The 1960s band David Lynch always wanted to see live: “I don’t think it gets much better”
In Lost Highway, during an eerie, tense nightclub scene where reality fractures and fragments and characters fold into one another, director David Lynch runs the synth-heavy Smashing Pumpkins’ track, ‘Eye’. The hypnotic electronic throb is at once an exact sonic rendering of Lynch’s surrealist world and evidence of his incredible taste in music.
Though first and foremost a film director, the multi-hyphenate icon was also an active musician and sound designer, though he humbly described himself as a “non-musician”. Creating and using music necessitates the ability to find good music: It may sound like an easy feat now, with algorithms and marketing straight to our pockets, but this was a hard task back in the day.
Lynch, however, had the ear as well as the eye, and famously attended The Beatles’ first-ever concert in the US at the Washington Coliseum on February 11th, 1964, and had a single word for the live affair: “Phenomenal”.
The stage was set up in the middle of a boxing ring, which was a prognostication of the violent frenzy that’d come after the Fab Four played their last song. Fans leapt over police barricades and snatched at the group as they left, like a pack of wild animals let out of their cages for the first time, and after that night, any other concert would pale in comparison.
But the man with the esoteric mind was a collector of experiences, sounds and images, and he favoured music of a less mainstream air, too, like Pink Floyd.
In 2010, when the Mulholland Driver director was asked if there were any gigs he wished he had attended, he shared, “My son played me Pink Floyd performing ‘Comfortably Numb’ at some giant arena with a light show, and I don’t think it gets much better than that”.
‘Comfortably Numb’ is one of Pink Floyd’s most celebrated tracks, and hails from an experience that sounds a lot like a Lynchian short film: Roger Waters was suffering from a severe illness in Philadelphia in 1977, but he also had a show to put on. One relaxant shot later, he was up on stage, performing blissfully but with a complete cognitive disconnect from his body. Like Lynch, Waters was reaching out into the darkness where his mind and body split.
The epic orchestral flourishes and soaring guitar solos would make for an incredible live show, one Lynch wishes he could’ve seen. However, as some of his more intimate scenes will detail, he loves a girl with a guitar and a dream just as much as the rest of us. He had a follow-up answer to the question, nodding to a stripped-back folk acoustic cover of Lady Gaga’s dancefloor hit, ‘Bad Romance’.
Lynch gushed, “There’s this girl Lissie, she does a cover of Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’. Gaga is amazing too, but this is stripped down man; it’s raw. Lady Gaga is much more about production, but still cool”. It is indeed an incredible cover, and Lynch might be the only creator of our generation who is able to give great music recommendations from beyond the grave.
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