By Thomas Conner
© Tulsa World

Dwight Twilley Band
"Sincerely"
"Twilley Don't Mind"
(The Right Stuff)

Tulsa's own Dwight Twilley has more lives than your average
alley cat. The latest reissue of the Dwight Twilley Band's first
two albums is the fourth reissue for both since their original
pressings in '76 and '77, respectively. Every few years, someone at
an indie label discovers the records, their eyes grow wide as 45s
and they begin asking everyone they know, “Why isn't this stuff
hugely popular? Why isn't radio saturated with this guy?'' They
think they've found a pop music gold mine.

They have, of course. Trouble is, bad luck and delays caused
people to miss these records the first time around and, well, it's
hard to convince the masses of a second chance. Pity, because these
two records, particularly “Sincerely,'' are examples of everything
that is great about pop music. The songs are immediate but
timeless. They spark with youthful energy without being base. They
are utterly accessible but remain smart. “I'm on Fire,'' the
opener to “Sincerely'' and Twilley's greatest hit with partner
Phil Seymour, was recorded the night Twilley and Seymour first set
foot in the Church studio here in town — their first time in a
studio, period. “Let's record a hit record,'' Seymour said, and
they did. The chugging guitars, the layered vocals, the infectious
attitude — it's irresistible.

“Sincerely'' brims with that immediacy and remains one of the
most exciting records of my lifetime. “Twilley Don't Mind'' starts
with that same eagerness (“Looking for the Magic,'' featuring Tom
Petty's ringing guitar, is truly intriguing and unique) but slows
down before the flying saucer “Invasion.'' (This “Twilley''
reissue, though, features the best bonus tracks.) Still, these
records are more than mere echoes of Abbey Road — they are
diamonds lost in the rough, but they still shine.


 

By Thomas Conner
© Tulsa World

The bands that best uphold the traditions of sex, drugs and rock
'n' roll are those that don't holler about it. Your basic '80s
hair metal band was no doubt a staunch purveyor
of that triumvirate of debauchery, but how subversive can your fans
feel about the experience when you're waving your fist in the air
at every opportunity and giving away the game with a whooping,
"Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roooooooooll!''?

The warm, wily wash of the Dandy Warhols' trippy roar is more
comfortable — and truly subversive. The sex in the feeling of
these songs isn't employed as a domination strategy. The rock 'n'
roll has less noise, more melody and, as Tom Wolfe might write, O!
the kairos! the vibrations! The drugs are, well, definitely a
factor — though the Warhols' hot single, "Not if You Were the
Last Junkie on Earth,'' and particularly its garish, "Price Is
Right'' kind of video, presents a more poignant case against heroin
than anything the Partnership for a Drug-Free America could stick
on your television.

This is, after all, a band that takes its cues from the Velvet
Underground and T. Rex — and they may be the first band of the
'90s to claim those influences and genuinely deserve the prestige
they transfer.

Last week, Eric Hedford got on the phone to shed some light on
the Dandys experience. Hedford is the band's drummer and occasional
Moog noodler, and he cleared some of the haze surrounding the
band's talent for mooching, its troubled effort making the current
album ("The Dandy Warhols Come Down'' on Capitol Records) and its
chance defiance of categorization.

Thomas Conner: You're in Portland (Ore.)? How did you score this
rare moment at home?
Eric Hedford: Three weeks in sunny Portland, then we go out for
another three months ... We'll be concentrating on the South,
because it's winter. Smart, huh? Last winter we were touring the
north, and we broke down in 70-below weather outside Minneapolis.
We fired our road manager on the spot. We plan to hit Florida this
winter in bathing suits.

TC: How's the tour been going?
EH: We put 30,000 miles on our van. Someone told me that's
once or twice around the whole planet. We've played with Blur, the
Charlatans, Radiohead, Supergrass, Spiritualized ...

TC: Those are all British bands. I thought you were trying to
avoid being called Brit wanna-bes.
EH: There aren't too many American bands we're compatible
with right now. Our mission is to find an American band to tour
with. The closest we got is this Canadian band we've got with us
next. I can't remember their name. (Note: It's Treble Charger, the
opening band for the Tulsa show.)

TC: Do you enjoy life on the road?
EH: It's a trippy way to live. We've got a contest we play
called Guess What the Date Is. I never win, and I've got a watch
with the date on it.

