Dedication

To Lisa, as always, with love.

Epigraph

And here is an area that needs attention. Here’s the connection—with the opposite side.

—DAVID BYRNE, “HERE”

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

1. A City in My Mind

2. Artists Only

3. The Harvard of Art Schools

4. An Anthropologist in Arbutus

5. RISD & MICA

6. The Admiral’s Daughter

7. The Amazing Artistics

8. CBGB & OMFUG

9. Chrystie Street

10. A Conservative Impulse

11. Born to Run

12. Punk Is Coming

13. They’re So Cute

14. London Calling

15. A Young Jesuit Monk

16. Summer of Sam

17. Don’t Call It Punk

18. The Big Country

19. Compass Point

20. Take Me to the River

21. Feet on the Ground

22. Fear of Everything

23. This Ain’t No Party

24. Two Fourteen-Year-Old Boys

25. Melody Attack

26. Once in a Lifetime

27. Expanded Heads

28. Bush of Ghosts

29. Geniuses of Love

30. The Name of This Band

31. Girlfriend Is Better

32. Speaking in Tongues

33. Preppy Funk Triumphant

34. A Movie Waiting to Be Filmed

35. Close to Perfection

36. And They Were

37. An Anthropologist in Virgil

38. Pleading for Mercy

39. Naked in Paris

40. Don’t Mention Harmony

41. Independence Day

42. Hall of Fame

Coda: American Utopia

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Notes

Index

Photo Section

About the Author

About Mariner Books

Also by Jonathan Gould

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

A City in My Mind

The residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

—E. B. WHITE, HERE IS NEW YORK

While its seven and a half million residents went about their daily business of striving and surviving, New York City confronted the specter of fiscal catastrophe during the first week of June 1975. For several months, the newspapers in America’s media capital had been chronicling the increasingly dire efforts of the administration of Mayor Abraham Beame to manage a multibillion-dollar shortfall in the city’s balance sheet, which had escalated from an “austerity budget” to a “budget crisis” as a series of deadlines for payments on New York’s ballooning short-term debt drew near. “Boos Greet Abe at Budget Quiz,” read the front-page headline on the June 5 edition of the Daily News. The accompanying article described a rancorous public hearing at which representatives from the municipal unions and minority communities denounced the mayor’s proposals for mass layoffs in the city’s workforce and deep cuts in its public education and social service programs. In the week ahead, the Board of Education would declare an official “day of mourning” for New York’s public schools; the unions representing the police and firefighters would distribute leaflets emblazoned with a death’s-head welcoming visitors to “Fear City”; and the sanitation workers would go on strike, leaving tons of garbage to rot and burn on the streets in the sweltering June heat. In the midst of a national recession, with inflation and unemployment cresting above 10 percent, the bill for a decade of wishful economics and willful mismanagement on the part of New York’s political establishment was inexorably coming due. America’s greatest city was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Or as John Denver declared on the record that topped the Billboard charts that week, “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.”

On that same night of June 5, an unlikely-looking group of musicians played their first professional engagement at a studiously seedy nightclub on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The name of the club was CBGB, an acronym for three types of music—country, bluegrass, and blues—that would almost never be played there. The place had opened a year and half before on the ground floor of a notorious Bowery flophouse called, with perfect New York irony, the Palace Hotel. The club’s owner, Hilly Kristal, had previously managed jazz and folk venues in Greenwich Village; his latest venture began unpromisingly as Hilly’s on the Bowery, a wino and biker bar at the wrong end of Bleecker Street that Kristal had planned to turn into a folk club until an ethereal-looking guitarist called Tom Verlaine convinced him to start booking unsigned rock bands to fill the void on Sunday nights. Though Kristal thought they were the proverbial “worst band I ever heard in my life,” Verlaine’s group, Television, was the first of these local heroes to attract a following. But it was a pair of even less accomplished and more openly aggressive acts, the Patti Smith Group and the Ramones, that first put “CBGBs” (as it came to be known) on the musical map of the downtown demimonde.

The band that made its debut that drizzly June night, opening for the Ramones before a handful of patrons on the club’s stark, fluorescent-lit stage, was called Talking Heads. On the face of it, they were a standard rock trio of guitar, bass, and drums—an instrumental lineup that had characterized some of the most flamboyant, virtuosic, and bombastic bands in the recent history of rock, including Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Led Zeppelin, and the Who. Yet none of those flashy attributes applied to Talking Heads. Rock fashion had taken a baroque turn in the 1970s, as the dandified style set by the Beatles and their fellow pop aristocrats—the mod suits, flower-power vestments, and helmets of well-coiffed hair—along with its rustic late-sixties American counterpoint—the beards, buckskin, and denim of groups like the Band, the Allman Brothers, and the Grateful Dead—had given way to the androgynous theatricality of “glam rock” stars like David Bowie and Elton John, the preening hypersexuality of “cock rock” stars like Mick Jagger and Robert Plant, and the less outlandish but equally preposterous hippie-cowboy trappings of California rock.

The three members of Talking Heads, by contrast, wore unremarkable haircuts and nondescript casual clothes (“the sort of clothes,” one of them later said, “our moms sent us for Christmas”). Nor was there anything in the group’s performance that called attention to their musical virtuosity, for the simple reason that they had none. While their drummer and guitarist displayed a rudimentary competence, their bassist, an elfin young woman named Tina Weymouth who had been playing her instrument for barely six months, seemed to cling to her carefully memorized parts with an air of quiet desperation. As for any hint of bombast, by the standards of CBGBs, Talking Heads played at a volume that was nothing short of demure.

Apart from their ability to defy the prevailing stereotypes of their musical time and place, the qualities that characterized this neophyte group in their first public performance centered on the awkward, disquieting intensity of their singer-guitarist, David Byrne, their sketchy, skeletal arrangements, and the quirky intelligence of their songs. Tall and thin, with a long neck and an anxious, wide-eyed stare, Byrne stood stiffly at the microphone, his upper body jerking and jiggling like a shadow puppet as he scratched out chords on his guitar. Here, too, the contrast with rock’s prevailing performance practice, derived from the self-assured physicality of its African American role models, could hardly have been more pronounced. Instead of doing his best to command the stage and the room, Byrne looked trapped by his surroundings, as if he were prepared, at any moment, to make a break for the door.

His squirrelly, strained voice was well attuned to the furtive ambivalence of his stage presence. Darting around on the musical scale, Byrne’s singing in these early days would inspire a rich lexicon of description, with one local rock critic memorably comparing it to the sound of “a seagull talking to its shrink.” In addition to capturing the plaintive undertones in his delivery and the shrill, Tourette’s-like quality of his vocal interjections, this image also conveyed the psychological discomfort of his song lyrics, which dealt largely in analytical negations of conventional emotions—beginning, of course, with love.

“Well there’s just no love when there’s boys and girls,” Byrne sang in “The Girls Want to Be with the Girls.” “Please respect my opinions / They will be respected someday / Because we don’t need love,” he sang in “I’m Not in Love.” And in the song that would become a signature of the band in its formative years, Byrne inhabited the calmly deranged persona of a “Psycho Killer,” bemoaning the slights to his fragile ego (“I hate people when they’re not polite”) and flaunting the scope of his cultural erudition by channeling the late soul star Otis Redding one moment (“fafafafah fafafafa-fah”) and singing in French the next. Faced with the odd spectacle of these earnest misfits onstage at CBGBs that night, the more literate members of the audience could be excused for thinking that if J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey Glass had decided to form a rock group, it might have looked something like this.

As luck would have it, however, within a few weeks of their professional debut, the three members of Talking Heads would be pictured on the cover of the Village Voice, the alternative paper of record for the New York arts scene, beneath a headline heralding “The Conservative Impulse of the New Rock Underground.” “They present a clean, flat image, devoid of fine shading and color. They are consciously anti-mythic in stance,” the accompanying article noted. A few weeks after that, the group would be praised by John Rockwell, the newly appointed “chief rock critic” of the New York Times, who became the first of many writers to draw a parallel between the band’s austere arrangements and the “minimalist” aesthetic that had permeated the visual arts and contemporary classical music since the 1960s. “The abrupt layerings of their music recall planes of color,” Rockwell wrote, “which isn’t too surprising, since all three members of the band share a background at the Rhode Island School of Design. . . . The relationship between the classical-music avant-garde and visual and conceptual art over the last decade has been a fascinating one, and Talking Heads is a stimulating instance of how the art world has had an effect on local rock as well.”

Over the next two years, CBGBs would establish itself as the epicenter of a style of music that became known as “punk,” a catchall term for the ruder varieties of rock that had been floating around in the music press for some time until the advent in 1976 of the fan magazine Punk helped to localize it, fleetingly, in Lower Manhattan. Whether despite or because of its lack of commercial appeal, this downtown punk-rock scene would be extolled as a major musical phenomenon by a cadre of ambitious New York–based rock critics whose influence was drastically amplified by the echo chamber of the city’s media world.

In their hands, the primitivism of punk was celebrated as a return to the original renegade spirit of rock ’n’ roll, and promoted as an antidote to the artistic grandiosity, heightened professionalism, and rampant corporatization that had transformed the record business since the advent of the Beatles in 1964 from a poor relation of Broadway and Hollywood into America’s most popular and lucrative form of mass entertainment. Many of these first-generation rock writers had grown up in thrall to the sounds that had emerged from provincial music scenes in places like Memphis, New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, Woodstock, and, above all, Liverpool. Now, imagining themselves to be present at the creation, they set out to generate a similar mystique around the music they heard in a couple of seamy venues on the Lower East Side. The analogy was not lost on the musicians themselves. The Ramones had adopted their “leather boy” look from the early Beatles and their name from the stage name, “Paul Ramon,” that Paul McCartney had affected during the band’s gestation in Hamburg. “This could be like our Cavern Club,” Talking Heads’ drummer Chris Frantz said of CBGBs.

He wasn’t wrong about that. Much like the Beatles in Liverpool, Talking Heads would emerge as the albino in the herd of this New York punk-rock scene: the one band whose combination of talent, originality, discipline, self-awareness, and steely artistic ambition would form the basis of a major musical career. Their debut at CBGBs marked the start of a two-year apprenticeship during which they performed at the club on a monthly basis, rehearsing and refining their original crop of songs, gradually building a following that reached well beyond the self-identified constituency of punk into the broader and deeper strata of the downtown arts scene. During that period, they would resist an offer to sign with Sire Records, a New York–based independent label, on the grounds that they weren’t yet ready to record. They finally relented in 1977, having fleshed out their sound by adding a fourth member, a Harvard graduate named Jerry Harrison, on keyboards and guitar.

During those same two years that CBGBs was cementing its role in the downtown music scene, New York’s epic struggle to avert bankruptcy would force its elected leaders to relinquish virtually all of their power to the dictates of a state-appointed board of investment bankers and corporate executives, dubbed the Municipal Assistance Corporation, whose single-minded efforts to restore the city’s standing with its debt holders led to the evisceration of a system of local government that, for all of its tribal politics, had served the diverse needs of New Yorkers more comprehensively than that of any other major city in America. Between 1975 and 1978, eighty-five thousand public employees, a sixth of the municipal workforce, were laid off, including large numbers of police, firefighters, and schoolteachers. City-run hospitals, health clinics, day care and senior citizen centers, youth programs, libraries, parks, and recreational facilities either were closed down or began operating on sharply reduced hours, while the City University of New York was forced to end its hallowed policy of offering free tuition to all qualified applicants. In response to these “austerity” measures, the quality of life for millions of New Yorkers spiraled precipitously downward, as social and economic trends that had been gaining momentum for decades reached a tipping point. New York had already lost more than five hundred thousand jobs during the first half of the 1970s, most of them in the blue-collar manufacturing and transportation industries that had formed the city’s economic base since the nineteenth century. It would lose more than a million residents over the course of the decade, nearly all of them white, working- and middle-class wage earners and homeowners who left in response to the loss of jobs, the fear of crime, and racial anxieties that were exploited by banks, landlords, and “blockbusting” property speculators. Crime rates had been rising exponentially since the 1960s; now, with the NYPD diminished and demoralized, untold numbers of assaults, robberies, and property crimes went unreported, while open-air drug markets operated with relative impunity in many parts of the city.

In the short run, however, New York’s economic downfall was a boon to its unrivaled status as a seedbed of art and culture. References to “business,” “real estate,” and “manufacturing” were not to be found in E. B. White’s classic 1949 testimonial, Here Is New York. Instead, White focused his portrait of the city—by which he meant Manhattan—on three species of New Yorkers: the natives, who were born there and took its character for granted; the commuters, who worked there and returned each day to their homes in the suburbs and the outer boroughs; and the “settlers,” who were “born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.” “It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements,” White wrote. “Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. . . . The city is always full of young worshipful beginners—young actors, young aspiring poets, ballerinas, painters, reporters, singers—each depending on his own brand of tonic to stay alive.”

It was this third group, composed of young strivers who were willing to endure the rigors of urban decay for the chance to pursue whatever quest they were on, that thrived in the postindustrial ruins of New York in the 1970s. In a decade when hordes of residents were fleeing the city, the one demographic group that showed a significant increase consisted of young adults in their twenties and early thirties. The wholesale loss of jobs and population turned the industrially zoned tracts of Lower Manhattan (as well as Brooklyn and Queens) into some of the most affordable living space in any major American city—especially for people who were willing to do without the comforts of heat and hot water, safe streets and supermarkets, in order to live out their dreams. “We felt as though we were living in the aftermath of some cataclysm we hadn’t quite witnessed, some war that had taken place while we were asleep or away for the weekend,” the author Lucy Sante wrote of her own introduction to the Lower East Side. “We naïvely thought that the downward spiral would simply proceed, that the city would be drained of its wealthy and that we could move into their vacated penthouses when tumbling rents and our minimally increased wages eventually agreed to shake hands.”

Even as the twin towers of the newly built World Trade Center loomed over the abandoned piers and warehouses of the once-mighty port of New York, marking the shift in the city’s economy from the making and movement of goods to the making and movement of money, Lower Manhattan was filling up with a critical mass of young adults: some of them talented, some of them poseurs, some of them strivers, some of them slackers, some of them visionaries, some of them drunks or junkies masquerading as visionaries, all of them seeking to make their mark in the place where making a mark mattered most of all.

Having come from Baltimore, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and Southern California, the four members of Talking Heads exemplified this influx of aspiring young migrants who arrived in the city in the 1970s. And more than any other rock artists of their generation, they would draw their energy and inspiration from the cosmopolitan influences and connections that were available in the new bohemia that was coalescing in Lower Manhattan. While the other bands that got their start at CBGBs were acting out their retrograde fantasies of adolescent rebellion and rock ’n’ roll salvation, the members of Talking Heads, and David Byrne especially, would identify and associate themselves with a stratum of downtown culture that included painters, writers, composers, actors, dancers, graphic designers, filmmakers, and theater directors, who in turn accepted these brainy, iconoclastic, art-school-educated rock musicians as kindred souls.

In the realm of popular music, Talking Heads became figureheads of a major shift that was taking place in the cultural geography of New York—away from the museums and galleries of the Upper East Side, the theaters, concert halls, and literary haunts of midtown, and the taverns, clubs, and coffeehouses of the West Village, toward a broad swath of derelict loft buildings, storefronts, and tenements whose future had remained in limbo until the city’s long-standing plans to build an elevated expressway through the heart of Lower Manhattan were finally abandoned in 1971. What Harlem had been in the 1920s, and the Village in the 1950s, the Lower East Side and the newly christened neighborhoods of SoHo, NoHo, and TriBeCa would be in the late 1970s and early 1980s: the latest crucible of New York’s multicultural melting pot.

2

Artists Only

I used to get mad at my school

The teachers who taught me weren’t cool

—JOHN LENNON AND PAUL MCCARTNEY, “GETTING BETTER”

As John Rockwell noted in the first of his many New York Times reviews, the “art school background” of Talking Heads and their affiliation with the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design was regarded from the beginning as the most distinctive and, on the stage of a seedy Bowery rock club, anomalous feature of the band. Rockwell was a relative newcomer to rock journalism, which may explain how he could have ignored the role that musicians with art-school backgrounds had already played in the transformation of rock in the 1960s from an adolescent subculture into the most artistically precocious and commercially successful form of popular music in the world.

In the fall of 1968, when the British writer Hunter Davies published the first substantial biography of the Beatles, many of the reviews in the British and American press cited Davies’s account of the band members’ backgrounds—their childhoods and schooling in Liverpool, and their musical apprenticeship in the clubs of Hamburg’s notorious red-light district—as the most revealing chapters in the book. For five years, the public phenomenon of the Beatles had been one of the most relentlessly reported entertainment stories of the 1960s. But the details of their lives before their meteoric success had come to the attention of the public, if at all, in a smattering of oblique references in feature articles and fan magazines.

Chief among the revelations in Davies’s book was his account of John Lennon’s brief tenure as a student at the Liverpool College of Art. Lennon enrolled at the college in the fall of 1957 after failing the examinations that would have qualified him for an additional two years of grammar school in which to prepare for admission to a university. A recalcitrant student who had shown a certain aptitude for drawing, he was steered toward a placement at the art college by his headmaster as an educational last resort. Lennon was not unusual in this regard. All across Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s, bright but nonacademic students who had fallen through the cracks in the country’s postwar initiative to democratize its class-bound system of public education were offered the option of art school as an alternative to entering the labor force at the age of fifteen without career qualifications or prospects. Ranging from august academies like the Slade School in London to provincial “redbrick” institutions like the one in Liverpool, the colleges formed an educational patchwork that was geared mainly to instruction in the applied arts of graphic, industrial, and fashion design. But their faculties provided a welcome source of employment for fine artists as well, whose presence helped to turn the schools into oases of aestheticism, bohemianism, and Romantic idealism amid the drab economic and cultural austerity of postwar British life.

As it turned out, John Lennon’s desultory experience at the Liverpool College of Art served mainly to imbue him with a lifelong resentment toward the pretensions of fine art. The main influence on his creative development came not from the college itself but from a precocious classmate named Stuart Sutcliffe, whose family had moved to Liverpool from Scotland during the war. In the eyes of the art college, Sutcliffe was everything Lennon was not: a talented painter and a budding intellectual who subscribed to a deeply Romantic sensibility about the meaning and purpose of art. In 1960, after Sutcliffe sold one of his paintings in a major juried show, Lennon convinced him to buy an electric bass and join his skiffle group, which was marking its transition from acoustic folk to amplified rock ’n’ roll by changing its name from the Quarrymen to the Silver Beatles. In the fall of that year, having acquired a drummer and dispensed with the “Silver,” the Beatles left for the first of the extended engagements in Hamburg that would seal their identity as a band.

In the midst of this Hamburg residency, the group crossed paths with a trio of upper-middle-class German art students who wandered into the club where they were playing and became enthralled with the look and sound of the five young Englishmen they encountered on the stage. Astrid Kirchherr, Klaus Voormann, and Jürgen Vollmer had met at a private art college in Hamburg, where Kirchherr and Vollmer studied photography and Voormann graphic design. Like many young Europeans with bohemian leanings, they took their cues in fashion and culture from the cosmopolitan cachet of Left Bank Paris, which led John Lennon to puncture their intellectual pretensions by dubbing them the “exis.” Kirchherr was a winsome blonde who wore her hair in the boyish cut that Jean Seberg modeled in Breathless, while Voormann and Vollmer wore their bangs in the softly rounded style that was popular with European university students at the time. Though the three young Germans were taken with all five of the Beatles, they quickly fixated on Stuart Sutcliffe, and he on them, as kindred souls. Astrid and Stuart soon became lovers, and Astrid photographed the Beatles, portraying them as a musical band of brothers in a series of grainy black-and-white images whose rakish solidarity would turn every subsequent portrait of a rock group into a variation on her theme. Stuart eventually moved in with Astrid, left the band, and enrolled as an art student in Hamburg. Along the way, he adopted the “college boy” hairstyle that the Beatles, following his example, would shortly spring upon an unsuspecting world.

Tragically, a year later, Stuart Sutcliffe died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of twenty-two. But the influence he and Astrid and their “exi” friends exerted combined with John Lennon’s brief career at the Liverpool College of Art to encode a distinct strain of art-school sensibility into the archetype of a “rock group” with which the Beatles would revolutionize the world of Anglo-American popular music in the decade to come. Former art students populated nearly all of the musically ambitious bands in the first wave of the so-called British Invasion of the American record charts that followed the Beatles’ success in 1964, including the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Animals, the Yardbirds, Manfred Mann, and the Who. Following the Beatles’ example, the best of these groups aspired to a model of artistic autonomy and experimentation that owed more to the Romantic ideology of an art-school education than to the hierarchical efficiencies of the music business at the time.

More broadly, an art-school background would serve as one of the common denominators of the explosion of British pop culture that comprised the Swinging London phenomenon of the mid-sixties, joining the worlds of music, fashion, advertising, fine art, film, and graphic design. Here, too, thanks to the refined sensibility of their manager, Brian Epstein (himself a product of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts), the Beatles played a leading role. A significant threshold was crossed in 1967, when the London art dealer Robert Fraser, whose Mayfair gallery served as a portal of Anglo-American Pop Art, suggested to his new friend Paul McCartney that the Beatles commission a fine artist to design the cover of their forthcoming album, a boldly ambitious collection of songs called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. With McCartney’s blessing, Fraser nominated Peter Blake, a British Pop painter known for the wryly nostalgic cast of his work. Blake conceived a life-size photographic collage that placed the Beatles at the center of a multitiered consortium of culture heroes, living and dead. The resulting tableau evoked and exploded the conventions of a group portrait in the same way that the music on the album evoked and exploded the conventions of a live performance.

More than any other single work, Sgt. Pepper established not only the Beatles but the entire genre of rock music as an aesthetically ambitious art form, and Blake’s cover became inseparable from the album’s cultural moment and its enduring renown. A year later, Fraser selected another artist from his stable, the conceptualist Richard Hamilton, to design the cover of the Beatles’ next LP. Hamilton’s minimalist, untitled white sleeve was as austere as Blake’s cover was elaborate, its mock serial number constituting a witty homage to the critic Walter Benjamin’s celebrated discourse on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

For all of its impact, Robert Fraser’s suggestion that the Beatles commission a noted Pop artist to design the cover of Sgt. Pepper was not an original idea. Fraser was Andy Warhol’s London dealer, and early in 1967, when Fraser put Peter Blake together with the Beatles, he was well aware that Warhol had designed the cover for the as-yet-unreleased first album by a New York band called the Velvet Underground. Warhol had originally recruited the group to provide the musical accompaniment for his efforts to monetize New York’s downtown performance art movement by promoting a multimedia “happening” called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Since Warhol’s interest in rock music, like his interest in visual art, was based on its status as a lucrative new arena of pop celebrity, he insisted on installing his latest “superstar,” a stunningly photogenic and musically maladroit German actress called Nico, as the nominal lead singer of the band.

As always, Warhol’s commercial instincts were astute; it was Nico, not the Velvet Underground’s brooding songs and droning arrangements, that attracted the attention of Verve Records, which signed them on the recommendation of Bob Dylan’s former producer Tom Wilson. Their eponymous first album featured Nico singing in a thick, melancholic German accent that lent an edge of Weimar decadence to songs about outcast women and femmes fatales. But most of the material on the album was written and sung by the band’s guitarist Lou Reed, who narrated his songs about heroin addiction, sadomasochism, and prostitution in a sardonic deadpan that seemed to mock the soft-edged, folk-rock style of production that Wilson had developed in his work with Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel at Columbia Records.

Notwithstanding their affiliation with Warhol, none of the members of the Velvet Underground had backgrounds in the visual arts. John Cale, the Welshman who played viola, bass, and keyboards in the group, had studied composition at London’s Goldsmiths College before coming to New York in 1963 to enlist in the musical avant-garde that was coalescing in Lower Manhattan around the composers John Cage and La Monte Young. The other founding members, Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison, came from the middle-class suburbs of Long Island and had majored in English at college. In their educational and class backgrounds, they personified an important distinction between British and American rock. For if the British pop scene in the 1960s could be seen as the revenge of the art students, the American pop scene during that same period was surely the revenge of the English majors, thanks to the domineering influence of the greatest would-be English major of his generation, Bob Dylan. Beginning with his emergence as the enfant terrible of the “folk protest” movement in 1962, and reaching new heights with his conversion to blues-based rock in 1965, Dylan’s vernacular genius as a lyricist brought a literary dimension to popular music that would inspire countless budding poets and writers to entertain the prospect of rock stardom as a wildly alluring alternative to the perils of publication or the pursuit of an academic career. In 1965, when the Beat elder Allen Ginsberg offered his endorsement, he was only affirming the self-evident fact that Dylan was a lyric poet of the first order, uniquely in tune with his times. Further amplifying Dylan’s influence was the discordant whine of his unlovely yet unmistakable voice, which defied all expectations of how a singer in any commercial genre of popular music should sound.

Lou Reed had brushed against literary stardom in college, where he studied and socialized with the writer Delmore Schwartz. His own aspirations to bring a poetic sensibility to rock coincided with Dylan’s rise, and while Reed wasn’t in Dylan’s class as a lyricist, he was strongly influenced by the eloquent, streetwise imagery of Dylan’s writing and infatuated with the aloof, disdainful persona that Dylan affected as he moved from the populism of folk to the aristocracy of rock. As a conflicted and partially closeted bisexual, Reed shied away at first from the romantic politics that formed the crux of Dylan’s songwriting after his abdication from the folk protest movement in 1964. Instead, he set out to chronicle New York’s liminal subculture of gay hustlers, drag queens, and drug addicts, allying himself like his literary heroes William Burroughs and Hubert Selby with the heroin cult of creative genius that Charlie Parker had bequeathed to modern jazz.

Before they settled on the name Velvet Underground, Lou Reed and John Cale had called their group the Warlocks. This footnote to their history suggests their unlikely affinities with another band that began as the Warlocks, only to rename themselves, with a similar subterranean irony, the Grateful Dead. Formed in 1965 on opposite coasts, both the Velvets and the Dead benefited from the patronage of controversial cultural celebrities, who incorporated their music into multimedia productions—the Velvets with Andy Warhol and his Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the Dead with the novelist Ken Kesey, his Merry Pranksters, and their Acid Tests. Both bands identified themselves explicitly with the drug culture of the 1960s, albeit at opposite poles: the Dead with the utopian promise of psychedelics, the Velvets with the dystopian derangement of amphetamine and heroin. On a musical level, both groups included members (the bassists John Cale and Phil Lesh) with ties to the classical avant-garde, and were distinguished by their use of modal improvisation, eccentric drumming unbeholden to the dictates of a backbeat, and a willful disregard on their early albums for the standards of musical coherence and professionalism that prevailed on commercial recordings at the time. Both bands eventually managed to rein in their many excesses and improve dramatically as singers, songwriters, and instrumentalists. But their fortunes could not have been more different as the 1960s came to a close.

In keeping with the rapid ascendency of California rock, the Grateful Dead went on to establish themselves as the most commercially successful and long-lived cult band of all time, amassing an intergenerational following of true believers who hung on their every note, forgave them their musical trespasses, and saw them as the living embodiment of the communal aspirations and earnest ideals of the hippie counterculture. In keeping with the relative eclipse of East Coast rock during the late 1960s, the Velvet Underground attracted a much smaller coterie of fans, centered not in New York but mainly in New England and Midwestern cities and college towns, most of whom were drawn to the group precisely as an antidote to the communal aspirations and earnest ideals of the counterculture.

After inspiring the cover photograph for White Light/White Heat, the Velvets’ defiantly self-indulgent and commercially ruinous second album, Andy Warhol lost interest in the idea of managing an unsuccessful rock group, thereby freeing Lou Reed to assert himself by banishing first Warhol, then Nico, and finally John Cale from the band. Cale was replaced by a multi-instrumentalist named Doug Yule, who contributed a new level of musical competence that helped the Velvets, on their last two albums, to transcend the dilettantish quality of their earlier work. Yet commercial success still eluded them—so much so that in August 1970, Reed himself abruptly quit the band in the midst of their first New York appearance in three years, a sparsely attended residency at Max’s Kansas City, the celebrated art-world hangout on Union Square.

Lou Reed spent the rest of the year ignominiously living with his parents and working at his father’s accounting firm. Yet the mystique of the Velvet Underground would only grow as the cultural disillusionment of the early seventies took hold. In Britain especially, under the banner of “glam rock,” pop music embraced themes of androgyny, decadence, and camp theatricality that suddenly made the Velvets seem like a band ahead of its time. In 1972, after signing with a major label, RCA, Reed released a “comeback” album called Transformer. The record was produced by David Bowie (yet another product of art school) and his guitarist-arranger Mick Ronson, fresh from their collaboration on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, the science fiction concept album that established Bowie as an international star.

In the fall of 1969, John Lennon announced to his startled bandmates that he wanted a “divorce.” Allen Klein, the Machiavellian business manager whose involvement with the group had brought the tensions among them to a head, prevailed on Lennon to keep the news of his planned departure quiet for the time being. The Beatles were about to release their tenth studio album, Abbey Road, and they were immersed in a web of complex business negotiations that would have been severely compromised by the announcement of their demise. Suppressing his newfound penchant (since his union with the New York performance artist Yoko Ono) to seek publicity at every turn, Lennon agreed to Klein’s request. But this did not prevent Klein himself from sharing the news of the Beatles’ impending breakup with his other high-profile clients, the Rolling Stones.

By the fall of 1969, the Stones had rehabilitated their career on multiple levels over the course of the previous year. Musically, they had shaken off their misguided attempt to imitate the Beatles’ experimentalism, Their Satanic Majesties Request, and returned to form with an acclaimed album, Beggars Banquet, and a pair of hit singles, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Honky Tonk Women.” Legally, they had defused the consequences of a series of drug busts that had constrained their ability to tour outside of Britain by forcing their founding member Brian Jones to leave the band. When Jones was found dead in his swimming pool a few weeks later, the Stones memorialized his death by performing at a vast open-air concert in London’s Hyde Park that prefigured the Woodstock festival in August 1969. Now, having played second fiddle to the Beatles since 1963, the Stones saw their chance to seize the moment. They responded by recording an ominously relevant album titled Let It Bleed—a play on the Beatles’ forthcoming single, “Let It Be”—and engaging Allen Klein’s nephew, a promoter named Ronnie Schneider, to arrange a major tour of the United States.

This monthlong tour proved to be a watershed event. It had been more than three years since a band as popular as the Stones or the Beatles had performed in the United States. During that time, “pop” had turned to “rock,” and the core demographic of its audience had shifted from the stereotype of a squealing starstruck teenybopper to that of a long-haired, pot-smoking, college-aged music fan. At the same time, the proliferation of rock venues like the Fillmore in San Francisco and outdoor festivals like the 1967 conclave at Monterey had led to significant improvements in the presentation of rock on a grand scale, with sophisticated stage, sound, and lighting equipment that allowed bands to put themselves across to much larger audiences while retaining some sense of musical integrity. The 1969 Stones tour of America marked the first time that a band of their stature would employ these new techniques of staging on a national scale.

The concerts themselves were thrilling, but the tour, famously, ended in utter disaster. In the fraught political climate of 1969, the Stones were criticized in the underground press for their “extortionary” ticket prices (three to eight dollars a seat, or twenty to fifty dollars in 2025 dollars) and their unwillingness to offer financial support to radical groups who had been co-opted by the armchair insurrection of their 1968 single “Street Fighting Man.” In an effort to show their good faith—and provide a suitable climax for a documentary film they had commissioned—the Stones arranged to end the tour by headlining a free outdoor concert in San Francisco that was touted as “Woodstock West.” The event was organized with the help of the Grateful Dead, who were known for their free concerts in Golden Gate Park, and who recommended that the promoters hire the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, with whom the Dead had an affiliation dating back to their days with Ken Kesey, to provide “security” for the event. But when the city of San Francisco denied them the use of the park, the Stones were forced to move the concert at the last minute to a desolate motor speedway near Altamont, an hour’s drive east of the city.

There, as the day wore on, the mounting contradictions of the counterculture devolved into a nightmare of bad drugs, bad vibes, and bad blood that culminated in a rampage of recreational violence by the Hells Angels. Dozens of audience members (and several of the performers) were beaten with fists and pool cues, and a Black teenager named Meredith Hunter, who attended the concert with his white girlfriend, was singled out and stabbed to death in front of the stage while the Stones performed their misogynistic anthem “Under My Thumb.” As the rock critic Greil Marcus wrote after witnessing the carnage firsthand, “A young Black man [was] murdered in the midst of a white crowd by white thugs as white men played their version of Black music.”

The story of Anglo-American popular music has never not been about race. From the earliest days of minstrel shows, music has been the principal cultural medium in which the tragic relationship between white people and Black people in America and Britain has been acted out and acted upon. More than any other major white recording artists of their generation, the Rolling Stones had cloaked themselves in the “authenticity” of Black music. They began as a collection of British “blues purists,” who filled their early albums with covers of American R&B before turning to songwriting under the sway of the Beatles. But while other great white rock singers like Elvis Presley and the Beatles had sought to emulate the phrasing, diction, and timbre of the Black artists they admired, Mick Jagger had taken this process a crucial step further, pushing the notion of “authenticity” through the cultural looking glass by affecting an outright imitation of rural Black Southern dialect in his singing voice. Many great singers are also great mimics, and in Jagger’s case, he mirrored this process in his speaking voice, masking his middle-class background by affecting a Cockney yowl worthy of My Fair Lady. But whether singing or speaking, Jagger’s sly genius was to infuse his racial and class mimicry with enough of an edge of self-parody to blunt its full affront. It was a brilliant strategy for having it both ways. Fans unfamiliar with Muddy Waters or Otis Redding took Jagger’s imitation of them at face value, while the many young whites who were now listening to R&B and soul music as a matter of course saw Jagger as an extension of themselves: an exceptionally bold disciple whose best performances were beginning to sound as distinctive and commanding as those of his acknowledged role models.

It was this dimension of the Stones’ appeal that lent such symbolic weight to their debacle at Altamont. The Beatles had presided over the explosive creative and commercial growth of popular music in the 1960s like a bright Apollonian sun, suffusing the decade with their benevolent emotionality, precocious musicality, and mordant wit. Now, in their prime, the Stones would preside over the retrenchment of popular music in the 1970s like a dark Dionysian moon, sounding themes of violence, decadence, debauchery, and drug abuse, extolling the creed of “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll” as if it were an actual philosophy of life rather than a hedonistic catchphrase of the counterculture. Their first studio album of the new decade, Sticky Fingers, featured a cover, designed by Andy Warhol, showing a crotch shot of a man in tight jeans, outfitted with a working zipper, in a phallic homage to the peelable banana that Warhol had placed on the cover of the Velvet Underground’s first LP. The album’s opening track and attendant hit single, “Brown Sugar,” conflated a paean to interracial sex (“how come you taste so good . . . just like a Black girl should”) with allusions to the transatlantic slave and heroin trade. “Brown Sugar” had been recorded, two days before Meredith Hunter’s murder, in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, an epicenter of the Southern style of soul music that had promised to finish what Sam Cooke and Motown had started in the early 1960s by turning gospel-trained African American singers into top-selling artists on the pop charts. But those prospects had changed dramatically following the 1968 murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, which strained the delicate marriage of convenience that had formed between Black artists and the white-owned record labels, radio stations, and management agencies that promoted and profited from their work.

As a result of this growing estrangement, what Black music had been to the 1960s, serving white rock as a gold standard of musical authenticity, the Stones themselves would be to the early 1970s. Taken together, their greatest albums—Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main Street—redefined the parameters of rock as surely as the Beatles had done with their masterworks Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, the White Album, and Abbey Road. But the ironic result of the Stones’ ascendency was to detach the entire genre of rock from Black music as never before. As Jack Hamilton noted in Just Around Midnight, his definitive study of the role of race in popular music, “The very act of imaginatively engaging with historically Black music forms while keeping Black bodies at arm’s length became a newly powerful way of being white.” In the 1970s, for the first time since the advent of rock ’n’ roll, most white musicians would no longer look to African American music for stylistic inspiration. Instead, they had the Stones.

3

The Harvard of Art Schools

I seriously thought I was going to be a painter. I was one of those people who did “big paintings” with acrylics.

—CHRIS FRANTZ

The government-funded art schools that nurtured the explosion of pop culture in Britain during the 1960s differed in significant ways from their nominal equivalents in the States. In the years after World War II, art education in America became increasingly centered in private colleges and universities, whose academic requirements and high tuitions significantly narrowed the social and economic backgrounds of their students. It was one thing for a working-class teenager with no other educational prospects to attend a local British art school on a government grant. It was another thing for an American teenager with the academic qualifications and financial resources needed to attend a private college to choose to major in fine art, fashion, or design. The same applied to the so-called “professional” art schools like the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Pratt Institute in New York, and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, which sought to prepare their students for careers in the fine and applied arts. For most of the predominantly affluent students who attended these schools, the idea of studying art or design was an appealing or compelling option, not an educational last resort.

In other ways, however, there were distinct similarities between the art schools of Britain and America. In both countries, the fine art faculties of these schools were largely staffed by working artists, who sought to underwrite their art careers with the salary and relative stability of a teaching position. This provided a direct link between the schools and the tastes, trends, ideologies, and attitudes of the contemporary art world. Another similarity between the art schools in Britain and America was their reliance on “foundation” programs in which entering students were introduced to a range of media, skills, and concepts that related in a general way to art-making and design. Depending on the institution, a common goal of these foundation programs involved the need to break students of certain habits and attitudes they had previously relied upon in making work. By placing an emphasis on the constructive role of experimentation, this process of reorientation represented an important distinction between conventional academic programs and instruction in fine art. Compared to undergraduates in other fields, art students were given much greater encouragement and latitude to try and fail in their work.

Founded in 1877 by a group of wealthy Rhode Island women who sought to improve the aesthetic quality of the textiles, jewelry, and tableware that formed the manufacturing base of their state, the Rhode Island School of Design—or “RISD,” as it came to be known—was a regional institution prior to World War II. In the late 1940s, however, a series of fortuitous developments combined to burnish the school’s reputation and expand both the size of its student body and the scope of its curriculum. The first of these was the largesse of the GI Bill, which opened the doors of higher education to the millions of American servicemen (and a much smaller number of women) who had fought in the war. RISD doubled its enrollment in response to this sudden influx of federally subsidized students, and received its academic accreditation as a four-year college in 1949.

A second postwar development that worked to the school’s advantage was the exodus of European artists, writers, architects, academics, and intellectuals of all description who had fled the tyranny of fascism in the 1930s and the subsequent devastation of the war. Among its many cultural repercussions, this great migration of talent, comprising the cream of late European modernism, helped to establish New York City as the aesthetic, intellectual, and commercial capital of the international art world, while the tendrils of its influence spread throughout the elite colleges and universities of the country. The émigrés included Walter Gropius and Josef Albers, two of the founding members of the Bauhaus school, whose conspicuous presence—Gropius at Harvard, Albers at Black Mountain College and Yale—helped to transform the practice of fine art education in America. The pedagogical principles of the Bauhaus were especially well suited to the curricula of professional art schools like RISD, which had always placed an emphasis on the applied arts alongside drawing, painting, and sculpture.

Adding to RISD’s growing allure was its affiliation with neighboring Brown University, which lent the school an aura of Ivy League status at a time when the Ivy League universities were tightening their hold on the socioeconomic imagination of postwar America’s aspiring middle class. This meant that in the fall of 1969, when a senior at Pittsburgh’s toney Shady Side Academy by the name of Chris Frantz set his sights on applying to RISD, his art teacher could assuage the boy’s anxious parents by telling them, “It’s not just any art school. It’s the Harvard of art schools.”

Named after his paternal grandfather, Charton Christopher Frantz was born in May 1951, in the base hospital at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where his father, an army captain, was stationed at the time. Robert Frantz—Bob to his friends—came from Pittsburgh. His parents separated shortly after his birth, and he was raised in the home of his maternal grandparents before attending Valley Forge Military Academy and West Point, from which he graduated in 1946. Two years later, he married the sister of a West Point classmate, Suzanne (“Sue”) Allen, who had grown up in Louisville, Kentucky. Chris was their first child. With the help of the GI Bill, Bob Frantz was accepted at Harvard Law School shortly after his son’s birth, and the family spent the next three years living in the Boston suburb of Arlington. After earning his law degree, Bob was assigned to the Office of the Judge Advocate General (JAG) at the Pentagon, and the Frantzes moved to the suburbs of northern Virginia, where Chris’s brother, Rodgers, was born. In 1955, when Bob was posted overseas to the US Command in South Korea, Sue and her sons spent his tour of duty living with her parents. After one last assignment teaching at the JAG School in Charlottesville, Chris’s father retired from active duty in 1958 and took a job with Buchanan, Ingersoll, Rodewald, Kyle & Buerger, a prominent Pittsburgh law firm, where he soon made partner and began his ascent through the upper middle class. He continued to serve in the army reserve, eventually attaining the rank of major general.

As the only member of Talking Heads to have published a memoir, Chris Frantz gives an account of his family and childhood that sounds idyllic, to say the least. He appears to have accepted the early dislocations caused by his father’s military service without complaint. One of the constants of his upbringing was his family’s regular visits to his maternal grandparents’ home in Washington, Kentucky, a little town on the Ohio River where Chris spent his summers and school vacations with his “Pappy” and “Mammy,” partaking of the rural pleasures of Southern cooking, church socials, and county fairs. This left him with a deep affection for the self-styled “gentility” of the American South. Years later, when people asked him where he came from, he liked to say Kentucky.

Back home in Pittsburgh, Chris attended Kerr Elementary School in O’Hara Township, the upscale suburb where his parents had built a house. It was there that a music teacher suggested that he take up the snare drum and provided him with sticks and a practice pad to help him on his way. After a few months, he joined the school band, which played an assortment of show tunes, light classical pieces, and occasional hits of the day. His interest in music accelerated during his junior high school years, spurred by the advent of the British Invasion in 1964, which prompted Chris and some of his classmates to form a rock group called the Lost Chords. They played songs by the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, the Tijuana Brass, and the Beach Boys, whose paeans to surfing, hot rods, and girl-watching, Frantz later wrote, had a special resonance for him.

The following year, Chris’s parents sent him to Christchurch, an austere Virginia boarding school on the edge of the Chesapeake Bay. Most of the all-male student body came from the Upper South, and Chris credited these wealthy white Southerners with adding contemporary R&B stars like Otis Redding and James Brown to his pantheon of musical heroes. (In the 1960s, white fraternities at segregated Southern colleges provided a major source of employment for R&B singers and bands.) Another musical highlight of Chris’s time at Christchurch came in February 1966, when he went with a classmate to see Bob Dylan perform at the Mosque Theater in Richmond. Dylan was then in the midst of his first tour with an electric backup band, the Hawks, whose presence was regarded as an apostasy by many of his most devout folk fans. Newspaper accounts of the concert affirm that Dylan opened with a solo acoustic set before returning with the Hawks for the second half of the show, at which point nearly a third of the audience left the theater in protest.

It is telling that in his own recollection of this concert, Frantz failed to recall this unpleasantness. (“The audience greeted each new song with cheers, and by the time Dylan counted off the intro to ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ the crowd, ourselves included, were in love with this guy.”) Whatever else his embrace of WASP gentility entailed, a need to put the best possible face on things loomed very large in him. As a child, he could not have been expected to see the side of life that the Southern performance of gentility was designed to obscure: the overt racism of a place like Washington, Kentucky, or the fact that his beloved Pappy suffered from bipolar disorder, which would eventually lead to his suicide. This same Pollyannaism applied to Frantz’s description of his departure from Christchurch at the end of his sophomore year. “I felt like going home to my family,” he later wrote. “I had learned valuable lessons about how to be a person of honor who tells the truth, and how to be a gentleman. . . . Still, I needed to expand my intellectual and artistic horizons.” His last two years of high school would be spent at Shady Side Academy, the top boys’ prep school in Pittsburgh, which occupied a sprawling campus in suburban Fox Chapel, a short drive from his home.

By the time Chris arrived at Shady Side, in the fall of 1968, the political and cultural turmoil that was roiling college campuses across America was trickling down into the nation’s high schools as well. If anything, the privilege and comparative sophistication of private school students made some of them especially eager recruits to the great wave of mass bohemianism that was sweeping the youth of America into uncharted cultural waters as the 1960s came to a close. Chris’s arrival at Shady Side coincided with his introduction to marijuana, speed, and psychedelic drugs. In keeping with the ethos articulated by Aldous Huxley (whose first-person account, The Doors of Perception, he read), Chris and his prep school classmates imagined themselves to be engaged in an esoteric quest for higher consciousness. “Acid was the king,” he later wrote. “I didn’t just want to get high. I wanted to experience the deeper feelings and connections made by the great artists and musicians, and hoped that psychedelics would open my eyes to a secret, more enlightened world. I believe that they did.”

Aldous Huxley’s belief in the revelatory power of psychedelics owed to the fact that he first encountered these drugs in his sixties, at the height of a distinguished career as an author and social critic. Mescaline and LSD were hence a great release for him from the constraints of his own finely tuned rationality. Among the less sophisticated and more credulous masses of young people who began dropping acid in the 1960s, however, psychedelics could encourage an attitude of indiscriminate receptivity in which almost every form of experience could seem equally mind-blowing. (“Infinity in four chair legs, and the Absolute in the folds of a pair of flannel trousers!” as Huxley himself once wrote.) In the young Chris Frantz, this attribute of the drug culture seems to have merged with his congenitally positive outlook to encourage an attitude toward art and music that was at best broad-minded and at worst undifferentiated. Young artists are prone to developing strong opinions about their own and other people’s work, and they fashion their creative sensibilities out of a mixture of strong likes and dislikes. By his own account, Chris was more of an appreciator than a discriminator. Be it the Beatles or the Tijuana Brass, it was all good music to him.

Apart from something called the Music Club, there was no organized music curriculum at Shady Side Academy, much less band or orchestra, and while Chris continued to think of himself as a drummer, his interest in playing music seems to have receded during his two years at the school. Instead, he tried his hand at writing poetry and contributed a record-review column to the student newspaper called “The Listening Ear.” He also fell under the spell of a young art teacher named David Miller, who had studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and would go on to a career as a painter and professor of art at Skidmore College. In addition to teaching the basic techniques of drawing, painting, and sculpture, Miller introduced his students to a wide range of modern and contemporary artists and the concepts behind their work. His influence and encouragement were instrumental in convincing Chris to pursue the study of art and in assuaging the anxieties of Bob and Sue Frantz with his talk of the Harvard of art schools. Top prep schools like Shady Side prided themselves on their cozy relationships with the admissions departments of select colleges and universities. David Miller had sent a number of students to RISD during his tenure at Shady Side, including two members of the preceding year’s graduating class. When Chris applied for early decision to the school, based on his grades and his teacher’s recommendation, his admission was all but assured.

4

An Anthropologist in Arbutus

It seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential.

—HANS ASPERGER

The Harvard of art schools” would have meant little to the parents of one of Chris Frantz’s future classmates at RISD in the fall of 1970. David Byrne was born in May 1952, in the town of Dumbarton, Scotland, a declining center of shipbuilding and whisky-making on the north bank of the Clyde Estuary, fifteen miles downstream from Glasgow. His father, Thomas, had served in the Royal Navy in World War II before earning a university degree in electrical engineering. His mother, Emily, better known as Emma, was the brilliant, thwarted daughter of a working-class family, a Depression-era “scholarship girl” who ranked first in her class at Hillhead, a top-flight Glasgow grammar school, only to take a job as a postal clerk on the eve of the war. Tom was Catholic, Emma was Protestant, and when they married in 1949, some of their relatives refused to attend their wedding.

As a young couple just starting their lives together, the Byrnes’ outsider status in sectarian Glasgow may have impelled them to flee. In 1955, when David was two, his father was recruited by the Canadian subsidiary of the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, and the family emigrated to Hamilton, Ontario. Not long after the birth of a daughter, Celia, in 1957, Tom was offered a position with the company’s elite Electronic Systems Division in Baltimore, and the Byrnes moved to an apartment in suburban Halethorpe, Maryland, just north of the Westinghouse research and development plant at Friendship International Airport, as it was then known. A few years later, when their rental in Halethorpe was condemned in connection with the completion of the Baltimore Beltway, the family moved again, this time to nearby Arbutus, a small suburban town eight miles south, and a world apart, from the city of Baltimore.

Westinghouse’s Electronic Systems Division was wholly concerned with defense and aerospace contracting, and while the exact nature of Tom Byrne’s work was classified, there is every reason to think that he spent his time engineering advanced guidance and communications systems for military ships and planes. Yet the Byrnes themselves were Labourite Scots whose political outlook had been formed during the early years of the British welfare state, and they were drawn to left-wing causes like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (or “Ban the Bomb,” in the vernacular of the times). They also shared a taste for Celtic and American folk music, which led to David’s introduction as a child to the harmonica, fiddle, and guitar. Tom Byrne recalled his son’s obsession with a portable record player he gave him shortly after the family arrived in Canada, which for David marked an unusually early initiation into the world of recorded sound.

From the start, his family’s Scottish heritage planted a seed of difference in David Byrne. As a child in elementary school, he was mocked for his accent, which he assiduously managed to lose. His parents were not so inclined, however, and from an early age, David found himself translating their speech to friends who came to his house. Their thick brogues, left-wing views, and old-country customs (including afternoon tea) served to limit their social circle in the insular, blue-collar community of Arbutus—a place where, well into the 1960s, African Americans were routinely refused service in local shops and restaurants. “My parents aren’t American, they’re from Scotland,” David would later say. “So my upbringing was as someone who is in a foreign country. They would always tell me, ‘Look at the way these Americans do this. Isn’t this a little bit odd.’ They always saw things as foreigners. I think they kind of taught me to see things that way as well.” Every few years, in the summer, the Byrnes returned to Scotland to visit their relatives there. Tom and Emma retained their British citizenship, as did their Dumbarton-born son.

This contributed to a family whose life was largely centered on itself. Tom and Emma were relentlessly supportive of their children’s interests and enthusiasms, which in young David’s case included such standard boyish fare as cowboys and dinosaurs. The Byrnes rented one of the nicer houses off East Drive, the main commercial street of Arbutus, where David attended the local elementary school, a homely relic of the 1920s that stood a few blocks from his home. Like his parents before him, he was an academically adept child; together with his sense of humor, this provided some cover at school for his shy and self-absorbed nature. “Some of my shy behavior was quite extreme,” Byrne recalled. “I’d have a party at my house and then I would go and hide.” In addition to his musical pursuits, which now included playing the violin in the school orchestra, he also liked to draw, albeit on an appropriately puerile level: “Pictures of rockets,” he later said, “and scenes from James Bond.” Tom and Emma hung his work all over the house.

In the fall of 1964, David entered the seventh grade at Arbutus Junior High, just in time to absorb the initial impact of the Beatles and their fellow Brits on the consciousness of American youth. As expatriate Glaswegians, David’s parents were primed to appreciate the significance of these four working-class Liverpudlians who were taking the world by storm; if anything, this made them even more sympathetic to the musical enthusiasms of their adolescent son. The following year, David and a friend named Joe Sappington, who lived around the corner, began working their way through the Beatles songbook, a musical rite of passage that would serve as a primer in guitar playing and songwriting for virtually every aspiring rock musician of their generation. It was around this time that Tom Byrne rigged up an electrical pickup for David’s acoustic guitar, converted a phonograph into a guitar amplifier, and helped him configure a reel-to-reel tape recorder so that he could perform overdubs—something the Beatles themselves were only just learning how to do.

In 1966, David put his newfound musical knowledge into practice by forming a band with Sappington and two other classmates from Arbutus Junior High, Pat Coogan and Rick Brewster, on bass and drums. They called their group Revelation after David suggested that they open a dictionary (or was it a Bible?) to a random page and see what they happened to find there. They began by playing hits by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Paul Revere & the Raiders, joined over the following year by the Troggs, the Turtles, and Them. “Our big song was ‘The Last Time,’” David recalled, although the only tune his bandmates would let him sing lead on was the Beatles’ version of the country hit “Act Naturally.” (He had recently failed his audition for the junior high school chorus.) After a suitable regimen of rehearsals in the Byrne family basement, the band began to play at occasional school and youth club dances. Around this same time, David and Joe Sappington began experimenting with tape overdubs of guitar feedback, along with a deconstructed version of the Turtles’ hit “Happy Together” arranged for tin-can percussion, tambourine, and kazoo.

Arbutus Junior High adjoined the campus of the newly built Baltimore County branch of the University of Maryland, which opened its doors at the start of David’s ninth-grade year. Fulfilling a long-deferred ambition, Emma Byrne enrolled as a full-time student at UMBC that same fall. (She would graduate summa cum laude with a degree in sociology in 1970.) Having a mother who was also a college student was a novel amenity for the Byrne children amid the growing campus turmoil of the late 1960s. It meant that their family attended anti-war demonstrations on the UMBC campus and in neighboring Washington, DC, the way that other families in Arbutus might go to the Maryland State Fair. It also provided David with a certain amount of access to campus life, including a student coffee shop where he would later perform what he described as “fake Bob Dylan songs,” accompanying himself on the harmonica and guitar.

In the fall of 1967, David entered the tenth grade at Lansdowne Senior High School, a half-hour bus ride from his home. His status as a new student at a large suburban high school only accentuated the shyness and social awkwardness that were becoming more pronounced in him, although his passage was smoothed by a budding romance with a girl named Wendy Jenkins and a new friendship with a classmate named Michael Yockel, whose outgoing personality offset David’s aloofness. In the year when hippie culture first entered the media mainstream, the two-thousand-member student body at Lansdowne was just beginning to separate itself into the rival tribes of “jocks” and “freaks” (or “straights” and “heads”) that would define American adolescence in the years ahead. David was firmly in the latter camp, which he advertised by growing his hair, dabbling with marijuana, and most of all, embracing the rubric of Art.

The summer before, the Byrnes had visited the Expo 67 World’s Fair in Montreal. Emma Byrne recalled that David was so inspired by the cultural feast he encountered there—the Expo presented musical artists like Jefferson Airplane and Thelonious Monk, dance troupes like Martha Graham and the Bolshoi Ballet, and a major exhibition of paintings ranging from Rembrandt to Modigliani—that he spent the next few months sequestered in the basement of their home, drawing, painting, and making tapes.

Revelation had disbanded by now, as the other members of the group gravitated toward more conventional realms of teenage status like sports and cars. David began to perform as a solo act, mixing his own imitations of Dylan with those of the Scottish folksinger Donovan and songs by the Incredible String Band (“First Girl I Loved”) and Fairport Convention (“Who Knows Where the Time Goes”) that drew on his Celtic roots. Given the chance, he would also regale his occasional listeners with cognitively dissonant versions of hard rock hits by bands like the Kinks and the Who, which he scratched out on a ukulele, an instrument that was enjoying a momentary resurgence in the hands of the freakishly campy novelty singer Tiny Tim.

Inspired by his trip to Montreal, David applied himself to his art classes at Lansdowne High, where he was regarded as “one of my top students” by his teacher Adrian Counihan, who excused him from the requirements of the standard art curriculum and hung a portrait he had painted in the style of Modigliani on the art room wall. “Dave was extremely shy,” Counihan recalled—which only added to his amazement when his prize student took to the stage at a school assembly and performed a rendition of “Old Brown Jug” on a kazoo. David also joined a philosophy club called the Diogenes Society, and contributed a comic strip to the student newspaper chronicling the heroics of “Super-Face: The Man of 1001 Faces.” In a typical episode, Super-Face transforms himself into a circus fire-eater to swallow a death ray unleashed by Professor Terror, and then into a vengeful Shriner to spit the ray back at the evil Professor, who explodes in a cloud of smoke, “to his complete surprise.”

At the start of his senior year at Lansdowne, David decided to run for the student council. Considering that he was an acknowledged oddball at the school by now, this was a quixotic effort, to say the least. Despite a “platform” that included such fashionably anarchic proposals as abolishing parliamentary procedure, his awkward, halting campaign speech was mainly a source of amusement to his classmates, and he received but a handful of votes. Still, this was a bold move on the part of a shy teenager who was preparing to leave the insular world of his family and the small suburban town where he had grown up. Not for the last time, David was thrusting himself into a situation for which he seemed to be singularly unsuited, and letting the chips fall where they may.

Tom Byrne was earning a good living at Westinghouse by the late 1960s—good enough to ensure that David, unlike most of his high school classmates, could afford to attend a private college or university when he graduated in the spring of 1970. (He was also graced with a high number in that year’s draft lottery.) Having excelled at both art and science, he felt torn between the two. “I had this romantic idea that studying pure science of some sort would be as equally creative a pursuit as rock ’n’ roll or art,” he later said. This led him to apply to Carnegie Mellon University in addition to RISD and the Maryland Institute College of Art. Accepted at all three, he once remarked that he picked RISD because “the graffiti in the halls was better.” If so, the capriciousness of his criterion only affirmed what a poor choice the school would prove to be for him.

Back in the 1940s, toward the end of World War II, a pair of Austrian-born pediatricians living on separate continents published clinical papers in which they applied the same term to the same previously unnamed phenomenon of child psychology. Leo Kanner was an Austrian Jew, educated at the University of Berlin, who in 1923 had the good fortune to emigrate to the United States, where he went on to become the director of the country’s first child psychiatry clinic, at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Hans Asperger was a reluctant collaborator with the Nazi regime who survived the war with impunity and went on to chair the department of pediatrics at the University of Vienna for decades. Both doctors applied the term “autistic” to a developmental disorder in children that was characterized by an impaired ability for social interaction, obsessive behaviors, and a range of communicative abnormalities. Dr. Kanner, who appropriated the term from a colleague of Asperger’s who came to Johns Hopkins before the war, focused exclusively on the debilitating effects of autism, as the condition came to be known, in infants and small children. But Dr. Asperger, whose own history suggested that he may have manifested some of these symptoms as a child, was also fascinated by a select group of subjects—“little professors,” he called them—in whom the social impairments and obsessional tendencies of autism were accompanied by exceptional cognitive, intellectual, or artistic abilities, that in some cases allowed them to lead highly accomplished lives.

Kanner’s work, published in English, laid the groundwork for several decades of narrowly focused research into “infantile autism,” which for many years was fixated on a misogynistic psychoanalytic fallacy that the condition was caused by emotionally frigid mothering. Asperger published in German, which ensured that his work was all but ignored by the postwar psychiatric community until shortly after his death in 1980, when a British psychiatrist named Lorna Wing published a clinical account of what she called Asperger’s syndrome, in which the behaviors associated with autism were accompanied by heightened abilities “in specific cognitive domains” including memory, concentration, atypical language skills, and a marked capacity for original thought. Herself the mother of an autistic daughter, Wing was responsible for promoting Asperger’s crucial insight that the symptoms of autism exist on a “continuum” or “spectrum” that ranges from people whose social and communicative impairments preclude them from leading independent lives to the sort of high-functioning creative or hyperrational individuals Asperger identified. “All the features that characterize Asperger’s syndrome can be found in varying degrees in the normal population,” she wrote. “Asperger pointed out that the capacity to withdraw into an inner world of one's own special interests is available in a greater or lesser measure to all human beings. He emphasized that this ability has to be present to a marked extent in those who are creative artists or scientists.”

Wing’s article went on to generate a great deal of hopeful attention among the parents of autistic children, and gave rise to a lively discourse in biographical revisionism that would ascribe the traits of Asperger’s syndrome to such historical figures as Michelangelo, Isaac Newton, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Lewis Carroll, and Albert Einstein, to name a few.

A milestone in the public awareness of Asperger’s came in 1988, with the release of the Oscar-winning film Rain Man, starring Dustin Hoffman as Raymond Babbitt, who is described as an “autistic savant.” Another milestone came in 1995, with the publication of An Anthropologist on Mars, a collection of essays by the neurologist Oliver Sacks. The title of the book was coined by one of its subjects, a distinguished professor of animal science at Colorado State University named Temple Grandin, to describe her own relationship to human nature and behavior. While Grandin’s Asperger’s placed severe limits on her emotional responses to people, she was able to describe these limitations, and the ways she had learned to manage and compensate for them, in precise and compelling terms.

“Nothing exists until it has a name,” Lorna Wing observed. Indeed, the concept of Asperger’s syndrome did not exist in the years when David Byrne was growing up, and Byrne would be nearly fifty before he diagnosed himself as having a “very mild, I think” form of the condition. Something similar would occur to quite a number of people in the 1990s and early 2000s, as the signal traits of Asperger’s gradually became known to the general public. One such person was Tim Page, a gifted writer and classical music critic for the Washington Post, who in 2009 published a memoir, Parallel Play, in which he recounted his childhood and adolescence through the lens of his newly acquired understanding that he had grown up with Asperger’s. The result was an eloquent, funny, and richly compassionate account of how his lack of social awareness and obsessional interests required him to navigate the world. “In the years since the phrase became a cliché,” he wrote, “I have received any number of compliments for my supposed ability to ‘think outside the box.’ Actually, it has been a struggle for me to perceive just what these ‘boxes’ were, why they were there, why other people regarded them as important, where their borderlines might be, and how to live safely within and without them.” Apropos the title of his book, Page wrote, “I am left with the melancholy sensation that my life has been spent in a perpetual state of parallel play, alongside, but distinctly apart from, the rest of humanity.”

Though David Byrne showed distinctive traits of Asperger’s as an adolescent and young adult, the effects of the condition on his social and educational prospects were indeed mild when compared with the accounts of people like Tim Page and Temple Grandin. Unlike Page, who scored off the scale on intelligence tests but failed miserably in school on account of his total inability to engage with subjects that didn’t interest him, Byrne was an able student. Unlike Grandin, who suffered a solitary childhood and went on to abstain from romantic relationships throughout her adult life, Byrne always had his share of friends, a steady girlfriend in high school, and a number of committed romantic relationships after that. But much like Page, the awkward social traits of Byrne’s Asperger’s—his aloofness, his inability to make eye contact, his difficulty in reading emotional cues, his halting speech, and his anxious response to social situations—were to some extent masked by the social norms of the late-sixties drug culture, in which eccentric, erratic, or otherwise “weird” behavior achieved not only a greater acceptance, but even a certain cachet.

“However we are, we don’t know how to be another way,” Byrne would later say. “That’s the way you are, and you change over the years. But at that earlier point, that’s who you are. You can’t say, Oh I’m unhappy, I wish I was more like this happy gregarious person who’s more socially adept. I figured, I’m not, so I’ll make friends with a socially adept person and they’ll be the one who brings everyone in. It sounds very calculated, but it wasn’t quite as much.” As Oliver Sacks noted, “In ways that go well beyond the usual process of ‘socialization,’ many people with Asperger’s school themselves in empathy: observing it in others, identifying the sorts of situations in which it seems an appropriate response, and then trying it on for themselves.” From childhood on, David Byrne’s desire for social interaction would draw him to people who valued his distinctive qualities—his intelligence, his humor, his creativity, and his eccentricity itself—and were undeterred by the awkwardness and inwardness that accompanied those positive traits. At the same time, the question of just how “calculated” Byrne’s reliance on socially adept people was would provide an uneasy and in some cases hurtful subtext to many of his relationships with friends and associates in the years ahead—leaving behind a succession of people who would come to feel that Byrne had indeed been engaged in some form of “parallel play, alongside but distinctly apart,” from them. “We assemble our personalities unevenly, in bits and pieces, almost robotically, from models we admire,” Tim Page wrote of his own struggles with socialization. “[Yet] the fact that my understanding of affection, comradeship, and human empathy has been hard-won rather than hardwired from the start does not make those feelings less genuine.” Or as E. M. Forster famously declared, “Only connect.”

5

RISD & MICA

I think art school is a real racket, especially in this country. You run into a couple of good teachers and some interesting students, but for the amount of money you spend it’s not worth it. You’re supporting something else that’s totally extraneous to anything that’s going to do you any good.

—DAVID BYRNE

Chris Frantz and David Byrne both arrived at RISD in September 1970. Though they lived on the same corridor in the same dormitory, the two boys did not get to know each other over the course of their freshman year. Byrne had spent the previous summer visiting his grandparents in Scotland and traveling in England, where he attended a two-day rock festival, headlined by Led Zeppelin, in the West Country city of Bath. He came to Providence wearing a full black beard, with his hair cropped short by the campus standards of the time. His vaguely rustic appearance reminded some people of a “lumberjack,” other people of the musicians in the Band; still others wondered if he somehow might be Amish. On account of his furtive demeanor and tatty wardrobe, Chris Frantz’s roommate, a fellow preppy named Hugh Roberts, jokingly dubbed him “Mad Dave.” For Frantz, who was developing something of an obsession with physical appearances, it was not a look that appealed to him in any way. Though Hugh Roberts became friendly with Byrne, Frantz gave him a wide berth. “He was definitely a persona, but he was a very withdrawn persona,” Chris would later say.

Broadly speaking, the two boys’ responses to art school could not have been more different. Like other colleges and universities across America, RISD was on the verge of insurrection in the fall of 1970. The previous spring, students and faculty at neighboring Brown University had joined with their peers in the rest of the Ivy League and voted overwhelmingly to go on strike to protest the US invasion of Cambodia and the murder of student protesters at Kent State. At RISD, students had petitioned to diversify the school’s affluent, lily-white demographic, only to see the administration’s promised initiative languish in the fall. The student newspaper was filled with earnest editorials and anonymous letters excoriating the deans and the curriculum. As an entering freshman, Chris Frantz was oblivious to all of this. “I was ready for action,” he wrote of his arrival in Providence. “Art! Girls! Parties! Fun! As far as I was concerned, RISD had it all.” In lieu of student activism, he eagerly embraced the social milieu of the school—joining a posse of freshmen, acquiring a steady girlfriend, Andrea Shapiro, who came from the wealthy suburb of Chappaqua, New York, and generally making the scene. He also completed the physical transformation he had begun in his last year of prep school, growing his hair into a well-groomed coiffure and dressing in a carefully put-together manner that gave him a rock ’n’ roll look. Though Chris had left his drums behind in Pittsburgh, musical taste had become a prime marker of identity on college campuses, and a big part of his identity at RISD would be that of an avid and knowledgeable music fan. Chris also cultivated the aura of an acidhead, taking the drug with Hugh Roberts, attending classes under the influence, then sharing his exploits with his friends.

It was another story for David Byrne. Intrigued yet intimidated by the cosmopolitan character of the RISD student body, Byrne struggled socially and academically throughout his freshman year. As he explained it, “I grew up in a little suburb of Baltimore, and all of a sudden I was meeting more Black people, Jewish people, rich people, fancy people, people from California, and it was mind-blowing. I might have heard or read that people like these existed, that their lives were completely different from mine, their upbringings were completely different, but you can’t really imagine it until you’re having a beer with somebody and they’re just talking about how things were when they grew up, and you realize, that is not my world at all, that person is from another world.” David’s individuality had been a given in suburban, blue-collar Arbutus, where his arty eccentricity was plain for all to see. Now he was surrounded by nearly two thousand self-styled individualists, many of whom were much more skilled in the art of self-presentation than he.

To some extent, all freshmen at RISD had to cope with this affront to their singularity, but David’s way of dealing with it was to rebel against the program he had just been admitted to. The Bauhaus orientation of RISD required all entering freshmen, regardless of the discipline or medium they planned to major in, to complete a foundation year of courses in drawing, art history, and multidimensional design. “RISD was very traditional,” Byrne recalled. “You had to learn how to draw.” He responded to this traditionalism by embracing the principal trend in contemporary art that had little to do with drawing, art history, or design. Nineteen seventy was the year of the first self-described show of “Conceptual” art in New York, and Byrne’s rebellion against RISD was centered on the defiantly intellectualized polemics of Conceptualism.

As articulated in the late 1960s in a series of manifesto-like essays by the theorist Joseph Kosuth and the sculptor Sol LeWitt, Conceptualism sought to finish what Marcel Duchamp had started by redefining the practice of art as a form of thinking, not making, shifting the focus from object to subject—from the physical manifestation of the work to the ideas behind its creation. This was based, in Kosuth’s words, on “an understanding that artists work with meaning, not shapes, colors, or materials.” In keeping with the 1960s penchant for radical new ideologies, Conceptualism declared an end to painting and sculpture, and to the very idea of art as a form of aesthetic, much less heroic, self-expression. In reaction to the improvisational spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism, most Conceptual artists extolled the virtues of premeditation. “All planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair,” wrote Sol LeWitt. “The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.”

An important corollary of Conceptualism was an ostensibly “democratic” impulse that sought to reject the exaltation and commodification of individual artworks. In the 1960s, Pop Art had delighted in the Duchampian challenge to conventional ideas about the sort of art objects that belonged in galleries and museums. Conceptual art took this challenge to its logical conclusion by questioning the very need for art objects, galleries, and museums. “Actual works of art are little more than historical curiosities,” Kosuth wrote in 1969.

Despite its antipathy to the institutional structure of the art world, Conceptualism would find its most enthusiastic constituency during the early 1970s in the BFA and graduate programs of America’s art schools, where its pervasive emphasis on critical discourse and theory, culminating in the incestuous proposition that the true subject of art is the nature of art itself, would transform the practice of art education in the decade ahead. In the young David Byrne, the democratic ethos of Conceptualism resonated with his own sense of intimidation at the affluence and sophistication of his fellow students at RISD, which left him, he later said, with a “frustrated disdain for the elitist streak predominant in the whole art scene.” As a result, Byrne’s work during his freshman year centered on Polaroid and pinhole photography, written questionnaires on topics like the existence of UFOs, and the grainy frontiers of Xerox art. “I did copier art because I wanted my work to be easily accessible and not available only to the few people who could afford it,” he explained. “I also didn’t want it to have that ‘aura’ that fine art in galleries has.”

It is hard to gauge how much of Byrne’s disenchantment with RISD actually had to do with his response to the “elitist” nature of the school. Previously, all of his efforts in art and music had involved activities of his own choosing—even his high school art teacher had allowed him to do as he liked. This meant that he came to RISD with little grounding in the habits of receptivity, much less humility, that are required to learn an artistic practice in an academic setting. Byrne would later claim, falsely and with a note of pride, that he was expelled from RISD on account of the originality of his work: “People responded strongly because they thought it wasn’t ‘art-related.’ They thought I was just some nut infiltrating the art community.” But the grandiosity of this explanation—like the grandiosity of his concern, as a freshman art student, that people would have trouble “affording” his work—is qualified by his simpler admission, “I had demons and I felt socially inept.” Major dislocations can be especially challenging for adolescents on the Asperger’s spectrum, who tend to place a strong reliance on familiar settings and routines. As it was, Byrne’s response to his disillusionment with RISD was not to try another field of study, but rather to try another art school, this one much closer to home. Having been accepted at the Maryland Institute College of Art the year before, he reapplied to the Institute (as it was known in those days) and was admitted as a transfer student in the fall of 1971.

In the meantime, the Byrne family had moved away from Arbutus after their rental house in the center of town was condemned to make way for a municipal parking lot. (David retained a memory of watching his home being collapsed into the basement where he had spent so much of his time, thus becoming the second Byrne residence in Maryland to fall prey to the forces of suburbanization.) Assimilating to the American custom of homeownership, his parents bought a town house in Columbia, an altruistic “planned community” that was being developed on a broad expanse of Maryland farmland within commuting distance of both Baltimore and Washington. Columbia would eventually grow into a major population center, providing homes for a hundred thousand residents in a string of villages that would be hailed as a triumph of decentralized urban planning. When the Byrnes moved there in 1970, however, the place was still a work in progress, with large tracts of undeveloped land awaiting the construction of houses, shops, and roads.

Though David remained close with his family, the suburbs of Maryland were the last place he wanted to be. One of his classmates at RISD had introduced him to a friend named Marc Kehoe, who attended the Maryland Institute and had a lease on a large apartment on Mount Royal Terrace, a few blocks from the school. Though Kehoe seemed confident that there would be a place for David there, the rest of the apartment was rented by the time he arrived, forcing these two virtual strangers to share a tiny room. In this hothouse atmosphere, Byrne and Kehoe became fast friends.

Of all the socially adept people that David Byrne would ever befriend as a way of “bringing everyone in,” Marc Kehoe was possibly the most gregarious and surely the most outlandish. He had grown up in a middle-class family in Edison, New Jersey, the eldest child of an Irish American office worker and his Ukrainian American wife—a mixture of Celtic and Slavic ancestry that had a combustible effect on his personality. Like Byrne, Kehoe (as everyone called him) had attended a newly built suburban high school that could have been purposefully designed to radicalize an arty teenager whose parents had exposed him to the cultural vistas of New York. After completing his foundation year at the Maryland Institute, Kehoe declared himself a painting major. But at this point, he was temperamentally more suited to performing his art than to making it. By the time he got to art school, Kehoe had assumed the countercultural persona of a prankster or holy fool, engaging the world with a brash theatricality that broadcast his autonomy from straight society. A dynamo of social energy and sardonic humor, with a big head of hair and a wryly expressive face, he was, on first impression, everything that David Byrne was not. Yet the two of them formed a powerful bond based on their shared sense of absurdity and their contrarian views of the world. While Byrne was drawn to Kehoe’s flamboyant sociability, Kehoe was taken with the intelligence and ambition he sensed behind his new friend’s outwardly diffident manner.

