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Rarely is your backyard graced with a legend, but that was just the case Sunday night at UT's Hogg Memorial Auditorium when David Byrne sashayed into town.
Clad in matching Dickies overalls, Byrne and band mates Paul Frazier (bass), Mauro Refosco (percussion) and Graham Hawthorne (drums) took the stage around 9:30 p.m. after an excellent opening set from Sam Phillips' four-piece band, featuring a macabre mix of sultry cabaret and bizarre carnival waltz with some offbeat humor thrown in to boot. Think the soundtrack to Tim Burton's life.
Just to make things even weirder, I feel I should mention that Phillips played opposite Bruce Willis as Jeremy Irons' steel-faced lover in 1995's "Die Hard With a Vengeance." The fact that she exuded the stage personality of a knock-kneed, oddball outcast forced to get up and sing in front of all these strangers (yet somehow retaining a quirky sexiness) sent my brain on so many diverging tangents it felt like it was about to explode. Yep, it was beginning to feel like a Talking Heads concert.
The former Heads front man and company kicked off their two-hour set with "Glass, Concrete & Stone," the gently lilting lead-track on Byrne's latest release, "Grown Backwards." Accompanied by Austin's own Tosca Strings (all six graduates of UT's School of Music) for much of the show, the band started things off slowly, easing the audience in and gradually building steam, much like the Talking Heads used to do. (See Jonathan Demme's 1984 concert film, "Stop Making Sense" - perhaps the finest concert movie ever - for reference.) As a hint of things to come, Byrne offered a sizzling, tribal rendition of the Heads' classic "I Zimbra" before leading the band back into to his solo material, focusing on orchestral arrangements and powerful vocals.
Sticking mostly to newer material, Byrne did touch upon recent commercial successes from past albums, such as "U.B. Jesus" and "Like Humans Do," perhaps his most recognizable song since leaving the Talking Heads in 1991.
But it all comes back to the Talking Heads, the indie-before-there-was-indie New Wave quartet that transformed into a pulsating, neo-funk pop 'n' roll powerhouse some time in the 80s and remains to this day one of the most influential bands ever. While the crowd definitely ate up the Talking Heads material that peppered the second half of the set and the two encores, Byrne's other inclusions deserve attention for the genius that they are, most notably "Dialogue Box" and "Tiny Apocalypse," as well as a Hendrix cover for good measure.
Byrne seemed comfortable in his thrust-in-the-limelight sort of way, engaging the diverse audience frequently, at times shyly and at times humorously, "imparting bits of wisdom as I go" as he put it. He even seemed familiar with one of UT's biggest headaches, noting that anyone who parked within five miles of the auditorium would surely have their cars towed by the end of the show. Though his appearance has changed - the oversized suit is gone and the hair is almost white - his stage presence has most certainly not, and at 52 he was still making flippy-floppy all over the place, dancing and contorting from front-and-center to behind the drum kit, even projecting his Gumby-like image onto the ceiling for a song, much to the delight of the crowd.
But, as I alluded to earlier, the biggest delights were culled from the Talking Heads catalogue, and after "Road to Nowhere" got the first fans up and dancing, it was a trip down memory lane from there on out, with the strings adding delightfully eerie melodies to "Psycho Killer" and gorgeous accompaniment to "This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)."
Other classics such as "(Nothing But) Flowers" and "Once in a Lifetime" did not fare as well with the new outfit's rough-around-the-edges take as opposed to the crisp, polished and perfected sound of the originals and further suffered when microphone problems and poor acoustics distorted the already-muddled mix. Not many people seemed to mind, though.
The house almost came down after Byrne closed with two more classics, the anthemic "What a Day That Was" and "Blind," before taking prolonged but obviously appreciative bows to the roaring crowd. The first encore ended with the appropriate "Life During Wartime" with Byrne delivering the classic lines in classic style - like the words are just spewing out, much to his surprise and completely out of his control - "This ain't no party/This ain't no disco/This ain't no foolin' around."
And just when we thought we were done, the house lights stayed down and Byrne returned with his acoustic guitar and told a story of riding his bike through lower Manhattan on Sept. 12, 2001, and the realization that artists must continue to make their art, no matter what before strumming his way into the last Talking Heads song of the evening, "Heaven."
After finishing the second appropriate show-closer in a row, the band, who had slowly returned to the stage, kicked into a version of X-Press 2's "Lazy," which Byrne had penned the lyrics to in 2001. Only this time, as he explained it, his take was based on a remix done by a DJ outfit known as Freeform Five. Almost 10-minutes long and alternatively funky and chilling, it too seemed like the perfect closer to the night: The legend doing his own version of someone else's take on his work, embracing today's sample-based pop with open arms, illustrating his ability to not only cope with but thrive in the ever-evolving world of popular music.
For a final curveball, Byrne seemed to decide on the spot to beckon the Tosca Strings for just one more, a beautiful rendition (which also appears on "Backwards") of Verdi's aria "Un di Felice, Eterea," from the opera "La Traviata," giving a nod back to the classics and reminding us that there is no way David Byrne is that predictable.
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