June 16, 2009

The Phish reunion tour moves on to St. Louis for one of the smallest American gigs in quite some time at the Fabulous Fox Theatre in St. Louis. HT Executive

Aerosmith – Unplugged: The Full Show [MP3s] In 1990, Aerosmith performed in front of an intimate audience as part of MTV’s Unplugged series of acoustic performances. The band had been

Welcome to the final installment of the second season of Randy Ray’s stellar Hidden Flick column which clues you in on films that may have slipped past your radar. But don’t fret, season three kicks off on August 4 and we’ll feature the best of season two every other Tuesday until season three begins. Here’s a Special Edition of Hidden Flick to close the season properly…

It was an old amphitheatre that was going to be torn down and replaced with…well, the owner just couldn’t say. “I had a few offers to do something with the place, but I couldn’t part with her. She’s special,” said…well, the owner just prefers to remain anonymous, almost like the Stranger, aka the Cowboy Narrator, played by Sam Elliott, in the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski. “Sarsaparilla for all my friends,” as Elliott channels Barfly’s Mickey Rourke in another cinematic dimension.

He seemed to get misty eyed when he spoke of how long he had owned the tiny outdoor venue—it had been used for concerts by no name acts for years, with seats up front, and then a lawn which stretched out far and wide in the back, all leading up to a lot where patrons could park, walk through the entrance booth, and go find a seat, a seat on this night, not to catch a concert, or hear any music whatsoever from any band, but to see a series of films in what is now known as “my little Hidden Theatre at the end of the road,” according to the owner, a gracious chap on this refreshingly mild pre-summer eve. READ ON for more of this week’s Hidden Flick…

In Stop Making Sense, Talking Heads’ magnificent 1984 concert film, you don’t see a lingering shot of the audience until the film’s final song, Crosseyed and Painless. Until this final climactic guitar workout, the audience is purposefully kept hidden — David Byrne and director Jonathan Demme did it so the film-viewing audience could form their own opinion of the show, uninfluenced by crowd reaction. When you finally do see the crowd, they’re all dancing uncontrollably, seemingly enthralled by the performance.

[Photos of David Byrne at Bonnaroo by Dave Vann]

It’s somewhat fitting then, that at Byrne’s June 6 performance at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Va., it took that very song — 11 songs into the 2-hour set — to finally get the typically reserved Wolf Trap crowd up and out of their seats. Maybe it’s understandable; it was the first real Heads heavy hitter in a set which — to that point — was dominant on Byrne’s other work. Perhaps it’s simple irony; just as Stop Making Sense’s Crosseyed and Painless gives visual evidence to Byrne’s power over an audience, the song still does the same thing 25 years later.

And it was the Talking Heads songs that proved most effective and garnered the biggest reactions from the crowd all night (despite Byrne never uttering the band’s name). Byrne smartly tailored his show as a back-heavy affair: after Crosseyed, he played seven Talking Heads songs, making it 11 out of 20 for the night. But where Byrne in the past had played Talking Heads songs with his various solo bands as re-arranged and re-imagined pieces (Example: a slowing down of This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody)), here Byrne and his band largely stuck to the originally Byrne/Eno arrangements.

READ ON for more of Rudi’s thoughts on the David Byrne show…