Miley Cyrus Shared the Stage with Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, and Laurie Anderson at Carnegie Hall
Philip Glass, the Flaming Lips, and Dev Hynes also performed at the annual Tibet House benefit.
vanityfair.com
BY MELISSA LOCKER – 6th March 2015
On Thursday night, Miley Cyrus popped up onstage at Carnegie Hall alongside Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, and Laurie Anderson, a trio of women who were downtown New York legends long before her 1992 birthdate. It was the annual Tibet House benefit concert organized by the composer Philip Glass. While Cyrus was at the show as a spectator, she couldn’t resist the pull of the concert’s traditional all-star end jam.
“She showed up and I said, ‘You gotta run out there with us,’” Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips told VF.com about his friend and occasional collaborator, Cyrus. “She said, ‘I don’t know the song!,’ but I pointed out that none of us know the song very well.”
Thanks to that irrefutable logic, Cyrus walked onstage to sing Smith’s punk anthem “People Have the Power” alongside the likes of Smith, Harry, Anderson, and indie R&B musician Dev Hynes, alt-country rising star Sturgill Simpson, fiddler Ashley MacIsaac, and Tibetan musician Tenzin Choegyal.
BY NEILSON BARNARD/GETTY IMAGES FOR TIBET HOUSE.
That’s when the audience rushed the stage of Carnegie Hall, a relative rarity for the staid institution, but par for the course for the Tibet House concerts. All proceeds from the show benefit the nonprofit Tibet House U.S., an educational institution that works to promote and preserve Tibetan culture and heritage.
Over the years, the show has come to be known for its unlikely collaborations. Thursday’s iteration featured Glass, the Flaming Lips, singer Julianna Barwick, the Scorchio Quartet, and Smith’s daughter doing a cover of David Bowie’s “Warszawa.” Harry performed a medley that ended with the audience on their feet for the Blondie classic “Heart of Glass.” Anderson performed a piece with Scorchio Quartet’s Martha Mooke, and took part in a haunting music/reading hybrid of the “Heart Sutra,” from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Smith read a birthday poem in honor of the Dalai Lama, who turns 80 later this year, before performing with her band.
This American Life host Ira Glass read two Allen Ginsberg poems accompanied by his cousin Philip on the piano. “Usually I don’t get to perform anything so grand. Usually all the performing I’m doing is much quieter, so it was fun to do something so huge,” the public-radio fixture said. (He laughed and walked away when we pressed for details about Serial’s second season.)
“It’s really insane,” said Hynes, who performs and produces as Blood Orange, of the star level in the room. “It was so surreal. Even Tenzin, who I just met yesterday, is so incredible that I feel star struck around him now.”
Anderson, the acclaimed storyteller and performance artist—and Lou Reed’s widow—has a long history with the Tibet House organization. She performed at the first-ever benefit concert, on a bill that included Spalding Gray, Ginsberg, and Philip Glass. “It was kind of like this one,” Anderson said. “It was a very unique audience filled with people interested in Tibetan culture and meditation and it tended to be a lot of artists. It was an eclectic mixture.”
As for ending up on a stage with Miley Cyrus a few decades later, Anderson laughed: “It was fun!”