Marc Kehoe was also the first person to be seriously impressed by David Byrne’s musicality, beginning with the renditions of early Beatles songs (“You Can’t Do That,” “Not a Second Time”) that he would pick out on an acoustic guitar in their cramped room. At Byrne’s suggestion, Kehoe retrieved an accordion he had learned to play as a child, and the two of them formed a duo they called Bizadi, with Byrne, variously, on violin, ukulele, and guitar. Their repertoire consisted of satiric versions of sentimental standards like “Pennies from Heaven” and “I Only Have Eyes for You,” interspersed with 1960s garage band hits like “Wooly Bully” and “96 Tears.” They performed this kitschy hodgepodge on the streets of Baltimore and in the student hangouts around the Institute with a distinctly Dada-esque flair, dressing in thrift shop clothes, striking odd poses, and in Byrne’s case, occasionally affixing a lit candle to the bow of his violin. The audience for their antics included Kehoe’s friend Naomi Reichbart, a fellow Maryland Institute painter from Long Island, and Melissa Kearney, a high-spirited high school student who was the sister of one of their classmates at the school. From Kearney’s perspective, Kehoe was the main attraction—she would later compare his crazed energy to that of the comedian Robin Williams—while Byrne played the role of straight man and sidekick.

Marc Kehoe’s appreciation of David Byrne’s renditions of Beatles songs was all the more telling for the fact that Kehoe subscribed to a growing strain of hip sensibility in the 1970s that professed to hate the Beatles. “The Beatles are good even though everyone already knows that they’re good,” the classical composer Ned Rorem had observed in 1967, alluding to the way the group’s ubiquitous popularity affronted the usual notions of discerning musical taste. As evidenced by top-selling artists like the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, and Motown’s singers and groups, Anglo-American popular music in the 1960s had been distinguished by an almost unprecedented correlation between ambitious artistic talent and enormous commercial success. While this served to generate a broad sense of cultural consensus, it also subverted the social function of musical taste, among young people especially, as a way of defining oneself in relation to one’s peers. To say that you liked the Beatles was another way of saying that you were just like everyone else, and to a dedicated iconoclast like Marc Kehoe, this was not an appealing thought. Kehoe had finessed this problem in the way that many young whites in Britain and America (including, at one time, the members of the Beatles and the Stones) had chosen to finesse it, by embracing Black music as the gold standard of emotional authenticity. Smokey Robinson and James Brown were particular favorites of his, and there is no question that some of this influence rubbed off on David Byrne, whose only previous interest in Black music had been acquired secondhand from groups like the Beatles, the Stones, and the Who.

At the same time, Byrne was also picking up on some of the more distinctive artists in the rock underground, beginning with a pair of oddly analogous figures named Mac Rebennack and Don Van Vliet, who were better known, respectively, as Dr. John and Captain Beefheart. Rebennack began as a rare white session musician in the Black New Orleans studio scene that spawned such seminal R&B stars as Fats Domino, Little Richard, and Lee Dorsey, in the course of which he became an acolyte of the great New Orleans piano master Professor Longhair. In the late 1960s, after moving to Los Angeles to work with the producer Harold Battiste, Rebennack sought to compensate for a potentially fatal lack of pop charisma by reinventing himself as Dr. John, the Night Tripper, a persona he based loosely on the New Orleans tradition of a voodoo medicine man. His early albums were filled with funky, laid-back tracks whose slurry vocals and swampy ambience fit well with the vogue for musical psychedelia. Byrne had seen Dr. John perform at the Bath Blues Festival in the summer of 1970, where he was heckled off the stage by a crowd of British blues purists, and had followed him ever since.

Don Van Vliet shared a similar lack of pop charisma and a similar fixation on an iconic Black musician—in his case, the bluesman Howlin’ Wolf, whose deep-voiced, hypermasculine vocal style he adopted as his own. Born in 1941 and raised in Southern California, Van Vliet showed promise as a visual artist before turning to music in high school, where his classmates included Frank Zappa. After dropping out of junior college and working at a series of odd jobs, he adopted the stage name Captain Beefheart and became his former classmate’s protégé when the success of the Mothers of Invention established Zappa as an impresario of musical weirdness. Beefheart’s 1967 debut album Safe As Milk was graced by the presence of the twenty-year-old slide guitar prodigy Ry Cooder, who quickly left the band; his third album, Trout Mask Replica, became an underground sensation on the strength of its clanging machine rhythms, wildly dissonant guitar playing, and portentously surreal lyrics.

The cult popularity of artists like Captain Beefheart and Dr. John—neither of whom enjoyed hit singles or significant album sales—was a testament to how high the record business was riding in the early 1970s, when the deep pockets of major labels like Warners and Columbia allowed them to record scores of artists and nurture their careers in the hope that, sooner or later, a certain percentage of them would parlay their talent into real commercial success. To some extent, this had always been the business plan of the recording industry; the difference in the early 1970s involved the creation of a new promotional infrastructure centered on high-fidelity FM radio stations, many of them affiliated with colleges and universities, and a specialized rock press, emblematized by but by no means confined to Rolling Stone magazine, that was entirely dependent on record company patronage and advertising.

The fine arts program at the Maryland Institute in the early 1970s was even more traditional than RISD’s, with a strong emphasis on figurative technique. This ensured that, as Marc Kehoe and David Byrne pooled their contrarian tendencies over the course of their sophomore year, they became increasingly disengaged from the school. One bright spot was the Institute’s liberal arts curriculum, which featured classes taught by young instructors like David Franks, a recent Johns Hopkins graduate whose course Sound and Visual Poetry took his students on an interdisciplinary tour of the modernist avant-garde. (Franks went on to become a fixture in bohemian Baltimore, known for his sound compositions for church bells and tugboat horns as well as his own Xerox art series, in which he made copies of his naked body on a machine at a local Social Security office that he chose, he claimed, for the distinctive patina of its prints.) Marc Kehoe studied with Franks, as did Joan Lobell, a Baltimore girl from a wealthy family who rented an apartment in a spacious row house on St. Paul Street. Joan and David Byrne began dating during the fall semester, and when David moved in with her during the winter of 1972, Kehoe moved there too. By this time, the two boys welcomed any excuse to avoid attending classes, and spent their increasingly long weekends hitching rides to Washington, New York, or up to Providence to commune with a growing circle of mutual friends.

6

The Admiral’s Daughter

Life in the military is about fronts. Appearances. Masks. The stage persona. That’s an important part of military life. Our parents were always obsessively concerned about how things looked. When we were growing up, every aspect of personal and private life was a measure of our fathers’ professional competence.

—MARY EDWARDS WERTSCH, MILITARY BRATS

While David Byrne was orchestrating his escape from yet another art school, Chris Frantz was eagerly staying the course at RISD. Frantz had spent the summer of 1971 living at home in Pittsburgh, working at a pipe foundry, and reviving his interest in drumming by playing along with records in his parents’ basement. When he returned to Providence in the fall, he brought his drum kit with him for the first time. Now, at the start of his sophomore year, Frantz declared himself a painting major and moved into an apartment on Benefit Street above a popular student hangout called Joe’s. His roommate, a fellow painter named Gregor Hornyak, was an Andy Warhol aficionado with a notably fey affect who turned Frantz on to the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed, and the cult of art star celebrity worship that Warhol personified. Their introductory figure-painting class was taught by Richard Merkin, a popular adjunct professor in RISD’s otherwise undistinguished painting department. (Merkin had been a face in the crowd of culture heroes on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album, placed there by his friend Peter Blake.) Though Frantz was still together with his girlfriend Andi Shapiro, Merkin’s class included a pretty transfer student who immediately caught his eye.

Martina Michèle Weymouth was six months older than Chris, born in San Diego in November 1950. She too had grown up in a military family, though there the resemblance ended. Whereas Bob Frantz had graduated from West Point after the end of World War II and spent the Korean War at Harvard Law School, Ralph Weymouth had graduated from Annapolis in 1938 and served as a naval aviator in the Pacific, earning the Navy Cross for valor after the squadron of dive-bombers he led sank a Japanese carrier in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Two years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, he had married Laure “Lo” Bouchage, the daughter of a well-to-do French doctor, whom he had met while serving as an ensign on a cruiser stationed in the Mediterranean. Tina’s father was a figure out of central casting: a six-foot-six, craggily handsome naval officer whose commanding presence was tempered by an amiable disposition and a worldly outlook. Her mother was a former Olympic-class skier and a granddaughter of the renowned Breton poet and folklorist Anatole Le Braz, whose wealthy third wife, an American named Mabel Davison, had been the sister of one of J. P. Morgan’s founding partners in the Bankers Trust.

Tina was their third child, born nine years after her brother Yann and seven years after her sister Reine Anne, better known as “Nanou.” Ralph Weymouth was six thousand miles away at the time of Tina’s birth, flying combat missions in the Sea of Japan during the early, desperate months of the Korean War. He returned to San Diego the following spring, and from then on, the Weymouths moved on a regular basis as he made his way up the chain of command: to Honolulu with the Pacific Fleet in 1953, then to Annapolis for a three-year post at the Naval Academy; to the South of France in the late 1950s, where Weymouth commanded the flagship of a Middle East task force, then to Newport, Rhode Island, where he served as captain of the aircraft carrier that recovered the first American manned space flight in 1961; to Washington, DC, in the early 1960s for desk jobs at the Pentagon and the National War College, and then to the naval air station at Keflavik, Iceland, in 1965, where Weymouth, now a rear admiral and an expert at antisubmarine warfare, spent two years commanding NATO’s Iceland Defense Force.

Along the way, Tina was joined by a gaggle of sisters—Danielle, Lani, Letitia, and Laura—and a kid brother, Loric, which effectively made her the eldest child in this second Weymouth brood. As Tina saw it, “I was groomed to be a teacher or maybe an artist of some kind. I was taught hard work and the rewards of it, and told not to be selfish. And then I had these other sisters, younger, incredibly beautiful, and it was like they were going to marry diplomats and give great parties and dress in fine clothes. I never really anticipated that I would be marriageable. I never identified with the princesses in fairy tales. I was much more likely to identify with the knight in shining armor or whoever got to ride horses. Tomboy stuff.” Together with the sheer weight of numbers, the Weymouths’ constant need to pick up and start over in a new place made their family the chief source of continuity in their otherwise itinerant lives.

Another source of continuity was Laure Weymouth’s Catholic faith, which led her to entrust the education of her daughters, whenever possible, to the nuns in convent schools. Tina has characterized her upbringing as that of the proverbial good Catholic girl—to the point, even, of comparing herself to Nan Ryan, the main character in “The Ugly Duckling,” a short story by the Irish writer Frank O’Connor. A homely yet willful tomboy “whose decisions seemed all to be dictated by some inner torment,” Nan withdraws into a shell of Catholic piety during her early teenage years—until a bout of illness unaccountably transforms her boyish features into the face of a great beauty. Suddenly besieged by suitors, she shamelessly plays the field, only to reject them one by one before choosing to enter a convent in order to preserve the inner life she created in her childhood. “Because of some inadequacy in themselves,” O’Connor writes of Nan, “those with the gift of creation built for themselves a rich interior world, and when the inadequacy disappeared and the real world was spread before them in all its wealth and beauty, they could not give their whole heart to it.” Like many people who are anything but, Tina liked to think of herself as a naturally shy person who kept her strong opinions to herself. In fact, whenever she did speak her mind, she did so with an air of certainty that seemed to suggest that any other perspective was simply specious or absurd.

To grow up as the child of a senior naval officer was to inhabit an insular, hierarchical subculture whose values and standards were markedly different from those of civilian life. Wherever Tina’s father was stationed, her family lived in the best available housing, socialized at their own clubs, avoided fraternization with the families of enlisted personnel, and occupied a rarefied position even in relation to the families of other, less senior officers. “The children of generals and admirals grow up feeling set apart from others, objects of curiosity, envy, or scorn,” writes the journalist Mary Edwards Wertsch, herself the daughter of an army colonel, in her definitive study, Military Brats. “So what can the message be for the military daughter, who never asked to be there in the first place? She finds herself born into a society that has little interest in helping her grow and define herself as a woman. This is a man’s world. . . . Her father commands it. Her mother personifies it. Even in the happiest, most closely knit of military families, with the most approving and loving of fathers, the young military daughter daily absorbs a powerful lesson: A female has value only as she is defined by the male. And she will be defined by the male world only in terms of how she can support or reward it.”

Following his NATO command, Ralph Weymouth went on to serve two tours in Vietnam, while his family settled in Los Angeles, where Tina attended a public high school, joined the cheerleading squad, and got to experience the rites of adolescence outside the confines of an Icelandic naval base. By this time, her brother Yann had graduated from Harvard and MIT with a graduate degree in architecture, married a Radcliffe senior named Elizabeth “Lally” Graham, whose family owned the Washington Post, and moved to New York City to work for I. M. Pei. Tina joined him there in the fall of 1968 after she graduated from high school and enrolled at Barnard College, where she planned to study art history and French literature. Instead, after taking a semester off in her junior year, she applied and was accepted as a second-year student at RISD, which was how she came to be the new girl in Richard Merkin’s painting class in the fall of 1971.

Chris Frantz was smitten from the start with this petite, blond, conventionally attractive young woman who shared his family’s military background and, he sagely noted, his taste for Camel cigarettes. (So-called military brats are known to have an uncanny ability to recognize one another amid the civilian population.) But Tina already had a steady boyfriend, a fellow transfer student named Peter Coan, and while their social circles conjoined throughout their sophomore year, it would be a full eighteen months before Chris and Tina shed their respective partners and turned their friendship into a romance. Tina later explained that, Andi Shapiro notwithstanding, on the basis of his soft-spoken manner and his circle of friends, she assumed that Chris was gay.

In January 1972, a junior named Juan Evereteze recruited Frantz to rehearse with an R&B pickup band that Evereteze, a trumpet player and one of RISD’s few African American students, was putting together to play at the school’s spring dance. The band had a full horn section and was fronted by a pair of male and female singers. While Frantz felt overmatched by some of the other musicians in the group, the chance to play the pulsating grooves on songs like Sly Stone’s “I Want to Take You Higher” and Aretha Franklin’s “Rock Steady” was a welcome challenge for him.

The music scene in Providence was similar to that in many university towns during the early 1970s, when the proliferation of college radio stations and the exploding market for “album-oriented rock” created a new performance circuit for established and aspiring recording acts. In addition to Brown and RISD, the tiny state of Rhode Island was home to more than a half-dozen colleges and universities, all a short drive from Providence, where the thirty-five-hundred-seat Palace Concert Theater and the newly opened Civic Center presented shows on a weekly basis. Among the variety of artists who performed there in 1972–73 were Frank Zappa, the Kinks, Jeff Beck, Pink Floyd, Flo & Eddie, Paul Butterfield, Mott the Hoople, Alice Cooper, the Grateful Dead, and Lou Reed (with an unknown Bruce Springsteen as his opening act). In addition, Providence was only an hour’s drive from Boston, whose enormous student population made it one of the hottest music markets in the country, supporting a robust network of rock, jazz, and blues clubs, concert halls, alternative newspapers, and FM radio stations, led by the progressive powerhouse WBCN.

On the local level, the music scene in Providence reflected the racial and town-gown divisions that characterized many New England college towns. The top Black group in the city was Chubby and the Turnpikes, an R&B show band fronted by the five Tavares brothers, who would go on to achieve national success under their own name as a disco act in 1975. (Their bandleader in the late 1960s had been a precocious New England Conservatory student named Bernie Worrell.) The blue-collar “townie” contingent spawned a popular bar band, Beaver Brown, and the consummate R&B revivalists Roomful of Blues. Over on College Hill, Brown University spun off a group called Benefit Street that gained a following on campuses throughout New England, while the house band at RISD was a willfully bizarre combination of satiric rock group and Dada troupe called the Fabulous Motels.

Formed in the fall of 1971, the Fabulous Motels were the creation of a Rhode Island University dropout named Bruce McCrae and a pair of recent RISD graduates, Dave Hansen and Charlie Claverie, who performed, respectively, as “Rudy Cheeks,” “Sport Fisher,” and “Charles Rocket.” The three singers (Hansen was also the band’s drummer, while Claverie played accordion) were backed by a group of competent sidemen and supplemented by another RISD alumnus named Dan Gosch, who performed on a toy drum set, and a trio of miniskirted female dancers called the Tantalizing Tampoons. Their stage names reflected the Motels’ fondness for Captain Beefheart, who assigned similar sobriquets to the members of his Magic Band. But their main sources of inspiration were Beefheart’s patron, Frank Zappa, whose Mothers of Invention had founded an entire genre of satiric, sardonic rock, and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, a British art-school group that tapped a related vein of rock parody, beginning with “Death Cab for Cutie,” the send-up of Elvis Presley they performed on the Beatles’ TV special Magical Mystery Tour. The Motels’ original songs included overt Mothers imitations like “Ow Wow” (“I’m not going to cut my hair for a year / Even if the mailman calls me a queer”), parodies of blue-collar rock (“Just back from Jersey City / With a girl who’s oh so pretty”), and outbursts of pop surrealism like “If Your Mother’s a Fish.” Onstage, the group dressed in clownish costumes and supplemented their songs with bits of stand-up comedy. (In 1980, Charles Rocket would enjoy a brief stint in the cast of Saturday Night Live, until his use of an on-air expletive got him kicked off the show.)

Although the Motels played almost exclusively at RISD and other local colleges, their apotheosis came in December 1972, when they performed at the Mercer Arts Center in Lower Manhattan. The Arts Center occupied a complex of rooms on the ground floor of the Broadway Central Hotel, whose hundred-year transition from one of New York’s grandest hotels into a dilapidated dormitory for welfare recipients made it a harbinger of the city’s fortunes in the 1970s—especially after the eight-story façade of the building collapsed into a pile of rubble, killing four of its residents, eight months after the Motels performed there. While it lasted, however, the center’s five performance spaces served as a crossroads for artists and musicians in multiple media. One of those spaces, the Oscar Wilde Room, became the site of regular performances by the New York Dolls; another, located in the former kitchen of the hotel and thereafter known as the Kitchen, would go on to become a fixture of the downtown arts scene.

Like the collapse of the hotel itself, the New York Dolls were also a portent of things to come. New York City had always served as the epicenter of the American music business: home to Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, most of the major record labels, numerous talent and booking agencies, and all three national television networks, whose entertainment programming provided a prime outlet for popular music of all kinds. New York had also reigned, since the 1940s, as the capital of the jazz world and, since the late 1950s, of the folk revival movement. Yet the city’s influence on the rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll that revolutionized the sound of popular music from the 1950s onward had been much less pronounced. Those bold styles had arisen as musical insurgencies, drawing their energy and inspiration from local and regional sources, as symbolized by the Tennessean Elvis Presley in 1956 and the Liverpudlian Beatles in 1964. Though New York remained an important recording center, the only successful rock groups it spawned in the 1960s were the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Young Rascals, and the jazz-rock hybrid Blood, Sweat & Tears. In the meantime, the epicenter of American popular music had gravitated steadily westward, to the studios, showcase clubs, and media conglomerates of Los Angeles and its countercultural satellite in San Francisco.

Though the New York Dolls were hardly the first rock group of the 1970s to strike a theatrically decadent pose, they were the first to do so with the distinctive plumage of New York’s Warholian downtown demimonde. David Johansen and John Genzale (Johnny Thunders) were a pair of Anglophilic dandies from the outer boroughs who had devoted their teenage years to refining their pouty imitations of Mick and Keith, studying the Stones’ documentary Gimme Shelter with the same rapt attention that an earlier generation of aspiring rockers had brought to A Hard Day’s Night. The band they formed in 1971 was an unabashed imitation of their heroes’ brand of misogynist riff-based rock, leavened by an occasional nod to the louche lyricism of Lou Reed (“Lonely Planet Boy”) and the loony backup singing of the Who. Though they never attained more than a rudimentary musical competence, the Dolls’ visual presentation took the androgyny of glitter rock into a bizarre parody of Times Square transvestism. Towering over his bandmates in his high-heeled platform shoes, Johansen, the lead singer, looked and sounded like a drag queen impersonating Mick Jagger. It was not a look that traveled well, and the Dolls had little impact outside of the small coterie of fans and fawning rock writers who attended their regular Tuesday night performances at the Mercer Arts Center. But they did leave their mark in Britain, where a brief tour of clubs in 1972 (which ended when their drummer drowned in a bathtub after overdosing on drugs) earned them the praise of rock journalists who were no less eager than their counterparts in New York to show that they were somehow in on the joke. Their most astute fan would prove to be the British fashion impresario Malcolm McLaren, who briefly managed the Dolls before their demise in 1974, and later incorporated their blend of transgressive outrage and musical primitivism into his great managerial brainstorm, the Sex Pistols.

After an idle summer living with Joan Lobell in an apartment she rented in the shadow of Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium, David Byrne and Marc Kehoe did not return to the Maryland Institute in the fall of 1972. Kehoe’s friendship with Naomi Reichbart had taken a romantic turn, so when Naomi transferred to RISD at the start of her junior year, Marc moved up to Providence to be with her. David and Joan’s relationship, on the other hand, was becoming increasingly strained—though this did not prevent the two of them from deciding to drop out of school and hitchhike across the country together. (Despite the obvious risks, hitchhiking remained a popular form of travel in the aftermath of the 1960s, when many young people relied on a spirit of countercultural camaraderie to provide them with some measure of protection.) Their first destination was a 160-acre commune on the outskirts of Bowling Green, Kentucky, that had been founded the spring before by a group of hippies who met at Towson State College in Maryland. (David had heard about the place from his former high school girlfriend, Wendy Jenkins, who attended Towson State.) Named after the Flying Burrito Brothers and inspired by Stephen Gaskin’s New Age mega-commune in neighboring Tennessee, the Flying Frog Farm was one of the scores of back-to-the-land outposts that were started in the early 1970s by disaffected kids from the cities and suburbs seeking to distance themselves from the materialist corruptions of American life. David and Joan arrived in late September and stayed for several weeks, during which David helped the Frog Farmers construct their obligatory geodesic dome and played with the commune’s obligatory house band.

After stopping in Albuquerque to visit a friend from RISD, David bought a dilapidated 1956 DeSoto sedan and drove Joan across the desert to stay with some friends in Los Angeles. He continued on to San Francisco to visit with another classmate from his freshman year at RISD, Michael Imlay, at his parents’ spectacular modern house in Sausalito. They were soon joined there by Marc Kehoe, who had hitchhiked across the country on something of a whim. After overstaying their welcome with the Imlays, Byrne and Kehoe spent several more weeks busking on the streets of Berkeley and sleeping in David’s car before hitching back east in time to spend Christmas with their families.

Early in the new year, Kehoe returned to Providence, while Byrne moved in with the ever-accommodating Joan Lobell, who had made her own way back from California and rented a loft on Market Place in the then-derelict Inner Harbor district of downtown Baltimore. David spent the winter there, working as a laborer on a construction site, saving his money, and contemplating his next move. Melissa Kearney was still in the picture; it was she who introduced David and Joan to Edith Massey, the corpulent, sweet-tempered amateur actress whom John Waters had recently cast as Edie the Egg Lady in Pink Flamingos, his magnum opus of queer kitsch. Melissa had befriended Edith at the vintage store she ran near the Maryland Institute and kept up with her after she moved her shop to Fell’s Point, the city’s new bohemia, which was a short walk from Market Place. In February 1973, Melissa and David drove Edith to New York for the “midnight movie” premiere of Pink Flamingos at the Elgin Theater, stopping off for dinner with Marc Kehoe’s mortified parents in New Jersey along the way.

Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth began dating that same winter, after Tina broke up with her architect boyfriend and Chris’s girlfriend honored a venerable tradition of art school by having a romantic entanglement with one of her professors. Among his and Tina’s early courtship rituals, Chris recalled, was watching the syndicated television show Soul Train on Saturday mornings. Based in Los Angeles and billed as “the hippest trip in America,” Soul Train began in Chicago in 1971 as a variation on the dance party format of American Bandstand, though it differed from Bandstand by presenting exclusively African American acts. (Significantly, the first white artists to appear on the show would be the glam-rock stars Elton John and David Bowie in 1975.) As the first syndicated television program of any kind to be produced by African Americans, the all-Black format of Soul Train reflected the show’s commitment to racial empowerment, providing television audiences across the country with an uncompromised window into the world of contemporary Black music and dance. The show’s theme song, “TSOP,” produced by the Philadelphia-based team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, became the prototype of the disco groove that would rule the dance clubs of America during the second half of the 1970s.

Like Chris, Tina had also dabbled in music as a teenager. In the early 1960s, when her family was living in Northern Virginia, she had joined the Potomac Handbell Ringers, a local institution led by a church organist named Nancy Poore Tufts, which revived an English tradition of handbell choirs that dated back to the 1700s. Dressed in period costumes, the twelve-member troupe performed at local schools, churches, and retirement homes and traveled as far afield as Colonial Williamsburg and the 1964 New York World’s Fair. A few years later, during her stay in Iceland, Tina began to learn folk guitar. But apart from listening to the current hits on the radio, she was not a serious fan of rock, much less blues or soul, until she met Chris Frantz. Soul Train was thus her initiation into the realm of hip musical taste. As a couple, both Chris and Tina prided themselves on their dancing, which Chris regarded as a sign of musical prowess. To hear him tell it, Chris began to contemplate the prospect of playing in a band with Tina from the moment they first got together.

7

The Amazing Artistics

Rock ’n’ roll fans are already beginning to launch an anti-sixties backlash that parallels (or parodies) the Nixon victory. It incorporates the standard grievances about musical-poetical-political pretensions crowding out fun and noise. . . . We’re supposed to get back to the mythic crudity and crassness reputed to be at the heart of rock ’n’ roll before it was corrupted by meaning, sensitivity, taste, and the like. . . . “Punk-rock” has become the term of endearment.

—ELLEN WILLIS IN THE NEW YORKER, 1972

In the spring of 1973, David Byrne returned to Providence from Baltimore and reunited with Marc Kehoe. One of their first moves was to reconstitute Bizadi as a trio with the addition of Naomi Reichbart, whose duet with Kehoe on the Marvelettes’ “My Baby Must Be a Magician” became a staple of their act. By this time, Kehoe had become friendly with members of the Fabulous Motels, who invited Bizadi to perform between their sets during a dance at the end of April in RISD’s Memorial Hall. Eager to make an impression on the art-school cohort he had left two years before, David devised a variation on “Pennies from Heaven,” the Bing Crosby standard that was Bizadi’s signature song. This time, while Kehoe’s accordion carried the tune and Reichbart held up placards inscribed with random Russian words, Byrne, wearing a fedora adorned with an inverted high-heeled shoe, put down his violin, picked up a razor, and began to shave off his thick beard. In the absence of a mirror and shaving cream, he made a mess of the job, opening cuts that sent blood streaming down his face and neck. Masochistic “body art” was a minor sensation in avant-garde circles during the early 1970s, furthering the careers of such artful self-mutilators as Chris Burden and Marina Abramović. Byrne’s performance was almost milquetoast by the standards of their work. But if nothing else, it announced to his former classmates at RISD that Mad Dave was back in town.

Despite his professed disillusionment with art school, Byrne had hopes of reenrolling at RISD when he returned to Providence that spring. But the school’s admissions department was unreceptive—not least because he didn’t seem to have made much new work in the two years he was away. At the point when undergraduates were expected to have chosen a medium, established a studio practice, and begun to create a body of work, Byrne was still recycling the questionnaires, Xerox art, and conceptual pipe dreams (“A Nielsen-type rating system for the arts”) that had preoccupied him since his freshman year. RISD’s rejection seems to have focused his ambitions, by default, on music, a prospect Byrne tested by dyeing his hair blond and affecting a wardrobe of black leather pants and white shoes. He and Marc Kehoe spent the summer of 1973 staying with Hugh Roberts’s girlfriend, Elisca Jeansonne, in an apartment she was renting in the Fox Point neighborhood, south of RISD. Then, at the end of the summer, this whole crowd—Byrne, Kehoe, Roberts, and Jeansonne, along with Naomi Reichbart and Byrne’s friend Michael Imlay—moved into a sprawling Victorian house on Brown Street in College Hill.

Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth returned to RISD in September 1973 for the start of their senior year. A few months before, following her father’s retirement from the navy, Tina’s parents had purchased a stately colonial house adjoining the campus of Brown University. Their new home featured a separate carriage house apartment, which they gave to Tina for her use. Chris Frantz kept his drums there, so when Marc Kehoe asked Frantz if he would be willing to play on the soundtrack of an 8 mm film he was making—Kehoe’s best recollection is that it was a call girl revenge fantasy called Metal Madam—Frantz suggested that they record the music in the Weymouths’ carriage house. On the appointed day, Kehoe arrived with David Byrne, whom he had also asked to play. Byrne and Frantz quickly improvised a crescendo of suitably discordant sounds. When they were done, Chris mentioned that he was thinking about starting a band and asked whether David might be interested. David said he was.

This brief encounter led to the formation of the Amazing Artistics, the band that Chris Frantz organized in the fall of 1973 with himself on drums, David Byrne on guitar and vocals, and a pair of RISD underclassmen named Hank Stahler and David Anderson on bass and guitar. (The “Amazing” modifier, adopted in obvious emulation of the Fabulous Motels, was quickly discarded as the irony wore thin.) They began, somewhat implausibly, by working up a repertoire of mid-sixties cover tunes. These included the British Invasion standards “All Day and All of the Night,” by the Kinks, and “I Can’t Explain,” by the Who, along with “Liar, Liar,” by the Castaways, a Top 40 flash in the pan from 1965. They offset these outbursts of adolescent angst with Smokey Robinson’s eloquent ballad “The Tracks of My Tears” and Al Green’s more recent rumination on “Love and Happiness,” a master class in groove that Green had performed on the first episode of Soul Train that Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth ever watched together.

Over the next few months, this loose-knit group of musical friends, joined at times by a saxophonist named Tim Behl, rehearsed on a regular basis in Hank Stahler’s apartment, filling out their repertoire with more of the same: “Kicks,” by Paul Revere & the Raiders, “Psychotic Reaction,” by the Count Five, “1, 2, 3 Red Light,” by the 1910 Fruitgum Company, and “96 Tears,” by Question Mark and the Mysterians, which David Byrne, who did virtually all of the singing in the band, had been performing with Bizadi for several years.

That a group of current and former art students would get together in the fall of 1973 to play this sort of archaic 1960s pop inevitably begs the question of what they were thinking. The year before, a freelance New York rock critic named Lenny Kaye had been commissioned by Jac Holzman, the president of Elektra Records, to compile a two-record anthology called Nuggets, composed of approximately two dozen pop singles drawn from the great herd of nondescript American “garage bands” whose members had responded to the British Invasion of 1964 by growing their hair, revamping their wardrobes, and trying to emulate the sounds they heard on hit records by groups like the Beatles, Stones, Animals, Kinks, and Who. “The name that has been unofficially coined for them [is] ‘punk-rock,’” Kaye wrote of these groups—all of them white, most of them “young, decidedly unprofessional, [and] seemingly more at home practicing for a teen dance than going out on a national tour.”

Along with similar LP compilations like the Oldies but Goodies series, Nuggets tapped into a wave of nostalgia for the salad days of rock that pervaded the music scene in the mid-seventies, inspiring records like the Band’s Moondog Matinee, David Bowie’s Pin Ups, and Elton John’s hit single “Crocodile Rock.”

This turn to the past was the flip side of the “progressive” aesthetic that had inflated rock with the pretensions of high art since the late 1960s and the machinery of theatrical spectacle since the early 1970s. In 1963, at the height of Beatlemania in Britain, John Lennon told a reporter, “This isn’t show business. This is something else. You don’t go on from this. You do this and then you finish.” Lennon’s prediction proved to be entirely untrue; by 1973, mainstream rock had enthusiastically turned itself into yet another branch of show business, as slickly professionalized and commercially calculated as network television, Broadway musicals, or big-budget Hollywood films. In response, many of the music’s true believers reacted by taking the Beatles’ own advice to “get back to where you once belonged.” A whole contingent of artists, led by the Band, Little Feat, Dr. John, Van Morrison, Randy Newman, Taj Mahal, the Allman Brothers, Ry Cooder, and John Fogerty, joined by recent converts like Eric Clapton and the Grateful Dead, were now revisiting the vernacular styles of rhythm and blues, rock ’n’ roll, rockabilly, and country blues that had drawn them to popular music in the first place. The garage band revival represented by compilations like Nuggets was a seemingly minor spin-off of this revisionist trend.

Toward the end of 1973, David Byrne asked one of his housemates on Brown Street, Elisca Jeansonne, for some help with the lyrics to a song he was working on. If nothing else, the rehearsals in Hank Stahler’s apartment were providing Byrne with a regular musical outlet, and he had reached the point where he was ready to try his hand at actually writing a song. Like every novice composer, he began by modeling his efforts on someone else’s work.

After languishing as one of the many freakish acts on Frank Zappa’s Straight Records label, the band called Alice Cooper became wildly popular in the early 1970s by bringing a horror-show sensibility to the ponderous clichés of heavy metal rock, enthralling their fans with ghoulish makeup, bloodstained clothing, and stages set with guillotines. Their bestselling album, Billion Dollar Babies, released in the winter of 1973, boasted titles like “Raped and Freezin’” and “I Love the Dead.” Alice Cooper’s willingness to wallow in the worst possible taste appealed to David Byrne’s sense of black humor (“I thought it was real funny stuff”) and inspired him to think about writing a song on a similarly macabre theme. An acquaintance named Barbara Conway, who performed as one of the Tantalizing Tampoons, had popularized the term “psycho killer” (along the lines of “killer-diller”) as an expression of utmost approval. Byrne had taken the phrase as a song title and was trying to combine it with a snippet of scat singing he liked on an Otis Redding record called “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song).” When he asked Elisca Jeansonne for her help, Jeansonne, who came from a New Orleans family of Creole descent, suggested the French idiom “Qu’est-ce que c’est” as a suitable rejoinder to the song title.

David Byrne routinely described “Psycho Killer” as the first song he ever wrote. What he meant, really, was that it was the first song he ever wrote that he was willing to perform for other people. While Alice Cooper may have inspired the subject matter, and Barbara Conway the song title, and Otis Redding the scat singing, and Elisca Jeansonne the idiomatic French, Byrne acknowledged that the sinister persona that gives the song its essential character was inspired by Randy Newman. (“I wanted it to be like Randy Newman doing Alice Cooper,” he later said.) At a time when contemporary singer-songwriters were taking an increasingly autobiographical or “confessional” approach to their work, Newman had emerged as rock’s master ironist, celebrated for his portrayals of overtly fictional and often unsavory characters: a duplicitous slave trader in “Sail Away,” a narcissistic celebrity in “Lonely at the Top,” a fetishistic voyeur in “You Can Leave Your Hat On.” It was this last song, with its menacing tempo and paranoid edge (“They don’t know what love is . . .”), that Byrne drew on most directly for the character he created in “Psycho Killer.”

Having written the chorus and a scene-setting opening verse, he showed the song to his bandmate Chris Frantz, who suggested some additional verses, and to Tina Weymouth, who brought her own family background to bear on the middle section, extending the conceit of “Qu’est-ce que c’est” into a grandiose declaration, in French, about fulfilling one’s hope and glory. At this point, the music to “Psycho Killer” was a lot less distinctive than the words, with Byrne simply strumming the chords on guitar. When he auditioned the song for his fellow Artistics, they responded by subjecting it to the same pounding eighth-note groove they applied to nearly everything they played. Byrne added a syncopated guitar introduction that sounded like a ham-fisted version of the telegraphic hook in the Supremes hit “You Keep Me Hanging On,” and Hank Stahler’s undulating bass part carried echoes of the Who.

In this form, it entered the Artistics’ repertoire in December 1973 as their first original song. But it was quickly joined by four others, as David Byrne responded to his new avocation of “songwriter” like a vine reaching for the sun. “Spin Spin Spin” applied a reggae-ish rhythm guitar to a song about the prospect of watching one’s life slip away—“Was this the place? / What’s going on? / You turn around and see your future’s gone”—reggae being the latest musical import to colonize the airwaves of America on the strength of Johnny Nash’s hit single “I Can See Clearly Now” and the film soundtrack to Jimmy Cliff’s The Harder They Come. “Sick Boy” was a lovelorn lament on which Byrne’s singing reached for a quivery vocal and emotional register reminiscent of Neil Young. “I Wish You Wouldn’t Say That” created an inordinate amount of musical fuss around an apparent slip of the tongue, culminating in a Tourette’s-like colloquy between Byrne’s singing and Tim Behl’s sax. “Warning Sign” featured copious lyrics by Chris Frantz, set to triumphal guitar chords in the verses and wistful arpeggios in the refrain.

None of these songs had the dramatic impact of “Psycho Killer,” not least because of their tone-deaf lyrics, which ranged from the serial non sequiturs of “Warning Sign” (“Hear my voice / Move my hair / I move it around a lot / But I don’t care”) to the self-piteous musings of “Sick Boy” (“I wish I were someone special / ’Cause maybe I’m wasting my ti-yime”). Yet their addition to the Artistics’ repertoire in the winter of 1974 gave the band enough material to think about playing in public. Two opportunities soon presented themselves.

By their senior year, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth were a prominent couple at RISD, sharing a studio as they prepared for their student exhibitions in the spring. Chris made large, brightly colored, gestural abstract paintings. Tina worked in a monochromatic style on what she described as her “battleship” series of canvases. She also held a seat on the student council, while Chris channeled his extracurricular energy into a well-funded enterprise called the Painting Club, which organized field trips to museums and galleries in New England and New York. In February 1974, the Painting Club hired the Artistics to play at a Valentine’s Day dance in a former bank building on the RISD campus.

The week before the dance, however, David Byrne arranged for the band to perform at another RISD-related event, this one at the Woods-Gerry House, an Italianate mansion whose first floor served as the main exhibition space for RISD undergraduates. Two of those undergraduates, Marc Kehoe’s friends Naomi Reichbart and Jeff Turtletaub, had scheduled a show of their work at the Woods-Gerry in the second week of February and invited both Kehoe and Byrne to join them. Individualized posters of the four artists were tacked up all over town and announcements were placed in the Brown Daily Herald, advertising the opening with a promise of “Movies, Cocktails, Live Bands, Guest Speakers, and a Talent Show.” (Byrne’s poster was a stern side-lit portrait that showed him in a black leather jacket buttoned up to his chin, while Kehoe posed in leopard-skin prints from head to toe.) Turtletaub and Reichbart showed their recent work: his lithographs, her paintings, which included an image of Jacqueline Onassis in bondage. Marc Kehoe showed a mixture of paintings and collage. And David Byrne presented the latest iterations of his UFO questionnaires, doctored photographs, and letter-sized text pieces.

Their work had already been hung when the RISD administration, alarmed at the festive publicity surrounding the opening and the fact that two of the artists had no affiliation with the school, abruptly canceled the show. This created an immediate cause célèbre that was played out in the pages of the student newspaper, the RISD Press, which filled the front page of its February 15 edition with statements by the artists and RISD’s president, Talbot Rantoul. The paper also printed a scathing review of the (unseen) show that was written pseudonymously by an art history professor, Barry Kirschenbaum, who railed about the UFO references and the “bizarre sexuality” of some of the work. (At the peak of his indignation, Kirschenbaum asked what Naomi Reichbart’s mother would think of her involvement with such a show.) For their part, Reichbart and Kehoe were disturbed to learn that, after the exhibition was hung—but before it was canceled—David Byrne had returned to the gallery and rearranged some of the pieces so as to highlight his own work at the expense of his collaborators. In Reichbart’s view, “David was always sort of selfish. He had this act of not being aware of other people’s feelings. I still haven’t figured out how much of it was real and how much wasn’t. That shtick was a way to get out of having to face things, of having to face other people’s unhappiness or something he did wrong.”

The cancellation of the Woods-Gerry show meant that the Valentine’s Day “Sweetheart Dance” was the Artistics’ official debut. Though the coverage in the RISD Press (written in gossip column style by the future fashion impresario André Leon Talley) failed to mention the band by name, they performed two sets, stretching their meager repertoire by repeating a number of their songs. As Chris Frantz remembered it, “We thought we sounded good.” Hank Stahler was more circumspect, recalling “small groups of people standing in front of the stage staring at us in utter bewilderment.” The consensus among their fellow musicians in Providence was closer to Stahler’s impression; Dave Hansen of the Fabulous Motels would later describe them bluntly as “a terrible band.” Their total lack of engagement with their audience caused some snarky listeners to dub them the Autistics.

The only known recording of the Artistics, a primitive rehearsal tape of their five original songs that was recorded on Hank Stahler’s tape deck in January 1974, tends to confirm Hansen’s view. Though their playing was presumably more concise on their cover songs (where they could model their parts on the records they were imitating), the predominant feeling on the tape is that of a group of musicians generating thick clouds of sound that do more to obscure than enhance the songs. While there is a recognizable timbre to David Byrne’s voice, there is no nuance or authority to his singing; he’s reciting the words to his songs while the band hammers away behind him. Since no one in the group could play a coherent solo, the instrumental interludes devolve into involuntary discords of gyrating guitars and pounding drums. But for the hint of distinction in the singing, the music sounds exactly like what it was: a group of kids who are just learning how to play their instruments cranking up the volume and having the time of their lives.

The Artistics played a few more times in the months ahead at private parties and RISD locales. But the end of the spring semester spelled the end of the band, as Hank Stahler and David Anderson went home for the summer, and Chris Frantz left for good, graduating at the end of May and returning to Pittsburgh, where he had been given a commission by a family friend to paint a mural at a local hospital. Their departures left David Byrne at loose ends. Marc Kehoe and Naomi Reichbart had long since moved into a place of their own on the other side of town, and nearly all the people David knew from his freshman year at RISD were graduating and moving on. When he learned that two former members of the Fabulous Motels, Charlie Claverie and Jeff Shore, were looking for a guitarist to play in a new, non-satiric group modeled on David Bowie and his Spiders from Mars, Byrne auditioned for their band. But after showing them a few of his own songs, he proved incapable of fitting in with the group’s original material. (“At that point, he could barely play the guitar,” Jeff Shore recalled.) The main impression he left them with was one of extreme awkwardness.

Now, finding himself in a predicament similar to the one he imagined in “Spin Spin Spin”—“You turn around and see your future’s gone”—Byrne prevailed on a new friend named Jamie Dalglish, a twenty-seven-year-old navy veteran who was graduating from RISD with a master’s degree in film and video. Compared to the typical RISD student, Dalglish had been around. His service on submarines in the navy had left him with a psychological disability, which qualified him for a monthly check from the government. Recently divorced, he had just signed a lease on a loft on Bond Street in New York’s East Village. Aware that making the place habitable was more than a one-man job, Dalglish offered to let Byrne stay there over the summer in return for his help in renovating the loft. On this basis, David Byrne loaded his few possessions into Jamie Dalglish’s van and arrived on the urban moonscape of Lower Manhattan at the end of May 1974.

8

CBGB & OMFUG

If you have an art orientation, you think about moving to New York, even if you’re not going to be in a band.

—DAVID BYRNE

In August 1974, a twenty-five-year-old French acrobat and aerialist named Philippe Petit astonished the residents of New York City by walking, dancing, and lying down on a one-inch steel cable he had somehow managed to string between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, which had opened in Lower Manhattan the year before. For forty-five minutes on a hazy Tuesday morning, the two tallest buildings in the city served as props for a feat of the purest artistry, in which Petit, dressed in basic black, walked the line between high comedy and high tragedy with breathtaking grace and aplomb. (“Get the hell off there or I’m coming out after you!” yelled one of the Port Authority police officers who responded to the reports of a “man on wire.”)

Following his arrest, psychiatric evaluation, and release on the promise that the trespassing charges against him would be dropped in return for a less terrifying encore for the city’s schoolchildren in Central Park, Petit met with reporters, charming them with his heavily accented English and providing them with the photographs he had arranged to have taken documenting his performance. By the following morning, he was the toast of the town. His portrayal of preternatural poise in the face of mortal danger resonated perfectly with the cherished self-image of New Yorkers as they navigated the crime-ridden, garbage-strewn, dysfunctional streets of their city.

What no one knew at the time was that Petit had been contemplating and planning his remarkable coup for more than seven years, ever since he first read about the Port Authority’s intention to build the world’s tallest buildings at the tip of Lower Manhattan. While waiting for the actual buildings to materialize, he had honed his craft on the spires of Notre Dame in Paris and the pylons of the Harbour Bridge in Sydney, Australia. He then assembled a team of eager accomplices, and together, like characters in a heist movie, they engaged in months of reconnaissance and subterfuge on numerous visits to New York. Though the Daily News described Petit as a “tourist,” it turned out that he had no intention of leaving the city once he had captured its imagination. In this sense, he epitomized the ambitions of the countless young people who had come to New York for generations on end because they conceived of it as the grandest possible stage on which to pursue their dreams.

On the day after Philippe Petit provided New Yorkers with one last spectacular gasp of the “Fun City” ethos that John Lindsay had sought to promote during his eight years as mayor, Richard Nixon became the first American president to resign his office. For the next few months, the political crisis in the country continued to distract attention from the fiscal crisis that was about to engulf New York. Having campaigned on the basis of his long experience as Lindsay’s budget director and comptroller, Abraham Beame had replaced Lindsay as mayor in January and promptly complained that he had “inherited” a $1.5 billion budget deficit from his predecessor. Throughout his first year in office, Beame would treat the widening chasm between New York’s uncontrolled spending and its dwindling tax revenue as a public relations problem caused by a “conspiracy” of the banks and the media to undermine trust in the integrity of the short-term bonds that the city had relied upon since the 1960s to balance its books. In the summer of 1974, the mayor’s own high-wire act was just beginning, and it would not end well.

David Byrne and Jamie Dalglish spent that summer familiarizing themselves with their new surroundings and renovating the parlor-floor loft that Dalglish had rented at 52 Bond Street, a squat brown building next to the graceful cast-iron façade of the Bouwerie Lane Theatre. Running a scant two blocks from Broadway to the Bowery, Bond Street lay at the center of a narrow corridor of industrial lofts and warehouses, soon to be known as NoHo, that divided the rapidly gentrifying West Village from the ever-increasing squalor of its namesake to the east. Two rising stars of the downtown art scene, the painter Brice Marden and the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, lived on their block, Mapplethorpe in the same building as the saxophonist Sam Rivers, whose Studio Rivbea was a center of the jazz loft movement in New York.

The location of Jamie Dalglish’s loft made it a popular gathering spot for his friends and former classmates from RISD, many of whom had also set their sights on living in downtown New York. Included in this cohort was a twenty-one-year-old photographer from Queens named Andrea Kovacs, who had been admitted to RISD at the age of sixteen and had just completed her first year in the prestigious MFA program at Yale. (The Yale of art schools, as it were.) The daughter of an exiled Hungarian politician-turned-journalist and a Radcliffe coed who was barely half his age, Kovacs’s sharp tongue, voluptuous figure, hyper-articulate intelligence (she was quick to mention her 180 IQ), and precocious artistic talent had generated a formidable mystique among her fellow students at RISD, where she had majored first in architecture, then in sculpture, and finally in photography, excelling at all three. Along the way, she communed with the Fabulous Motels and became enchanted by the work of the Conceptual artists Vito Acconci and Dennis Oppenheim. She came to Bond Street at Jamie Dalglish’s invitation, but one night, while listening to the live version of “Sweet Jane” on Lou Reed’s Rock ’n’ Roll Animal LP, she and David Byrne fell into a conversation that sparked an intense affair.

For Byrne, it was his first serious romantic involvement since his on-again off-again relationship with Joan Lobell; for Kovacs, whose charismatic personality and art-school eminence masked a constellation of deep-seated neuroses, it was her first real love affair. Though Andrea had been “repelled” by David at RISD, where he had reminded her of “a crazed lumberjack who’d just come out of the woods,” she was now captivated by his looks, his humor, and his critical intelligence. “He was always analyzing life’s systems,” she recalled. “Wondering if they were real or not. He was an agnostic, not just about God but toward what people accept as truths about life. It was very difficult for David to believe in love. He was full of questions of about it. He wanted love. He was almost in love with the concept of being in love.”

Andrea’s comment about David’s attention to “analyzing life’s systems” was a reference to an infatuation with cybernetics that he had picked up on the margins of art school. “By the time I moved to New York and was writing songs and making artworks I was reading a lot of systems theory and cybernetics,” he later said. “I had hopes of integrating this bizarrely analytical approach to the creation of music and art.”

As first articulated in a 1948 book by the eccentric mathematician Norbert Wiener—himself a classic Asperger’s “little professor” who received his PhD from Harvard at the age of eighteen—cybernetics began as the interdisciplinary study of “systems of control and communication” that rely on real-time information to adjust to changing conditions. In addition to introducing the concept of “feedback” into the popular lexicon, cybernetic theory would have important applications in the fields of neurology (nervous systems), psychology (family systems), sociology (social systems), business (management systems), and, above all, computer science. Its application to the arts centered on the writings of Roy Ascott, a protégé of the Pop artist Richard Hamilton who taught in the 1960s at a number of British art colleges, where his students included Pete Townshend and Brian Eno. Ascott was a fervent proponent of “process over product” in art-making, which aligned him closely with the principles of Conceptualism that both Andrea Kovacs and David Byrne had encountered in art school.

In Byrne’s case, though, his interest in cybernetic control and communication extended into the realm of emotional “systems” as well, as a means to gaining an understanding of concepts like attraction, affection, and empathy that, for someone with Asperger’s, was going to be (as Tim Page described it) “hard-won rather than hardwired.” It was on this basis that cybernetic terminology relating to decision-making and problem-solving would find its way into the lyrics of some of the songs he wrote during his first year in New York.

David Byrne’s relationship with Andrea Kovacs may have been the only good thing that was happening in his life in the summer of 1974. Jamie Dalglish’s disability pension allowed him to work on his art full-time; David, on the other hand, had no means of support, no academic credentials, and no real job experience. His ambition, as he explained it to Andrea, was “to make his life into a work of Conceptual art, to design a persona and then animate it.” Ever since high school, Byrne had relied on friends, whether Michael Yockel, Joan Lobell, Melissa Kearney, Marc Kehoe, or Chris Frantz, to take the initiative on his behalf. With her formidable façade of self-assurance—in speaking about her own work, she clearly regarded herself as a genius—Kovacs might have played that role. But as the summer wore on, and Andrea prepared to return to Yale, David sank into a depression that left him immobilized for hours on end, face down on the mattress they shared on the floor of Jamie Dalglish’s kitchen. Though he had always maintained a belief in his own talent, and his friends were aware of the palpable sense of ambition he conveyed, there was little to substantiate either his talent or his ambition around people like Dalglish and Kovacs, whose achievements had been recognized and—however much David professed his disdain for art school—accredited in an academic setting. He, on the other hand, possessed no marketable artistic skills of any kind.

One faint glimmer of possibility lay right around the corner, in a dive bar on the Bowery where David, Andrea, and Jamie would occasionally go to drink beer, play pool, and listen to music. Hillel “Hilly” Kristal had assumed the lease on the ground-floor bar in the dilapidated Palace Hotel in December 1969, but in the summer of 1974, he still hadn’t figured out what to do with the place. Born in New York in 1931 and raised in rural New Jersey, Kristal had served in the marines and flirted with a career as a folksinger before taking a job as the house manager of Max Gordon’s Village Vanguard, New York’s top jazz club, in 1959. The Vanguard presented the aristocracy of modern jazz, as well as hipster comics like Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen, but Kristal himself was not that much of a jazz fan, and he eventually left to try his hand at concert production, teaming up with the fledgling promotor Ron Delsener to start the Rheingold Music Festival in Central Park in 1966. That same year, Kristal opened his own bar and restaurant, Hilly’s, on West Ninth Street, where he began booking cabaret singers on the weekends. (Bette Midler got her start as a solo performer there.)

Three years later, seized by the delusion, possibly inspired by Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, that country music was going to be the next big thing in New York, Kristal shifted his proprietorship, first to a club on Thirteenth Street in the West Village and then to the Palace Bar, renaming it Hilly’s on the Bowery, but otherwise leaving it pretty much as he found it: a filthy tunnel of a room, 25 feet wide and 160 feet deep. Its sole amenity was one of the longest bars in the city, which was well suited to a clientele of solitary alcoholics who liked to spend long hours of the day and night staring off into space. Given the derelict scene on the Bowery, a relative measure of security was provided by the local chapter of the Hells Angels, who adopted the place as their own, and whose members jumped at the chance to manhandle unruly or unconscious patrons and throw them out onto the street. Kristal’s initial contribution to the ambience was to allow his dog, a saluki named Jonathan, to roam free and defecate at will on the floor.

Over the next few years, Kristal experimented with presenting various types of music on the small, low stage he built toward the back of the bar. These included a quartet led by John Coltrane’s former drummer Rashied Ali, who went on to open his own club in SoHo; Queen Elizabeth, a rock band led by a drag queen from Georgia who called himself Wayne County and performed with a strap-on vagina; and Suicide, a duo led by the visual artist Alan Vega (né Bermowitz), which combined a primitive form of electronic music with confrontational performance art. But while acts like these drew a smattering of patrons from the downtown jazz, gay, and art scenes, they did not begin to compete with the combination of vacant drunks, Hells Angels, and actual dog shit that gave Hilly’s on the Bowery its essential character.

In January 1974, hoping that a fresh start might improve his prospects, Kristal renamed his bar CBGB & OMFUG. The abbreviation stood for Country, Bluegrass, Blues & Other Music for Uplifting Gourmandizers—not that anybody knew what the circus-style letters on the club’s new marquee stood for. It was supposedly while Kristal was installing this marquee that Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd happened to walk by and ask him about hiring their newly formed band Television. Kristal told them that he didn’t book rock groups, but a few days later, at the urging of the band’s nominal manager, Terry Ork, he agreed to give them a spot on a Sunday night, when his club was even more deserted than it was during the rest of the week. Ork promised that the band would bring its own contingent of fans. In return, Kristal offered them the standard deal of down-market clubs: they would keep the proceeds from the door; he would keep the proceeds from the bar.

Hilly Kristal’s plans to reconstitute his dive bar as a country, blues, and folk club did comport with certain trends in the downtown music scene. CBGBs stood at the eastern end of Bleecker Street, which had once been home to some of New York’s best-known folk, blues, and comedy clubs. Many of these venues had been coffeehouses, and few of them had liquor licenses. This hadn’t been much of an issue in the 1960s, when the proliferation of recreational drugs loosened the long-standing linkage between the consumption of music and the consumption of alcohol. But with the drinking age in New York still set at eighteen, the youthful appetite for beer and hard liquor had made a big comeback in the early 1970s, as the Age of Aquarius yielded to the dystopian vistas of the Nixon era. Kristal may have been hoping to lure his share of thirsty country, blues, and folk fans from the one surviving Bleecker Street coffeehouse, the Bitter End. Adding to his potential clientele were the aggressive efforts of NYU to complete its transition from America’s largest commuter college into a residential university centered in Lower Manhattan—a project that involved the acquisition and construction of numerous dormitory buildings around Washington Square, including three thirty-story residential towers that had opened toward the eastern end of Bleecker Street in the late 1960s. This had the effect of flooding the neighborhood with students and young faculty members.

Still another development working in Kristal’s favor was a cluster of recently opened entertainment venues within a block or two of CBGBs that brought a bubble of renewed nightlife to the north end of the Bowery. These included the Tin Palace, an avant-garde jazz club on the corner of East Second Street that was a magnet for artists and writers, the Jean Cocteau Repertory in the Bouwerie Lane Theatre, on the corner of Bowery and Bond, and the experimental theater company La MaMa, which occupied a performance space on East Fourth Street, around the corner from Phebe’s, a popular watering hole, and right next door to Club 82, one of the city’s premier drag clubs.

Television made their debut at CBGBs at the end of March 1974. Kristal thought they were “god-awful,” but the two dozen friends they brought into his club were enough of a bonanza that he offered them a month of Sundays, and successive months after that. A brief write-up in the new downtown paper the Soho Weekly News set the counterintuitive standard by which much of the music at CBGBs would be judged in years to come. “The great thing about this band,” the paper noted, “is that they have absolutely no musically or socially redeeming characteristics and they know it.”

For their part, the members of Television took a rather different view. Tom Miller and Richard Meyers had met at a Delaware boarding school during the mid-1960s. Both of them were eventually expelled and found their way to New York, where they reunited in the East Village in 1969. For the next four years, they worked in used-book stores, hung around the periphery of the scenes at Max’s Kansas City, the Mercer Arts Center, and St. Mark’s Church, and together presumed to be poets. Miller had played guitar since high school, and in 1973, when the two of them resolved to switch their pretensions from poetry to rock, he took it upon himself, in the tradition of John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe, to teach Meyers to play the electric bass. (As Meyers described it, “There was just so much more excitement in rock & roll than sitting at home writing poetry. . . . And we definitely thought we were as cool as the next people, so why not get out there and sell it?”) They settled on a name, the Neon Boys, and recruited a drummer they knew from their old prep school named Billy Ficca. But the band went nowhere, mainly because they lacked the technical facility to perform as a trio. After nearly a year, they finally found a capable second guitarist named Richard Lloyd, a part-time male hustler who had grown up in the West Village and lived with Terry Ork, the manager of Cinemabilia, the film memorabilia shop where Meyers worked. With the addition of Lloyd, they renamed their band Television; at the same time, Miller and Meyers renamed themselves Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell.

By 1974, the story of the Beatles’ apprenticeship in the cellar clubs of Liverpool and Hamburg had become a canonical chapter in the story of rock ’n’ roll. Long before Malcolm Gladwell would use them to illustrate his proposition that it takes ten thousand hours of practice to master a complex skill, the Beatles’ residences at the Kaiserkeller, the Top Ten Club, and most of all, the Cavern, where they played nearly three hundred times in 1961–62, were understood to be the crucible in which they learned their craft and forged their sovereign identity as a band. Something similar had happened to the Stones at the Crawdaddy Club in Surrey in 1962 and the Who at the Marquee Club in London a few years after that. Given the itinerant nature of the music business, the chance to perform repeatedly on the same stage in the same place has had a salutary effect on the confidence and capabilities of countless young singers and groups.

So it would be for Television. A crude videotape of the group rehearsing early in 1974 shows a band of stunning ineptitude, pawing at their instruments, striking stadium-rock poses, and constructing off-key harmonies with a thoughtful solemnity worthy of This Is Spinal Tap. But by performing on a weekly basis before a friendly, forgiving audience, their playing steadily improved, and their Sunday night residency was instrumental in establishing CBGBs, against Hilly Kristal’s better judgment, as a rock venue. Much of this owed to the assiduous networking of the band’s manager, Terry Ork, whose service as a night-shift worker in Andy Warhol’s Factory had made him a fixture at Max’s Kansas City and a well-connected figure in New York’s increasingly liberated, post-Stonewall gay underground.

On a personal level, however, Television began falling apart almost as soon as they got together. Richard Lloyd and Billy Ficca were pretty much along for the ride, but Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell shared divergent strains of grandiosity that caused them to respond in very different ways to the attention that was generated by their residency at CBGBs. Verlaine channeled his ample ambition into the role of a musical taskmaster: rehearsing the group, practicing his guitar, and, in due course, promoting his own songs at the expense of those of his bandmates. By downtown New York standards, he turned out to have a surprising affinity for the guitar heroics and languorous lyricism of hippie jam bands like the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead. As for Richard Hell, his interest in playing in a rock group, aside from the prospect of sex and drugs, was centered not so much on the music as on his desire to play the part of a culture hero—the role that Rolling Stone had helped to institutionalize with its interviews and cover stories in which rock musicians were unaccountably asked to pronounce on the events of the day. Hell was a particular fan of Pete Townshend, whose Mod anthem “My Generation” he sought to emulate by writing a song called “Blank Generation” (“I belong to the blank generation / I can take it or leave it each time”). While Hell’s singing, songwriting, and bass playing remained as pedestrian as his poetry, his talent for commanding attention would lead him to exert an indelible influence as a fashion icon, promoting a style of artfully distressed clothing and artfully deranged hair (inspired, he said, by a youthful photograph of Rimbaud) that would serve as enduring emblems of the downtown music scene.

By the time Jamie Dalglish, David Byrne, and Andrea Kovacs began frequenting CBGBs, Television was into the fourth month of their Sunday night residency, now joined by a campy retro girl group called the Stilettoes. Hilly Kristal continued to book occasional folk, blues, and glam-rock bands on the weekends, but he was becoming increasingly reliant on Terry Ork, who drew on his extensive social network to bring people into the club. “He persuaded me every which way,” Kristal recalled. “He brought in a lot of theater and poetry people from the area, since he lived around here and knew them all. He was very excited about the whole thing, and he got me excited about it.”

Over the summer, the Stilettoes broke up and re-formed around the most lushly attractive of their singers, a twenty-nine-year-old former Playboy Bunny and waitress at Max’s Kansas City named Deborah Harry. Harry and her guitarist boyfriend, a recent art-school graduate named Chris Stein, returned to CBGBs in the middle of August, now billing themselves as Angel and the Snakes. Opening for them was a quartet of rank amateurs named John Cummings, Doug Colvin, Jeffrey Hyman, and Tommy Erdelyi, working-class outcasts from the middle-class enclave of Forest Hills, Queens, who had channeled their love of the Dolls and the Stooges into a band they called the Ramones. Eight months before, Cummings and Colvin had pooled their savings, purchased a pair of cheap guitars, and gotten together with Hyman, a gangly drummer who had previously sung (under the Bowieish name Jeff Starship) in a glam-rock band called Sniper. They soon agreed that Hyman should focus on his singing, at which point they prevailed on Erdelyi, a friend from Forest Hills who managed the rehearsal studio they used near Union Square, to take over on drums, an instrument he had never played before.

It was Doug Colvin who came up with the name for this group of absolute beginners, drawing on his awareness that, as a teenager, Paul McCartney had once tried to pose as a prospective pop star by calling himself “Paul Ramon.” Colvin also suggested that they take the “band of brothers” conceit that the Beatles had brought to rock a step further by pretending to be actual brothers, henceforth known as Dee Dee (Colvin), Joey (Hyman), Johnny (Cummings), and Tommy (Erdelyi) Ramone. Within a few months, the group would take their homage to the Fab Four a step even further by adopting a uniform of motorcycle jackets similar to the cheap knockoffs that John, Paul, and George had acquired during their inaugural trip to Hamburg in 1961, affecting a “leather boy” look that had since become associated with New Left radicals and male prostitutes. Considering that both Dee Dee and Joey Ramone had turned tricks from time to time to earn money for drugs and clothes, this was not that much of a stretch.

The Ramones’ debut before a dozen or so people at CBGBs in August 1974 marked an early watershed for the club. Unlike most amateur bands, their set consisted entirely of self-written songs—in their case for the simple reason that their musical knowledge was so limited that they couldn’t figure out how to play songs by anyone but themselves. They began their compositional efforts with a trilogy of disavowals: “I Don’t Wanna Get Involved with You,” “I Don’t Wanna Walk Around with You,” and “I Don’t Wanna Go Down to the Basement.” Then, lest they fall into a rut, they embraced a more positive sentiment, “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.” Each of these songs featured the same frenetic accompaniment of unbroken and unaccented eighth notes on guitar and bass over an unvarying backbeat on the drums, all played as loudly and rapidly as possible before careening to an end in under two minutes’ time.

Apart from the obvious analogies with adolescent sex, the harmonic content of this music was minimal, consisting of a handful of barre chords; the melodic content was negligible, hewing to the contours of normal, shouted speech; and the lyric content was confined to slight variations on the song titles, repeated again and again. Ever since Chuck Berry, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan had established the idea of authorship as an essential feature of rock, singer-songwriters had expended untold amounts of time, energy, and creativity devising their own distinctive innovations and variations on the musical and lyrical content of their songs. To which the Ramones seemed to say, “Why bother?” To their way of thinking, rock music was the noise you had to make in order to play in a band—nothing more, nothing less. Which is not to say that there was no emotional subtext to their songs. All through their years at Forest Hills High School, they had slouched in the back of the classroom while the future English majors held forth. Now, guitars in hand, they were ready to exact their revenge on those fucking teachers’ pets.

9

Chrystie Street

The New York I lived in was rapidly regressing. . . . It was a ruin in the making, and my friends and I were camped out amid its potsherds and tumuli. This did not distress me—quite the contrary. I was enthralled by decay and eager for more. . . . If you walked east on Houston Street from the Bowery on a summer night, the jungle growth of vacant blocks gave a foretaste of the impending wilderness, when lianas would engird the skyscrapers and mushrooms would cover Times Square.

—LUCY SANTE

In Chris Frantz’s telling, he had always planned to move to New York with Tina Weymouth in the fall of 1974 with the intention of starting a band. But the winter before, at the start of their final semester at RISD, both Frantz and Weymouth had applied to the MFA program at Yale, and it was only after they received their rejections that music seems to have moved to the forefront of Chris’s plans. The money he earned from his mural commission in Pittsburgh gave him the wherewithal to come to New York in September, where he and Tina stayed with Tina’s brother Yann, who was now divorced from the former Lally Graham, living in a loft building in Long Island City, and running a design firm with Tina’s old boyfriend Peter Coan. Once they were settled, Chris and Tina joined the group of RISD expatriates whose social circle revolved around the scene at Jamie Dalglish’s place on Bond Street.

By the time they arrived, Andrea Kovacs had returned to Yale, and David Byrne had roused himself enough to get a job as an usher at the Murray Hill Cinema on Thirty-Fourth Street. At Jamie Dalglish’s suggestion, Frantz made his way to CBGBs, where the Ramones had joined Television as fixtures at the club, and where the novelty of seeing an amateur band whose members thought nothing of interrupting their sets to argue with one another onstage about what to play and how to play it went a long way toward reducing any sense of intimidation he might have felt about what it took to break into the downtown music scene. Although Hilly Kristal was now regularly booking rock groups on weekend nights, the audiences at the club still numbered no more than a few dozen paying customers.

Emboldened by the example of the Ramones and the low-key scene at CBGBs, Frantz raised the subject of forming another band with David Byrne, whose response, as Frantz recalled it, was a less-than-fervent “I guess so.” That was enough for Chris to begin looking for a loft in Lower Manhattan with enough space and privacy for a rock group to rehearse and for Tina to paint. Early in the fall, he found a place on the top floor of a nine-story building at 195 Chrystie Street, two blocks south and one block east of CBGBs. The southern extension of Second Avenue, Chrystie Street was bordered by a narrow, seven-block city park that had been built during the Depression through the heart of the then-Jewish Lower East Side and named after Sara Delano Roosevelt, the mother of the president. By the mid-1970s, like many public spaces in downtown New York, this leafy urban oasis had turned into an open-air drug market, ruled by Latino street gangs. After dark, large numbers of sex workers were drawn there by the crosstown traffic on Houston and Delancey Streets. Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, 195 Chrystie Street stood on the exact spot of a former African American burial ground, which had been built over in the 1850s, during the first of the neighborhood’s many incarnations as an ethnic melting pot.

Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, and David Byrne moved into the loft on Chrystie Street in October 1974. There was a cold-water sink in the space they called their kitchen and toilet stalls down the hall. Access was provided by a rickety freight elevator and nine flights of stairs. Like the set of a sitcom about young people moving to New York, the grimy windows that ran along the north wall of the loft featured a view of the Empire State Building over the rooftops next door. Most of the floors in the building were occupied by small manufacturing firms, including a number of sweatshops staffed by Latina seamstresses. As the weather grew colder, the heat cut off in the late afternoon, but the residual heat from an illegal foundry on the floor below kept their top-floor loft fairly comfortable at night.

To pay their share of the three-hundred-dollar monthly rent, Chris and Tina relied on family and friends to find day jobs in midtown Manhattan. Yann Weymouth’s girlfriend got Chris a job in the shipping department of the Fifty-Seventh Street branch of Design Research, a chain of chic home furnishing stores. Jamie Dalglish’s fiancée, Susan, got Tina a job as a saleswoman at Henri Bendel, an iconic “ladies’” department store on Fifth Avenue, around the corner from Design Research. After David Byrne took a new job as a copy boy at an ad agency on Fifty-Seventh Street, the three of them began commuting on a daily basis between the squalor of the Lower East Side and the splendor of New York’s most fashionable shopping district.

Having set up their instruments in the center of their loft, Byrne and Frantz began playing together most nights after work. Frantz described it as “jamming,” but it mainly consisted of David working out songs and chord patterns on guitar while Chris accompanied him on drums and offered his suggestions on the words and music. To the extent that they were serious about forming a band, their first order of business was to find a bass player. The “Public Notice” section of the Village Voice classifieds served as a popular forum for New York musicians seeking to connect with one another, but it doesn’t appear that Frantz and Byrne ever placed an ad for a bassist there. Instead, Frantz has said that he harbored the notion of playing in a band with Tina Weymouth all along, and that it was mainly a matter of Tina coming around to the idea. If so, it didn’t take her long following their arrival on Chrystie Street. (She would later remark that seeing Brice Marden’s monochromatic work “Three Deliberate Greys for Jasper Johns” at MoMA in the fall of 1974 deflated her aspirations as a painter.) Toward the end of November, Tina received a check from her parents for her twenty-fourth birthday and used the money to purchase a Fender bass guitar. Though Fenders were the instrument of choice for most electric bassists, the model Tina bought was also one of the largest and heaviest basses on the market, making it an unlikely (or perhaps willful) choice for a woman of her slight stature.

David Byrne’s initial reaction to the prospect of playing in a band with Tina Weymouth would become a matter of much contention. Years later, Weymouth would insist that Byrne was skeptical of the idea of any woman playing in a rock group, on account of his belief, as she described it, that “the big world was a dangerous place for women.” If so, this suggests a degree of paternalism on Byrne’s part that none of his girlfriends (or his future female collaborators) would have recognized. He did regard rock, for obvious reasons, as a male-dominated world, and he was concerned that “people might not like” the idea of a woman in the group. But aside from this timidity, David insisted that his hesitancy about forming a band with Tina was based not on her gender but on the simple fact that she didn’t know how to play an instrument.

Their different impressions affirm how little Tina and David knew each other when they began living together on Chrystie Street in the fall of 1974. Back in Providence, their only contact had been through Chris, and it didn’t amount to much. Now, in New York, Tina was suddenly required to mediate on a daily basis between her doting, almost proudly conventional boyfriend, with whom she shared a similar privileged background and outlook, and the awkward, aloof, and eccentric roommate whom she, like many people who knew David Byrne at the time, believed was engaged in a constant performance of originality.

“David would do anything to get attention,” Tina later said. “He was always afraid of becoming an ordinary person, and I think he wanted to be unique and individual. So he would do sort of wacked-out things instead of slipping into the mainstream.” By this time, Jamie Dalglish had developed a similar sense of Byrne’s performative nature. “He’s a very smart guy,” Dalglish recalled. “He was always aware of his image and he didn’t want to break character.”

The disconnect between affect and emotion can lend an air of inscrutability to people with Asperger’s, inviting confusion about their intentions and motivations. Yet despite what Tina believed about David’s preconceptions regarding women in rock, it remains that he took it upon himself to teach her how to play the bass. And Tina proved to be an eager and diligent student. In the seclusion of their loft on Chrystie Street, the three of them began to rehearse on a daily basis, long into the night. David was required to first compose bass lines to the songs they wanted to play, beginning with the original material he and Chris had performed with the Artistics, and then teach them, note by note, to Tina. Her reliance on him was only exaggerated by the fact that, in the very beginning, she had to play her bass through his guitar amplifier.

In the fall of 1974, after a ten-year run as a cultural crossroads of Lower Manhattan, Max’s Kansas City shut its doors. Over time, the place had evolved into something very different from the casual bar and steak house that Mickey Ruskin had opened in 1965 on a shabby block of Park Avenue South just north of Union Square. Max’s was colonized first by downtown artists, for whom it served as a successor to the legendary Cedar Tavern; then by celebrities, socialites, fashion people, and denizens of Andy Warhol’s nearby Factory; and finally by rock musicians, record executives, music writers, drug dealers, groupies, and fans.

Ultimately, the popularity of Max’s owed as much to Mickey Ruskin’s ability to keep these different social circles apart as to his ability to bring them together. Early on, when the macho artists who dominated the bar at the front of the restaurant expressed their disdain for Warhol (whom they referred to as “Wendy Airhole”) and his coterie of gay and transvestite “superstars,” Ruskin gave the Factory crowd the exclusive use of the restaurant’s back room and turned a blind eye to what went on there. Warhol himself came infrequently after he was nearly murdered by a radical feminist in 1968, but the amphetamine-fueled back-room scene continued to thrive under the auspices of his acolyte Danny Fields, a rock journalist, publicist, and talent scout for Elektra Records, who brought in growing numbers of people from the music business.

Eventually, in 1970, Ruskin converted the upstairs room at Max’s into an intimate, 125-seat music venue, and prevailed on his friend Sam Hood, who had previously managed the Gaslight Café on MacDougal Street, to fill it with an eclectic mix of talent. In that intimate setting, Upstairs at Max’s presented the Velvet Underground, Tim Buckley, Iggy Pop, Willie Nelson, Alice Cooper, the New York Dolls, Bruce Springsteen, the Wailers, Billy Joel, Aerosmith, Steely Dan, and the avant-garde composer Philip Glass, most of them (apart from the Velvets) at the dawn of their careers. But in February 1974, a much larger and more congenial club called the Bottom Line opened in the West Village, and the record companies that had been subsidizing the artists who appeared at Max’s shifted their promotional spending there. By that time, the insular self-regard of the music crowd at Max’s had driven away many of the artists, fashionistas, socialites, and other regulars. Burdened with debt and bored with running the business, Mickey Ruskin tried to sell out to a shady music promoter and real estate developer named Don Soviero. But when Soviero failed to make good on his payments, Ruskin had no choice but to shut the whole thing down.

The closing of Max’s Kansas City represented a golden opportunity for Hilly Kristal. While the headliners who played at Max’s all had recording contracts, the upstairs room had come to serve as the principal New York showcase for unsigned opening acts. Its closing left CBGBs as one of the few downtown clubs where local bands could perform original material in front of a (marginally) paying audience.

