How Music Works (6 page)

depressing. Maybe the costumes and headdresses made it seem like too much

of a “show” for this bunch, who valued what they imagined as blues-guitar

authenticity? But authentic blues played by white English guys? It made no

sense. I couldn’t figure it out, but I could see that innovation wasn’t always appreciated and that audiences could be nasty.

Later, when I was in art school, I caught James Brown at the Providence Civic Center. It was the best show I’d ever seen; it was so tight and choreographed 34 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

that it seemed to be from another planet, a planet where everyone was incredible. He had sexy go-go dancers who just danced the whole show, and though it was exciting as hell, this too put any thoughts of being a professional musician out of my head—these folks were in the stratosphere, and we were just amateurs. That didn’t take any of the enjoyment out of the amateur experience; I’m just saying I didn’t have some transformative moment after seeing these acts when I immediately knew that was what I wanted to do. No way.

I was musically curious, and sometimes I would check out performers

whose music I was only slightly aware of. I saw Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the

jazz saxophonist, at the Famous Ballroom in Baltimore, a downtown venue

with glitter cutouts of rocket ships on the walls. I realized there that jazz wasn’t always the staid, almost classical and reserved style I’d presumed—it was a show too. It was about musicianship, sure, but it was also about entertainment. Kirk sometimes played two or three horns at once, which seemed

like the musical equivalent of playing the guitar with your teeth or behind

your back or even smashing it—a stage gimmick. But it got everyone’s atten-

tion. At one point he took audience interaction to new “heights”: he gave out bumps of cocaine on a little spoon to folks up front!

After having played on the streets of Berkeley, back on the East Coast Mark

and I opened for a wonderful local band called the Motels at the art-school auditorium. I shaved off my scraggly beard on stage while Mark played accordion and his girlfriend held up cue cards written in Russian. I didn’t have a mirror and couldn’t manage the razor very well, so there was a fair amount of blood. Needless to say, that kept the audience’s attention, though the bloodletting drove some of them away. In retrospect, it seems I was saying goodbye to the old

immigrant guy in the dark suit. I was ready to embrace rock and roll again.

A brief flash forward—when I first moved to New York, I caught Sun Ra

and his Arkestra at the 5 Spot, a jazz venue that used to be at St. Mark’s Place and Third Avenue. He moved from instrument to instrument. At one point

there was a bizarre solo on a Moog synthesizer, an instrument not often associated with jazz. Here was electronic noise suddenly reimagined as entertainment! As if to prove to skeptics that he and the band really could play, that they really had chops no matter how far out they sometimes got, they would

occasionally do a traditional big band tune. Then it would be back to outer

space. There was a slide show projected on the wall behind the band, com-

memorating their visit to the pyramids in Egypt, and much of the time Sun Ra DAV I D BY R N E | 35

was wearing spectacles that had no glass in them. They were “glasses” made

of bent wire that looped into crazy squiggles in front of his eyes. In its own cosmic way, this was all show business too.

In 1973 my friend Chris Frantz, who was about to graduate from the paint-

ing department of the Rhode Island School of Design, suggested that we put

together a band. We did, and he proposed we call ourselves the Artistics.

Being more social and gregarious than I was, Chris pulled in some other musicians. We began by doing cover songs at loft parties in Providence. We must

have done a Velvets or Lou Reed song or two, and some garage-rock songs as

well—“96 Tears,” no doubt—but interestingly, at Chris’s suggestion, we also

did an Al Green cover, “Love and Happiness.”

I began to write original material around this time, now that I had a band

that I hoped would be willing to perform my compositions. I still had no

ambitions to become a pop star; writing was purely and simply a creative outlet for me. (My other artistic medium at the time was questionnaires that I’d mail or pass out. Not many came back completed.) The song “Psycho Killer”

began in my room as an acoustic ballad, and I asked Chris and his girlfriend Tina for help on it. For some reason I wanted the middle eight section to be in French, and Tina’s mom was French, so she had some skills there. I imagined

that this serial killer fancied himself as a grand and visionary sophisticate in the model of either Napoleon or some Romantic lunatic. “Warning Sign” was

another song written then; I remember the live version being painfully loud.

Another guitar player in that band, David Anderson, was probably even less

socially adept than I was, and he was a great and somewhat unconventional

performer. Chris joked that we should have called the band the Autistics.

Glam rock was the new thing. Bowie made a big impression on me, and at

one point I dyed my hair blonde and sewed myself some leather trousers. No

doubt this made for a striking image at the time in little Providence, Rhode Island. What might be okay as a stage get-up was maybe stretching things as

street wear. I was flailing about to see who I was, switching from an Amish

look to a crazy androgynous rock-and-roller—and I wasn’t afraid in the least to do so in public.A

There were also some discos in Providence, and I remember hearing the

O’Jays and the Three Degrees and other Philadelphia acts that were staples on the dance floor. I became aware that the DJs were finding ways to extend the songs longer than what appeared on the records. Somehow, to us, this club

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music didn’t seem antithetical to the rock we were playing and listening to.

Dancing was fun, too.

