Dallas Morning News

Lost Cause - David Byrne, Lucinda Williams and Terry Allen

Inattentive Byrne, audience undermine memorial benefit: On paper, it had the makings of a magical one-of-a-kind concert: David Byrne, Lucinda Williams and Texas singer-pianist Terry Allen on one-stage, singing together and playing whatever tunes tickled their collective fancy.
But in reality, the magical moments were few and far between during a 2-1/2- hour show where forgotten lyrics, aborted songs and ignorant audience members were par for the course.
Tueday night's Byrne-Williams concert at the Red Jacket was a memorial benefit for C.B. "Stubb" Stubblefield, whose barbecue restaurants in Lubbock and Austin were the sites of many a jam session. Ms. Williams was a friend of Stubb's, as was Mr. Allen, who is designing a statue of the restaurateur——fittingly, holding a plate of barbecue——to be erected in Lubbock later this year.
Mr. Byrne told the sold-out club that he didn't know Stubb but wanted to play the show as a matter of principle.
"Building a statue for a guy who ran a barbecue joint . . . now that sounds like a good idea to me," said the former Talking Head, who was in Texas for last weeks Southwest Music and Media Conference.
Yet while his spirit was willing, Mr. Byrne's brain was foggy as he struggled to remember how several of his old songs went.
"I think I'm in the wrong key," he said, halting a tune from True Stories to which he later forgot the words. Later, he screwed up the lyrics of his 1979 ballad "Heaven" so many times that he decided to shift gears into "Life During Wartime (a.k.a. "This Ain't No Party, This Ain't No Disco").
It was no use. "Wartime" might be one of the Heads' best-known songs, but apparently not to Mr. Byrne.
"This has got too many words," he said, pulling the plug on the number after botching the lyrics.
Let the record state that he did get the words right to "Psycho Killer." But that's probably because all those "fa-fa-fas" are pretty easy to remember.
Mr. Byrne fared much better when he played electric guitar on Mr. Allen's songs or teamed with Ms. Williams for lovely harmonies on her tragic tales "Greenville" and "Lake Charles." And while Ms. Williams relied too heavily on the exact same song introductions she used in December at the Gypsy Tea Room (as well as last week in Austin at SXSW), she was in fine form as usual.
"Change the Locks" took on a dark, almost horrific sound, and she later transformed "Still I Long for Your Kiss" from a love song into a chilling, suicidal dirge.
Too bad more people weren't listening. Judging from all the nonstop chattering——much of it coming from the club's VIP balcony——a fair share of the crowd thought that it was a cocktail party where a concert just happened to break out."