One of the most distinctive of the unsigned artists who appeared at Max’s during its last year was a poker-faced poet, singer, part-time actress, and full-time femme fatale by the name of Patti Smith. Backed by the rock critic Lenny Kaye, curator of Nuggets, on electric guitar, Smith first opened at Max’s for the folksinger Phil Ochs in December 1973. She and Kaye returned to the club the following June, this time as the opening act for John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s nondescript former backup band, Elephant’s Memory. Prior to these appearances, Smith had made a name for herself in multiple precincts of the downtown arts scene: as a poet affiliated with the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery; as the mistress and onetime writing partner of the La MaMa playwright and Hollywood screenwriter Sam Shepard; as the “old lady” of the guitarist Allen Lanier, who played in the heavy metal band Blue Öyster Cult; and as the lover, soulmate, and muse of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, with whom she lived for five years at the Chelsea Hotel after she arrived in New York from New Jersey in 1967. In the early 1970s, Smith and Mapplethorpe had spent many an evening loitering on the sidewalk outside of Max’s Kansas City, in the futile hope that Mickey Ruskin would grant them admission to the inner sanctum of the restaurant’s back room.

A self-styled “hero worshipper,” Patti Smith was also known as the occasional author of record reviews that appeared in magazines like Creem and Rolling Stone, in which she promoted a wildly romantic, messianic view of the cultural power of rock. Her most recent effort along those lines was a piece she wrote for the upstart downtown paper the Soho Weekly News after seeing Television perform at CBGBs in the spring of 1974. Titled “Escapees from Heaven,” the review was animated by her infatuation with Tom Verlaine, with whom she began an affair even before it appeared in print. Verlaine, wrote Smith, had “the most beautiful neck in rock ’n’ roll. Real swan-like. The kind of neck you want to strangle.” She went on to lavish similar attention on each of the band members’ physical attributes, before concluding, in words that could serve as an epigraph for the entire scene that was developing at CBGBs, “The thing I like about this group is the way they just get on stage and do it . . . No hesitation. Wrong note so what.”

Smith’s enchantment with Television and Tom Verlaine inspired her to expand the duo she had formed with Lenny Kaye into the makings of an actual band. They began by adding a piano player named Richard Sohl, whose floridly Romantic sensibility proved the perfect foil to the tough-chick persona and Jersey-girl accent that Smith had adopted in her poetry readings at St. Mark’s Church and her appearances with Kaye. In the summer of 1974, Smith, Kaye, Sohl, and guest guitarist Verlaine convened at Electric Lady Studios on West Eighth Street to make a recording that was bankrolled by Robert Mapplethorpe’s lover and patron, Sam Wagstaff. The first song they cut was an elegiac remake of the folk-rock murder ballad “Hey Joe,” which was made famous by Electric Lady’s original benefactor, Jimi Hendrix.

Smith began the track by communing with Hendrix’s ghost (“Jimi, the way you play guitar makes me feel so, makes me feel so—masochistic”) before embarking on an appreciative spoken-word prelude about another Patti, in this case Patty Hearst, the publishing heiress who had recently shocked the country by taking up arms with the Symbionese Liberation Army, a band of self-styled urban guerrillas who had kidnapped her for ransom. In a stunning conflation of the casual racism and sexism that pervaded 1970s bohemia, Smith speculated that Hearst’s change of heart owed to good sex with her African American captors. Then a quote from Hearst’s father about seeing a photograph of his daughter with “a gun in her hand” provided the cue for Smith to segue into the actual body of “Hey Joe,” which, given the prelude, might have referred to one of Hearst’s jealous guerrilla lovers.

The second song Smith recorded was based on a poem titled “Piss Factory” that she had been performing since the early 1970s in her readings at St. Mark’s Church. Set to a brisk soul-jazz vamp on piano, it transformed her experience as a teenager working a summer job in a suburban New Jersey toy factory into a Dickensian nightmare of industrial torment, drawing its power not so much from its language, which verged on a parody of Beat poetry, as from the astonishing vehemence with which Smith voiced her contempt for her working-class Catholic supervisor, a woman she called Dot Cook, along with her envy of the sweet-smelling nuns in the convent next door to the factory, and her lust for her high school classmates whose “dicks droop like lilacs” beneath their desks. The song ended with Smith plotting her escape: “I’m gonna get on that train, go to New York City / I’m gonna be so bad, I’m gonna be a big star, and I will never return.” “Piss Factory” may have been third-rate poetry, but it managed to capture Patti Smith’s talent as a first-rate performer, with a prodigious gift for throwing herself into a role.

The single of “Hey Joe”/“Piss Factory” was privately produced (thanks again to Sam Wagstaff) and distributed to a handful of record stores in Lower Manhattan. Then, in March 1975, the Patti Smith Group played a four-night stand at CBGBs, which created enough of a stir that Hilly Kristal extended it into a residency of two shows a night, four nights a week, that ran for seven weeks. “Patti is perhaps the most macho performer in the macho-obsessed rock scene,” wrote James Wolcott, a fledgling arts reporter for the Village Voice. He went on to describe Smith as “a true off-the-wall original. . . . Because of her notorious poetry readings, her reputation is largely as a crazy-as-birds stage speaker, but it’s clear she’s going to be an extraordinary rock singer.”

Opening each night for Smith was Television, whose sound, following the eviction of Richard Hell and his replacement by a more competent bass player, was now completely dominated by the piquant guitar and strangulated singing (Smith wasn’t wrong about his neck) of Tom Verlaine. The Patti Smith Group had taken on new members as well, beginning with Ivan Kral, who doubled on bass and guitar. On select numbers at CBGBs, he was joined by Jay Dee Daugherty, the club’s soundman, on drums, thereby giving Smith the backing, for the first time, of a full rock rhythm section. This was particularly effective on a recent addition to their repertoire, an extended improvisation on the rock anthem “Gloria.” First recorded in 1964 by the Belfast group Them, “Gloria” would have remained a typical garage band hit of the sort that Lenny Kaye collected on Nuggets were it not for the fact that the leader of this particular garage band went on to become the greatest “blue-eyed soul” singer of his generation, Van Morrison, whose stirring revival of the song on a live album he released in 1974 provided the inspiration for Patti Smith’s version. (She may also have known that the song had been covered in live performance by one of her rock idols, Jim Morrison of the Doors.)

It was with “Gloria,” prefaced by a stanza from a self-written poem that began “Jesus died for somebody’s sins / But not mine . . . ,” that Patti Smith came into her own as a rock singer, forging a connection between her own Christ-haunted upbringing and Van Morrison’s wryly carnal allusion to the Catholic doxology. And it was on the strength of the Patti Smith Group’s seven-week residency that CBGBs came into its own as a fixture of the downtown music scene. Smith’s web of affiliations with the city’s poetry, theater, art, and music underground brought a diverse new crowd to the club, one that on some nights lined up down the block to buy tickets to Hilly Kristal’s former dive bar.

Among the people who came to see what all the fuss was about was Lou Reed, who brought the head of his new record label, Clive Davis. An unctuous former attorney who had served as president of Columbia Records before losing his job in an accounting scandal and founding his own record company, Arista, in 1974, Davis prided himself on his discovery of talent. In the spring of 1975, Patti Smith became his latest discovery, signed to a multi-album contract with Arista. In excelsis deo indeed.

10

A Conservative Impulse

We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock ’n’ roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity. We would call forth in minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take up arms. We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone. . . . CBGB was the ideal place to sound a clarion call.

—PATTI SMITH

David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth all saw Patti Smith perform during her residency at CBGBs in the spring of 1975, and the buzz she brought to the club only heightened their desire to play there. (Ever the fan, Frantz bought a copy of Smith’s single of “Hey Joe” b/w “Piss Factory” from Lenny Kaye himself at a local record store.) In the meantime, night after night, the three of them rehearsed in their loft on Chrystie Street: learning to play their instruments, building a repertoire of original songs, and, in effect, curating the band that they were attempting to put together.

This involved discussions about not only what and how to play, but also what their group’s visual image and style should be. The idea that an ambitious rock group needed to create its own distinctive look as well as sound had been institutionalized by the British Invasion bands of the 1960s, which catalyzed a revolution in male fashion as well as popular music. The images of groups like the Beatles, Stones, and Who were originally crafted by their style-conscious managers (with some help, in the Beatles’ case, from their exi friends in Hamburg). But by the late 1960s, the visual aesthetics of rock, from stage clothes to album cover art, had increasingly become the province of the musicians themselves. In Britain, this culminated in the theatrical glam and glitter of self-invented performers like David Bowie, Marc Bolan, and Elton John. (Bowie preferred to think of himself as “an actor playing a rock star.”) But American bands, for the most part, continued to hew to a style of vintage bohemian authenticity, a relic of the folk revival and the hippie movement that was epitomized by the long hair, denim, and cowboy plaid of the California groups and their more rustic brethren in the heartland.

In their discussions of what the look and sound of their group should be, Byrne, Frantz, and Weymouth have all affirmed that, at this point, they mainly had a sense of what they didn’t want it to be. However much they may have admired the work of artists like Bowie and Lou Reed, the flamboyance and camp androgyny of glitter rock seemed like another world to them. At the same time, the “leather boy” look of the early Velvet Underground, as recently revived by contemporary New York–based rockers like the Ramones, struck them as a studied and anachronistic pose. They had all been exposed, at RISD and MICA, to the aesthetic principles of Minimalism, with its emphasis on formal simplicity, neutral colors, and hard-edged geometry. This inspired them to make a virtue of their limitations by crafting both a musical style and a visual image for their group that was initially “defined by its negatives,” as David Byrne later explained it, consisting of “no show-offy solos, no rock moves or poses, no pomp or drama, no rock hair, no rock lights, no rehearsed stage patter,” and perhaps most tellingly, “no singing like a Black man.”

At one point, according to Frantz and Weymouth, they also discussed the possibility of recruiting a more conventional lead singer for their group—someone like Debbie Harry, whose band Angel and the Snakes had reconstituted itself as Blondie in the fall of 1974. But when Frantz approached Harry at CBGBs one night to ask if she might be interested in singing with a nameless band that she had never heard of, Harry politely declined. As Weymouth remembered it, “In the beginning, David didn’t know if he should be the singer. His vocal range is real high. When we started his voice wasn’t so good. But we talked about it and we said, ‘David should sing.’ We wanted to have the focus be on one person.”

Whatever she and Frantz might have thought at the time, Weymouth’s suggestion that Byrne himself doubted whether he should sing seems a bit far-fetched, given his egocentric temperament and the idiosyncratic nature of the songs he had been writing since his arrival in New York. In addition to the four numbers they had salvaged from the Artistics—“Psycho Killer,” “Warning Sign,” “I Wish You Wouldn’t Say That,” and their cover of “96 Tears”—their repertoire now included a half-dozen newly written originals. With the exception of “Artists Only,” which was based on a set of lyrics written by a friend from RISD named Michael Zieve, all of these new songs addressed the most conventional subject of popular music, romantic love, in willfully unconventional and unromantic terms. The ups and downs of Byrne’s relationship with Andrea Kovacs surely had some influence on these oblique, analytical discourses on the themes of attraction, aversion, and attachment. As time went on, she gave him a lot to work with.

At first, Andrea and David had kept in close touch during the fall of 1974, with David visiting Andrea in New Haven on several occasions. In the course of these visits, she enlisted him as a subject of her work, taking multiple Polaroid close-ups of his body for inclusion in a series of large photographic assemblages she was making for her upcoming thesis show. Apart from the fact that Andrea was exceedingly outspoken and David was exceedingly shy, their artistic sensibilities were aligned in many ways, beginning with their shared identification with Conceptualism. “I think that anyone who is left over from expressionism is a loser,” Kovacs declared in a Yale student publication around this time, adding, “I haven’t studied art before the Acconci period because I was interested only in Conceptual art.”

Over the course of the fall, however, Andrea began to sour on their relationship, finding David’s sensibility to be more contrived and less “unorthodox” than she had imagined it to be. At RISD, she had been a precocious and provocative undergraduate art star. At Yale, she responded to the critiques she received from the faculty by becoming only more defensive and adamant in her insistence on the utter originality of her work. In this context, David’s visits to New Haven became a source of embarrassment to her, and she eventually sent him away. But this did not prevent her from inviting him to the opening of her thesis show in the winter of 1975—only to totally ignore him when he arrived in New Haven bearing a stack of albums she had requested for her after-party. David responded to her disregard by sitting, alone, in front of one of the photographic assemblages his body parts were represented in.

Not long after Kovacs’s thesis show at Yale, David, Chris, and Tina attended a performance at the Kitchen, the arts collective that began as part of the Mercer Arts Center in the Broadway Central Hotel. After the collapse of the hotel in August 1974, the Kitchen had relocated to a loft on Wooster Street in SoHo. The music program there had recently come under the direction of a young cellist from the Midwest named Arthur Russell, whose tastes were eclectic, to say the least. In March 1975, seeking to enlarge upon the Kitchen’s association with the downtown avant-garde, Russell presented a four-night “Rock and Roll Show” featuring the singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman and his group, the Modern Lovers.

The Modern Lovers were in many ways a premonition of Talking Heads. Born in 1951 and raised in the Boston suburb of Natick, Jonathan Richman was an early and avid initiate into the cult of the Velvet Underground. While still in high school, he began religiously attending the Velvets’ performances in Boston, absorbing the songs on their early albums with a wide-eyed innocence that somehow ignored the band’s pretensions to hipness, irony, and amorality. In 1970, after a pilgrimage to New York during which he worked briefly as a busboy at Max’s Kansas City and literally slept on Lou Reed’s couch, Richman returned to Boston and formed a band called the Modern Lovers with a drummer named David Robinson and two former classmates from high school; the following year, the classmates were replaced by a pair of Harvard undergraduates named Ernie Brooks and Jerry Harrison on bass and keyboards, respectively. Robinson and Brooks formed a solid rhythm section, but it was the addition of Harrison, who played a whiny Farfisa “combo” organ and a Fender Rhodes piano whose lushness was defeated by a distortion box, that dramatically enhanced the sound of the band. On the strength of Richman’s anomalous appearance—he wore his hair short and liked to perform in neatly pressed chinos—and equally anomalous songwriting—his early efforts included an earnest homage to the strip-mall suburbs of Boston called “Roadrunner” and a hilarious wish-fulfillment fantasy called “Pablo Picasso” (“Some people try to pick up girls and get called an asshole / This never happened to Pablo Picasso”)—the Modern Lovers gained enough of a following in the Boston area to attract the attention of several New York rock writers, which in turn whetted the appetite of a number of record labels.

In 1972, Richman and his band recorded demo sessions in Los Angeles for both Warner Bros. and A&M Records. The sessions for Warners were produced by the ex-Velvet John Cale, who was keen to record the group. After ending the year on a high note by performing with the New York Dolls at the Mercer Arts Center on New Year’s Eve, the Modern Lovers were finally signed by Warners in 1973. But Richman proved to be a contrarian to his core. Having embraced the Velvet Underground as an alienated antidote to the communalism of the counterculture, Richman was equally repelled by the commercialism and sheer degeneracy of the rock scene in the early seventies. (Unlike most Velvets aficionados, not to mention budding rock stars, he was adamantly opposed to the use of recreational drugs.) Over the course of 1973, his growing disillusionment with the music business and the retrograde style of garage band rock that had earned the Modern Lovers a following in the first place caused the band to fall apart. Richman’s appearance at the Kitchen in the spring of 1975 featured a makeshift acoustic version of the group, performing material that ranged from his theme song “Roadrunner” to campfire standards like “Kumbaya” and “Rock Island Line.”

The sheer unlikeliness of Jonathan Richman, who dressed like the kid that everyone laughed at in high school, sang in a toneless deadpan modeled on Lou Reed’s, and delivered his willfully naïve lyrics with an air of quizzical surprise, had to serve as an inspiration to David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth as they contemplated their own prospects as a rock group. If someone this eccentric could develop a cultlike reputation, if not yet a professional career, by running counter to all of the prevailing musical, sartorial, and attitudinal trends in the contemporary music scene, there might just be room for someone as unlikely looking and sounding as David Byrne in the world of downtown rock.

Like the question of who should do the singing, the authorship of the songs that were written in the loft on Chrystie Street would also become a matter of some contention. Chris Frantz would later insist that “the great majority of our songs, particularly the early ones, were always a collaborative effort.” What he meant by this was that the songs were fleshed out in rehearsal, with Chris and Tina adding their own parts on drums and bass and offering their suggestions to David on his singing and guitar playing. It also seems possible that, as they had done with “Psycho Killer” and “Warning Sign” back in Providence, Chris and Tina may have contributed to the lyrics of some of these new songs.

But if so, the nature of their “collaboration” was very different from that of such classic songwriting teams as Lennon and McCartney or Goffin and King, in which a pair of skilled musicians combined to fashion the melodies, lyrics, and chords of their songs by singing and playing to each other in real time. Tina Weymouth was a precocious beginner on the bass, but a beginner nonetheless, playing the parts that David had taught her, while Chris Frantz’s ability to influence the melody or chords of a song was limited by the fact that he neither sang nor played a harmonic instrument. It is true that by the 1970s, the proliferation of rock groups playing self-written material had made songwriting a less clear-cut activity than it had been in the heyday of Tin Pan Alley, when a strict division of labor among composers, lyricists, arrangers, sidemen, and singers had prevailed. Instrumental accompaniment, especially, had become a more fluid and informal process, as most groups worked out the arrangements of their songs by ear, through repeated rehearsal, rather than on paper, as had once been the norm in the music business.

Actual songwriting, though, still came down to a matter of lyrics, chords, and melody, and from the start, David Byrne was the only person in the room who was in a position to combine those three elements of musical composition. Michael Zieve was witness to this process: “David would always work the songs over. He’d put things in, take things out. The words would remain pretty much the same, but he might change the rhythm, the chords, the whole structure of the song.” Byrne also relied on a cheap analog “rhythm box” to try out different backings. “He’d set up a certain rhythm, play his guitar with it, then have Chris join in on drums.”

Zieve’s own contribution to the group’s repertoire, the lyrics to “Artists Only,” was an earnest homage to art-making that began with the breathless announcement, “I’m painting again!” Zieve stayed with Byrne, Frantz, and Weymouth on Chrystie Street for some time during the spring of 1975, and his visit coincided with their efforts to settle on a name for their group. They had compiled a list of dozens of possibilities—names like the Vogue Dots, the Tunnel Tones, and, in an obvious play on Television, the Videos. Zieve had a better, though not unrelated, idea. Citing an article in a recent issue of TV Guide, he proposed that they call their band Talking Heads, which was broadcasting jargon for a head-and-shoulders shot of a person speaking directly into the camera. Zieve felt the name was an apt description of Byrne’s performing style: “David didn’t sing that much. It was more like he was talking, giving information. It seemed like a cerebral enough name for them.” Chris Frantz recalled that he and Tina were sufficiently taken with Zieve’s suggestion that they had it printed on T-shirts, which they test-marketed on the street, soliciting comments from passersby.

The adoption of a name is a signal rite of passage in the formation of any group, musical or otherwise—the point where the individual members institutionalize their collective identity. Previously, David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth had been three people rehearsing in a loft in Lower Manhattan. Now, having named themselves, those same three people were a band. In the case of Talking Heads, the plural form would require a perpetual (and often futile) effort to disabuse people of the tendency to refer to the group as the Talking Heads. But as Michael Zieve noted, the name fit well with the intellectuality of three novice musicians who had had their heads stuffed with aesthetic theory over the preceding four years. Like other forms of higher education, the undergraduate study of art exposes students to concepts that often require years of germination and practice before they can be understood. Going forward, these three former art students were preparing to adapt those germinal, half-grasped concepts—Dadaism, Minimalism, Conceptualism—to an entirely different creative medium than the one that they were schooled in. Much of what they would go on to achieve would be shaped by the way they applied their background in the one to their practice of the other.

By the end of May 1975, after six months of concerted rehearsal, the members of Talking Heads felt they were ready to try their hand at performing in front of people who were not necessarily their friends. Their repertoire now consisted of nearly a dozen songs, including such newly written titles as “The Girls Want to Be with the Girls,” “With Our Love,” and “Tentative Decisions.” Chris Frantz had a word with Hilly Kristal, who offered them a spot on his audition night, Thursday, in the first week of June. Along with another auditioning band called the Shirts, they would be opening for the Ramones, who by this time had established themselves as fixtures at CBGBs.

Unlike most of the bands he booked, Kristal was immediately taken with Talking Heads—so much so that he hired them on the spot to open for the next three nights. “I loved them right off,” he recalled. “I thought they were great. It was very angular music and David looked like a chicken with its head cut off. I kind of liked the wild flow that they had when he sang. It was an emotional quality.” (Kristal was equally taken with the Shirts, a proficient band from Brooklyn, graced by the pixieish presence of their singer Annie Golden, which he would wind up managing in the year ahead.)

In keeping with the Minimalist aesthetic they were seeking to apply to their music, Byrne, Frantz, and Weymouth decided to dispense with the idea of stage clothes in favor of a neutral, nondescript wardrobe of collared white shirts and black jeans that, by downtown standards, gave them a vaguely preppy look. In addition, Tina had recently cut her hair into a short pageboy style that added to the uniformity of their appearance.

One of the few amenities of CBGBs was a readmission policy that allowed patrons to come and go at will over the course of an evening. In the warm weather months especially, people tended to hang out on the street in front of the club until the band they had come to see went onstage. This could be daunting for opening acts, who often found themselves playing to a near-empty room. Talking Heads forestalled this possibility by inviting nearly everyone they knew to their first weekend at the club. In addition to their colleagues from work and the RISD expatriates who frequented Jamie Dalglish’s loft, David Byrne’s old friends Michael Yockel and Jane Lobell came up from Baltimore to see the show, and Tina Weymouth’s brother Yann brought members of his social circle, which included Albert Goldman, an adjunct professor at Columbia who served as the rock reviewer for Life magazine. (Picking up on Byrne’s arpeggiated guitar playing, Goldman said the group reminded him of something out of the 1960s television series The Twilight Zone.)

While there is a limit to how much enthusiasm a crowd of two dozen people can generate, Talking Heads were encouraged by their CBGBs debut. “The audience reaction was kind of bewilderment,” David Byrne recalled of the band’s first gigs, “and then they would decide that they liked it during the performance.” The bewilderment stemmed from the unlikely tableau they presented onstage, beginning with the contrast between the willful conventionality of their appearance and the palpably neurotic affect of their performance, as seen in Byrne’s fraught expressions and frozen stance, which amplified his herky-jerky movements as he strummed his guitar. Weymouth exuded a similar air of rapt concentration as she fingered her bass and stared intently at Byrne as a way of keeping her place in the music, inadvertently communicating the impression that this was a man who needed to be watched carefully.

Hilly Kristal was sufficiently satisfied with Talking Heads’ debut that he asked them to return later in June to open again for the Ramones, thereby initiating the shotgun marriage of these comically dissimilar bands that would last for years to come. (The story, most likely apocryphal, was that Dee Dee Ramone thought the Heads were so bad that they would make the Ramones look good.) It had taken Kristal a full five years to figure out what to do with his dive bar on the Bowery, but by the summer of 1975, thanks to Terry Ork, Television, Patti Smith, and the Ramones, CBGBs was finally coming into its own. In an effort to capitalize on his club’s growing visibility, Kristal decided to sponsor a monthlong “Festival of Unrecorded Bands.” He chose the Ramones, Blondie, and Talking Heads to open the festival in the third week of July.

James Wolcott’s rave review of the Patti Smith Group in the Village Voice had established him as the paper’s roving ambassador to the downtown rock scene. Like David Byrne, Wolcott was a brainy college dropout in his early twenties who grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore. He had moved to New York in 1972 on the strength of an encouraging letter from his literary hero Norman Mailer, who helped him get a job at the Voice, first on the circulation desk, then as a freelance arts reporter. His second epiphany at CBGBs had come, at the insistence of Patti Smith, with Television, followed shortly by the Ramones. “The Ramones are a leather-jacketed quartet of rockers intent on piercing a hole in the ozone layer,” he wrote in the Voice’s listing of coming attractions at CBGBs, touting the group as “the most ferociously exciting band” in New York. Opening for them, Wolcott noted, was “Talking Heads, a compellingly eccentric trio [whose] loopiness nicely complements the Ramones’ monomaniacal tightness.”

Wolcott’s arrival at the Voice had coincided with a major upheaval at the paper. In the summer of 1974, the Voice was acquired by New York magazine, the slick cosmopolitan weekly whose founding editor, Clay Felker, had made it a paragon of the so-called New Journalism, home to a stable of irreverent and glibly sociological feature writers like Tom Wolfe, Gail Sheehy, and Jimmy Breslin. Felker’s single-minded fascination with the interplay of power and status in the realms of New York politics, business, and culture quickly put him at odds with the bohemian old guard at the Voice, who regarded him, correctly, as a bourgeois arriviste, and who left in droves following the firing of the paper’s founding editor, Dan Wolf. Yet throughout his brief tenure—both New York and the Voice were acquired in a hostile takeover by Rupert Murdoch in 1977—Felker did his best to transform a neighborhood newspaper that happened to serve one of the most distinctive neighborhoods in America into a nationally distributed journal of political and cultural commentary. This created new opportunities for ambitious young writers like James Wolcott, who came naturally to the knowing, hyperbolic style of journalism that Felker had helped to pioneer.

Wolcott’s coverage of CBGBs’ Festival of Unrecorded Bands was a case in point: a three-thousand-word feature, spread across two full pages at the front of the paper, that ran beneath the headline, “The Conservative Impulse in the New Rock Underground.” After heralding the festival as “perhaps the most important event in New York rock” since the 1966 advent of the Velvet Underground, Wolcott characterized the “unpretentiousness” of the CBGBs bands as “a counterthrust to the prevailing baroque theatricality of rock,” a genre that had grown “as arthritic, or at least, as phlegmatic, as a rich old whore.” “What’s changed,” he suggested, with a curt nod to T. S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “is the nature of the impulse to create rock. No longer is the impulse revolutionary—the transformation of oneself and society—but conservative: to carry on the rock tradition.”

Wolcott went on to focus on a pair of bands, neither of which had anything much to do with his thesis. Turning first to Television, he compared Tom Verlaine’s “dreamy” stage presence to that of Keith Richards (“pale and aloof, he seems lost in a forest of silence”), and noted the dramatic improvement in the group since the departure of Richard Hell. Next, Wolcott lavished his praise on Talking Heads, whom he introduced as “one of the most intriguingly off-the-wall bands in New York.” “Seeing them for the first time is transfixing,” he wrote. “Frantz is so far back on drums that it sounds as if he’s playing in the next room. Weymouth, who could be Suzi Quatro’s sorority sister, stands rooted to the floor, her head doing an oscillating-fan swivel. The object of her swivel is David Byrne, who has a little-boy-lost-at-the-zoo voice and the demeanor of someone who’s spent the last half-hour whirling around in a spin dryer.”

Wolcott had interviewed the group at their loft on Chrystie Street after meeting them at CBGBs in June. (“I’d never been to an artist’s loft before,” he later wrote, “and was a total Heads convert when the invite came.”) There he learned about their art-school backgrounds, which led him to describe them as “musical minimalists.” He compared David Byrne’s style of guitar “to a charcoal pencil scratching a scene on a notepad” and praised Tina Weymouth (on whom he developed an “instantaneous crush”) for the “hard and articulate” tone of her bass playing. He also gained a sense of the group’s “consciously anti-mythic stance,” noting, “These people understand that an entire generation had grown up on the nourishment of television’s accessible banality. What they’re doing is presenting a banal façade under which run ripples of violence and squalls of frustration.” Or, as Tina Weymouth assured him, putting a world of difference between her group and the “clarion call” of Patti Smith, “Rock is not a noble cause.”

Wolcott’s article was illustrated with a half-dozen photographs of the bands he named, but the photograph that mattered was the somber, shadowy portrait of David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, and Chris Frantz that ran beneath the banner headline “Tired of Glitter?” on the front page of the Voice’s August 18 issue. Eight months after they began to rehearse on Chrystie Street, two months after their first nominally professional engagement, Talking Heads had been plucked from obscurity and presented as the poster children of New York’s emergent downtown music scene.

11

Born to Run

The entire New York band scene started with five to ten bands who basically all hated each other, were jealous of each other, had nothing in common with each other, and yet, were lumped together in the mainstream press as “punk.” . . . [This] scene was made up of the CBGBs bands and the few music writers who loved them. In total, this may have consisted of about sixty people.

—LISA ROBINSON, ROCK SCENE

The same week that James Wolcott’s article appeared in the Village Voice, Bruce Springsteen celebrated the release of his third album on Columbia Records, Born to Run, by playing five sold-out nights at the West Village showcase the Bottom Line. For more than a year, Springsteen had been dazzling audiences at clubs and colleges with the passionate intensity of his live performances. But his first two albums had sold poorly, which lent an air of anxiety, not to say desperation, to the recording of Born to Run. Springsteen had recently acquired a lyrical new piano player, Roy Bittan, and stolid new drummer, Max Weinberg, who brought a new conciseness and solidity to the sound of his six-piece band. He had also acquired a new record producer, the rock critic Jon Landau, who in 1974 had burnished Springsteen’s reputation with a gushing review in Boston’s Real Paper in which he heralded the singer as “the future” of rock ’n’ roll. The phrase would go on to become the centerpiece of Columbia’s promotional campaign for Springsteen, and it initiated a creative partnership that would endure for decades to come. As a producer, Landau was instrumental in encouraging Springsteen to imbue the tracks on Born to Run with the thunderous “wall of sound” ambience that Phil Spector had pioneered in the early 1960s on the records he made with girl groups like the Crystals and the Ronettes. Landau also helped Springsteen to rein in his excesses as a lyricist—the profligate, too-clever-by-half wordplay that made many of the songs on his earlier albums sound like mid-sixties Bob Dylan on steroids instead of amphetamine.

On one point, however, Jon Landau had it wrong. Far from heralding the future of rock, in the sense of a new musical direction, Born to Run embodied a “conservative impulse” far more powerful than anything that was happening at CBGBs in 1975. The album’s cover featured a gatefold photograph of the leather-jacketed Springsteen, guitar in hand, leaning affectionately against the imposing physique of his saxophonist Clarence Clemons, the one remaining African American in what had once been his racially balanced backup band. This tableau could hardly be surpassed as a metaphor for the state of popular music in 1975, at a time of increasing polarization between Black and white musical styles. Like Born to Run’s Spectorian production values, Clemons’s saxophone, which he played in a raucous honk beholden to the R&B master King Curtis, was a throwback to the pre-Beatles era of rock ’n’ roll, to a time when rock and R&B represented a socially charged interchange between African American musical genius and rebellious white working-class youth. Raised by his Italian and Irish Catholic parents in the blue-collar suburb of Freehold, New Jersey, Springsteen had embraced rock as a teenager with a quasi-religious fervor akin to that of his fellow Jerseyite Patti Smith, honing his craft in bar bands with names like the Castiles and Steel Mill. Now, five years after John Lennon had declared that “a working-class hero is something to be,” America, on the strength of Born to Run, was about to embrace its first avowedly working-class rock star. Like Lennon before him, of course, Springsteen had never worked a day in his life at the sort of blue-collar jobs his father once held—no “Piss Factory” for him. But as a songwriter, he was skilled at drawing inspiration from the lives of the people he grew up with and imbuing them with an authentic sense of drama and pathos.

Around the same time that Talking Heads began performing at CBGBs, Andrea Kovacs completed her MFA studies at Yale, returned to New York, sublet a loft in Chinatown, and rekindled her relationship with David Byrne, whose newfound status as the singer in a downtown rock group had a transformative effect on her opinion of him. “It was such a sensational feeling,” Kovacs recalled. “Being David’s girlfriend at the heart, at the center of this scene, was a quintessential experience.”

Kovacs returned to the city with high hopes for her own artistic career. Her thesis show at Yale may have been a humiliation for her rejected boyfriend, but the large “photomosaic” assemblages she exhibited there caught the eye of the Minimalist painter Ellsworth Kelly and his good friend Henry Geldzahler, an influential curator who had single-handedly ushered the Metropolitan Museum into the world of contemporary art. On a subsequent visit to Kovacs’s Chinatown loft, Geldzahler described her photomosaics as some of the most promising student work he had ever seen, and told her to get back in touch with him in five years’ time. A prominent uptown gallery owner who viewed the work was similarly impressed. But such was the extent of Kovacs’s postgraduate dreams of grandeur that these encounters left her discouraged by her lack of immediate success, and as time went on, she began to take out her frustrations on David Byrne. Byrne had recently written an aggressively dispassionate song called “No Compassion” that began with the declaration, “Other people’s problems, they overwhelm my mind / They say compassion is a virtue, but I don’t have the time.” Kovacs believed that the song—which went on to ask, “What are you, in love with your problems?”—was personally inspired by her.

When her sublet ran out at the end of the summer, Andrea moved in with David on Chrystie Street, where she wasted little time in initiating a rivalrous relationship with Tina Weymouth, whose willingness to take musical direction from David she mistook for a romantic attraction. Though David was quick to reassure her that there was nothing between them, Andrea remained unconvinced. “I think Tina really loved David,” she later said. “David sculpted Tina’s entire style . . . she allowed her whole being to become his art form.”

The rapt attention that Tina paid to David onstage ensured that Andrea Kovacs was not the only person to imagine that there might be some sort of romantic spark between them. Female singers were ubiquitous in all genres of popular music, including singers like Aretha Franklin and Bonnie Raitt, who accompanied themselves expertly on the piano or guitar. But it is hard to overstate the novelty of a female instrumentalist in a rock group in 1975. Maureen Tucker’s gamely amateurish drumming with the Velvet Underground and Cynthia Robinson’s brash trumpet playing in Sly and the Family Stone had been modest breakthroughs, as was the presence of Christine McVie in Fleetwood Mac and Linda McCartney in Wings. Yet the fact that both McVie and McCartney were married to the leaders of their bands only made them exceptions that proved the rule.

Nevertheless, from Tina Weymouth’s perspective, there was nothing amorous about her feelings for the eccentric roommate who had spent the last year teaching her how to play the bass. If anything, the deference she showed toward David Byrne was more the result of having grown up in a military family, an experience that had acclimated her from an early age to the idea of taking her direction from men. Notwithstanding Tina’s good looks and apparent sophistication, this was the legacy she had inherited as she entered the male-dominated world of downtown rock. And however much she may have resented it, it was not in her nature to rebel against it in any way. In addition to relying on David to teach her how to play, she was also surprisingly amenable to his sense of how she should present herself onstage. It was he, she later remarked, who suggested that she wear her hair in a pageboy cut that gave her a mildly androgynous look. Sounding more like an art director than a bandmate, he told her it would accentuate her big eyes.

“Along with a lot of other new groups, we’re very self-aware,” Byrne would later say. “About where we perform, what we look like, how we appear to the press . . . very aware of every move we make and what the supposed ramifications will be. It could seem very contrived but I think that’s the way people are now. The days of naïve, primitive rock bands are gone.” An irony of this overtly self-conscious approach was that, in the early days of Talking Heads, and for some time after that, Byrne himself seemed to have little awareness of how he came across onstage. While most accomplished performers have an intuitive sense of how they look and sound, Byrne was mainly reliant on the feedback of others to refine his presentation. After reading, early on, of his tendency to roll his eyes while singing, he immediately corrected the habit.

At the same time, the group’s apparent self-awareness did not sit well with some of their contemporaries in the downtown music scene. According to Alan Vega of Suicide, who shared a background in visual art, “I never liked Talking Heads. I mean they were the talk of the town, playing CBs. [But] it was all studied . . . his moves were all plotted. He wasn’t performing up there, he was just going through the motions. He didn’t make any twitchy gestures without something in his head saying, ‘Make a twitchy gesture now.’ It wasn’t for real.” For Roberta Bayley, the young photographer who manned the door at CBGBs, Talking Heads were akin to Patti Smith in this regard. “The more you continued to see her act,” Bayley said of Smith, “the more it seemed like artifice to me. There was something a bit pretentious about her. Then when Talking Heads came out it was like, ‘Oh these people have really found their band.’”

Though all three Talking Heads considered CBGBs to be a congenial hangout, as David Byrne remembered it, “There wasn’t much camaraderie among the bands.” Tina Weymouth was characteristically more blunt: “In a way, we were always outside the CBGBs scene. They were very snotty to us there because we didn’t dress like the New York Dolls. We started getting publicity very quickly [and] the other bands didn’t like it.” From Tom Verlaine’s perspective, “There were maybe two early eras of CBGB. The first was the New York City bands who were very revved up. And then Talking Heads, who sort of signaled the arrival from elsewhere.” It was telling that Verlaine should describe the group in these terms, since he and Richard Hell were among the few other luminaries at CBGBs who came, as he said, from “elsewhere.” Otherwise, the vast majority of the musicians who were involved in the downtown rock scene, from Lou Reed to the Dolls to the Ramones to Patti Smith, came from either the outer boroughs of New York or the suburbs of Long Island or New Jersey. “Settlers,” as E. B. White described the passionate outsiders who were “born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something,” were few and far between.

The other quality that set the members of Talking Heads apart in the milieu of CBGBs was a matter of social class. Both Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth came from upper-middle-class families that verged on wealthy by the standards of 1975. While David Byrne chose to downplay the affluence of his family background (like the frugal Scot that he was), his father was a well-paid engineer and his mother worked full-time as a special-needs teacher. As their RISD friend Jeff Turtletaub observed, “Before Chris and Tina, David was with Marc Kehoe and Naomi. Those days were fun, but crazy. Chris and Tina enveloped him in a kind of bourgeois situation. Culturally and socially, they were from very strong backgrounds. By aligning himself with them, David gave himself a certain kind of cushion.” Talking Heads’ affiliation with RISD may have been alluring to writers like James Wolcott, but it was a badge of privilege for most of their peers, few of whom had attended college. Chris Frantz got a taste of this when he was introduced to Patti Smith at CBGBs in the summer of 1975: “Oh, you’re that art school band,” she said, cutting him dead. “I wish my parents were rich enough to send me to art school.”

In September, Hilly Kristal brought Talking Heads back to CBGBs for the first time since they appeared on the cover of the Voice, alternating sets with the Shirts. The following week, the New York Times critic John Rockwell published a brief review of their performance, titled “A Trio That Shows Art’s Effect on Rock.” After citing the band’s rather tenuous ties to the New York art world (“They are all in their early 20s, live in SoHo, and attended the Rhode Island School of Design”), Rockwell expressed some frustration with David Byrne’s singing—“half-sung, half-gabbled in a wobbly monotone”—before praising the group’s “simple but tightly structured” instrumental palette of “aural color.” “What is interesting about their music is that it is so unabashedly uncommercial,” he noted, almost as a point of pride.

Raised in San Francisco and schooled at Harvard and Berkeley, John Rockwell was hired as a classical music critic by the Times in 1972. Two years later, though he had little experience writing about popular music, he was appointed as the paper’s first full-time rock critic, a job that required him to mediate between New York’s prominence as a showcase for major touring acts and more localized developments like the nascent scene on the Bowery. Rockwell had already written effusively about Patti Smith, and approvingly, if briefly, of the Ramones. But a Times review was an almost unprecedented form of recognition for an amateur band that had played barely a dozen times in public. (A notable precedent was the Times critic Robert Shelton’s 1961 review of “a bright new face in folk music” that launched Bob Dylan’s career.) Between Wolcott’s piece in the Voice and Rockwell’s piece in the Times, Talking Heads were beginning to carve out a niche of their own in the desolate precincts of New York’s downtown rock scene.

Earlier in the summer, on a Tuesday in July, a thirty-three-year-old Queens man named Owen Quinn had taken a running leap off the roof of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Quinn plummeted for half the height of the building before he opened the parachute that he had thoughtfully strapped to his back and floated down to the street-level plaza below. There he was arrested, taken in for psychiatric observation, and subsequently charged with trespassing and reckless endangerment. Unlike Philippe Petit’s leisurely rooftop stroll the summer before, Quinn’s stunt happened so quickly that there was little opportunity for it to be witnessed, much less documented, by anyone besides the handful of horrified office workers who happened to catch sight of him plunging and then drifting past their windows in the course of his descent. But coming as it did from a born-and-bred New Yorker, Quinn’s headlong dive was a much more accurate commentary on the state of the city that stretched below him than Petit’s astonishing balancing act.

Throughout the summer and early fall of 1975, as the death spiral of New York City’s fiscal crisis resulted in mass layoffs of city workers and drastic cutbacks in city services, Mayor Abraham Beame and his patron Governor Hugh Carey searched in vain for the financial equivalent of Owen Quinn’s parachute. In September, the New York State Legislature acted to shore up investor confidence by taking the management of the city’s finances away from the mayor and the city council and awarding it to an Emergency Financial Control Board, consisting of the governor, the mayor, their comptrollers, and the CEOs of three major corporations. Even so, in the middle of October, New York came within hours of default when its teachers union, reeling from the layoffs of seven thousand of its members, threatened to back out of a plan for its pension fund to purchase $150 million in NYC municipal bonds.

Behind the scenes, Beame and Carey continued to prepare for the prospect of bankruptcy, which seemed inevitable without the intervention of the federal government. New York’s two Republican senators, Jacob Javits and James Buckley, favored federal aid, as did Gerald Ford’s vice president, the former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. But Ford himself was a fiscally and culturally conservative Midwesterner who was preparing to run for the Republican nomination in 1976 against the archconservative West Coast wing of his party that was represented by Ronald Reagan. To Reagan and his supporters, both the liberal politics and the cosmopolitan culture of New York stood for everything that was wrong with America in 1975. Accordingly, in a speech at the National Press Club in October, President Ford drew a line, promising to “veto any bill that has as its purpose a federal bail-out of New York City to prevent a default.” The New York Daily News responded the next day with the iconic front-page headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”

That same month, as if to refute the president’s death sentence, a show called simply NBC’s Saturday Night made its network television debut, introduced by the catchphrase “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” Over the course of its first season, “SNL” would serve as a weekly reminder to the rest of America that, for all its travails, New York City was not prepared to go quietly into the night.

Talking Heads played their first engagements away from CBGBs in the fall of 1975, returning to Providence to entertain at Jamie Dalglish’s wedding, and performing for two nights in November at Mother’s, a gay bar on West Twenty-Third Street that was attempting to fill the void left by the demise of Max’s Kansas City by booking local bands. Max’s itself had recently reopened under the management of a new owner, Tommy Dean Mills, who initially sought to convert the place into a disco. When that failed, Mills went back to presenting live music, in direct competition with CBGBs. Ironically, in light of its origins, the “new” Max’s attracted a more hard-core crowd, consisting largely of rowdy kids from the boroughs and New Jersey who felt put off by the artiness of the scene at CBGBs. Along with Blondie, Television, and the Ramones, Talking Heads did play at Max’s from time to time. But CBGBs would remain their base of operations throughout the year ahead. One of their performances there in December was filmed by Metropolis Video, a group of videographers affiliated with the public access channel of Manhattan’s cable television network. The results of their work provided both the band and posterity with the first recording of how they actually looked and sounded at the end of their first year.

Though the black-and-white technology of the Metropolis video makes it look antique, the visual and sound quality of the recording is surprisingly good. It begins with a shot of David Byrne wearing an amplified acoustic guitar as he tests the volume level of his microphone with a series of odd exclamations (“ah-ah . . . ah-ah”) before announcing in a high monotone, “The name of this band is Talking Heads and the name of this song is ‘Psycho Killer.’”

Like so much else in contemporary popular music, the visual presentation of rock was standardized by the Beatles, with their line of three guitarists standing at the front of the stage and their drummer on a riser behind them. (Before them, rock singers like Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly were literally “backed” by their accompanists.) In the case of three-piece groups like Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and the Who, the usual arrangement had the guitarist and bassist flanking the drums. Talking Heads’ presentation at CBGBs conformed to neither of these models. Instead, David Byrne stood front and center at a single microphone, with Tina Weymouth off to the side and behind him, and Chris Frantz, as James Wolcott noted, sitting as far back as he could. The effect was to focus attention on Byrne in a manner more consistent with a singer-songwriter than an autonomous rock group. According to Tina Weymouth, this eccentric setup reflected a conscious design. “It annoyed us that in other bands there was always someone else showing off,” she later said. “We thought people should focus on something specific: David’s writing and singing.”

Their thirty-minute set consists of a half-dozen tightly arranged songs. They begin with a version of “Psycho Killer” that has been transformed by the addition of a throbbing quarter-note bass line that gives the song an insistent, ominous edge. They end with a rendition of “96 Tears,” the garage-band warhorse that David Byrne had been singing since his days with Bizadi, subjected here to an arrangement that treats the opening verse of this churlish teenage revenge fantasy (“You’re way on top now since you left me / You’re always laughing way down at me”) as if it were a contemplative ballad. In between come a much-improved version of the Artistics’ “I Wish You Wouldn’t Say That,” set to Chris Frantz’s scampering brush beat, and an oddly android take on gender relations called “Tentative Decisions.” “With Our Love” and “I’m Not in Love” are a pair of companion pieces that trade in similar forms of emotional detachment, recalling Andrea Kovacs’s comment about Byrne’s “agnostic” attitude toward love. In the first, David sings over the herky-jerky rhythm of the verse about the perils of romance (“It’s just a look / And it makes the boys quiver”); in the second, set to the frantic jitters of his rhythm guitar, David begins with the words, “Pretty! . . . What is? Brand new? Well that’s not the way I think of you.”

“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,” Byrne would later write. “It was a sketch, just the bare-bones musical elements needed to lay out a song. There was no real pleasure or pleasantness to these arrangements.” The accompaniment to these quirky, quizzical songs is indeed spare, if perhaps not quite as sketchy as Byrne himself recalled. Three-piece rock groups have usually featured virtuoso guitarists (Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page) who are adept at integrating their chording with dynamic melodic leads, and aggressively dexterous drummers (Mitch Mitchell, Keith Moon, John Bonham), who can embellish their backbeats with a battery of accents and fills. David Byrne and Chris Frantz, by contrast, possessed neither the technique nor the command of their instruments to fulfill these dual functions. Byrne was still struggling at this point with the basic demands of singing and playing at the same time. It was mainly his singing that suffered; as John Rockwell noted, he tended to half-sing, half-speak the lyrics while maintaining static patterns on guitar that alternated between densely strummed chords and more spacious arpeggios. The same need to keep the music going lent an inflexible quality to much of Chris Frantz’s drumming. This assigned an unusual prominence to Tina Weymouth’s bass, which often seemed to float on top of the guitar and drums rather than burrow beneath them. Despite her relative inexperience, it was Tina who provided the most distinctive coloration to many of the band’s arrangements, beginning with the ominous intro to “Psycho Killer,” which would become iconic over time.

The more telling aspect of Byrne’s critique involves his reference to the absence of “real pleasure or pleasantness” in the music. Inexperienced musical performers tend to focus intently on the act of playing or singing in ways that can make them seem detached, both from the audience and from one another. Apart from his ritualistic announcement of the song title at the start of every number, David Byrne made no apparent effort to connect with his listeners, while the way the band set up onstage, with Byrne in front, Frantz in back, and Weymouth in between, meant that there was little eye contact or any other form of visible interaction between the three of them. This lent a somber, joyless quality to their performance that often ran counter to the words and particularly the spirit of the music they were playing—even as it added to the strange fascination that this oddly remote trio exerted on CBGBs’ tiny, dimly lit stage.

12

Punk Is Coming

The instigators of punk are the same old petit-bourgeois art students, who a few months ago were David Bowie and Bryan Ferry look-alikes—who’ve read a little art history and adopted Dadaist typography and bad manners, and are now in the business of reproducing a fake street credibility.

—DEREK JARMAN, 1976

As Ellen Willis noted in The New Yorker in 1972, the term “punk rock” had been in circulation since the early seventies as a colorful designation for certain varieties of primitive, retrograde rock. The first time the term was applied in print to the bands at CBGBs came in an article by Charles Shaar Murray in the popular British weekly New Musical Express, in November 1975. CBGBs, wrote Murray, “is to the New York punk band scene what the Marquee was to London rock in the ’60s.” He described his favorite of the local groups, the Ramones, as “pocket punks,” dressed in the “standard N.Y. punk uniform [of] black-leather jackets, T-shirts, sneakers and jeans.” Murray then went on to survey the rest of the “Bowery punk bands,” including Tuff Darts, Blondie, and Talking Heads, whose music left him cold. “Talking Heads are seemingly aiming for an effect similar to the early Velvets’ more icily restrained material,” he advised his British readers. “But their music is too thin and disjointed to make it work.” This did not prevent Murray from fixating on Tina Weymouth as “possibly the most arresting single figure in any of these bands. . . . She wears leather pants, grips her bass like it was the only thing keeping her from drifting out into some weird echoing warp phase, has blond hair, and the most frightened eyes I’ve ever seen.”

New Musical Express was widely available on newsstands in New York, but it’s unclear whether Murray’s article had any direct influence on a trio of Connecticut émigrés named John Holmstrom, Ged Dunn, and Legs McNeil, who in January 1976 began to publish a hand-drawn magazine that merged their love of comic book art with their interest in downtown rock. They named their magazine Punk, and they advertised its first issue, which featured interviews with Lou Reed and the Ramones, by pasting stickers that read “Watch out. PUNK is coming!” on lampposts and fire alarm boxes all over Lower Manhattan.

For its second issue, which appeared in March, Punk put Patti Smith on its cover and sent a young writer named Mary Harron to interview Talking Heads. An Oxford-educated Canadian who would go on to have a distinguished career as a filmmaker, Harron was operating on a different level of critical intelligence than the other, ostensibly more experienced writers who covered the New York music scene. Her article began with the now-obligatory reference to RISD, in this case centered on David Byrne’s account of his rejection for readmission, in which he claimed the “admissions board” had told him, “Maybe you should go to New York.” “Two years later,” Harron noted, “he is the star singer for Talking Heads. . . .

“Typed as the ‘intellectuals’ rock band,” she continued, “words like ‘stable,’ ‘sensible,’ and ‘normal’ fill their conversation, as if it were Scarsdale, not a tenth-floor loft with red acetate on the windows.” She concluded her piece with a steely backhanded compliment: “The music generates enough eerie emotion to carry the banal phrases, and they have a nice line in absurdist humor. But many of the lyrics, once unearthed from the music, are self-indulgent jottings that suggest more than they deliver. . . . Byrne’s sensibilities are college sophomore disillusioned. Talking Heads will probably get away with it. But that’s not good enough—not for the best band in New York.”

Mary Harron’s article in Punk came close on the heels of a review of the group by Richard Goldstein in the Village Voice. Goldstein was arguably the first serious rock critic in America, contributing a weekly column to the Voice that ran from 1966 to 1969. He had since become an editor at the paper, and rarely wrote reviews, but he was moved to write about Talking Heads after seeing them perform at CBGBs. His account was notable for its description of David Byrne as “a remote and skinny guy who sings in a high, somber voice, somewhat like a seagull talking to its shrink. . . . He doesn’t move like any rock star ever. He wobbles and cranes his neck . . . and his voice rises as though he’s about to yell at his mother.” Prompted by the emergence of “Psycho Killer” as the band’s best-known song, these articles by Goldstein and Harron marked the start of an entire subgenre of writing that would account for David Byrne’s disquieting stage presence through the use of psychiatric metaphors and references to his passing resemblance to the film actor Anthony Perkins, who played the homicidal maniac Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Around this same time, Talking Heads did their best to affirm the linkage between the downtown art and music scenes that John Rockwell had described by following in Jonathan Richman’s footsteps and performing at the Kitchen. In the year since Richman played there, the Kitchen had come into its own, establishing itself as the prime downtown exhibition space for performance artists like Carolee Schneemann and Vito Acconci, visual artists like William Wegman and John Baldessari, dramatists like Robert Wilson, and choreographers like Carmen Beuchat—all of whom had presented work there in recent months.

In keeping with the protocols of the art world, the Heads were asked to submit an “artist’s statement” for inclusion in the Kitchen’s catalogue. They responded with a paragraph of unwitting self-parody that epitomized the pseudo-intellectual pretensions their detractors ascribed to them. Talking Heads, they wrote, are “a group of performing artists whose medium is rock and roll music and the pursuant ‘band’ organization and visual presentation. The original music and lyrics are structured within the commercial accessibility of rock and roll sound and contemporary popular language . . . Lead singer David Byrne relies on Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth to complete their anti-individualist stance as a group concept.” They were a rock group, in other words.

Fortunately, their performance in a loft filled with fervent admirers was much less euphemistic, consisting of two brisk, well-played sets in which they performed a number of newly written songs. “I Want to Live” was loosely based on a lyric by Marc Kehoe and struck a note of tender aspiration (“to see the earth turn one more time . . . to feel a hand that isn’t mine”); “I Feel It in My Heart” featured both a melody and a sentiment worthy of early period Lennon and McCartney; “Stay Hungry” was a tense rocker co-written by David Byrne and Chris Frantz, with an alliterative refrain (“move a muscle . . . make a motion”) that David chose to sing with a clipped Germanic accent. To judge by the videotape of their performance, the band’s ensemble playing had continued to solidify. Chris and Tina were coalescing into a sturdy, increasingly relaxed rhythm section, with Tina’s trebly bass providing an angular melodic counterpoint to David’s quiet, introspective singing. Though he still struggled with the demands of singing and playing, on much of the material, David’s voice was surprisingly calm and strong, despite his tendency to fall back on wordless vocalizing when he couldn’t think of anything else to do. But the band’s stage presence remained casually amateurish, marked by long pauses between the songs while David switched guitars and fiddled with his sound-effect boxes, Chris and Tina stared blankly into space, and all contact with the audience was suspended until they were ready to start the next song.

Talking Heads’ appearance at the Kitchen inspired another, more substantial Times review by John Rockwell, who described their instrumental sound in visual terms: “The abrupt layerings of their music recall planes of color in minimalist art.” In speaking with Rockwell, however, David Byrne pushed back against this characterization, explaining, “I don’t like to think of myself as an artist playing at having a band. It’s gotten to the point where I think of myself as a performer—almost an entertainer.” Perhaps the most telling point in Rockwell’s article was his impression, on the basis of their appearance and attitude, that Talking Heads now stood “curiously alone” from the “post-Velvet Underground styled punk school” that categorized the other bands at CBGBs.

As the most popular of those bands, the Ramones were approaching a state of near perfection at performing their loud, short, fast, funny, numbingly repetitive, and triumphantly stupid songs. “Johnny’s guitar was so loud that it would feed back as soon as they stopped playing,” recalled Gary Valentine, the bassist in Blondie. “Most of the time Dee Dee’s bass was out of tune. He played it like a jackhammer, drilling ‘duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh’ about half a step sharp or flat of Johnny’s wall of sound. Joey would droop over the mic-stand like an unwatered sunflower, his terse staccato vocals barely breaking through the waterfall of Johnny’s guitar. Tommy’s drums were the most stable thing about the act, and he hit them like a metronome. I don’t think he ever played a drum roll.”

Among the Ramones’ most fervent admirers was Danny Fields, the consummate music business insider whose role as the master of ceremonies in the back room at Max’s Kansas City had forged the ties between New York’s rock scene and its Warholian art-world demimonde. Ivy League educated and openly gay, Fields was a connoisseur of camp decadence. As the Ramones came into their own at CBGBs over the summer of 1975, Fields invited a friend named Linda Stein to see them play. Linda’s husband, Seymour, was a record executive who ran an obscure independent label called Sire. Now in his early thirties, he saw himself as a successor to the scrappy Jewish “record men” who had revolutionized the music business in the 1950s by promoting styles of music—rhythm and blues, country and western, and rock ’n’ roll—that the goyim who ran the major corporate labels like Columbia and Capitol professed to disdain and preferred to ignore.

Seymour Steinbigle had grown up in an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn. While still in high school, he landed an internship at Billboard, where he met Syd Nathan, the notoriously crass and corpulent owner of King Records in Cincinnati, home of R&B stars like Hank Ballard and James Brown. Nathan took this nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn under his wing and taught him the rudiments of the record business, beginning with the need for him to shorten his surname to Stein. After working for a number of indie labels in New York, Stein and a partner named Richard Gottehrer founded Sire Records in 1966. Gottehrer was a songwriter and producer whose credits included three epic one-hit wonders, “My Boyfriend’s Back,” by the Angels, “I Want Candy,” by the Strangeloves, and “Hang On Sloopy,” by the McCoys. But Sire itself had little success in mining that vein of piquant three-chord rock, and Stein wound up spending a lot of his time in London during the late sixties, scouting for British recording acts that he could license for release in the American market.

In the meantime, Stein met Linda Adler, his future bride. Theirs was a marriage of convenience, since Seymour was a closeted gay man, and Linda was the first woman he had ever slept with. Though their union produced a pair of daughters, they went on to lead separate lives, neither of which had much to do with raising a family. Linda Stein’s ambitions as a party girl had brought her into the orbit of Danny Fields, whose invitation to see the Ramones was mainly intended to interest her husband in the group, which Fields had recently agreed to manage. Seymour Stein responded by auditioning the Ramones and signing them to Sire in a matter of days. He may have seen himself in the mold of the old-school Jewish record moguls whose labels—King, Specialty, Imperial—Jerry Wexler, the greatest and wittiest of them all, once compared to the Lost Tribes of Israel. But Stein’s manners and motivations were much more like those of the gay managers and record executives who came to dominate the British pop scene in the wake of Brian Epstein’s unparalleled success. When Stein walked into a Manhattan rehearsal studio and encountered a quartet of cartoonishly butch young men, the deal was all but done, whereupon his wife, Linda, joined Danny Fields as the co-manager of the band.

To say the least, the signing of the Ramones to Sire marked a milestone in the flowering of the scene at CBGBs. Sensing an untapped market, Seymour Stein made it his business to frequent the club. Arriving one night in December 1975 to hear the Ramones, he was standing outside on the street when the opening act began to play. As Stein liked to tell it, the sound of their first number drew him inexorably inside. The song was an oddly titled number called “Love → Building on Fire” and the band was Talking Heads. After accepting an invitation to visit the group at their loft the following day, Stein was impressed to hear them say that they felt they weren’t yet ready to record. He would spend most of the coming year monitoring their progress and reiterating his interest in signing them to his label.

Stein was not the only New York record executive to take an interest in Talking Heads. Clive Davis went to see them at CBGBs, chaperoned by Lou Reed, who had recently signed with Davis’s Arista label and had thoughts of producing the group. But Davis caught them on an off-night and came away unimpressed. (Reed himself made a characteristically obnoxious effort to mentor the band, counseling David Byrne to cover his hairy arms onstage.)

Next up was Matthew Kaufman, a Baltimore native who had started an independent label called Beserkley Records in Berkeley, California, in 1973, just in time for the decline and fall of the San Francisco rock scene. Before that, Kaufman had worked for A&M Records when the Modern Lovers recorded their demos for the label. Having licensed the group’s demos from both A&M and Warners, he was now preparing to release them on an album, a mere two years after the band broke up. His affection for Jonathan Richman drew him to Talking Heads, for whom he arranged a demo session at a studio on Long Island. But Kaufman was an abrasive ex-lawyer whose track record and business sense were negligible, and once the session was done, the Heads wisely avoided further contact with him. Their main takeaway from the Beserkley audition was an advance copy of the Modern Lovers album. Though they had already seen Jonathan Richman perform at the Kitchen in 1975, hearing him backed by a rock group made the affinities between his work and theirs that much more apparent to them.

Finally there was Mark Spector, a young A&R man at Columbia Records who had worked with the folksinger Tom Rush and the jazz-rock groups Chicago and Weather Report. Seeking to get in early on what he saw as a burgeoning scene, Spector focused on Talking Heads as the most musically palatable of the bands at CBGBs and invited them to a recording test at Columbia. There, in quick succession, the group ran through their whole repertoire of original songs, including the tune that impressed Seymour Stein, “Love → Building on Fire,” with its chiming guitar, stamping backbeat, and faintly surreal lyrics. Also recorded were a pair of recent additions, “The Book I Read” and “Thank You for Sending Me an Angel,” both of them set to variations on the lighter, scampering groove that Chris Frantz first applied to “I Wish You Wouldn’t Say That.”

Though the level of playing was tight and assured on nearly all the tracks, some of the older songs on the Columbia demo suffered from badly rushed tempos, as if the band had grown bored with the arrangements and felt a need to liven them up. In any case, while Mark Spector may have been interested in signing Talking Heads, the powers-that-be at Columbia, flush with a recent run of top-selling albums by Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Chicago, Pink Floyd, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Aerosmith, were not. The principal outcome of their recording test was to provide the Heads with ample aural evidence of the need for them to bolster the sound of their band.

It so happened that a friend of Chris Frantz’s parents in Pittsburgh was related to Ernie Brooks, the former bass player in the Modern Lovers. In the spring of 1976, Chris recognized Brooks at a West Village café and introduced himself. After exchanging pleasantries, he asked about Brooks’s former bandmate Jerry Harrison and learned that Harrison had recently enrolled in graduate school at Harvard. When Chris mentioned that Talking Heads were looking for a keyboard player, Brooks gave him Harrison’s phone number.

When Frantz called Harrison in Cambridge, they had a cordial conversation in which Chris explained that Talking Heads were great fans of Jerry’s playing on the soon-to-be-released Modern Lovers album, and Jerry explained how disillusioned he had felt after the breakup of the band. When Chris mentioned that several record labels had expressed an interest in Talking Heads, Jerry’s own interest was piqued. Chris then offered to set up a club date for Talking Heads in Boston so that Jerry could hear them play.

Born in Milwaukee in 1949, Jeremiah Griffin Harrison had grown up in Shorewood, an upscale suburb just north of the city, as the only child of Richard and Janice Griffin Harrison. His father was a dentist’s son from neighboring Waukesha who graduated in the early 1930s from the University of Wisconsin, where he majored in art and supplemented his income by playing saxophone in a dance band. After serving as a naval officer in World War II, Richard took a job as an account executive with the largest advertising agency in Milwaukee, Baker, Johnson & Dickinson, where he remained for his entire career. His work was lucrative but not glamorous; the company’s clients included the makers of Mercury outboard motors and a number of big Midwestern meatpacking firms.

Jerry’s mother, Janice, was born on Christmas Day in 1917 and grew up in Shorewood. Her father was a traveling salesman from Massachusetts who moved his family to Milwaukee, where he started a wholesale seafood company before striking it rich in the stock market boom of the 1920s. Janice’s mother was a watercolor artist who showed her work locally. Janice herself went on to study art, first at the Layton School in Milwaukee and then at the Cranbrook Academy in Detroit. In 1941, while still enrolled at Cranbrook, she married a fellow student who enlisted in the Army Air Corps shortly after Pearl Harbor. But their marriage did not survive their separation during the war, and by the time she met Richard Harrison in 1947, Janice was back in Shorewood, living with her parents and teaching art at the Layton School.

Shorewood was a leafy, all-white enclave of five thousand private homes, bordered by the bluffs of Lake Michigan to the east and the Milwaukee River to the west. At the time of Jerry’s birth, his parents lived in a modest house on East Olive Street, around the corner from the much grander home where Janice had grown up. The Harrisons later moved to a larger house at the end of North Stowell Avenue, in a cul-de-sac closer to the lake.

Jerry’s upbringing there conformed in many ways to the postwar suburban ideal of good schools, safe streets, Boy Scout troops, and Little League. The community’s sole form of diversity consisted of its substantial Jewish population. Jerry attended Atwater Elementary School, a short walk from his home. In the seventh grade, he moved to Shorewood High School, which occupied an imposing copper-domed building on a large campus adjoining East Capitol Drive, the town’s main commercial thoroughfare.

As the only child of two former art majors, Jerry’s artistic orientation might have been preordained. But an interest in visual art did not figure heavily in his childhood. Instead, like many well-to-do children of his generation, he took piano lessons during his middle school years, which taught him to read music, and went on to play clarinet in the junior high school band. After the advent of the Beatles in 1964, he played electric piano and organ in a series of high school rock groups. The most durable of these was a quintet called the Walkers, which formed in the fall of 1965 and gained some local renown by playing at youth club and high school dances. Their repertoire consisted mainly of R&B covers gleaned from the records of British Invasion bands like the Stones and the Yardbirds. Their members included a guitarist named Bob Metzger, who went on to play with Leonard Cohen, and a bassist named Jon Paris, who went on to perform with the albino blues guitarist Johnny Winter.

Milwaukee was known as one of the most racially segregated cities in America during the postwar years, and the distinction between its white-ethnic South Side and its African American North Side defined the local music scene. A number of North Side clubs presented blues and soul recording artists, but in the mid-1960s, they were largely off-limits to white teenagers. Jerry recalled seeing the Lovin’ Spoonful perform at the Eagles Club Ballroom, a storied South Side venue that became a flashpoint in the summer of 1966 when the local chapter of the NAACP picketed the place to protest its whites-only policy, and the Milwaukee klavern of the Ku Klux Klan staged a counterdemonstration in full regalia. He also recalled seeing James Brown at the Milwaukee Auditorium, which in 1964 had hosted both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

In addition to his musical pursuits, Jerry’s main distinction in high school was that of an exceptional student. A National Merit Scholar and a member of the mathematics honor society, his grades and test scores were good enough to earn him admission to Harvard in the fall of 1967, where he joined a freshman class that included such future luminaries as Chuck Schumer, Frank Rich, and Christopher Durang. One of his housemates was a budding bass player from Connecticut named Ernie Brooks. The two of them became fast friends.

In their sophomore year, Jerry and Ernie began living together off-campus and playing in a band called Albatross, which performed bluesy rock by artists like Jimi Hendrix and Steve Miller at college “mixers.” In the politically charged climate of the time, the group also appeared at some of the big anti-war rallies that were held at Harvard and MIT. Jerry and Ernie played with Albatross for two years, followed by a group called Jan and the Eagles, led by the singer-songwriter Jan Egleson. After that, Ernie joined a band called Catfish Black, while Jerry began to concentrate on his coursework, having elected to major in art, film, and visual studies.

The two of them first encountered Jonathan Richman in the fall of 1971, when they saw him performing outdoors on the Cambridge Common, accompanying himself on a half-strung electric guitar. Around the same time, they also crossed paths with Danny Fields, who knew Richman from his days as an acolyte of the Velvet Underground. Fields took it upon himself to introduce Richman to Jerry and Ernie, who were suitably intrigued by the singer’s strange synthesis of sincerity, eccentricity, and deadpan humor. Jerry incorporated footage of Richman, talking and singing, into his senior thesis film. In January 1972, he and Ernie, on something of a whim, decided to take off the spring semester and join the Modern Lovers, the band that Richman had formed the summer before. (They returned to Harvard the following fall to complete their senior year.)

The next three years were a roller-coaster ride, as the Modern Lovers, like the Velvets before them, subsisted in the lurch between their underground mystique and their seemingly willful lack of commercial viability. While the band attained a degree of musical proficiency, Richman himself remained an almost perversely erratic performer, his singing off-key, his guitar out of tune, who wore his lack of professionalism as a badge of artistic integrity. Though a case of arrested development was hardly a disqualifying factor in the world of rock, the distinctive feature of Richman’s arrested development was that it seemed to be rooted in his early rather than late adolescence. This lent a powerfully evocative vulnerability to his songs, but it also made him almost incapable of pursuing a professional career.

Lacking competent management, the Modern Lovers played mainly at Boston-area colleges, coffee shops, and high schools, even as they were being courted by major record labels. A 1972 showcase in California, opening for the popular horn band Tower of Power, ended in disaster, with the band being pelted by beer bottles onstage. After finally signing with Warners the following year, Richman surprised both his bandmates and his producer, John Cale, by declaring his intention to renounce the raw-boned rock of his earlier songs in favor of a gentler, quieter, defiantly puerile style of singing and accompaniment. In response to this change of heart, Jerry Harrison began playing guitar with the group, in order to reproduce Richman’s old parts. But the final straw for everyone came when Richman began refusing to perform his signature song, “Roadrunner,” in front of live audiences, on the grounds that people “liked it.”

At loose ends back in Cambridge, Harrison and Brooks began playing behind Elliott Murphy, a self-consciously “literary” singer-songwriter whose first two albums on Polydor Records had caused him to be touted in the rock press, along with Bruce Springsteen, John Prine, and Billy Joel, as a contender for the mantle of the “next Dylan.” But after a year of touring clubs and colleges and playing on several tracks of Night Lights, the lackluster album that marked the end of Murphy’s pretensions to greatness, Jerry decided to return to Harvard to earn a master’s degree in architectural design. He was in the middle of his first semester when Chris Frantz called from New York.

By the spring of 1976, Boston had spawned a punk-rock scene of its own, centered on the Rat (short for “Rathskeller”), a grungy basement venue in Kenmore Square, and the Club, an equally grungy dive bar in Cambridge’s Central Square. The Ramones had played at the Club in February; citing the CBGBs connection, Chris spoke with the manager and arranged for Talking Heads to appear there on a weeknight in the middle of April as the opening act for Fox Pass, a popular Boston group. Billed as “New York’s Talking Head,” their reception by the Boston crowd was tepid. Listening from the back of the room, Jerry Harrison found their music somewhat “strained.” But he was sufficiently intrigued to meet with the Heads the following day. After giving them a tour of the architecture school at Harvard, he agreed to come down to New York at some point in the future to play some music with them.

13

They’re So Cute

Rock writers have welcomed the infusion of new bands and rock clubs in New York for their own good reasons. It’s fun to feel part of something fresh and new.

—JOHN ROCKWELL, NEW YORK TIMES

The best new band are Talking Heads, preppy RISD kids,” a CBGBs regular named Duncan Hannah wrote in his diary at the start of 1976. Strikingly handsome and heartbreakingly heterosexual (“the perfect English schoolboy,” in the words of Patti Smith), Hannah had arrived in New York from Minneapolis by way of Bard College and spent the previous few years making the scene as a graduate student at the Parsons School of Design, in the course of which he became friendly with the gay icon Lance Loud, star of the 1973 PBS documentary An American Family. Loud was now singing in a CBGBs band called the Mumps and writing a column for Interview, Andy Warhol’s celebrity gossip magazine. In the middle of May, Hannah prevailed on Loud to bring Warhol to see Talking Heads play at CBGBs, where the three of them shared a celebrity table with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, the record executive Chris Blackwell, and the singer Robert Palmer, who recorded for Blackwell’s Island Records.

“They’re so cute,” Warhol said of the band. He asked Loud to invite the group to join him for lunch at the Factory the following week. At the end of their lunch together, Loud interviewed the Heads for a piece in Warhol’s magazine.

The article, which was published later in the summer, did not differentiate among the three of them. “Although they have separate names and duties within the band,” Loud wrote, “they are a unified creative force and come across like one total person rather than three.” After prompting them to talk about their recent celebrity contacts with Lou Reed, Clive Davis, and Robert Palmer, Loud cited the Heads’ “artistic” reputation and asked them their opinion of the contemporary art scene.

“We don’t subscribe to many of the ideas going on in the art world now,” one of them replied. “We think what makes art good is when people forget everything else and just do what’s in their hearts.” Asked about their reception at CBGBs, “they” recalled that “writers seemed to like us very quickly . . . but the one problem we ran into was that we were dubbed as being intellectual. We don’t think we’re smarties, we just don’t particularly enjoy being stupid either. We don’t get into ball scratching, know what I mean?”

That “writers seemed to like us very quickly” was putting it mildly, coming from Talking Heads. At the end of their first full year as a performing band, virtually all of it confined to a single club on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the group had received more attention from the New York–based print media than any unsigned act within memory. As their reference to “ball scratching” suggested, some of this attention they owed to the Ramones, who had ruled the roost at CBGBs over the course of the previous year, and who, in their looks, sound, rare utterances, and overtly Neanderthal posturings, provided rock writers with the perfect foil for the preppy, chatty, Cro-Magnon Talking Heads.

The advent of punk rock in the United States and Britain during the second half of the 1970s was at least as much a journalistic phenomenon as it was a musical movement or trend. Though literate writing about jazz dated back to the 1930s, rock writing, some of it literate, most of it not, began in the mid-1960s as a dilettantish pursuit, practiced by fervent fans and published in mimeographed magazines like Crawdaddy and the back pages of underground newspapers. The outpouring of critical praise that greeted the release of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper and the subsequent founding of Rolling Stone magazine in the fall of 1967 helped to professionalize the genre. But it was the determination by the flourishing recording industry that feature stories and album reviews had an effect on radio airplay and record sales that prompted the outpouring of advertising dollars that underwrote Rolling Stone and its competitors like Circus and Creem. Along with ads for clubs, concerts, and stereo equipment, record company advertising also subsidized the many alternative weekly papers that sprang up in cities across America during the 1970s. In response, the editors of these papers prioritized their coverage of live and recorded rock.

In January 1976, Robert Christgau, the music editor of the Village Voice, wrote an article for his paper heralding the power of the “Rock Critical Establishment,” a self-styled journalistic cabal consisting of himself and four other critics—John Rockwell, Jon Landau, Paul Nelson, and Dave Marsh—and the role that these writers had played in promoting the meteoric rise of Bruce Springsteen over the course of the previous year. Written in Christgau’s patented style of ironic self-congratulation, his article also documented the increasing concentration of rock journalism in New York. The year that began with the founding of the fanzines Punk and its alter ego, New York Rocker, continued with the arrival in the city of Lester Bangs, the former enfant terrible of the Detroit-based magazine Creem, and culminated in December with the announcement that Rolling Stone was moving its editorial and business offices from a warehouse in San Francisco to an Art Deco tower on Fifth Avenue overlooking the Plaza Hotel. Combined with the now-routine coverage of rock in glossy magazines and prestige papers like the Times, this helped to make New York the new epicenter of rock writing in America.