In the mid-seventies I was offered room and board in New York by a painter,

Jamie Dalglish, who let me sleep on his loft floor in return for help renovating the place. This was on Bond Street, almost right across from CBGB, where Patti Smith would read occasionally while Lenny Kaye accompanied her on guitar. Television and the Ramones had started playing there as well, and we took advantage of our perfect location to go see these bands as often as we could afford. When Chris and Tina moved to New York, staying at her brother’s place in Long Island City, we’d all go there regularly. Soon Chris again took the initiative and suggested we form another band. This time, perhaps inspired by the

acts playing at CB’s or perhaps by the fact that we already had some original material (that handful of songs I’d written for the Artistics), he suggested we try something with a little more integrity and seriousness. I agreed to give it a try, and if it wasn’t well received, well, we all still had ambitions to be fine artists, or at least I did. I began to write songs based on riffs and fragments, which I would cobble together, my guitar plugged into an old Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder that had a mic input. I filled notebooks with lyrics.

Talking Heads, the name we settled on, started off as a live band. This

might sound obvious, but when you think of all the records and musicians

that were out there then (and there are more now) who made their records

before figuring out how to play their songs live, or how to hold an audience’s
A

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attention, it’s significant. We all remembered stories of naïve and ambitious acts, singers mostly, plucked out of obscurity and handed material—and then, if the song became a hit, they’d be assigned a band to do the inevitable promotional tour. They’d be styled and choreographed and, in most cases, they’d crash and burn before long. Some great stuff was created this way, and there were lots of pretty phony manufactured stars as well, but it seemed to be a bit of crapshoot whether any of these acts could actually get an audience to listen.

They hadn’t learned the ropes of live performance.

These poor souls thrust in the limelight had to compete with the Beatles,

Dylan, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder, who all seemed completely comfort-

able performing and had taken charge of their own creative destinies (or at least it seemed that way at the time). In a sense, these extremely talented artists made it harder on those whose middling talents needed a little help—whether

that meant some coaching on how to sing as if you mean it, how to engage an

audience in your performance, or on how to dress and move. Suddenly there

was a prejudice against acts that weren’t able to hold all the creative reins and do everything by themselves. This prejudice now seems unfair. The highly

coached acts—or, to be kind, the more collaboratively put-together acts—were not all bad. Some were the result of teamwork that produced things that were beyond any one artist’s or band’s vision or abilities, but many of them were underappreciated at the time, and only later were they seen as hip innovators: Nancy Sinatra, the Shangri Las, the Jackson 5, KC and the Sunshine Band. The fact that some of them weren’t great live performers made it doubly hard for them. At that time we couldn’t accept that making a great record was maybe all we should expect. As Lou Reed once said, people want to “view the body.”

More recently, composers, DJs, and pop, rock, and hip-hop artists have

created their music on computers and not, as was often the case in the past, by playing with other musicians. Though this allows them to be more self-empowered—they don’t need a band, record-company funding, or even a

recording studio—these artists are often (though not always) similarly lost

when it comes to, well, showmanship. Some should never get near a stage, as

their talents end with the laptop or with rhymes, but others eventually find their way. Expecting them to be good at both things sometimes seems unfair.

I’ve seen too many creative souls who were suddenly expected to go on stage

desperately imitating moves, clothing styles, and bits of stage business that they’d obviously seen elsewhere. We’ve all spent time imagining ourselves

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inhabiting the bodies of our childhood heroes, like avatars in a way, and it’s thrilling, but at some point it’s time to put those urges to rest. After all, those bodies are already being used by their original owners.

After auditioning at CBGB one afternoon for Hilly Kristal, the club’s owner, and a few others, Talking Heads got offered a slot opening for the Ramones.

As twitchy and Aspergery a stage presence as I was in those days, I had a sense from my time busking in Berkeley and elsewhere that I could hold an audience’s attention. I wouldn’t call what we did then entertainment, exactly, but it was riveting in its own disturbing way. Not quite like looking at an accident, as one writer said, but not that far off either. My stage presence wasn’t fake, as weird as it looks to me in retrospect, but it wasn’t altogether unconsciously oddball either. Occasionally I’d cross over into something affected, but most of the time the poor soul up there was just doing what he thought was right, given the skills and techniques available to him.

Once we began playing at CBGB, we also got gigs at other venues in

Lower Manhattan—Mothers, Max’s Kansas City, and eventually the Mudd

Club. We played somewhere almost every week but held on to our day jobs.

Mine was being a movie theater usher on 34th Street, which was perfect, as

the first show wasn’t until 11 or 12. We didn’t always get much sleep, but

the band got pretty tight.

Looking at early video footage of our three-piece combo at CBGB, I now

sense that it was less a band than an outline for a band. It was a sketch, just the bare-bones musical elements needed to lay out a song. Nothing more.

There was no real pleasure or pleasantness to these arrangements. This wasn’t music to seduce the ear, but it wasn’t intentionally aggressive or abrasive like punk rock, either. It was like looking at a framework, an architectural drawing, and being asked to imagine where the walls and sink might go.

This was all intentional. The range of pre-existing performative models

from which to draw on was overwhelming—and artistically invalid, as I’ve

argued, because those tropes were already taken. So the only sensible course was to avoid all of it, to strip everything back and see what was left. Some others in that scene had similar ideas. The Ramones didn’t allow guitar solos, for example, but we took reductionism pretty damn far. It was a performance

style defined by negatives—no show-off-y solos (I remembered Nils Lofgren,

and knew it was hopeless for me to go there, though I did love Tom Verlaine’s solos with Television), no rock moves or poses, no pomp or drama, no rock