - but it was spectacular. It was truly the first real rock and roll theatrical show that made any sense. A lot of people feel that it has never been bettered...it was something else, it really was."

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Nonetheless, even on an aesthetic level the show had its drawbacks. The decision to hire a top-flight band of musicians resulted in a rather peculiar interpretation of the Diamond Dogs material. By any conventional definition it was probably the finest live band Bowie had yet employed, and in terms of sheer musicianship their performance is impossible to fault. But as Bowie recalled in 1997, "Some of my lines had sounded almost proto-punk because of my inabilities as a virtuoso. But by the time they took it on stage, they were playing it in a very musicianly style. Something was lost because of that. That album had a quality of obsession with what I wanted to get over. That's not there when I hear the gigs from that period...They play it too well and with too much fluidity. So to me, Diamond Dogs was never played well on stage, or at least never with the sensibility that the album had."

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In its original form, the Diamond Dogs tour breathed its last over two nights at New York's Madison Square Garden - moved from the smaller Radio City Music Hall after increased demand - on July 19th and 20th. The Ringling Brothers Circus, which had a residency at the venue, was still in the process of vacating the loading area, and the presence of elephants and tigers made for an unusual atmosphere backstage. When the tour re-convened in September after a six-week break, during which David's relationship with his manager had deteriorated further, his cocaine habit had spun dangerously out of control, and he had retreated to Philadelphia to begin recording the Young Americans album, it was immediately evident that things were going to be very different.