The result was a curious brand of metropolitan provincialism. As John Rockwell noted, “New York is distinguished by the huge number of writers and publications that flourish here. The cultist enthusiasm that exists in any regional scene is picked up and disseminated world-wide. This gets the bands noticed more quickly than they might be elsewhere. It also creates a new set of problems—aroused expectations that may not be fulfilled when the records actually come out, and resistance to New York-originated ‘hype’ or inflated praise.” The release of the Ramones’ eponymous first album on Sire Records in the spring of 1976 was a case in point. The album received favorable and in some cases fawning reviews. Robert Christgau raved about it in the Voice—“I love this record—love it”—without ever mentioning why; Gene Sculatti sang its praises in Creem as “a rock ’n’ roll reactionary’s manifesto . . . so brazenly out of touch with prevailing modes as to constitute a bold swipe at the status quo”; Paul Nelson touted the group as “authentic American primitives” in Rolling Stone; and Rockwell himself described their music as “an abstraction of rock so pure that other associations get left behind.”

Yet outside the friendly confines of the rock critical establishment, Ramones was met with a mixture of indifference and disdain by the marketing nexus of radio stations and record stores that constituted the actual “business” end of the record business. It didn’t help that Sire’s promotion and distribution network was totally ad hoc. Nor did it help that the album’s opening track and designated single was an homage to Dee Dee Ramone’s juvenile fascination with Nazi iconography, titled “Blitzkrieg Bop.” This might have been taken as poetic license but for the fact that the album ended with a track called “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World,” which began with the lines, “I’m a storm trooper in a stupor, yes I am / I’m a Nazi schatze, you know I fight for Fatherland.” As Seymour Stein later noted, “Radio stations wouldn’t touch the Ramones with a toilet brush.”

The commercial disappointment of Ramones came as a coda to the flagging sales of Patti Smith’s debut album Horses, which had been released with great fanfare on Arista Records toward the end of 1975. Despite the cachet of Clive Davis and the promotional muscle of his label, Robert Mapplethorpe’s stunning cover portrait, and a raft of rapturous reviews and feature stories heralding Smith as a major new artist, Horses peaked at a middling #47 on the Billboard Top 200 in February 1976. By the time Smith appeared in April as a featured guest (along with President Gerald Ford) on Saturday Night Live, the album had fallen off the charts. Since the Ramones and the Patti Smith Group represented the alpha and omega of the downtown New York bands, this did not bode well for the commercial prospects of Bowery punk rock.

Early in the summer of 1976, Yann Weymouth informed his sister Tina that one of the lofts in his building in Long Island City, four blocks south of the Queensboro Bridge, was becoming available. Eager to leave the squalor of Chrystie Street, Chris and Tina jumped at the chance to rent the place, which had ample rehearsal space for the group. By this time, their gigs at CBGBs were earning the members of Talking Heads a steady enough income that they had been able to quit their day jobs. David chose to remain in Lower Manhattan, renting a one-room apartment on East Fifth Street, three blocks from CBGBs and a forty-five-minute subway ride from Chris and Tina’s new home.

As America prepared to celebrate its bicentennial summer of 1976, Talking Heads settled into a steady routine of live performances that would carry them through the rest of the year. Once a month they played three or four nights at CBGBs, beginning on the July Fourth weekend, when New Yorkers were briefly distracted from the prospects of urban collapse by the stirring spectacle of an armada of tall-masted sailing ships, whose presence in New York Harbor served as a reminder of the two centuries when the city had stood as an international symbol of arrival, rather than departure from its crime-ridden, burnt-out residential neighborhoods. Talking Heads also played occasional gigs that summer at My Father’s Place, a former bowling alley in the Long Island town of Roslyn that had been converted in the early 1970s into a major music venue, presenting a wide range of rock, jazz, blues, and reggae artists.

Another new showcase was Mickey Ruskin’s latest venture, the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club, which had just opened on Chambers Street, in a once-thriving commercial district on the Lower West Side—previously known as Washington Market, soon to be named TriBeCa—which was showing new signs of life thanks to the opening of the World Trade Center and the gradual migration of artists southward from the rising rents of SoHo. Talking Heads played there in August, September, and October, but their introduction to the club came in July, when John Cale invited David Byrne to join him onstage with Lou Reed and Patti Smith for an impromptu set that included cacophonous versions of “I’m Waiting for the Man” and the Modern Lovers’ “Pablo Picasso.” Like Lou Reed, Cale had expressed an interest in producing Talking Heads, and this was his way of drawing them into the fold. The evening turned into a full-scale Velvets reunion when Andy Warhol and his entourage attended the show. Looking distinctly uncomfortable in this august company, David Byrne was content to stand to one side and idly strum an acoustic twelve-string guitar.

The inclusion of “Pablo Picasso” in Cale’s set was telling. Though Jonathan Richman had stopped performing the song, which he regarded as a relic of his former “negativity,” the release of the Modern Lovers album generated a flurry of critical attention in the rock press during the summer of 1976. Beserkley Records responded to the buzz by releasing Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers, a newly recorded collection of childishly self-delighted songs that gave full voice to the singer’s suburban savant syndrome. While some of this new material revived Richman’s signature themes of chaste romance and Massachusetts chauvinism, titles like “Hey There Little Insect” and “Abominable Snowman in the Market” would not have sounded out of place being performed by the Muppets on Sesame Street.

In the middle of August, Jerry Harrison came down from Boston to play with Talking Heads at their new loft in Long Island City. It had been five months since their meeting in Boston, but whether out of conviction or inertia, the Heads had made little effort over the summer to audition other prospects for their band. Lacking a car to transport his keyboards, Harrison arrived with just a guitar. Nevertheless, his visit went well on both a musical and a personal level. Unlike most of the musicians they had met in New York, Harrison was a self-possessed, well-educated young man from a well-to-do, middle-American family not unlike their own. With his wide face, puckish features, and ringlets of dark curly hair, he looked the part of a 1970s rock musician in a way that Byrne, Frantz, and Weymouth did not. Perhaps most important, he had the sensitivity to recognize that Talking Heads had spent a year and half developing a distinctive sound of their own, and that his role would be to enhance that sound, not impose himself on it. Having played in a band with Jonathan Richman for several years, Jerry was unfazed by David Byrne’s social awkwardness, and David in turn was thrilled to be playing, for the first time in his life, with another musician whose musical knowledge and experience exceeded his own.

Afterward, Harrison stayed in the city long enough to sit in with the group at one of their gigs at the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club. Before returning to Cambridge, he made it clear that any commitment on his part was contingent on a recording contract for the band and the completion of his current semester at grad school.

On that basis, Talking Heads informed Seymour Stein that they were ready to sign with Sire. After speaking with Danny Fields about the Ramones’ experience with the label and receiving a positive response, they had convinced themselves that an independent label like Sire would afford them greater attention and autonomy than they would receive as one of many acts on the roster of a major corporate label like Warners or Columbia. Not that they had much choice. In a year when a journeyman rocker with no previous track record like Peter Frampton could sell an unprecedented six million copies of a mediocre live album on the basis of a pretty face, a big head of hair, and a massive promotional budget, the downtown New York rock scene, as represented to date by the Ramones and Patti Smith, amounted to pocket change for the major labels. A contract was drawn up and signed at the start of November, nearly a year after Stein first heard the group play at CBGBs. The band’s advance on the contract was modest; David Byrne used some of his share to purchase a color television, while Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth celebrated their imminent status as recording artists by announcing their engagement to be married.

To date, Seymour Stein’s only success in the record business had come from licensing British and European imports. Though his partner Richard Gottehrer was a capable producer, Gottehrer had recently dissolved their partnership on amicable terms in order to work with Blondie, who had signed with Private Stock, another fly-by-night New York independent label. In Gottehrer’s absence, Stein’s professional contacts in New York were limited. At the time he signed Talking Heads, the Ramones were recording their second album at Sundragon, a cramped, cut-rate sixteen-track studio on West Twentieth Street. The record was being coproduced by Tony Bongiovi and Tommy (Erdelyi) Ramone, Tommy being the Ramone who served as the group’s musical organizer (“arranger” would be too strong a word). Tony Bongiovi, while still in his early thirties, was already an old hand in the record business. A New Jersey native, he had come up in the 1960s as a precocious engineer whose emulation of Motown’s recording techniques eventually earned him a job with the label. More recently, he had teamed up with the arranger Meco Monardo to produce a series of disco hits, most notably Gloria Gaynor’s Top 10 single “Never Can Say Goodbye,” the royalties from which Bongiovi was using to convert an abandoned Con Edison substation on West Fifty-Third into a state-of-the-art recording studio, aptly named the Power Station, that was due to open in the year ahead. When the time came for Talking Heads to record, Seymour Stein simply had Bongiovi and Erdelyi pick up where they left off at Sundragon with the Ramones.

Stein also decided that Talking Heads’ debut on Sire should feature the song that first drew him to the group, “Love → Building on Fire.” It was an odd choice, given the song’s vexing title and obscure lyric, but at this point the band was happy to take direction from the head of their new record label and his appointed producers, especially since they were already on friendly terms with Tommy Ramone. For the B-side of the single, Stein and the Heads chose a recently written song called “New Feeling,” whose opening line, “It’s not yesterday anymore,” seemed well suited to an artistically ambitious band making its first record.

By all accounts, their inaugural session in December 1976 went smoothly. In keeping with the prevailing studio practice of the time, Sundragon was an acoustically “dead” room, in which the instruments were isolated from one another and the musicians could hear themselves only through headphones. This took some getting used to, but a great virtue of multitrack recording was that David Byrne was able to overdub additional guitar parts that served to thicken the band’s instrumental texture. Further embellishment came from the decision to add a trio of horns to both of the tracks—inspired, according to Chris Frantz, by the Heads’ desire to emulate the stately “Stax sound” of the R&B records produced in Memphis and Muscle Shoals during the 1960s.

“Love → Building on Fire” was a good example of Mary Harron’s point about the tendency of David Byrne’s lyrics to suggest more than they can deliver. After a four-bar intro of muted guitar and sporadic bird calls, the song begins on an oddly cheerful note of romantic negation. “When my love / Stands next to your love,” David sings in a choirboy voice over the stop-start cadence of Chris’s parade ground snare, “I can’t compare love / When it’s not love.” “It’s not love,” he insists, reaching for the top of his range, before alluding, in the chorus, to his idea of what love is: “Which is my face / Which is a building / Which is on fire.” With that the bass and drums combine on a stamping quarter-note beat, while the verse and chorus reprise the cries of “not love” and the haunting image of a face lit up like a burning building, so eerily evocative of the dystopian world of Lower Manhattan in 1976.

The sound of overdubbed horns dominates the flip side of the single, “New Feeling,” lending an incongruously pop inflection to an opaque lyric that rides on one of David’s whirly rhythm guitar riffs, its insistent offbeats set against the smack of Chris’s snare and Tina’s nudging downbeats on bass. Though the words “new feeling” never occur in the song, the verses describe a newfound desire for social connection on the part of an awkward narrator who talks too loud and draws too near in his efforts to be understood, and who now wishes that he could somehow reintroduce himself to every one of his friends. “Meet them all over again,” David sings, and “bring them up to my room.”

In January 1977, while they waited for their single to be mastered, pressed, and released, David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, and Chris Frantz turned their attention to welcoming Jerry Harrison into their band. After spending a week rehearsing in a rented cottage on Cape Cod, the group played a number of club and college dates in Boston, Worcester, and Providence with Harrison sitting in on some of their songs. Then, leaving their new member behind to complete his coursework at Harvard, they ended their career as a trio by performing at colleges in Toronto and Stony Brook, New York, where they opened for John Cale.

The February release of “Love → Building on Fire” was duly noted in Billboard. “A strange enough but not too rough-edged debut from one of the stalwarts of the New York punk rock scene,” read the trade journal’s brief review. But with its unannounceable title (“Love Goes to Building on Fire” was the usual translation), the song was unsuited to the format of commercial radio, and what little airplay it received was confined to a smattering of college stations. In the absence of any real promotion by Sire, the record never made the charts, and its sales were negligible outside of Lower Manhattan. Still, with its appealing combination of quirky singing and rhythmic solidity, it fulfilled its function as a musical calling card, providing potential bookers with a succinct answer to the question: What do they sound like? On that basis alone, it was a great leap forward for the band.

There’s a story Tina Weymouth liked to tell, that when Talking Heads were preparing to sign with Sire in the fall of 1976, David Byrne asked her to “audition” for the group. “I was a founding member,” Tina told the writer Richard Grabel in 1980. “But I had to audition again. And I passed—isn’t that good?” Tina would repeat this story over the years as a testament to David’s ambition and egocentricity, the implication being that he wanted to reassess her competence before he agreed to include her in what he regarded as his big break. Chris Frantz recounted another version of the story in his memoir, though he set it several months earlier, in the summer of 1976: “One day we were recording at the Shirts’ studio and before I got there, David said to Tina for no apparent reason, ‘I’m gonna play some stuff and I want you to come up with some bass parts.’ Tina, realizing that this was some kind of audition, declined. They were exchanging words about this when I walked into the room, and David immediately dropped the subject.”

The discrepancy between Chris’s and Tina’s recollections of when this exchange took place isn’t the only thing about this story that strains the bounds of credibility. Tina Weymouth had been a prime attraction of Talking Heads from the very start of the band—not only for her fresh-faced good looks and the novelty of her gender in the boys’-club milieu of downtown rock, but also for the way her watchful stage presence helped to contextualize the neurotic spectacle of David Byrne. For David to entertain the idea of replacing Tina with a presumably more experienced and presumably male bass player would seem to run counter to the entire “self-aware” ethos of the group. It also suggests that David was oblivious to the possibility that Seymour Stein might have something to say about the prospect of replacing the photogenic female bassist in the band he was preparing to sign, and that David somehow believed, if push came to shove, that Chris would find a way to take his fiancée’s replacement in stride.

Perhaps the most plausible explanation is that Tina’s own doubts about David’s opinion of her playing caused her to take the suggestion that she “come up with some bass parts” as a test of her competence—rather than an invitation to work on the arrangements of some songs. If so, those doubts were encouraged by David’s infuriating inability to express the sort of routine appreciation for his bandmates’ contributions that underlies the creative camaraderie of most collaborative groups. If nothing else, Tina’s story provides a startling insight into the stilted communication and ambivalent personal relations that prevailed in Talking Heads.

Beginning with the paradigm of the Beatles, rock groups (more than groups of jazz or folk or classical musicians) have often seemed analogous with gangs or cliques or other close-knit circles of friends. In practice, this has been the exception rather than the rule. More often, rock groups have consisted of people like the members of Talking Heads: casual acquaintances who formed a tentative musical partnership, bonded over their efforts to learn to play and develop a musical identity, and then, if all went well, reacted in their different ways to the experience of public recognition, critical approval, and commercial success. Sometimes this shared experience has led to deep bonds of personal or professional friendship; more often it has not.

From the beginning, the group dynamic of Talking Heads was shaped by the romantic bond of Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth on the one hand and by David Byrne’s aloofness and social awkwardness on the other. As a couple, Chris and Tina were gregarious with friends and strangers alike, whereas David’s default setting was furtive and withdrawn. In the absence of any public awareness of Asperger’s (not that it would have made much difference), people tended to project whatever motivations they wanted onto David’s detached behavior, ranging from arrogance to insecurity, affectation to inhibition, or the catchall of “eccentricity,” whatever that might mean. Within the group, however, it was a different story. Though journalists who interviewed the Heads were often struck by Tina’s annoyance or impatience with David, she and Chris were familiar with his idiosyncrasies by now, and they were well aware that the musical manifestation of those idiosyncrasies was central to their band’s appeal.

Fortunately, Jerry Harrison’s enlistment had rebalanced the group dynamic by adding another strong-minded personality to the mix. In addition to his past experience with Jonathan Richman, Jerry’s Harvard-endowed sense of self-confidence ensured that his response to David’s social inadequacies would remain less fraught than Tina’s as time went on.

14

London Calling

I couldn’t believe how anybody could be so bad. And I was suddenly impressed by the fact that I was no longer concerned with whether you could play well. Whether you were able to even know about rock ’n’ roll to the extent you were able to write songs properly wasn’t important any longer. . . . The Dolls really impressed upon me that there was something else. There was something wonderful. I thought how brilliant they were to be this bad.

—MALCOLM MCLAREN ON THE NEW YORK DOLLS

In the winter of 1976, when Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years won the Grammy for Album of the Year, Simon got a big laugh when he ended his acceptance speech at the annual RIAA gala in New York by thanking Stevie Wonder for failing to release an album in the previous year. Wonder’s last two LPs, Innervisions and Fulfillingness’ First Finale, had won the Album of the Year award in 1973 and 1974, and Simon’s joke would be reaffirmed in the fall of 1976 by the release of Songs in the Key of Life, a sprawling, self-produced double album that would win it yet again. Twenty years after Ray Charles had transformed the landscape of Anglo-American popular music by melding elements of rhythm and blues, gospel, modern jazz, and country and western to create a new musical and emotional vocabulary, another blind African American genius had performed a similar feat of masterful synthesis, combining the revolutionary musical developments of the 1960s and ’70s in rock, soul, fusion, funk, and reggae into a distinctive style of singing, playing, composing, and recording that would shape the agenda of popular music for years to come.

Stevie Wonder had scored his first hit as a child harmonica prodigy with the instrumental “Fingertips” in 1963. His maturation into the most musically accomplished and commercially successful Black recording artist of the 1970s coincided with the maturation of an entire generation of popular musicians, Black and white, who had spent the previous decade honing their craft, refining their art, and aspiring to the kind of creative autonomy that commercially empowered predecessors like the Beatles, Bob Dylan, James Brown, and Jimi Hendrix had exerted over the direction of their musical careers. By the mid-seventies, the world of Anglo-American popular music was populated by a cadre of musicians whose skills had begun to rival the virtuosity associated with modern jazz, along with a cohort of singers and songwriters whose command of their craft equaled and in many cases surpassed that of the mainstream pop singers and Broadway composers associated with Tin Pan Alley’s mid-century golden age. As tends to happen in a creative field where large numbers of people are competing for the chance to earn large amounts of money—record sales in the United States alone rose from one billion dollars in 1968 to two billion in 1973 to four billion in 1978—the popular music business in the United States and Britain had become deeply professionalized.

It was precisely this aura of professionalization that the bands that formed in Lower Manhattan in the mid-seventies under the rubric of “punk” claimed to be rejecting, based on their belief that rock ’n’ roll in its glory days, when the music was perceived as a cultural assault on the middle-class, middle-American sensibility of the 1950s, was a form of inspired self-assertion by a collection of charismatic amateurs who barely knew how to sing or play their instruments. (As Patti Smith put it, “Wrong note so what.”) For the most part, however, their version of musical history was a self-serving myth. It’s true that rockabilly, the country-inflected R&B hybrid that nurtured white stars like Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and Jerry Lee Lewis, included its share of musical naïfs. But beginning with the entire generation of gospel-trained African American singers that was epitomized by Ray Charles, and continuing with the masterful studio bands that performed on the records that were made in New Orleans, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles in the 1950s, there was nothing amateurish about the standards of singing and playing that prevailed during the formative years of rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll. When Earl Palmer, one of the great drummers of his generation, flattened the backbeat behind Little Richard to create the straight eighth-note pulse that would serve as the rhythmic foundation of popular music for fifty years to come, he knew exactly what he was doing.

Yet while real innovation in popular music is rare, human beings are exceedingly skilled at imitation. The kid guitarist on the internet who can reproduce every lick that Jimi Hendrix ever played takes nothing away from Hendrix’s creative genius; he merely demonstrates that with practice, practice, practice, a dedicated player can learn to reproduce even the most complex musical ideas. By the beginning of 1977, most of the bands associated with the resurgence of rock in Lower Manhattan had been together for two or three years, which was enough time for the more diligent of them to start to develop a real proficiency on their instruments. Here again, the Ramones were a case in point. Whatever they may have believed about themselves—Tommy Ramone once remarked that when the group was recording their second album, he thought they had reached the stage that the Beatles had reached with Sgt. Pepper—these were people of negligible musical “talent,” as the term is generally understood. Yet by adopting a fanatical work ethic, ignoring the distractions of melody and harmony, and focusing all of their attention on a single unvarying rhythm and a handful of common chords, the Ramones by the start of 1977 had become utterly proficient at performing their own drastically attenuated version of rock ’n’ roll.

Jerry Harrison’s arrival marked a similar maturation in the evolution of Talking Heads. In March, when the group made its debut as a quartet at CBGBs, the British rock writer Barry Miles filed an enthusiastic review of their performance in New Musical Express, drawing the now-familiar contrast between the “calculated sleaze” of the club and the preppy primness of the band (“Tina looks sexy like a girl on a tennis court”). Two weeks later, Miles wrote another piece in NME, recounting the group’s art-school origins and their formation in Lower Manhattan. “Right now, Talking Heads are the cult band in New York,” he informed his British readers.

This well-timed burst of publicity in the music press enabled Seymour Stein to convince a London booking agent named Ed Bicknell to invite Talking Heads to serve as the opening act for the Ramones on a low-budget tour of Britain and the Continent that Bicknell, who worked for the remnants of Brian Epstein’s old management agency, NEMS, had been arranging for several weeks. The tour was due to begin at the end of April and run through the first week of June. For their part, Talking Heads were eager to accept Bicknell’s invitation to take their show on the road.

At the beginning of April, after several more weeks of rehearsal with Jerry Harrison, the band returned to Sundragon Studios to begin recording the tracks for their first album on Sire Records. This time, it did not take long for tensions with their producer Tony Bongiovi to come to light. Though Bongiovi had spent his whole career in recording studios, he was a producer in name only. His disco success with Gloria Gaynor had come as a member of a team headed by Meco Monardo, who oversaw the musical aspects of the production, allowing Bongiovi to function mainly as an expert engineer. (Bongiovi cautioned him not to “make it too musical,” Monardo recalled. “Tony would say, ‘It’s not dumb enough.’”) Similarly, his work with the Ramones had been centered on the technical challenge of capturing the band’s sonic assault on tape. Bongiovi knew a great deal about sound recording, but very little about music, and his selection by Seymour Stein to work with Talking Heads was a testament to Stein’s own inexperience as a curator of musical talent.

From the Heads’ perspective, the saving graces at Sundragon were Bongiovi’s congenial assistant, a guitarist named Lance Quinn, and the actual engineer on the sessions, another Bongiovi protégé named Ed Stasium. A former musician, Stasium had played with the late-sixties band Brandywine and served as the mixing engineer on Gladys Knight’s hit single “Midnight Train to Georgia” in 1973. His supportive and sure-handed presence provided a buffer between the Heads and their dumbed-down, technically minded producer.

The sessions began with the band familiarizing Bongiovi with the songs in their current live show, which had been the focus of their rehearsals with Jerry Harrison in recent months. “We did this rough rehearsal demo for Tony Bongiovi,” Tina Weymouth recalled, “and he selected the songs that he thought were the best.” The band’s reliance on Bongiovi resulted in some odd choices of material, beginning with a song called “Who Is It?” which consisted of little more than David repeating the question over and over before arriving at the foregone conclusion, “Baby it’s you,” in a manner that might delight a small child. Another questionable selection was “First Week/Last Week . . . Carefree,” a claustrophobic monologue whose disassociated lyrics (“Every appointment has been moved to last week”) carried vaguely psychiatric overtones.

As the sessions progressed, it soon became apparent that Bongiovi had little sense of what Talking Heads’ music was all about. He felt the band’s playing was weak and that their arrangements lacked the catchy “hooks” he associated with commercially successful recordings. “David would present me with a song, and it would take forever to get to the chorus,” he later said. When Bongiovi proposed to remedy this problem by editing the tape to move the choruses forward, his relationship with the band went from bad to worse. (“He was horrible to work with,” Byrne recalled.) Yet despite the tense atmosphere in the studio, by the middle of April, when work on the album was suspended on the eve of their departure for Europe, Talking Heads had recorded the backing tracks for fourteen of their songs, including a new arrangement for “Psycho Killer.” Having played the song at every performance they had given over the past two years, the Heads sought to shake things up by inviting the cellist Arthur Russell, whom they knew from the Kitchen, to accompany them on the track.

The Ramones had performed briefly in Britain in the summer of 1976, shortly after the release of their first album, when Seymour Stein and Danny Fields arranged a showcase for the group at a couple of London clubs. At that time, the response of the British music papers had been scathing, with Max Bell describing their performance in New Musical Express as “closer to a comedy routine than a rock group . . . a selection of imbecilic adolescent ditties whose sole variation involves the shuffling of three chords into some semblance of order.” But much had changed in Britain over the course of the last year.

Among the fans who had met the Ramones at their London showcase were the members of a pair of budding British punk bands, the Sex Pistols and the Clash. The Clash had only just formed, but the Sex Pistols had been more or less together since the fall of 1975, when the London boutique owner Malcolm McLaren returned from a six-month sabbatical in New York, in the course of which he had managed the final incarnation of the New York Dolls by dressing them in “Maoist” red leather. A self-styled anarchist and cultural provocateur, McLaren had been fascinated by the synergy between fashion, pop music, and radical politics since the heady days of the student-led May 1968 insurrection in France. In New York, he had visited CBGBs and met up with Richard Hell, whom he invited to come to London to form a band. Music had little to do with it: McLaren was looking for a face and an image and an attitude that could serve as the focal point for his concept of an anarchist rock group.

Hell declined the invitation, but upon his return to London, McLaren found his man in a petulant teenager named John Lydon, who liked to hang around Sex, the S&M-themed boutique that McLaren and his partner Vivienne Westwood ran on Kings Road. Lydon came from a working-class family of Irish immigrants who lived in the ethnically diverse neighborhood around Finsbury Park, where his hatred of authority and his searing sense of alienation had been perfected by a Catholic-school education and a series of dead-end jobs.

In the fall of 1975, McLaren introduced John Lydon to a trio of amateur musicians who also frequented his shop. Their singer-turned-guitarist, Steve Jones, was a petty thief who had personally stolen most of the group’s equipment, including an entire sound system, pilfered from the Hammersmith Odeon on the eve of a David Bowie concert. Their drummer, Paul Cook, was an apprentice electrician and a former schoolmate of Jones’s, while their bassist, Glen Matlock, was a middle-class art student. They had named themselves the Strand after a song by Roxy Music, but their meager repertoire consisted mainly of Mod-era material by the Who and the Small Faces. John Lydon and Steve Jones pretty much hated each other from the word go, but that comported well with Malcolm McLaren’s plans. “We knew he couldn’t sing [and] that he had no sense of rhythm,” McLaren said of Lydon. “But he had this charm of a boy in pain, trying to pretend that he’s cool.” It was in that spirit that McLaren sanctioned John Lydon’s decision to start calling himself Johnny Rotten.

In November 1975, Charles Shaar Murray’s NME article on the scene at CBGBs introduced the term “punk rock” into the lexicon of British music fans. That same month, having settled on their name, the Sex Pistols played their first gigs at a pair of suburban art colleges, followed by some club dates in the winter of 1976 that earned the group their first write-ups in the music press (“We’re not into music. We’re into chaos,” Steve Jones explained). By the time the Ramones visited London that summer, punk rock and punk fashion had begun to coalesce into a flamboyant working-class subculture that was taking root among disaffected teenagers in cities across Britain.

As the rock writer Mary Harron recalled of her return to London around this time: “I felt that what we had done as a joke in New York had been taken for real in England by a younger and more violent audience. And that somehow in the translation, it had changed, it had sparked something different.

“What to me had been a much more adult and intellectual bohemian rock culture in New York had become this crazy teenage thing in England. I remember going to see the Damned that summer, who I thought were really terrible. I was wearing my Punk magazine T-shirt and I got mobbed. I mean I can’t tell you the reception I got. Everyone was so excited that I was wearing this T-shirt that said ‘Punk.’ . . .

“There I was backstage, and there were hundreds of little kids, like nightmares, you know, like little ghouls with bright red dyed hair and white faces. They were all wearing chains and swastikas and things stuck in their head, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, what have we done?’”

In the fall of 1976, Malcolm McLaren scored a major coup by signing the Sex Pistols to Britain’s largest and most venerable record company, EMI. EMI dutifully turned the group over to Chris Thomas, a former protégé of the Beatles’ producer George Martin who had gone on to produce records by such notably proficient bands as Roxy Music and Procol Harum. Their first single, released in late November, was a musical manifesto titled “Anarchy in the UK.” “I am an antichrist / I am an anarchist / I don’t know what I want / But I know how to get it,” Johnny Rotten snarled over a relentless, Ramones-like backing of searing white-noise guitar.

That December, shortly after the uneventful release of “Anarchy in the UK,” the group appeared on the live broadcast of a London television talk show, where they responded to an invitation to say something provocative by getting into a profanity-laden exchange—“you dirty fucker!”—with the show’s drunken middle-aged host. The result was a firestorm of outrage that so exceeded Malcolm McLaren’s expectations that he was initially unnerved by the response. The next day, the Sex Pistols were featured on the front page of every British tabloid beneath banner headlines decrying “The Filth and the Fury” of their behavior on the show. As the story built, the press expanded the scope of its indignation to include the group’s record label, EMI, whose board of directors, after briefly entertaining the possibility of standing behind their investment, chose instead to cancel the Sex Pistols’ contract and write off their forty-thousand-pound advance.

Emboldened by their sudden status as pop pariahs, the Sex Pistols made new strides of outrage in the months to come. Glen Matlock was dismissed from the group (allegedly on account of his love of the Beatles) and replaced by a friend of Johnny Rotten named John Beverley, aka Sid Vicious, who had never so much as held a bass guitar. “Everyone agreed he had the look,” Johnny Rotten explained. Sid Vicious had previously distinguished himself by attacking the rock critic Nick Kent with a bicycle chain in a London club, but this did not deter the British subsidiary of an American label, A&M Records, from offering the Sex Pistols a recording contract, which they announced by staging a press conference in front of Buckingham Palace in April 1977. A few days later, at another London club, Vicious and several of his friends assaulted the DJ Bob Harris, host of the BBC’s most popular music show, The Old Grey Whistle Test, who happened to be a good friend of the director of A&M’s London office, Derek Green. When Harris threatened to sue, A&M’s horrified owners in Los Angeles, Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss, instructed Green to cancel the group’s contract and, like EMI, forfeit their advance.

Though it earned them seventy-five thousand pounds for a single night of mayhem, the collapse of the A&M deal left the Sex Pistols in a bind. They had recently recorded a song in honor of Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee, marking her twenty-fifth year on the throne, the celebration of which was due to reach its peak in the first week of June. Titled “No Future,” the record began with the words, “God save the Queen / The fascist regime.” Malcolm McLaren wanted to release “No Future” as a single on the eve of Jubilee Week, and to do that, he needed a record company. Enter Richard Branson, the hippie entrepreneur who had parlayed the success of his London record shop into a record label, both of them called Virgin. Branson owned Virgin Records outright; he had no partners or board members to answer to. He approached McLaren in the middle of April and the two men dickered over the deal for several weeks before Branson agreed to release the single of “No Future,” now retitled “God Save the Queen,” in the month ahead.

In the meantime, the members of the Ramones and Talking Heads boarded a flight to Zurich to begin their European tour. Their itinerary called for them to arrive in Britain in the middle of May.

15

A Young Jesuit Monk

We have to raise the volume when we do, or we’ll sound like mosquitos.

—TINA WEYMOUTH ON OPENING FOR THE RAMONES

Twenty years before the Farrelly brothers brought the road trip comedy to its cinematic nadir, the Ramones and Talking Heads collaborated on their own variation of this durable Hollywood formula: take a pair of utterly dissimilar and seemingly incompatible characters (multiplied, in this case, by a factor of four), throw them into a fast-moving, unfamiliar situation under stressful conditions, and let the laughs begin. The members of Talking Heads may not have been quite as cultured and brainy as their reputation in the world of downtown rock would suggest, although the addition of Jerry Harrison had done nothing to lower the band’s collective IQ. And the Ramones were not as crass and cretinous as they made themselves out to be, although their pitch-perfect portrayal of a group of total morons was not, in itself, proof of any countervailing intelligence. What can be said with certainty is that both bands stayed firmly in character for the whole six weeks they spent together.

The tour began in Zurich with a performance at the Volkshaus, a twelve-hundred-seat concert hall that was by far the largest venue Talking Heads had ever played. After a two-day trip to Marseilles and back for a show that was canceled due to a power failure, and a second Swiss date in Geneva, the two bands spent the next week crisscrossing France in a British tourist bus, staying in cheap hotels and hostels, playing shows in Lyon, Le Havre, Orléans, Lille, and Paris. In addition to the eight musicians, their party consisted of their tour manager, a wizened Brit named Mickey Stewart, the Ramones’ two roadies, and an ebullient Scottish soundman named Frank Gallagher, who took an immediate liking to Talking Heads. The Ramones’ managers, Danny Fields and Linda Stein, came and went at will.

From day one, Johnny Ramone, the group’s willfully obnoxious guitarist, asserted his status as a headliner on the tour by imposing a strict pecking order on who got to sit where on the bus. Johnny himself claimed the seat beside the driver, which enabled him to survey the passing countryside from beneath his helmet of hair with the contemptuous disdain of a Panzer commander. It turned out that there was nothing about Europe—not the scenery, the architecture, the food, or the way that people looked and acted—that Johnny did not despise. He was particularly incensed to discover that Europeans spoke languages other than English. This caused him to develop an immediate antipathy toward the “unbearable” Tina Weymouth, who offended his sensibilities by speaking French to the natives, and Jerry Harrison, whose voluble Francophilia drove him around the bend (“If you asked him a question, he would go on and on, talking for twenty minutes on the same subject”). Relations were warmer between Talking Heads and the other Ramones, not least because the rest of the band lived in constant fear of Johnny’s abusive personality. “I got along well with them,” Dee Dee recalled, “they liked to smoke a lot of hash.”

As reported on a city-by-city, meal-by-meal basis in his memoir, Chris Frantz’s account of this tour was filled with expressions of musical solidarity with the Ramones, whom he described as blowing their audiences away wherever they played. But Frantz’s appreciation of the group’s retrograde style of rock was not shared by all, if any, of his bandmates. By the spring of 1977, David Byrne was drawing some sharp distinctions between his own musical sensibilities and those of his contemporaries in the downtown New York scene. “Some of those CBGB groups were really just continuing those rock ’n’ roll romantic archetypes, the rebellious attitudes and stage postures and all those inherited gestures,” Byrne would later say. “I thought it wasn’t saying anything new, it was just a sloppier version of the Stones, the same clothes and the same pose.”

After Paris, the tour continued with a second week of shows in Brussels, Amsterdam, and several other Dutch cities. Then, while the Ramones headed north to play a series of dates in Scandinavia, Talking Heads weathered a turbulent channel crossing to perform for two nights at the Rock Garden, a cellar club in the West End of London. Thanks to the many articles in the British music press about the scene at CBGBs, the shows were well attended. On the second night, the audience included the record producers Chris Thomas and John Cale, who came with their mutual friend and occasional collaborator Brian Eno.

In the glam-rock era of the early 1970s, Brian Eno’s disarming blend of high intellect and high affect made him one of the most exotic creatures on a British pop scene dominated by such similarly flamboyant figures as David Bowie and Elton John. He first came to attention as a member of Roxy Music, a band defined by Bryan Ferry’s postmodern portrayal of a rock star, in relation to which Eno played a supporting role as Roxy’s androgynous “sound doctor,” using a suitcase-sized EMS synthesizer to “treat” and “color” the band’s otherwise conventional rock instrumentation. The creative tension between these budding auteurs had lasted for two albums, until the end of 1972, when Ferry asserted his prerogative and forced Eno out of the band.

Since then, Eno had released a series of critically acclaimed and commercially unsuccessful albums on which he refined his methodology of conceptually improvisational recording, often starting a track with nothing more than a sound or a note or a thought. In addition to his solo work, he had also assisted Roxy’s guitarist Phil Manzanera in producing a pair of albums by John Cale, and had recently worked with David Bowie on Low, the techno-pop album that Bowie recorded in Berlin after fleeing the pop scene in an effort to recover from a severe cocaine addiction. When Eno went to see Talking Heads at the Rock Garden, he was preparing to return to Berlin to work on the second album of what would become known as Bowie’s Berlin trilogy.

Born in 1949, Brian Eno had grown up as the son of the village postman in the river town of Woodbridge, ninety miles northeast of London in a part of Suffolk that hosted a number of NATO air bases during the 1950s. The local pubs and cafés catered to the tastes of the American airmen who were stationed in the area, and their jukeboxes provided young Brian with his introduction to American popular culture. In 1964, he enrolled at an art college in neighboring Ipswich, where he fell under the influence of the cybernetician Roy Ascott. Ascott had previously taught at the Ealing School of Art, where he developed an innovative “ground course” curriculum that dispensed with instruction in drawing and painting and relied instead on role-playing and behavioralist theory to disabuse students of their preconceptions about making art. Ascott’s theoretical approach, and his overriding concern for “process, not product,” made an indelible impression on Eno, whose admiration extended to the work of Ascott’s former student Pete Townshend. The Who’s hit single “My Generation” struck Eno with the force of revelation in 1965, leading him to adopt the stylized Mod identity that was emblematized by the band.

Another instructor at Ipswich who exerted a strong influence on Eno was Tom Phillips, a young painter from London whom Roy Ascott recruited to teach a multimedia survey course on the contemporary avant-garde. Phillips had a keen interest in experimental music, and his class exposed Eno to minimalist composers like John Cage and Terry Riley, who pioneered the concept of using the tape recorder as a compositional tool.

In 1966, after Eno enrolled at the Winchester College of Art in Southampton to earn a graduate degree, he stayed in close touch with Phillips, who was eager to provide his former student with an introduction to London’s burgeoning underground arts scene. At Winchester, Eno volunteered to serve as the entertainment director of the student union, which allowed him to invite a succession of avant-gardists to speak or perform at the school. These included disciples of John Cage like Christian Wolff, known for his work with “prepared pianos,” whose strings were encumbered with various objects to alter their sound, and Cornelius Cardew, who presided over a “Scratch Orchestra,” which put accomplished musicians together with people who had no idea how to play their instruments. Eno’s other promotional coups included booking an unknown rock group called Pink Floyd for a school dance, but his interest in rock music remained merely recreational until a new mentor, a German-born painter and art teacher named Peter Schmidt, turned him on to the Velvet Underground.

The Velvets’ first album combined nearly all of the aesthetic themes that had fascinated Eno to date, including the Pop Art imprimatur of Warhol, the atonality of John Cale’s viola, the overt amateurism of the drumming and guitar playing, the louche poignancy of Lou Reed’s lyrics, and the campy decadence of Nico’s singing—all of it capped by the group’s purely cultish appeal, which would lead Eno, years later, to make the observation that could serve as the Velvets’ epitaph: “Only a few thousand people bought that record, but all of them formed a band of their own.”

After graduating from Winchester in the summer of 1969, Eno threw himself into the countercultural whirlwind of London, living in a commune of former art students, reconnecting with the Scratch Orchestra and another deliberately amateurish spin-off called the Portsmouth Sinfonia, working briefly as a paste-up artist, and earning additional money by buying and selling used sound equipment. Along the way, he affected an outlandishly androgynous style of dress that served to distract attention from his unfashionably balding pate. Between his dandified self-presentation and his hyperarticulate conversation, Eno was emerging as a skilled self-promoter, by turns modest and grandiose, who could seemingly talk his way into almost any situation that interested him.

In the fall of 1970, a chance reunion with an art-school acquaintance named Andy Mackay led to an invitation for Eno to make some demo recordings of a band that Mackay, a saxophonist, was helping to put together. The group was led by Bryan Ferry, a farmworker’s son from the north of England who had transformed himself into a formidable aesthete by way of the Newcastle School of Art, where he had studied with Roy Ascott’s mentor, Richard Hamilton. As fellow art-school dandies and musical dilettantes, Ferry and Eno took an immediate liking to each other.

“When you’re just starting out, it’s much easier to know what you don’t want to be. A lot of what Roxy was about was a rebellion against the maudlin sincerity of the blues movement,” Eno recalled of the formation of Roxy Music, anticipating David Byrne’s account of the formation of Talking Heads down to the proscription against “singing like a Black man.” The similarities didn’t stop there. Long before Roxy Music played a note in public, much less signed a record deal, their demo tape was being championed by the BBC DJ John Peel, and their art-school provenance was being touted in the pages of Melody Maker by the paper’s deputy editor, Richard Williams.

Though Eno’s first role with the group was as an amateur engineer, it did not take long for him to assume a more active role, thanks to Andy Mackay, who owned an EMS synthesizer that he didn’t know what to do with. The portability and user-friendly interface of the EMS made it a favorite of early British synth aficionados like Pink Floyd and Eno’s former idol Pete Townshend. When Roxy Music began performing live in the winter of 1972 (after more than a year and a half of rehearsals and personnel changes), Eno served as their soundman, sitting in the back of the room and using the EMS to alter the texture and timbre of the instruments in the group. But he soon joined the band onstage, cutting a striking figure in his berets, feathered boas, leopard-skin prints, and eye shadow.

Eno had dispensed with this sartorial affectation by the time he met the members of Talking Heads at the Rock Garden. Instead, his balding good looks reminded Tina Weymouth of “a young Jesuit monk.” Impressed by their performance, he invited the Heads to visit him the next day at his immaculate flat in West London, where he proved to be a gracious host and an exceedingly voluble conversationalist. After Chris Frantz left early to attend to Tina, who was nursing a cold at their hotel, David Byrne and Jerry Harrison were delighted to discover the similarities in their sensibilities and outlook.

“He was a kindred spirit,” Harrison recalled. “We saw the same books in his library.” Byrne was especially intrigued to learn of Eno’s obsession with cybernetics, which he referred to as his “secret career.” A self-described “non-musician” (on account of his lack of technical facility on any instrument), he preferred to think of himself as “an organizer of musical events.” Cybernetic theory, as he explained it, provided him with a methodology for organizing events “toward goals you can’t predict,” in hopes of creating states of “conceptual disorientation.” “Good art breaks rules” was one of the many credos he retained from his art-school days.

Byrne, Harrison, and Eno spent the next few days hanging out together in London, talking for hours on end. According to Byrne, their conversation touched “a little bit, but not a whole lot,” on music. One musical subject that did come up concerned the fact that while Roxy Music had defined itself in opposition to blues-based rock, and Eno himself had once professed to “despise funky music,” he had recently developed an intense fascination with the “Afrobeat” recordings of the Nigerian singer, saxophonist, and bandleader Fela Kuti, whose breakthrough album Zombie had just been released in Britain. In Eno’s cybernetic conception, the dynamics of Fela’s band, Africa ’70, succeeded in reordering the “hierarchical organization” of Anglo-American popular music, which assigned greater prominence to lead singers and soloists than to the “accompanying” drums, bass, and backup vocals. One of Fela’s early albums had found its way into Chris Frantz’s record collection at RISD, albeit as something of a novelty. But Eno’s endorsement of Afrobeat planted a potent seed.

Despite the bad acoustics and the warren-like layout of the club, Talking Heads’ showcase at the Rock Garden was a major coup for them, as all three of Britain’s fiercely competitive music papers—Melody Maker, Sounds, and New Musical Express—reported on their performance in glowing terms. “What makes involvement with Talking Heads music so easy is the sheer physicality of it,” Giovanni Dadomo noted in Sounds, citing the band’s relationship to “vintage Stax funk” and the “stunningly rich bass guitar of Tina Weymouth.” In the same issue, Vivien Goldman wrote a glowing appreciation of Weymouth, asking her to discuss her influences (“a lot of James Brown, soul, and reggae”) and her overall approach to the bass. “I play up the octave,” Tina explained, “in approximately the cello range, trebly, the same range as the human voice, because sometimes that cuts through a lot better, with closed as well as open notes so that you can play a lot of notes that just click out like on disco records.”

Having made their mark at the Rock Garden, Talking Heads reunited with the Ramones for a two-week tour of Britain that began in Liverpool and ended back in London, with dates in Leeds, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, and a half-dozen other cities and towns along the way. These shows were the Heads’ introduction to some of the curious rituals of Britain’s emerging punk rock subculture, including “pogoing,” the practice of rigidly jumping up and down in time to the beat, and “gobbing,” the practice of showing one’s appreciation by spitting at the musicians onstage. The tour also provided several high points of their road-trip comedy with the Ramones, including an instance in which Johnny Ramone angrily refused to leave the bus after the members of Talking Heads convinced the driver to stop at Stonehenge. “I was upset that we were stopping to look at a bunch of rocks,” Johnny later said.

The Ramones tour ended with two shows at the Roundhouse, a popular London venue in a Victorian-era railroad shed, on the weekend of Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee, a massive celebration that brought more than a million people flooding into the streets of the capital. As promised, the Sex Pistols had released their single of “God Save the Queen” the week before. Despite being banned by the BBC and several chains of record stores, the single entered the British pop charts at #11, having sold 150,000 copies in its first week. While the Ramones and Talking Heads played their final night at the Roundhouse, the Sex Pistols were performing at full throttle on the deck of a tour boat called the Queen Elizabeth as it sailed down the Thames past the Houses of Parliament.

The Roundhouse show inspired another chorus of praise for Talking Heads in the British music papers. In New Musical Express, Nick Kent drew an explicit comparison between David Byrne and Tom Verlaine of Television, who had recently toured in Britain with Blondie as their opening act. “Byrne’s performance is full of the tortured passion and gut-commitment that many of us were hoping for and found so disappointingly lacking in Tom Verlaine’s recent shows. . . . Where Verlaine is oh-so calculatingly distant, Byrne’s thrashing desperate need to communicate his songs grants his music a whole other dimension of sheer humanity and warmth a million light years removed from the cold arch-romanticism of Television.” Kent was especially taken with a new song called “Don’t Worry About the Government,” whose portrait of “an ordinary man who owns an apartment in some American suburb and lives a quiet, inconsequential existence” he compared to the work of Ray Davies and Randy Newman.

Kent was also struck by the undercurrents of tension in the band. “Off-stage, sitting with his cohorts in Talking Heads, Byrne exudes all the cooped-up mannerisms of a caged bird,” he observed. “When he talks, his voice is weak and reedy and often his attempts to explain certain facets of his songs—particularly his lyrics—lead him into weird tangential awkward ramblings that cause other members of the band, Tina Weymouth in particular, to open displays of ridicule which make him even more edgy.” As Kent described it, “Weymouth would virtually scold him like a mentally defective son for his inability to articulate logically for the band.”

Caroline Coon made a similar point in her otherwise admiring piece in Melody Maker. “As a group they don’t inspire a warm initial response,” she wrote, noting that “Tina seems tense and nervous in the presence of the band, especially David.” An avowed feminist who had endured her own hazing by the boys’ club of British pop journalism, Coon went on to quote a testy exchange about the circumstances of Tina’s entry into the group. “I was wary about playing with Tina,” David admitted. “[But] my reluctance was only to do with the fact that she didn’t know how to play bass.” To which Tina responded, “David tries to be very liberal and fair and not have preconceptions, but of the many people I’ve met, he has more preconceptions about women than most.”

Amid this profusion of press coverage, it was left to Richard Williams to capture the essential sensibility of the Heads’ music in an erudite review that ran in the London Times. “Unlike their British counterparts,” he wrote, Talking Heads “are concerned with technical and emotional precision, placing such accuracy ahead of the fashionable numbing impact of speed and volume.” With his “high, etiolated voice,” Williams added, David Byrne “resembles a CIA trainee of the early sixties infiltrating his neighborhood folk club.”

16

Summer of Sam

There was nihilism in the atmosphere, a longing to die. Part of the feeling of New York at that time was this longing for oblivion, that you were about to disintegrate, go the way of this bankrupt, crumbling city. Yet that was something almost mystically wonderful.

—MARY HARRON

In late May, while Talking Heads were still on tour in Europe, a twenty-seven-year-old Queens man named George Willig arrived at the base of the South Tower of the World Trade Center early on a weekday morning and abruptly began to climb the outside of the building, using a set of metal blocks he had fashioned to fit in the grooves on the steel façade. For the third time in three years, the Port Authority Police scrambled to respond to the unauthorized recreational use of their world-famous real estate.

Compared to Philippe Petit’s stroll and Owen Quinn’s plunge, however, the pace of George Willig’s ascent was glacial, and by the time two officers were lowered from the roof in a window-washer’s basket to assess his state of mind, Willig had reached the fiftieth floor. A large crowd filled the plaza below, television crews were on the scene, police and news helicopters buzzed the building, and half the city was following the progress of the proverbial “Human Fly.” Once the cops had determined that Willig was not suicidal, they kept him company on the rest of his climb, helping him through a grate on the rooftop parapet before engaging in the now-familiar ritual of arrest, psychiatric observation, and release into the glare of the New York media. “It was more personal gratification than anything. I didn’t expect all this hullabaloo,” Willig told the press, sounding the one false note in his otherwise impeccable publicity stunt. His firsthand account, Going It Alone, would be published by Doubleday in 1979.

The city attorney initially threatened to sue Willig for $250,000 to recoup the cost of his aborted “rescue.” Mayor Abe Beame, who was up for reelection in November, preferred to settle for $1.10, or one cent for each floor of the Trade Center. But the mayor was sorely mistaken if he hoped to identify himself with Willig’s death-defying ascent. By the summer of 1977, there were signs that New York might indeed survive the fiscal crisis that Beame claimed to have “inherited” in 1974. The question was: At what cost?

Under the iron hand of the Emergency Financial Control Board, the city had cut its public expenditures by 20 percent and laid off eight thousand police, twenty-five hundred firefighters, and thirteen thousand teachers. The drastic cuts in social, educational, and emergency services fell mainly on the city’s poorest residents, even as the proportion of Black and Hispanic New Yorkers increased as working- and middle-class white residents continued to flee the city at a rate of a hundred thousand a year. Although Gerald Ford had ultimately backed down from his “Drop Dead” stance and approved a series of federal loans, New York voters had exacted their revenge by awarding their state’s forty-one electoral votes to Jimmy Carter to help him win the presidency in November 1976.

But in the mind of the electorate, Mayor Beame remained fatally implicated in the city’s fall from grace. In the months to come, Beame would lose in the Democratic mayoral primary to Ed Koch, a once-progressive congressman from Lower Manhattan who was now prepared to do the bidding of the city’s business, financial, and real estate interests at the expense of the millions of ordinary New Yorkers whose inordinate demands for social and educational services, according to the newly fashionable “neoconservative” narrative, were responsible for the city’s decline.

The human cost of the measures that New York had taken to set its fiscal house in order would become grimly apparent during a heat wave in the summer of 1977, when a sudden electrical blackout set off an eruption of looting and arson that was concentrated in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. The shock of the mayhem and destruction was all the greater for the contrast with a previous blackout that had occurred in 1965, when the sudden plunge into darkness had prompted a holiday atmosphere throughout the five boroughs, accompanied by a notable drop in crime. This time, when the lights went out and every able-bodied officer was ordered to report for duty, more than a third of the demoralized NYPD failed to answer the call. Even so, more than thirty-seven hundred people were arrested—a small fraction of those who took part in the looting—sixteen hundred businesses were ransacked, and more than a thousand buildings were set ablaze.

Adding to New Yorkers’ sense of impending doom was the fear of violent crime, which was epitomized in the minds of city residents by a series of shootings targeting young couples that had left six people dead and seven wounded since July 1976. As the pattern of the shootings became apparent early in 1977, the police acknowledged that they appeared to be the work of a real-life psycho killer, who in May left a rambling hand-scrawled screed near the bodies of his latest victims, in which he claimed to be possessed by demons and mocked the failure of the NYPD to arrest him. The letter was signed “Son of Sam,” which provided the New York media with the perfect handle on the story. In June, the Daily News created a frenzy when it published another letter that the apparent killer had sent to its columnist Jimmy Breslin; it began with the words “Hello from the gutters of NYC” and seemed to link the murders explicitly to the image of New York as a city in the midst of a collective nervous breakdown. Two more shootings occurred in June and July, leaving one victim dead and three wounded, before the police finally arrested a twenty-four-year-old Yonkers resident named David Berkowitz, who promptly confessed and pled guilty to all of the shootings. Berkowitz would later admit that his story of demonic possession was a hoax intended to draw attention to his crimes.

At the start of that “Summer of Sam,” shortly after Talking Heads returned from their European tour, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth were married at the home of Chris’s widowed grandmother in Maysville, Kentucky. The wedding party consisted almost entirely of family and family friends; the only music-related guests apart from David Byrne and Jerry Harrison were their label owner, Seymour Stein, his wife, Linda, and his label manager, Ken Kushnick. With the exception of Yann Weymouth’s business partner Peter Coan, none of Chris and Tina’s friends from RISD or the Lower East Side were invited; nor, for that matter, was David’s new girlfriend Mary Clarke, who accompanied him anyway—an omission that points to the way that the band members’ social lives were diverging, now that they were no longer living together as a group.

As it was, the New York contingent felt distinctly out of place in the sweltering social ambience of Maysville in June. “There was a dinner at Chris’s grandmother’s beautiful old house,” Mary Clarke recalled. “There were Black servants who gave you mint juleps. I’d never been in the South and it was pretty Southern.” However class conscious Chris and Tina may have been about their family backgrounds—Tina would later berate Mary for her description of the scene—the exclusivity of their wedding did not sit well with their New York circle of friends.

When Jerry Harrison had first arrived in New York, he stayed with Chris and Tina in their Long Island City loft, which now served as Talking Heads’ clubhouse, business office, and rehearsal space. Though David Byrne continued to live on East Fifth Street, he was spending more and more of his time with Mary Clarke at her parents’ home on East Eighty-Ninth Street and her sister’s apartment on the Upper West Side. David and Mary had started dating in the fall of 1976. Petite, droll, and unconventionally attractive, she was a former member of the Tantalizing Tampoons and a current member of the RISD alumni society that had coalesced around Jamie Dalglish’s loft on Bond Street.

Mary had grown up in New York, where she attended the elite Dalton School, and while she was as new to the downtown arts scene as everyone else, she was well acquainted with the parts of uptown Manhattan that still dominated the city’s social and cultural life. Now that Talking Heads’ base of operations had moved to Long Island City, David felt ready to escape the squalor of the Lower East Side. When his lease on East Fifth Street ended, he and Jerry Harrison, along with Jerry’s girlfriend Linda Alexsa and her daughter, Natasha, rented an apartment in a building next to where Mary and her sister were living at Riverside Drive and 115th Street.

This solidified a shift in the personal dynamics of the band. Whereas previously David had relied on Chris and Tina to organize everything from the domestic routine on Chrystie Street to the logistics of booking gigs, his relationship with Jerry Harrison had added a new axis to the group. In addition to their musical affinities, Jerry shared David’s broader intellectual and artistic interests in a way that Chris and Tina did not. “I think it was good for David to have Jerry,” Mary Clarke recalled. “I think it balanced things in terms of, shall we say, power plays. Jerry and David kind of paired off. David and I had very little to do with Chris and Tina socially, but once Jerry came into the picture we would do stuff with him and his girlfriend Linda.”

Apart from a well-received appearance at the Bottom Line in June as the opening act for Bryan Ferry (who had embarked on a solo career), a four-night stand at the Village Gate on Bleecker Street in July, and another long weekend of shows at CBGBs toward the end of August, Talking Heads did not perform much in public during the summer of 1977. Instead, they turned their attention to completing their first album, which Seymour Stein had plans to release on Sire as part of a package of CBGBs bands in September. Thanks to the success of one of his British imports, the Climax Blues Band, whose sixth album had recently spun off a Top 10 hit, Stein had been able to switch Sire’s distribution from ABC Records, a once-estimable major label that had fallen by the wayside during the rock revolution of the 1960s, to the industry giant Warner-Elektra-Atlantic (WEA). This gave Sire the benefit, for the first time, of a formidable national marketing and distribution network.

Talking Heads did not return to Sundragon Studios for the remaining work on their album; instead, they moved to Media Sound, a converted Baptist church on West Fifty-Seventh Street whose ecclesiastical acoustics made it one of the best “live” studios in New York. The addition of Jerry Harrison’s keyboards and guitar had already thickened the band’s sound, but compared to the elaborate production that took place on many rock recordings, the Heads kept their instrumental overdubs to a minimum. David and Jerry added guitar and keyboard parts to some of the tracks; a proficient session musician, Jimmy Maelen, provided touches of marimba, steel drum, and Latin percussion; and the saxophonist Lew Del Gatto, a stalwart of the Saturday Night Live band, played horns on one of the songs. In addition, based on the rousing reception that “Psycho Killer” had received on their European tour, the Heads decided to dispense with Arthur Russell’s screechy, atonal cello and rerecord a full-bodied version of the song, with the intent of releasing it as a single in the months ahead. At Ed Stasium’s suggestion, they ended the track with a pounding instrumental outro modeled on the epic recording of “I Can See for Miles” by the Who.

For the most part, the sessions at Media Sound were focused on recording the lead vocals, and when David announced that he wanted nothing more to do with Tony Bongiovi (to the point of refusing to sing in his presence), Lance Quinn and Ed Stasium arranged for him to record his singing when Bongiovi wasn’t around.

The one way that Bongiovi did assert himself during the production sessions left a residue of ill will. Back in the spring, when Talking Heads recorded the basic tracks, Bongiovi had questioned Tina Weymouth’s note selection on a couple of songs. When he asked her to try something different, Tina replied that she’d been playing her parts that way for more than a year. Now, in the mixing stage, Bongiovi decided that he wanted to bring in a session musician to correct these alleged flaws. Without mentioning it to the group, he solicited the necessary funds from Seymour Stein and hired Bob Babbitt, a top-flight bassist he had worked with at Motown in Detroit, to overdub his bass on two tracks, “Pulled Up” and “Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town.” Babbitt came in and, while Bongiovi looked on approvingly, basically replicated Weymouth’s parts an octave below. Ed Stasium considered the whole exercise to be a waste of time and money, and wound up using Babbitt’s playing to add a subtle layer of depth to Weymouth’s perfectly adequate bass lines. Another enhancement that Stasium engineered involved fattening the sound of Chris Frantz’s drums on several tracks by rerecording them through a playback speaker in Media Sound’s exceptionally live room.

Work on the album was completed by the middle of August. Talking Heads’ hope that signing with an independent label would afford them greater control over the way they were presented on record was affirmed by Seymour Stein’s willingness to go with David Byrne’s minimalist design for the album cover: a solid red square with the title “TALKING HEADS:77” printed in green Day-Glo letters across the top. (It’s doubtful that the marketing department of a major label like Columbia or Warners would have approved such an anonymous cover for the debut album by an unknown group.) The back of the album jacket consisted of a shadowy, head-and-shoulders portrait of the band members staring intently into the camera lens of Mick Rock, a trendy British photographer who was best known for his work with David Bowie.

Not long after the noted rock critic Lester Bangs moved to New York from Detroit in 1976, he gave a party in his apartment on Sixth Avenue for his newfound downtown friends. “The staff of Punk magazine came,” Bangs recalled, “as well as members of several of the hottest CBGBs bands, and when I did what we always used to do at parties in Detroit—put on soul records so everybody could dance—I began to hear this: ‘What’re you playing all that nigger disco shit for, Lester?’ ‘That’s not nigger disco shit,’ I snarled, ‘that’s Otis Redding, you assholes!’ But they didn’t want to hear about it.”

Bangs was stunned by this response—so much so that, several years later, he wrote a piece in the Village Voice titled “The White Noise Supremacists,” in which he quoted the Voice’s music editor, Robert Christgau, to the effect that “one of the most important things about New Wave is how much of it is almost purely white music, and what a massive departure that represents from the almost universally blues-derived rock of the past.” Christgau himself welcomed this development, seeing it as an opportunity for rock to “differentiate itself from its fundamentally Black and”—in his view—“rural sources by taking on the crude, ugly, perhaps brutal facts of the white and urban prevailing culture.” Together, Bangs’s incredulity and Christgau’s racial distinction highlighted the musical dimension that distinguished Talking Heads from nearly all of their contemporaries in the downtown New York scene. As Lenny Kaye described it, “Talking Heads were a dance band. When I first used to go visit them at their loft, they used to talk about Bohannon [the former Motown drummer turned disco producer] all the time. That element of Blackness shouldn’t be underestimated. And it stemmed from the rhythm section.”

Over the first two years of the band’s existence, “that element of Blackness” had remained almost entirely theoretical. Since the days of Scott Joplin and Louis Armstrong, stylistic innovation in African American music has been driven by instrumental virtuosity. This was especially true of the innovations of swing, bop, R&B, soul, and funk, all of which required musicians to school themselves in new ways of playing and thinking about rhythm. As children of the 1960s, the members of Talking Heads had come of age listening to the great R&B studio bands at Atlantic, Motown, and Stax, along with their precocious disciples in rock, beginning with the Beatles and the Stones. But it was only when David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth began to play together with a real seriousness of purpose that they began to deal with the subtleties of tempo, timing, and syncopation that the rhythms of soul and funk demand. And it was not until they added Jerry Harrison to their group that they could bring the crucial element of relaxation to bear on how they put those rhythms across. It was no accident that the band’s playing on their tour of Britain had inspired the first comparisons, however hyperbolic, with Stax. The addition of Harrison’s piano, organ, and second guitar shifted their whole musical demeanor from the anxious intensity of a guitar trio toward the stately solidity of a well-honed R&B rhythm section.

Much as it distinguished them from their lily-white—and, in many cases, casually racist—contemporaries in the downtown music scene, Talking Heads’ emulation of African American dance rhythms was hardly unusual among white musicians in 1977, at a time when the latest of those rhythms, disco, was taking the pop world by storm. What was unusual—indeed, almost unprecedented—was the marriage of that rhythmic sensibility with a singer who exhibited none of the vocal techniques, mannerisms, and attitudes commonly associated with African American popular music in all of its myriad forms. In both the way that he looked and the way that he sounded, David Byrne in 1977 could well have been the “whitest” man in rock, and Byrne’s nascent genius as a singer, performer, and bandleader would be to embrace that identity as his own.

Here, too, for the first two years of Talking Heads’ existence, the racial implications of Byrne’s musical persona remained largely theoretical. Of the many forms of artistic license that the fans of downtown rock granted their hometown heroes, the most pervasive, from a musical perspective, turned on the fact that, by the prevailing standards of popular music, almost no one in the bands that performed at CBGBs could actually sing. Patti Smith drew on her charisma and inherent theatricality to obscure this inconvenient truth. But in live performance especially, Joey Ramone, Tom Verlaine, Debbie Harry, Richard Hell, and David Byrne all struggled to hit their notes with any consistency, and all of them operated within a narrow range of emotional expression that was mainly determined by the sheer physical effort that singing required of them.

In Byrne’s case, the quality of his singing had been further constrained by the need to carry the band with his guitar playing, and the addition of Jerry Harrison had relieved a lot of that pressure on him. But the most significant factor in his improvement as a singer came from the experience of recording. “I never sang like that before in my life,” Elvis Presley once said of “That’s All Right,” his debut record on Sun, alluding to the profound effect that hearing the sound of one’s own voice on playback in a recording studio can have on an ambitious but unformed singer. Apart from the one-take demo recordings that Talking Heads had made in the winter of 1976, David Byrne was accustomed to hearing his voice, just barely, over the sound of the band, supplemented, if at all, by the stage monitors at some of their live performances. But at Media Sound in the summer of 1977, singing over the prerecorded instrumental tracks of Talking Heads’ first album, he was able to hear his voice on playback with a new clarity, and concentrate on his phrasing and intonation as never before. If the effect of this feedback loop was not quite as earth-shaking as it was for Elvis on “That’s All Right,” the results speak for themselves in the wealth of artful, consonant performances that Byrne turned in on Talking Heads: 77. The album marks the point where he began to separate himself from the progenitors of the first commercial genre in the history of popular music that did not require its singers to have the ability to carry a tune.

17

Don’t Call It Punk

Talking Heads shares neither the anger nor the nihilism of the newly emerging punk. In a curiously inverse way, however, they do share the energy.

—FRANK ROSE, VILLAGE VOICE

The revival of interest in vinyl records in the twenty-first century has reacquainted a new generation of listeners with the format that was largely responsible for the explosion of enthusiasm for recorded popular music that transformed the American entertainment industry in the decades after World War II. The double-sided LP was one of the revolutionary consumer products of its time. Twelve inches in diameter and capable of holding more than twenty minutes of music on a side, LPs orchestrated a listening experience that resembled a concert or nightclub set, with the need to turn the record over halfway through the program serving as the equivalent of an intermission. The foot-square cardboard sleeves in which the records were sold functioned as an advertisement for the product within, large enough to present a substantial visual image, which turned album cover art into a specialized form of commercial photography and graphic design. The covers also served as companion pieces to the listening experience, providing promotional copy and liner notes, while literally putting a face on the music that was coming out of the speakers.

Prior to the late 1980s, the LP was the predominant format of popular music on record, and the albums that Talking Heads made need to be considered in that context. Talking Heads: 77 contained eleven tracks: six on Side One and five on Side Two. All eleven songs featured bright, medium-tempo grooves, which served to highlight the soul influences in Chris Frantz’s drumming and David Byrne’s rhythm guitar. While the Heads may have felt inhibited by the insular protocols of multitrack recording, their playing and singing on the album, for the most part, were significantly more polished than the way they sounded live. If the first priority of a band’s recording debut is to demonstrate a basic level of musical competence, Talking Heads: 77, with the help of Tony Bongiovi, Lance Quinn, and Ed Stasium, succeeded admirably in that regard.

First impressions have always mattered in the music business, and in the era of album rock, the first track of an artist’s first album—“I Saw Her Standing There,” “Purple Haze,” “Tears of Rage,” “Good Times, Bad Times”—had the potential to set the tone, not only of the record that followed, but of an entire career. Given this, it was up to Tony Bongiovi, as producer, to select, or at least ratify, the opening track of Talking Heads: 77. Unsurprisingly, Bongiovi’s choice, “Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town,” is the album’s most conventionally commercial track. From its opening fanfare of bouncy major chords, this jubilant confection appealed on multiple levels to Bongiovi’s Motown roots, with jolting offbeats from the rhythm guitars knit together by Tina Weymouth’s fluid bass. “Love is simple as 1-2-3,” David declares in the opening verse, in a cheerful allusion to the schoolroom motif of the Jackson 5 hit “ABC.” As sung by a self-described “know-it-all, the smartest man around,” who’s fallen hard for “the smartest girl in town,” the song wastes no time in mocking Talking Heads’ reputation as a band of the intelligentsia, helped along by a Caribbean steel drum whose chiming counterpoint serves as a musical metaphor for nonchalance. “I’ve been to college / I’ve been to school / I’ve met the people that you read about in books,” David assures his listeners, as he ponders the emotional “riddle” that has caused him to neglect his “duties” and choose instead to “believe, believe in mystery.” “The answer is obvious,” he announces with an elementary-my-dear-Watson flourish in the last line of the song: “Love has come to town.”

This high-spirited expression of soul-inflected romance is followed by a series of songs that provide an introduction to the emotional detachment of David Byrne’s emerging sensibility as a songwriter. The first is a revised, four-piece version of “New Feeling,” relieved of its jingle-like horns, in which David’s objectified desire to relive his life and re-meet his friends seems to stem from a rueful sense of social inadequacy. “And now I’m speaking out, speaking about my friends,” he sings, his voice brimming with lofty conviction. Note to self, he seems to be saying: don’t forget your friends.

“Tentative Decisions” steps further into the minefield of abstract social relations by constructing a colloquy of mutual incomprehension between the Boys and the Girls, where the “hard logic” of heterosexuality is reduced to a matter of “problems,” “functions,” and “decisions.” If Star Trek’s Mr. Spock was assigned the task of writing a popular love song, it might sound something like this, since the song’s vocabulary is a direct reflection of David Byrne’s ramblings in the realm of cybernetics. (“Some of that lingo made its way onto Talking Heads’ first album,” he later said.) The track begins with a quirky, robotic riff of muted guitar and purring slides on the bass, while David draws on his “best intentions” to address the problem at hand: “Girls ask: Can I define decision? / Boys ask: Can I describe their function?” With that the band erupts into a rousing march led by chiming piano chords and exuberant street-beat drumming, as a booming chorus of voices brings a note of comical solemnity to the disconnect between the Boys’ need for further discussion and the Girls’ concern for decisiveness. Taking his cues from Jerry’s guttural prompts, David asserts his male prerogative, insisting, “I’m gonna talk as much as I want / I’m gonna give the problem to you.” “Decide, decide, make up your mind!” the Girls reply, before adding, in what could stand as David’s joke on the entire premise of the song: “Confuse, confuse, I told you what to say.” They then repeat the marching chorus again, this time with the genders reversed, before the song goes out on a rollicking piano vamp.

Inspired by Al Green, “Happy Day” is a love song that benefits from some of David Byrne’s most nuanced singing on the album. Yet the song barely hints at its basis in romance, concerning itself almost entirely with the state, not the source, of the happiness it describes, to the point where the word “you” occurs only once, obliquely, in the last verse. “In my sensations, I believe that I was born with the things that I know,” David begins, his voice lifting into a wistful falsetto at the end of the line. “I want to talk, like I read, before I decide what to do,” he goes on to say, until his critical faculties are silenced by a feeling that “a heart can’t stop.” “Such a happy da-ay,” he sings in the chorus, his voice cracking like a schoolboy’s, “came to me, comes to me, here it comes.”

After the comic relief of “Who Is It?” the first side of the album ends with the psychodrama of “No Compassion,” whose staggered backbeat and weepy guitars are anchored by a bass line that echoes the Animals’ hit “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” Whether or not the song was indeed inspired, as Andrea Kovacs believed, by the vicissitudes of her relationship with David Byrne, its verses are cut from the same cybernetic cloth as “Tentative Decisions.” “Other people’s problems, they overwhelm my mind,” David sings with a weary pallor in his voice. “They say compassion is a virtue, but I don’t have the time.” After a full stop, he emits a stifled squeal of frustration as the guitars, bass, and drums congeal in a headlong two-chord vamp. “It takes a lot of time to push away the nonsense,” he declares, shouting, not singing, repeating the phrase “my interest level is dropping” like a cyborg run amok. “What are you, in love with your problems?” he asks, suddenly addressing his antagonist. “Talk to your analyst—isn’t that what they’re paid for?” After sixty-four bars of this rant, having all but run out of breath, he ends with the words, “Be a little more selfish, it might do you some good.”

Jerry Harrison once described “No Compassion” as the “epitome” of a Talking Heads song, adding, “We were the least sentimental band.” Compared to what? one wonders. In the 1960s, Bob Dylan established a provocative new genre of “anti-love” songs that was embraced by a generation of contemporary songwriters as a counterweight to the sentimentality of pop romance. “No Compassion” is pretty tame by comparison with such masterpieces of disavowal as “Like a Rolling Stone,” not least because, Andrea Kovacs notwithstanding, the song doesn’t even bother to establish a romantic context for its theme. (It could as easily be directed at an annoying next-door neighbor.) But it does push back hard against the idealization of sensitivity that pervaded the work of 1970s singer-songwriters from James Taylor to Billy Joel, while expressing, however inadvertently, the emotional overload of an Asperger’s state of mind.

David Byrne once said that his inspiration for the song that opens Side Two of the album was “Rock Your Baby,” George McCrae’s seminal disco hit from 1974. Though it’s a long way from McCrae’s one-line exhortation to “take me in your arms, rock your baby” to the overtly literary premise of “The Book I Read,” the result was the most fully realized love song that Byrne had written to date. After an intro of skittering guitar and scampering tom-toms, he begins by acknowledging the corniness of the song’s conceit with a flourish of internally rhymed wordplay: “I’m embarrassed to admit / It hit a soft spot in my heart / When I found out you wrote the book I read.” His invitation in the chorus to “take my shoulders as they touch your arms” reveals his debt to George McCrae. “I’m a little cautious,” he admits, before giving himself over in the second verse to the prospect of “living in the future,” looking back on his romantically ambitious self, as the groove behind him assumes a disco feel. Jerry Harrison is all over this arrangement, with a soaring organ in the chorus and a driving piano in the wordless refrain, where David transcends the metaphor of literacy on which the song is based. “Nah nah nah nah,” he sings in lazy triplets that tug against the beat. “Na na na nah na-na-nah.”

“Don’t Worry About the Government,” which served as such a crowd pleaser on Talking Heads’ British tours, owed some of its popularity to the sort of straightforward narrative that was rare in David Byrne’s early work. After a toy-town introduction of seesaw bass and twittering guitar, the song opens with the image of clouds in motion over a highway that winds through pinewoods and peach orchards before arriving, as David declares, at “the building that I want to live in.” Sooner or later, every New Yorker becomes obsessed with the subject of real estate, and the pastoral setting of this suburban wish-fulfillment fantasy surely had its origins in the derelict precincts of Chrystie Street in 1975. (“That song was heartfelt,” Byrne would later say. “I could completely identify with wanting a cozy modern place to live.”) So it is that David relishes the chance to “relax along with my loved ones” in the building whose “every convenience is gonna make life easy for me.” “Don’t you worry ’bout me,” he sings over the worrisome minor seventh chord that sounds in the song’s refrain.

In the second verse he turns his attention to the “big nation” as a whole, singing with the same air of heartfelt appreciation about the hardworking bureaucrats who administer some of his “favorite” laws in Washington, DC. “Some civil servants are just like my loved ones,” he suggests, sounding pleased that they too have “buildings to help them along.” The brilliance of “Don’t Worry About the Government”—a sentiment that is never expressed in the song—hinges on the gentility of its satire: its ability to conflate the modest desire for a home of one’s own with the machinations of the federal government at a time when the “big nation” was still reeling from the aftermath of Watergate and its revelations of corruption and malfeasance—not to mention the threat to abandon New York City to its fate. “I wouldn’t worry about me,” David repeats, lifting uncertainly into a high falsetto to end the song.

