David Byrne, Ex-Head Blows Some Heads Off: Live At Kewit Hall In Omaha 10/17/08

Story by Mark Green 

| Published Oct 28, 2008

A guy with 2-foot dreadlocks is dancing on his chair.

David Byrne is onstage playing his legendary addition to the canon of rock, “Burning Down the House.” A male dancer is doing the leapfrog off Bryne’s back.

I untuck my shirt for maximum dancability. Even the usher who looks like a heavyset Sarah Palin is clapping along.

And I ask myself, well, how did I get here?

And where is that large automobile?

This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife…

Anyways, my failing Lehman Bros. stock is something else, but tonight I’m having a good time right here in Omaha.

After getting my hopes high about seeing a kickass post-Election Day version of “Rockin’ in Free World,” Neil Young cancelled his Nov. 5 show here.

Well, at least I didn’t have to hear Death Cab for Cutie as the opening band….

So I decided I’d take my Ticketmaster refund and go see another living legend, one of the most influential dudes to make music since cavemen first picked up rocks: David Byrne.

The lead Head of, you know, the Talking Heads, the guy who is indirectly responsible for the term Radiohead (a moniker adopted by a popular alternative rock band in the early 90’s).

You hear David Byrne in almost every girl or boy who steps on stage in Converse’s and decides, instead of singing about love or money, to make up some lyrics about buildings and food.

So a guy who is so cool that he could totally ignore the Breadbasket and only play select theaters in Europe and New York is playing in Omaha.

Q:What’s better than that?

A: He’s only playing the songs he wrote or produced with Brian Eno, the legendary British producer and songwriter who is currently cryogenically frozen and in orbit around Venus until April 2011.

His coworker, Mr. Bryne, is just a young 56 year old and apparently riding his bike a lot. He’s getting sun, looks muscular and starting the rock and roll early these days.

The show started a quarter after 8, and the performance hall didn’t sell booze (no booze, what the hell...).

Tonight was a big night for me. I even ate at a restaurant I can’t pronounce and wore a suit. The suit was nice because it made the usher think I was a respectable citizen.

Tonight was the reverse of every rock show I’ve ever attended: it started on time, I wasn’t in a sea of sweaty bodies,the majority of the crowd wasn’t on drugs or drunk and the sound didn’t suck.

When the band took the stage in their all-white uniforms the crowd stood up, clapped a bunch and sat down.

This continued until everyone stood up when they played “I Zimbra,” the Heads’ first venture into world music on 1979’s “Fear of Music.”

Three backup dancers in all white took the stage and they spent the majority of the show frollicking.

It was hilarious to hear the backup singers crooning the lyrics taken from the Dadaist poem “Gadji beri bimba” by Hugo Ball: “A BIM BERI GLASSALA ZIMBRABIM E GLASSALA TUFFM I ZIMBRA.”

Byrne’s backing band was two percussionists, a bass player, three backup singers, a guy on keys and himself on wireless guitar, which became useful for running and bunnyhopping around stage.

And yes, they completely nailed all of the Talking Heads songs.

As the night went on, the crowd rose and fell according to the song. Most would sit down for the slower, more contemplative new pieces off Byrne and Eno’s newest release, “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.”

Then he’d pull out something like “Heaven,” which really isn’t a dance-along song to begin with, but most of the house would sort of stand up and sway like it would make us all closer somehow.

This ebb and flow of the crowd continued throughout the night, with a few lesser known songs and then a Heads gem here and there.

Although it should be said that the diehards in the front were standing all night.

And then, near the end of the show, the band started pulling out the serious Heads hits: “Once in a Lifetime,” “Life During Wartime,” their cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River.”

At this point, it became socially agreed that we should all just stand up and rock out, even if we are in some fancy place with ushers and we can’t drink booze or smoke any reefer.

It was just a giant sigh of relief when everyone said, “Fuck it, this song is awesome, let’s have a good time.”

When the show ended, Mr. Byrne and company treated the crowd to three encores. For the second encore he played “Air” from “Fear of Music,” a song which Byrne said the band had never played.

He didn’t want to think about the number of years it had been since he last played it. And yes, David, I do agree that “some people don’t know shit about the air.”

After a short pause, Bryne approached the mic in his perfectly disarming geeky posture and said something about a song that “they learned from a marching band in San Francisco,” followed by a few unmistakable guitar notes.

And then, with a little bit of drums and a swipe of the keyboards, the song we’d all been waiting for fell from the sky:

“Burning Down the House,” although not produced by Eno, is probably the Heads most well-known song. It’s a song known by people who don’t even know who the Talking Heads are.

It’s a song I remember hearing in the grocery store when I was six years old.

So it was beautiful when I turned around to see a three-tiered fancy performance hall being torn up by mostly middle-aged white men dancing with their wives.

A few rows in front of me, a guy in his 60’s who looked like Kurt Vonnegut was dancing in the aisle and grinning from ear to ear.

This place can be a fancy sit-down opera joint tomorrow, but tonight it’s time to throw our arms in the air and shout along:

“BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE!”