The new show opened at the St Paul Civic Center on October 5th, moving through middle America for the next four weeks before descending on New York's Radio City Music Hall for seven dates. The first two were added by Defries at a late stage after the others had sold out, but unfortunately the extra concerts did poorly at the box office (another instance of MainMan's overweening self-belief: few artists could hope to sell out seven consecutive nights at Radio City). As a result Bowie was forced to open before the New York press in a half-empty house, and the critical reaction was frosty. The New York Times found David "self-consciously uncomfortable without routines to act out, and he was in hoarse voice". The New York Post likened the experience to a gaudy birthday cake "made out of cardboard, with a hollow centre", while Zoo World condemned the show as "a disaster...something like a bad night in Las Vegas...totally mediocre". In Creem, Lester Bangs epitomised American critics' attitude to Bowie during the 1970s, mistrusting the credentials of an artist who changes direction. Pleasantly referring to David as a "pastyfaced snaggletoothed little jitterbug", Bangs considered the show "a parody of a parody" which was "as full of ersatz sincerity as Jerry Lewis...Bowie has just changed his props: last tour it was boxing gloves, skulls and giant hands, this tour it's Black folk."

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Even some of the band were unhappy with the new show. Earl Slick later complained that "David had gone completely in a direction I didn't like," while the ousted musical director Michael Kamen was in the audience for a show which he described to the Gillmans as "horrific - a sort of third-rate gospel revivalist meeting. The stage was full of large black people going "Hallelujah" and shaking tambourines, and poor David was very thin and very white and completely out of his element."

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Kamen's comment reveals one of the more disturbing aspects of the Soul tour phase. Bowie was now gravely debilitated by cocaine abuse, and his appearance by the end of 1974 was alarming. He looked emaciated, his voice was often hoarse and he required glasses of water lined up on Mike Garson's piano to re-hydrate himself during the shows. "When he grimaced his lips adhered to his gums," the Gillmans were told by David's cousin Kristina, who watched one of the New York concerts from the wings. "He would turn his back on the audience to run his finger around his mouth to free them." According to percussionist Pablo Rosario, "David was really wired. He was doing too much cocaine. He looked like a tiger in a cage going from side to side of the stage." Most distressing of all was the gold-topped walking cane that now became part of David's stage act. He gave the impression that it was nothing more than his latest prop, but the truth was that at times he couldn't keep himself upright without it. "Trust me, I prayed for him - I was very concerned," Mike Garson said in 1999, adding that Bowie was lucky to have survived the period.

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At the same time, signs began to appear that David's imagination was expanding in ever more eccentric directions. It was during the Soul tour that he began peppering his interview patter with references to ghosts, UFOs, government conspiracy theories, the Kabbalah and, increasingly, Adolf Hitler. Creem's Bruno Stein transcribed a post-show conversation in a Chicago hotel bar in which Bowie rambled disconcertingly about these and other topics, including the sinister agendas of advertising agencies and the "cultural manipulation" practised by the ancient Mayans. Looking back on the period twenty years later, Bowie observed that he was losing his grip on the division between his own personality and those of his stage characters: "As drugs started to take a more severe hold on my life, the ability within your conscious mind to actually deliver yourself into two separate parts disappear, and the lines blur, and it's only this one formless mutant that's left behind...it gets very messy in there..."

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All things considered, one of the more incongruous sidelines of the period can be found in the unintentionally hilarious version of events still being peddled by Cherry Vanilla to readers of the teenage magazine Mirabelle. "I must admit that I'm getting rather attached to just getting anything I want from room service," reveals "David" in one entry, while another includes the innocent recollection that "Mick Jagger and Bette Midler arrived, and very soon I was in a relaxed state". "I've lost so much weight on this tour that I'm going to have to start getting back in shape," he reports cheerily on January 4th. "Angie is trying to fatten me up again with her home cooking!"

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Indeed, while the Soul tour unwound MainMan continued to project a business-as-usual air to the outside world, despite massive debts on both sides of the Atlantic and further extravagances on the part of Tony Defries, whose dislike of Bowie's soul music was no secret and whose relationship with his errant client was now in terminal decline. Defries was attempting to groom Dana Gillespie and Wayne County for pop stardom (neither found it), and while David brought in the dollars MainMan announced that it was to produce a Broadway spectacular called Fame, written by Pork veteran Tony Ingrassia and based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. The show opened and closed on November 18th 1974 at a cost to MainMan of $250,000.

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Despite the chaotic management situation, the physical self-destruction, the mental torment and an artistic direction many critics regraded as questionable, late 1974 represents one of the most fascinating and certainly one of the most poorly documented of all Bowie's live incarnations. Bootleg recordings which survive from the tour reveal a vital and gutsy show already transformed by the rhythm skills of Carlos Alomar and Dennis Davis into the prototype for what was coming next.

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The Soul tour closed in Atlanta on December 1st 1974, a planned concert in Tuscaloosa the following day having been cancelled. Three days later, The Dick Cavett Show screened an appearance that had been taped in New York on November 2nd during the Radio City residency. There were excellent live performances of "Young Americans", "1984" and "Foot Stomping", but David himself was looking terrible. At his most waxen and monosyllabic, he fended of Cavett's enquiries with vague, almost inarticulate answers, sniffing obsessively and jabbing at the carpet with his walking-stick. "It was horrendous," he recalled twenty years later. "I had no idea where I was, I couldn't hear the questions. To this day, I don't know if I bothered answering them, I was so out of my gourd." As ever, the Mirabelle diary offered a different view to UK readers: "Dick Cavett and I got on very well," it claimed desperately, "and it was almost like sitting in my living room and talking to a friend." It was an inglorious conclusion to 1974, a year in which Bowie's increasingly fascinating musical transformations threatened to be eclipsed by his painfully visible physical and mental ones.

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On December 7th Disc & Music Echo reported that the tour was to continue in Brazil in January 1975, after which Bowie would bring his soul show to mainland Europe and Britain. A fortnight later the Mirabelle diary stated that "Some of the dates for my European tour have been set. As it stands now, I'll be starting in the Scandinavian countries in March." By the New Year, however, plans for a European tour had evaporated amid the concluding sessions for Young Americans and the final meltdown of Bowie's relationship with his manager.