The disassociated lyric of “First Week/Last Week . . . Carefree” provides a suitable segue to “Psycho Killer,” which by 1977 had become the signature of Talking Heads. “It used to bother us when that was the song that drew all the attention,” David Byrne later said. “But we rationalized it by telling ourselves that it was the driving meter of the bass line and the chord changes that had the appeal. I realize now that the idea of a personality close to the edge had something to do with the song’s attraction.” Indeed. Iconic songs have a way of becoming burdensome for musically ambitious bands. When the Beatles added a sardonic snippet of “She Loves You” to the medley of musical quotations at the end of “All You Need Is Love,” they were referencing their own exhaustion with the record that first propelled them to fame in Britain in 1963. But they were also charting the artistic distance they had traveled from the simple sentiment of that world-changing song. Ambitious as they were, Talking Heads would never make an equivalent break with the past. Instead, they would perform “Psycho Killer,” without fail, at every live performance they ever gave, from their audition night at CBGBs to their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame—as if it never once occurred to them to not give their audiences exactly what they expected from the band.

And yet, for all the hundreds of times they would perform “Psycho Killer” in the years to come, they would never improve upon the abridged version, shorn of two of its original verses, that they recorded on Talking Heads: 77. The song’s opening has the determined feel of a beginner’s bass lesson: a repeated two-bar phrase that starts with six even quarter notes, all on the tonic of the key, followed by the simplest possible variation, in the form of a three-note run that starts on the tonic, drops to the fifth, and rises back toward where it began. As an elemental rock introduction, it bears comparison with the menacing single-string riff that opens the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” the grating, cranky octaves at the start of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” and the ponderous portent of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.” Tina Weymouth once said that her part was inspired by the pounding quarter-note pulse that underlies Bernard Herrmann’s score for the film Psycho. But considering that the bass line was almost undoubtedly written by David Byrne, this might have been a case of retroactive attribution by Tina, who, unlike David, liked to speak of the song in Hitchcockian terms.

Once Tina’s bass has been joined by the eager entry of drums and squalls of rhythm guitar, David embarks on the performance that would initially define his persona as a rock singer, marking the far end of a spectrum of psychological distress and alienation from which he would gradually evolve and emerge. “I can’t seem to face up to the facts,” he begins, and from the flat affect of his singing, we don’t need for him to tell us that he’s a bundle of nerves who’s struggling to cope with reality, what with his “bed on fire” and all. “Don’t touch me, I’m a real live wire,” he adds, raising his voice for the first time in the song. As the harmony shifts from major to minor, David delivers the title line of the chorus in another monotone. “Psycho killer. Qu’est-ce que c’est?” he asks, answering his own question with a melodious stream of jabber (“fa-fa-fa-fah”) derived from Otis Redding’s “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song),” before sounding a warning for his listeners to “run-run-run-run away.” When the verse returns, David doesn’t even pretend to sing, gritting his teeth as he excoriates the sort of sociable people who start conversations without even knowing where they lead, talking about nothing at all. “When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed,” he explains. “Say something once, why say it again?” Then the chorus repeats and the music grinds to a halt on a series of staccato chords that herald the song’s release, where David spits out a series of phrases in French that translate as “What she said last night / What I did last night / Realizing my hope / I’m on my way to glory.” His turn to French to voice his delusions of grandeur evokes the old cultural stereotype of crazy people believing themselves to be Napoleon, and when he returns to his native tongue to deliver the non sequitur that provides “Psycho Killer” with its best line, he retains the “royal we,” declaring, “We are vain and we are blind,” before concluding, “I hate people when they’re not polite.” He then repeats the chorus for the third and final time, and the song goes out on a coda of crashing chords and stinging guitar in homage to the Who.

It took some self-confidence for a band to save the best for last on a debut album where first impressions counted for so much. But “Pulled Up” is a brilliant finale, the record’s most heartfelt track. And in a genre of popular music that was staging an aggressive return to its roots in adolescent rebellion, it took some nerve for a songwriter in 1977 to compose a paean to his parents’ love and support and then deliver it without a trace of irony. Like “Don’t Worry About the Government,” “Pulled Up” runs sharply counter to the cultural grain of downtown New York. “Mommy, Daddy, come and look at me now!” David exclaims in the opening verse over a brisk up-tempo groove, proclaiming his status as “a big man in a great big town” with the boastful glee of a small child, punctuating each line of his singing with a fitful fluster of chords. While the verses recount his childhood dreams of power and glory, it’s the band itself that plays the part of his faithfully attentive parents on this track. Tina’s swooping bass closely shadows the melody, boosting the song and its singer as he recounts how every time he slipped, tripped, or otherwise doubted himself, there was someone there to lend a helping hand. Having declared “say something once, why say it again” on the previous track, David repeats the phrase “you pulled me up” dozens of times with dozens of different inflections during the chorus and bridge of this song, working himself into a frenzy of gratitude whose tantrum-like intensity resolves in a final verse that captures the sort of imaginative freedom that a well-nurtured childhood can provide: “I cast a shadow on the living room wall / Dark and savage with a profile so sharp / Keep that wonderful food on the table / There’s really no hurry, I’ll eat in a while.”

By the fall of 1977, Seymour Stein had signed four acts associated with CBGBs: the Ramones, Talking Heads, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, and the Dead Boys, all of whom had albums that were ready for release. Stein’s original intention was to promote the records together, as a joint expression of the downtown New York scene, but WEA, his new distributor, had other ideas.

Asked to pick one group to serve as the focus of their promotional efforts, Stein picked Talking Heads. The Ramones had already released two albums, neither of which had sold well, and their new record, Rocket to Russia, was indistinguishable from their previous work. Richard Hell was essentially a style icon masquerading as a rock singer, while the Dead Boys, who had arrived in New York from Cleveland over the summer, were tuneless Stooges acolytes with an alarming penchant for Nazi paraphernalia. Seymour Stein had to be aware that Talking Heads were the only band in his downtown stable who had any chance of getting their music played on the radio. Toward that end, he was happy to join with other record executives and rock writers in marketing the new releases on Sire under the rubric of “New Wave.” “Don’t Call It Punk,” read the full-page advertisements that Sire placed in the music papers. (Stein would later claim to have invented the term “new wave” as a more palatable alternative to “punk.”)

In a proud but demoralized metropolis that was hungry for ways to celebrate itself, the New York press, from the Times to the Voice to the Soho Weekly News, hailed the release of Talking Heads: 77 as the work of hometown heroes. John Rockwell began his two-column review by praising the record as “one of the most amusing and serious rock albums ever.” “Along with Patti Smith’s Horses and Television’s Marquee Moon,” he wrote, “this is part of a trilogy of albums that stakes New York seventies underground rock’s claim to greatness.” Over at the Village Voice, Frank Rose sought to distinguish the group from the anger, nihilism, and inanity of the punk rock scene by focusing on the “manic petulance” of Byrne’s vocal persona and the seemingly naïve, Eisenhower-era aspiration of songs like “Don’t Worry About the Government” and “Pulled Up.” “Theirs is a romantic, lyrical faith. Punk-rock it isn’t,” he wrote.

From a promotional perspective, Stephen Demorest’s review in Rolling Stone could hardly have been bettered, and Sire Records gratefully quoted from it in all of their print advertising. A well-traveled rock journalist who had mainly written for Rolling Stone’s rival Circus, Demorest welcomed the album as “an absolute triumph . . . one of the definitive records of the decade.” “Dressing like a quartet of Young Republicans, playing courteously toned-down music, Talking Heads are not even remotely punks,” he noted, before doing the admissions department of RISD proud by describing the group as “the great Ivy League hope of pop music.” Building on her earlier fixation with Tina Weymouth, Vivien Goldman sounded a similar theme in the British weekly Sounds. “I don’t think England has produced a similarly upper-class rock ’n’ roll band,” she observed. “Tina’s haughtiness when faced with people who give her a hard time is more threatening than screaming or yelling; it’s born of a deep-down awareness of position and privilege, both natural and social.”

18

The Big Country

We played Antonino’s Pizza Parlor. It was great. It also opened that market for a lot of other groups.

—DAVID BYRNE

Chris Frantz’s first impression of CBGBs—“This could be our Cavern Club”—was prescient in more ways than one. In August 1963, shortly before their third single, “She Loves You,” became the catalyst for the phenomenon that the British press would shortly dub “Beatlemania,” the Beatles played their final engagement at the cellar club in Liverpool that had served as their musical incubator for the preceding two years.

Similarly, Talking Heads’ four-night stand at CBGBs in August 1977, on the eve of the release of their first album, would mark their last scheduled appearance at the club. (Their final performance there came six weeks later at an “invitation-only” live recording.) Like the Beatles before them, the Heads had reached the point where their talent and ambition had transcended the theater of low expectations that had given them the space and freedom to discover what they were capable of. “I guess we’re pretty much an aberration down there,” David Byrne told a reporter from Newsday around this time.

Not that they were exactly graduating to the big time. The release of Talking Heads: 77 marked the start of a grueling road tour of clubs and colleges (with an occasional steak house or pizza parlor thrown in for good measure) in the Northeast and Midwest. The tour was arranged by the band’s newly hired manager, Gary Kurfirst, a thirty-year-old New Yorker who was recommended by Ken Kushnick of Sire Records after Kushnick declined Seymour Stein’s suggestion that he manage the group himself.

In 1967, fresh out of high school, Kurfirst had gotten his start in the music business when he joined with a fellow novice named Shelly Finkel to promote concerts by up-and-coming artists like the Doors, the Who, and Jimi Hendrix at the Singer Bowl in Queens and the Village Theatre on Second Avenue. The following year, after Bill Graham bought the Village Theatre and renamed it the Fillmore East, Kurfirst took a job with Windfall, a management company owned by the record producer Felix Pappalardi and his partner Bud Prager. When Pappalardi formed the band Mountain with Leslie West, Prager assigned Kurfirst to manage the group, which became a top-selling act in 1970 on the strength of their hit single “Mississippi Queen.” Mountain was distributed in Britain by Island Records, whose Jamaican-born owner, Chris Blackwell, had recently signed the Wailers and was now preparing to market reggae music to the rest of the world. Blackwell was sufficiently impressed with Kurfirst to recommend him as a manager to Toots and the Maytals. A health scare in the mid-seventies forced Kurfirst to take a break from the music business, but by 1977, his health was restored, and he was eager to get back in the game.

His first move with Talking Heads was to connect them with an agent at the venerable William Morris Agency named Stu Weintraub. Drawing on their wealth of contacts, Kurfirst and Weintraub were able to book the Heads on a nightly basis, with occasional days off for rest or long-distance travel, throughout the rest of the year, earning them enough on each night to get them to the next town. The four of them traveled together in a station wagon, accompanied by a soundman named Gary Scovil and a roadie named Jeff Jones, who rode in a separate equipment van. Scovil was a self-professed jazz snob who owned a small recording studio in Wilton, Connecticut. He made no secret of his disdain for the Heads’ music; Jones was his trainee, and a fervent admirer of the band.

After a series of warm-up dates at the Rat in Boston, Lupo’s in Providence, and a Beefsteak Charlie’s in Scarsdale, the tour began in earnest in the second week of October with the Heads opening for the ailing jazz master Charles Mingus at a small club in Woodstock, New York, followed by their invitation-only farewell to CBGBs. They then played shows in Buffalo, Syracuse, and Ithaca before heading west to Chicago, Minneapolis, and a homecoming for Jerry Harrison in Milwaukee. After a brief return to New York for their debut as headliners at the Bottom Line, they toured clubs and colleges in New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, where Chris Frantz’s parents got to see their son perform at Antonino’s Pizza Parlor in Pittsburgh. In November they reunited with the Ramones to play concerts in Boston and Detroit before heading south to Nashville and Atlanta, where they met members of a newly formed band from the college town of Athens, Georgia, who called themselves the B-52’s. Then, in early December, the Heads flew to California for an additional two weeks of club dates that included a three-night showcase at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles.

Those many weeks on the road amounted to a change of life for the band. Though they had tasted the routine of touring during their sojourn in Europe and Britain earlier in the year, that had been as an opening act on a tour that was supported by a seasoned road crew. Touring the United States by station wagon in the late 1970s was another matter. The bookings and modest accommodations were arranged by Gary Kurfirst and Stu Weintraub in New York, but the responsibility of getting from here to there was entirely up to the band. The four of them took turns with the driving (always with trepidation when David Byrne took the wheel). As the most pragmatic member of the group, Tina Weymouth assumed the role of road manager, dealing with the club owners and promoters, making sure the band was paid what they were due at the end of each night. Most days began with several hours of travel before they arrived in a town, checked into a motel, set up and performed a sound check, fed themselves on their meager per diem allowance, and finally played the gig. They did not carry their own sound system, only their instruments and amplifiers, and while many of the clubs had first-rate sound equipment, many of the colleges did not. The Heads continued their practice of playing without theatrical lighting, which helped to simplify their presentation onstage.

In an era when every city and town in America was still served by a local newspaper, WEA’s promotion department provided those papers with press packets that included publicity photographs and copies of the New York Times and Rolling Stone reviews of Talking Heads: 77. The packets also contained printouts of a syndicated article by a Rolling Stone contributor named Michael Aron describing, somewhat oddly, their steak house gig in Scarsdale. The main purpose of Aron’s article was to assure local editors, entertainment reporters, and their readers that Talking Heads were not a punk-rock band. “The big difference between us and punk groups is that we like groups like K.C. and the Sunshine Band and Funkadelic,” Chris Frantz explained to Aron. “You ask Johnny Rotten if he likes K.C. and he’ll spit in your face.”

After referencing their collegiate backgrounds and the dubious possibility that “the members of Talking Heads all could have had legitimate careers as painters,” Aron went on to describe David Byrne as “a captivating performer. Everything about him is straight and ‘uncool.’ . . . You’re never sure whether his stage persona is real or if it’s a brilliant satire. Eventually you stop wondering, because he’s fun.” Distributed by King Features Syndicate beneath the logo of Rolling Stone, Aron’s piece was reprinted in dozens of newspapers across the country. Nearly all of these papers ran the article beneath some variation of a headline that read, “Talking Heads: Not Punks.”

In many of the college towns they played, Warners also arranged for the band to visit campus radio stations and local record stores to publicize their upcoming gigs. College stations had been one of the keys to the explosion of “underground radio” in the 1970s, schooling a generation of hip DJs and serving as a prime outlet for album-oriented rock. By the late 1970s, their influence was pervasive enough to give rise to the music business marketing term “college rock.” Here, too, the Heads’ collegiate backgrounds and their overt lack of punk or rock star affectation made a good impression on their hosts.

By the time the band returned from California in the middle of December, they were totally depleted from months of constant travel. “It was really an education for us,” Chris Frantz said. “I’m afraid we bit off more than we could chew. We thought we could play every night and we found that after four months we were feeling pretty uninspired.” After a brief break for Christmas, the Heads appeared as the top-billed act at the opening of CBGB’s 2nd Avenue Theater, Hilly Kristal’s ill-fated attempt to expand the brand of his club into concert production. They followed this with two nights at the newly opened Paradise Theater, adjoining the Boston University campus. By then, David Byrne’s voice was in tatters; after performing on New Year’s Eve at a club outside of Philadelphia, he began to cough up blood.

A bright spot of the band’s return to New York was the presence of Brian Eno, who arrived in the city shortly before Christmas. Since their meeting in London in the spring, Eno had reunited with David Bowie in Berlin, where he contributed to the writing and recording of several of the tracks on Bowie’s album “Heroes.” He then returned to London to oversee the completion of his fourth solo album, Before and After Science, whose opening track, “No One Receiving,” had a driving funk groove that reflected Eno’s newfound appreciation for dance music. Until now, though he had collaborated with a wide range of artists in the studio, Eno had never actually produced an album by anyone other than himself. Nevertheless, their reunion in New York convinced all four Talking Heads that he was the ideal candidate to produce their second album. Seymour Stein was initially resistant to the idea of putting an avowed English avant-gardist in charge of recording his label’s most commercially promising act, but the band and Gary Kurfirst quickly brought him around.

Unfortunately, given the group’s state of exhaustion, Stein and Kurfirst had previously committed the Heads to a monthlong tour of Britain and Europe that was intended to promote the release of their album overseas. The tour began in the second week of January, with shows in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Brussels, and Paris that featured the hyperkinetic British band XTC as their opening act. This was followed by a three-week circuit of clubs and colleges in Britain that had them crisscrossing the country multiple times in snowy winter weather. Opening for them on the British leg of their tour was Dire Straits, whose demo recording of “Sultans of Swing” was receiving heavy airplay on British radio and would go on to become a Top 10 hit in Britain and America in the year ahead. Composed, like Talking Heads, of former college students, Dire Straits was dominated by the distinctive presence of the singer and lead guitarist Mark Knopfler, who shared with David Byrne a Scottish heritage and a reticent personality. Knopfler was a disciple of the understated American guitar masters Ry Cooder and J. J. Cale, and while he and his bandmates were much more accomplished players than Talking Heads, the two groups proved to be very compatible on both an artistic and personal level. (“Their laid-back approach is an almost perfect foil for the unremitting tension of the Americans,” one reviewer wrote.)

Primed by the release of Talking Heads: 77, the British music press was eager for the band’s return. Paul Rambali’s review of these “four squeaky collegiate types” in New Musical Express compared the “powerful, disciplined economy” of their playing to Booker T. & the M.G.’s. In class-conscious Britain, the band’s educational background remained a major talking point. “What the world doesn’t need is another posturing clown yammering away about his baby,” David Byrne told Penny Valentine of Melody Maker. To which Jerry Harrison added, “We don’t try to be stupid, which so many bands do, trying to be the noble savage onstage.” Speculating on the news that Brian Eno would be producing their next album, Tim Lott noted in Record Mirror, “It occurs to me the connection with Eno is merely going to add to their mystique as a band of the intelligentsia, the mentally gifted elite.”

In the midst of their tour, the Heads appeared on the BBC program The Old Grey Whistle Test, where they performed “Don’t Worry About the Government” and “Psycho Killer.” Broadcast from a cramped studio in Manchester without the presence of a live audience, Whistle Test had served since the early 1970s as Britain’s principal television showcase for album-oriented rock. The New York Dolls had performed on the program, as had Patti Smith, following the release of Horses in 1976. But Talking Heads were the first American new wave band to appear on the show.

Standing onstage with David at the center, Jerry to the left, Tina to the right, and Chris’s drums behind, their performance marked the first time they were captured on film in the year since Harrison joined the group. The band as a whole looks appreciably more relaxed than the frozen tableau that characterized their earlier filmed performances as a trio at CBGBs and the Kitchen. Whether on keyboards or guitar, Jerry moves languidly in time to the music, his head tilted back, his eyes half-shut, while Tina’s former fixation on David has softened into a mere watchfulness. But David, front and center, with his yellow polo shirt buttoned tightly up his neck, exudes an air of palpable self-consciousness, tracking the camera as the camera tracks him, at times glaring madly into its lens. His vocal embellishments, on “Psycho Killer” especially, are affected and overdone, his voice rising at times into a tuneless shout. The band ends “Psycho Killer” with an extended instrumental vamp in which the tempo of the music quickens as David retreats to the back of the stage and awkwardly changes guitars in an attempt to coax some feedback out of his amplifier. After the music slows to a stop, he returns to the microphone and shouts to the empty studio, “That’s all! Over to you!”

The raggedness of his performance attested to the fact that Talking Heads were physically and psychologically spent after so many months on tour. It was around this time that Seymour Stein, who had joined them in London, learned that Elvis Costello wanted Talking Heads to open for him at a series of concert dates on the West Coast. Costello was the first new wave singer to be signed by Columbia Records, and the label was giving his debut album, My Aim Is True, a big promotional push. Seeing this as a prime opportunity, Stein encouraged the Heads to cancel the last week of their British tour and accept the offer. Instead, in their debilitated state, they used the Costello offer as an excuse to curtail their remaining tour dates and return to New York. Stein did his best to cover for the band by planting a story in Billboard stating that David Byrne was now “resting at home” after being “hospitalized for exhaustion in London.”

What actually happened with David Byrne in London would become a matter of some dispute, but hospitalization did not enter into it. What can be said with assurance is that, on the night before the band’s departure for New York, something caused Byrne to damage some of the furnishings in his room at the Portobello Hotel. According to some associates of the band, he may also have defecated on his bed and decorated his offering with a note that read “For the maid.” Whatever the particulars of this incident, it does give some indication of how unhinged Byrne became on this British tour. Coming from a band that prided itself on shunning the clichés of rock stardom, bad behavior in hotel rooms was perhaps the most banal cliché of them all.

As for Elvis Costello, the prodigiously gifted singer-songwriter from Liverpool who had adopted his preposterous stage name a few months before the death of the real Elvis in the summer of 1977, Seymour Stein wasn’t wrong about his affinities with Talking Heads. Like David Byrne’s, Costello’s unlovely voice and nerdy, awkward stage presence presented an intriguing alternative to the macho preening of stadium rockers and the heartfelt sensitivity of singer-songwriters. He too enjoyed the support of a highly proficient band, the Attractions, whose playing was grounded in the danceable grooves of soul, reggae, and R&B. “I liked the weirder, slightly arty punk groups, not the ones who sounded like speeded-up heavy metal,” Costello later said. “Because of the image and the Elvis name, people never looked close enough to home to see where I was stealing ideas from. People were always looking in the back catalog of rock ’n’ roll for my influences, when I was just as likely to be listening to Talking Heads.”

19

Compass Point

What appealed to me initially about their music was its powerful structural discipline. The rhythm section is like a ship or train—very forceful and certain of where it’s going. On top of that you have this hesitant, doubting quality that dizzily asks, “Where are we going?” That makes for a sense of genuine disorientation, unlike the surface insanity of the more commonplace, expressionist punk groups.

—BRIAN ENO

Like Seymour Stein, Gary Kurfirst became sufficiently concerned about the morale of Talking Heads on their European tour that he flew to Paris to see for himself how they were doing. After the band returned to New York in February 1978, Kurfirst gave some thought to promoting their peace of mind in the months ahead. He knew that his friend and patron Chris Blackwell had recently built a new recording studio for Island Records in a resort-like compound at Compass Point, just outside of Nassau in the Bahamas, as a way of escaping the political violence that was convulsing Jamaica at the time. (Island’s top artist, Bob Marley, was currently living in exile after surviving an assassination attempt at his home in Kingston the year before.) Though the studio was still untested, Kurfirst was able to get his clients an attractive rate as the first “outside” band to record there.

After three years of living on the cheap in New York and touring on the cheap in the United States, Europe, and Britain, the tropical ambience of Compass Point looked and felt like paradise to the members of Talking Heads. The band arrived in the middle of March and settled in for a monthlong stay. They were met there by Brian Eno and his favorite engineer, Rhett Davies, who had served as a coproducer on Eno’s solo albums, in addition to working with other Island artists like Roxy Music and Robert Palmer. Eno himself had spent the last month back in Berlin, producing an album by Devo, an art-school band from Ohio. Devo’s surreal stagecraft, robotic rhythms, and satiric futurism had captured the fancy of David Bowie, who bequeathed the group to Eno after initially planning to produce them himself. For all their artiness, however, the members of Devo had stubbornly resisted Eno’s freewheeling approach to recording, leaving him somewhat disillusioned by the experience.

At the time of Jerry Harrison’s arrival, Talking Heads had a working repertoire of around two dozen original songs. But David Byrne’s creative output had slowed to a crawl over the course of 1977, as the demands of recording and touring denied him the ruminative time and space he needed to write new material. (Despite the iconic images of Lennon and McCartney facing off with their guitars in hotel rooms and Bob Dylan banging away on his typewriter in Don’t Look Back, most musical artists struggle to find the time and energy to write on the road.) The songs that Tony Bongiovi had chosen for the band’s first album were mainly drawn from their more recent work, which meant that most of the songs that were still available for their second album dated from their first year on Chrystie Street. These included “Artists Only,” with lyrics by their RISD friend Michael Zieve, and two of Byrne’s early collaborations with Chris Frantz, “Stay Hungry” and “Warning Sign.” In anticipation of their upcoming recording sessions, the Heads had revived several of these earlier songs on their European tour and rehearsed the others in New York prior to their arrival at Compass Point.

While the addition of Jerry Harrison had helped to flesh out and in some cases renovate this older material, in regard to its lyrical content, especially, it was not their strongest work. From Brian Eno’s perspective, however, this was not a major concern. Among the many contrarian aspects of Eno’s approach to record production was his inclination to reduce the prominence of vocals and lyrics in the overall musical mix. Generally speaking, he was much more interested in the sound of singing than in the meaning of what was being sung. (His own compositional method, which he would later impart to David Byrne, was to record the music first and then sound out the words and melody by singing along repeatedly with the instrumental tracks.)

Another of Eno’s contrarian tendencies was to reject the obsession with isolating the sounds of individual instruments that had become a standard practice in studios since the proliferation of multitrack technology in the early seventies. Most of the recording that took place in the 1960s had been done on three-, four-, or eight-track tape decks, which enabled an engineer to record a band’s basic instrumental accompaniment on a pair of stereo channels and then use the remaining tracks to overdub vocals and additional instruments. In the 1970s, with the advent of sixteen- and twenty-four-track decks, it became common not only to assign multiple tracks to a single instrument like the drums, but also to physically isolate the individual instruments using booths and baffles to prevent the sound of one from leaking into the sound of another. This in turn required musicians to listen to themselves and one another through headphones, which combined with the physical buffering in the studio to create a disquieting sense of social as well as sonic isolation. It also had the effect of breaking down the distinctive sound of a band into its component parts, which were then reassembled, for better or worse, by the engineer at the control board.

With the help of Rhett Davies, Brian Eno had gradually dispensed with this protocol, first on his own albums and then in his work with other artists, and the Heads were delighted with his plan to have them set up in the middle of the studio at Compass Point as if they were onstage. This enabled them to capture the sound of their band as they conceived it, while still allowing for adjustments in the volume and tone of each instrument and the overdubbing of vocals and additional instrumental parts. In that configuration, they recorded the basic tracks for an album’s worth of songs in less than a week. With twenty-four channels to work with, Eno was able to feed the individual signals from the guitars, keyboards, and drums through his EMS synthesizer to alter or color the sound, often combining them with the untreated sound of the same instrument to create a range of subtle effects. This made for a dynamic process in which Eno encouraged the Heads, who rarely improvised in the sense of spontaneously making up new parts in the course of performing a song, to be attuned to the possibilities of accident and happenstance.

As Eno described the process: “I always record everything, even a run-through where you’re trying to get in tune, because sometimes when the situation isn’t clear interesting things happen, and they’re worth listening to again. I would also have my synthesizer permanently linked into the control desk and I would sit in the control room next to the engineer, so I could feed any instrument through as they were playing, and what I did would also go on tape. Instead of adding an instrument, which is the traditional overdubbing idea, I was extracting ideas and rhythmic parts from what they were playing. Then they would come in and listen and we would select the interesting parts and that would become the basis for the next time ’round. This didn’t always happen. There were some things that were first take. But some of it got changed quite a lot.”

In this fluid and experimental atmosphere, Talking Heads recorded and mixed eleven tracks in their month at Compass Point. Seven of the songs dated from their first year at CBGBs. Three had been written more recently, including “The Big Country” and “Found a Job,” an ambitious new song that the band had never performed live. The eleventh track was a new arrangement of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River,” which had been a staple of their live shows for more than a year.

During the sessions, the working title of the album was reported in the music press as Oh What a Big Country, a play on the song of the same name. At one point, Jerry Harrison proposed calling the album Fear of Music, a term from a British medical textbook called Music and the Brain that had found its way onto Brian Eno’s reading list. But at the end of their stay in Nassau, the band seized on Chris Frantz’s suggestion that they name the record More Songs About Buildings and Food—a reference to the building with every convenience in “Don’t Worry About the Government” and the food on the table in “Pulled Up” from Talking Heads: 77.

The Heads returned to New York in the middle of April and took a couple of weeks off. This gave David Byrne and Tina Weymouth a chance to work together on the cover for the album, which they based on the “photomosaic” technique that David’s former girlfriend Andrea Kovacs had developed for collaging Polaroid photographs. Kovacs’s own work in this mode had ripened into a form of innovative photographic abstraction, but the image Byrne and Weymouth created was a figurative full-length portrait of the four band members set against a mottled red backdrop, with the exposed white edges of the more than five hundred individual Polaroid photographs forming a strict white grid. In keeping with David’s willingness to take credit for anything that came of out his head, he specified that the photo credit on the album cover should read “Concept by David Byrne.” (Unsurprisingly, Kovacs was livid at his presumption.) For the back cover of the album, the band used another photomosaic image, this one created by the cameras on a NASA satellite, showing the continental United States, in another apparent reference to “The Big Country.”

Brian Eno returned to New York with the group to oversee the final mixing and mastering of their album. Though he had originally planned to return to London when this work was done, he was so enthralled by the city and what he saw as its promise of boundless possibility that he wound up staying on, subletting an apartment in Greenwich Village and becoming a ubiquitous figure at downtown clubs, performance spaces, art bars, gallery openings, and museum shows. “New York’s a great place for having ambitious ideas because they all look feasible there,” he later wrote. Compared to London, “people are just much more willing to talk to one another, because everyone is desperate for an idea.” At the same time, he observed, “New York is so energetic and self-contained that it’s easy to forget the rest of the world exists. So there are a lot of artists in New York who work only in terms of that situation, and whose work outside of that context really isn’t interesting.”

More Songs About Buildings and Food was scheduled for release in the middle of July 1978. In May, the Heads played a number of shows in the Northeast that gave them a chance to incorporate the new arrangements of the songs they had recorded at Compass Point into their live set. They then returned to Europe on an ill-planned promotional tour whose dates corresponded with those of the 1978 World Cup football matches, which were played during the day in Argentina and broadcast at night in Europe. After performing in half-filled clubs for several weeks, the band took some time off while David and Jerry visited the Riviera and Chris and Tina stayed with relatives in France. Then, in the second week of July, they reunited to perform at a rock festival in Belgium and a sold-out show at the Lyceum Ballroom in London, which coincided with the British release of More Songs About Buildings and Food.

Sire Records had arranged to have its new parent company, WEA, take over its foreign distribution, which meant that More Songs was released simultaneously in Britain and the United States. The reviews in the British music papers appeared the following week, and they were fulsome in their praise. Writing in Sounds, Phil Sutcliffe quoted the entire lyric to “The Big Country,” the album’s closing track, and compared its air of “painterly” detachment to that of David Hockney’s domestic portraits. “Their words and music have the polite correctness and formality of strangers or foreigners or, to carry it to the extreme, visitors from another planet,” he wrote, anticipating by two decades the Asperger’s metaphor of Oliver Sacks’s An Anthropologist on Mars.

The American reviews were slower to see print, but they sounded similar themes. Comparing More Songs with the band’s first album, where “the vocal craziness was obviously studied and posed,” John Piccarella of the Village Voice found the Heads’ “trademarked combination of intelligence and cracked passion” to be more cohesive and convincing on the new record, buttressed by the “disco-punk tightness” of Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz. Two weeks later in the Voice, Robert Christgau dismissed his previous reservations about the group, describing every track on the album as a “positive pleasure” stemming from “the tension between Byrne’s compulsive flights and the sinuous rock bottom of the music.”

Temporarily absent from the hometown rooting section was John Rockwell in the Times—not due to any lack of enthusiasm, but rather because all three of New York’s daily papers were shut down by a strike in the summer of 1978. When the Times resumed publication, Rockwell circled back to designate More Songs About Buildings and Food as the #1 album of the year on a top-ten list that included Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness at the Edge of Town, the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls, and Blondie’s Parallel Lines, the album that would soon turn Debbie Harry into an international pop star.

The chorus of praise continued throughout the fall. In Rolling Stone, under the headline “Preppy but Potent,” Ken Emerson began with the now-ubiquitous comparison between David Byrne and the Anthony Perkins character in Psycho before hitting hard on the disjunctions in the band’s music between mind and body, head and heart, and work and love, which he attributed to the WASP provenance of its members: “Not since the Four Freshmen has there been a group as Protestant and downright preppie as Talking Heads.” Tom Carson, a CBGBs regular who had followed Talking Heads since their infancy at the club, published a long, thoughtful piece in the Boston Phoenix in which he noted the “aesthetic aloofness, almost an isolation, that has informed not only Talking Heads’ style but their world view from the beginning. . . . Byrne’s vocal style is that of a man terrified by experience, yet obsessed with the need to plunge in anyway.” Focusing, like many reviewers, on the “The Big Country,” Carson considered the song to be “as true and moving a vision of America as the mocking bitterness of Randy Newman’s ‘Sail Away’ or the tragic fatalism of [the Band’s] ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.’”

Carson’s piece also included excerpts from an interview he did with David Byrne shortly after the band returned from Europe in July, in which he was struck by the difference between Byrne’s onstage persona and his offstage reticence. “In performance, he’s mesmerizing precisely because his maniacal, demanding intensity seems to be utterly at war with his character. At the same time, he projects a quirky pride in his own eccentricity.” Asked about the possibility that mainstream audiences might be put off by the Heads’ reputation as intellectuals, Byrne replied, “I would hope that we don’t sound elitist. If we do then I would have to reevaluate what we play, and make some changes.” “I, not we,” Carson noted. “On a conceptual level, at least, this is clearly a one-man show.”

20

Take Me to the River

He’s a brilliant producer, and he’s extremely perceptive. If you’re uncomfortable, he’s very sensitive to your feelings. He’s not somebody who says, “I make hit records so you do it my way.”

—DAVID BYRNE

In fact, one of Brian Eno’s achievements as a producer was to prevent More Songs About Buildings and Food from sounding like a one-man show. Tony Bongiovi was a product of Motown’s corporate music culture, where teams of producers, songwriters, arrangers, studio musicians, and backup singers applied their talents to making the “artist” sound good. This had led Bongiovi to treat David Byrne as the “artist” on Talking Heads’ first album, effectively ignoring their collective identity as a band. Eno, by contrast, had gotten his start alongside Bryan Ferry as the self-appointed amateur in a group of otherwise accomplished musicians who had assumed the collective identity of Roxy Music. Instead of following the path of least resistance, he understood that part of his job was to present Byrne’s outsized talent in the context of the band as a whole.

One way that Eno achieved this was by mixing the vocal tracks on More Songs About Buildings and Food so that Byrne’s singing seemed to emerge from “inside” the music rather than riding on top of it. This also aligned with the Heads’ expressed desire to have the sound of the album reflect the live sound of the band. In other ways, however, Eno wisely chose to ignore that desire. Live, Talking Heads played with little sense of dynamics at this point in their career, and they paid little attention to the actual tone of their instruments onstage. Tina’s bass tended toward shrillness, Chris’s drums tended toward tubbiness, and it was often hard to tell the difference between the sounds of David’s and Jerry’s guitars. (The members of Dire Straits had been amazed to learn that, unlike most guitarists, David and Jerry didn’t bother to change their strings on a regular basis.) On record, Eno worked wonders by giving each of their instruments a variety of crisp, distinctive timbres. Perhaps as important as the effects and tonal treatments he added were the parts he subtracted from the band’s live arrangements, thereby creating a sense of space that called attention to particular instruments at particular moments in a song. After making their mark in a downtown club scene in which they were surrounded by a defiant form of musical mediocrity, Talking Heads were now working for the first time with a producer whose artistic sensibility was notably more sophisticated than their own.

The album’s overture, “Thank You for Sending Me an Angel,” is a viscerally uplifting track, a headlong dive into the first blush of romantic infatuation that has David Byrne yipping and yelping in delight over Chris Frantz’s galloping downbeats. “Oh baby, you can walk, you can talk just like me,” David exclaims over a backdrop of booming major chords. “You can look . . . you won’t see nothing like me!” His qualified boast is as close as Talking Heads would ever come to the swagger of mainstream rock, and much of the song’s charm derives from the way it satirizes the choreography of courtship. What starts with David’s invitation to walk and talk like him—something few sane women would ever choose to do, even “with a little practice,” as he sagely suggests in the second verse—ends with the absurd image of these two prospective lovers walking and talking in literal circles around one another, to end with the exhortation, “But first . . . show me what you can do!”

Without missing a beat, this jubilant introduction yields to a jabbering riff on guitar, which lends a quizzical cast to the opening bars of “With Our Love,” perhaps the bleakest of the early, skeptical love songs with which Talking Heads sought to distance themselves from the sentimentality of pop romance. Here, singing over the herky-jerky rhythm of the verse, David describes the mere look of love as a fearsome thing, enough to “make the boys quiver.” As the teller of this cautionary tale, he tries to learn from their example, insisting “I’ve got other things to do now.” But he’s hardly immune to the pitfalls of emotional amnesia. “I forgot the trouble, that’s the trouble,” he repeats again and again in the song’s refrain, until the beat drops out and he murmurs the words “with . . . our . . . love” in a dreamy, quavering voice that sounds like a B-movie version of a man under the spell of hypnosis.

Several reviews of More Songs About Buildings and Food noted that the songs on the album seemed to revolve around the classic Freudian themes of love and work. The transition from “With Our Love” to “The Good Thing” introduces this duality. “The Good Thing” is like a musical version of the classic self-help manual The Power of Positive Thinking, if it were updated for the 1970s with a distinctly Maoist twist. (“The Chinese idea that uniformity and restriction don’t have to be debilitating and degrading—I found that attractive,” Byrne would later say.) The track features a cheerful lilt of melody that’s doubled on guitar in the verse, where David vows to fight with all of his heart and understanding to surmount the “unfavorable conditions” that stand between him and “the good thing.” Urging him along on the path to productivity is a backup chorus of women’s voices, recruited from the office staff at Compass Point (and listed in the liner notes as “Tina and the Typing Pool”). “A straight line exists between me and the good thing,” the women intone as the band drones on behind them, their voices lifting brightly at the end of each line. “As we economize, efficiency is multiplied,” they croon in the second chorus, up to the point where the song takes a stunning turn, as Tina steps out of the typing pool with a vibrant, driving bass line that pushes David bodily into the testimonial mode. “I have adopted this and made it my own / Cut back the weakness, reinforce what is strong,” he sings, invoking the words of another paragon of positive thinking, the incomparable James Brown. “Watch me work!” he cries, as the band explodes behind him with swelling chords that second his shouts of “Work! Work!”

Most every track on More Songs was enhanced by Brian Eno’s production, but some, like “Warning Sign,” were transformed by it. Apart from “Psycho Killer,” “Warning Sign” was the only song left in Talking Heads’ repertoire that dated back to the Artistics, which made it a good example of what happens when a twenty-year-old art student sets out to write a “heavy” lyric about the end of a relationship. That the twenty-year-old in this case was Chris Frantz rather than David Byrne mattered little, for the song was no better or worse than all the other juvenilia Byrne wrote for the Artistics in 1974. In the years since, it had come and gone and come again on the Heads’ set lists, its durability owing in part to band politics (as one of Chris and David’s few collaborations) and in part because it was great fun to play. Brian Eno succeeded in highlighting all the song’s strengths and obscuring most of its deficiencies. His contribution began with the treatment of Chris’s staggered drumbeat, which is doctored with treble and echo to sound like the world’s funkiest wind-up toy, joined by Tina’s bass and Jerry’s guitar, which combine on a sonorous line that recalls the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb.” The band vamps on this appealing groove for a full minute before David starts to sing, sounding the alarm of “Warning sign! Warning sign! / I see it but I pay it no mind.” Roy Trakin described the song as a “parody of pessimism” in the Soho Weekly News, and the lyrics are indeed hard to take without a grain of salt. In the first verse, David issues an urgent appeal to “pay attention” to the fact that “I’ve got money now.” In the second verse, he brings a similar urgency to the line, “Look at my hair, I like the design.” Brian Eno’s main contribution to the track was to bury Byrne’s voice in the mix, as if he were marooned on a distant musical landscape, thereby turning the silly, disjointed lyrics he’s singing into a kind of verbal window dressing.

“The Girls Want to Be with the Girls” was an early fixture of the Heads’ repertoire that fell by the wayside when Jerry Harrison joined the group. Here, with the song taken at a slower tempo that gives the melody room to breathe, the addition of Jerry’s chiming trills on piano and his soaring backdrop of organ in the chorus make all the difference. Written as one of David Byrne’s quasi-anthropological ruminations on gender roles, the lyrics extol the pleasures of female bonding in a way that untold generations of male songwriters have done their best to ignore. “Well there’s just no love / When there’s boys and girls,” David decides. And why is that? Because in their heart of hearts, “the girls want to be with the girls.” His dour conclusion comes as a wry riposte to the whole genre of sixties “girl group” songs, in which gaggles of lovelorn females competed and commiserated in their desperate efforts to capture the male gaze.

The first side of More Songs About Buildings and Food ends with “Found a Job,” the newest song on the album, and easily one of the best. Taking a page from the Paul McCartney/Randy Newman school of third-person narrative songwriting, David Byrne turns the domestic drama of a couple named Bob and Judy into a remarkably prescient premonition of the change in media culture that began with the advent of public access cable in the 1970s and metastasized decades later into the epic contrivance of reality TV. “Damn that television!” Bob shouts to start the song, fed up with the bad reception and the banal shows. The flickering guitar that accompanies his complaint has the blankness of a test pattern, but Judy is unmoved. “Nothing’s ever on,” she says. “I don’t know why you bother.” That’s David’s cue to step in with a constructive suggestion. Instead of “fighting over little things,” why don’t the two of them try “making up their own shows, which might be better than TV.” Bob and Judy do just that in the song’s chorus, over Chris’s thumping toms and Tina’s growling bass, “inventing situations,” “scouting up locations,” enlisting the help of their family and friends, and saving their relationship in the process. When their efforts are rewarded with high ratings and talk of a possible spin-off, David returns to deliver the moral of “this little scene” in no uncertain terms: “If your work isn’t what you love, then something isn’t right,” he sings. “Just look at Bob and Judy / They’re happy as can be.”

David Byrne based the lyrics to “Artists Only,” the track that opens Side Two, on a song called “Pretty Soon,” which his RISD friend Michael Zieve had written for a band of his own. The significant difference between the two songs is that, from Zieve’s perspective, there was nothing funny about “Pretty Soon,” whereas Byrne turned “Artists Only” into an act of satiric revenge on the art world that had treated him so rudely at RISD and MICA. Coming from a poster child for creative neurosis, David’s caricature of a creative neurotic is a terrifying thing to behold. The track begins with another long introduction whose minor-key tonality and spooky guitar evoke a climate of suspense worthy of a horror film, somehow suggesting that studio practice can be a perilous pursuit. After a full minute, the suspense gives way to a charging backbeat anchored by Jerry Harrison’s whiny organ. “I’m painting! I’m painting again!” David declares with an air of breathless self-importance. The comedy of “Artists Only” turns on the speed with which the promise of those opening words reverts to frustration and despair. One moment, the painter is busy “cleaning” his brain (of his preconceptions, no doubt); the next moment, he’s bracing for defeat. “Pretty soon, I will be bitter,” he predicts. By the song’s last verse, paranoia is setting in, as David starts to wrestle with the voices in his head. “I don’t have to prove that I’m creative,” he sings, repeating the line with a demented droop in his voice, adding, as a point of pride, “All my pictures are confused.” Then, in what could serve as a musical metaphor for creative paralysis, the band repeats the same one-bar phrase, note-for-note, no less than thirty-six times, before ending on the arpeggiated coda that once reminded the writer Albert Goldman of the theme to The Twilight Zone.

“I’m Not in Love” was another of the songs that Goldman heard at the Heads’ CBGBs debut, a rousing expression of David Byrne’s “agnostic” attitude toward love. David begins each of the three verses with a cheerful proposition, only to reject it out of hand: “Pretty! . . . Well that’s not the way I think of you”; “Happy! . . . Is there time for this?”; “Feelings! . . . Don’t let your feelings get in the way.” “We can talk forever,” he insists as the band grinds to a halt on a sudden, petulant stop-chorus, “but I’m not . . . in . . . love.” After promising not to ask any questions, he proceeds to do just that (“Do people really fall in love?”) before arriving at the apparently hopeful conclusion, “There’ll come a day when we won’t need love.”

Like “The Good Thing” on Side One, “Stay Hungry” makes a case for self-improvement, minus the Maoist edge. The song is the second collaboration on the album between David, who wrote the music, and Chris, who wrote the words, taking the title from the cover of a bodybuilding magazine advertising Arnold Schwarzenegger’s role in the 1976 film of the same name. In its original form, the song included multiple repetitions of its verse, chorus, and release, and seems to have been written as something of a goof, applying highbrow language to lowbrow physicality, with a chorus that repeats the words “stay hungry . . . move a muscle . . . make a motion . . . pull it tighter,” which David, in a nod to Schwarzenegger, sang in a clipped German accent. The recorded version of the song retains the minor-key opening, the major-key chorus, and, at Brian Eno’s urging, little else from the original, dispensing with the German accent, the later verses, and the entire release. In their place comes a hypnotic instrumental vamp and a newly written refrain whose poignant countermelody allows David to breathe a sudden tenderness into the song. “Here’s that rhythm again,” he sings. “Here’s my shoulder blade . . . Here’s the sound I made . . . Here I am.”

Virtually every notable rock singer of the 1960s began as a disciple of rhythm and blues and of a few favorite R&B singers who served as role models of emotional expression and vocal technique. David Byrne began as a willful exception to this rule. Under the influence of Marc Kehoe and Chris Frantz, Byrne had dabbled in Motown and Memphis, but he never seems to have modeled himself on a particular Black singer or style, to the point of making “no singing like a Black man” a founding principle of his band. As Byrne matured as a singer, however, and as Talking Heads dug deeper into the grooves of contemporary Black music, it was only a matter of time before that principle outlived its usefulness.

The Heads had added “Take Me to the River” to their live shows early in 1977, inspired by the way the addition of Jerry Harrison’s organ brought their instrumentation in line with that of the seminal Southern soul band Booker T. & the M.G.’s. They knew the song from Al Green’s upbeat version on his 1974 album, Al Green Explores Your Mind, or possibly from its bluesier cover by Green’s labelmate Syl Johnson, which was a Top 10 R&B hit that same year. David Byrne had been singing “Take Me to the River” for more than a year before he got around to recording it, and his performance became increasingly restrained as time went on. Brian Eno’s contribution was to take this element of restraint to the next level by drastically slowing the tempo and encouraging the band members to simplify their parts. The result was a creative breakthrough that would recalibrate the Heads’ entire approach to the dynamics of rhythm and groove.

Like “Psycho Killer” before it, “Take Me to the River” begins with an ominous jolt of rhythm, as the leaden thud of Chris’s kick drum and his spacey, reverberant snare meld with the steady eighth-note pulse of Tina’s bass to generate a current of sensuality that was missing from the earlier song. They are joined by Jerry’s spiky interjections on organ, David’s harsh scrapes on guitar, and then by David himself, voicing a timeless lament of the blues: “I don’t know why I love you like I do / With all the changes you put me through.” Like his role model Otis Redding, much of Al Green’s emotional power as a singer rested on his ability to turn his aura of confident masculinity into a foil for his vulnerability. This was not a dynamic that David Byrne was in a position to emulate. What David brings to the song instead is an air of convincing desperation. His vocal presence is mesmerizing; between the lower register of his singing and the palpable constraint in his phrasing, his performance draws its strength from the very absence of the quirkiness he was known for. Jerry Harrison practices a similar form of understatement, sounding a pair of thick chords on the last two beats of each two-bar vocal phrase that provide the song with its elegantly simple hook. Jerry then envelops David’s voice in a churchy progression of richly sustained chords as he prevails on his lover to tell him where he stands. “I’d love to stay,” he assures her, couching his plea for romantic deliverance in baptismal terms: “Take me to the river / Drop me in the water / Washing me down.”

“Take Me to the River” was itself a kind of baptism for Talking Heads: their first immersion in the synthesis of sacred and secular that lay at the heart of soul music. Providentially, the song’s release as a single would provide the group with their first real taste of commercial success, rising into the Billboard Top 40 in the fall of 1978. Chris Frantz would later write that David Byrne was so intimidated by the success of the single that he resolved never to record another non-original song. But this did not prevent the song from serving as a watershed for Byrne. The way that most musical artists get good, and good musical artists get great, is by emulating the work of other artists who are better at what they do. It’s no accident that the greatest singer-songwriters of the modern era, from Ray Charles to the Beatles to Bruce Springsteen, all spent many years playing other people’s music, during which they learned to inhabit the songs they sang. In contrast to the experience of artists like these, the immediate recognition that downtown bands like the Ramones, Blondie, and Talking Heads received from New York’s fawning music press meant that none of these groups needed to go through this sort of extended apprenticeship. Most of these bands proved to be so pedestrian that this didn’t matter much either way. But as the most distinctive, ambitious, and willfully original singer-songwriter to emerge from that downtown scene, David Byrne would draw on his privileged lack of experience, time and again, to reinvent the wheel by “discovering” musical possibilities that would have been second nature to more seasoned performers than he.

“The Big Country” is the only song on More Songs About Buildings and Food that mentions buildings or food, taking its title and theme from the lyrics to “Prairie Rose,” an ironic homage to the state of Texas on Roxy Music’s 1974 album Country Life. Here, singing over the earnest thump of white-bread country rock, David turns his account of a flight over the American heartland into an anthem of cosmopolitan chauvinism, while Jerry Harrison’s sweeping swells on slide guitar lend the track both a rural flavor and a panoramic feel. (An early outtake of the song without Jerry’s slide falls completely flat.) David begins by describing a landscape of strip malls, factories, and farmland very much like the place where he grew up in Maryland, lavishing his attention on the schools, parking lots, bars, and restaurants that “work together” to form a way of life. To which he declares in the chorus, “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.” He goes on to deliver this same verdict on the fresh air, neighborly relations, and wholesome bounty (“Look at that kitchen! And all of that food!”) of life in Middle America, and ends the song by affirming its vitriolic viewpoint, deciding, “It’s not even worth talking about those people down there.”

Though “The Big Country” dated from a flight that Byrne took home from the Heads’ gig in Toronto in January 1977 on the eve of Jerry Harrison’s entry into the band, the song is closely related to one of the proudest expressions of parochialism to emerge from New York’s municipal meltdown in the mid-1970s. As an avid reader of The New Yorker, Byrne was undoubtedly familiar with Saul Steinberg’s iconic “View of the World from Ninth Avenue,” which appeared on the cover of the magazine in the spring of 1976: a cartoonish drawing that shows the buildings and streets of the city bustling with life in the foreground, while the rest of the country is depicted, in wildly foreshortened perspective, as an unpopulated patch of green that starts on the far side of the Hudson with a narrow strip of New Jersey, and ends at the Pacific Ocean, with occasional mountains and the names of random cities and states scattered in between. In this sense, the song represented Talking Heads’ most overt identification to date with the metropolitan ethos of New York. In its willingness to write off the rest of the Big Country, the song was greeted with a sense of relief by the many Talking Heads fans who had puzzled over the degree of irony in its obvious precursor, “Don’t Worry About the Government.” Years later, after she had moved to the Connecticut suburbs, Tina Weymouth would disavow “The Big Country” as a “mean-spirited” song that was “tacked on” as an afterthought to the end of Buildings and Food. In fact, it had been a popular staple of Talking Heads’ repertoire for more than a year, and its pride of place as the final track on the album was meant to leave no doubt about the affinity that David Byrne, at least, now felt for his adopted home.

21

Feet on the Ground

No longer merely a New York cult band, no longer even simply the best performing rock group in the city, Talking Heads have entered the commercial mainstream of popular music. But the waters of that mainstream can be perilous. . . . Some of the raw, quirky edges of the lead singer David Byrne’s personality seemed to have been smoothed by a combination of experience and exhaustion. . . . He seemed more at ease with himself onstage. Ordinarily such increased self-confidence would be all to the good, but since much of Mr. Byrne’s music is about anxiety, many of his songs seemed to lose some of their meaning.

—KEN EMERSON, NEW YORK TIMES

Barring an overnight success, the career of an up-and-coming rock recording act in the late seventies followed a fairly predictable path. Most singers and groups sought to release an album every year, which they promoted by performing as often and widely as possible in cities and college towns, and by releasing a strong and representative track from the album as a single in hopes of getting it played on the radio in multiple media markets. Certain venues, cities, and regions of the country would prove to be more hospitable than others, and a well-managed band divided its efforts between fulfilling the expectations of its existing fans and seeking to enlist new ones.

Whether despite or because of their experience with the Ramones, Talking Heads and Gary Kurfirst had resolved to avoid the common promotional strategy of gaining exposure by touring as an opening act for more established and popular bands. (They may also have been influenced by the example of Television, who toured with the progressive rocker Peter Gabriel shortly after their first album was released, to a stony reception from Gabriel’s fans.) While this didn’t prevent the Heads from occasionally sharing a bill with better-known acts, their insistence on performing as nominal headliners did serve to limit the size of the venues they played. But the rock club and concert business had begun to function largely as a promotional arm of the recording industry in the 1970s, as the major record labels, under the rubric of “tour support,” agreed to subsidize the promotional expenses and, in some cases, performance fees of their artists in the interest of publicizing their records. This was not a form of charity. Along with studio costs, these expenditures were deducted from an artist’s record royalties, leading to a situation where many singers and groups wound up deeply in debt to their labels.

With modest support from Warner Bros. Records, Talking Heads spent the five months following the release of More Songs About Buildings and Food on tour, performing some eighty shows at clubs, colleges, and small theaters across the United States. Having learned their lesson the year before, the band scheduled regular breaks in their itinerary, which gave them a chance to unwind and return to New York for several days at a time. Their progress around the country was mirrored by the progress of their album, which entered the Billboard charts at #154 in the second week of August, when they began their tour with a pair of sold-out shows at the Entermedia Theater on Second Avenue.

As part of its tour support, Warners commissioned a twenty-five-minute promotional film of the Heads’ performance at the Entermedia, which served to document the improvement in their playing over the course of 1978. From the opening chords of their first number, “Love → Building on Fire,” their tempos are slower and less anxious, their overall sound more succinct and self-contained. Chris Frantz has further simplified his drumming, playing pounding backbeats with fewer syncopations and fills (apart from his thunderous tom-tom rolls on “Thank You for Sending Me an Angel”). His discretion allows ample space for David Byrne’s choppy chording and Tina Weymouth’s fluid bass lines to supply the rhythmic variation within each song, while Jerry Harrison’s guitar and keyboards, including a newly added synthesizer, provide harmonic reinforcement and textural embellishment. But the biggest improvement in the Entermedia film can be heard in David Byrne’s singing, which has finally begun to show some of the nuance and command of his singing on record. And while the look of the band onstage remained static, with each member rooted in place, they were all beginning to move more sympathetically and even gracefully in time to the music, in contrast to the frozen tableau they had presented in years past.

Having paid their respects to their hometown fans, the Heads spent the remainder of August playing club dates in Boston, Chicago, and Minneapolis as their album climbed into the Billboard Top 100, surpassing the highest ranking of Talking Heads: 77 after less than a month on the charts. Following a break at the start of September, they headed to the West Coast for two weeks of one-nighters in cities from Vancouver to San Diego, with showcases at the Boarding House in San Francisco and the Roxy in Los Angeles along the way. By the time they reached San Diego, More Songs stood at #63. The band then returned east by way of club dates in Tucson, Houston, Austin, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Atlanta. A break in the middle of October was followed by three weeks of shows at clubs and colleges in the Midwest and Northeast, in the course of which More Songs rose to #34 and the single of “Take Me to the River” was released. This was enough to earn them return bookings during the second half of November at the Roxy and the Boarding House, along with additional college dates in California, most notably a free outdoor concert in front of ten thousand fans at UC Berkeley. With their album cresting at #29 and their single moving rapidly up the charts, the Heads finished their tour in the first half of December by playing clubs and small theaters in Texas and the Midwest. A ten-day Christmas break was followed by shows at the Paradise in Boston and the Beacon Theater in New York. By that time, “Take Me to the River” had broken into the Top 40, on its way to a peak of #26 in the weeks ahead.

Talking Heads’ first album had been a critical success for a band that had enjoyed an inordinate amount of critical success from the moment they began. But the sales of More Songs About Buildings and Food and “Take Me to the River” marked their first commercial success in a business that, for all its talk of artistry, worshipped commercial success. It could not have come at a better time.

Sales of records and tapes in the United States had climbed from $2.4 billion in 1975 to $4.1 billion in 1978. The impetus behind this precipitous rise had nothing to do with the negligible sales of punk rock or new wave. It was rather the result of the booming new market for cassettes and eight-track tapes, a posthumous surge in sales of records by Elvis Presley, and the burgeoning popularity of disco, which culminated in the unprecedented success of the soundtrack of the John Travolta film Saturday Night Fever, a double album, priced accordingly, that sold more than thirty million copies worldwide and spun off four #1 singles, three of them by the Bee Gees, in the American market alone. The record industry responded to this bonanza by ramping up its production facilities and marketing operations—only to be confronted in the coming year by a dramatic falloff in sales and massive returns of unsold “product,” as disco fever abruptly gave way to disco fatigue. (For the most part, sales of disco singles did not translate into sales of disco albums.) With the Iranian revolution and the resulting spike in oil prices prompting the first signs of a recession in the economy as a whole, the major record companies panicked at the prospect of soaring overhead and reduced profits in the year ahead, laying off staff and planning drastic reductions in the promotional budgets and tour support of up-and-coming acts.

Compared to competitors like Columbia, whose chairman, Walter Yetnikoff, had recently boasted of his label’s lack of interest in artists who “only” sold one hundred thousand copies of their albums, Warner Bros. had gotten its start in rock with commercially challenged acts like the Grateful Dead, and the label prided itself on its patient nurturing of talent. By 1979, the success of such well-nurtured artists as Fleetwood Mac, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, the Eagles, Rod Stewart, Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt, Van Morrison, and Randy Newman had helped Warners and its partners Atlantic and Elektra-Asylum rival the sales of the longtime industry leader Columbia. In this sense, given the sudden softness in the record market, Talking Heads’ decision to sign with Sire, combined with Seymour Stein’s crucial decision to merge his label with Warners, boded very well for them.

More Songs About Buildings and Food held steady on the Billboard charts during the winter of 1979, while “Take Me to the River” remained in the Top 40 through the end of February. This was enough to earn the Heads an invitation to appear on Saturday Night Live, thereby becoming the first downtown band to perform on the program since Patti Smith in 1976. (The Ramones had foolishly turned down an offer to appear as a last-minute replacement for the Sex Pistols in December 1977, ceding the spot to Elvis Costello, who made the most of it by performing an unscripted version of his anti-media screed “Radio Radio” that got him banned from the show.) Now in its fourth season and nearing the peak of its popularity, SNL had established itself as a fixture of late-night television and a symbol of the resilient cultural power of New York. “A musical shot on the show has become perhaps the most sought-after, prestigious showcase in the nation,” John Rockwell had recently noted in the Times. After a brief introduction by the show’s guest host, the actress Cicely Tyson, the Heads turned in a solid rendition of “Take Me to the River,” followed, later in the broadcast, by “Artists Only.” As seen in close-up, David Byrne’s expression during his clipped, stylized singing on both of these songs had a faintly demonic edge.

That same February, Seymour Stein invited Byrne to join him on a weeklong trip to Trinidad to attend the island’s annual Carnival. David had mentioned to Sire’s label manager Ken Kushnick that he was struggling to come up with new songs, and Kushnick had passed this along to his boss. Stein had vacationed in Trinidad the year before, and he hoped that the spectacle of Carnival and a taste of the island’s calypso culture would serve as a source of musical inspiration. Since Stein’s sexual orientation was an open secret by now, he asked Kushnick to accompany them on the trip to avoid any implication of impropriety. But his solicitude toward David alone, however well intended, did not sit well with the other members of the band.

Later in the month, Talking Heads flew to Los Angeles to tape an appearance on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, the long-running television dance party show, which had been given a fresh lease on life by the disco craze. Amid a playlist of current hits by the Bee Gees, Sylvester, and Cher, the show’s affable, ageless host introduced Talking Heads by explaining that he’d first heard about them from his friend Richard Robinson, the editor of Rock Scene, who had co-written Clark’s memoir a few years before. After the Heads went through the motions of lip-syncing and pantomiming their playing to “Take Me to the River,” Clark attempted to make small talk with David Byrne, who was sporting an Elvis-style spit curl, by asking if the group had been well received on their European tours.

“I thought so,” was David’s terse reply.

“Is he always this enthusiastic?” Clark asked, turning to Tina.

“I guess he’s organically shy,” she said, to a big laugh from the studio audience. Further awkward banter with David, Chris, and Jerry (who looked embarrassed by the whole situation) led Clark back to Tina, who answered his question about the band’s ambitions by suggesting, as demurely as she could, “We want to make our mark on music history.” With that the Heads launched into a convincing simulation of “Thank You for Sending Me an Angel,” while the studio audience clapped along to the record and punctuated their response with a smattering of girlish squeals.

Apart from this trip to Los Angeles, the Heads enjoyed several months of comparative leisure in the winter of 1979, which gave them some time to reconnect with their lives in New York. Jerry Harrison, his girlfriend, and her daughter had recently moved into a loft in Chris and Tina’s building in Long Island City, which now served, more than ever, as the epicenter of the band. David Byrne’s two-year relationship with Mary Clarke had gradually ended during the second half of 1978, prompting David to move from the Upper West Side into a fifth-floor apartment on East Seventh Street, within walking distance of the clubs, galleries, and performance spaces that continued to proliferate in Lower Manhattan. As SoHo filled up with boutiques, restaurants, and weekend tourists, the tendrils of the downtown arts scene were reaching south to TriBeCa, which had recently been rezoned for loft conversion. The area was home to the artist bookstores Printed Matter and Franklin Furnace, the performance venue Artists Space, and a scattering of artists and actors that included Red Grooms, Richard Serra, Elizabeth Murray, and Meryl Streep. But as Mickey Ruskin had learned when he closed the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club in the summer of 1978 and moved uptown to the bustle of University Place, the streets of this once thriving commercial district remained all but deserted after dark. That began to change a few months later, when the Mudd Club opened its doors.

The Mudd Club was the brainchild of a group of scenesters led by Steve Mass, a cultural refugee from Macon, Georgia, whose ownership of a private ambulance service may have prompted him to name the club after Samuel Mudd, the Maryland doctor who went to jail for treating the injured John Wilkes Booth. Inspired by the example of a struggling uptown disco called Hurrah that had recently turned itself around by presenting new wave and punk rock music in a dance club setting, Mass and his partners planned to open a combination “punk-disco” and art bar that would promote the confluence of the downtown music and arts scenes that had occurred as something of a geographical accident in the early days of CBGBs. As it turned out, however, their true inspiration was to fashion the club as a hipster parody of Studio 54, the Dionysian disco in midtown whose celebrity-studded clientele had captured the imagination of the New York press since it opened in a blaze of publicity two years before.

Occupying the lower floors of a corner building on White Street, two blocks south of Canal, the Mudd Club was furnished in a trashy style of thrift-shop chic, and prided itself, from the start, on the squalor of its restrooms. The first floor contained a bar, a dance floor, a collapsible stage, and a DJ booth. The second floor was added a few months later as a lounge for the exclusive use of club regulars and visiting VIPs. The club stayed open from midnight to five or six in the morning, and on most nights, the music was provided by DJs spinning a mix of current and classic rock, pop, R&B, new wave, rockabilly, and reggae—almost anything, at first, except the mechanized groove of contemporary disco. Live music was also presented on a weekly basis, with artists that ranged from new wave groups like Mass’s fellow Georgians the B-52’s to R&B icons like Percy Sledge and Professor Longhair to recycled 1960s stars like Nico and the Shirelles.

While the look, vibe, and location of the Mudd Club were the antithesis of Studio 54, the one hallmark of the midtown disco that Steve Mass retained was its exclusionary door policy, with an industrial steel chain in place of the proverbial velvet rope. Having given out membership cards to dozens of friends and friends-of-friends in the downtown music, art, film, and fashion scenes, Mass’s instructions to his doormen regarding the treatment of non-members varied from night to night. One some nights, they were told to admit suits and turn away punks. On other nights just the opposite. The same went for fat people, short people, bearded people, blond people, and so on down the line. The gatekeepers had to be careful not to turn away actual celebrities, although they were sometimes instructed to make VIPs wait a while before letting them in. Early in the club’s existence, Mass was known to hire limousines to park on the street in front to suggest that rich and famous people were indeed inside.

The success of the Mudd Club came from the understanding that social snobbery was the lifeblood of every New York elite, and that one could attract a genuinely diverse and eclectic group of people by applying this hallowed principle to the burgeoning downtown scene. In addition to eligible musicians, artists, writers, actors, models, designers, and drug dealers, the regulars ranged from young unknowns like the graffiti artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring to gay eminences like Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, and Taylor Mead. On one notable night in the summer of 1979, not long after his indictment for tax evasion, Studio 54’s owner Steve Rubell ventured below Canal to see what the buzz was all about, to be photographed snuggling on a sofa in the VIP lounge with his good friend and fixer, the attorney Roy Cohn.

In addition to its DJs and live bands, the Mudd Club also became known for its campy, invitation-only theme nights, the first of which was a Hawaiian Luau Beach Party, with music by the B-52’s. This was followed on a monthly basis by elaborate productions like the Joan Crawford Mother’s Day Celebration (inspired by the recent publication of her daughter’s harrowing memoir), and the Rock ’n’ Roll Funeral Ball, with a guest list, noted the writer Anthony Haden-Guest, that included a number of people “who would shortly be dead rock stars themselves.” Haden-Guest’s quip alluded to the fact that while the revelry at the Mudd Club was fueled by the same disinhibiting party drugs—alcohol, quaaludes, and cocaine—that prevailed at discos throughout New York, a special distinction of the club was the amount of heroin that would be bought, sold, and consumed there. With the exception of Talking Heads, virtually all of the original downtown bands had at least one hard-core junkie on the team, but the scene at the Mudd Club reflected the rebranding of heroin, on the cusp of the 1980s, as an upscale glamour drug. (For their part, now that they could afford it, Talking Heads had settled on cocaine as their favorite recreational and performance-enhancing drug.)

Talking Heads were on tour when the Mudd Club first opened, and it was not until the winter of 1979 that they became regular patrons of the place. “I come here to get out of my loft,” Chris Frantz told a reporter from the New York Times, adding that he stopped by an average of three nights a week, drawn by the hip ambience and the “weird” music that served to keep “the kids from Brooklyn away.” (Despite his home in Queens, Frantz obviously did not consider himself to be a member of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd.) Making the most of his newfound bachelor status, David Byrne was also a frequent guest in the winter of 1979, especially after Brian Eno returned to town.

Like Talking Heads, Eno had been away from New York when the Mudd Club first opened, but he was well aware of Steve Mass’s plans for the place, having spent much of the previous year living as Mass’s upstairs tenant in a duplex apartment on West Eighth Street. In September 1978, Eno had gone to Switzerland to work on the third of David Bowie’s “Berlin” albums, Lodger. Flush with the success of his production work with Devo and Talking Heads, he played a more assertive role on the album, co-writing half the songs, including a track called “D.J.” on which Bowie turned in an unmistakable imitation of David Byrne. At the end of the year, seeking to extend his sabbatical from the whirlwind of New York, Eno had flown to Bangkok, where he spent the next two months indulging his taste for Thai food and Thai women (“the essence of femininity,” he decided), while listening to a carefully curated selection of Fela Kuti, Beethoven quartets, and Bulgarian chorales.

By the time Eno returned to New York in March to work on the final mixes of Lodger, Talking Heads had begun to rehearse the half-dozen songs, several of them unfinished, that David Byrne had written in recent months. At this point, the Heads were not committed to working with Eno again. At the end of their 1978 tour, as part of a radio promotion, Warner Bros. had commissioned a live recording of a show they played at the Agora Theatre in Cleveland. At Seymour Stein’s urging, the label invited the group to work with their old engineer, Ed Stasium, on mixing the tapes of the show. Instead of striving for a purely live sound, they used this opportunity to embellish some of the tracks by adding studio effects. This had led them to consider the possibility of self-producing their next album.

When David Byrne played him the tapes of the Agora show, Brian Eno was enthralled by what he heard. Compared to the band he had recorded at Compass Point, two things stood out. In the mode of “Take Me to the River,” many of the songs were played at slower, more deliberate tempos that further enhanced the power and solidity of the rhythm section. But the real astonishment was the change in David Byrne. Months and months of touring had given Byrne a new command of both his singing and his guitar. Gone were the yammering interjections and tuneless vocalizing that David had previously fallen back on during the instrumental passages of songs, replaced by a new inventiveness and variety in his guitar playing that verged on soloing while stopping short of the single-note style of conventional lead guitar. Eno was also impressed by the one new song on the Agora tape, “Electricity,” a darkly dissociated number that had the introspective drama of Byrne’s best work.

Encouraged by Eno’s enthusiasm, Talking Heads decided to try recording the basic tracks for their next album, with Eno producing, in the friendly confines of their rehearsal space in Queens, using a remote recording truck provided by the Record Plant studio in Manhattan, which parked on the street outside. To minimize the background noise from the factories and passing trucks in their industrial neighborhood, they confined their work to a pair of Sundays at the end of April and the beginning of May.

22

Fear of Everything

These are mutant times, and Talking Heads are the most human of mutant groups.

—LESTER BANGS

To all outward appearances, the members of Talking Heads seemed to have reached a harmonious accommodation with one another by the spring of 1979. While telltale signs of tension would continue to surface in the press, the shared experience of playing together on a nightly basis and touring together for months on end had a unifying effect on what David Byrne would later characterize as their “little tribe.” His choice of words was telling. For decades on end, the standard musicians-union contract that was filed for every professional engagement contained a line at the bottom that was reserved for the signature of the “leader.” This reflected an assumption about the structure of musical groups: that an orchestra, band, or combo was indeed led by an individual, who employed the other musicians, as needed, to perform the work. And for decades on end, by and large, this assumption held true. Duke Ellington, Bill Monroe, Louis Jordan, Miles Davis, James Brown, and Buddy Holly were indeed the leaders of the bands that carried their names; the rest of their musicians, or “sidemen,” no matter how long they had played in the group or how famous they became in their own right, were their employees. Then came the 1960s. “The Beatles were the first group where it was assumed that the band members were all more or less equal,” David Byrne recalled. “It became a very important item: the band as a whole stood for something, everybody more or less said the same thing, as if the group was on a mission.” Rightly or wrongly, rock groups were presumed to be musical partnerships in which the members held an equal stake. Yet unlike most business partnerships, the members of successful rock groups wound up not only working but also living and traveling together, often for months on end.

More than anything else, it was this constant close proximity that imbued Talking Heads with the “tribal” mentality that David Byrne described. But their sense of camaraderie had a specifically musical dimension as well. In contrast to their early years, when they tended to turn in rote performances of their songs, the Heads were reaching a level of proficiency where they could now engage in a cautious form of collective improvisation onstage. It was still rare for any of them to solo in the usual sense of playing a sustained instrumental part that carried the prominence of a vocal line. And it was almost unheard of for any of them to deviate from the underlying rhythm or harmonic structure. But they had become accomplished at “playing out” on their songs, melding with one another instrumentally over a steady pulse of rhythm, shifting and elaborating their individual parts in new and sometimes surprising ways. The sense of variety and discovery this brought to their live performances generated a feeling of musical intimacy that reinforced their solidarity as a group.

At the same time, there was one way in which the structure of the music business had not changed at all in the era of rock. Prior to the advent of records and radio, songwriters made their living by selling sheet music copies of their songs. This gave music publishers a fifty-year head start in asserting their dominance over the royalty structure of the music business as a whole. When records, radio, and jukeboxes entered the picture, publishers instituted a system of mechanical and performance royalties based on record sales and radio and jukebox plays. But musical copyrights were still based on a format that had remained unchanged since the nineteenth century: a “lead sheet” of musical notation showing the melody, chords, and lyrics of a song. The instrumental accompaniment on a recording was a separate matter. While written arrangements could also be copyrighted, until the late 1970s, the informal and often improvised “head” arrangements that prevailed on the great majority of popular recordings made in the rock era could not. Never mind that a guitar part, bass line, or drumbeat might serve as the distinctive hook of a record. Never mind that the song itself might have been rewritten in the studio in response to a new instrumental part. Songwriting royalties were divided, evenly and exclusively, between the publisher and the person or persons who had written the melody, chords, and lyrics of a song.

This was the great exception to the partnership model of rock groups, including Talking Heads, where it would become a major source of contention as time went on. Notwithstanding their shared musical experience, David Byrne, who was listed as the sole author on all but a handful of songs on their first two albums, received a steady source of publishing income over and above the band’s shared earnings from record royalties and live performance fees. While it took some time for the impact of this to sink in, it had a particular relevance as the group prepared to start work on their third album in the late winter of 1979.

Having exhausted the backlog of songs he composed during the first two years of Talking Heads’ existence, Byrne made lists of possible song topics, many of them identified by one-word titles like “Mind” and “Air” that emphasized their conceptual basis. He also employed a technique that Brian Eno had shown him of recording an instrumental riff and then intuiting melody lines and lyrics by humming and singing over a cassette tape of the track. Eno had originally developed this method of composition because he didn’t play an instrument well enough to accompany himself in real time; Byrne was drawn to it because of the way it allowed him to free-associate on the conceptual themes suggested by the song titles he had adopted in lieu of fully realized lyrics or narrative ideas. By his own account, the results were mixed; he would later say that his initial efforts to write in this manner were successful “half the time.” And indeed, there was a disjointed, half-written quality to the lyrics of many of these new songs.

