What a difference 30 years makes.

Back in 1978, the Talking Heads were playing clubs that barely had functioning toilets and drew small crowds to hear their progressively styled poly rhythms.  Flash forward to 2008, and the Talking Heads are no more, but David Byrne is, and the music he created with his band and producer Brian Eno has gone uptown.  Byrne played at the swanky Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco to a sold-out crowd on Monday, and it was clear the moment he took the stage that he was expecting the audience to be a bit more sedate. However, the crowd was in no mood to politely sit in their seats — they gave Byrne a standing ovation at the outset, and then began to crowd the outer edges of the hall to dance feverishly for the next two hours.

The opening song, “Strange Overtones,” was a mid-tempo number from his new collaboration with Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, and it got some heads nodding and bodies swaying in their seats.  A couple of women in the front row did a kind of hippy-dippy/body and hands undulating dance — only to be told by an usher to sit down or move to the side of the hall.  This was, after all, Davies Symphony Hall, and dancing in front of high-paying patrons was bad form.  Ha! (more…)