by Debra D’Alessandro, Host/Producer, Amazon Country, XPN

I was about 16 years old when the Talking Heads toured with the “Stop Making Sense” album. When my brother Jim offered to take me to the concert (because a friend who planned to go with him bagged at the last minute), I was thrilled. Jim is 6 and ½ years older than me, so getting to go to a concert with my 22-year-old brother and his friends was beyond cool. My first concert experience was two years before, when Jim took me to see Al DiMeola, with Spyro Gyra as the opening act for my 14 th birthday; Jim’s always had wide-ranging musical tastes…it runs in our family. In the interceding years, I had seen Jethro Tull, Allman Brother’s Band, Dan Fogelberg, and the Charlie Daniels Band with friends. At the Talking Heads concert, I LOVED that people thought I was old enough to be his date (even though the suggestion also skeeved us both -– yuck, that’s my brother!). The concert was at the Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh (a fine venue almost lost, but now restored), and I remember thinking to myself -– “This man is an amazing musician! I am in the presence of a genius!” The concert began with Byrne alone on stage, and on each successive song an additional band member would join him. It took 5 or 6 songs to get the entire band assembled. There was a slide show in time with the music -– major multi-media in the age before MTV. The event bonded me with my brother in a very special way, and solidified our joint love of all kinds of music. It also began a habit of sharing new artists with each other that thrills us to this day.