TC: What's different about this tour and your first jaunts with
the debut album, ""Dandy's Rule OK''?
EH: Well, since we just went around the world cramped in a
van, not much. For this next leg, though, we've got a big, rock
tour bus. I'm hoping it's going to have some big, cheesy eagle
painted on the side.

TC: Courtney (Taylor, lead singer) frequently confesses to the
band's winning ability at mooching. Isn't that one of the great
fringe benefits of being a rock star?
EH: All I know is that people are always giving us stuff. I
don't know if this happens with every rock band in America. Maybe
we just attract people doing this. The people who really count are
the ones who give us things like clean socks or fresh food. Those
people become our friends. They'll get invited onto the bus. We get
plenty of beer and stuff, but it's those things we don't get from
home that win us over ... Someone actually gave us socks once after
a show. We thought that was the coolest thing. We threw away our
old ones.

TC: Is there an art to mooching?
EH: Don't take advantage of the small people. Go after the
corporates, the ones with deep pockets. When we started getting
courted by the record companies, we took full advantage of the
thing. We didn't say no to a single person. Every label in
existence was flying us back and forth to L.A. and New York, buying
us these ridiculous dinners and trying to impress us. You have to
jump on that because once you get signed the label doesn't give you
anything. Then you have to sell a bunch of records before they even
send you a bottle of champagne on your birthday.

TC: Wow, a spirit of hedonism in a band — how refreshing. What
happened to that hedonism in rock 'n' roll?
EH: A lot of bands just turned into a big bunch of pansies.
I can't figure it out. But then, we think we party a lot and you
look at someone like Fleetwood Mac — and, man, we're nothing
compared to that. People back in the '70s, like Elton John, they
were crazy. They knew how to live. We work hard, too, though. We're
pretty good at rehearsing, and we play relatively sober, saving the
fun for afterward.

TC: How responsible of you. Well, if this reckless spirit is
creeping back into rock 'n' roll, does that mean grunge is dead?
EH: The mentality lives on, though, as far as that
do-it-yourself spirit goes. I mean, the grunge people were pretty
good at not being pretentious at first, and I liked how most of
them had a good sense of humor. Those are the things we stole from
it, and we grew up around it in Portland. We just never dressed
like that or tried to think we were cooler than everyone else.

TC: Did you consciously try to avoid being like the then-hot
grunge bands?
EH: We started when grunge was still around. It was the
opposing force for us, and we just tried to distance ourselves from
it — not because we didn't like it, really, but because it just
wasn't us. Grunge died out and then we realized that the rest of
the world thinks that if you're from the Northwest, you're a grunge
band. They don't realize that there were a lot of different styles
going on here.

TC: There was some trouble in the making of the new record. What
happened?
EH: We had a false start. We got done with a big tour
(after the first record) and didn't have enough material prepared.
We thought we'd just go into the studio and do an experimental
record. It didn't work. Some of us were stoned all the time, and
some of us didn't care. Capitol heard the record and didn't think
it had any songs on it, so we basically canned it.

We still have the option of releasing it. I don't know if we will.
We went on tour again and wound up focusing on writing good
songs. We still used some of the experimental things we'd learned
and just applied them to the new songs for this record. It worked
out well. It's got new angles -- it's not just 12 pop songs. The
video helped make the single ("Not if You Were the Last Junkie on
Earth'') pretty big, but now we've got all these people coming to
shows expecting them to be all pop. We usually start a show with a
trippy, psychedelic jam, and those people stand there not knowing
what the hell is going on.

We like to take people on a trip — bring them up, bring them
down, make it move a bit. We don't have a set list. We just get a
feel for what mood the crowd is in and start picking songs.
Sometimes that (screws) us up, and sometimes it's incredible.

TC: You're a club DJ there in Portland, too, right?
EH: Yeah. I was doing that Halloween night. I'm still
hungover from that.

TC: How does DJ-ing relate to what you do in the band?
EH: When I'm a DJ, I don't have a set list, either. You
just read the crowd. Also, a lot of my drumming comes from a DJ
perspective. I like that monotonous kind of groove. I'm not a big
rock drummer who likes to do big crashes and solos; I like just
sitting in the background and grooving out. As a DJ, I got into
that monotonous thing. And everyone's saying that electronic music
and stuff is going to be this next big thing, but I don't like
seeing the bands live. They're boring. I do, however, love seeing a
DJ live.

TC: Does the monotonous groove come from the Velvet Underground
influence?
EH: I haven't listened to them a lot myself. Courtney and
Zia (McCabe, keyboardist) listen to them. It's that same idea,
though: the three-chord mentality and not a lot of changes in the
song. You just sink into that trippy groove.

