Last night, musical icon and modern-day renaissance man David Byrne performed at Atlanta's Fox Theater. Tune-Yards opened, but the audience never gave her a chance, talking loudly over her performance and generally ignoring her on stage. The Fox didn't help her out much either, providing poor stage lighting and low volume during her set.
But the audience wasn't there to hear no Tune-Yards. They were there to hear David Byrne perform Talking Head songs, and while they were willing to tolerate some of the songs from Byrne's most recent solo album, they had no use for Tune-Yards, whoever she was. Their loss - Tune-Yards performed a most impressive set earlier this year at Variety Playhouse, and from what we could hear over the roar of the crowd, she performed much the same set last night. but it seemed to fall on mostly deaf ears. C'est la vie.
David Byrne has long influenced our musical tastes. When Talking Heads first emerged in the late 1970s, theirs was the music that first got us into punk rock and new wave. You could say Psycho Killer was our gateway song into punk. Where before punk music sounded scary and off-putting, playing by psychotic looking weirdos in scuzzy downtown dive bars, there was something accessible and inviting in Psycho Killer that allowed us in. Not that the song compromised the music in any way - hey, it's called Psycho Killer - but Byrne's tongue just enough in his cheek to render his quirky delivery accessible.
So we jumped on board the Talking Heads bandwagon, which in turn opened the doors to all the other punk and goth and new wave music of the late 70s and early 80s. But Byrne wasn't through with us yet and in the early 80s he blew our minds again by expanding the sparse Talking Heads sound by adding big dollops of funk and African polyrhythms to the mix (I Zimbra, almost all of Remain In Light and Speaking In Tongues) while at the same time producing a string of MTV-ready hit singles (Once In A Lifetime, Burning Down The House, etc.). And then with the True Stories movie and the Stop Making Sense concert film, directed by the late, great Jonathan Demme. Our world was really rocked when we discovered My Life In the Bush of Ghosts, Byrne's mind-bending and consciousness-expanding collaboration with Brian Eno, and The Catherine Wheel, his dance score for Twyla Tharp. We listened to Byrne all through the 80s and into the 90s, even including his underappreciated solo albums following the disbanding of Talking Heads, and most recently, we enjoyed his collaboration with the fellow subversive St. Vincent, including a memorable show here in Atlanta.
Which brings us to last night's show. Ever the innovator, Byrne has completely reinvented the rock-concert format for this tour. Gone were the amplifiers and monitors that usually clutter up a stage. Gone was the large drum kit that typically anchors the band to their positions on the stage. Instead of a drum set, Byrne used a half-dozen or so percussionists, each of whom carried one single drum - bass, snare, tom, etc. - and walked around the stage marching-band style. The remaining musicians were all wired so they could transmit their instruments directly to the off-stage mixing board via wi-fi, so they too were free to wander the empty stage. Byrne then used the empty space and freedom to present a carefully choreographed show complete with dancers, precision marching exercices, and various lineups. Some of these techniques were used in his shows with St. Vincent, but Byrne has now completely uncluttered the stage other than the musicians, who incidentally all wore identical suits and performed barefoot for the entirety of the show.
Byrne opened the set alone on stage, sitting behind a small table and holding a human brain like Hamlet addressing poor Yorick while singing a song that described the various lobes and functions of the brain like some musical neurology lecture. He was soon joined by the rest of the band, and before long they were playing Talking Heads classics I Zimbra, Home, Blind, Burning Down the House, and Once In A Lifetime, deep cuts like Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On) and The Great Curve from Remain In Light and even Big Blue Plymouth from The Catherine Wheel. Tune-Yards (Merrill Garbus) joined him on stage for the last song of the encore, a moving Black-Lives-Matter tribute written by Janelle Monae for the victims of police violence.
Alert readers may recall that we saw this very same David Byrne show last May when he appeared at the Shaky Knees Festival. Those readers are correct and last night's show was fortunately almost the exact same as that at Shaky Knees, and since we didn't capture any video of last night's show, here's a little taste or two from Shaky Knees.
No comments:
Post a Comment