- by Pavel Lembersky
REVELATIONS OF A FORMER HEADS HEAD.
Fit as a fiddle and happy as a clam, the former Talking Heads’ frontman-extraordinaire David Byrne wowed us at Carnegie Hall on June 8th. The silver-haired art-rock icon clad in Maoist (UPS?) brown shirt and pants, riffed between the songs and on occasion strutted backwards. Made sense too: Byrne tours in support of his new Grown Backwards CD.
The new songs sounded good. If this is the result of what Byrne terms top down songwriting (melodies first, textures later), I wouldn’t have my Byrne any other way. Such ditties as the uptempo foot-stomper Lazy, a percussion heavy collaboration with the DJ group X-Press 2, hit the spot. So much so that during the song I was compelled to leave my companion in the dark, rush out of our 2nd tier box and do a bit of solitary foot-stomping in the red-carpeted hallway. Some of the old (19 century old), slower pieces, like Un Di Felice aria from La Traviata, were awesome in their own right. I am admittedly biased, being something of a Verdi groupie. But then, I have a thing for Byrne too, so the aria was bound to be the piece de resistance for this writer.
In program notes Byrne ponders if his new CD is a breakup record (stands to reason, the man is newly single) or a post 9/11 record (how can it not be?) or a rehab record (never heard of the genre, is it akin to MTV’s AA Blues of Behind The Music ilk?). None of the above, Byrne concludes.
During the hour-and-a-half set which centered around the predominantely old material, the loose and intermittently funny Byrne, his vocals no longer clipped’ as in the olden CBGB’s days, but rather strong and polished, refrained from bobbing his head in his all too familiar angst-ridden chicken routine, which was fine by me. Man doesn’t live by shtick alone. (Rumor has it, the granddaddy of them all Chuck Berry briefly toyed with the idea of dropping his trademark duck-walk midcareer in favor of fire-breathing and tongue-flicking antics only to back down faced with an imminent threat of lawsuits both from Gene Simmons’ people and his own management. So there. A true artist never messes with his image, you see. Unless, of course, he firmly establishes the image of an eclecticist’ prior to messing with it. That may work.) Also gone were Byrne’s arm-flailing punk-xercise aerobics c. 1981. And those I kinda missed, especially during the Tosca Strings backed rendition of Life During Wartime.
(Oh, 1981! Oh, the swift and painless transition from a nomadic Dead Head to a Heads Head of my early days! Oh, that Talking Heads Greek Theatre concert under the starry Berkekey skies! Ah, the kickass grass! Was it truly greener? I don’t know... The sonic assault of an uprecedented level.... The dazzling minimalism of the set design... Tina Weymouth on bass!... Nona Hendryx singing backup!... Take me to the river... hit me on the head... but I guess I’m already there.)
The initially stodgy forty-something crowd packing Carnegie Hall (who are these people anyway? my g-generation? we sure looked cooler 20 years ago) got visibly unhinged around the powerful strings-driven version of I Zimbra which was introduced by Byrne making references to Dada and the famed Cafe Voltaire. I didn’t quite get the connection, but then if it’s Dada... plus the song sounded better than ever, so let it be Dada. Right around Psycho Killer the crowd was on its feet. A bunch of happy-go-lucky ex-yuppies with an ex-dot-commer or two thrown in for good measure were jumping in the aisles. So were the folks up in the gallery. Now that’s what I call a warm uptown welcome to the downtown’s very own. But then, how long has it been since Byrne left downtown? And I don’t just mean his new Hell’s Kitchen address.
The Tosca Strings sextet did a great job bringing out the operatic potential of such early Talking Heads songs as Psycho Killer, or Once In A Lifetime, not to mention the inherently dramatic What A Day That Was from Byrne’s 1981 score to Twyla Tharp’s The Catherine Wheel. Which suggests that Byrne’s newly exhibited interest in opera (on the new CD he also sings a Bizet aria) has always been lurking there, as far back as the Eno and even pre-Eno days. Not to be sneezed at either were the flavorful UB Jesus from Byrne’s penultimate Look Into The Eyeball CD and the rarely performed Blind (1988) fraught with the unexpectedly ominous 9/11 overtones.
Throughout the night, the 52 year-old avant-gardian art-rocker world-music purveyor pop-meister tunesmith filmmaker photographer writer ex-Luaka-Bop exec (did I forget to mention that Bertolucci film score Oscar?) ageing boy genius (whew!) chatted amiably with the audience between the songs, and often was funny too. Which added warmth to the memorable night making it better and even more memorable.
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