Review: David Byrne @ Wolf Trap
In Stop Making Sense,
[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…
