Once in a lifetime

adfamiliares and I had the privilege of seeing David Byrne's Halloween concert at the Wang. He and Brian Eno just released a new album together, and David has been running around the country with some whippersnapper dancers and musicians, performing selections from this and all their previous collaborations. Tonight, the set included seven of the eleven tracks from the new album (plus a bonus track); four from each of Fear of Music and Remain in Light; one each from More Songs about Buildings and Food, The Catherine Wheel, and the Byrne-Eno "found vocals" collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts...and Burning Down the House for one of the three (three!) encores. I scrawled nearly-readable notes in the dark: ( set list. )

It was as thrilling and torrential and draining as I'd hoped, and I danced in the tiny square afforded me, between seat backs and adjacent audience members, like I was having a seizure in a phone booth. David, the band, and the dancers have been dressing all in ice-cream-man white for this tour, and for the holiday they added matching costume elements: a chef's hat, a goblin mask, a white sombrero. For Burning Down the House they went one better, donning fright wigs and angel wings, then turned the spotlights on the audience so we could see the inspiring sea of cutlasses and caveman bones and Clockwork Orange canes waving in the air. There was a walking banana, and a girl in gold lamé dressed as a (functional) lamp. (Sadly, they didn't perform This Must Be the Place, so David couldn't bring her up on-stage to dance with him.)

The dancers seemed at times like triplet avatars of young David Byrne's id: stuttering spasmodically around the stage in the manner he made famous in Stop Making Sense, while he, the sedate, older version, stayed rooted to the floor, softly swaying. At times they seemed to be mocking the young David — one dancer mimicking his iconic chopping gesture during Once in a Lifetime, for instance, but extending it to cover all four outstretched arms of the other two. I'm fairly certain this was intentional; David has a wicked, if subtle, sense of humor. To wit: during Take Me to the River, they got the entire audience clapping along with wild abandon, hands above our heads...then slowly lowered the tempo until we were all left hanging like rhythm-impaired rubes. (Then, of course, drummer #2 machine-gunned it back up to speed, rappa-rappa-rappa-rappa, and we were sucked helplessly back in...)

The lighting was beautiful: from bright circus-tent stripes, test-pattern stripes, behind their white white outfits, to rippling sea-blue light during Air. Spotlights picked out the active players, coming in as the instruments did. Sudden lacunae in the music and motion were frozen in blue light for the beat-and-a-half they lasted, then roared back in with reds and yellows as the music resumed. Between numbers, a warm, incandescent glow filled the stage as David chatted to the audience: "That was from a piece I did with the choreographer Twyla Tharp. You're probably more familiar with, ah, the thing she did with Billy Joel. But...well, that was what that was."

I was thrilled with the set list. I guess they usually do Home from the new album where they did Air, but it was such an ethereally powerful version of Air I can't mind the switch. I spent the whole night waiting for them to do Everything That Happens, which had been stuck in my head all day, so I'm pleased they got to the third encore, even if David was a bit hoarse by then. Help Me Somebody was not something I ever thought I'd hear live, but it was a knockout — danceable polyrhythms plus David channelling his southern preacher character. The three big A-side tracks from Remain in Light were all devastatingly good; the tight, warm harmonies of the new album were uplifting, hopeful, straining. Burning Down the House did exactly that, of course.

And hey, thanks to the magic of the internet, you can see what I'm talking about:

Once in a Lifetime
Burning Down the House

(If you read this, David, or any of your dancers or musicians do, thank you!)

The name of the place...is Los Angeles

Is it already common knowledge that Clint Eastwood's new feature, Changeling, was written by Babylon 5's JMS?