Rock's Renaissance Man

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"We weren't your typical American family," Celia says, and her brother adds, "My parents fostered a little bit of a view of us as outsiders. They are very happy, but they never completely adapted." It wasn't simply that the Byrnes had teatime in the afternoons -- a habit in which David still indulges -- or that Tom Byrne seemed to others to be just the kind of mildly eccentric technowhiz who really could, as family legend insists, have once fixed a submarine with a coat hanger. The Byrnes were politically active and socially liberal; Emma Byrne is a Quaker. Folk and Scottish music was played in the house, and the Byrnes seemed to be the only parents around who were not making speeches and threats about everything from loud rock to long hair.

Music had always been important, of course -- by high school, David was onto the violin, accordion and guitar -- but Emma remembers an art and music exposition in Montreal that sent her 15-year-old son off in another direction. "As soon as we came back," she says, "David spent the next few months in the basement, painting and just doing things all day." Some of David's efforts are still to be seen in the town house in Columbia, Md., where the Byrnes live now, including a comic strip he drew to illustrate some personal notions of paradise. "When we die," says one frame of the strip, "there is a party in heaven."

David took honors classes at high school, but it was extracurricular action that got his full attention. Early attempts at mainstream musicianship met with some resistance. He was rejected from the choir at Arbutus Junior High because, the teacher told his parents, David was "off-key and too withdrawn."

Yet a few years later he was playing Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell tunes at a campus coffeehouse near the University of Maryland. A lot of Byrne's high school classmates were going into the military, but, Celia says, "David wanted to go to art school. Teachers and guidance counselors tried to talk him out of it. My family was supportive though. They just wanted us to be happy."

Art school liberated Byrne. He logged time at two of them, the Maryland Institute's College of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. He was formally enrolled at R.I.S.D. for just two semesters but subsequently spent one year hanging out and letting his fantasies roam wild. "He was doing conceptual art," Tina Weymouth remembers. "David has never been one for draftsmanship." Byrne earned some money working the grill at a hot dog stand but largely devoted himself to experimental extravagance. At Maryland he formed a duo called Bizadi with an accordion-playing friend, and would sometimes perform with a lighted candle on his violin bow.