This was our shared band in college but it had been at least over a decade since we had last seen them perform.
We knew they would perform this song but in light of the recent massacre in Connecticut it was also pretty much a given that its heavy message would be even harder to bear...
Johnette changed many of the words and then she stopped the song midway through and demanded a moment of silence.
Which is a hard thing to instantaneously expect from a concert crowd of about thousand people when they weren't prepared for it.
So it took a second call more along the lines of: "I SAID - A MOMENT OF SILENCE!! DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?!!" to grab everyone's attention.
Still, it seemed like she HAD to do something. And truthfully, the shooting hung over the whole night anyway - whether intentional or not.
They did a cover of Midnight Oil's "Beds Are Burning" and that seemed suffused with (additional) commentary.
They did that song that Johnette did with all the members of the Talking Heads and that seemed like part of the grieving proccess.
During the encore, Johnette rendered an accapella version of Tomorrow Wendy and that seemed like a eulogy.
Bottomline, they are a band with a wide humanistic streak that explores the darker corners of our nature anyway but on a night like last night the music just suffused the room with a powerful mixture of pathos and anger.
It would have been a cathartic performance on par with the time I saw PJ Harvey just two days after 9/11 if not for the fact that they also played "Ghost of a Texas Ladies Man".
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