Plus, a lot of it comes from the fact we're just not good
players. We're quite basic, and we admit that, but there's a lot
you can do with the basics and still have fun. That way, we're not
up there worrying about the big, complex chord change that's coming
up.

TC: And the Andy Warhol allusion in your name?
EH: It's just a cool name. That whole pop art scene was
amazing, though. We're notorious for nicking things out of other
decades and throwing them together, and that's what the pop artists
were doing -- taking what people recognized and presenting it
without pretension. You can steal everything and put it together
and say it's a brand-new creation. Then sit back and watch people
run around trying to categorize you.

TC: Been there, done that.
EH: What, the categorizing?

TC: Yep. It can't be done anymore, though. I don't think there
are categories anymore, at least not on the scope for mass culture.
EH: Wow. See? You just come to our show and let all that
fall away. Fall, fall away.

 
Dandy Warhols
With Treble Charger
When 7 p.m. Sunday
Where Cain's Ballroom, 423 N. Main St.
Tickets $5 at the door

By Thomas Conner
© Tulsa World

The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha -- which is to demean oneself.
 
David Byrne, it seems, is a machine.

He's moving around the stage like a plastic doll in some art
student's stop-motion short film, like two successfully fused
halves of the mechanized mannequin parts in Herbie Hancock's
"Rockit'' video. He stepped onto the Cain's Ballroom stage
Thursday night upholstered in a pink, feathered suit, thick and
bulky like the white one in the quintessential video for one of the
disaffected anthems of his former band — the song he's opening the
show with, Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime.'' His voice is
clipped and cold, same as it ever was, and this old, cyclical lyric
spews forth the same questions — where does that highway go to,
and, my God, what have I done? — that none of us gathered for this
otherworldly, Harlan Ellison kind of display have found time to
answer.

He must be a machine. He hasn't aged. By the time the programmed
jungle rhythms for "The Gates of Paradise'' (from his latest
album, "Feelings'') begin tsk-tsk-tsking out of the timid speaker
stack, Byrne has stripped down to a baby blue jumpsuit that
outlines a very svelt and fit 45-year-old.

Grasping his guitar as the chorus riffs, he plants his feet
firmly just inches from the front row of wide-eyed, cautious
onlookers. He's so close that the peghead of his guitar nearly
smacks the hat off the head of Don Dickey, the cheshire-grinning
singer of Tulsa's own Evacuation of Oklahoma.

Byrne is right there in front of us. Two nights previous,
barricades and burly security goons kept a crowd of fanatics a safe
distance from Morrissey, a performer claimed by fans to be coursing
with real, palatable passions and, thus, to be esteemed as utterly
human. This David Byrne model requires no protection. He is a
machine. He must be replaceable.

The five people on this stage are machine components, anyway.
The keyboard player is merely pulling stops and turning knobs to
allow the samples and programs to speak. The drummer plays a live
snare and two cymbals; the rest are computer pads. The plucking and
strumming of the bass and Byrne's guitar are only the beginnings of
the sonic impulses, which — after numerous devices have encoded
the frequencies — are emitted as wholly new and unreal wavelengths.
Even Christina Wheeler, a dancer and backup singer, takes her
turn playing not an instrument but a portable station of sound
processors and compressors that capture her voice and utilize it as
the breath of a larger, more layered sound. The machinery is
co-opting the energy of humanity for its own artistic goals, the
kind of live-vs.-Memorex dichotomy we've seen this year mastered by
Bowie and muddled by Beck.

But this is Byrne, and he doesn't seem to let the technology
control him. If I dashed back to the sound board right now and
severed the power cables with a quick hatchet chop, I'm convinced
Byrne would still be able to make his music. He wears a headset
microphone and dresses his new songs in doo-dad drapery, but there
is a deeper and more fluid sense of art in this display than in
Beck's synthohol or Bowie's ice crystals.

Of all the classics to revive, Byrne starts playing the Al Green
song that gave the Talking Heads the first sign of a human face,
"Take Me to the River,'' and the cold, jerky Devo concert
atmosphere begins to thaw. For "Daddy Go Down,'' a roadie who had
just been adjusting microphone cables reappears on stage with a
fiddle and balances the martial drum machine with Circean sawing.
For "Dance on Vaseline,'' Byrne bops back to the stage wearing a
black T-shirt and a red, plaid kilt (his third costume change thus
far and, for many, the most titillating — a young woman shrieked,
"He's wearing tighty-whities!'') and chuckles about the, um,
slipperiness of love. People are bellowing, People are bouncing.
People are bobbing. Byrne, the efficient showman — show-man --
smiles and shakes and sweats. Machines can't do that.