In the weeks leading up to their first remote recording date, the Heads arranged and rehearsed this new material. They also jammed on a number of instrumental riffs that had not yet been incorporated into any particular song. Once the truck from the Record Plant was parked outside their building, its cables snaking through the windows of their loft, the instrumental tracks were recorded, reviewed, and, in some cases, further refined during the two weeks that elapsed before their second recording date. This time around, the band was not concerned with trying to capture the sound of their live performances. Instead, almost every vocal and instrumental part on the new album would be altered or edited in some way.

With the basic tracks recorded, Eno and the band spent the month of May working at a number of New York studios, overdubbing vocals and instrumental parts and applying electronic effects. At the beginning of June, the Heads left on the first leg of the ambitious tour that Gary Kurfirst had booked for them over the summer. They began with ten dates in New Zealand and Australia, where their second album and their cover of “Take Me to the River” had sold well. After that, on something of a whim, David and Jerry returned to New York to work with Eno on an additional album track that was based on some of the guitar riffs they had recorded in their loft. Chris and Tina flew directly to Europe, where the band reunited at the end of the month for a ten-day tour that began with a show at the annual Roskilde Festival in Denmark and ended at Le Palace theater in Paris. Opening for them on these dates were Gary Kurfirst’s newest clients, the B-52’s, who had just released their first album on Island Records, which included a remake of their novelty single “Rock Lobster.”

Talking Heads’ sets on their summer tour previewed several of the songs on their forthcoming album, which they had decided to call Fear of Music, reviving the title that Jerry Harrison had suggested the year before. Jerry also supervised the design for the album cover, which was modeled on some industrial rubber flooring that Yann Weymouth had installed in sections of his loft. The austere result was a black cardboard sleeve embossed with raised, diamond-shaped ridges that would gradually assume a patina as the album rubbed against its neighbors in a stack or on a shelf. The inner sleeve was David’s idea: a ghostly black-and-white image of a person’s head and shoulders, taken with thermal photographic film.

From Paris, the Heads flew halfway around the world for a weeklong tour of Japan, where their records were becoming increasingly popular in the country’s nascent punk rock scene. Shortly after they returned to New York, they were visited by a production team from The South Bank Show, a London-based television arts program, then in its second season, that would go on to become an institution on British TV. The South Bank crew filmed interviews with each of the band members, scenes of the group rehearsing in their loft, and, in early August, a specially arranged performance at the Mudd Club. These segments were then combined with an abundance of stock footage showing the skyscrapers and dystopian streetscapes of New York in a half-hour film that was scheduled to be broadcast when Talking Heads toured Britain in the fall.

The result was an oddly banal group portrait, especially in the interview segments that showed the individual band members as actual televised talking heads. Asked to characterize their music, Chris Frantz responded in the vaguest possible terms: “I think it’s real city music, even though it’s in the traditional rock ’n’ roll context of a verse and a chorus and a middle eight.” Asked about their low-key stage presence, Tina Weymouth explained, “Everybody knows when somebody takes their shirt off onstage—which is terribly sexy, supposedly—everybody knows nothing’s going to happen more than that. I mean there’s not going to be any more sex after that. It’s just a teaser. And I think we just want to avoid those kinds of things because we’re too embarrassed to do it ourselves.” On a more substantive level, Jerry Harrison addressed the role of contradiction in the band’s music. “We write songs that have a particular point of view, and we’re not worried if the next song has the opposite point of view,” Jerry explained. “We don’t really want to have a manifesto or an ideology. I think it’s more important for people to seek some sort of truth on their own.” “A lot of music on the radio seemed to deal with love and life in general in rather mythic terms,” David Byrne added. “Everything was happening on a grand scale, and every trip down the highway was some huge experience. I thought, That’s a little bit out of proportion. People are really going to be disappointed.”

Tina Weymouth’s professions of sexual modesty were themselves contradicted around this time by the publication of an unfortunate interview the band had given a few months before to a writer named Scott Cohen, who worked for the men’s magazine Oui, a spin-off of Playboy that was ostensibly geared to a younger, hipper audience. “In an apparent effort to kill their reputation as a thinking man’s New Wave band, Talking Heads agreed to the following interview,” the piece began. Though Cohen could barely get a word out of David, Chris, or Jerry, Tina made up for their reticence, seizing on the invitation to act like one of the boys. In response to Cohen’s first question, “Who was the first pop star you wanted to fuck?” she eagerly took the bait: “When I started to get boy crazy, the Beatles came out, but I thought they were prickless. I guess Mick Jagger was the first, but I would want to fuck Marianne Faithfull just as much.” She went on to answer Cohen’s questions about the size and shape of her breasts, the sort of men who found her attractive, and her favorite word for penis: “I like cock. I don’t like prick or dick. For a girl I like pussy. That’s very sweet.” In the past, Tina had been unsparing in her criticism of David for making awkward or inappropriate remarks to the press. But by the time the Oui piece appeared, it was David who had decided that, going forward, he would no longer participate in interviews with the other members of the band.

Fear of Music went on sale in the United States, Britain, and Europe at the beginning of August. The first reviews appeared within days of its release, led by John Rockwell in the Times, who celebrated the marked improvement in David Byrne’s singing. “Mr. Byrne has learned to control and exploit his vocal idiosyncrasies so that he can project rather than distract from his image,” Rockwell wrote. “What’s new,” he added, “is the raw passion of many of the songs.” Writing from London in NME, Paul Rambali also praised the growing confidence of Byrne’s writing and singing, but complained that “Talking Heads don’t sound like a band on this record. They sound like a band playing Byrne’s songs.” Rambali’s reservations were not shared by his colleagues in the British music press; both NME and Melody Maker named Fear of Music as their “album of the year” for 1979.

Lester Bangs submitted a rambling eight-thousand-word exegesis of the album’s lyrics to the Village Voice, which the paper’s editors wrestled into a fourteen-hundred-word review. Bangs’s piece was notable for its suggestion that “Fear of Music might as well have been called Fear of Everything,” such was the pervasiveness of the paranoia with which it viewed the world. The unifying premise of David Byrne’s songs, he wrote, was that “to feel anxiety is to be blessed by the full wash of life. . . . Crazy is simply your birthright, signifying citizenship in the human race.” Bangs was speaking for many Talking Heads fans who expressly identified with the aura of neurosis around the group, and who saw the character that David Byrne portrayed in “Psycho Killer” as an exaggeration, but only an exaggeration, of forms of psychological distress that closely mirrored their own. Though the expression of extreme emotions was commonplace in contemporary rock, Byrne’s ability to articulate his anxiety and alienation in psychological rather than romantic terms gave the Heads’ music a novel appeal to people in their twenties and early thirties for whom the traditional role of popular music as a form of emotional and sexual education had lost its currency. This was not “another posturing clown yammering away about his baby.” For listeners like Lester Bangs, this was an urban cliff-dweller like himself, struggling to retain his sanity in a world that was out to get him at every turn.

23

This Ain’t No Party

I didn’t mean for it to be so frightening. I was hoping it would be more melancholy. Closer to the kind of melancholy that you feel to the songs that are on The Threepenny Opera—only with a beat.

—DAVID BYRNE

Fear of Music begins with “I Zimbra,” the title given to the track that David Byrne and Jerry Harrison returned to New York to work on with Brian Eno in the midst of their summer tour. The instrumental backing of the song was pieced together in the studio from a series of guitar riffs that reflected Byrne’s growing fascination with the Afrobeat recordings by Fela Kuti that he and Eno had sought out over the past year. These riffs were strung together over a foursquare backing of bass drum and hi-hat that was embellished by a pair of unnamed conga drummers whom Byrne and Eno encountered in Washington Square Park and recruited to play on the track. In Tina’s absence, David played bass, and Eno invited his friend Robert Fripp, the former guitarist in the progressive rock group King Crimson, to overdub an otherworldly part using his signature tape-delay effect—otherwise known as “Frippertronics”—which turned the guitar into a synthesizer-like tone generator.

In the early going, however, David was at a loss to come up with lyrics that would turn this studio confection into something that sounded like a song. It was then that Eno drew on his working knowledge of the modernist avant-garde and suggested that they use “Gadji Beri Bimba,” a nonsense poem written by Hugo Ball, the German pacifist who founded the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich as a crucible of the Dada movement. One of the early affectations of Dada was “les chants negres,” which sought to dabble in the exoticism that colonial Europeans associated with the “dark continent” of Africa. Written in 1916, Ball’s poem was such a work, whose opening lines Eno and Byrne, joined by an assistant engineer on the session named Julie Last, sang as a syncopated chant that repeats with suitably nonsensical variations throughout the track.

Capped by a cawing three-note trill that evokes a “jungle” ambience worthy of a Tarzan film, “I Zimbra” presents with a racing pulse of kick drum and congas embroidered by a sinuous strand of sixteenth notes on guitar. Next comes the sound of voices, chanting: “Gad . . . ji . . . beri / Bim . . . ba . . . glan-dri-di / Lau . . . li . . . lonni / Ca . . . do . . . ri-gad-jam.” They continue in this vein through two verses, when the voices yield to a fluster of guitar chords and a series of deep groans from the bass that seem to bend the whole song on its axis. As the opening track on a new album by a band whose sound was familiar to its listeners by now, the effect is akin to that of arriving in a foreign country and encountering the familiar cadences of speech rendered in an unintelligible tongue. It’s one thing to encourage people to rely less on their need to verbalize; it’s another thing to force them to do so. And that is what “I Zimbra” does, driving the point home in the interludes where everything but the rhythm drops out, awaiting the return of the incomprehensible chanting, whose sheer insistence assumes an edge of proud defiance as the beat goes on.

Both of Talking Heads’ previous albums began with short, upbeat, musically powerful love songs that bore little relation to the tracks that followed them; Fear of Music conforms to that pattern in a different way. “I Zimbra” is such a novelty that it begs the question of what comes next. The answer turns out to be a trio of conceptually abstract songs, each of them identified by a one-word title. “Mind” is the first of these constructs, this one focused on the immutability of human nature. “Time won’t change you / Money won’t change you,” David sings in a world-weary voice over a plodding rhythm leavened by flurries of muted guitar. “I need something to change your mind,” he repeats three times in the chorus, where the song title echoes portentously at the end of each line. “Mind” is the only track on Fear of Music that might be construed as a love song, on the assumption that a change of mind could mean a change of heart. The later verses add drugs, religion, and science to the list of futile inducements, but after David concedes, “Looks like I can’t change you,” his lack of conviction when he mouths the line, “And it comes directly from my heart to you,” suggests that the mind in need of changing might very well be his own.

After “Mind” comes “Paper,” heralded by a fanfare of ringing guitar notes that reminded one reviewer of the atmospheric opening of the Beatles’ hallucinatory classic “Rain.” Marshall McLuhan’s credo that the medium is the message was a cornerstone of conceptual art; in the case of “Paper,” the song may well have been inspired by the blank page of a notebook and the need to fill it with words. “Hold the paper up to the light,” David sings with an air of rapt assurance, noting, “Some rays pass right through.” Then Chris’s hammering quarter notes deliver the song to the refrain, where David asserts the need to “hold on to that paper” time and time again. “Had a love affair, but it was only paper,” he sings when the verse returns.

To say the least, writing like this posed a challenge to listeners conditioned by the colloquial conventions of popular song lyrics. “Paper” holds its one-word title up to the light to parse it for all of its possible meanings as a material, a medium, and a metaphor. The result is a kind of conceptualist joke: a song about what it takes to write a song. The reference to a love affair promises to restore it to the realm of pop convention, but the promise doesn’t hold. Instead, the last verse returns to the realm of documentation. “Though it was never written down,” David allows, there’s “a chance that it might work out.” Or maybe not. “Go ahead and tear it up,” he eventually decides, leaving us with a song that, by design, is nothing more or less than the paper it’s written on.

From “Route 66” to “I’ve Been Everywhere” to “Dancing in the Street,” the transience of the music business (and the desire to appeal to multiple media markets) has inspired a long line of singing travelogues. Set to the groove of Tina’s burbling, skeptical bass line and Chris’s pummeling rolls, the itinerary of “Cities” is more constrained, confining itself to three cities that no one in their right mind would ever associate with one another. (A fourth verse set “down El Paso way” was cut when the track was mixed.) After a slow fade-in to the whine of car alarms, David starts with “London, a small city,” home to a mere seven million residents, a place so dark and quiet, he notes, “people sleep in the daytime” there. Next on his quest to “find myself a city to live in” is Birmingham, though whether he means the one in Britain (where Talking Heads had played) or Alabama (where they had not) is anybody’s guess. As a Randy Newman fan, Byrne may have been thinking of the eponymous song on Newman’s Good Old Boys, though his sense of the place has nothing to do with its legacy of steel mills and segregation. Instead he informs his listeners, “Look over there: a dry ice factory / A good place to get some thinking done.” It’s one of the wittiest lines on the album, and it sets a standard of geographic absurdity that runs through the rest of the song. Coming from a narrator who insists he’s “got it figured out,” the real joke, it seems, is that this would-be urban adventurer hasn’t got a clue. “Did I forget to mention Memphis?” he asks in the final verse, “home of Elvis and the ancient Greeks?” Well, Elvis was an Adonis, and the Greeks did rule over Egypt, thanks to Alexander the Great. But like any New Yorker adrift in the heartland, David is mainly interested in sampling the local cuisine. “Do I smell home cooking?” he wonders, before realizing that it’s only the funk of the Mississippi River as it rushes past the town.

“Cities” sets the stage for Fear of Music’s tour de force. On an album filled with abstract wordplay, “Life During Wartime” delivers a torrent of seamless narrative set to a deadpan melody and an urgent two-chord vamp. “Psycho Killer” took on added meaning in New York thanks to the media circus surrounding Son of Sam. In “Life During Wartime,” David returns to the realm of social pathology, inhabiting the persona of an urban guerrilla modeled on radical groups like the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army. The lyrics are informed by allusions to the history of these groups, from the Weathermen bomb factory that blew up a brownstone in Greenwich Village to the shootout with police in Los Angeles that ended the SLA.

Unlike the milquetoast maniac of “Psycho Killer,” the protagonist of “Life During Wartime” is brimming with a sense of purposeful self-importance. “Heard of a van that’s loaded with weapons, packed up and ready to go,” David begins. “Heard of some gravesites out by the highway, a place where nobody knows.” Nobody, that is, except for the people who know where the proverbial bodies are buried. “This ain’t no party! This ain’t no disco!” he scolds in the chorus, his voice rising into a squeak over the second of the song’s two chords. “This ain’t no fooling around!”

Indeed, while his contemporaries sink into a stupor of disco dancing and “lovey-dovey,” this political fugitive with his “three passports and a couple of visas” is prepared to fight the power by any means necessary. Like the Londoners in “Cities,” he sleeps in the daytime and works in the nighttime, maintaining an itinerant lifestyle not unlike that of a rock group on tour. And sure enough, the second time through the chorus, the song hits closer to home. “This ain’t no Mudd Club!” David sings, “Or CBGB! I ain’t got time for that now!”

Talk about the road not taken. “Life During Wartime” was first performed at the Mudd Club, shortly before Fear of Music was released, which allowed that coterie of downtown hipsters to sing along with the chorus in the very place it was not. And though the song takes pains to emphasize that the revolution is not a form of entertainment (“Ain’t got no speakers, ain’t got no headphones, ain’t got no records to play”), the pounding musical backing does sound a lot like the soundtrack to a party, a disco, and people fooling around. David shifts his form of address from “I” to “we” in the later verses, while the affinities between a rock group and a sleeper cell start to pile up, beginning with a Vandella-like itinerary of heartland cities: “Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit? Heard about Pittsburgh PA?” “We dress like students, we dress like housewives,” he adds, recalling the New Conservative look of early Talking Heads.

The undercurrent of dread that runs through Fear of Music surfaces with a vengeance at the end of Side One in the song called “Memories Can’t Wait,” an interior monologue that conjures a nightmarish vision of being trapped in one’s own head. “Do you remember anyone here?” David asks himself in the opening verse, over the metallic clamor of grating, slashing guitars. “No,” he answers, dead to the world, “you don’t remember anything at all.” The high-pitched squeal of audiotape rewinding brings on the chorus of this fiercely conflicted song, and the harmony erupts into a rising progression of groggy major chords. “There’s a party in my mind,” David sings, “And I hope it never stops.”

The second verse begins with an invitation to “take a walk through the land of shadows,” whose “peaceful meadows” fail to live up to his hopes. “Don’t look so disappointed,” David tells himself, before plunging back into the chorus, where his voice assumes an edge of real hysteria, rising to a shriek on the line, “I’ll be here all the time, I can never quit!” And then the torment seems to lift in the song’s release, giving way to a quiet space in which the party is over and the rest of the world has gone to sleep. “I’m wide awake on memories,” David sings as he arrives at the title line, “These memories can’t wait.” As his voice recedes into the maw of the music, he repeats those words again and again as the first side of Fear of Music comes to a close.

Side Two begins with a chorus of women’s voices whose soothing undulations really do sound like a breath of fresh “Air”—the title of the track—after the angst of “Memories Can’t Wait.” The voices belong to Tina Weymouth and her sisters Laura and Lani, but the sweetness of their singing is a setup for David’s entrance, muttering to himself over cartoonishly bent synth notes as he prepares to do battle with the Earth’s atmosphere. “What is happening to my skin?” he asks before sounding the warning that “Air can hurt you too.” The threat posed by the air we breathe is a paranoid’s delight, but David’s cranky, distracted delivery prevents the song from expressing any serious ecological intent. “Air” is a musically seductive track with an amusingly phobic premise, but much like “Paper,” there’s a one-dimensionality to its lyric that leaves it nowhere to go.

“When we die, there is a party in Heaven,” David Byrne wrote on a childhood drawing that his parents hung on the wall. The word “party” occurs three times on Fear of Music. In “Life During Wartime,” it’s what the life of an urban guerrilla is not. In “Memories Can’t Wait,” it’s an internalized state of mind. And in “Heaven,” the most poignant song on the album, it describes the scene at a popular bar, where the house band plays the same “favorite song” all night long, and the current moment repeats itself with such a sense of regularity that, as David sings approvingly in the chorus, “nothing ever happens.” In the bar called Heaven, variety is assuredly not the spice of life. On the other hand, as a vision of eternity, it has a certain appeal.

Musically, “Heaven” was as close as Talking Heads had come to the warhorse of pop, the Big Ballad (as the Beatles jokingly called it): a powerful melodic statement with an affecting emotional theme. Songs like this had been anathema to the punk scene, and they remained rare among the proponents of new wave music, not least because so few new wave singers had the vocal ability to sing them. (One of the first signs of Elvis Costello’s punk apostasy was his stunning performance of “Alison” on My Aim Is True.) David Byrne’s inspiration for the track, he liked to say, came from a pair of Neil Young albums from the mid-seventies, Tonight’s the Night and Zuma. While there’s no obvious antecedent of “Heaven” on those albums of country-rock, the sound of Young’s high, thin voice had certain obvious affinities for Byrne, whose singing lifts a full octave in the chorus of the song, cresting on the line, “Heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.” David sings the word “nothing” with an almost prayerful tone, and he returns to the word in the second verse, where he anticipates his listeners’ incredulity by admitting, “It’s hard to imagine that nothing at all / Could be so exciting, could be so much fun.”

“I’m mad, and that’s a fact,” David declares at the start of “Animals.” The first joke in this very funny song is that he’s referring to his temper, not his sanity. “Animals” began as an attempt to refute the myth of the noble savage; sensing that a song satirizing the innate goodness of so-called primitive peoples might not go over so well in 1979, Byrne set his sights on the animal kingdom instead. Suitably disinhibited, he let his wit roam freely over the steady, stamping beat. “Animals think they’re pretty smart / They shit on the ground / See in the dark,” he shouts in a voice that sounds as if it’s coming from the next room. “They’re never there when you need them / They never come when you call them,” he adds over an off-kilter riff in 7/4 time in the song’s refrain. Having arrived at the ultimate affront—“The animals are laughing at us,” though “they don’t even know what a joke is”—David deepens his voice into a double-tracked grunt in the coda, where he takes the pathetic fallacy as far as it can go: “They say they don’t need money . . . They think they know what’s best . . . They’re setting a bad example . . . They’re making a fool of us.”

There were no viable outtakes associated with the Fear of Music sessions; even with the last-minute addition of “I Zimbra,” the Heads needed every track they recorded to fill out the album. That provides at least some justification for “Electric Guitar,” which has to rank among the very worst songs they would ever record. A lumbering musical contrivance, it tries and fails to construct a satiric narrative about an electric guitar being tried in a court of law. Even the novelist Jonathan Lethem, who wrote an entire book about his adolescent obsession with Fear of Music, began his chapter on the track by writing, “Not so bad for the official worst song on the album. . . . The whole air is drunken, misguided, deranged, but rather harmlessly so.”

The last song on Fear of Music was called “Electricity” when Talking Heads performed it on tour in the fall of 1978. But when the advent of “Electric Guitar” made that title redundant, Byrne and Eno took it upon themselves to drastically deconstruct the track, renaming it “Drugs” and stripping away the original instrumentation until all that remained was a snare drum and a snippet of guitar. In its reconstituted form, “Drugs” begins with an ambient backdrop of chirping birds and a spaced-out intro of stop-start bass and synthesizer that lasts for more than a minute until an ethereal shower of notes brings David into the song. “All I see is little dots / Some are smeared and some are spots,” he begins, his murky voice echoing crazily at the end of each line as he recoils from the light of day. “I’m all charged up! Don’t put me down!” he huffs in the chorus, with a breathless, coked-up intensity befitting his drug of choice. After a flashback to the clueless Boys and Girls who filled the Heads’ early songs, “Drugs” ends as it began, with a minute and a half of spacey synthesizer, the occasional croak of a bullfrog, and a wrenching motif of guitar.

In his commentary on Fear of Music, Jonathan Lethem compared the last track on each side of the album to its counterpart on Revolver, the Beatles’ milestone of acid rock. The comparison seems especially apt in the case of “Drugs,” not only because its analog on Revolver, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” was inspired by John Lennon’s experiences on LSD, but also because the revolutionary recording techniques the Beatles employed on that track prefigured the experimentalism of their work on Sgt. Pepper in the year ahead. “Drugs” marked a similar milestone in the evolution of Talking Heads: the point where David Byrne and Brian Eno bonded so deeply over their shared fascination with the compositional possibilities of the recording process that they felt a need to eliminate the musical presence of the rest of the band before they could even begin. At the time, the results were auspicious. In the long run, not so much.

24

Two Fourteen-Year-Old Boys

We do a short tour of Germany and England, and then I think it’s time to stop and think about things for a while. I like performing and touring, but the drawback is that it’s so time consuming and physically exhausting I can’t work on anything else. I can’t write songs. It’s a shame, but it seems I can’t do two things at once.

—DAVID BYRNE, NOVEMBER 1979

After playing a series of dates in the Northeast that gave them a chance to integrate the songs from Fear of Music into their repertoire, culminating in a sold-out show at the Wollman Rink in Central Park with the B-52’s, Talking Heads flew to Edinburgh at the start of September to perform at a rock festival on a bill with Van Morrison, the Birmingham-based reggae group Steel Pulse, and the English new wave band Squeeze. They then returned to the United States and set off on a grueling national tour that saw them play fifty-five shows in ten weeks with only occasional days off along the way. Fear of Music sold briskly as they traveled across the country, rising to #33 on the Billboard charts by the middle of September, peaking at #22 the month after that. But the single that Warners released from the album, “Life During Wartime,” fared less well, rising only as high as #80 by the beginning of November before quickly fading away. After returning to New York the week before Thanksgiving, the Heads closed out the year and the decade with a three-week tour of Britain, France, and Germany.

As Chris Frantz recalled in his memoir, at the tour’s last date in Berlin, a Czech reporter who had just interviewed David Byrne asked Chris and Tina what they were planning to do now that Byrne was “leaving the band.” In a manner reminiscent of Tina’s account of her “audition” on the eve of their signing with Sire, Chris maintained that he and Tina never discussed this incident with David, writing it off as yet another example of his “hurtful behavior.” If so, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that whatever David said to a foreign reporter might have been misconstrued. Around this same time, Nick Kent published a profile of Byrne in New Musical Express in which he quoted “someone close to the band” that Talking Heads “were due to take a lengthy sabbatical, commencing very soon. No permanent break-up, just an extended holiday for a band who’ve been relentlessly working ever since the deal with Sire was signed.” This would prove to be exactly what David had in mind, but here again, his failure to discuss it with the others reflected the climate of miscommunication that prevailed within the group.

As it was, David saw little of his bandmates after they returned to New York. This was not unusual; he lived in the East Village, Chris, Tina, and Jerry lived in Queens, and apart from their shared affection for the Mudd Club, they were no longer in the habit of socializing with one another away from work. Back in August, on the eve of the Fear of Music tour, Brian Eno had invited David and Chris to play with Robert Fripp and a bassist named Busta Jones on a session at RPM, a boutique studio just south of Union Square that appealed to Eno’s epicurean tastes in technology and décor. (The studio was owned by the electronic composer Robert Mason, a pioneer of the polyphonic synthesizer.) This session, which resulted in a groove-based track called “Regiment,” ostensibly marked the start of work on Eno’s next solo album.

Around this same time, Eno got together with a trumpeter named Jon Hassell, whom he had met at a “New Music” festival at the Kitchen earlier in the summer. Now in his early forties, Hassell was a veteran of the modernist avant-garde. He had performed with Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young, and studied (like Riley and Young) with the North Indian vocal master Pran Nath, whose haunting tonalities influenced his trumpet playing on a pair of critically acclaimed albums he had made in the late seventies. After Eno introduced Hassell to David Byrne, the trumpeter began familiarizing the two of them with some of the ethnographic recordings that had influenced his work. In the fall of 1979, while Talking Heads were on tour, Eno and Hassell recorded an album called Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics, which integrated Eno’s synthesizer textures into Hassell’s multicultural sonic stew.

Eno’s fascination with all things African had increased exponentially over the course of 1979. As he explained it to a reporter from New Musical Express: “Well, the truth is it was through two things: African music and the Black women I met. Seeing people who never have any doubts that sexuality was a thing of the mind and body, not just the body and not just the mind. And that the universe was a place charged with erotic possibilities—that’s really the sense I get and it seems the sense they have.” Eno was able to find a form of intellectual justification for his eroticized Afrophilia in the pages of African Art in Motion, the catalogue for a 1974 exhibition of African art and dance at the National Gallery in Washington. Both the exhibition and its catalogue were the work of an art history professor at Yale named Robert F. Thompson, who would go on to earn a reputation as a preeminent Western scholar of the African cultural diaspora. A Texan whose life was transformed by his exposure to Afro-Cuban music at a young age, Thompson wrote incisively about the parallels between African music, dance, social life, and spirituality. African Art in Motion became a touchstone for both Eno and Byrne.

On New Year’s Eve, as the 1970s came to a close, Eno flew to California to deliver a lecture he had written, “The Recording Studio as a Compositional Tool,” to students at Berkeley and UCLA. Before he left, he told the journalist Richard Williams that he was looking forward to spending a year “in seclusion” on the West Coast. Instead, he checked into the Sunset Marquis Hotel in Los Angeles and invited David Byrne and Jon Hassell to join him there to work on a “faux-ethnographic” recording project the three of them had discussed. Hassell couldn’t afford to make the trip, but Byrne could, arriving in LA in February and renting an apartment in Venice Beach. After booking time at Eldorado Studios in Hollywood, Eno and Byrne enlisted a pair of accomplished percussionists, Prairie Prince and Mingo Lewis, to work with them on a series of rhythm-based improvisations. Prince was the drummer in the San Francisco rock group the Tubes, who happened to be staying at Eno’s hotel; Lewis was known for his work with the guitarists Carlos Santana and Al Di Meola. Assisting them at Eldorado was a young engineer named Dave Jerden; among the studio’s attractions was a prototype of the Linn Drum Computer, the first “drum machine” that utilized actual samples of percussion instruments and effects.

During their stay in California, both Byrne and Eno were reading a newly published book with the weighty title African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms. The author was a thirty-three-year-old ethnomusicologist from Pittsburgh named John Chernoff, who had spent most of the 1970s studying with master drummers in the West African nation of Ghana. In his opening chapters, Chernoff recounted his own initiation into the culture of African drumming as a way of examining the pervasive role of rhythm as an aesthetic and organizing principle in African music and society.

David Byrne would later say that he enjoyed the book so much that he read it twice, and as Chernoff himself made clear, the musical concepts he was describing needed to be revisited time and again before a Western reader could begin to make sense of them. Considering that neither Byrne nor Eno had a background in drumming or the ability to read musical notation, Chernoff’s detailed analysis of African polyrhythms was of limited value to them. But the general principles he articulated about the rhythmic basis of African music were easily grasped. In Western music, Chernoff wrote, “Rhythm is something we follow. [It] is counted evenly and stressed on the main beat, and we have the special word ‘syncopation’ to refer to the shifting of the ‘normal’ accents to produce an uneven or irregular rhythm.” In the call-and-response format of most African music, by contrast, “there are always at least two rhythms going on, [and] the main beat comes at the end of a phrase, not its beginning, signaling the start of the response, not the call. Instead of following the beat, the drummers play toward the beat.”

Chernoff likened this polyrhythmic interplay to a conversation, subject to the same dynamics of reciprocity that make for any good conversation: “A good rhythm, if it is to enhance itself, should both fill a gap in other rhythms and create an emptiness that may be similarly filled.” He also emphasized the role of repetition as “the key factor which focuses the organization of the rhythms in an ensemble.” Simply put, while it’s one thing to repeat a two-bar rhythmic pattern four times in the typical eight-bar verse of a Western pop song, repeating that same pattern thirty-two or sixty-four or an indeterminate number of times generates an entirely different form of musical tension, stemming from a buildup of expectation about if and when that seemingly relentless rhythm will change to something else.

Chernoff noted that many of the concepts of syncopation, repetition, and release that he described were pervasive in African American, Latin American, and Afro-Cuban popular music. The African predilection for rhythms that fall on offbeats rather than downbeats was familiar to Western listeners from its migration into blues, jazz, gospel, and the backbeat drumming of rock and R&B. The same was true of the call-and-response patterns of singing and horn arranging, as heard in gospel, big band jazz, and soul music. James Brown, in particular, had been refining his own synthesis of these concepts since the mid-1960s, and Brown’s application of them to Western instrumentation had in turn exerted an enormous influence on Afropop innovators like Fela Kuti and Sunny Adé.

Another aspect of African Rhythm and African Sensibility that had a strong impact on Byrne and Eno was its examination of the role of music in the social, aesthetic, and moral context of Ghanian culture as a whole. In a long chapter called “Style in Africa,” Chernoff elucidated the essential link between musical aesthetics and moral conduct. “To Ibrahim,” he wrote of his drum teacher, “my education in African music was an education in my awareness of spiritual and ethical principles, the prerequisites of the clear mind and experienced judgment I would need to play really well. As Ibrahim told me, patience and sense are necessary to bring one’s power to the service of form and beauty, and balance through dialogue is essential for the avoidance of overstatement and isolation. Without balance and coolness, the African musician loses aesthetic command, and the music abdicates its social authority, becoming hot, intense, limited, pretentious, overly personal, irrelevant, and ultimately alienating.”

For David Byrne and Brian Eno, it was hard to ignore the extent to which “hot, intense, limited, pretentious, overly personal, irrelevant, and ultimately alienating” sounded like a critique of many varieties of Western popular music, beginning with hard rock, punk, and disco. Chernoff made much of the fact that “It was sweet” is the universal African term of aesthetic approval, sweetness being the essential antidote to the harsh realities of daily life. “The feelings the music brings may be exhilarating, but not overpowering,” he wrote. “Ecstasy as we see it would imply for most Africans a separation from all that is good and beautiful, and generally, in fact, any such loss of control is viewed by them as tasteless, ridiculous, or even sinful.”

By the end of March, having laid the groundwork for more than a dozen instrumental tracks, Byrne and Eno had had their fill of Los Angeles. (Byrne was particularly affronted by the laid-back vibe of Venice Beach.) Seeking a change of scene, but not yet ready to return to New York, they moved up the coast to San Francisco in hopes of finishing the album there. They had agreed by now that the record would be released under both of their names, and that neither of them would sing on it. Instead, they began to overlay the instrumental tracks with “found” vocals derived from commercial and ethnographic recordings and broadcasts they had taped off the radio. Eno’s selections centered on his newfound enthusiasm for Arabic singing, as heard on records by a pair of Lebanese pop singers, Samira Tewfik and Dunya Younes, and a congregation of Algerian Muslims chanting verses from the Quran. He also drew on looped snatches of dialogue from radio talk shows. David Byrne picked up on this idea and focused his selections on sermons by radio evangelists, whose unhinged delivery of otherwise repressive messages had a special fascination for him. (“It’s hard to reconcile the fact that these guys are going absolutely berserk while they’re telling everyone to behave themselves.”)

On a visit to the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, Byrne came across an out-of-print novel called My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. The book was written by the Nigerian author Amos Tutuola, whose first novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, was considered a landmark in postcolonial literature. While neither Byrne nor Eno actually read the book, they decided to appropriate its evocative title as the name of their album.

Though My Life in the Bush of Ghosts began as a Brian Eno solo project, Eno was not under contract to any record label, and he and David Byrne had personally financed the sessions in California. Fortunately, Byrne’s involvement and Eno’s reputation were enough to convince Seymour Stein to agree to release the album on Sire. But in the era before digital sampling transformed the concept of authorship in the music business, the use of found and prerecorded material presented Sire’s parent company, Warners, with a set of legal hurdles, since copyright permissions had to be obtained for the use of all the non-original material. What began as a mere delay turned into a major impediment when the estate of the Pentecostal faith healer Kathryn Kuhlman, who had died in 1976, refused to grant permission for the use of her voice on a track called “Into the Spirit World.” While Eno and Byrne mulled the question of whether to replace or revise the track, Sire became concerned that the delayed release of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts might conflict with the release of the next Talking Heads album. Since there was no comparison between the commercial prospects of the two records, this led the label to put Bush of Ghosts on hold.

The three months he spent working with Brian Eno in California were a transformative experience for David Byrne. He had always relied on other people to orchestrate situations in which his creativity could thrive. But because Byrne had never regarded these facilitators as his artistic equals, his attempts to collaborate with them were ambivalent and unavailing. Playing in Talking Heads had obviously involved a significant amount of musical collaboration—but only up to a point, since the dynamic of the group required the other members to show a lot of reflexive deference toward the lead singer and songwriter on whom their existence depended. As David explained it in 1977 to the British writer Caroline Coon, “I always wanted to be a collaborative writer [but] I haven’t been able to communicate what I wanted and I’ve never taken up suggestions anyway. I’d want them, but when I got them I never thought they were right.”

Working one-on-one with Brian Eno changed that in a big way. Eno was more than Byrne’s equal on an intellectual level, and he was able to articulate his ideas and intuitions with an eloquence that Byrne, at this point, lacked. For all his intelligence and imagination, however, Eno’s lack of instrumental ability and practical musical knowledge had always required him to rely on others to execute his musical ideas. The months they spent together in California served as a crash course in the possibilities and protocols of artistic collaboration that would fundamentally alter the course of David Byrne’s career.

The effect of this was plainly evident when the two of them returned to New York—Byrne at the end of April, Eno in early July, after spending two months back home in England. During their absence, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth had traveled in the Caribbean, visiting Haiti, where they witnessed a vodou ceremony and acquired a set of hand drums, and Jamaica, where Gary Kurfirst had arranged for them to meet Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, the drum-and-bass duo whose playing with Peter Tosh and others had revolutionized reggae rhythm during the second half of the 1970s. “We’d give each other ego massages,” Tina told the journalist Richard Grabel, throwing all modesty to the winds. “Hey, the best rhythm sections in the world!” Turning to the subject of Byrne and Eno, Tina told Grabel, “By the time they finished working together for three months they were dressing like one another. They’re like two 14-year-old boys making an impression on one another.” Though she couched her anxiety in the condescension she liked to adopt with Byrne, Weymouth was right to feel threatened by the intensity of the collaboration that had blossomed in California.

Jerry Harrison had spent the winter and spring of 1980 producing demo sessions for the R&B singer Nona Hendryx in Philadelphia and recording with a generic new wave band from Canada called the Escalators. His involvement with both of these projects came at the invitation of Brian Eno’s friend and associate, the bassist Busta Jones. Born in Memphis in 1951, Jones began his peripatetic career in the early seventies by touring with the great electric bluesman Albert King, who had a devoted following in Britain. In 1973, this led Jones to move to London and join a hard-rock band called Sharks, which was led by the guitarist Chris Spedding and signed to Island Records. After touring as an opening act for Roxy Music, Spedding and Jones were among the contingent of musicians Brian Eno recruited to play on his first solo album. A year later, Jones returned to the United States and formed a power trio called White Lightnin’ with a fellow Albert King alumnus, the guitarist Donald Kinsey. The group’s only album, also on Island, was produced by Gary Kurfirst’s former boss Felix Pappalardi.

In 1978, after Kinsey left to play with Peter Tosh, Jones moved to Montreal, affected the pimpish persona of Busta “Cherry” Jones, and jumped on the disco bandwagon with a crassly commercial solo album whose main redeeming feature was the presence on several tracks of the Parliament-Funkadelic mainstays Bernie Worrell on keyboards and Tyrone Lampkin on drums. When disco fever broke in the winter of 1980, Jones, ever attuned to the latest trend, decided to try his hand at new wave with the Escalators. Having played electric blues, hard rock, disco, funk, and now new wave, Busta Jones was nothing if not versatile, and for an African American musician of his generation, he had an unusual amount of experience working with white musicians. It was on this basis, with the endorsement of Gary Kurfirst, Brian Eno, and Jerry Harrison, that he entered the orbit of Talking Heads. His first role with the group involved giving some informal lessons to Tina Weymouth, who was eager to learn the nuances of funk bass playing.

25

Melody Attack

With a band it’s usually more difficult because of the awful threat of democracy creeping into the situation. There’s nothing more certain to kill an idea than democracy.

—BRIAN ENO

According to Chris Frantz, Remain in Light, Talking Heads’ highly acclaimed fourth album, was nearly never made. “It was usually up to me to be the person who reminded everyone in the band that it was time to make another album,” Frantz wrote in his memoir. But when he contacted David Byrne in June 1980, “David expressed no interest in making another album with us. I called Brian and he said he wasn’t interested in producing another album with us.” Frantz went on to describe how Tina Weymouth devised a plan to entice Byrne and Eno into jamming with the rest of the group at their loft and, based on the positive energy in the room, agreeing to make a new album. Whatever the truth of this, it seems likely that Gary Kurfirst, Seymour Stein, and Warner Bros. chairman Mo Ostin had something to say about it as well, considering that Talking Heads had recently renegotiated their record contract with Sire.

Brian Eno’s account of this episode was very carefully hedged: “I agreed to work with the band on generating some new material, but I suggested they find another producer. After a few days of playing together, the band, and in particular Chris and Tina, requested very forcefully that I reconsider producing the record. I said that I would do it willingly, on the condition that I would treat it as I would treat my own work. I explained that this would not be a production in the usual sense, that I was only interested in pushing certain musical ideas at the moment, and that if I were producing their record I would pursue those ideas there. . . . The band understood and accepted what I said. They urged me to treat the album as a collaboration rather than a simple production.”

Based on this apparent understanding, Talking Heads booked three weeks at Compass Point Studios in Nassau in July. Eno arranged for his preferred engineer, Rhett Davies, to join them there, but Davies wound up leaving abruptly after a few days, frustrated, he said, by Eno’s incessant manipulations of the sound on tape. After his departure, Eno contacted Dave Jerden, the engineer he and Byrne had worked with in Los Angeles, and invited him to Compass Point. When Jerden arrived a week later, his involvement made the sessions even more of an extension of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

The methodology Talking Heads adopted for these sessions was based on the approach they had taken on “I Zimbra” and “Life During Wartime,” both of which began as instrumental jams on repetitive riffs that were then reviewed, revised, and combined with other instrumental ideas. Working with Eno had introduced David Byrne to the daunting prospect of starting out with nothing in the studio—no tune, no title, no lyrics, no chord changes, no predetermined idea—and simply seeing what people came up with when the tape began to roll. This blank-slate approach became the norm of the sessions at Compass Point. As Byrne described it, “We’d listen to the tapes, isolate the best bits, then learn how to play them over and over.”

Most of those “bits,” like “I Zimbra,” were modal riffs that hung on a single chord. The resurgence of modality in American popular music dated from the late 1950s, when jazz musicians like George Russell and Miles Davis sought to free themselves from the preoccupation with complex chord changes that had turned bebop into a cult of harmonic cognoscenti; Davis’s masterpiece, Kind of Blue, was regarded as the touchstone of “modal jazz.” In the 1960s, the Beatles explored this territory with a pair of tracks on Revolver, John Lennon’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” and George Harrison’s raga-influenced “Love You To,” whose influence helped to make modal improvisation a hallmark of acid rock. At the same time, the harmonic simplicity of blues artists like John Lee Hooker and Howlin’ Wolf had established a lively precedent for one- or two-chord R&B songs like Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools,” Sly Stone’s “Dance to the Music,” and the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.” More recently, groups like the Wailers (“Get Up, Stand Up”), Parliament-Funkadelic (“Give Up the Funk”), and Kool & the Gang (“Hollywood Swinging”) had continued this trend.

To be sure, there were certain limitations inherent in the process of assembling songs from autonomous instrumental riffs, beginning with the fact that, with the lyrics and melodies yet to be written, the musicians had no way of knowing what a given song was about, much less how to adapt their playing to the melodic contours of the track. In addition, recording in this manner served to isolate the individual sections of a song, so that the musicians often had no way of knowing how long a given section would last or what would come after it. This all but eliminated the most basic form of small-group dynamics: the way that accomplished instrumentalists anticipate, accentuate, and respond to changes in the melody, harmony, rhythm, texture, or mood of a song by varying their playing or inserting accents and fills. While embellishments like these could be overdubbed later, the effect was very different from that of a drummer or guitarist interjecting a fill or a run to which the other players reacted in real time.

For the most part, the band recorded simple, loop-like rhythm tracks, which often began with just the drums, or bass and drums, playing unchanging two- or four-bar patterns, on which guitars and keyboards were superimposed. Once an individual riff was recorded, the next step involved pairing it with other riffs to form the sections of a song. This too was not done in real time, but rather by switching back and forth between one taped section and the next. In addition to the standard technique of multitrack recording in which instrumental parts were overdubbed, Brian Eno also relied on the practice he and David Byrne had employed on “Drugs” of removing individual tracks, or parts of tracks, in order to open up new spaces in the music. The effect of this constant manipulation was to treat almost everything the band recorded as a form of provisional musical information, to be used or modified, removed or reinstated, as the finished track took shape. Finally, once the overall structure and feel and flow of a song-in-progress had been determined, Byrne or Eno would start scat singing over the instrumental track, mouthing nonsense at first, as a way of determining suitable tones, phrases, and melody lines.

Everyone involved with the sessions at Compass Point seemed to revel in this loose, experimental atmosphere. Talking Heads left Nassau after three weeks with a new sense of creative possibility, based on the feeling shared by Jerry, Chris, and Tina that they had been involved in the actual composition of the music as never before. By this time, it was understood that all of the songs on the album, which had been given the working title of Melody Attack, would be credited jointly, in alphabetical order, to Byrne, Eno, Frantz, Harrison, and Weymouth. Not only did this reflect the egalitarian ethos of the sessions; it also meant that the four Heads and their producer would share equally, for the first time, in the album’s publishing royalties.

Once they returned to New York, however, the responsibility for bringing this joyously collaborative project into the realm of musical and commercial reality—that is, by turning these strings of riffs into actual songs with titles and lyrics and melodies that could be released on a record album—fell mainly to David Byrne. David had struggled to come up with the songs on Fear of Music, and in the year that had elapsed since that album was recorded, writing lyrics and melodies was the one form of musical activity he had hardly engaged in at all. Now, as he explained it, the dynamic, often jubilant tone of much of the music the Heads had recorded at Compass Point required him to “reinvent myself as a lyricist. The anxiety of my lyrics and my singing didn’t seem appropriate for this kind of music; this music was more positive, though a little mysterious at the same time. So it was important that I write lyrics that also had these qualities. It was a matter of writing from a different part of my personality, one that didn’t come out in our earlier stuff.”

One part of his personality that he drew on extensively was his fascination with the delivery and rhetoric of the radio evangelists he had recorded for My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Another possibility Byrne entertained was a new willingness to collaborate on both the singing and the lyrics, now that he had found, in Brian Eno, a creative partner whose judgment and sensibility he respected. Not only did several of the tracks feature lyrics that were written by the two of them, but shared vocals as well. Eno proved to be especially adept at writing tuneful choruses to Byrne’s declamatory verses, many of which were spoken, not sung, thereby turning the songs into collaborative dialogues.

In the meantime, Jerry Harrison drew on his recent contacts to get the Heads a good deal on studio time at the New York annex of Sigma Sound, the celebrated “Philly Soul” studio where he had recently recorded with Nona Hendryx. But when the band and Brian Eno convened there in the stifling heat of early August, the excitement of the sessions at Compass Point yielded to an increasingly anxious mood. “Suddenly, what had flowed really easily became nightmarishly hard,” Harrison recalled. For one thing, time was now of the essence, with Sire Records pushing to satisfy the Heads’ collegiate fan base by releasing their next album as early as possible in the fall semester of the coming academic year. In addition, after reveling in the feeling of being the band’s fifth member during the sessions at Compass Point, Brian Eno now made good on his promise to treat the album “as my own work” and went into his full producer’s mode. “The fact that David and Eno had worked together on their album meant that they had a shorthand when they talked,” Harrison explained. “That created a potential for friction because David had a close relationship with Eno and we didn’t.”

Though Harrison was merely put off, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth felt completely shut out of the production process. Tina was especially incensed by Eno’s willingness to edit and in some cases replace her bass parts on several of the tracks as other instruments were added to or subtracted from the mix. (The album credits listed four bassists: Weymouth, Byrne, Harrison, and Eno, which didn’t include the uncredited Busta Jones.) As Dave Jerden recalled it, “The dynamic was all broken up. Tina was acting weird, hanging out with some homeless people, saying ‘These people understand me.’ After she had her parts removed she was totally exasperated by the whole thing.” (Chris Frantz would later write that Jerden invited Weymouth to rerecord her bass parts in a way that went unnoticed by Eno or Byrne, a wildly improbable notion that mainly suggests how fraught the sessions had become.) The edits and erasures were hardly confined to the bass, however; Eno, Byrne, and Harrison wound up reverse engineering much of the music they had previously recorded in order to accommodate the addition of melodies and lyrics.

“I did take a very dominant hand on the record, though there are places where I did almost nothing,” Eno later said. “There was a sort of uneasy feeling about what exactly my role was. There were all sorts of levels of angst going on. Some of them were for personality reasons, and others were for accidental reasons. One of the things that affected [the album] a lot was this history of frictions within the group. And of course, they started manifesting themselves, quite inappropriately, on this record, and they weren’t particularly things that I wanted to deal with. But I had to.”

Chris and Tina made up for their sense of marginalization by working on the cover art for the album, which was still saddled with the clunky working title of Melody Attack. Through his work with I. M. Pei, Tina’s brother Yann had an association with a computer lab at MIT called the Architectural Machine Group, which was doing foundational work with digital graphic imagery. With Yann’s help, Chris and Tina spent some time at the lab generating a pair of images for the cover. One showed a quartet of World War II–era navy torpedo planes flying in echelon formation over a Himalayan landscape, their wings and fuselages digitally transformed from blue to red; the other image consisted of blue-tinted head shots of the Heads overlaid with deep red digitized masks that gave them a vaguely “tribal” look.

In the midst of the sessions at Sigma, the guitarist Adrian Belew opened for Eno’s friend Robert Fripp and his latest group, the League of Gentlemen, at Irving Plaza, a club off Union Square. Eno knew and admired Belew from his work with David Bowie on Lodger in 1978; Talking Heads had gotten to know him a year later when he sat in with them at a couple of college dates near his home in Illinois. Eno, Byrne, and Harrison attended the show at Irving Plaza and invited Belew to join them in the studio the following day. He wound up playing guitar on a couple of tracks where, in the absence of any vocals, Eno told him to solo wherever he felt a solo should go. Further support on the album came from Jon Hassell, whose trumpet added a haunting Middle Eastern tonality to a track called “Houses in Motion”; Busta Jones, who was brought in, anonymously, to overdub funk-style string bends and fret slaps; José Rossy, a percussionist who had played with Nona Hendryx; and Nona Hendryx herself, enlisted by Jerry Harrison to sing with David Byrne and Brian Eno on several tracks. She was a consummate professional, and her presence was infectious. “Nona created a whole new flavor,” Harrison recalled. “It was a real joy to watch David singing with her. He became totally excited and lost his reserve.”

Work on the album ended in the middle of August with a pair of marathon sessions in which David Byrne and Dave Jerden flew to Los Angeles to mix some of the tracks at Eldorado Studios while Brian Eno and Jerry Harrison remained in New York and mixed the rest of the album there. It was at this point that Eno suggested that Remain in Light would be a more appropriate and appealing title for the album than Melody Attack.

Given the multilayered nature of the music, Eno, Byrne, and Harrison had already begun to discuss what it would take to perform the material live, with the three of them agreeing that it was simply beyond the capability of a four-piece group. Talking Heads had received a lucrative offer to perform on a bill with Elvis Costello, the Pretenders, and the B-52’s at Heatwave, a rock festival that was being held at a racetrack outside of Toronto in the third week of August. They were also scheduled to appear at the Dr Pepper Music Festival in Central Park one week after that. Though they could have played a set based on their earlier Fear of Music tour, David and Jerry were much too enthralled by the music they had just recorded to rehash that earlier work.

David was still in Los Angeles when Jerry began assembling a pickup band that could perform at least some of the songs on their forthcoming album. He asked Adrian Belew to join them on guitar. He asked Busta Jones to join them on bass. Through Jones, he extended an invitation to the Parliament-Funkadelic keyboard wizard Bernie Worrell. Jones also recommended a percussionist he knew named Steve Scales and a backup singer named Dolette McDonald, who had sung on the Escalators’ EP. Exactly what Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth thought about this sudden initiative was anybody’s guess, but when the whole assemblage convened at a rehearsal space in Long Island City, the feeling in the room was sufficiently electric that Chris and Tina acquiesced to the idea.

To no one’s surprise, Brian Eno declined the chance to join this expanded version of Talking Heads. It had been a long time since he had toured or performed onstage, and the “frictions” in the group were wearing on him. Unfortunately, this did not deter him from proposing an idea whose sheer obtuseness effectively ended his working relationship with the band.

From the start of their work on the album, the Heads had agreed that everyone, including Eno, would be listed as co-writers of the songs on this largely improvised recording. Composers and lyricists had been sharing their credits and royalties since the birth of Tin Pan Alley; the usual arrangement called for them to share equally in the writers’ half of the royalty, with the publisher taking the other half. But now, with the album completed, Eno proposed a convoluted variation on this formula: that he and each of the band members would individually estimate the “percentage” of the others’ contributions to the words and music on any given track, average those figures together, and then, on a song-by-song basis, reimburse themselves proportionally. The obvious assumption on Eno’s part was that the percentages would work in his favor, affording him a bigger slice of the publishing pie than some of the lesser Heads. While it’s hard to imagine why David, Jerry, Chris, and Tina would even consider going along with this scheme, it set the stage for still more “friction” in the weeks ahead.

Remain in Light was scheduled for release in the second week of October. Despite a turnout that fell far short of the promoters’ hopes for a “New Wave Woodstock,” the debut of the expanded Talking Heads at the Heatwave festival in August was an unqualified success. The band took the stage at sunset with the four original members performing a rendition of “Psycho Killer,” joined by Adrian Belew. After several more older songs, the rest of the group came onstage to perform “I Zimbra” and four songs from the upcoming album, followed by “Life During Wartime” and “Take Me to the River” to close.

“We look a little different than we did the last time we were here,” David Byrne announced to the five thousand hometown fans who gathered a week later at the Wollman Rink in Central Park. Focusing on the new material, John Rockwell described the Heads’ set as a “triumph” in his Times review. “It is extremely difficult for successful rock bands to evolve,” Rockwell noted. “They are trapped by both commercial expectations and by a lack of technical expertise and imagination. Mr. Byrne seems blissfully able to escape that trap, and he makes one look forward to further permutations of Talking Heads with eager curiosity.”

Rockwell’s focus on Byrne was ironic in its way, given David’s own comments after the Central Park show. “By adding all these musicians it makes my role less dominant,” he told the journalist Roy Trakin. “There’s just less of a feeling of a performer projecting his own ego to a crowd. . . . The kind of thing we’re doing now deals with a different set of metaphors than pop music. The most obvious one is that of a model community. Everyone working together in harmony to produce a single entity.”

The success of the Heads’ appearances at Heatwave and in Central Park sent Gary Kurfirst into overdrive, arranging a tour for the expanded version of the band to coincide with the scheduled release of Remain in Light in six weeks’ time. But when advance copies of the album and its cover were delivered in September, David Byrne’s “model community” was forced to absorb a major affront to its collective self-esteem. The cover itself looked terrific, with the four navy torpedo planes—a relic of Melody Attack—now consigned to the back of the record jacket. The front featured the masklike images of the band members and the name of the group blazoned across the top of the cover in block capital letters with the two “A’s” stylishly inverted. The lettering and layout were the work of a new downtown design firm called M & Co., which, despite the role that Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth had played, was subsequently given credit for the entire album design.

But the more serious issue of credit due was found on the album’s inner sleeve, where a dense block of capital letters began by listing, instrument by instrument, the names of everyone who played on the record. This was followed by the words, “All songs written by David Byrne, Brian Eno, and Talking Heads,” in an explicit contradiction of the band’s agreement to list the five of them, by name, as co-writers of all the songs. The credit listing on the actual record label was even worse, reading “All Selections Written by David Byrne & Brian Eno except as indicated,” with Jerry Harrison’s name added on two tracks, “Houses in Motion” and “The Overload,” and no mention whatsoever of Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz.

In the first paper that Hans Asperger published on the subject of autism, he described his precocious “little professors” as “egocentric in the extreme.” Ever since an awareness of high-functioning autism began to emerge in the 1990s, its relationship to egocentricity, as defined by “the tendency to emphasize one’s own needs, concerns, and outcomes rather than those of others,” has been a topic of much debate. A commonly accepted distinction between the self-centeredness shown by some people on the autism spectrum and that of the everyday egotists and narcissists who populate the world has turned on the “naïve” quality of autistic egocentrism—a fundamental lack of awareness of the effect that one’s words, actions, and behavior might have on other people—as opposed to those who know and do not care. Needless to say, this slippery distinction becomes even slipperier in the case of high-functioning autistics who qualify for the special forms of attention, approval, and adulation that society reserves for people of demonstrable talent or achievement. That is, people like David Byrne.

In their different ways, both Brian Eno and David Byrne qualified as “egocentric in the extreme.” Though Eno was well schooled in the English art of preemptive self-deprecation, his obvious pride in his intellect and his penchant for press attention—he once suggested that giving interviews was his single greatest talent—revealed a man who was deeply impressed with himself and his own ideas. In the case of David Byrne, prior to 1980, his self-centeredness had been masked by his membership in a rock group with a strong collective identity, and by the social discomfort that could make him seem withdrawn, uncertain, and inarticulate in his contacts with the press. That began to change in a big way when he stopped speaking with reporters in the presence of the rest of the band. One on one, Byrne’s halting speech came across as thoughtful rather than awkward, and after spending the better part of the year working with Brian Eno, he seemed to have acquired some of his partner’s volubility as well.

To publicize the release of Remain in Light, Sire Records put together a press kit that included rave reviews of the recent shows at Heatwave and Wollman Rink, a mangled history of the band (“David, Chris and Tina studied architecture at Harvard”), and an artist’s statement, written and signed by Byrne alone, in which he described the influence of African music on the album, complete with a bibliography citing the books by John Chernoff and Robert F. Thompson that he and Eno had read. “The instrumental tracks were then brought to New York where Eno and I added some instruments and worked on the musical and vocal arrangements,” Byrne wrote, going out of his way to highlight the role that the two of them played.

His words only confirmed his bandmates’ suspicions that he and Eno had simply decided to disregard the agreement to list the songwriting credits equally, presenting themselves instead as the album’s auteurs. (“It was not an administrative error,” Chris Frantz told Paul Rambali of NME. “It was an error by a member of the band who is used to taking credit for everything.”) The release of Remain in Light in October 1980 would leave little doubt that David Byrne and Brian Eno brought out the best in each other as musical collaborators. Or that as people, they brought out the worst.

26

Once in a Lifetime

I don’t even think of ourselves as a rock band anymore. We’re closer to funk now. The whole sensibility that we play with has nothing to do with what rock music is about. So I want to be as far away from that as possible.

—DAVID BYRNE

On the drooping clap of a hand drum and a sharp exhalation of breath, Remain in Light begins with a burbling backdrop of jungle cries, whirring guitar, and popping bass: a strict cell of propulsive rhythm marked by a quartet of stamping snare hits at the end of each four-bar phrase. “Take a look at these hands!” David Byrne demands at the start of “Born Under Punches,” repeating the words in a commanding voice beholden to the radio preachers he’d been studying of late. Though the hands in question belong to a “government man,” he’s a far cry from the beloved civil servants Byrne extolled in “Don’t Worry About the Government.” This wily fellow is a “tumbler,” who prides himself on his ability to roll with the punches and wriggle his way out of tight spots. “I’m so thin,” he exclaims, as a chorus of dreamy voices intones, “All I want is to breathe / Won’t you breathe with me?” A little room to breathe, they explain, is a way to “keep one step ahead of yourself.”

But the government man isn’t listening. “Don’t you miss it!” he exclaims. “Never seen anything like that before,” the chorus replies as “falling bodies tumble ’cross the floor.” David thanks them for what he takes as a compliment. “Don’t even mention it,” he insists, returning to his litany of “take a look at these hands.” Those hands are what a tumbler relies on to break his fall.

After an instrumental passage of synthesized sparks, blips, and bleeps that sound like a set of synapses on the fritz, the chorus returns with a fervent chant of “Goes on! And the heat goes on.” Appropriated by Brian Eno from a tabloid headline bemoaning the hottest August on record in New York, it serves here as a way of wresting control of the song away from its nutjob of a narrator, who declares, “I’m not a drowning man, and I’m not a burning building.” Then both choruses return at once, singing in counterpoint, juxtaposing the punning chant of “heat goes on” with the soothing aspirations of “Won’t you breathe with me?” The words are given new meaning by David’s talk of burning and drowning, as he continues to offer his blithe assurances to the very end of the track. “Keep one step ahead of yourself,” the chorus repeats. “I’m catching up with myself,” he replies.

David introduces himself on “Crosseyed and Painless” as a man who’s “lost my shape, trying to act casual.” It’s a familiar role for him, but this time around, he’s joined by a chorus of high, dreamy voices that seek to “explain their experience” by singing, “Isn’t it weird? Looks too obscure for me.” The instrumental accompaniment to this colloquy is paced by a push-pull pattern of bass and a veritable concertino of cowbells, the one freely syncopated, the other a steady tock that starts to sound like a ticking clock over the course of the song.

“Crosseyed and Painless” is a meditation on the limits of rational thought, in which David comes to terms with the intractable nature of “facts,” which, he complains, “are never what they seem to be.” The interlude of sweeping, swooping synth notes that fills the middle of the track evokes the sound of things coming undone until the chorus returns to repeat the phrase “still waiting” a half-dozen times. Waiting for what? we wonder, as David compares “the island of doubt” to the “taste of medicine” before deciding that “facts are useless in emergencies.” After once more through the chorus, the song takes a brilliant turn, as all but the rhythm drops out, and David becomes, very likely, the first white man ever to rap on a commercial recording. “Facts are simple and facts are straight / Facts are lazy and facts are late,” he chants. “Facts all come with points of view / Facts don’t do what I want them to.” “I’m still waiting,” the chorus allows, in what starts to sound like a permanent state of mind.

Each succeeding track on Side One of Remain in Light is faster and more tightly wound than its predecessor, culminating in the controlled frenzy of “The Great Curve,” which races along at a blistering tempo in a two-bar phrase of whirly guitar that repeats, without appreciable variation, for six and a half minutes, a hundred and thirty-odd times. “The Great Curve” began as an attempt to dignify Brian Eno’s libidinous fascination with Africa by celebrating the powers of divinity, fertility, and sensuality associated with the Yoruba goddess Oshun, whom Byrne and Eno first encountered in the writings of Robert F. Thompson. In the early going, however, their attempt to capture the mythic scope of their subject carries an awkwardly anthropomorphic edge. “Sometimes the world has a load of questions,” David declares in the opening verse. “Seems like the world knows nothing at all.” The second verse offers more of the same—but not before the whole production has been swept off its feet by the vocal arrangement with which Brian Eno, channeling Brian Wilson, totally transformed the song.

Talking Heads would go on to perform “The Great Curve” as a high point of their live shows, with Dolette McDonald, Adrian Belew, and Bernie Worrell joining with David Byrne on the contrapuntal vocal parts. But their best efforts could not match the overwhelming intensity of the dense, multitracked singing on the recorded version of the song. As David delivers the lines, “She is moving to describe the world / She has messages for everyone,” his words are echoed by a chant of “moves the world, moves the world” interwoven with a third group of voices, led by the gospel shout of Nona Hendryx, singing, “Night she must fall now . . . darker, darker.” The intense musicality of the singing is only enhanced by the way the overlapped phrasing renders many of the words unintelligible.

When the chorus returns after the second verse, David’s vocal has receded in the mix, leaving the voices led by Hendryx to carry the tune, slurring the line, “Divine, to define, she is moving to define, so say so, so say so,” into a euphony that verges on doo-wop and sets the stage for the first of Adrian Belew’s solos, a thirty-two-bar stampede of screeches, roars, and strangled cries that runs rampant over the unchanging rhythm of the song. The ferocity of his playing conveys the metamorphic force that’s ascribed to femininity in the verse that follows, where a chorus of voices (with Eno predominating) declares, “The world moves on a woman’s hips . . . The world moves and it bounces and hops.” The remaining three and a half minutes of “The Great Curve” is a masterfully arranged chorale of almost operatic proportions, in which a new refrain—“World of light, she’s gonna open our eyes up”—alternates with the earlier three-part choruses (“Night she must fall . . . She has got to move . . . Divine, to define . . .”) whose jumbled line endings (“darker, darker . . . to move the world . . . so say so, so say so”) coalesce in a mesmerizing flow of words and images, until Adrian Belew finishes the whole thing off with another outburst of his zoological lead guitar.

The three tracks on the first side of Remain in Light sound like a dance party unlike any dance party ever heard on a commercial recording before. The five tracks on Side Two have a very different flavor, presenting a series of introspective reflections and ruminations that cast David Byrne in the role of an actor more than a singer, delivering declamatory, spoken verses that alternate with Brian Eno’s melodic choruses.

The first of these, “Once in a Lifetime,” forms a bridge between the physicality of the music that precedes it and the introspection that follows by replicating the fierce drive of the songs on Side One with a three-note push of bass and a booming tom-tom upbeat that generates a hypnotic jolt of rhythm at the end of each one-bar phrase. In the introduction, this unchanging rhythm is surrounded by an ethereal swirl of synth notes that carry over into the verse, where David, drawing on his many months of secular Bible study for My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, begins to deliver a sermon on the ever-popular sin of worldliness, prefacing each of his lines with the words, “And you may find yourself . . .” Wherever that may be, he explains, in a humble shack or a foreign country, behind the wheel of a big car or in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife, the material trappings of life count for little when the time comes, as it surely will, to question the meaning of it all. “Well,” he asks on behalf of his flock of listeners, “how did I get here?”

The song’s refrain of “Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down” only begins to answer that question, but it does provide a strong metaphorical undercurrent. “Once in a lifetime,” the chorus proclaims, “water flowing underground.” Then David resumes his portrayal of a man consumed by existential doubt, first wondering what’s become of his large automobile, and then, as if waking from a dream, exclaiming, “This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife!” Each time the refrain returns, its reference to an underground river of time takes on added weight if not literal meaning, which is reinforced by the chant of “same as it ever was” that David repeats over high-pitched chirps of guitar.

In the last verse, David concludes his litany of doubt (“What is that beautiful house? Where does that highway go?”) by asking, “Am I right? Am I wrong?” To which the answer by now is obvious: “And you may say to yourself, ‘My God! What have I done?’” The refrain of “days go by” repeats with a lulling intensity, until a bolt of transcendence arrives in the form of a trio of chords from Jerry Harrison’s Hammond organ, heavily distorted, that rise from C to G and back to the keynote of D. It’s a common progression that Harrison knew from a Velvet Underground song, but as the first instance of harmonic resolution on the album as a whole, this gritty cadence of chords carries a stirring, born-again edge. “Same as it ever was,” the chorus repeats. “Time isn’t holding us, time isn’t after us,” David interjects as the music fades.

Robert Christgau praised “Once in a Lifetime” in his review of Remain in Light as “the greatest song David Byrne will ever write.” It certainly ranks among the best of Byrne’s (and Eno’s) work, not least because it is a song that only someone with Byrne’s contrarian relationship with his musical influences would ever think to write. Since the 1950s, the synthesis of sacred and secular in gospel and rhythm and blues had exerted a seminal influence on popular music as a whole, not least by inspiring a generation of white imitators and emulators to incorporate those styles of singing, playing, and songwriting into the musical hybrid of rock. Talking Heads had always reflected this influence in the dynamics of their rhythm section. But in his own singing and songwriting, David Byrne had steered clear of the devotional stance and fervent emotionality associated with gospel and soul—until now, that is, when his fascination with the commanding rhetoric and stentorian delivery of the radio evangelists who flooded the airwaves of America in the 1970s had lured him into the fold.

One of the virtues that contributed to the impact and influence of Remain in Light was the sheer breadth of its innovation. In addition to relying on Brian Eno’s methodology of building up tracks in layers from a minimal rhythmic base, David Byrne experimented with an approach to lyric writing based more on the way words felt and sounded than on what they actually meant, consciously resisting the impulse, as he would later put it, to “make sense.” In the case of “Houses in Motion,” Byrne took the title and some of the lyrics from a radio sermon he heard. Speaking softly over the quacking clavinet and quiet rim clicks that imbue the track with a taste of Stevie Wonder, he begins by making an example of himself, confessing to a lack of “style or grace” that once led him to wear shoes without socks in cold weather. He then contrasts this absurdly minor failing with a Sisyphean figure in the second half of the verse who expects to be “digging his own grave” for a thousand years to come. The chorus of the song intrudes before anyone has a chance to ponder what’s gotten into this guy. “I’m walking a line / I’m thinking about empty motion,” they sing, initiating a call and response that has David answering their prompts (“Get outa the way . . . I’m turning around”) with a series of bland negations (“no time to begin,” “no trouble at all”). “Houses in Motion” is a song that seems to delight in its own incomprehensibility, fueled by its author’s hopeful belief that whatever came into and out of his head might adhere to a logic all its own.

The next cut begins with a jolt of drum-machine rhythm and a string of piping synth notes that set the stage for the closest David Byrne had come since “No Compassion” to writing an Asperger’s manifesto. Spoken with a flat affect, “Seen and Not Seen” is an internal monologue that bears an eerie relationship to Tim Page’s observation that people on the spectrum “assemble our personalities unevenly, in bits and pieces, almost robotically, from models we admire.” How else to explain this disembodied narrative about a man who scans the movies, magazines, and television for “faces that might be right for him,” and tries, “by force of will,” to “cause his face to approach those of his ideal”? In the second of the song’s two verses, David allows himself to imagine that “most other people” might be engaged in a similar process of personal transfiguration, seeking new faces that “would better suit their personality,” or changing their personalities to fit their visual ideal. As a commentary on pop psychology, “Seen and Not Seen” makes the familiar strange by reimagining a wishful impulse as a willful ability, and then, given the vagaries of human nature, by taking that willful ability to its logical extreme. What happens, our narrator asks, if people choose their ideal appearance capriciously, based on “some childish whim”? What if halfway through this transformation, they change their minds? “He wonders if he too might have made a similar mistake,” David says blankly at the end.

That the most wistful song on Remain in Light describes the actions of a would-be mass murderer carried a provocative irony in 1980, at a time when America’s thirst for foreign oil was laying the groundwork for a decades-long pandemic of geopolitical substance abuse. Having satirized the domesticity of a domestic terrorist in “Life During Wartime,” David Byrne turns his attention to the real thing in “Listening Wind,” constructing an extraordinarily prescient narrative about a fictional character of Middle Eastern origin with the made-up name of “Mojique,” who “thinks of days before Americans came” to his village. The lack of specificity only adds to the power of the song. It hardly matters whether the infidels are Exxon workers, Club Med tourists, or Peace Corps volunteers; their mere presence poses a mortal threat to life as Mojique knows it, and he responds in kind, by planting “devices” and mailing them “packages.” With “the power of the past behind him,” his defiance and radicalization are rooted in the timeless struggle to subsist amid the shifting sands and swirling dust of his desert home—a landscape that is brilliantly evoked by a rhythmic loop whose soft downbeats and quivering offbeats are overlaid with atmospheric sighs and wails from Adrian Belew’s guitar that lend a pall of sadness to David’s quiet narration of the song. “The wind in my heart, the dust in my head,” he sings in the chorus, summoning the forces of Nature itself to “drive them away.”

“The Overload” is such a departure from the seven tracks that precede it on Remain in Light that it could only have come at the end; the question is whether this overtly poetic six-minute composition should have been included on the album at all. As an elegy of cultural disillusionment, William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” was the “Day in the Life” of its time. Written in the aftermath of the Great War, the Russian Revolution, and the Easter Rebellion in Yeats’s native Ireland, the poem sounded a millennial warning that came to be associated, for better or worse, with the birth of modernism. It went on to inspire book titles by Chinua Achebe, Joan Didion, and Walker Percy, and was even quoted by Lou Reed on a live album in 1978. With its mournful references to “a gentle collapsing,” “the removal of the insides,” and “the center is missing,” “The Overload” sounds like a riff on the most famous lines in Yeats’s poem: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

“The Second Coming” was a favorite of Brian Eno’s, which is probably how it came to the attention of David Byrne. Jerry Harrison had a hand in creating the track’s musical setting, a dense overlay of keyboards whose dirgelike tempo and ominous, droning timbres were supposedly inspired by the “gloom-rock” sound of the English band Joy Division—or, more precisely, by word of mouth about Joy Division, since David Byrne maintained that he and Harrison had never heard the group. Whatever else it was meant to be, “The Overload” was an apt name for the last track on the last album that Talking Heads would ever record with Brian Eno, whose brilliant but overbearing influence had ultimately inspired such dissension in their group.

27

Expanded Heads

This record represents a radical shift, one that may alienate some of the band’s art-rock fans. And one does wonder if the other three Heads—Miss Weymouth and Mr. Frantz, in particular—are quite so sanguine about merging their identities into a ten-member band as Mr. Byrne appears to be.

—JOHN ROCKWELL, NEW YORK TIMES

In the United States especially, Remain in Light was hailed as a sociocultural phenomenon as well as a musical triumph. Even as he worried about its acceptance among die-hard Talking Heads fans, John Rockwell described the album in the New York Times as “a significant artistic and even social statement that demonstrates how Black and white music and musicians can blend together creatively.” Citing “Take Me to the River,” Rockwell noted, “Black music has always lain at the roots of the supposedly hyper-intellectual Heads style . . . in graduating to funk, Mr. Byrne merely proves he is willing to evolve along with Black music—unlike so many white lovers of 1960s rhythm & blues who have never been able to accept the 1970s in Black music.”

Ken Tucker sounded a similar theme in the pages of Rolling Stone: “Seldom in pop music history has there been a larger gap between what Black and white audiences are listening to now. While Blacks are almost entirely uninterested in the clipped, rigid urgency of the New Wave, it’s doubtful that more than a small percentage of Rolling Stone’s predominantly white readership knows anything at all about the summer’s only piece of culture-defining music, Kurtis Blow’s huge hit, ‘The Breaks.’ . . . Remain in Light is a brave, absorbing attempt to locate a common ground in today’s divergent, often hostile musical community.”

The amount of attention paid to the racial dynamics of the music on Remain in Light owed a lot to the fact that the band had unveiled its expanded biracial incarnation even before the album’s release. The enthusiastic coverage of their shows at Heatwave and in Central Park elicited an offer of financial support from Warner Bros. that enabled Gary Kurfirst to book a national tour of thirty dates in major cities across the United States. The tour began in California in the middle of October, moved back across the Midwest, returned to New York at the beginning of November for two shows at Radio City Music Hall, and continued in the Northeast before ending the week before Thanksgiving with dates at the Agora chain of ballrooms in Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston. After a brief respite, the Expanded Heads then left on a three-week tour of Europe, with shows in London, Paris, Lyon, Nice, Brussels, Amsterdam, Milan, Bologna, and Rome, ending with a televised concert in Dortmund, West Germany, on a bill with Roxy Music and Dire Straits.

