David Byrne Brings One of Rock’s Greatest Tours to Hollywood Bowl

Well, Brady Corbet has got his work cut out for him.

That was one of the first thoughts that came to mind soon after David Byrne and company took the stage for the first of two shows at the Hollywood Bowl this weekend. It stemmed from an announcement having come out just one day earlier that Corbet, the director of “The Brutalist,” had already shot shows along Byrne’s long-running tour, in 70mm, for the purposes of a feature film. The proper first response to that news was delight, that one of the most striking tours of all time, now coming to a close, was going to be captured for posterity by a visually inventive filmmaker. And the inevitable second response should have been: Yes, but how can he?

At the Bowl, you might have been tempted to make a fleeting mental game out of how a show with this many moving parts — which is to say, constantly moving humans — might be wrassled to the ground for a satisfying screen experience. But ultimately that was too distracting a thought experiment to pursue for very long when, before your eyes, you had one of the greatest shows on earth, and what surely has felt to everyone who has seen it across 140 or so dates like a you had to be there experience. Viewers have come away from the “Who Is the Sky?” shows over the past year like glassy-eyed cultists, suddenly feeling, as corny as it sounds, like it’s good to be alive. And to cut off one letter to reduce that thought into Pollstar terms: It’s good to be live.

For anyone who hasn’t been caught up on the conceptual conceits of this particular tour, a thumbnail description goes something like: “‘American Utopia,’ but better.” (Sorry, Spike Lee, helmer of the previous tour’s pretty good film rendering.) Byrne had started reinventing the concert wheel a long time ago, in the “Stop Making Sense” days, but he really gave things a revolutionary twist with the 2018 tour that rethought how musicians could be made to be seen behave on stage, essentially as sort of free-range chickens, untethered to any visible wires or technology or anything except adherence to brilliant choreography. But “American Utopia” was a monochrome affair, all grey suits and static, beaded curtains, which was a decent enough way of framing the players. “Who Is the Sky?” is the expansion of that idea into stupendous Technicolor, using everything from elaborate LED backdrops and floorings to glow-in-the-dark sneakers to create an expansive sense of “moving out in all directions,” to quote “And She Was.” (Along with occasional pauses for the master of ceremonies to stop and give his TED talk.)

For these Bowl shows, Byrne — or somebody — had the ingenious idea to have the concerts opened by the USC Trojan Marching Band, who managed to squeeze a freshly minted Dolly Parton tribute into their hits medley. (There was a little bit of booing, apparently from UCLA partialists, when they first appeared, but look, Bruins, ‘SC earned lifetime rights to this sort of thing by having been booked for “Tusk,” which is still the climax of their set. Life and Lyndsey Buckingham aren’t fair that way.) The Trojans, who took up too much floor space on the Bowl stage to do any marching, per se, were themselves preceded by Stroll Groove, a small dance troupe that specializes in the slightly nostalgic art of stepping. Something both these openers have in common is a sense of self-containment, that you could set them down in any amphitheater or park and they could do their thing, even if Byrne’s production is too high-tech to really be that movable a feast.

But in some sense, booking the USC band was a sly way of giving away the magic trick, almost. Byrne and his dozen musicians and dancers are a marching band, too, in all of their glorious mobility and wirelessness. There is no quick and easy way to summarize exactly what it is this talented crew is doing, when that is constantly changing, but it always involves constant changes in where people are located on stage and what they’re up to, and even whether they are moving together in close formation or allowed to be funky and free for a few moments before the choreography tightens up again. Even the instrumentation is constantly shifting, and there’s a constant sense of happy disbelief that the full arrangements we’re hearing are actually emanating from the relatively few dancing musicians who are interacting with the singer-hoofers. (If we can count on anybody not to cheat on that, it’s probably Byrne.) It’s as if every instrument you ever imagined was somehow adapted into being the equivalent of a key-tar. But, obviously, marching band and first-line directors have been dealing with these issues since time memorial, so Byrne is innovating as part of a fine tradition.

Not enough can be said in praise of how, in a world where LED screens are ubiquitous on every big tour, Byrne’s design is especailly well-thought-through. We can add the caveat here that the Dolby Theatre down the street in Hollywood, where this show played last November, was the ideal size for this production, where the screens provided a more immersive experience. At the Bowl, from a distance, even screens that fill up two-thirds of the width of the stage can feel postage stamp-sized. But it was still spectacle enough for 17,500 people, whatever the production was scaled for originally.

One of the most imaginative wrinkles in the staging is one the average viewer might not even be noticing, or at least thinking much about. Among the 13 people on stage, not once does anyone ever enter from stage left or stage right, which would be a major distraction, given how frequently these slippery people are coming in or out. Rather, they are making these transitions via the spaces separating the central LED panel from the left and right screens. (There are backdrop panels between the panels, to create a fairly seamless widescreen effect most of the time, or about as seamless as the original three-panel Cinerama ever was.) The show opens with Byrne singing the Talking Heads classic “Heaven” accompanied by only three other musicians — two string players and a keyboardist — in an echo of how the “Stop Making Sense” film portrayed the ensemble starting out small and then getting bigger, much bigger. But here, conversely, the nearly invisible entrances and exits seem designed not to leave you consciously thinking about how many of the participants are or aren’t on stage at a given time. You just know that, quickly, it comes to be a lot. And somehow, the ensemble comes to intuitively feel like some kind of wildly friendly vision of our shared humanity — their uniform orange jumpsuits symbolizing our commonality, even as the cast’s movement and playing exemplified our rich differences.