The music swells and glows, like oceanic phosphorous — pouring
through the sensual balladry of "Soft Seduction,'' foaming with
the borderless joy of "Miss America'' and flowing swiftly through
the righteous riffing of "Angels.'' Finally, the set ends with a
song based on that live snare drum, another Talking Heads anthem --
"Road to Nowhere'' — recorded at the dawning of the derision of
the post-boomer generation and written as a reductio ad absurdum
argument against the prophesies of our detachment and cyberization.
No, we may not know exactly where this highway goes to, but with
Byrne running in place and the rest of us unconsciously jumping up
and down on the Cain's spring-loaded floor, it's clear that the
road leads somewhere and that Byrne is as good a piper to follow as
any.

In fact, he raises us to such cheer and wonder that we won't let
him go. We call him back for an encore.

He returns, this time in the most astonishing costume I've seen
on a public stage: a full-body skin-tight suit, with only eye and
mouth holes, illustrating the body's underlying muscles and bones.
Like an alien child of the gimp in "Pulp Fiction'' and educational
television's Slim Goodbody, Byrne sings a slow, eerie version of
"Psycho Killer'' while climbing across the stage in slow motion.
After folding himself into a yoga posture, the band bows, exits,
and the crowd demands more. Byrne returns in another tight jumpsuit
featuring flames from toe to chest. The rhythm festival cranks up
for "I Zimbra.'' After a shouting, dancing frenzy, the band bows,
exits, and would you believe Tulsa demanded a third encore?
Exhausted and hoping to settle us down so that we'll let him leave,
he returns and plays the new lullaby "Amnesia.''

In our newfound calm, we discover we are at peace. It feels good
to be alive and to be human.

David Byrne, it seems, is very human.


 

By Thomas Conner
© Tulsa World

The only logical place to go after Tuesday night's Morrissey
concert was the Fur Shop, a downtown watering hole just blocks from
the Brady Theater and owned by several fellow Morrissey fanatics.
One of them, Mike Aston, floated through the bar wearing a dumb
grin and one of his dozens of Smiths T-shirts, boasting that he
actually touched his hero at the edge of the stage.

The stereo attempted to play Morrissey's "Kill Uncle'' album,
and the crowd just glowed. Collegiates and curmudgeons alike
maintained airy, blissful faces as they guffawed about the
particular moments of the show — "Did you hear him introduce the
band as a Tulsa band?'' "He couldn't stop touching his hair!'' and
"Look! I got a piece of a stem from the flowers he threw out!''
Complete strangers stopped at our table to discuss the concert.

These were Morrissey fans being ... gregarious. Bring on the
millennium.

The show was short but stunning — and I say this not
solely because I am a lifelong fan of the former Smiths leader. I
had entered the Brady Theater with trepidation, steeling myself for
a letdown. He's so pompous and so British, he'll hate Tulsa and
make fun of us, I thought. He's pushing 40, he's been looking tired
— the publicity photos for the current album have been nothing
short of embarrassing — and he'll have lost his spark, I thought.
By mid-show, I thought, I'll be throwing back into his face his own
lyrics from a song called ""Get Off the Stage'' ("You silly old
man, you're making a fool of yourself, so get off the stage'').

But from the first song, ""Boy Racer,'' when he licked his palm and
criss-crossed his chest with it, all fears were allayed. Clearly,
the man who introduced sexual ambivalence and ambiguity to the
mainstream of popular culture maintains a surprising sex appeal.
The spark is still there, and as the show progressed it grew hotter
and hotter. The crowd, estimated at 1,800 and from throughout the
region, was putty for the next hour.

For a tour that is intended to support the new album,
"Maladjusted,'' he nearly ignored that batch of songs, performing
only the single, "Alma Matters'' (which has more much-needed umph
in concert), and the laborious street-crime dirge "Ambitious
Outsiders.'' Instead, Morrissey and his crack band tore through
material from his last three solo albums, concentrating on 1994's
"Vauxhall and I'' (seven of the 11 tracks).