In the weeks prior to the start of their tour, the Heads worked at familiarizing their new members with their repertoire. The four of them had little experience working with musicians of this caliber. Bernie Worrell, Adrian Belew, Busta Jones, and Steve Scales were all skilled instrumentalists who were adept at playing in a wide range of musical styles. Worrell had grown up in New Jersey as a classical piano prodigy, performing with local symphonies at the age of ten. He went on to study at Juilliard and the New England Conservatory, but his ecumenical taste in music embraced everything from the classical masters to the Beatles, Thelonious Monk, and the musical parodist Victor Borge. George Clinton enlisted Worrell as a founding member of Parliament-Funkadelic in 1969. Over the next decade, his work with P-Funk established him as an imaginative arranger and a reigning virtuoso, along with Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock, of the Minimoog synthesizer and the Hohner clavinet.

Adrian Belew first came to prominence in 1977, when Frank Zappa heard him performing with a bar band in Nashville and invited him to join the Mothers of Invention a few months after that. A year later, Brian Eno heard Belew perform with Zappa and recommended him to David Bowie, which led to a tour with Bowie and his appearance on Lodger. Belew credited Bowie with turning him loose as a soloist. Like many of the musicians who came up with Zappa, there was an almost cartoonish quality to his virtuosity. A disciple of Jimi Hendrix, he was a master of sustain, which allowed him to generate a menagerie of animalistic whoops, screeches, groans, and cries that sometimes sounded like a parody of the frenetic, gargantuan excess of 1970s hard-rock lead guitar. With Talking Heads, he also added an adaptable, if somewhat featureless, singing voice to the group.

Busta Jones and Steve Scales were less distinctive players than Worrell and Belew, journeymen more than stylists, but they were both experienced and solid accompanists. Scales employed a full battery of hand drums, tom-toms, cowbells, and shakers—everything but a bass drum and hi-hat—to elaborate on the percussion overlays that José Rossy and others had added to Fear of Music and Remain in Light. Jones’s role was more complicated, to say the least. The initiative to add a second bass player to the group had come from David and Jerry, who presented it as a matter of necessity given the multiple bass overdubs on Remain in Light. Neither Tina nor Chris was in favor of the idea, but considering that Jones had been instrumental in recruiting Worrell, Scales, and Dolette McDonald to the group, and had already served as Tina’s bass teacher, they resolved to make the best of it.

The set that Talking Heads performed on their 1980 tour was designed to ease their audiences into an acceptance of the expanded band. They retained “Psycho Killer” as their opening number, with Belew on lead guitar. They followed this with a song from their second album, “Warning Sign” or “Stay Hungry,” which gained a new lease on life with Steve Scales on congas. After Dolette McDonald came onstage to add an eerie descant to “Cities,” Bernie Worrell and Busta Jones completed the group for a rousing version of “I Zimbra.” Next came a third song from Fear of Music, “Drugs,” which was transformed by atmospheric solos from Worrell and Belew. The second half of their set was a steady crescendo of songs drawn mainly from Remain in Light, consisting of “Once in a Lifetime,” “Crosseyed and Painless,” “Life During Wartime,” “Houses in Motion,” and “Born Under Punches.” They ended with an understated version of “Take Me to the River,” with McDonald adding an impassioned gospel vocal alongside David Byrne, and “The Great Curve,” which served as a set piece of group singing and guitar pyrotechnics from Belew.

The band’s expanded instrumentation allowed for a new looseness and flexibility in the arrangements of these songs. Apart from the reggae-ish lilt he added to “Houses in Motion,” Chris Frantz confined himself to playing steady backbeats, strongly accented downbeats, and snappy propulsive rolls that left ample room for Steve Scales’s hand drums and percussion to embroider the music with polyrhythmic patterns, offbeat accents, and explosive fills. Tina Weymouth and Busta Jones played bass together on roughly half the songs, with Weymouth’s shapely lines pitched an octave above Jones’s funky pops and bends. When she wasn’t playing bass, Tina doubled on keyboard or percussion and sang backup on several songs. But the most dramatic change in the music owed to the presence of Adrian Belew and Bernie Worrell. As accomplished improvisers with a full command of their instruments, their playing on any given song varied from night to night, which introduced an element of surprise and uncertainty into the music that was new to Talking Heads as a performing band.

The addition of Belew gave the Heads a real lead guitarist for the first time, but most important, it freed David Byrne to focus his attention on his singing as never before. And to judge by the many live recordings that survive from this tour, the effect on Byrne was profound. In addition to singing with greater authority, his phrasing and intonation, both of which had tended to erode over the course of previous tours, remained strong and sure from night to night, with much less reliance on the vocal tics and quirks that he tended to fall back on as his stamina flagged.

Visually, too, the Heads had come a long way from the frozen tableau of their years as a trio or quartet. The band set up in a long line that placed David Byrne, Busta Jones, and Chris Frantz at the center of the stage, flanked on their left by Steve Scales, Tina Weymouth, and Adrian Belew, on their right by Dolette McDonald and the keyboards of Jerry Harrison and Bernie Worrell. Belew, Jones, McDonald, and Scales were all notably kinetic performers. Dressed in baggy pantaloons, Belew bounded around like a puppet on a string, while Jones moved in a steady cadence of jerks and bends that echoed the punctuations of his bass. The petite McDonald cut a lithe, pixieish figure flashing blazing smiles of delight, while Scales, a tall man who often performed shirtless, ranged all over the stage when he wasn’t behind his congas, his hands a perpetual blur. Though David Byrne remained the center of attention, he was now surrounded by a whirlwind of musicians, moving in time to the music and reacting effusively to the sight and sound of one another onstage. In their own roundabout way, Talking Heads had arrived at a level of stagecraft that many bands reach before they can do much else.

On a personal level, the enthusiastic reception the Expanded Heads received, first in Toronto and New York, and then throughout the tour, served to suppress the fierce resentments caused by the drama over the final mixes and album credits on Remain in Light. At precisely the moment when tensions in the group were nearing a breaking point, the original four members were suddenly immersed in a touring party of nine musicians and a road crew, performing night after night with an energy and inventiveness that far surpassed anything that they had been capable of before. The sheer pleasure of playing so well together assuaged some of the hurt feelings.

Not that harmony reigned. “These people taught us how to be,” Tina Weymouth recalled to the writer Simon Reynolds. “When we had been onstage before, my whole experience was just being David’s whipping boy. . . . David didn’t even know how to talk to these Black people,” Tina continued. “He didn’t understand what they were saying half the time.” In fact, both Bernie Worrell and Busta Jones recalled having numerous one-on-one conversations with David Byrne; what Jones remembered were the growing tensions between himself and Tina Weymouth as the tour progressed.

Talking Heads were playing at Radio City Music Hall on November 4, 1980, the day that Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter to become the fortieth president of the United States. Reagan won 51 percent of the popular vote and carried all but five states and the District of Columbia. His victory was assured by the independent candidacy of the liberal Republican John Anderson and the revolutionary mullahs of Iran, whose refusal to come to terms for the release of the fifty-two American diplomats and civilians taken hostage during the Iranian revolution of 1979 branded Carter as a weak and ineffectual leader. Though a majority of New York State residents voted for Reagan, New York City residents did not, affirming the city’s position as a world apart from the predominantly white Republican suburbs of Long Island, Westchester, and New Jersey.

A month later, on the first weekend of December, Talking Heads were performing in Paris (with a young Irish band called U2 as their opening act) when the New York Times reported on a dinner party that the socialite matriarch Brooke Astor was giving in honor of the president-elect and his wife at her Park Avenue duplex in the week ahead. The guest list included the financiers Felix Rohatyn, David Rockefeller, and Walter Wriston, the publishers and managing editors of the major New York newspapers, CBS president William Paley and several network news anchors, the fashion designers Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta, the labor leader Victor Gotbaum, and, in a curt nod to diversity, Vernon Jordan, the president of the Urban League. Notable for their absence would be New York’s Governor Hugh Carey, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Mayor Edward Koch, all Democrats, all of whom were excluded from the gathering, the Times reported, lest “politics” mar the spirit of the occasion. Despite the absence of New York’s three most powerful elected officials, Brooke Astor’s dinner in honor of the Reagans was a paradigm of the new power structure of New York—a city where Victor Gotbaum, whose municipal workers union had seen tens of thousands of its members laid off over the past five years, could serve as the best man at the wedding of his tennis partner, Felix Rohatyn, the Wall Street banker whose leadership of the Municipal Assistance Corporation had mandated those draconian cuts in the city’s workforce.

Not that Ed Koch, who was well on his way to winning reelection by a landslide in 1981, would have been out of place in this company. “The old climate was that profit was evil,” the former “lefty” congressman from Greenwich Village told the Times. “I have created the impression, ‘We love you if you are rich!’” Under the spell of Koch’s ebullient grandiosity, the city had weathered the fiscal crisis of the late seventies, had retired nearly all of its federally insured debt, and was preparing to issue municipal bonds for the first time since 1975. Over the next five years, New York would add more than two hundred thousand private-sector jobs, most of them in finance and business services, nearly all of them in Manhattan. But still the question lingered: At what cost? The proportion of the city’s population that lived below the poverty line had grown from 15 percent in 1975 to 24 percent in 1980, and for the first time since the Depression, homeless people, including many psychiatric patients released from recently closed city hospitals, were a growing presence on the streets and in the parks. Violent crime in general, and in the subways in particular, was off the charts.

Indeed, on the night before Brooke Astor’s party, directly across town at Seventy-Second Street and Central Park West, John Lennon was murdered on the sidewalk in front of his apartment building by an obsessive Beatles fan. A month before, Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, had released an album called Double Fantasy, thus ending a five-year hiatus from the music business in which the couple had lived in relative seclusion following the birth of their son. Though the album was panned by the music press in the weeks following its release, it vaulted to the top of the charts in the wake of Lennon’s death. Ten years before, on his first solo album, Lennon had declared, “The dream is over.” The dream he was referring to was the utopian aspiration of the 1960s, of which the Beatles, in many ways, were the happiest and most fulsome expression. But the breakup of the group in 1970, at the height of their success, created a prospect that had dogged the world of popular music throughout the decade ahead—that at the right time, in the right circumstances, the incomparable constellation of musical talent, charisma, and beneficence that the Beatles embodied might come together again. Amid all the outpouring of grief and disbelief, this was the dream that died that December day. Whatever the future of popular music held in store, a second coming of the Beatles would not be a part of it.

Later that same month, a physical education teacher in the New York City public school system named Rick Wellikoff was discharged from New York Hospital and returned to his home on the Upper West Side. There, on Christmas Eve, Wellikoff became the first New Yorker known to die of the mysterious disease that would soon become known as AIDS. Taken together, the election of a former movie star as president of the United States, the murder of a rock star on the streets of the city, and the death of a gay gym teacher marked the real start of the 1980s in New York.

28

Bush of Ghosts

I was taught in art school that process is everything, which is another way of saying that having an idea is enough. Since I’m basically lazy, I liked that idea, but I no longer think it’s true. . . . An idea really isn’t enough; a piece of music should also be seductive or move you in some way.

—BRIAN ENO, 1981

In January, David Byrne flew to Los Angeles to meet with the choreographer Toni Basil about the possibility of making some music videos based on tracks from Remain in Light. To date, the sales of the album had mirrored those of Fear of Music. It had entered the Billboard charts at #70 in the middle of November, peaked at #19 in the middle of December, and disappeared from the listing a few weeks after that, having sold around 250,000 copies since its October release. But the single that Sire released from the album, “Crosseyed and Painless,” had fared even worse than its predecessor, “Life During Wartime,” by failing to make the charts at all. Between its Afropop groove and its abstract lyrics, FM radio stations didn’t know what to make of the record, though it did rise to #23 on Billboard’s listing of disco favorites. Byrne’s trip to Los Angeles was thus inspired by commercial as well as creative considerations. Several reviewers had cited “Once in a Lifetime” as the strongest track on Remain in Light. A music video based on the song could serve to boost sales of the album.

Byrne had met Toni Basil through Brian Eno during their stay in Los Angeles the year before. Now in her late thirties, Basil had gotten her start in 1964 as a featured dancer on the teen television show Shindig! Pertly pretty, she went on to play a beach bunny in the Elvis film Viva Las Vegas and a New Orleans call girl opposite Peter Fonda in Easy Rider. But her true talent was as a dancer and choreographer. In the early seventies, Basil and her partner Don Campbell founded a dance troupe called the Lockers, whose regular appearances on Soul Train pioneered and popularized the seminal break dance styles known as “popping” and “locking.” (Basil was the only white or female member of the troupe.) In 1974, David Bowie hired Basil to choreograph his Diamond Dogs tour. This brought her into the orbit of Eno, who was already a fan of Basil’s performance in an obscure 1966 short by the underground filmmaker Bruce Conner, in which she danced in various states of undress to her own recording of a soul song called “Breakaway.”

Byrne’s relationship with Basil established a pattern of romantic involvement with female collaborators that he would repeat in the years to come. He wound up hiring her to direct a pair of videos. For “Crosseyed and Painless,” he gave Basil a budget and the freedom to do as she liked, telling her, “Don’t let me ruin your fun.” In response, Basil choreographed a brilliant routine that was performed by a group of Soul Train regulars called the Electric Boogaloos and targeted at dance club audiences. Filmed against a backdrop of South Central locales, it shows a wide-eyed Black teenager dancing his way through a rogue’s gallery of gangsters, pimps, hookers, lowriders, and businessmen. For “Once in a Lifetime,” Byrne and Basil visited the film archive at UCLA to review footage of televangelists, Pentecostal preachers, African tribal rites, and other examples of people in trances or states of rapture. As Basil described it, “We watched the footage together, examined the movements and discussed how to incorporate it into his performance. I set up the camera, put him in front of it and asked him to absorb those ideas. Then I left the room so he could be alone with himself. I came back, looked at the videotape, and we chose physical moves that worked with the music.”

The result was quite extraordinary. The video of “Once in a Lifetime” shows David dressed in a suit and bow tie, with his hair slicked down and his eyes framed by a pair of retro “browline” glasses that caricature his geeky whiteness as never before. (His crazed, thyroidal look also owed something to Brad Dourif’s portrayal of an atheist preacher in John Huston’s recent film Wise Blood.) As he starts to declaim the lyrics (“And you may find yourself . . .”), he’s visibly buffeted by the percussive force of the music, recoiling from every booming tom-tom upbeat as if from a blow to the head—a straight white man who’s being physically assaulted by the syncopations of African American rhythm. His allusions to displacement (“. . . in another part of the world”) are accompanied by clips from the ethnographic films his gestures of emphasis and supplication are derived from, followed by a sequence that shows him in profile, striding across the screen in an angular, herky-jerky gait that’s mirrored by a backup chorus consisting of his own image in quadruplicate. In the song’s release, where “there is water at the bottom of the ocean,” he drifts across the screen on a bed of textured blue and green. Then the camera closes in on his sweat-soaked face, disheveled hair, and fraught expression, amplifying the contradiction of a man consumed by existential doubt who is nevertheless delivering the parable of his predicament in a voice of total authority. The one false note is the ending, which bows to pop convention by showing a flattering shot of David, abruptly out of character, looking like the unlikely rock star he’s become.

Though the video had no immediate effect on the sales of “Once in a Lifetime,” which Sire released as a single in the month ahead, it would go on to become a fixture on a new cable television channel called MTV, whose debut in the summer of 1981 would utterly transform the marketing of popular music in America and around the world. Music videos had been a staple of pop promotion since the 1960s, when bands like the Beatles and the Stones released made-for-TV shorts to publicize their records at a time when fan hysteria made them reluctant to tour. In the 1970s, as rock entered the mainstream of popular entertainment, artists made music videos, or “clips” as they were known, for broadcast on late-night talk and concert shows like The Midnight Special and The Old Grey Whistle Test. Most of these were simple performance videos, but some were more theatrical productions that sought to illustrate or dramatize the songs they were based on.

Following the lead of New York clubs like Hurrah, discos began adding large video monitors to their dance floors, and the advent of cable television in the late seventies made it only a matter of time before the format of music radio was adapted to a round-the-clock video channel. That would be MTV, on which a succession of photogenic “veejays” presented a Top 40–style rotation of music videos. While its initial impact was constrained by the limited availability of cable television, within a few years, MTV would rival and then virtually replace radio as the principal means of promoting new artists in the pop marketplace.

David Byrne returned from Los Angeles and moved into a large apartment in SoHo, whose cachet as an art center was now institutionalized by a procession of neo-blue-chip galleries along West Broadway that were eagerly promoting the revival of painting as a marketable medium of contemporary art. On a commercial level, the 1970s had been a decade of stagnation and drift in the art market, as Minimalism and the gestural manifestations of Conceptualism proved to be a very hard sell in an economic climate plagued by recession and rampant inflation. The 1980s would be a different story. The incoming Reagan administration wasted no time in enacting unprecedented federal tax cuts on income and capital gains, thereby compounding both the wealth and the hubris of America’s expanding millionaire class. Some of those millionaires responded by financing a feeding frenzy in the art market that the critic Robert Hughes would shortly compare to “Utrecht at the height of tulip mania.” Initially, much of this commerce was centered on a coterie of young New York painters led by Julian Schnabel, Robert Longo, and David Salle, who embarked on meteoric, self-aggrandizing careers that had more in common with rock stars than with the involuntarily bohemian artists of previous generations.

At the same time, in an art world that still clung to the mystique of an “avant-garde,” the gentrification of the SoHo gallery scene demanded an ostensibly bohemian response—preferably one that was rooted in parts of the city where struggling artists could still afford to live. The first manifestation of this was The Times Square Show in the summer of 1980, which featured the work of more than fifty “artists, designers, and personalities,” who repurposed a derelict midtown massage parlor with a populist potpourri of sculpture, video, installation, graffiti, and graphic and performance art. This was followed in February 1981 by a sprawling exhibition titled New York/New Wave at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (as it was then known) in Long Island City.

Curated by one of the cofounders of the Mudd Club, a white Midwesterner who called himself Diego Cortez, New York/New Wave filled the classrooms and corridors of the former public school building with more than six hundred works by more than a hundred artists, who ranged in reputation from established art stars like Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe to young upstarts like Keith Haring and, most notably, Cortez’s protégé, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Cortez saw to it that Basquiat had the only painted canvases in the show, most of which consisted of photography, including photographs of no particular distinction by Chris Stein of Blondie, Brian Eno, and David Byrne.

“Byrne’s large-format color photographs have the same cool disengagement his performance persona has,” Richard Flood wrote in Artforum. “Stripped of situational information, his subject matter could be composed of details from an airport waiting-lounge. . . . So why is Byrne included in the show?” Flood asked. “He’s there because he is New Wave. In ‘New York/New Wave,’ celebrity is the dominant art form [and] Byrne’s participation, not his photographs, is the issue.”

While most serious art critics dismissed the exhibition as a grab bag of mediocrity, Glenn O’Brien jumped at the chance to celebrate its populist ethos in the pages of Interview magazine. “This is a tidal wave of art, about to reduce the art world to limp rubble,” he predicted. “A whole new art world ready to replace the old one. Of course the old one is not going to just pack up and move to Chicago because of an art show in Long Island City. But I can tell they’re scared. And why? I think because here is art based on life, not on art. The public might like it.” Writing in the Village Voice, Peter Schjeldahl cut to the bone of these populist pretensions. “This sleek new New Wave extravagance has little populist flavor, despite its focus on graffiti artists, small children, and the lumpen street and rock club scenes,” he wrote. “Rather, it celebrates a brittle aristocracy of cool.” While singling out the work of both Mapplethorpe and Basquiat for special praise, Schjeldahl’s review read like a cultural eulogy for the art world of the 1980s, written in the decade’s second year: “At P.S. 1, Youth is not served so much as served up—to a devouring self-regard. The spirit might be called participatory narcissism. There is nothing novel about this. It is the established marketing strategy of commercial pop culture, here embraced—with a degree of irony that is hard to say—as a generation’s first principle.”

David Byrne had barely settled into his new loft before the Expanded Heads left on a ten-day tour of Japan. At the end of the tour, on Toni Basil’s recommendation, Byrne spent several weeks in Bali, where he explored the countryside on a motorcycle, attending ritual dances and puppet shows in local villages. He returned to New York by way of Los Angeles in March. (Among his souvenirs from the trip was an hour-long recording he made of a chorus of Balinese frogs.) That same month, Byrne received an invitation from the choreographer Twyla Tharp to discuss a project she had in mind. It so happened that he had just seen a performance by Tharp’s company in Los Angeles on his way back from Bali.

By 1981, on the eve of her fortieth birthday, Twyla Tharp was recognized as one of the most distinctive and innovative choreographers of her generation. Born in Indiana and raised by a fiercely ambitious stage mother in the cultural backwater of Rialto, California, Tharp arrived in New York in 1960 to attend Barnard College. She quickly immersed herself in the city’s dance world, studying with such eminent teachers as Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. After marrying her college boyfriend and moving to a loft on Franklin Street in Lower Manhattan, she promptly fell in love with her downstairs neighbor, a bohemian painter named Bob Huot. Tharp left her husband, moved in with Huot, and joined the scattered community of struggling artists who were living, surreptitiously, in the warehouse district below Canal Street. In 1965, after a two-year stint as a featured performer with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, she left to form a dance troupe of her own.

From the beginning, Tharp’s distinction as a choreographer was based on a hybrid style that combined elements of modern and jazz dance with the rigor of classical ballet. In 1971, after moving with Huot to a farmhouse in upstate New York and giving birth to a son, she initiated a critical change in her work. All of her early dances had been performed in silence. Now, for the first time, she choreographed a dance that was performed to the early New Orleans jazz of Jelly Roll Morton. Eight Jelly Rolls was a sensation, heralded as a “masterpiece” by John Rockwell in the Times, and its success earned Tharp a commission to write a piece for the Joffrey Ballet. After considering using the Beatles’ music, she reverted to her California roots and chose an assortment of early Beach Boys songs instead. The result was Deuce Coupe, staged by Tharp’s troupe and the Joffrey company against a backdrop that was spray-painted at each performance by a group of subway graffiti artists who joined the dancers onstage. From then on, music ranging from Haydn, Mozart, and Bach to Chuck Berry, Randy Newman, and Bruce Springsteen became essential to Tharp’s work. She also collaborated (and had a celebrated affair) with Mikhail Baryshnikov on a ballet called Push Comes to Shove. In 1979, Tharp created the choreography for Miloš Forman’s film adaptation of the musical Hair.

The following year, after a residency by her troupe in San Francisco that was produced by the rock impresario Bill Graham, Tharp and Graham had a brief affair, in the course of which she asked him whom he most admired among “the young, not-quite discovered” rock groups on the scene. Graham nominated Talking Heads. Though Tharp was unfamiliar with their music, this was enough for her. “I wanted a mega-hit with my next collaboration,” she later wrote, and after listening to the group’s recent albums, she got in touch with David Byrne.

At their first meeting, Tharp sensed that she and Byrne “were unified in our ambition to succeed.” Within a few weeks, they agreed to collaborate on a dance piece based on the theme of a dysfunctional American family. (The title she gave it, The Catherine Wheel, referred to a torture rack.) After speaking with Seymour Stein, Byrne signed a contract with Sire Records and asked Gary Kurfirst to inform his bandmates that he would be spending the months ahead working on an album of his own. Twyla Tharp’s company was booked to perform a residency at the Winter Garden Theater on Broadway in September; she wanted to make the premiere of The Catherine Wheel the highlight of that production.

In keeping with Tharp’s established practice, their artistic collaboration soon turned into an affair. Over the next few months, she and David spent their nights together and their days in dance and recording studios, as she rehearsed her troupe and he worked on a series of nearly two dozen musical motifs. Most were instrumentals, but several were fully formed songs with Afropop grooves that would not have sounded out of place on a Talking Heads album. David played guitar, bass, and a variety of synthesizers, accompanied by a virtuoso funk drummer named Yogi Horton, who improvised freely over the instrumental backings. They were joined on individual tracks by Jerry Harrison, Brian Eno, Adrian Belew, Bernie Worrell, Steve Scales, and Dolette McDonald—most everyone, that is, except Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz—along with the percussionist John Chernoff, whom Byrne had befriended since reading his book. Chernoff and Eno were also listed as co-writers on several of the tracks.

Notwithstanding their romantic involvement, the collaboration between David and Twyla did not go smoothly. She found him to be “an incredibly thorough worker, economical and well-prepared. . . . He would try anything, and he never let himself be intimidated by his own innocence.” But he struggled to keep up with the pace and decisiveness of her creative process, and the two of them were unable to agree on what the narrative arc of the piece should be.

“David and I spent months trying to find a common ground between the rich mysteries of his investigations and my own sturdier, pragmatic, and highly judgmental Midwestern biases,” Tharp later wrote. “Sometimes I felt he substituted ambiguity for artistry. . . . We were at such fundamental loggerheads that we even called sections by different names.” A dance piece about family discord gradually began to take on an unintended subtext of romantic discord between its creators. The two of them were spending a lot of their time together in Tharp’s cramped apartment with her eleven-year-old son, Jesse, who found his mother’s boyfriend to be a disquieting presence (“totally quiet, always listening to music”). As Tharp wrote in her memoir, “Jesse remembered that once when he and I had argued over what TV channel we would watch, David’s solution had been a threat to smash the TV.”

Around the same time that Byrne and Tharp began working together, Sire Records finally got around to releasing My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, six months after the album was put on hold by the licensing issues stemming from its use of found material. Though Eno and Byrne had eventually decided to substitute another recording for the track that Kathryn Kuhlman’s estate had refused to authorize, Eno had welcomed the chance to revisit the entire album, using it as an opportunity to bring in Steve Scales and José Rossy to add congas and percussion on several cuts.

In its finished form, Bush of Ghosts consists of ten compositions, nearly all of them built on meticulously constructed rhythm tracks in which three-, four-, or, in one instance, five-beat patterns are looped in two- or four-bar phrases that are overlaid with bass, rhythm guitar, synthesizer, and a plethora of percussion. The two opening tracks present snippets of dialogue culled from radio talk shows, which are variously repeated, sped up, and slowed down. Four of the tracks feature Arabic singing or chanting, most notably by Dunya Younes, whose sinuous melismas turn the funk groove of “Regiment” into one of the high points of the album. The remaining four tracks reflect David Byrne’s fascination with evangelical preaching. “Help Me Somebody” features a fiery Black Baptist minister, the Rev. Paul Morton, declaiming gospel phrases that could come from any soul song over a racing conga rhythm and a lyrical ostinato on guitar. “Moonlight in Glory” samples a field recording of “See God’s Ark a-Moving” by the Moving Star Hall Singers, on which a preacher with a thick Gullah accent is accompanied by groaning bass notes and echoed by a mournful chorus of women’s voices. The replacement for Kathryn Kuhlman consisted of an unnamed, unhinged exorcist banishing the spirit of Jezebel, a favorite demon of Christian charismatics.

Given its esoteric nature, the initial sales of Bush of Ghosts were surprisingly strong. Released in the middle of March, the record took about a month to rise to #44 on the Billboard charts, where it remained throughout the spring. Virtually all the reviews praised the album’s technical polish and invention. But its delayed release caused many critics and listeners to regard it as a belated ten-course appetizer that previewed the methods of production and studio composition that Eno and Talking Heads had brought to fruition on Remain in Light. Most reviewers preferred the tracks with the most expressive vocal parts, including “Regiment,” “Help Me Somebody,” and “Moonlight in Glory,” over those that were based on radio dialogue or white evangelical preaching. (Eno himself cited “Regiment” and “Moonlight in Glory” as “the two real achievements of the album.”)

By far the most passionate critique of the album came from Tom Carson, writing in the Boston Phoenix many months after its release. Identifying himself as an ardent fan of both early Brian Eno and early Talking Heads, Carson began by acknowledging the mystique that Eno had succeeded in generating around his theories of music making, which he described as “the most sustained, overtly intellectual body of thought ever imposed on rock ’n’ roll.” Central to that body of thought was Eno’s preoccupation with “process over product,” which led Carson to hear Bush of Ghosts as a concerted attempt “to remove the emotionally evocative aspects from art—sometimes by simply omitting them, sometimes by placing familiar emotional associations in an alienating framework that denudes them of meaning and aesthetic pleasure in ways that ultimately work to convey the artist’s superiority to all such phenomena.” The result was “nothing less than art without content, which means that the artist’s conceptualizing handiwork is the only thing left to notice.” Carson saw signs of this alienation in Talking Heads’ recent work as well, beginning with “I Zimbra” (“passing off nonsense syllables as an African chant is something even racist old Hollywood doesn’t do anymore”) and extending to the Afropop tracks on Remain in Light, which in his view applied the communal spirit of African music to “one coldly deliberate dislocation after another.” “Talking Heads were at some point able to change people’s lives,” Carson wrote. “Now they only bolster a vague sense of hipness in an elitist and cerebral way.”

29

Geniuses of Love

I hated the press release that was sent out with Remain in Light, this little artistic statement about how it came about: “We read these books and we decided to play African.” I didn’t read those books! I said, “This is bullshit, Eno. You should just do interviews with Artforum and forget the pop world.”

—TINA WEYMOUTH

Jerry Harrison had reacted to the news that David Byrne would be otherwise engaged with Twyla Tharp in the months ahead by signing a contract with Sire Records to make a solo album of his own, using most of the musicians he had recruited for the Expanded Heads, backed by a rhythm section consisting of Yogi Horton and a pair of top-flight bassists, George Murray and Tinker Barfield. This left Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth in something of a lurch. For all its critical and commercial success, the extended tour with the expanded band had been expensive to mount, and when all the bills were paid, there was little left over for the original members of the group. But when Frantz and Weymouth followed Harrison’s lead and spoke with Seymour Stein about the possibility of the two of them making an album together, Stein demurred, having already committed his label to the release of three albums (counting My Life in the Bush of Ghosts) that would be received as spin-offs of Talking Heads.

Chris and Tina then asked Gary Kurfirst to prevail on his friend Chris Blackwell, who responded by inviting the couple to return to Island Records’ Compass Point Studios in Nassau to record a single, and perhaps a full album. Blackwell also arranged for them to meet in New York with the famed (and famously eccentric) Jamaican producer Lee “Scratch” Perry, who nominally agreed to produce their single. But when Perry failed to appear for a full two weeks after Chris and Tina arrived in Nassau in the spring, they decided to coproduce the sessions with Steve Stanley, who had stepped in the year before as the engineer on Remain in Light. Treating the project as a working vacation, they invited Tina’s sisters Laura and Lani to join them at Compass Point.

The name they chose for their ad hoc recording group was Tom Tom Club, and they conceived of it, pointedly, as an antidote to the aura of aestheticism and intellectuality that people associated with Talking Heads. As Chris Frantz explained it: “We wanted to make a real musical anti-snob record, because we’re fed up to here with all the seriousness which surrounds Talking Heads. We were consciously trying to get away from being influenced by heavy philosophies and drugs and the more cynical or nihilistic attitudes that a lot of people feel. It’s the only kind of emotion they can get behind in New York. We liked the happier, more innocent approach of the Island people.”

In line with these sentiments, Chris and Tina were great fans of the B-52’s, who had opened for Talking Heads on their 1979 tours. Their enthusiasm was shared by Chris Blackwell, who had signed the group to Island for distribution in the UK and personally produced their first album. The Georgia band’s knowing celebration of a kitschy, trashy brand of pop inanity epitomized the “theme night” sensibility of the Mudd Club—the embrace of masquerade and make-believe that had migrated into the downtown scene from the camp bacchanalia of gay disco culture. Along with their snappy backbeats, the B-52’s holiday from all seriousness exerted a strong influence on the “house party” ambience that Chris and Tina envisioned for Tom Tom Club.

The first track they recorded was a novelty song with the storybook title “Wordy Rappinghood.” A few months before, Blondie had released a bass-heavy dance single called “Rapture,” on which Debbie Harry descended from the pining peaks of her vocal register to deliver a vapid tough-chick rap about a club-hopping, man-eating Martian, in the course of which she name-checked the hip-hop pioneers Fab 5 Freddy and Grandmaster Flash. Coming from Blondie at the height of their fame, the single went to #1. (To her credit, when Harry hosted Saturday Night Live, she invited the first real woman rapper, Sharon Green, better known as MC Sha-Rock, to perform on the show.) In “Wordy Rappinghood,” Tina Weymouth upped the ante of cultural cognitive dissonance by delivering her white-girl rap with the prim elocution of a grade-school teacher intent on imbuing her students with a lifelong love of words. The opening verses repeat the pattern David Byrne used in “Crosseyed and Painless,” substituting “words” for “facts” at the start of each line and filling in the blanks with whatever came to mind. “Words in papers, words in books / Words on TV, words for crooks,” Tina intones over spasmodic pings of synth notes and a backbeat of almost satiric monotony, enumerating the many uses of language with occasional turns of phrase (“Eat your words but don’t go hungry”) and sidesteps into French (“Mots pressez, mots sensez / Mots qui disent la verité”). “What are words worth?” a chorus of giddy Weymouth sisters asks in the song’s refrain, repeating the pun before launching into a Moroccan nonsense rhyme they knew from their Mediterranean childhoods: “A ram sam sam / A ram sam sam / Guli guli guli guli / Ram sam sam.”

A startling eruption of timbales then splits the song in two, and the later verses are joined by a subtext of jittery rhythm guitar as they touch on themes of profanity (“Four-letter words I cannot say”) and ecology (“Words won’t find the right solution / To the planet Earth’s pollution”). Tina signs off with an acerbically veiled reference to “a certain person who can’t say what they mean [and] don’t mean what they say.” Then the track devolves into a colloquy of voices quacking about a rap-rap here and a rap-rap there, the need to wrap things up, and a long outro punctuated by another flourish of timbales and a chant of “He don’t stop.”

Chris Blackwell was sufficiently taken with “Wordy Rappinghood” to release the song as a single in Britain, where it leapfrogged up the charts, peaking at #7 in July. This was enough for Blackwell to sign Tom Tom Club to an album deal, which he sweetened by offering to sell the Frantzes an apartment in the Compass Point complex as an advance against royalties. Chris and Tina responded by inviting Adrian Belew, along with his wife and kids, to visit them there and play on their album in the weeks ahead. Belew had spent the spring of 1981 recording with Robert Fripp and a reconstituted version of the progressive rock group King Crimson, a band he would shortly join.

By the time of his arrival, Chris and Tina had already sketched out a successor to “Wordy Rappinghood,” relying on the same additive, ground-up approach to recording they had learned from Brian Eno and used with Talking Heads. Chris was very much taken with a recent R&B hit called “More Bounce to the Ounce” by the P-Funk disciples Zapp, whose mid-tempo groove featured a stuttered downbeat on the bass drum at the start of each one-bar phrase. Bracketed by Tina’s bass line, this punchy yet unhurried backbeat became the rhythmic foundation of the track, which they named, at Chris’s suggestion, “Genius of Love.” But the real stroke of genius came from Steve Stanley, who doubled Chris’s stuttered downbeats with a pair of perky synth notes, followed by a two-note pickup in the second half of the bar, thereby endowing the song with a world-class melodic hook. Adrian Belew arrived at Compass Point in time to add a serpentine rhythm guitar part and a pair of solos he would later describe as “the best I’ve done on any record.”

Joining with her sisters to sing in a chorus whose sound she would later compare to a group of “naughty Catholic schoolgirls,” Tina starts “Genius of Love” with a spoken-word introduction. “Whatcha gonna do when you get out of jail?” she asks, deciding, “I’m gonna have some fun!” The opening verse of the song finds her nestled “in heaven with my boyfriend, my laughing boyfriend,” whose amorous attention makes this “the one time I’m glad I’m not a man.” Following in the footsteps of “Rapture,” Tina then proceeds to name-check a roster of R&B luminaries, including George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Smokey Robinson, Bob Marley, Sly and Robbie, Bohannon, and Kurtis Blow, all in the context of a slim romantic narrative that turns on the unexplained disappearance of the boyfriend.

Along the way, further embellishment is provided by a dub-based interlude that repeats the phrase “Oops! Your mama said uh”; a burst of sonic gibberish that answers the line, “We went insane when we took cocaine”; and Chris’s gravelly chant of “James Brown . . . James Brown.” Then Tina returns to the matter of the missing boyfriend, who’s described in the song’s last verse as the titular “gen-i-us of love.” “He’s so deep,” the naughty schoolgirls croon, putting their finger on the one thing he is not. In the final mix of the song, Steve Stanley, with Chris and Tina’s tacit approval, decided to permanently erase both of Adrian Belew’s favorite solos, which Stanley felt detracted from the commerciality of the track.

Although Tina Weymouth would one day improbably insist that “Genius of Love” tells a story of “incredible pain overcome, all [about] cocaine and jail and our Black heroes who have been put down,” the song throws out so many mixed messages, beginning with its la-di-da allusion to the perils of life in the ’hood, that no one could begin to take it seriously, whether as a love song or as a celebration of Black culture. Along with its funky groove and its perfect hook, the very inanity of “Genius of Love” would make the record all but irresistible to dance club audiences across the United States. In August, Island released the song as a single in Britain and Europe, where it elicited little initial response. Undeterred, Chris Blackwell then decided to import one hundred thousand copies of a twelve-inch single with “Genius of Love” on one side and “Wordy Rappinghood” on the other, for sale in the American market, where it quickly caught on in clubs. This prompted Seymour Stein to relent and offer Tom Tom Club a contract to release their album in the States.

While Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth basked in the lighthearted spirit they attributed to the “Island people” at Compass Point, Jerry Harrison and David Byrne were hard at work on their respective solo albums. Harrison recorded the basic tracks for the nine songs on his album at a studio called Blank Tape, which was known for its attractive hourly rates and its offbeat recordings by artists like Kid Creole and the Coconuts. Jerry then spent much of the summer overdubbing and mixing the album at Eldorado Studios in Los Angeles, with Dave Jerden serving as his coproducer and engineer. David Byrne recorded the basic tracks for the Catherine Wheel score at Celestial Sound in New York, where Julie Last, who had worked on Fear of Music, was now employed as an engineer. Additional overdubs and the final mixes for the soundtrack were done later in the summer at Blank Tape, where David worked closely with an engineer named Butch Jones.

The Catherine Wheel premiered in the middle of September as the centerpiece of Twyla Tharp’s monthlong residency on Broadway: an uninterrupted eighty-minute dance depicting the travails of a white, well-to-do American family composed of a Father, Mother, Sister, and Brother, their Asian Pet, and their Black Maid, whose torturous interplay is variously witnessed and abetted by a chorus of blindfolded dancers led by Sara Rudner, the star of Tharp’s company.

The dance was staged on an elaborate set that included a maze of vertical poles, diaphanous backlit scrims, racks of ominous machinery, and numerous representations of pineapples, as both images and props, that served as a symbolic motif. After nearly an hour of fierce physical interaction between the family members, much of it turning on the lecherous predations of the Father toward the Pet and the Maid, the narrative gave way in the last twenty minutes of the production to a tour de force of acrobatic movement titled “The Golden Section,” in which the dancers were dressed in golden tights and bathed in limpid golden light.

David Byrne’s score consisted of more than twenty musical segments that ranged from short rhythmic motifs and atmospheric instrumental passages to a half-dozen full-fledged songs that provide a mixture of narration and commentary. The first of these, “His Wife Refused,” functions as an overture, setting the scene in “a great big house with nothing in it.” “These people are savages,” David sings. “Take a look at their misfortune.” “My Big Hands (Fall Through the Cracks)” accompanies a section in which the Father ravishes the Pet. “Well I help myself to what I want,” David growls in a voice beholden to the bluesman John Lee Hooker. A pair of songs, “What a Day That Was” and “Big Blue Plymouth (Eyes Wide Open),” accompany “The Golden Section” at the end, the soaring chorus of the one offset by the jaunty rockabilly groove of the other, with David channeling Elvis and Roy Orbison as he sings, “Well there is nothing stronger than the feeling that you get / When your eyes are wide open.”

The initial reviews of The Catherine Wheel were decidedly mixed. The New York Times’ chief dance critic, Anna Kisselgoff, felt that the production’s many virtues were undercut by its narrative confusion and fragmentary structure: “Whatever message [Tharp] has so purposefully muddled, it pales beside the interest of the formal ideas she has contributed along with David Byrne. . . . Mr. Byrne’s music, particularly in the occasional funky vocals, has a humor not usually matched in the choreography.” Writing in New York magazine, Tobi Tobias marveled at the staging, but suggested that “Tharp’s manipulation of this handsome gimmickry is so laden with potential meanings, the conceits at once so naïve and portentous, it ends by signifying nothing at all.” Still, both critics described the final twenty minutes of the production as an unqualified triumph; as Tobias put it, “This passage of lusty, daring, unencumbered dance, along with the raw force of Byrne’s lyrics and his rich percussive polyphony, are the juiciest pieces of the pineapple.”

A pointed response to these qualified reviews came from Arlene Croce, who had championed Twyla Tharp’s work since the start of her career. Writing in The New Yorker several weeks after the premiere, Croce pushed back against her peers, describing The Catherine Wheel as “a major event in our theatre.” While making it clear that she was no fan of Talking Heads, Croce was fulsome in her praise for David Byrne’s music, which she described as “the first rock score to pull solid weight in a theatrical dance context. It has real rhythm, not just beat.” In her view, “The horrendous chill that I take to be characteristic of Byrne’s music . . . is perfectly suited to the dark side of Tharp’s world.”

Sire Records staggered its release of the three solo albums by the four Talking Heads over the course of the fall, beginning with Tom Tom Club in October. By that time, the import single of “Genius of Love” was firmly ensconced on the Billboard disco chart, where it would remain for the rest of the year. From Seymour Stein’s perspective, the commercial success of the single made Tom Tom Club by far the most promising of the Heads’ solo projects.

In keeping with its theme of pop juvenilia, Tom Tom Club featured a cover by a SoHo-based artist named James Rizzi, who depicted the band members surrounded by palm trees, beach scenes, and images drawn from the song lyrics, all of it rendered in the faux-naïve style of a hand-colored children’s drawing. The album itself begins with its two longest and strongest tracks, “Wordy Rappinghood” and “Genius of Love.” They are followed on Side One by the instrumental “Tom Tom Theme,” a minute-and-a-half snippet of drumming on tom-toms and piano strings that repeats a one-bar phrase, and “L’éléphant,” an antiwar fable, sung in French, about an elephant and a hippopotamus who disguise themselves as humans and visit a village filled with traumatized women and children, victims of “le guerre des hommes.” The track is graced by Adrian Belew’s full menagerie of large mammal impersonations, and it ends with a chant of “tuer, tuer, tuer, tuer” that functions as an exercise in incomprehension for those not fluent in French.

Side Two begins with an ill-fated return to lyrics sung in English. “As Above, So Below” marries a nicely staggered drum pattern reminiscent of the Stones’ hit “Honky Tonk Women” to a stream of New Age prattle addressing a spiritual journey of some kind. “Behold the door appears before you,” Tina intones without a trace of saving irony. “Tear away the minds that bind me.” Its successor, “Lorelei,” is the best track on the side, a siren song whose similarly portentous lyrics (“Across the wasted plain / Across the twisted dune”) are blissfully obscured by a haunting melodic refrain and an expert overlay of scratchy guiro percussion played by Uziah “Sticky” Thompson, a legendary Jamaican session man who had recently joined the house band at Compass Point. In “On, On, On, On . . . ,” Tina takes another page from the Book of Blondie to issue a stirring call to arms. “On and on we will come / There are scores of us,” the Weymouth sisters vow, though the song fails to mention what the point of all this determination might be. The album’s finale, “Booming and Zooming,” is an extended stoner goof, written by Tina’s brother Loric and possibly inspired by Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, on which Chris Frantz affects a military accent to narrate a jargon-filled radio dialogue, complete with static effects, between an anxious ground controller (“F-104, come in, F-104”) and a fatalistic test pilot intent on pushing the envelope (“It’s lighting up like a damn Christmas tree in here”).

If the pretentious poetics of “L’éléphant,” “As Above, So Below,” and “Lorelei” ran counter to the spirit of playful innocence that Chris and Tina envisioned for their group, they also suggest why David Byrne stopped collaborating with his bandmates on song lyrics when he did. But the more revealing aspect of the music on Tom Tom Club is that none of it, not even the bouncy funk of “Genius of Love,” comes close to the rhythmic intensity of Talking Heads’ recent work. Despite Tina Weymouth’s contention that she and Chris had been responsible for introducing David Byrne and Brian Eno to the Afrobeat grooves of Fela Kuti, there is no trace of a polyrhythmic approach in their own playing on the album. If anything, Tom Tom Club reveals the extent to which Talking Heads had succeeded in superimposing multiple layers of rhythmic complexity onto Chris Frantz’s exceptionally solid, exceptionally steady, and exceptionally unimaginative drumming.

As a musician who prided himself on his connoisseurship of Black music, Chris was something of a paradox—not least because he also prided himself on his non-technical approach to the drum set. This meant that he never developed the “chops” needed to play the sharply syncopated grooves and asymmetrical fills that the drummers for Motown and James Brown had established as the fundamentals of R&B drumming in the 1960s, to which the funk, fusion, reggae, and Afropop drummers of the 1970s added new levels of rhythmic nuance and complexity. At a time when gifted contemporaries like Pete Thomas with Elvis Costello and Stewart Copeland with the Police were creating their own new wave synthesis of rock, reggae, and R&B, Frantz, to judge by his playing on Tom Tom Club, remained firmly set in his ways. As David Byrne put it around this time, “Chris plays pretty much the same. He doesn’t change his style very much. His style is sort of a given.”

30

The Name of This Band

To be perfectly honest, I think it’d be nice if more people bought our records. Our record sales don’t seem to match up to the things people say about us. Talking Heads are in the strange position where we’re more famous than we are successful.

—JERRY HARRISON, 1981

The limitations of Talking Heads’ rhythm section were among the constraints that both Jerry Harrison and David Byrne sought to transcend on their respective solo albums, beginning with the prominent presence on both records of the drummer Yogi Horton. Released at the beginning of November, a month after Tom Tom Club, Harrison’s album, titled The Red and the Black, contains a preponderance of tracks that are built on Horton’s aggressive funk grooves—several of them in odd time signatures that would have tied Chris Frantz in knots—and punctuated by all manner of slaps and slides, groans and growls, from George Murray, David Bowie’s longtime bassist, and Tinker Barfield, fresh from his work with the disco star Sylvester. These well-made beds of rhythm are overlaid with the textured keyboards and choppy rhythm guitar parts that characterize Harrison’s playing with Talking Heads, expertly supplemented on several tracks by Bernie Worrell on organ and clavinet and Adrian Belew on lead guitar. Although there is little Afropop influence, apart from the rippling conga and marimba intro on the album’s opening track (which takes its name from another Nigerian novel, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart), the overall sound and feel of the musical backings is very close to that of recent Talking Heads.

There the resemblance ends. Tina Weymouth enlisted her sisters to bolster her vocal presence on Tom Tom Club. Jerry Harrison enlisted Nona Hendryx and Dolette McDonald for the same reason on The Red and the Black, but the effect is very different. Whereas Tina’s sisters served to enhance her appealing girlishness, the rich timbre of Hendryx and McDonald’s singing serves mainly to emphasize the utter tunelessness of Harrison’s voice. “Jerry should keep his teeth clenched at all times,” Robert Christgau advised in his Village Voice review. John Piccarella put it more bluntly in the Boston Phoenix: “Jerry Harrison can’t sing for shit.”

If these critical assessments were harsh, they were also, unfortunately, true. Singers are made, not born. Though Harrison had sung backup with Talking Heads, and before that with the Modern Lovers, he had never had the incentive or opportunity with either of these groups to develop a vocal personality of his own. This left him with little sense of how, as the expression goes, to carry a tune. And while he may have hoped to set a literary tone by naming his album and its opening track after novels by Stendhal and Achebe, his lyrics on The Red and the Black show no trace of the quirky way with words associated with Jonathan Richman and David Byrne.

Instead, Harrison’s songs fall back on a familiar rock pose: the man of hard-earned experience, serving up hip, jaded commentary on the ways that people cling to their illusions and fall short of their ideals. The most musically compelling song on the album, “Slink,” squanders its infectious groove on a dreadful lyric extolling the need to “keep it cool” in the rat race of daily life. “Have you ever been in a traffic jam? / Have you ever needed a gram? / Well I have,” Jerry snarls. “But I got over it!” Many of his lyrics employ the accusatory “you” that Bob Dylan perfected in his scathing mid-sixties love songs. In “Things Fall Apart,” he recycles the taunt of “How does it feel?” from “Like a Rolling Stone”; in “No Warning, No Alarm,” the breathless rhyme scheme (“sneak attack / move it back / in the track / break your back”) recalls Dylan’s incomparable “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” While most of Harrison’s songs address themes of loss and disillusionment in the context of romantic relationships, others do so in political terms. “Get ready for America’s new day / Get ready and get out of the way,” he warns in “The New Adventure,” whose atmospheric backing recalls early-seventies Miles Davis. “Worlds in Collision” constructs an apocalyptic vision (“All you mothers / Show your children / You’re not afraid to die”) and then drives the point home with overdubbed excerpts from Hitler’s speeches.

Sire Records released its third solo album by a Talking Head a few weeks after The Red and the Black. Titled Songs from the Broadway Production of “The Catherine Wheel,” the LP version of the album contained eleven tracks, including all six of the songs on which David Byrne sang, while the cassette version contained Byrne’s full score, twenty-three tracks in all. In both formats, the album was marketed as a theatrical soundtrack, not a pop record, with an austere cover showing shadowy photographs of The Catherine Wheel’s stage set and the individual dance pieces that coincided with each track.

Unsurprisingly, much of the instrumental music on the soundtrack was an extension of the work that Byrne had done with Brian Eno on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, including a pair of tracks, “Ade” and “Two Soldiers,” that were co-written with Eno. The first is an homage to Sunny Adé, its chattering Afropop groove overlaid with groaning lines of synth bass and sprightly rhythm guitars; the second moves from its elegiac chordal opening to a wildly off-kilter march of punchy funk drumming and Adrian Belew’s discordant short circuits on guitar.

On account of their narrative role in the dance piece, the six full-fledged songs on the soundtrack required Byrne to write in a more purposeful manner than the improvisational approach he had used on Talking Heads’ recent albums. Instead of feeling out the words and melody by singing over prerecorded instrumental tracks, Byrne went back to writing the old-fashioned way, starting with a subject, a title, or an opening line and relying on the lyrics and melody to determine the musical shape and structure of the song.

Several of these songs gave him a chance to sing over more syncopated, fluid, or asymmetrical grooves than he had attempted with Talking Heads. The overture “His Wife Refused” transpires over a dizzying barrage of offbeat snare accents that create an impression of time out of joint, while the chorus of “Big Business” races along on a rippling current of hand drums beholden to Fela Kuti. David also took the opportunity to explore more vernacular styles of singing, affecting a bluesy snarl that turns the slow funk groove of “My Big Hands” into the most overtly lascivious song he had ever sung, and a rockabilly yelp that lends a delirious edge to the refrain of “I’ve got my eyes wide open” in “Big Blue Plymouth.”

The concurrent release of three albums by four members of the same band made it inevitable that the records would be reviewed together and compared with one another in the music press. The consensus of critical sentiment was summarized by Robert Christgau in his Village Voice column, where he awarded grades of A minus to both the “magical synthesis” of The Catherine Wheel and the “kiddie funk” of Tom Tom Club, and a C plus to the “steamy clutter” of The Red and the Black. David Fricke was a bit more generous to Jerry Harrison in his Rolling Stone review, avoiding the issue of Harrison’s singing and praising the darkly contrapuntal cast of his instrumental arrangements. Writing in Musician magazine, Van Gosse celebrated the “familial and even communal joyousness” of Tom Tom Club and dismissed The Red and the Black as sounding “like outtakes from Remain in Light.” Though Gosse had written a rave review of Remain in Light, his attitude toward David Byrne had soured since the release of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. “The Catherine Wheel is completely what most of Bush of Ghosts and some of Remain in Light edged toward,” he concluded, “a self-referential formality made of bits of this and that, pale funk-ism and pop-sophism.”

Robert Palmer interviewed each of the Talking Heads about their respective solo albums for his column in the New York Times, which gave them a chance to refute the rumors that the band was in disarray. “We’re having a good time,” David Byrne assured Palmer. “We’re socializing with one another again.” “We can even laugh at each other’s jokes,” said Chris Frantz. “It’s a welcome relief.” To some extent, Palmer was making amends for a column about Brian Eno he had written earlier in the year, in which he speculated that “Mr. Eno’s expansion of [Talking Heads’] musical horizons may result in [their] dissolution. Now they are not sure whether they want to continue as a four-piece group.” The column had infuriated Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth. “Somebody had gotten it into their heads that we were going to split up, maybe by something somebody said in an interview,” Frantz complained to Palmer. “Eno said it!” Weymouth interjected. “Who knows where he got that idea? The problem went away because Eno went away.”

At the time they spoke with Palmer, “Genius of Love” was still climbing the Billboard disco chart, where it peaked at #1 in January before crossing over onto the magazine’s soul and pop listings. Its success fueled the steady sales of the Tom Tom Club LP, which spent a total of thirty-three weeks on the album charts, rising to #23, with more than five hundred thousand copies sold. During this same period, Jerry Harrison’s album disappeared without a trace, while Songs from the Broadway Production of “The Catherine Wheel” stalled at #104 in the winter of 1982.

For Chris and Tina, the commercial success of Tom Tom Club was a personal triumph that came with a twist of sweet revenge. Notwithstanding their RISD diplomas, the two of them had played little part in promoting the reputation of Talking Heads as the darlings of New York’s pop intelligentsia. Their own ambivalent engagement with the worlds of fine art and high culture had waned since their college days, and they had always viewed David Byrne’s intellectual, literary, and art-world interests and ambitions as forms of pretension on his part. Now, at the precise moment when David was burnishing his reputation in that world by entering into a collaboration with one of its most celebrated figures, Chris and Tina had parlayed their long-standing affinity with Black music—and, as they would have it, Black culture—into a top-selling record on the soul and disco charts.

“We wanted to make an album that had to do with the street,” Frantz told Robert Palmer. “And we haven’t really heard any feedback from the New York cognoscenti, the people who have been the core of the Talking Heads’ audience.” “The feedback has been coming from above 110th Street,” Tina Weymouth added proudly. And indeed, in the winter of 1982, the seminal Bronx rappers Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released a single called “It’s Nasty” on which they sampled the synth riff from “Genius of Love.” The actual lyrics to “It’s Nasty” had nothing to do with “Genius of Love,” but the relationship between the two tracks was enough to inspire the rock photographer Laura Levine to invite Grandmaster Flash and Tina Weymouth to pose together, holding a pair of enormous ghetto blasters, on the cover of New York Rocker, thereby providing a striking vignette of interracial and cross-cultural pollination in the New York music scene.

From Seymour Stein’s perspective, it was the commercial success of Tom Tom Club, combined with the commercial failure of The Catherine Wheel, that convinced David Byrne to recommit himself to Talking Heads. In fact, as Robert Palmer’s column in the Times made clear, the Heads had reunited even before the release of the Catherine Wheel album, convening at Blank Tape studios in November 1981 to work on a two-record anthology of their live performances from 1977 through the end of 1980. If anything had a salutary effect on their unity, it was this opportunity to review the course of their career from their first days as a four-piece group through their tour with the Expanded Heads.

Taking its title from the monotonic manner in which Byrne had introduced the group in its early years, The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads was released on Sire in March 1982. Sides One and Two of the two-LP set consisted of ten tracks by the four-piece band, including five from a live broadcast on WCOZ in Boston in November 1977 and five from a concert at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey, two years later, in November 1979. Sides Three and Four consisted of seven tracks by the Expanded Heads—three from their homecoming in Central Park in August 1980 and four from a show they did later that year in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. The only outright surprises on the album were an unissued song from 1977 called “A Clean Break (Let’s Work)” and a version of their first single, “Love → Building on Fire,” that would inspire the band to revive the song in their live repertoire in the months ahead. There were no selections from Talking Heads in their original three-piece configuration, nor, with the exception of a version of “Take Me to the River” from their concert in Central Park, were there any of the cover tunes they played in their formative years. (An expanded and much-improved version of the album was issued on CD in 2005 with an additional twelve tracks, many of them drawn from a 1978 show in Cleveland and a 1981 concert in Tokyo.)

What the album chronicled in no uncertain terms was the diligent improvement in the band, from their taut, crisp playing on the songs from 1977 and 1978, most of them with Jerry Harrison on second guitar, to the dense, bass-heavy funk of the Expanded Heads, leavened by Steve Scales’s explosive percussion and Adrian Belew’s rampaging lead guitar.

The LP’s gatefold sleeve was faced on its front by photographs of Talking Heads playing in a suburban living room at a private party in New Jersey shortly after Jerry Harrison joined, and on its back cover by wide-angle shots of the Expanded Heads performing in Central Park. The interior panels were filled with more than two hundred snapshots of the band and its individual members at various stages of their career. After parsing the liner notes, one rock critic was struck by the Heads’ carefully calibrated idea of collaboration. “Remember the way songwriting credits used to read?” wrote Cameron Cohick in the Fort Lauderdale News. “Lennon-McCartney, Jagger-Richards . . . Check out the credits for the three most recent songs on this new double live album: ‘Initial music by David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison, and Tina Weymouth. Additional music by David Byrne and Brian Eno. Musical and vocal arrangements by David Byrne and Brian Eno.’ God forbid that the public should think that Chris had as much to do with these songs as David did.” Despite the avoidable drama surrounding the credits on Remain in Light, it appeared that David Byrne’s need for personal recognition remained stubbornly intact.

Critically and commercially, The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads was something of a non-event. Its sales were brisk but short-lived. The album peaked at #31 on the Billboard charts in May, six weeks after its release, fell out of the Top 100 in June, and vanished in July. The reviews in the music press served mainly as a referendum on the musical evolution of the group, with some critics preferring the quirky minimalism of the original four-piece band, while others reveled in the explosive kinetics of the Expanded Heads. Paraphrasing Jerry Harrison, Van Gosse summarized the Heads’ peculiar predicament in his Village Voice review. “These two LPs in no way damage the standing of the world’s greatest semipopular pop band,” he wrote. “They’re as near flawless and choice as can be, but we already knew they were this good.”

31

Girlfriend Is Better

The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads had a big effect on this new record, actually. It gave us the opportunity to sit down and listen to everything we’d done. By listening to ourselves play the old and the newer stuff as a live band, we could hear what we had gained and lost from the various changes we’d been through. We tried to gain some of what we felt we had lost when we made this record. Some of the simplicity, some of the feeling of a band playing.

—DAVID BYRNE

The same month that The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads was released, Tina Weymouth learned that she was pregnant, with her baby due in November. The recording and publishing royalties from Tom Tom Club had provided the Frantzes with the financial cushion they felt they needed to start a family, and they had wasted little time in making good on that goal. Tina’s pregnancy led Gary Kurfirst to adjust the schedule of live performances he had planned in the months ahead, booking ten shows in Japan in April, a monthlong tour of Europe in July, and thirty-two US dates in August and September. On the strength of their hit record, Tom Tom Club was booked as the opening act at their concerts in Japan and Europe.

“It will be an interesting exercise because the band has been both strengthened and weakened by this long stay away from each other,” Jerry Harrison said of their upcoming tour. “Working with other people,” he added, had helped the Heads to “appreciate what a good relationship we had. We’re also less insistent on getting one’s own idea across. You feel more comfortable compromising when you know there are other outlets for your ideas and emotions.” David Byrne agreed. “I’m looking forward to working together again,” he told Roman Kozak of Billboard. “Everybody now has more confidence in what they like, which should make for a real interesting relationship.”

By this time it was clear that Adrian Belew would not be rejoining the band. In addition to his involvement in the revival of King Crimson, Belew’s relationship with the Frantzes had ended on bad terms—ironically enough, in the aftermath of Remain in Light—with a dispute over his share of the songwriting credits and royalties on the Tom Tom Club LP. In his place, the Heads recruited an effusive rhythm guitarist named Alex Weir, who had previously played with the Brothers Johnson, a Los Angeles–based disco-funk band that released three Top 10 albums in the 1970s.

Belew’s departure also coincided with that of Busta Jones. (According to Tina Weymouth, “It was like two kings in one palace. It just didn’t work out that well.”) Bernie Worrell, in the meantime, had agreed to coproduce an album by the country-rock singer Rita Coolidge, which led to his replacement on the European leg of the tour by a keyboard player named Raymond Jones, a mainstay of the disco band Chic. Steve Scales and Dolette McDonald remained with the Expanded Heads. Another addition to the tours in Japan and Europe was Tyrone Downie, formerly of the Wailers, who had joined the house band at Compass Point following the death of Bob Marley in 1981. Having contributed to the Tom Tom Club LP, he was hired to play keyboards behind the group when it opened for Talking Heads.

The Heads’ tour of Japan was notable mainly for David Byrne’s encounter in a Tokyo restaurant with the woman who would become his wife. Adelle Lutz, known as Bonny to her family and friends, was a thirty-four-year-old Japanese American designer and model. Her father, Walter Lutz, had met her mother, Miwako “Mona” Furuki, while serving as an officer in the Army Corps of Engineers during the American occupation of Japan. After they were married, in 1947, Walter brought Mona back to his home in the suburbs of Cleveland, where he expanded on a fascination with bamboo he had acquired during the war by opening a specialty shop called Bamboo House. Adelle was born a year later, followed by her sister Bettina (“Tina”) in 1950. Though the Lutzes’ biracial, green-eyed daughters were something of an anomaly in suburban Bay Village, Ohio—“My mother served potato chips to my friends in a lacquered bowl,” Adelle later joked—the girls felt comfortable growing up there.

But Mona missed her family, and in 1966, the Lutzes decided to return to Japan, where Adelle and Tina finished high school, and both sisters capitalized on their striking good looks by modeling for Shiseido, a cosmetics firm that was promoting Western concepts of glamour to Japanese women at the time. Tina was the taller and more extroverted of the two; she went on to become a top fashion model in London and Paris, a favorite of designers like Yves Saint Laurent and photographers like Cecil Beaton. Adelle’s career centered on her work in television commercials. In addition to Shiseido, she appeared in ads for Mazda, Coca-Cola, and Japan Airlines, in the course of which she learned a great deal about filming, staging, and production design.

In 1972, Tina Lutz met and married the flamboyant Chinese-born restaurateur Michael Chow, a celebrity in his own right, whose restaurant in Knightsbridge, Mr. Chow, had grown from a Swinging London hot spot into a crossroads of international café society. A year later, when Chow captivated Hollywood by opening a branch of Mr. Chow’s in Beverly Hills, Adelle moved to Los Angeles to run the front of the house. In 1979, she relocated to New York to help her brother-in-law open another branch in Manhattan, which soon became a nucleus of the city’s new nexus of wealth, art, and fashion. Her move to New York gave Adelle the opportunity to study acting with Stella Adler and become increasingly involved in theater and costume design. In 1982, Michael Chow sponsored a performance at Lincoln Center by a Shanghai-based opera company that his father, a renowned actor and director, had founded, and that his brother William now ran. It was at the after-party for this performance that David Byrne, who came with Twyla Tharp, first met Adelle Lutz.

Their second meeting, in Tokyo, where Adelle was working on a project with the avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson, was unencumbered by Tharp’s presence. After accepting David’s invitation to see the Heads perform, Adelle was amazed at the difference between his offstage demeanor, which she likened to a proverbial “deer in the headlights,” and his “transcendent abandon” onstage. Twyla Tharp didn’t know it yet, but this marked the end of her relationship with David Byrne. When the tour ended and the Heads returned to New York at the beginning of May, David stayed on in Japan. Tharp was not surprised by their breakup. “It was our temperaments that did us in,” she later wrote. “Deep down, each of us felt a need to be in charge—a conflict that became clear over the Catherine [Wheel] video. I raised the money for the project and I was going to direct. David felt differently.”

Twyla Tharp was a preeminent figure in the world of modern dance. David Byrne was a noted rock musician who had recently become fascinated, after working with Tharp and Toni Basil, with the vocabulary of physical movement. That Byrne now thought of himself as a suitable candidate to direct a full-length video of a dance piece that Tharp herself had choreographed suggests a stunning level of artistic presumption on his part. Even as he continued to speak with reporters about “sacrificing our egos for mutual cooperation” in the context of Talking Heads, something in him was doubling down on the quiet grandiosity that had compromised his relationships with his bandmates in recent years.

Adelle Lutz’s beauty and modesty masked a strong aesthetic sensibility and an acute artistic eye, and from the moment they got together, she began to exert a profound, if largely uncredited, influence on David Byrne. In addition to her work in fashion, theater, and design, the years Adelle had spent presiding over Mr. Chow’s in New York and Hollywood had taught her how to navigate some of the biggest egos in the world, celebrities of all description who made David Byrne’s version of self-assertion seem demure. Going forward, Adelle would play a central role in many of Byrne’s creative endeavors, both by connecting him with people in her wide circle of contacts and by providing him with forthright critiques of his work that he respected and took to heart.

When David returned from Japan, the Heads gathered at Chris and Tina’s loft to begin work on material for their next album. It had been nearly two years since the release of Remain in Light. Tina’s pregnancy and their summer tour schedule made it unlikely that they would have enough time to record and release a new album in 1982, but they needed to make a start. The four of them had agreed to produce the album themselves, and to retain the approach they used on Remain in Light of jamming on riffs and elaborating the results into songs. The difference this time, as David told a reporter, was that he hoped “to write and rehearse the material before the band went into the studio, rather than start with rhythm patterns and write the words and melodies last like we did on Remain in Light.”

As it turned out, however, after several weeks of jamming and rehearsal, the Heads booked time with Butch Jones at Blank Tape studios and recorded the instrumental backings, without words and melodies, for a number of prospective new songs. Most of these, like their antecedents on Remain in Light, were based on one- or two-chord vamps that relied on changes in texture and melody to determine their structure of verse, chorus, and release. Steve Scales and their new guitarist Alex Weir joined them on several of these tracks.

At the end of June, the band left on their monthlong tour of Europe, which included performances at rock and jazz festivals in Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany, two nights at London’s capacious Wembley Arena that were filmed by a crew from Britain’s new commercial network, Channel 4, and a dozen concerts in France, Italy, Hungary, Greece, and Yugoslavia. Tom Tom Club opened for them at each venue, with Tina at center stage, flanked by her miniskirted sisters Laura and Lani, whose brazenly amateurish singing and dancing added to the lighthearted spirit of their sets. The crowds at the concerts in Italy and Greece were dominated by an abundance of rowdy young men, and several of the shows were marred by outbreaks of recreational violence that prompted a heavy-handed response from the police.

The changes in personnel lent a different feel to the sound of the expanded band. “We’ve cleaned it up a bit,” said David Byrne. “Two years ago there was a lot of spirit and energy, but it was a little sloppier than it is now.” Both Alex Weir and Raymond Jones were accompanists, not soloists, and in the absence of Adrian Belew and Bernie Worrell, the Heads became even more of a rhythm machine, playing tighter, more streamlined arrangements powered by Tina Weymouth’s resurgent bass playing and Steve Scales’s explosive percussion.

Their ninety-minute sets began, as always, with “Psycho Killer.” This was followed by the revived version of “Love → Building on Fire,” a dozen songs drawn equally from Fear of Music, Remain in Light, and The Catherine Wheel, Jerry Harrison’s “Slink,” and a bluesy new number called “Swamp.” The live versions of “Big Blue Plymouth,” “My Big Hands,” “Big Business,” and “What a Day That Was” were far superior to the recorded versions, with stronger grooves and exultant backup singing on the choruses, as if the Heads felt a need to make their mark on these new songs.

But the most dramatic improvement centered on David Byrne, whose singing and, for the first time, dancing commanded the stage as never before. Byrne’s work with Toni Basil and Twyla Tharp had inspired him to choreograph his performances on familiar songs like “Once in a Lifetime,” “Mind,” and “Life During Wartime,” dispensing with his guitar in order to move more freely. His dancing was as quirky as his singing had once been: bending over backward (like Burt Lancaster in Elmer Gantry) with his arms outstretched in “Lifetime,” skipping an imaginary rope in “Mind,” and jogging in place like an aerobics coach in “Life During Wartime,” then circling the stage at a dead run in the coda of the song. An added benefit of the attention Byrne paid to his dancing was the way it reined in his tendency to overembellish his singing in live performance and focused his energy on a clear and consonant delivery of the songs. On “My Big Hands,” he reproduced the tinny tone of his vocal on the Catherine Wheel album by singing through a bullhorn.

When the tour of Europe ended in late July, David Byrne did not return to the States with the rest of the band. Instead, he spent a week with Adelle Lutz in Tokyo, during which he accepted an offer from Robert Wilson to write the music for a section of Wilson’s current magnum opus, a multimedia, multinational, multilingual production called The CIVIL WarS. Set in the nineteenth century and loosely linked by themes of social strife, The CIVIL WarS consisted of a half-dozen full-scale operatic productions that would be staged in different countries and then combined in an epic twelve-hour performance that was scheduled to take place in Los Angeles in conjunction with the 1984 summer Olympic Games. The section that Byrne was charged with, The Knee Plays, comprised a dozen short segments that were choreographed by the eminent Kabuki dancer Suzushi Hanayagi to function as “joints” or interludes between the sections of the full production. Though Byrne was initially drawn to the idea of scoring the piece for traditional Japanese instruments, he would shortly change his mind.

In the second week of August, Talking Heads reunited with Bernie Worrell and began their US tour with a string of sold-out concerts in California, several of them with the reggae group Black Uhuru as their opening act. A stadium show with the Police in Toronto (where the Heads had been added to the bill to boost flagging ticket sales) was followed by dates in the Midwest, a triumphant homecoming at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in New York, and a half-dozen concerts in the Northeast. On Labor Day weekend, as Tina Weymouth entered her third trimester, the band returned to California to perform in 110-degree heat with the Police, the B-52’s, and the English Beat at an underattended rock festival in the foothills of the San Bernardino mountains. Touted as an antidote to the “Me Decade” ethos of the 1970s, the three-day “Us Festival” was produced by Bill Graham and bankrolled by the cofounder of Apple Computer, Steve Wozniak, who sank more than twelve million dollars into the construction of a natural amphitheater, a massive sound and video system, and a hundred thousand campsites, most of which went unused.

Their progress across the country was greeted by a chorus of rave reviews. “The band played with extraordinary style, command, and surprising warmth. Who could have foreseen that this group, the artiest of New York City’s punk class of ’77, would develop into one of America’s premiere dance bands?” Don Waller wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “An inspired and inspiring evening with a great band at the height of its powers,” was Robert Palmer’s assessment in the New York Times of their performance in Forest Hills. When the Heads played in the Byrne family’s hometown of Columbia, Maryland, Geoffrey Himes described the concert in the Baltimore Sun as “the richest, most rewarding music of the band’s career. Freed from the hermetic studio approach of former producer Brian Eno, the band allowed a welcome spontaneity and fun into its formerly claustrophobic songs.”

At the beginning of October, as Tina Weymouth entered her eighth month of pregnancy, the Heads flew to Nassau to spend the next six weeks, hopefully, recording at Compass Point. Much had changed since the group had last worked there with Brian Eno in 1979. In an effort to facilitate the post-disco career of the Jamaican-born model and dance club diva Grace Jones, Chris Blackwell had assembled an elite group of studio musicians and dubbed them the Compass Point All-Stars. This house band featured a rhythm section of Sly Dunbar, Robbie Shakespeare, and Sticky Thompson, overlaid with the distinctive synthesizer stylings of an erudite Afro-Frenchman named Wally Badarou. Their exceptionally punchy sound was the work of Alex Sadkin, an American engineer who had learned his craft at Criteria Studios in Miami, where his mixing credits included James Brown’s last iconic single, “Get Up Offa That Thing,” and Bob Marley’s commercial breakthrough, Rastaman Vibration. In 1979, when Marley returned to Jamaica for the first time since the attempt on his life, he picked Sadkin to produce his penultimate album, Survival. Though Talking Heads were officially producing themselves at Compass Point, Sadkin was essential to the sound and feel of the music they recorded there. Wally Badarou also added synthesizer parts to several of their songs.

In this familiar and supportive atmosphere, the Heads recorded the basic instrumental tracks for ten songs (one of which would be left unfinished). Unlike the open-ended sections they recorded for Remain in Light, the eight-bar verse-chorus structure of these songs had been determined in advance, which made David Byrne’s job somewhat easier. “I spent a lot of time on the words of this record, more than I did on Remain in Light,” Byrne explained at the time. “After we finished the basic recording, I sang nonsense lyrics—I mean complete gibberish—to the music until I was happy with the way that the gibberish fit the music. Then I put in more words to fit the rhythms and melodies. I was aiming for a kind of dream world, non-specific in the way that dreams are, which leaves things open and requires interpretation in the way that dreams do, the way that dreams contain powerful images with a strong emotional impact but you don’t know what they mean.”

The raw material for these lyrics was drawn from long lists that Byrne had made of idiomatic phrases and figures of speech, which he then organized and selected based on the way they resonated, complemented, or in some cases clashed with one another. In his reliance on dreamlike imagery, he was picking up where he and Brian Eno had left off with Hugo Ball and “I Zimbra,” exploring the techniques of free association and juxtaposition that were introduced by Surrealist writers in the 1920s and more recently practiced by William Burroughs, master of the “cut-up,” in his role as a literary godfather of the Lower Manhattan scene. David Bowie had been using Burroughs-style cut-ups to randomize his lyric writing since the mid-seventies, but Byrne was characteristically more comprehensive and considered in the selections and juxtapositions he made.

The sessions at Compass Point ended abruptly in the first week of November, when Tina Weymouth gave birth at a private hospital in Nassau to a premature but otherwise healthy baby boy. Robert Weymouth Frantz, Robin for short, was named after Chris’s father. After David Byrne and Jerry Harrison returned to New York, the proud parents decided to remain in their second home at Compass Point through the end of the year.

