In 1978, experimental musician Brian Eno entered a studio with David Byrne and his band the Talking Heads to produce an album that would eventually become known as More Songs About Buildings and Food. More than 30 years later, at Berkeley's Greek Theatre last Friday, a white-haired Byrne played that album's cover of Al Green's "Take Me to the River" to an enthusiastic crowd. Time has passed and the band was dissolved almost two decades ago, but their classics-most of which were created with Eno at the producer's helm-have not dulled.

Less than a year after the release of Eno and Byrne's second non-Talking Heads collaboration, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, Byrne played a surprisingly democratic set, touching on only a few songs from the new work. Instead, he allocated most of the concert to cuts from the golden era of the Talking Heads-mostly, the Talking Heads' Eno-produced masterpiece, Remain in Light.

The songs from that work were bound to be the most exciting, but they were also the most revelatory. Flanked by dancers clothed in white and engaged in an all-out artistic attack, Byrne and his band worked through the first five songs from Remain in Light, and every rendition was a testament to the revolutionary nature of his works.

Even today, his music is a thrilling shock, bold and foreign to most in its West African tendencies. "Crosseyed and Painless" and "The Great Curve" were still hair-raising live, and even the comparatively tamer "Once in a Lifetime" and "Houses in Motion" sent sparks into the crowd. Byrne was also unafraid of occasionally changing the delivery of songs like "Born Under Punches," which adopted an eerier feel with minimal instrumentals and a focus on Byrne's yelps and his backing singers' harmonies.

Comparing these cuts to the performances of the Talking Heads' later '80s works also showed the significance Eno had on the music behind the scenes. Byrne's live rendition of "Burning Down the House" was accompanied by the Bay Area's quirky Extra Action Marching Band and hundreds of balloons, but it was more a blood-pumping than heart-stopping experience; the same was true for "Road to Nowhere." Eno may not be at any stop on Byrne's tour in support of their new album, but he is certainly present in the most emotional and breathtaking moments of the concerts when you realize just how important his effect was.

We often forget of the significance of Byrne's and the Talking Heads' major works. Byrne noted this before he played a reworked version of "Help Me Somebody." It is a track from Byrne and Eno's first non-Talking Heads collaboration, the sample-based My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, whose original "vocals" were sound bytes of a preacher. He hinted at the irony that the album is mostly unknown but was a predecessor to the sampling style that today's music industry depends on. It's easy to ignore past works writers and self-proclaimed rock experts consider revolutionary because we would understandably rather live in the present, but Byrne's concert was proof that no artist has managed to further the ideas that he, Eno and the Talking Heads laid down in the span of a few years, many years ago. Eno is a recluse now, and Byrne is aging and becoming less prolific, but the chance for someone to add to their musical story still exists. And that, as perhaps even Byrne would admit, is more significant than everything else.