And then came the Smiths songs. Having not performed the songs
of his old band in several years, the appearance of one Smiths song
— let alone two — was reason for intrigue. Perhaps Morrissey
simply missed singing some of the old standards. Perhaps the recent
royalties lawsuit against him from the Smiths rhythm section — a
case that he lost and is none too bitter about — inspired the
brief retrospective. His lone encore, "Shoplifters of the World
Unite,'' alludes to the former possibility, but the other choice,
"Paint a Vulgar Picture,'' surely indicates the latter.

This was the moment midway through the show in which Morrissey's
real passion surfaced. Until then, he had been dashing and suave,
but his much-revered noble chin had been twisted in more than a few
smirks and possibly derisive comments to the audience ("Thank you
for pretending to know any of these songs''), which screamed and
trembled with as much mania as any Morrissey audience I have
encountered. For "Paint a Vulgar Picture'' (which he introduced as
a Glen Campbell song), though, any provincialism fell aside and we
watched the Morrissey of our heady days of youth — mildly bitter,
endlessly clever, worthy of pity and simultaneously biting and flip.

"Paint a Vulgar Picture,'' from the 1987 posthumous Smiths
album "Strangeways, Here We Come,'' was the first song in which
Morrissey abandoned his lyrical ambiguity and went straight for the
jugular. Its ridicule of the entire music business, as well as the
fanatical fan adoration that feeds him, still rings alarmingly true
after 10 years — and it still backfires, turning the ridicule more
on himself than others. But if the lawsuit was indeed the catalyst
for the kind of passion he poured into this old invective Tuesday
night, perhaps he should be dragged into court before every tour.

But the substance of this show wasn't as titillating as the
style, particularly for a majority crowd that likely had never seen
him live before. (This is Morrissey's first-ever appearance in the
Sooner state, and on this tour he's strangely avoiding Texas, far
more populated with Morrissey fans.) The mere presence of the
godhead before the masses incited the usual frenzy. Beefy security
men fought a hard battle to tear away desperate young men and women
who had managed to crowd-surf onto the stage and wrap themselves
around their hero. It happens at every single Morrissey show, and
he hardly misses a note anymore. After one particularly boisterous
girl had been pried off his person, Morrissey sat down on the stage
and actually seemed to marvel at the occurrence — amazed that it
still happens, even in Tulsa, Okla.

At least he still marvels. When he takes it for granted, that's
when I start singing "Get Off the Stage'' in earnest.


 

By Thomas Conner
© Tulsa World

Let's take a song from David Byrne's latest CD, "Feelings,'' as
an example of our post-postmodern everything-and-the-kitchen-sink
era of art. Knitting together the unabashed, knee-slappin'
country-and-western chorus are delicate, jittery jungle techno
rhythms. Sounds absurd, but it works beautifully.

Or "Daddy Go Down'' — a Cajun fiddle see-saws on a playground
of droning sitars and tell-tale scratching. Walk into your local
record label office and pitch that to a talent scout. See what kind
of looks you get.

David Byrne is used to strange looks. In the 20 years since the
debut of the Talking Heads' first album, he has led that band and
his own solo career through a series of unbelievable and harrowing
stylistic twists and turns, and every time he pitched one of his
art-student ideas, he met numerous odd looks. He's racked numerous
successes — personal (a wedding — at which Brave Combo played --
and a daughter) and commercial (you know the hits — "Once in a
Lifetime,'' "Wild, Wild Life,'' "And She Was,'' etc.) — in those
20 years, though, and there's no good reason to stop now.

"I'm used to the look of bewilderment,'' Byrne said this week
in a telephone interview from a tour stop in Florida. "I just have
to explain that I'm from the same planet you are — you just don't
realize how strange it is out there. You're living in some TV dream
world.''

Fortunately, Byrne has reached a position from which he can act
on his whims with relative freedom. For instance, his record label,
Luaka Bop (a subsidiary of Warner Bros.) signs and produces artists
from around the world that normally wouldn't get looked at twice by
American labels. It cuts out the middlemen and those looks of
bewilderment.

"Look at the new Cornershop record. It looks like it's making
some kind of impact, but if you went to someone and said, 'We have
this band with an Indian singer and their single is about Asha
Bosley, this woman who stars in Indian musicals, and we think it's
a hit record,' they'd look at you like, 'What planet are you from?'
But it worked. Every now and then one of them clicks,'' Byrne said.

