David Byrne - Paramount Theater (Seattle, WA; Jun. 24, 2009)

Have you seen Stop Making Sense (1984)? Do you have the entire Talking Heads catalog on your iPod? How about the Byrne/Eno collaboration projects? Even that one with all the weird newscast sampling that music critics seem to hate? No? Well, no matter, this recommendation still applies to you. David Byrne’s performance last Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 would have blown your mind, regardless of your inability to commit to such obsessive Byrne love.

Twenty-five years after the legendary Talking Heads’ “Stop Making Sense” tour, David still manages to bring that extremely 1980s quirkiness to the stage in a way that only someone who defined it can do. One will notice at a Byrne show that nothing about him, his presence or his music, seems washed-up or outdated. I have attended too many retro acts where I thought to myself, “This would have been great . . . in the 70’s” or “Man, that would have been sexy . . . if it were done by a 30 year old.”

I think the former is the more pertinent, seeing as how David’s performances have never been about sexiness. Watch those 1984 performances and note that you can call them a lot of things: strange, post-modern, funky, upbeat, energetic, even downright weird, but you can never refer to them in erotic terms (in any seriousness, anyway). This is why there is just as much force in David Byrne’s show today as there was 25 years ago; you can lose your looks, you can lose your mojo, but no matter how old you get, you only get stranger.

His set included songs from both his solo career and his time with the Talking Heads, as well as some tracks he and Brian Eno did together. He treated the crowd with the utmost respect, giving them license to dance in the aisles and take and upload as many pictures as they wanted, “so long as he looked good.” As he awed the crowd, a troupe of contemporary dancers frolicked around the stage doing kicks and throws and even moves that manipulated David himself. All and all, a sight that, when paired with the excellent lighting and presentation of the Paramount Theatre, made for a non-stop optical euphoria.

The encore presentation? David Byrne and the Extra Action Marching Band, a San Francisco-based marching troupe of entertainers dolled up to portray a group of meth-addicted trannies who have been given pompoms and brass instruments and told to “rock the shit out of the audience.” It was at this moment I realized that point I mentioned earlier—you know, about it being really hard to get sexier w/ age, but it being nearly impossible not to get weirder. Needless to say, this was the crux of all Seattle performances, the pinnacle of Northwest stage presence. I doubt that I will ever be as into a Seattle show as I was at that particular moment. A brilliant showing by both parties. Thank you for completing my summer so early on!

David Byrne: Strongly Recommended

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