The initial fortnight's rehearsals in Manhattan were overseen by musical director Carlos Alomar, back on board after his absence from Let's Dance. In April David joined the band in rehearsal at Las Calinas, near Dallas. Alongside the Let's Dance personnel the new faces included sometime Village People and Billy Joel keyboardist David LeBolt, and saxophonist Lenny Pickett, whose arrival brought together the sax trio who would be dubbed The Borneo Horns in the tour brochure. The ten-piece band was Bowie's biggest since 1974, and in another throwback to the year of the Diamond Dogs it included two choreographed backing vocalists, Frank and George Simms.

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Serious Moonlight would prove to be Alomar's favourite of the six Bowie tours he played - "it was the first tour where we did all of the hits," he told David Buckley, adding that he particularly enjoyed creating "all these fabulous horn arrangements so that every song sounded as if it had just been recorded." During the tour Bowie confirmed that Alomar's rearrangements were crucial to the show's identity: "Before, I've had up to three synthesizers onstage. The music had sort of industrial, mechanised-sounding connotations to it. That's another aspect that I wanted to lighten up on...The choice of musicians has helped, because they're not familiar with my music. So they've interpreted it more from a soul-based background. Inherently, there's a lighter-hearted characteristic coming through the music, than if I had used my original musicians who had it in their minds, 'Oh yeah, I know Bowie, he wants doom and gloom in here'."

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Towards the end of the Dallas rehearsals, while the band worked with choreographer Chris Dunbar in advance of their departure for a final week of preparation at the Vorst Nationaal in Brussels, a crisis arose with the eleventh-hour sacking of lead guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan. The problem had nothing to do with Vaughan's ability: on the contrary, as rehearsal bootlegs reveal, his unique contribution to the band's sound was striking. Bowie later remarked that "Stevie was pulling notes out of the air that no-one could have dreamed would have worked with my songs." Unfortunately drugs and management problems were afflicting Vaughan, who was apparently at loggerheads with Bowie over impositions of choreography and costume, strictures against drug-taking on tour, and in particular the fee he was receiving. Vaughan claimed that Bowie's management had also reneged on a verbal promise that his group Double Trouble would support some of the British and American dates. A further can of worms was opened when, midway through the rehearsal period, the video of "Let's Dance" was released: Double Trouble bassist Tommy Shannon recalled that Vaughan, unaccustomed to the ways of pop stardom, was "furious" to see Bowie miming his guitar solo.

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Bowie, who had already departed for Europe to undertake promotional duties when the crisis arose, would later say that he was "almost blackmailed" by Vaughan's "cartoon of a manager", explaining that half an hour before the coach was due to leave for the airport to take the band to Brussels, Vaughan's manager "demanded to renegotiate Stevie's fee, there and then, giving him a higher salary than any other musician on the tour, otherwise he would pull Stevie from the tour. As I was thousands of miles away in Belgium and with twenty minutes to go, our promoter took it upon himself to make a decision which would change the entire sound of the show."

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Thus, with less than a week to go until opening night, Vaughan was dismissed. "When the rest of the party arrived in Belgium," Bowie later recalled, "Carmine Rojas, my bass player, told me that it was one of the most heartbreaking moments he had ever witnessed on the road, Stevie left standing on the sidewalk with his bags surrounding him. Carmine was convinced that Stevie had no idea that his manager was going to pull such a scam or, if he did, that this guy had convinced Stevie that he could pull it off." The rest of the band rallied against any controversy, Alomar telling journalists that "David has never made any money before, and on this tour there are a lot of people making sure that he's going to make some money. As far as our money situation, come on, that's just fine. Everybody's making over four figures [per week]." Despite the stance of Vaughan's manager, this was evidently no re-run of the David Live pay mutiny. (Vaughan, who was later reconciled with Bowie, tragically died in a plane crash in 1990).

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Ironically, Vaughan was replaced by a guitarist whose last contribution to the Bowie story had also involved pulling out of a tour at the last minute. Earl Slick, who had toured with David in 1974 and played on Station To Station before parting company on frosty terms, was hastily contracted and flown out to Brussels on May 14th. "Everything was straightened out," Slick said of his former quarrel with David. "There was communication, a lot of joking and fooling around. In the old days I'd show up at the theatre and literally not see him except for the stage part. Now it's back to normal. Business as usual." Carlos Alomar put in frantic extra rehearsal time with Slick, who spent four days locked in a hotel room "with coffee pot after coffee pot", learning the 31 songs on the set-list.

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Bowie had laid down the law to his band about drug-taking, and his personal regimen on the Serious Moonlight tour was a far cry from the coke-bombed madness of the mid-1970s. He began each day with two hours of aerobics and shadow-boxing. "This is a long tour and I want to be in shape," he told reporters. "I don't want it to be like the old days, when I felt it was almost my duty to end up a wreck. I thought that was what you had to do to be a substantial artist." He had also conquered his much-vaunted fear of flying: along with the new lifestyle came the ultimate touring accessory, a private 707 jet.

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Although the show was more tightly choreographed than the 1976 or 1978 tours, Bowie had avoided intricate stagecraft in favour of broad strokes which, like the set and lighting, were well conceived for giant venues. There was a revival of 1974's skull-and-shades routine for "Cracked Actor". The four giant columns filled with smoke during "Station To Station", and Bowie sang "Ashes To Ashes" inside one of them as it rolled downstage. In the same number, the Simms brothers played ball with a giant inflatable globe, which then sat in a spotlight for "Space Oddity" before being kicked out across the audience during "Young Americans". For other numbers there were stunningly frenetic light shows, while "Life On Mars?", "Wild Is The Wind" and "Space Oddity" were delivered from points of stillness in a solitary spotlight. There was rudimentary choreography for "Fashion" (Bowie and the Simms boys acting as catwalk models), while "Let's Dance" was the cue for David to perform some shadow-boxing. For "Red Sails" he mimed climbing a mountain, while Lenny Pickett executed what Bowie called a "whirling dervish" dance suggested by the saxophonist during rehearsals. But these were the exceptions: most of the numbers were performed in a straight stand-and-deliver style, with David the unchallenged centre of attention.