Cornershop found success for the same reasons Byrne continues to
astound listeners: they both realize the patchwork potential of pop
music now. They mix styles. They bridge the gaps between musical
genres. They play to our expanding awareness of the world.
It's not intentional, of course. Byrne doesn't hunker down next
to his wall of gold Talking Heads records and plot ways to better
communicate with today's collage minds. His consciousness is a
collage, too, so the music comes out that way.

Upon the release of "Feelings,'' Byrne explained it this way:
"We all seem to have these musical styles and reference points
floating around in our heads, things we've heard at one time or
another that rub off on us — sometimes in small ways, as a feeling
in a melodic turn of phrase, other times in the overall style of a
song. There's a subconscious cut-and-paste going on in our heads
that doesn't seem strange at all. It seems like the most natural
thing in the world. It's the way we live now ... borrowing from the
past and future, from here and there.''

It's the way Byrne lives, anyway, and he said the ideas for
style-melding sneak up on him.

"It doesn't come when you have your forehead furrowed, figuring
out what to do with a song. It comes when you're not paying
attention, when you're making coffee late in the afternoon and
there's a record playing in the background,'' Byrne said. " 'The
Gates of Paradise' is an example of that. I had a jungle record
playing while I was in the kitchen, and my ear caught something. I
realized that the rhythm I was hearing was the same basic beat of
the song I had just been working on.''

In the making of "Feelings,'' those moments came with greater
frequency, Byrne said, because of the way the album was made. The
songs were recorded with musicians and producers all over the world
— the dance trio Morcheeba in London, the Black Cat Orchestra in
Seattle, Devo in Los Angeles, Joe Galdo in Miami and Hahn Rowe in
New York City. No big studios, either — everything was economical,
in home studios.

That contributes largely, Byrne said, to the natural, relaxed
gait of the songs. Nowadays, with advancements in technology and
lower prices, home recordings sound as good or better than those
from big, complicated studios. This is not breaking news to
musicians, but it's a new dynamic to the musical marketplace.

"All artists have gone through this — you make a demo at home
that sounds great, that has this intensity and feel and
spontaneity, and it gets scrubbed clean in the studio. They listen
to the final product and go, "There's something missing here. Why
doesn't this sound as exciting as the demo?' That's an old story,''
Byrne said. "Now we're coming around to where if you take a little
more care when recording the demo, you can release that as the
record.''

That's what Byrne did this time around. The result is an album
that packs a suitcase of musical styles that ordinary musicians
wouldn't be able to carry across the room, but the disc holds
together with a surprising fluidity and coherence. It may be the
most enterprising effort Byrne has tackled since the heady days
with his old band.

"In the beginning, the Talking Heads were always kind of
beat-oriented. Always in the living rooms and the loft there was
R&B in the air as well as experimental music and rock stuff. That
resulted in the same fusion that I think I still capture from time
to time,'' Byrne said. "It's a natural tendency to end up putting
together the different things in your experience. You act out what
you love. That's how different music comes into being. What we call
rock 'n' roll is a patchwork of many different things. It's not
like Elvis Presley had no roots.''

Byrne prefers continuing on his own path, too. The other three
members of the Talking Heads reunited last year without him,
calling themselves simply the Heads and using different vocalists
for each song on the resulting CD "No Talking Just Head.'' Bad
blood still exists between Byrne and his former bandmates, so his
part in the reunion was never an issue.

"Years earlier I had tried to talk to them, and they didn't
want to even talk to me,'' he said. "It's been going on for a very
long time. It just finally got to the point where I realized I was
not in this as a masochist and that I don't need to be whipped and
berated. Music should be a joy. It was time to move on.''

Even when Byrne gets venomous or angry, though, his music
somehow maintains an air of cheer, optimism and hope. Even with a
foreboding lyric like that in "Daddy Go Down,'' the song's
rhythmic momentum instills a crucial air of confidence.
In fact, it's that rhythmic element that pulls off that trick,
Byrne said.

"You can dance to it,'' he said. "For me, you can say
something very bleak and pessimistic, but if you counter it with a
groove, it implies that the human being is going to persevere and
survive. At least, that's what it feels like. Despite what ominous
clouds gather, the groove and the life force is going to pull you
through.''


David Byrne
with Jim White
When: 7 p.m. Thursday
Where: Cain's Ballroom, 423 N. Main St.
Tickets: $20 at the Ticket Office at Expo Square, Mohawk Music,
Starship Records and Tapes, the Mark-It Shirt Shop in Promenade
Mall and the Cutting Edge in Tahlequah