David Byrne Gets Mean

David Byrne was on TV, doing some sort of concert special. He was back with the Talking Heads, but they were billed as "David Byrne and the Talking Heads." Now and then he'd just look at them and they'd look at their shoes or shrug sheepishly. It was obvious who was in charge.

David Byrne was wearing a nice suit made out of feathers and glitter. He called it his chicken suit, but it looked really nice, not like a hideous novelty chicken suit.

I was taping this show for posterity. It ended, so I took the tape out of the machine, rewound it and labeled it. I made sure to pop out the write-protect tab. I was only half watching the show that came on next, being busy with the tape.

The next show was a gritty cop drama. It was set somewhere warm and flat, and it seems to have been filmed in the 1970s. Everything seemed a little too orange, just like '70s film stock. The main characters were two policemen, one square and one nut, as usual. Oddly, David Byrne was playing the crazy partner. He wasn't just funny-eccentric-crazy, he was scary-dangerous-crazy. He wore the big white suit from "Stop Making Sense," and it stayed immaculately clean and pressed through all the gunfights.

The big white suit seemed to hold a lot of guns. David Byrne just kept yanking enormous firearms out of his suit and shooting bad guys with it. There was a lot of on-camera violence, way too graphic and realistic for '70s broadcast TV. A gunfight would start, and Byrne would say something like "You scum, get the hell off my streets," in a frighteningly calm voice. Then he'd methodically shoot a lot of people. A bullet would hit his suit or his car, and then there would be a close-up of his face as it went from impassive to very, very angry. Then he'd start shrieking incoherently and jump around, doing some kind of combination of martial arts and marksmanship.

Once that happened in a warehouse while his partner was away. The normal partner came back and found him crouched, hyperventilating in a pool of gore. "Jeezus, Scooter. What happened here?" said the sane partner, then patted David Byrne on the head to calm him down.

It seemed like a weird show. I think Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks showed up at one point. I was annoyed for missing the first ten minutes. I could have put it on the tape with the concert!

I told Poppa, and he said that it looked like a pilot, so they'd probably show it again later.