On October 5, 1983, Talking Heads brought the Speaking in Tongues tour to the Broome County Veterans Memorial Arena in Binghamton, a Wednesday-night general-admission show at $10.50 a ticket, wedged between the Providence Civic Center the night before and Rochester’s War Memorial the night after. The band was riding “Burning Down the House,” their first Top 10 single, and the 22-song setlist logged for the night opened with “Psycho Killer” before building through “Slippery People,” “Life During Wartime” and “Once in a Lifetime,” with a nod to the Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” and Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” before a “Crosseyed and Painless” encore. It was the same tour Jonathan Demme would film two months later at the Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles for Stop Making Sense. Forty-three years on, the Southern Tier can say it saw that show before the rest of the world did.
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