That description may sound lofty for what is, after all, a rock ‘n’ roll show. But Byrne has a way of putting you in that heady space. At the conclusion of “Heaven,” he and the initially small crew of musicians took a time out to just stand in front of the still image of earth, taken from outer space, and let everyone consider our island home from a distance for a minute. “There she is,” he said. “Our heaven. As seen on TV. The only one we have.” He could wax on about the natural order of things, and our unnatural response to it. Introducing another song later on, Byrne talked about animals and asked, “Who’s to say that they’re not feeling something similar inside to what we feel? We don’t know. This separation between us and nature, animals and plants and everything else began a long time ago, but it really kicked into gear only a few hundred years ago, and we’ve been living with the consequences ever since. The good news is it doesn’t have to be that way forever.”And then he and the band performed “What Humans Do,”with an overhead screen showing footage of the group playing the song with animal masks on.

There were, of course, numbers that emphasized the world-scrutinizing whimsy he has brought to much of his material over the past 50 years. “I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party” is a song with a rather self-explanatory title, which didn’t stop Byrne from prefacing it with a short, funny lecture about different ways the Buddha has been portrayed throughout history, including one where “he was given a retractable penis. Now we’re getting somewhere! Now, maybe half of you in the audience will say, ‘What’s so special about that? I’ve got one of those.’ But his might have been special.” He even put up a slide show, with “some depictions (that) have him looking like a young, handsome monk with a kind of bun hairdo and extraordinarily large ears. Other depictions have him (as) a rather more corpulent fellow with Robert Smith’s makeup.” Sure enough, the accompanying illo got a laugh. Divine figures like their pastries and pancake mascara, too, just like us new-wave veterans.

Byrne has a part of the show each evening, apparently, in which he catches everyone up on what he did in town that day, photo montage included. On Friday, he said, with the band having taken the train up from San Diego, as touring rockers are wont to do (?), he then “biked from Union Station to our hotel in West Hollywood, which was kind of a crazy thing to do, but I did it. And I did it so I could take some pictures. Here we go.” He put up pics from Grand Central Market — “things to take home, things to consume on the premises,” he remarked, which sounded like a line from an early Talking Heads song. He showed geometric patterns he enjoyed on a concrete restraining wall: “Los Angeles works very hard to constrain nature — keep nature from burning the city down, washing the city away, having the city roll down the hill.” And, then, a famous east Hollywood haunt. “Now we’re getting somewhere, right? Everybody’s been to Jumbo’s Clown Room. Oh, boy. I’m not gonna say anything about this place that features these lovely Thai ladies. But yes… If you’re looking to meet a clown, if that’s your thing, this is the place to go.”

But for all those stand-up routine elements, he was mostly serious. Byrne introduced “When We Are Singing” with clips of Italians singing on their balconies during quarantine — “they happened to have really nice voices” — on Liberation Day, the “day they celebrate their freedom from fascism.” That was as political as it got. He prefaced “Everybody’s Coming to My House,” the first encore number, with a notation that his current arrangement of the song is borrowed from the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and he said he realized, “Now I know what this song is about… Some years ago, when the pandemic was easing up, these outdoor restaurants started opening here and there, and I remember riding around on my bike downtown New York, and I heard a sound. It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. Wasn’t quite sure what it was. So I stopped my bike in the middle of the street, got out, listened, and I realized, ‘Oh, it’s people.’ People talking to one another. It had been a while. Whoo! And I thought, ‘Despite all our differences, despite all the craziness, people love being with other people.’”

David Byrne, the one-time psycho-killer channeler who is really just a person who loves people, trying to expand the company of the luckiest people of all.

Bicycling every day, by the way, seems to have served him well. The 74-year-old singer-songwriter is in visibly great shape, keeping up with the agility of his dancer-musician companions at every step, every sway and every sudden crouch. His vocals sound pretty much exactly as they did five decades ago, which is not Caruso, but is a strong and steady continuation of one of rock’s most distinguishable voices. There’s hardly anything happening on stage that he isn’t a direct and equal participant in, without ever overshadowing anyone in his visual orbit… all the way down to the subtle line-dancing homage with thumbs hooked into pockets in the surprisingly country flavored-“Independence Day.”

Some of the visuals that remain in memory: The way his and the other participants’ names appear in the cosmos on screen overhead during one number, corresponding to exactly where they are moving around on the stage below, as if they were stars moving to their own beat through the constellations. The way that “Nothing but Flowers” is backdropped with a liminal space before the cornfield suddenly takes over civilization at the end. The 360 views of his real-life New York high-rise living space during “My Apartment Is My Friend” (a completely unironic ode to how the right home can be your bestie). The mock-drone overhead elation of “And She Was” (introduced with an amusing story about how it was inspired by Byrne’s acid-dropping childhood friend). But sometimes, the imagery didn’t need to be elaborate. The crew’s glowing-in-the-dark orange sneakers, set against a pure deep-blue backdrop, was as weirdly mesmerizing a visual as anything put on stage or screen during the evening.

“We’re only tourists in this life / Only tourists, but the view is nice,” he sang during the penultimate number, before the house inevitably got burned down for the climax. With Byrne as one of the best tour guides we could ever get, the view at the Hollywood Bowl had never been better — sights and sounds that feel like they’re rearranged your molecules, in some way that you hope lasts more than just a couple post-euphoric days.

After about 40 shows last year and 90 more this year, the “Who Is the Sky?” tour will very shortly draw to a close after a few dates in Mexico and a closing night at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens Sept. 19. As for its possible eternal life, if Corbet manages to get even 60% of what this show felt like as well as looked and sounded like onto a 70mm screen, that might be good enough.