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November 14, 2008

David Byrne @ Tower Theater: Upper Darby, PA 11.8.2008

Eighty years ago the Tower Theatre on 69th St. housed acrobats, magicians, contortionists, and dancers that all performed under the umbrella of vaudeville. Last Saturday in a meeting backstage someone got to say, “Ghosts of vaudeville meet David Byrne.”

I feel like I have to issue an erratum to anyone that I told I was going to see Byrne in concert. This is because at some point during the evening I started to think that there was something else at play that didn’t quite fit into the normal modes of “concert.” Then, just as Byrne dodged a graceful kick from a dancer while another one slid through his legs as he simultaneously hit his guitar and belted out that “this ain’t no disco...” it hit me... this ain’t no concert, this is performance art.

If Byrne’s tour that was so matter-of-factly named “Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno” should be seen as a piece of performance art, then Byrne’s artistic statement would have to be that he is trying to "draw a line linking this new material with what we did 30 years ago, a little bit anyway.” At first this statement seems like the run of the mill kind of line that musicians will say to appease questions from the press about purpose and intention. But then I start thinking about what it would take to actually sketch out this “line” that Byrne is asking us to draw. We first put pencil to paper with the bridge between pop and punk, funk and African cross rhythms from the three Talking Heads albums produced by Eno (More Songs About Building and Flood, Fear of Music, and Remain in Light). From there we draw a line to connect the 1981 collaboration that technically introduced elements of electronic, ambient, and world music in My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Skip almost thirty years and the line reaches its destination at the recently released Everything That Happens Will Happen Today described by Byrne and Eno as “Electronic Gospel.”

If we really are to "draw the line" to attempt to trace the sounds uncovered in Byrne and Eno’s journey from Talking Heads to Everything That Happens, we end up with something that looks like this Cy Twombly piece:

It has taken me nearly a week to digest Saturday’s performance and the new material from Everything That Happens. I can’t help but feel that there is some significance and symbolism in the fact that Byrne and Eno, champions of world music and distant sounds, have arrived on a sound that is distinctly American. Perhaps I’m still in a post election haze and not too far removed from slapping hands, honking horns, and watching Jesse Jackson cry, but I still can’t help but think that Byrne and Eno’s exploration into “Electronic Gospel” is also a reevaluation of the country itself in examining the sound that holds to the deepest roots of the American struggle and then bringing this sound into new territory.

Houses in Motion
(@ the Tower in Philly 11.8.08)

Byrne explains that he came to the lyrics of the song “One Fine Day” while reading David Egger’s What is the What. He describes the plot of the book as being about “a young man named Valentino and his hallucinatory and horrific journey from his destroyed village in Darfur to Atlanta, Georgia and beyond.” Now again, I may just be still under the Oprah spell and completely taken with the events of the past two weeks (not to mention a World Series win) but I can’t help but read the Eggers connection as a direct parallel to the road that the sounds of Eno and Byrne have taken. Thirty years ago they started with the rhythms and samples from distant continents and now somehow have found themselves entrenched in Gospel, not too far from Georgia and beyond.

Byrne and Eno: "One Fine Day"

I was all set to stop my theorizing of trying to look at the recent Byrne and Eno collaboration as a reinvention of Americana until I opened up Byrne’s tour journal which covered his stop in Philadelphia. Byrne blogs that while in Philly he, like Rocky, ran over to the Art Museum but, unlike Rocky, actually went in the building. At the Museum Byrne went to two exhibitions. The first was an exhibit of the Gee’s Bend Quilts which, as NPR puts it, are quilts “created by a group of women who live in the isolated, African-American hamlet of Gee's Bend, Ala.”

A Gee's Bend Quilt: Bars and String-Piece Columns

The second exhibition, that I had also viewed the night before, was on James Castle, a self taught artist from rural Idaho who became deaf at a very young age and communicated through drawings made from soot and spit.

James Castle: Farmscape, view from inside shed through shed doors,

The connection between these two exhibitions is that amazingly these artists with no formal training and who were working in complete isolation from the rest of the art world had hit on the same complex themes tackled by their famous contemporaries. This all led Byrne to question whether there was some sort of universal experience or as he puts it whether “well, nutty as it might sound, some part of the visual and material response to our world is innate — and like myths, a similar response might occur and recur across time and space — unconnected yet uncannily similar.”

Once in a Lifetime
(@ the Wang Center, Boston 10.31.08)

Is the search for the innate American sound what Byrne and Eno have been jabbing at in this new album? Are the explorations into Electronic Gospel an attempt to test the innate sound of the American experience? If so, then we can not call Byrne’s output on this tour as anything less then a work of performance art. On this tour he has taken a sound so deep in American roots and has made it into something new. Something familiar to the heartland but also something that is moving well beyond the constraints of time. It is something that draws on an innate sound, it is something American that looks optimistically forward and most importantly, it is something that also sounds amazing in stereo.

//Buy Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

Previously from the Byrne files:
Byrne and the Science of Nonsense

Setlist and more clips after the jump....

Posted by Yonah Korngold at November 14, 2008 05:37 PM

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Posted by: Abbey at November 16, 2008 03:30 PM

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