Performance art, or actual psychoanalysis in progress? Billy Corgan and David Byrne are set to be psychoanalyzed at New York’s Rubin Museum of Arts as part of a series of discussions on the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung. The musicians will appear on separate nights, and will be paired onstage with a psychoanalyst, who will ask them to respond to and interpret a folio from Jung’s Red Book as a jumping off point for a broader conversation.

Corgan will take the stage to be psychoanalyzed on November 14; Byrne’s appearance is scheduled one week later, on November 21st. The Byrne event is sold out, but tickets for Corgan’s sure-to-be-intense session are still available. For those unable to attend, audio and video podcasts of the sessions will be made available at some point after the events.

Taking to his blog, David Byrne recently criticized U2’s touring excess after playing a date in Warsaw; claiming that U2’s mega tour effectively subsidized smaller, lower-grossing performances at the venue where he performed, since the money lost on less-lucrative productions would be made back once U2 hit the stage. Byrne went on to say:

Those stadium shows may possibly be the most extravagant and expensive (production-wise) ever: $40 million to build the stage and, having done the math, we estimate 200 semi trucks crisscrossing Europe for the duration. It could be professional envy speaking here, but it sure looks like, well, overkill, and just a wee bit out of balance given all the starving people in Africa and all. Or maybe it’s the fact that we were booted off our Letterman spot so U2 could keep their exclusive week-long run that’s making me less than charitable? Take your pick — but thanks, guys!

Yeah, Bono- what about the starving people in Africa? It’s interesting that despite the singer’s effort to brand himself as a messiah for Africa’s cause, Bono has made no attempts to limit the impact, environmental or monetary, of U2’s tour. A STORM IS BREWING.

Photos and words by Rez Avissar

You can read reviews of this show all over the internet. I’ll just deliver with my 2 cents: The weather was perfect, the sound (at least up front) was great, Byrne’s voice sounded full after all these years, the Gala after-party (open bar!) was actually awesome, the amount of people that came out was mind-boggling (I read somewhere close to 30,000). As many reviewers point out, at 57, Byrne is in fantastic form. The press area in front of the stage had about 10-15 feet or so between the stage and the first row, and by the time the band was beginning to hit its stride, somewhere between “Heaven” and “Crosseyed and Painless,” everyone was up out of their seats and the area filled up with a sea of excited, dancing bodies, which remained there for the remainder of the 2-hour long set. That stride never lost steam from there, and of course the more well-known Talking Heads tunes got the most people rowdy and jerking around. One of those concerts where everything goes right.
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Our bros, who we just so happen to share some very close quarters with, recently produced a whole magazine dedicated to Mr. David Byrne. As if giving the man an entire publication and calling him an “icon” wasn’t enough, now he’s giving aural tours of his office for them.
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[Photos and words by Rez Avissar]

Big concert, and currently, every mag large and small in New York is raving about how amazing it was. I had to come out to check out what was in store, as the lineup read like a who’s who of upper-echelon indie rock, crowned by Byrne, plus Sharon Jones!?!? Of course, when you pack this many acts into a night something has to give, and each artist performed four songs or less, sort of bite-sized micro-sets.
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