Work on the album resumed in February at Sigma Sound in New York, with Alex Sadkin at the mixing board. As David Byrne refined his nonsensical “guide” vocals into melodies and lyrics, instrumental and vocal parts were added in relation to his singing. Tina Weymouth and Jerry Harrison contributed backup vocals on more than half the tracks. Dolette McDonald and Nona Hendryx were brought in to sing with David on a gospel-flavored number called “Slippery People,” which also featured a heavily doctored solo by Dickie Landry, a saxophonist who had played in Philip Glass’s ensemble for many years. (After hearing the original mix, Adelle Lutz convinced David to rework the vocal arrangement into more of a call and response.) In addition to Steve Scales, whose tom-tom overdubs lifted a track titled “Burning Down the House” into another dimension, two more percussionists, Raphael Dejesus and David Van Tieghem, performed on the album. Dejesus was a Latin percussion specialist; Van Tieghem was a jack-of-all-trades who had played with Steve Reich and, most recently, with the performance artist Laurie Anderson, whose debut album Big Science became an underground sensation in 1982.

The title the group agreed upon for the album, Speaking in Tongues, was a reference to David Byrne’s glossolalic approach to lyric writing, while a band dinner at Chinese Chance, Mickey Ruskin’s restaurant on University Place, resulted in a novel idea for the cover of the LP. The walls of Ruskin’s restaurant were lined with artworks he had traded for food and drink with his many illustrious patrons over the years, among them a painting by Robert Rauschenberg. “I suggested we ask him to do a record cover,” Byrne recalled, “and everyone thought it was a good idea.” The Heads had met Rauschenberg the summer before when he came backstage at their concert in Pasadena, and David had just seen a show of his work at the Castelli Gallery in SoHo. The fact that Adelle Lutz had been a close friend of the artist since the early seventies may also have influenced him.

Rauschenberg was delighted by the Heads’ offer to design their album cover, but he gave little thought to the commercial or manufacturing constraints that might apply to such a project. Instead, drawing on a sculptural piece he had made in 1967 called Revolver, in which images were silk-screened onto rotating Plexiglas discs powered by an electric motor, Rauschenberg proposed to replicate this effect on a vinyl LP cover. He began by making a photographic collage that included images of a suburban bedroom, a billboard, a bicycle, a cow, a hen, a row of numbers, and the side of a woman’s head. His design called for this collage to be printed in three-color separation with one color on each side of a clear plastic record jacket and the third color on a clear, LP-sized disc inside the jacket that could be rotated, manually, to form a random array of imagery.

Having volunteered to turn this concept into a reality, Jerry Harrison spent many weeks locating a company that could manufacture these clear plastic discs and album jackets. Though it came as no surprise that the cost of Rauschenberg’s cover far exceeded that of a standard record sleeve, Warners agreed to issue it in a “special limited edition” of fifty thousand copies for four dollars more than the list price of an LP. Since the anticipated sales of the album would be many times that number, David Byrne and Adelle Lutz designed a more conventional cover for the mass-produced version, showing the mandala-like image of a swirling azure disc against an ochre background, surrounded by four tinted photographs of overturned armchairs and a border of red, white, and green. The design firm M & Co. suggested the use of cleverly displaced lettering that read: “TA LKI N GHE ADS” and “SP EAK IN GI N TO NGU ES.” This was the version of Speaking in Tongues that was released in June 1983. Beset by production delays, the Rauschenberg cover was shipped to stores about a month later, by which time it served as an expensive afterthought. An even more “special limited edition” of the album, signed by Rauschenberg and, significantly, Byrne alone, was made available for sale in art galleries at one thousand dollars apiece. Rauschenberg donated his royalties from the cover to a nonprofit he had founded in 1970 to provide emergency financial aid to artists.

32

Speaking in Tongues

I thought that it would be a challenge to write words that, in a literal sense, don’t make any sense, but that hold together according to some other rationale.

—DAVID BYRNE

Speaking in Tongues enters gently, fading in on a whirl of guitar and dreamy synth notes, followed by one deep thud and a stunning cascade of Steve Scales’s tom-toms that deliver the song to its verse. “Watch out!” a chorus of voices warns over a brittle strum of acoustic guitar and a chugging keyboard bass. They might be referring to the sound of those drums, until David answers them by naming the real danger: “You might get what you’re after.” He then defies all expectations by introducing himself as just an “ordinary guy” before the chorus shouts the refrain, “Burning down the house!”

Chris Frantz claimed to have derived the song title from a crowd chant at a P-Funk show he attended in 1979. But David Byrne, who had been playing with fire since the days of “Psycho Killer” and “Love → Building on Fire,” cited a tenet of analytic psychology—“the House is the Mirror of the Self”—as his inspiration for a song about the prospect of “ecstatic rebirth.” Beyond that, Byrne recalled, “I simply combined aphorisms and non sequiturs that had an emotional connection. They’re not telling a story or signifying anything.” “Here’s your ticket, pack your bag / Time for jumping overboard,” he sings as a string of choppy synth notes escorts him through the bridge. “All wet!” the Heads announce at the start of the following verse, where the line “dreams walking in broad daylight” echoes Byrne’s ambition for the songs on the album as a whole. “Burning Down the House” sets the loosely associative, illogical standard for everything that follows on Speaking in Tongues. The lyrics of this homage to self-immolation serve largely as window dressing in a song suffused with the call and response of its singing, the seismic force of its drumming, the cartoonish quacking of Wally Badarou’s synth solo, and the sensual pleasure of its groove. The driving rhythm and dense texture of the music invert the usual relationship between music and words by turning the singing into an accompaniment to the track, allowing autonomous phrases—“fighting fire with fire,” “it was once upon a place”—to capture the listener’s attention in the way that a guitar riff or a drum fill would. “Some things sure can sweep me off my feet,” the song declares in its fourth and final verse, before Badarou’s synthesizer returns to add a spacey, dreamy coda to the conga pops and tom-toms that send the track on its way.

“Everybody . . . get in line!” David gasps at the start of “Making Flippy Floppy,” with a catch in his voice that seems to split the difference between a dance floor instruction and a call for social conformity. “Making Flippy Floppy” is the way a drunk WASP uncle might refer to sex, and the wobbly yowl of Tina Weymouth’s brilliant bass part takes nothing away from that implication. But the phrase could as easily apply to the way that words themselves are tossed around in the six minutes of free association that make up the lyrics to this track. “Nothing can come between us / Nothing gets you down,” it begins, with the first of the many negations (“nothing left to offer,” “nothing is complete”), idiomatic pairings (“rest and relaxation,” “business and pleasure”), and figures of speech (“no one makes a monkey out of me”) that are strung together in verses that show a willful disregard for comforting notions of narrative continuity. David goes on to offer some political commentary (“Our president’s crazy / Did you hear what he said?”) before finally arriving at the title line. “Making flippy floppy, trying to do my best,” he sings, adding, “We kill the beast / Kill it!,” in what may or may not be an allusion to the chant of the savage schoolboys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

On the strength of its last chorus, “Girlfriend Is Better” would achieve an iconic status in the annals of Talking Heads. David makes his entrance over the jolting backbeat in a state of apparent distraction, prefacing his lines with the word “I” before veering off in other directions: “I . . . Who took the money? / Who took the money away? / I . . . it’s always showtime, here at the edge of the stage.” After taking a moment to “wake up and wonder” where he’s been and who was there, he's joined by a twinkly trill of keyboard as he offers his dubious assurance that there’s “no need to worry, everything’s under control.” The cause of his distraction is revealed in the chorus of the song. “I got a girlfriend that’s better than that / She has the smoke in her eyes,” he announces, as Bernie Worrell, who’s been laying low up to this point, answers each line of his singing with some of the lewdest sounds in his P-Funk library of lewdness, impersonating the allure of this woman with a series of squeals and squiggles that seem to leap out of the music like a jack-in-the-box as David sings, “She’s coming up, going right through my heart / She’s gonna give me surprise.”

After another rambling verse and a chorus that echoes Doris Troy’s R&B standard “Just One Look,” Worrell expands his instrumental commentary into a sixteen-bar solo that croaks like a conclave of primordial bullfrogs, setting the stage for David, in the remaining two choruses, to reaffirm the virtues of his anonymous girlfriend before arriving at the lines that could serve as his credo for the album as a whole. “As we get older and stop making sense,” he sings, “you won’t find her waiting long.” “Stop making sense!” he repeats again and again, turning the phrase into a command. “I got a girlfriend that’s better than this / And nothing is better than that.”

The call-and-response singing that figured so prominently on Remain in Light is largely absent from Speaking in Tongues—a casualty, it seems, of Brian Eno’s divorce from the group. The exception is “Slippery People,” on which Nona Hendryx and Dolette McDonald form a gospel choir on a song whose title suggests a cautionary tale, but which turns out to be anything but. Set to a four-beat stomp whose jumpy bass and jittery guitars are laced with popping hand drums and a rattle of vibraslap, the track opens with David back in the pastoral mode of “Once in a Lifetime,” asking, “What about the time you were rolling over? Fall on your face, you must be having fun.” “Walk lightly! Think of a time,” the women advise, to which David answers, “You’d best believe this thing is real.” And what thing is that? “Put away that gun,” he continues, sounding a sudden note of alarm. “Try to recognize what is in your mind.” “God help us! Help us lose our minds,” the women respond, playing off his words. In the bridge their dialogue quickens, as the chorus responds to each of David’s admonishments with words of reassurance (“He’s all right!”) that show the way these “slippery people”—the ones who are hard to pin down, or get a handle on—are “gonna see you through.” “Turn like a wheel inside a wheel,” David proclaims, drawing an image from the Book of Ezekiel on the convoluted workings of the world. The sound of Dickie Landry’s sax solo after the chorus repeats is so distorted that it’s unrecognizable as a wind instrument, sounding more like a series of tender animal cries. Then a wah-wah guitar drawn straight from the theme from Shaft brings the song to its final chorus. “We’re gonna move,” David promises. “Right now,” the women reply.

One of the many virtues of the Heads’ playing on Speaking in Tongues was the newfound variation that Chris Frantz brought to his drumming. Confidence and experience contributed to this, but a prime influence was Sly Dunbar, whose innovative playing Chris was able to assimilate firsthand during his extended stays at Compass Point. The inverted “one-drop” rhythm of classic reggae had been a daunting proposition for conventional drummers like Frantz, who were used to beginning everything they played with a downbeat on the bass drum—the very beat that “one-drop” eliminated. But in his playing with Peter Tosh and the Compass Point All-Stars, Dunbar had pioneered a hybrid style, known as “steppers,” that combined reggae upbeats with a halftime backbeat and a steady funk four on the bass drum.

Chris’s playing on the awkwardly titled “I Get Wild / Wild Gravity” (either phrase would have sufficed) at the end of Side One is an homage to Dunbar’s style, filled with darting snare, tom-tom, and timbale accents that, in a song about disorientation, keep the music in a state of perpetual imbalance. The impact of his playing was dramatically enhanced by Alex Sadkin, who gave the track the echoey, bottom-heavy sound of a Jamaican dub mix, with clavinet croaks on the upbeats and a piquant keyboard trill that answers each line of the singing after David arrives in the song. He begins with a startling suggestion, “Let’s not be ourselves today,” and goes on to describe the sensation of feeling “pleasantly out of proportion” when “gravity lets you down.” “I get wild, wising up / I just can’t let go,” the Heads sing in the chorus, where the melody lifts brightly through the notes of a B minor chord. “I get wild, it’s automatic / I can hardly move.” David goes on to describe his efforts to “survive the situation” by pulling the curtains, shutting the doors, and climbing the walls. As for the exact nature of that situation, he’s the first to admit that “some things are hard to describe,” whether it’s “the sounds inside your mind, playing all the time” or the way the lights change from “red and white, black to gold, yellow turns to blue.” Somehow, he assures his listeners, “I get by on automatic / No surprise at all.”

The motif of rhythmic variation continues on the second side of the album. Half a century before Anglo-American rock musicians became entranced by the Afrobeat polyrhythms of artists like Fela Kuti, African American jazz musicians were combining the two-beat drive of a march with the three-beat lilt of a waltz in a way that felt totally natural to them. The result was the pulsating, tripleted style of phrasing that became known as “swing,” which provided the rhythmic basis of jazz, blues, Broadway, and Tin Pan Alley up through the 1960s, when the “straight-eight” groove of rock, funk, and disco gradually became the norm. R&B artists and rock groups like the Beatles could swing like crazy when they chose to, in songs like “Heat Wave” and “Can’t Buy Me Love.” But by the 1980s, swing was largely confined to mainstream jazz, blues, and roots revival bands. Talking Heads had never come close to playing with this rhythmic inflection—not until “Swamp,” that is. Given its rhythmic novelty for them, its placement at the start of Side Two of Speaking in Tongues sounds like the turning of a page.

The track picks up where “My Big Hands” on The Catherine Wheel left off, with David throwing off the last traces of the proscription against singing like a Black man with a full-throated growl beholden to Delta bluesmen like John Lee Hooker and Howlin’ Wolf. The lyrics were inspired by the 1980 Mabou Mines production of Dead End Kids, which portrayed the “harnessing” of nuclear energy by scientists, politicians, and generals as a Faustian bargain for humankind. “Swamp” opens with a strutting backbeat, a whimper of synth, and David muttering to himself off-mike for almost a minute before he finally lowers his voice, curls his lip, and does his best to assume a shamanistic pose. “Lemme tell you a story,” he begins, his words echoed by a rasp of distorted guitar. “The devil he has a plan.” It takes a while for that plan to come into focus, but not before David launches into a wordless refrain of “Hi . . . hi-hi-hi-hi hi” that alludes to the scat chorus (“Hi-di-hi-di-hi-di-hi”) of “Minnie the Moocher,” Cab Calloway’s classic paean to the drug culture of, yes, the Swing Era. Here, this oddly upbeat refrain serves as the marching orders for a world that’s going to hell in a handbasket of nuclear terror. “Where we goin’?” David asks. “Who knows? We come to take you home.” The song ends with the vacant image of “Lights on, nobody home” and a sinister nonsense rhyme that goes, “Click click, see ya later / Beeta beta, no time to rest / Pika pika, risky business / All of that blood will never cover this mess.” In postwar Japan, the word pika (“flash”) was how the survivors of Hiroshima referred to the atom bomb.

David Byrne had shown an interest in extraterrestrials going back to the rockets he drew as a child and the UFO questionnaires he tried to pass off as conceptual art at RISD. But “Moon Rocks” marks the advent of science fiction in his songwriting, inspired by a syndicated article that ran in the Los Angeles Times in December 1982 under the headline, “Moonstones Rock Scientists’ Theories of the Past.” “Flying saucers, levitation / Yo! I could do that,” David sings over another “steppers” groove. Though the song takes its time getting to the point, it has a lot of fun on the way, with David urging his listeners to “give it a chance” as he prepares for some heavy-duty “transubstantiation”—brought on, it turns out, by an impulse to swallow a rock from the moon. “Man in the moon, moon in the man,” is the way he describes the rumble in his belly when a voice from deep inside him begins to mumble and then sing a melodious, Enoesque release that goes, “I don’t mind, let me go / Sounds inside, I don’t know.”

After his struggles to come up with the words to the songs on Fear of Music and Remain in Light, the sheer profligacy of David Byrne’s lyric writing on Speaking in Tongues is another of the album’s surprises. Byrne’s newfound determination to stop making sense seems to have left him, in song after song, verse after verse, bursting with things to say. “Pull Up the Roots” is the last of these effusions, driven by yet another steppers-influenced rhythm that seemed to have a special capacity to loosen David’s tongue. Against a rippling current of synth plinks and a storm of funky guitar, the song opens with an expression of unconcern that, like his initial claim to be “an ordinary guy,” doesn’t sound much like the world’s idea of David Byrne: “I could be right, I could be wrong / I feel nice when I sing this song.” “Nice,” did he say? “Pull Up the Roots” celebrates the joy of letting go, of slipping the bounds of rationality for a state of mind that’s “wilder than the place we live in.” “I don’t mind some slight disorder,” David declares, putting it mildly, against a chant of “pull up the roots, pull up the roots.” “Well I have a good time when I go out of my mind / It’s a wonderful place, and I can’t wait to be there,” he sings in the chorus. Evoking the image of “towns that disappeared completely” along “miles of endless highway,” David goes on to imagine a world in which “everything has been forgiven” once all ties to the soil are cut.

For all the obscurity, free association, and serial non sequiturs of the lyrics on Speaking in Tongues, the album, beginning with its title, does sustain a theme. From “Burning Down the House” (“time for jumping overboard”) to “Pull Up the Roots” (“I have a good time when I go out of my mind”), with stops at “Making Flippy Floppy” (“check it out, still don’t make no sense”), “Girlfriend Is Better” (“stop making sense!”), “Slippery People” (“help us lose our minds”), “I Get Wild” (“let’s not be ourselves today”), “Swamp” (“Where we goin’? / Who knows”), and “Moon Rocks” (“talking transubstantiation”) along the way, the first eight tracks on the album all reflect an effort to escape the confines of linear, rational, narrative thinking in favor of “the derangement of the senses” that the poet and Beat icon Arthur Rimbaud, writing at the dawn of modernism, extolled as the essence of artistic creativity. In the 1960s, Bob Dylan had single-handedly founded an entire school of rock songwriting on Rimbaud’s credo (which Dylan himself, under the spell of love, abandoned by the decade’s end). But David Byrne’s embrace of the concept of artistic derangement was characteristically oblique. While some of this owed to his own intensely rational nature, some of it also may have been influenced by his Asperger’s, which required him, in his relations with other people, to devote so much mental effort to the rearrangement of his senses in a conscious if often quixotic effort to conform to social norms and emotional expectations.

In this sense, the whole of Speaking in Tongues serves as an extended setup for the album’s final track, on which Byrne seeks to come to terms with the one subject he had barely touched on in his career as a professional songwriter. The subtitle of “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)” bears the stamp of self-consciousness, but if the parenthetical distraction was what he needed to compose “the most direct love lyrics I’ve ever written,” it was a small price to pay. And yet, as always with Byrne, much of the song’s impact comes from its unwillingness to take anything for granted where human emotions are concerned. This is still the same singer who seeded Talking Heads’ early albums with songs interrogating the commandment of popular music that all you need is love. The legacy of that skepticism is found in the way “This Must Be the Place” admits to its own uncertainty, describing an emotional state that “must be,” not “is.” The expression of first love is usually portrayed as an adolescent rite of passage; here, it is coming from a man in his early thirties.

“This Must Be the Place” opens with Jerry Harrison’s synth bass ostinato, Chris Frantz’s genteel backbeat, Tina Weymouth’s chirpy offbeats on guitar, and David Byrne’s fluty, droopy synthesizer melody, which strikes a wistful balance between sweetness and sadness as it repeats for nearly a minute before a high, piercing countermelody heralds the start of the verse. “Home . . . is where I want to be,” David declares, introducing himself as a numbly detached romantic, “born with a weak heart” and an even weaker sense of self-awareness, “so I guess I must be having fun.” “The less we say about it the better,” he decides, bringing himself, by the end of the verse, to admit that “nothing’s wrong.” “Hi yo!” he exclaims as the melody lifts brightly in the nominal chorus of the song. Turning to the lover beside him, the one with the light in her eyes, he sings, “I love the passing of time.”

After another wistful melodic interlude, David resumes his struggle with the prospect of settling down. “Home . . . is where I want to be,” he repeats, “but I guess I’m already there.” His reticence speaks volumes; it’s the very idea of “home” that remains a mystery to him. “Did I find you, or you find me?” he wonders, before allowing himself this much: “If someone asks, this is where I’ll be.” But that hint of assertion seems to embolden him. “Hi yo! Sing into my mouth,” he asks at the start of the song’s last chorus, fancying himself a creature of instinct, “just an animal looking for a home.” “Love me till my heart stops / Love me till I’m dead,” he sings in the last lines of the song, prevailing on his lover to disregard his doubts and bring him to his senses instead. Or as he puts it, “Cover up the blank spots / Hit me on the head.”

33

Preppy Funk Triumphant

This is a great American rock band, with a blend of artistic statement and populist passion that has hardly been equaled. . . . Preppy funk triumphant, you might say.

—JOHN ROCKWELL

Burning Down the House” proved to be the Top 10 single that Talking Heads had been waiting for all along. Released in conjunction with Speaking in Tongues, it ascended the Billboard charts over the next three months to peak, in October, at #9. More important, the sales and airplay of the single contributed to the commercial success of the album, which rose to #15 on the Billboard LP chart by the end of October and remained in the Top 20 for the next four months, earning the group their first gold record for more than a half-million copies sold.

The reviews of the album were generally favorable, if a bit befuddled at times. Speaking in Tongues went on to place third in the Village Voice’s year-end critics’ poll, behind Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Murmur by R.E.M. David Fricke praised it in Rolling Stone as “a marriage of art-school intellect and dance-floor soul [that] finally obliterates the thin line separating arty white pop music and deep Black funk.” But while nearly everyone had good things to say about the album’s “killer grooves and meta-hooks,” there was little consensus about the meaning of the songs. After describing “This Must Be the Place” as the “purest pro-love song” David Byrne had ever written, the Voice’s Robert Christgau complained that, on most of the album, “the disjointed opacity of the lyrics fails to conceal Byrne’s confusion about what it all means.” “Byrne is back in the mode of panicky exclamation, saying the first thing that comes into his head,” Barney Hoskyns added in NME.

The Top 10 success of “Burning Down the House” was facilitated by the release of a music video of the song that went into “heavy rotation”—four or five times a day—on MTV in the summer of 1983. The Heads’ earlier video of “Once in a Lifetime” had become a fixture during MTV’s first year, when the cable channel was starved for both content and viewers. But the reach of its network had grown exponentially over the course of 1982, attracting more than seventeen million subscribers in media markets across the country. By circumventing the hidebound and decentralized promotional apparatus of FM radio, MTV’s twenty-four-hour format provided a portal for yet another “invasion” of previously unknown yet highly videogenic British and Australian bands, enabling Duran Duran, Culture Club, the Stray Cats, Eurythmics, and Men at Work to begin selling millions of records in the American market on the basis of their MTV exposure alone.

Initially, from the heads of major labels to top-selling stars like Bruce Springsteen, Rod Stewart, and Billy Joel, the powers that be in the music business did their best to ignore the phenomenon of MTV, dismissing it, in the words of the singer Joe Jackson, as a “shallow, tasteless, and formularized way of selling music.” However gifted rock performers might be as singers, dancers, or instrumentalists, few of them possessed any particular talent as actors or models, and many of them, having been drawn to the “authenticity” of rock as an alternative to mainstream show business, bristled at the idea of playing to the cameras. “Look at the picture in your locker as if you’re in love with this woman and then dance around with a wrench in your hand,” Billy Joel was told by the director of his video for “Uptown Girl.” To which Joel replied, “Are you fucking kidding me?” “We thought MTV was a little silly,” Jerry Harrison recalled. “A lot of the videos, like Duran Duran’s, felt more like fashion shoots than films.” “They make me ill,” David Byrne told a reporter around this time. “Most are made with the attitude that rock video is a second-rate art form, a commercial for a product.” Talking Heads’ manager, Gary Kurfirst, considered them a waste of time.

So it was until the release of Michael Jackson’s album Thriller, in December 1982. Produced by Quincy Jones to maximize its appeal to a “crossover” audience and backed by the full corporate weight of Columbia Records, Thriller engendered a sea change in the economics of the music business akin to that of the Beatles in 1964. (Not for nothing was Paul McCartney one of Jackson’s guest artists on the record.) In the first year of its release, the album sold a mere thirty million copies in the United States alone, monopolizing the #1 spot on the Billboard charts for thirty-seven weeks. Six of its nine tracks were released as singles; all became Top 10 hits over the course of 1983, with two of them reaching #1. Crucial to its sustained commercial success was the series of extravagantly produced music videos that accompanied the release of each single, their six-figure budgets amply justified by their impact on record sales.

Despite his reservations, David Byrne’s growing interest in visual presentation drew him to the possibilities of rock video. Following the completion of Speaking in Tongues in the spring of 1983, Byrne went to London to serve as the “creative consultant” on a television special that Channel 4 was making of the Talking Heads concert at Wembley it had filmed the summer before, a project the band itself had helped to finance. Produced by Geoff Dunlop, who had directed the South Bank Show segment on the group in 1980, the program featured heavily edited portions of eight songs. The soundtrack had presence and clarity, and the quality of the playing was superb. But Dunlop and his production team had focused their cameras entirely on Byrne’s performance—the first shot of the full band came forty minutes in. And they had intercut the concert footage with a relentless barrage of clips and still images drawn from television shows and commercials, print advertising, home movies, travelogues, and ethnographic and industrial films, all of which were meant to illustrate or comment on the lyric content of the songs. This gave the entire seventy-minute production the frantic visual rhythm and disjointed feel of a music video—colored, in this case, by the condescension toward anything foreign or unusual that pervaded British media culture at the time. Aesthetically, it was a disaster.

Fortunately, though the film was meant to be aired in Britain to promote the release of Speaking in Tongues, the need to secure permissions for all the extraneous “found” material put its broadcast on indefinite hold. For David Byrne, the experience served mainly as an example of what not to do. Back in New York, he enlisted a multimedia performance artist named Julia Heyward to help him produce and direct a music video of “Burning Down the House.” Heyward was a contemporary of Laurie Anderson and the singer in T-Venus, a band that combined inventive film and video projections with a raw brand of techno rock. An accomplished video editor, she was hired to bring a downtown look and feel to the project.

Set to the whirring guitar of the song’s introduction, the video begins with time-lapse footage of night falling on a typical suburban tract house. The arrival of the verse shows the four Talking Heads in matching white suits, miming their parts on the low stage of a former East Village wedding parlor, intercut with a ghostly close-up of David’s face, projected onto the outside of the house. Then the Heads are replaced onstage by a quartet of white-suited surrogates: two large men standing in for Jerry and Tina, a little old lady for Chris, and a button-cute Black kid in place of David. A series of spooky, disembodied images of all the participants’ faces superimposed on one another is followed by back shots of David and his kid-proxy performing for a stadium-sized crowd. Next comes a silly dance routine in which the members of both bands hunch their shoulders and bend their bodies from side to side, a flattering head shot of David, and the sight of flames flickering on the wall of the house. In the last verse, the surrogates are shown grappling with the Heads onstage, as if trying to wrest control of their instruments. The final minute of the four-minute video consists of the now-familiar image of David’s face projected onto the dotted white line of a highway at night, as seen from a speeding car.

The decision to feature a simulated performance by the band reflected the lingering ill will dating from David’s solo turn in the video of “Once in a Lifetime,” while the juxtaposition of the band with a group of “real-life” surrogates had a tinge of self-deprecation that bordered on cliché. But the video of “Burning Down the House” was edgy by the standards of MTV, and eye-catching enough to fulfill its intended role as an advertisement for the song and the album. Equally as important to the success of the single was the substantial promotional budget that Warner Bros., for the first time, allocated to a Talking Heads release, an outlay that included a healthy stipend for cash payments or “payola” to induce program directors and DJs to play the record on the air.

Earlier in the spring of 1983, after serving for four and a half years as a watering hole and pleasure dome for a broad cross section of the downtown arts scene, the Mudd Club shut its doors. The club had been losing its cachet for some time, turning, like CBGBs before it, into a formulaic shadow of its former self. Young artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf who had gotten their start by hanging out there were now showing their work in SoHo galleries and Whitney Biennials; Basquiat was living in a loft owned by Andy Warhol on Bond Street and dating Madonna Ciccone on the cusp of her rise to fame. The Mudd Club’s East Village analog, Club 82, also closed that spring, followed by the sad news that Mickey Ruskin, the once-abstinent restaurateur who had virtually invented the downtown art and music club, had died of a drug overdose at fifty years of age.

As the downtown clubs were closing, a raft of gleaming new skyscrapers bearing the logos of corporate giants like AT&T and IBM were rising in midtown Manhattan, where the real estate market, flush with generous tax abatements that had been granted in the depths of the financial crisis, was responding with a vengeance to the city’s return to solvency and Mayor Ed Koch’s credo, “We love the rich.” A prominent addition to these new spires of wealth and power was the Madison Avenue showplace called Trump Tower, whose opening that spring announced the ascendency of the thirty-seven-year-old eternal adolescent who would prove to be, at the very least, the greatest vulgarian showman of his generation in New York.

Raised in Queens and obsessed with the glamour of Manhattan, Donald Trump was in many ways the ultimate bridge-and-tunnel New Yorker. Prior to 1975, he was merely the son of one of the city’s many racist, rapacious, politically connected property developers. His father, Fred Trump, had made a fortune building segregated apartment blocks and tract housing in Brooklyn by greasing the palms of the Democratic machine that produced Abe Beame and Hugh Carey—transactional relationships that became indispensable when the elder Trump resolved to use his fortune to bankroll his son’s ambitions to found a real estate dynasty in midtown Manhattan. New York’s financial crisis had attracted bottom-feeders of all description, whose first impulse was to ask themselves how they could profit from the misfortune of the city and its millions of residents. With Beame as mayor and Carey as governor and his father’s millions behind him, Donald Trump had been one of the first to act on that impulse—and to be lauded as a savior while doing so—by convincing the city to subsidize his plans to transform the aging Commodore Hotel, next door to Grand Central station, into a garish new Hyatt Regency. Three years later, using the same combination of political muscle and byzantine financing, he put his name on the Manhattan skyline with a monument to his grandiosity that looked like a high-rise version of Versailles. To substantiate his claim that the fifty-eight-story building was actually sixty-eight stories tall, he simply renumbered the buttons in the elevators that served the upper floors.

In the spring of 1983, after completing their work on Speaking in Tongues, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth returned to Compass Point to record a second album by Tom Tom Club. Close to the Bone would be modeled with some exactitude on its predecessor, beginning with a designated single called “Pleasure of Love.” In addition to the Compass Point All-Stars Wally Badarou and Tyrone Downie, the Frantzes enlisted Alex Weir, Steve Scales, and Raymond Jones to play on the record, which was once again coproduced by Steve Stanley.

In July, the Heads rented space on one of the dilapidated piers along the Hudson River and began a month of rehearsals for their upcoming tour in support of Speaking in Tongues. Building on his experiences with The Catherine Wheel, his observations of theater and ritual in Bali and Japan, and the personal choreography he had introduced on the Heads’ 1982 tour, David Byrne presented his bandmates with a set of carefully orchestrated ideas for the staging of their show. “I got a new perspective on stagecraft by seeing theater in Bali and other places,” Byrne said at the time. “I had to acknowledge that performing onstage is theatrical and dramatic; it’s not just a bunch of musicians standing up and playing. If you just get up as a bunch of musicians and play, then that’s the statement you’re making. Whatever you do, you make a statement that’s theatrical in one way or another. I realized that it was a very natural impulse to get dressed up for a performance and to act in ways that you wouldn’t in normal life or on the street.” Eight years after Talking Heads began by categorically rejecting the artifice of rock performance (“no rock hair, no rock lights”), Byrne had come around to the realization that standing on a stage in front of people is inherently a show, and that to pretend otherwise is itself a form of artifice. He was now determined to introduce his own ideas about staging, theatrical lighting, and even wardrobe—first to the band, and then to its fans.

Since the Heads’ last tour, Dolette McDonald had been hired to sing backup with the Police, whose popularity was exploding in 1983 on the strength of a #1 single, “Every Breath You Take,” and a triple-platinum album, Synchronicity. In her place, the Heads hired a pair of African American backup singers, Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt. Mabry was a cousin of Sly Stone who began as a singer in the Family Stone before moving into the orbit of Parliament-Funkadelic and the group’s female auxiliary, the Brides of Funkenstein. After dropping out of the music business in the late seventies to raise a child, she was recommended to Talking Heads by Bernie Worrell. Ednah Holt was a Pittsburgh native who had studied opera at the Manhattan School of Music and recorded with a pair of R&B artists, the Ritchie Family and Angela Bofill. She came to the Heads by way of Jerry Harrison’s friend, the bassist Tinker Barfield.

The lessons David Byrne had learned about theatrical lighting from working with Twyla Tharp led him to hire Beverly Emmons as the lighting designer for the tour. Emmons’s credits included the 1976 production of Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, a pair of hit plays on Broadway, The Dresser and The Elephant Man, and the 1980 production of Dead End Kids by Mabou Mines, whose director, JoAnne Akalaitis, Byrne also solicited for advice. To minimize the level of visual distraction onstage, Emmons suggested that all of the band members dress in neutral gray clothing and that all of the sound equipment and drum hardware be painted or anodized black. Inspired by the hulking two-dimensionality of the costumes in the Noh drama he had seen with Adelle Lutz in Japan, David commissioned a SoHo-based dress designer named Gail Blacker to construct a preposterously oversized, square-shouldered business suit for him to wear toward the end of the show. “Byrne still dances like a man who forgot to remove the coat hanger from his jacket,” the rock critic David Hepworth had written back in 1981. Hepworth’s vision was about to be realized on a grand scale.

In Byrne’s conception, the concert would begin on an empty stage, devoid not only of performers but of instruments, amplifiers, and backdrop curtains as well. Having institutionalized “Psycho Killer” as an opening number and taken its instrumental possibilities as far as they could go, David now planned to reduce the song to its essence, singing it alone to the bare accompaniment of his acoustic guitar. Each song in the first part of the show would be drawn from the Heads’ early repertoire and used to herald the arrival of an additional band member. First Tina, playing bass on “Heaven.” Then Chris, his drum riser wheeled on by black-suited stagehands, joining on “Thank You for Sending Me an Angel.” Jerry would follow on guitar for “Love → Building on Fire” as more risers holding keyboards, percussion equipment, and hidden guitar amplifiers were brought on to flank the drums. Next up were Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt to sing on “The Book I Read,” Steve Scales to play bongos on “Slippery People,” Alex Weir on “Cities,” and finally Bernie Worrell. With the full band in place, the Heads would play “Burning Down the House” and “Life During Wartime” to close the first part of the show.

David designed the second part of the concert as a series of staged vignettes, centering on songs from Remain in Light, Speaking in Tongues, and The Catherine Wheel, each with its own distinct choreography, props, and lighting effects. Then Tina and her sisters would take center stage for “Genius of Love,” after which David would emerge from the wings in his Big Suit, to end the concert with “Girlfriend Is Better,” “Take Me to the River,” and an encore of “Crosseyed and Painless.”

In the midst of their rehearsals, the Heads were booked to promote their new album on Late Night with David Letterman, which had premiered on NBC the year before as a hipper, New York–based sequel to the venerable Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Crammed onto a narrow stage, the group played “Burning Down the House” and “I Zimbra,” separated by a short break in which David Byrne bantered quite credibly with the show’s ever-ironic host about the two versions of the Speaking in Tongues cover, the meaning of the album’s title, and the obscurity of its song lyrics.

A week later, Jerry Harrison’s father died suddenly in a Milwaukee hospital at the age of seventy-three. Jerry’s mother, Janice, had been diagnosed with cancer the year before, and as an only child, the sense of grief and responsibility he felt for her care and well-being would weigh heavily on him in the months ahead.

Gary Kurfirst and Premier Talent had booked a series of forty-five dates for Talking Heads in the summer and fall of 1983. The tour began in August with twenty-one shows in the Northeast and Midwest, followed by a week in California. After a break for most of September, the Heads played ten more shows in the Northeast before ending in October with a two-week swing through the South. The itinerary accommodated Chris and Tina’s needs by allowing them to travel mostly by bus with their infant son and his nanny. Unlike the band’s previous tours, the transportation and setup of the stage, sound, and lighting equipment was a major logistical operation, requiring a large crew of trailer truck drivers, technicians, and stagehands. At each venue, all the equipment had to be set up, sound-checked, and then taken down so that the show could start on an empty stage. While few changes were made in the selection and running order of the songs, the playing and dancing evolved from night to night; whenever someone did something new that worked, it was incorporated into the show.

The technical issues that arose on a regular basis created an atmosphere of tension that David Byrne, for one, did not handle well. “I was turning into a little dictator,” Byrne recalled in 2001. “There were times I threw microphones at crew members. It was really embarrassing.” At one of the early dates, David adamantly refused to leave the stage until a single faulty spotlight was fixed, forcing the promoter to keep the audience waiting outside the hall.

Yet as the tour progressed, the shows themselves were thrilling, verging on euphoric at times, and some of Byrne’s anxiety came not from the snags in the production, but rather from his feeling that Talking Heads were closing in on a heightened level of live performance that would prove definitive for him. It is hard to overstate the intensity of his need for recognition and approval at this point in his career—not so much from the band’s fans, though that was well and good, nor from the rock press, which he regarded, for the most part, as a bunch of useful hacks, but rather from a select group of musical, visual, and theatrical artists and critics, centered in New York, whose own work he admired, emulated, and had drawn on for the staging of this tour.

34

A Movie Waiting to Be Filmed

To me, the challenge was to get what they had onstage. That was enough. To go beyond that would have been distasteful to me. I don’t think there’s a need to use what this band does as a springboard to something else.

—JONATHAN DEMME

At the end of August, when Talking Heads played two nights at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, the filmmaker Jonathan Demme attended the show. A thirty-nine-year-old Long Island native who had gotten his start by making low-budget films about outlaw bikers and women convicts for the B-movie mogul Roger Corman, Demme had been a fan of the Heads since their recording debut. He first saw them live in 1979 at the Wollman Rink in Central Park, where he was struck by the way “the four of them stood there like statues on this platform. They didn’t perform.” Two years later, Demme achieved his first success as a serious director with the release of Melvin and Howard, a bittersweet comedy about a chance encounter in the Nevada desert between a down-on-his-luck gas station attendant and the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes.

Now, seeing the Heads for the first time in four years, he was stunned by the change in the band. The four former statues had turned into a dynamic, interracial troupe of singers, dancers, and instrumentalists performing exuberantly arranged and choreographed versions of their songs.

“I got so overstimulated by it,” Demme later said. “It was a rock show that not only presented great music, but also seemed to have all these little hidden pockets of humor and also of emotion. I thought, my God, that’s a movie waiting to be filmed.” He quickly contacted the band through a mutual friend, met with David Byrne, and pitched the idea of making a film of their show.

At the time Demme saw the Heads at the Greek Theatre, he was at a crossroads in his own career. The critical success of Melvin and Howard had earned him the opportunity to make his first film with a major studio and a major movie star, Goldie Hawn, who was then at the height of her popularity as a screwball comedienne. The film was called Swing Shift, and it featured Hawn as a young housewife who takes a job as a defense plant worker during World War II. Demme’s feminist ambitions for the film centered on showing the liberating effects of gainful employment on the lives of a group of women whose men have gone off to war. The production itself went smoothly, and when Demme screened a rough cut for the studio heads at Warner Bros. in the summer of 1983, they were thrilled with the result. In the meantime, however, Goldie Hawn had fallen in love with one of her costars, Kurt Russell, and decided that the film needed to be rewritten and reshot to highlight their romance at the expense of the other characters. When Demme objected strenuously to these changes, he was taken aback when the studio heads turned around and sided with their star. Instead of wrapping up production on the film, he was now looking at an ordeal of revision in the months ahead.

The impact of this was just sinking in when he met with David Byrne in September. “I said essentially that I’d try to keep it simple,” Demme recalled. “I would try very hard to honor the excitement of the live performance by avoiding tricky shots, flashy editing techniques, anything that would constitute a digression from the performance itself. I felt watching the show was like watching a story that you admittedly can’t follow on a narrative level, but there seemed to be an emotional through-line. And there was this perception of the band members as characters. David liked that a lot.”

Byrne’s enthusiasm was not shared by all of his bandmates. Much as Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth may have respected Jonathan Demme, the intensity with which David was now directing the staging of their live shows caused them to fear that they would wind up as extras in the film. Once David managed to convince them otherwise, the Heads consulted with Gary Kurfirst, who urged them, as always, to retain control of the project by financing it themselves. Kurfirst then negotiated a deal with Warner Bros. Records to lend the group eight hundred thousand dollars toward that end. Demme’s friend and “visual consultant,” Sandy McLeod, attended more than a dozen of the Heads’ remaining concerts, taking copious notes, while Demme and the film’s fledgling producer, Gary Goetzman, began to assemble a production crew that included the celebrated cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, who had recently finished his work on Ridley Scott’s sci-fi dystopia Blade Runner.

After briefly entertaining the notion of filming the show on a soundstage, everyone agreed that a real venue with a real audience was the only way to go. Since Demme was still embroiled with Swing Shift, Kurfirst arranged for Talking Heads to play a series of dates on the West Coast in the first week of December. This would allow the band to take a break in November while Demme presumably finished with Goldie Hawn, and then fine-tune their performances before arriving in Los Angeles for three nights of filming at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood.

In the 1950s, low-budget rock ’n’ roll musicals like Rock Around the Clock and Loving You helped to launch stars like Bill Haley and Elvis Presley into orbit by presenting their musical performances in the context of flimsy narratives about high school sock hops and singing deliverymen. In 1964, these fictional contrivances became the foil for the first great concert film of the rock era, A Hard Day’s Night, which was conceived by its director Richard Lester as a mock documentary that showed the Beatles to be something new and different by expertly satirizing the conventions of the typical rock ’n’ roll musical. (“We won’t do a rags-to-riches story, or the one about the record being smuggled into the studio and put on by mistake,” the Beatles assured the press.) Subsequent rock performance films like Monterey Pop, Woodstock, and Gimme Shelter dispensed with the satire but otherwise stuck to the documentary format of A Hard Day’s Night, showing not only the performances, but also scenes of the bands coming and going, interviews with musicians, promoters, and fans, and a great deal of vérité attention to the logistics of the staging and the fervent response of the crowd. In the 1970s, the rise of a new generation of directors who had grown up in thrall to rock resulted in a number of well-crafted additions to this formula, the best of them being Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, a reverently staged and filmed homage to the farewell performance of the Band.

As Jonathan Demme made plans to film Talking Heads in concert in the fall of 1983, he had no way of knowing that Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer were preparing to demolish the whole genre of “serious” rock performance films with the release of This Is Spinal Tap in the year ahead. To his credit, Demme had something very different in mind. Having promised to “keep it simple,” he and Jordan Cronenweth planned to focus their battery of cameras on the stage and the band alone, dispensing with all elements of location and backstory—no establishing shots of the venue, no backstage interviews, no cutaways to the crowd—while enhancing but otherwise adhering to the original design of the show.

“David hadn’t got to do everything he wanted to do lighting-wise with the stage show because of the limitations of technology at that point,” Demme recalled. “But he got a chance to work with Jordan Cronenweth, and he could do all the little tweakings and brushstrokes that he had dreamed of doing with the stage show.” In fact, in Demme’s absence, it was Sandy McLeod who worked most closely with Byrne on how to translate the live performance to film, beginning with the need to reduce the length of the production by cutting several numbers from the opening section of the concert.

Though it is never shown in the film, the Pantages Theater, on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, was built in 1930 as an Art Deco showplace by the vaudeville impresario Alexander Pantages and converted into a movie house during the Depression. It had served as the site of the Academy Awards in the 1950s, and was converted back into a twenty-seven-hundred-seat theatrical venue in the late seventies. Its suitability as a film set was established in 1980, when scenes from the remake of The Jazz Singer were shot there.

The actual production got off to a rocky start after Ednah Holt showed up on the first day sporting a new hairstyle that dispensed with the long braids she and Lynn Mabry had made a signature of their stage presence, thereby necessitating an emergency hair weave to restore her kinetic locks. The first night of filming had its share of technical problems as well, and when David Byrne viewed the rushes the following day, he was appalled by the polished look of the cinematography in the opening sequences of the film. Along with the need to reshoot several scenes in the empty theater in order to capture certain lighting effects, this prompted Gary Kurfirst to solicit another two hundred thousand dollars from Warners to pay for additional filming.

For Jonathan Demme, both the pressure and the pleasure of the work was compounded by the fact that he was still not done with Swing Shift, the revisions of which had gone on much longer than anyone had anticipated. This required him to spend his days working on a film he had come to despise, and his nights in a state of creative elation as he and Jordan Cronenweth sat at a bank of monitors directing their camera crews. It also meant that Demme had no time to discuss or reflect on the work in progress, which made him even more reliant on Cronenweth and Sandy McLeod, who had effectively assumed the uncredited role of an assistant director.

Free at last of Swing Shift, Demme worked tirelessly with David Byrne and a young editor named Lisa Day on the film’s postproduction during the winter of 1984. Their goal was to screen Electric Guitar, as they had nominally titled the picture, at film festivals in the spring, in hopes of attracting an independent distributor who could release it in theaters by the fall. In his role as executive producer, Gary Kurfirst had already approached Chris Blackwell about having Blackwell’s own film company, Island Alive, handle its distribution.

About three-quarters of the footage Demme and his team wound up using came from the second night of filming, with the rest drawn equally from the other two nights. Their ability to cut back and forth between different versions of the same song was facilitated by the consistency of both the staging and the performances themselves. “By that point in the tour, there wasn’t a lot of variation,” David Byrne recalled. “Almost the same thing would happen every night, the same interactions.”

For the most part, the filmmakers allowed their cameras to linger on the performers, scrupulously avoiding the sort of rapid rhythmic cutting familiar from MTV. As Demme explained it, “The use of extended shots instead of quick cuts is a result of my belief that there is great power available by holding on any extended terrific moment and letting the viewer become more deeply involved in the performance at hand, instead of constantly interrupting the flow with unneeded cuts. Too much cutting usually speaks to a lack of editorial confidence in the players and the music.” One of the more difficult editing choices involved the need to shorten the length of the film even further by cutting a beautifully staged medley of “Big Business” and “I Zimbra.” Somewhere in this process, the film shed its generic working title in favor of David’s appeal in “Girlfriend Is Better” to “stop making sense.”

Talking Heads had enjoyed a considerable following in Australia and New Zealand since their 1979 tour, and Speaking in Tongues sold well there, especially in New Zealand, where the album placed at #3 on the country’s record charts. This led them to accept an offer to perform at a number of outdoor rock festivals in the antipodal summer of 1984. Preceded by the shipment of all the equipment they needed to stage their show, the band flew to Sydney at the end of January to headline a bill with the Pretenders and INXS on the second night of the Narara Festival. Two more concerts at a sports complex in Melbourne were followed by a flight to New Zealand to perform at a pair of festivals in Auckland and Christchurch called Sweetwaters North and South. By the last of these shows, David Byrne had had enough. Civil rights activism by New Zealand’s indigenous Māori population was intensifying around this time, and when Byrne invited a couple of Māori women to come onstage in Christchurch and address the crowd, they were greeted with a hail of beer cans and verbal abuse. The Heads began their set after things calmed down, but halfway through, David walked offstage in a huff, unnerved by the behavior of the crowd. Chris Frantz prevailed on him to finish the set, and the group flew out the following day. Though no one could have guessed it at the time, this unhappy incident marked the end of Talking Heads’ eight-year career as a performing band.

Upon their return, everyone went their separate ways. David Byrne stayed in Los Angeles to work with Jonathan Demme on the postproduction of Stop Making Sense, living with Adelle Lutz in a house in the Hollywood Hills. Jerry Harrison moved back to Milwaukee to care for his widowed mother. Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth returned to Compass Point to bask in the sun and nurse their disappointment at the weak sales and harsh reviews of Tom Tom Club’s second album, Close to the Bone. “Genius of Love” had been a classic novelty hit, but a novelty, by definition, cannot be repeated, and Tom Tom Club’s moment had passed, superseded by the giddy girl power of groups like the Go-Go’s, the Bangles, and Bananarama. Close to the Bone featured another faux-childish cover by Frank Rizzi, and its lead track, “Pleasure of Love,” sounded as if someone had shredded the tape of “Genius of Love” and spliced it back together over a beat as clunky as “Genius” was funky. In songs like “This Is a Foxy World” (“Hey boy, what’s it gonna be / Freedom for the sexes full equality”) and “The Man with the 4-Way Hips” (“He’s a bad nasty mother / He’s a sweetheart undercover”), Tina and her sisters took the conceit of “naughty Catholic schoolgirls” beyond the pale. With the exception of Ken Tucker in the Philadelphia Inquirer, who praised the album’s “intoxicating rhythms, gentle humor, and sexy amusement,” the critics were not amused. “The simplistic tunes and sing-song delivery do no service to the coy credos of freedom, equality, and happiness they accompany, and there are times when all this praise of jitney drivers and four-way hips suggests the kind of irresponsible exoticism cynics always suspect when rich white people find the meaning of life in the tropics,” Robert Christgau grumbled in the Village Voice.

Stop Making Sense was first screened in April, on the last night of the San Francisco Film Festival, where the audience in the theater applauded wildly after each number. The first review in Variety drew a comparison that would be made again and again when it praised the picture as “probably the best executed film presentation of a concert since Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz.” A month later, writing in the journal Film Comment, Michael Sragow described the film as “exhilarating,” a word that would reappear in a half-dozen subsequent reviews. Screenings during the summer at film festivals in Florence, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Rio led, as hoped, to deals with a pair of independent distributors, Island Alive and Cinecom, a New York–based company that had released features by Robert Altman and John Sayles.

In its finished form, Stop Making Sense has the classical structure of a musical three-act play. It begins in silence, with an elegant title sequence by the Cuban-American graphic designer Pablo Ferro, whose distinctive hand-drawn titles had appeared in dozens of notable films going back to Dr. Strangelove in 1964. The credits end with a close-up of David Byrne’s white tennis shoes, walking out onto an empty, darkened stage. “Hi. I’ve got a tape I want to play,” he announces, setting down a boom box and switching on a robotic rhythm track as the camera draws back to show him wearing a light gray suit and an acoustic guitar. Relieved of its signature bass line, David’s solo performance of “Psycho Killer” sounds unexpectedly fresh, his metallic, jittery guitar uniquely in tune with the “tense and nervous” persona with which he entered the musical world. At certain points when the rhythm track starts to skip like a broken record, he loses his footing and staggers across the stage, before regaining his balance and continuing on with the song.

Having established its protagonist as a lone and somewhat disquieting figure, the film starts to add to its cast of characters, beginning with Tina Weymouth, a radiantly blond presence in a puffy gray jumpsuit with a steel-blue bass guitar. “Heaven” is the antithesis of “Psycho Killer” in Talking Heads’ repertoire, and Tina’s playing seems to lift David up as he sings this tender song, joined on the chorus by the haunting sound of Lynn Mabry’s offstage voice. As the cameras draw back to show the two of them standing onstage, a crew of shadowy, black-suited attendants are seen wheeling out a drum riser and setting up sound equipment behind them. When the song ends, a smiling Chris Frantz bounds out, his blue polo shirt a match for Tina’s bass, and the three of them combine on “Thank You for Sending Me an Angel,” with Chris’s galloping beat causing David to bounce on one leg like a barn-dancing buckaroo.

Next comes Jerry Harrison, his gray jumpsuit offset by pink shoes and a black guitar, to join in the choppy funk of “Found a Job,” a paean to the communal joy of work, during which the front line of Jerry, David, and Tina begin to move in time with one another. Then Jerry retreats to his keyboards on a riser next to Chris as the Heads are joined by three people of color: a grinning Steve Scales, seated next to Tina with a pair of bongo drums, and Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt, two strikingly sensual women showing a lot of leg between their gray shorts and white sneakers as the band launches into a reggae-inflected rendition of “Slippery People. “He’s all right!” they repeat in the gospely chorus, and when the two of them turn to face David and affectionately mimic him strumming his guitar, they become the living embodiment of the way that “slippery people gonna see you through.”

After Steve Scales positions himself behind his rack of tom-toms, Alex Weir and Bernie Worrell emerge to complete the band onstage, and the Expanded Heads, now at full strength, blister their way through a version of “Burning Down the House” that ends with David and Alex side by side, cartoonishly running in place as they chop at their guitars. Then David unstraps his guitar, loosens the top button on his shirt, and plunges into the anxious paranoia of “Life During Wartime.” Framed by Lynn and Ednah on one side, Tina and Alex on the other, he stands at center stage, twisting his hips and undulating his arms like a temple goddess during the verses, baring his teeth and lifting his elbows above his shoulders like a Balinese stick puppet in the refrain. The whole front line joins with him, jogging and lunging in place, their aerobics-class choreography mocking the song’s fugitive self-importance, until Jerry’s swirly synth solo sends David into orbit around the band, first at a trot, then at a run, as the music careens to a close. “Anyone have any questions?” David asks over the roar of the unseen crowd.

The first part of Stop Making Sense shows this racially and sexually integrated cast of characters coming together; the five theatrical vignettes in the second part of the film show the range of what they can do. They start with the lighthearted funk of “Making Flippy Floppy,” in which the word salad of the lyrics is compounded by still more random words (“DOG . . . GRITS . . . DUSTBALL . . . TIMECLOCK”) projected in bold white letters on screens behind the band, while David, Jerry, and Alex combine on a sonata for rhythm guitar and Bernie Worrell coaxes fanfares and quotes from the national anthem from his Prophet synthesizer.

“Swamp” is next, with the band members silhouetted against the glow of a bloodred backdrop as David sings with his voice in his throat and a desperate look in his eye, bargaining with the devil as he variously marches, staggers, and drags a palsied leg behind him across the stage. Propelled by Chris Frantz’s fierce drumming, the performance of “What a Day That Was” that follows is incomparably better than the attenuated version on The Catherine Wheel. David, Lynn, and Ednah sing it in near-total darkness with their faces illuminated from below, turning the soaring melody into a vocal tour de force. “This Must Be the Place” is staged as a domestic interior against a backdrop of comically enlarged bookshelves, with David, Lynn, and Ednah standing around an antique floor lamp, flanked by Tina and Alex, both of them strumming guitars. As the song plays out, David enters into a pas de deux with the lamp that’s modeled on Fred Astaire’s genius dance with a hatrack in the 1951 film Royal Wedding.

In the afterglow of this whimsical, heartfelt number, David dons a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and, with the stage lit from the side, reprises his impersonation of a televangelist on “Once in a Lifetime.” It’s the first song since “Psycho Killer” where the camera stays fixed on him, and he rewards its attention with a far more nuanced performance than the one he gave in the music video of the song, supplementing his gestures of emphasis and supplication by engaging in a dialogue (“and you may ask yourself”) with his flapping left hand, shaking uncontrollably to the pinging of Steve Scales’s agogo bells, and then, after many iterations of the “same as it ever was” refrain, bending over backward with his arms outstretched as the band sounds the colossal chords in the coda that lift the roof right off the song. As David brings himself back to standing, the camera shifts for the first time to capture a chiaroscuro image of exquisite beauty, showing the side-lit faces of Bernie and Jerry at their keyboards above, Lynn and Ednah with their heads thrown back below, looking like a pair of shadowy angels as they slowly mirror David’s rise. “Letting the days go by,” they sing again and again with open arms, beckoning, no longer angels but sirens, as David, barely able to stay on his feet, reaches for rapture in the twilight of the song.

Then the screen goes dark and the mood shifts from the sublime to the ridiculous for the funky fantasia of “Genius of Love.” Couched as a guest appearance by Tom Tom Club, it begins with Chris Frantz channeling his inner frat boy into the role of a dance club MC. “Check it out!” he shouts as Tina steps to the microphone in the gray minidress and ankle boots she wears in the second part of the show. She goes on to deliver a definitive performance of “Genius,” thanks to the skilled playing of the band and the singing and dancing of Lynn and Ednah, whose professional impersonation of a pair of amateur white girls adds yet another twist to the tsunami of racial irony that swirls around the song. “The girls can do it too, y’all,” Chris bellows into his microphone. That they can, dancing to a strobe that freezes their leaps and bounds until Tina seizes the spotlight by spreading her legs, getting up on her toes, and crab-dancing across the stage. “Who dat? Who dat? Who dat trying to be bad, you muthah?” Chris asks, exhorting the crowd in a voice that sounds, in the grand tradition of white rock, like a bad imitation of Black.

Preceded by his shadow looming high on the backdrop of the stage, David returns for the film’s three-song finale encased in the Big Suit: a vast expanse of creamy gray cloth, literally twice his size, that turns him into a walking two-dimensional box of man with a little head and hands. After taking his place at the front of the band, this ludicrous apparition starts boasting about his supposedly hot girlfriend, the one with the “smoke in her eyes.” The look on his face is that of a man who’s pleased with the figure he cuts—he’s the only one there who doesn’t realize that his tailor has sold him an outrageous bill of goods. His every move sends ripples through the curtain of fabric that surrounds him, turning his performance into a travesty of the sexualized self-presentation that rock learned from rhythm and blues. “Check me out!” he seems to be saying, and sure enough, as the squealy funk of “Girlfriend Is Better” takes hold, David starts to hit his stride, pumping his arms, cocking his hips, thrusting his hands into his enormous pockets, and generally striking a pose.

Having broached the limits of romantic absurdity, he then proceeds to wade, or, more precisely, waddle, into the baptismal waters, joining with Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt on an upbeat, full-gospel version of “Take Me to the River,” in the course of which he removes his suit jacket to reveal his sixty-inch waist, shake his sixty-inch hips, and introduce the band. It’s a good but not great rendition of the song, marred by Steve Scales’s exuberant cheerleading and a bit of “over-souling,” as Jerry Wexler used to say. This leaves the film wanting for an ending, which Talking Heads, with their singer restored to his original size and shape, are quick to provide as they launch into a lyrical, half-time introduction to the frantic Afro-funk of “Crosseyed and Painless.” “Lost my shape, trying to act casual,” David sings once the groove kicks in behind him, as if to account for what has come before. After trading guitar solos with Alex Weir and delivering his rap on “facts,” he joins with Lynn, Ednah, and the rest on the refrain of “still waiting” as the cameras finally turn around to show glimpses of the audience dancing in their seats, of Jonathan Demme and Jordan Cronenweth seated at their console, and lastly of the stagehands and film crew as they emerge from the wings and join with the band to the resounding cheers of the crowd.

35

Close to Perfection

David just doesn’t know his limitations. If he runs over people, it’s just because he doesn’t see them. He has a fearlessness that’s like a child’s. It gives him incredible confidence, and it’s charismatic and people are drawn to it. People will give themselves very lovingly to his projects and put a lot of heart into it and then it will be considered all David’s.

—TINA WEYMOUTH

It didn’t take long for Jonathan Demme and Talking Heads to realize they had a singular triumph on their hands. When Stop Making Sense opened in theaters in New York and Los Angeles in October 1984, it was quickly hailed as one of the greatest concert films ever made. The reviews were rhapsodic, led by John Rockwell in the New York Times (“exhilarating”), Robert Hilburn in the Los Angeles Times (“exhilarating”), Joseph Gelmis in Newsday (“exhilarating”), and The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, an early champion of Jonathan Demme’s work, who was enthralled by David Byrne. “Byrne dances in the guise of a revved-up catatonic,” she wrote. “He’s so white he’s almost mock-white, and so are his jerky, mechanical man movements. He seems fleshless, bloodless; he might almost be a Black man’s parody of how a clean-cut white man moves. But Byrne himself is the parodist. . . . Though there’s something unknowable and almost autistic about him, he makes autism fun.” “In its own terms,” Kael concluded, “Stop Making Sense is close to perfection.” In New York magazine, David Denby compared Byrne to “great professional entertainers like Fred Astaire or Tommy Tune, who gauge their effects modestly and in relation to the results they want to achieve. If Byrne has no special use for one of his arms, he lets it hang by his side.” “It’s apparent that this is a rock concert film that looks and sounds like no other,” Janet Maslin wrote in the Times. “The film’s visual style is as coolly iconoclastic as Talking Heads itself.”

On the basis of its rave reviews and word of mouth, Stop Making Sense became a commercial as well as critical success after it went into wider circulation in cities and college towns across the country, grossing approximately $5 million on its $1.2 million investment. While this was a drop in the bucket compared to the mega-musical film of 1984, Prince’s Purple Rain, which managed to embrace every contrivance and cliché that Stop Making Sense avoided, it was a very respectable return on an independent documentary, and its success was accompanied by the release of an eponymous soundtrack album that sold more than a million copies over the next two years.

The album contained nine tracks whose clarity and presence were enhanced by the innovative technology of digital recording that the filmmakers had employed. Though it began, like the film, with “Psycho Killer,” the time constraints of the LP format made it impossible to reproduce the full complement of songs. Instead, Side One included four of the tunes from Speaking in Tongues; Side Two opened with “Once in a Lifetime” and ended with “Take Me to the River,” with “What a Day That Was” and “Life During Wartime” in between. On account of the dramatic improvement in David Byrne’s singing and the overall proficiency of the band, along with the sort of spontaneous interplay that could not take place in the systematic, ground-up approach that Talking Heads had taken to studio recording since Fear of Music, the live performances (with the exception of “Take Me to the River”) were far superior to the album versions of these songs. Contributing to the sound quality was the work of an engineer named Eric Thorngren, whom Chris Frantz had met at Compass Point after Chris Blackwell hired him to remix the tracks on the posthumous Bob Marley anthology Legend. When Jerry Harrison expressed his dissatisfaction with the initial mixes of the live album, Chris suggested that they let Thorngren try his hand.

In January 1985, the National Society of Film Critics honored Stop Making Sense as the best documentary of 1984. That same month, David Byrne appeared at New York’s Public Theater with Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Patti LuPone, Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk, and Wallace Shawn at a benefit for the experimental theater group Mabou Mines, and Talking Heads reunited for the first time in nearly a year to begin work on a new album. Apart from their joint appearances at the October opening of Stop Making Sense in New York, the band members had seen little of one another since the anticlimactic end of their Australasian tour. Chris, Tina, and their two-year-old had been immersed in domestic life. Jerry had spent the year in Milwaukee, recording tracks for his second solo album and attending to his terminally ill mother, who passed away in November. And David had remained in Los Angeles, living with Adelle, completing the music for The Knee Plays, and working with the playwright Beth Henley and the actor Stephen Tobolowsky on the screenplay for a feature film. Set in Texas and titled True Stories, the film was described in Variety as “a modern-day Our Town, assembled from tales in the National Enquirer.”

When Talking Heads met in New York shortly after the first of the year, David presented his bandmates with a set of demo recordings he had made of eighteen new songs, half of which he had written for the soundtrack of True Stories; the rest, he felt, would be suitable for release on Talking Heads’ next album. Unlike any of the music the group had recorded since Fear of Music, virtually all of this new material conformed to a conventional pop song format of verse, chorus, and bridge, with the chords, melodies, and lyrics already written. As Byrne said at the time, “I’ve felt lately that my culture is pop songs. It’s what I know best, what gets me in my gut, and I should admit that to myself. I’m not African or Japanese, and while that music moves me deeply, I relate to pop songs.” Many of the demo recordings sketched out full arrangements, with drum-machine beats, overdubbed bass lines, and vocal harmonies added. The effect of this was sufficiently jarring that Tina Weymouth asked David whether he really wanted to record this new material with Talking Heads, as opposed to working with studio musicians on a solo album and a film soundtrack. David assured her that he felt the band would make a distinctive contribution to arranging and performing the songs.

“At the moment, it seems like everybody [in the group] contributes something,” Byrne told a reporter around this time. “Sometimes it’s just advice or a point of view or a comment. Like saying, ‘That doesn’t sound right there.’ We’ve been around one another long enough that we can say things like that without risking offense. Other times it’s specific things, like a great bass part Tina comes up with. But more than anything else, there’s a kind of confluence of sensibilities that sometimes clicks. Sometimes it’s kind of rough, but a lot of times it clicks.”

In February, after spending several weeks learning to play this new material, the Heads booked time at Sigma Sound and began recording the basic tracks for nine of these new songs. These self-produced sessions were engineered by Eric Thorngren, who had impressed everyone with his mixes on the soundtrack for Stop Making Sense. Thorngren had cut his teeth as an engineer at Sugar Hill Records in the early days of rap, and his ears were more attuned to the thick, drum-heavy sonic sensibility of the 1980s than anyone the band had recorded with before. Because the songs were so well rehearsed, some of David Byrne’s “guide” vocals were so polished that they wound up using them in the final mixes. (“Even though he doesn’t seem to have a singer’s voice, he never would sing a note out of tune,” Thorngren later said.)

This work went very quickly—so much so that the Heads began rehearsing and ultimately recording the songs that David had written for True Stories while they were still overdubbing and mixing the nine tracks they had already completed. The instrumental embellishments they added were simple and straightforward. The most exotic instrumentation—for Talking Heads—came from Eric Weissberg, who played pedal steel guitar on two songs, and from Jimmy Macdonell and Andrew Cader, a pair of Louisiana natives who played accordion and rubboard in a white, New York–based zydeco band called Loup Garou. For the most part, however, the music on the album consisted of four-part arrangements performed by the four Talking Heads. David Byrne overdubbed a good deal of lead guitar. Jerry Harrison switched between guitar and keyboards, and sang backup harmonies with Tina Weymouth on most of the tracks.

The band reveled in the looseness of these sessions. “It’s so much fun to be able to relax and just play without feeling you have to be avant-garde all the time,” Tina explained. “We spent so many years trying to be original that we don’t know what original is anymore.” She also detected a change in David Byrne: “There’s been a little bit of relaxation on David’s part. Whatever it was that was making him ambitious to be taken seriously as an artist, he’s getting that out of his system now.”

The group considered a number of titles for the album, including Wild Infancy and In Defense of Television, before deriving Little Creatures from a song called “Creatures of Love.” For the cover, they took their lead from Michael Stipe of R.E.M., who as an art student at the University of Georgia had encountered the work of the Rev. Howard Finster, a Christian mystic and late-blooming folk artist who lived in the northwest corner of the state. Finster had never gone to high school, much less art school, and didn’t take up painting until he was in his sixties, when he began to turn out iconographic figurative work, rendered in enamel on plywood, whose combination of obsession and naïveté eventually brought him to the attention of the art world. By 1984, when Stipe commissioned him to paint a cover for R.E.M.’s second album, Reckoning, Finster had acquired a SoHo gallery (downstairs from David Byrne’s loft), appeared on The Tonight Show, and had his work selected to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale.

For Little Creatures, Byrne provided Finster with photographs of the band members and requested that the artist depict him, in all modesty, carrying the world on his shoulders. Finster did not disappoint. His painting for the cover was a landscape centered on the image of David as an Atlas figure in white underwear, holding up a blue globe on which the continents are represented as furry brown monkeys, and surrounded by a trio of Babel-like towers. On the right, Chris overlooks the roof of a stone chapel, while Tina and Jerry are shown beside a pair of mountain peaks. All the open space in the painting is filled with tiny people, animals, trees, and blocks of text containing captions and biblical inscriptions ranging from “make a joyful noise unto the Lord” to the artist’s calculation that “this is my 4000 411th piece of art.” The back of the album jacket featured a photo of the four Talking Heads dressed in wildly colorful costumes that were designed by M & Co. to make them look like characters in Finster’s painting.

In April, as work on the album neared completion, Robert Wilson’s production of The Knee Plays had its debut at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis. By this time, individual sections of The CIVIL WarS had been performed in Amsterdam, Rome, and Cologne, but Wilson’s plans to stage the full production in Los Angeles the summer before had come to naught when the funding for the project failed to materialize. The performance at the Walker, a mere ninety minutes long, offered a taste of the larger work, and it was enthusiastically received. In his music for the piece, which consisted of a dozen short sketches, David Byrne had abandoned the idea of using Japanese tonalities and chosen instead to emulate the somber sound of the hymns and spirituals played by the brass bands that accompanied so-called “jazz funerals” in New Orleans. Against this sonorous backdrop, David joined the musicians onstage to read brief, characteristically deadpan snatches of text to several of the sketches. “When shopping at the supermarket / I felt a great desire to walk off with someone else’s groceries / So I could study them at length, and study their effects on me,” he intoned in one.

Little Creatures was scheduled for release in the middle of June. Earlier in the spring, Byrne had been approached by Ken Emerson, the articles editor of The New York Times Magazine, about a profile he wanted to write in a series called The Creative Mind, previous installments of which had focused on the artist Robert Motherwell and the corporate executive Roger Smith. Recognizing that a feature article in the Times shortly before the release of their album was a promotional coup, the Heads had given Emerson all the time and access he needed, including a photo session with the band.

On the first Sunday in May, the Times Magazine appeared on newsstands with a cover story about the first class of women cadets at West Point. Ken Emerson’s article ran inside under a headline that read “David Byrne: Thinking Man’s Rock Star.” It was accompanied by a full-page photograph of David, alone at his desk in his loft; another shot of David, Jerry, and Tina sharing a joke; and in the back pages of the magazine, images of David in his Big Suit and Tina in the recording studio.

Emerson’s five-thousand-word profile was far more comprehensively reported than anything that had been written to date about David Byrne. It began by listing Byrne’s avant-garde credentials—his work with Twyla Tharp, Mabou Mines, and Robert Wilson—and quoting Philip Glass, who said, “We are watching someone realize a very deep talent. . . . I think he will be writing music that everyone is going to have to think of as concert music, and not just Talking Heads.” The article went on to trace Byrne’s path from Baltimore to RISD, his move to New York and the formation of the band, his early fascination with conceptual art and cybernetics, Talking Heads’ anomalous performances at punk clubs, and their aversion to the aggressive stance of more conventional rock groups.

Next came an account of the band’s involvement with Brian Eno and the evolution of the Expanded Heads, followed, given the theme of the Creative Mind series, by a detailed description of the writing, recording, and staging of “Once in a Lifetime.” Along the way, the other band members were quoted here and there, most notably Tina Weymouth, in her customary role as a foil to the pretensions of David Byrne.

“Look, we know we’re in a sleazy business. We’re not going to call ourselves artists,” Tina said. She went on to compare Talking Heads’ music to a nonexistent “New Yorker cartoon where a man on a sofa says to the woman beside him, ‘Yes, I know I’m just one long line of clichés, but I put them together in a really interesting way, don’t you think?’” “Like David in his Big Suit,” she continued. “He takes the most obvious thing, and people all go, ‘Genius! Genius!’”

After describing the genesis of the music for The Knee Plays, Emerson concluded, “Byrne’s adventures outside the group, as well as occasional differences within it, make the future of Talking Heads uncertain.” “In the beginning,” he quoted David as saying, “we were like a family, but eventually it becomes more like a business. I wish we could all be as close as we were years ago, and we all to some extent keep struggling to return to that. But, at the same time, I love these other things.”

Chris and Tina, and to a lesser extent Jerry, were enraged by the Times profile. “That was the first time we ever got so mad that there was almost an end,” said Tina. “Nobody told us it was going to be a profile of David,” said Chris. “We thought it was going to be a profile of the band. We spent hours and hours with the guy, and we go to these photo sessions not knowing that David, secretly, the day before, unbeknownst to us, had a separate photo session with the same photographer. I practically beat him up, I was so mad.”

Coming on the heels of a collaborative effort in the recording studio that had seemed idyllic to them, the resurgence, as they saw it, of David’s calculation and egocentricity was more than they could bear. “It’s been resolved, but it hasn’t been healed,” Tina would subsequently tell a reporter from Rolling Stone. In the past, they had found it convenient to blame Brian Eno for David’s inability to give credit where credit was due. That was not an option in this case. “Why did it happen?” Tina asked. “Because David assumed credit for everything that happened with Talking Heads. And because we allowed that to happen. Yes, it’s been resolved, but the damage has been done.”

The institution of the rock group has always been an ambiguous form of social and musical organization. Artists like Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and James Brown were musical visionaries whose bands contained some of the most accomplished musicians of their time. But when it came to how the band sounded or what sort of music they would play, there was never any question of who was calling the tune. As the paradigmatic rock group, the Beatles muddled this question from the beginning, for the simple, miraculous reason that they were the only group in the history of popular music that contained two of the greatest singers and two of the greatest songwriters of their era. This meant that, for as long as they lasted, collaboration was the only viable option for them. And in the 1960s, the best of their contemporaries shared some version of this collaborative model, in which combinations of distinctive singers, songwriters, and instrumentalists defined the sound of their bands.

But while the expectation lingered, the prevailing mode of organization in popular music in the 1970s and beyond was much closer to that of Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and James Brown than it was to that of the Beatles. Paul McCartney, Bob Marley, Bruce Springsteen, Mark Knopfler, Prince, and George Clinton were the unequivocal leaders and the only irreplaceable members of the nominal bands they led. Springsteen went so far as to play up his primacy by affecting the working-class persona of the Boss.

To be sure, back on the Bowery in 1975, no one could have predicted that David Byrne would come to be recognized as one of the most accomplished and original singers, songwriters, recording artists, and stage performers of his generation. But by 1985, it was apparent to everyone but the most slavishly partisan Talking Heads fans that Byrne was operating on an entirely different level of talent, ambition, and imagination than Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, and Jerry Harrison. Frantz and Weymouth had combined to form an exceptionally powerful and concise rhythm section, while Harrison excelled as a musical colorist, arranger, and budding record producer. But like most rock musicians once they attain a professional level of competence, the three of them shared musical and technical limitations that they made little effort to redress. Despite their background as art students, none of them had developed the musical equivalent of a studio practice that would have led them, like most ambitious instrumentalists, to sharpen their skills and expand their musical vocabulary on a daily basis. Nor was it ever clear how much the other three members of the group understood or identified with David Byrne’s song lyrics, many of which were written after their contributions to the music had been made. (Tina Weymouth would later reveal her own cluelessness about songwriting by telling the writer David Bowman, “David just takes personas and people and makes them his own. It’s art. It’s all trickery. It’s his idea of art.”)

It is hard to imagine Max Weinberg, Garry Tallent, and Roy Bittan of the E Street Band feeling slighted, much less enraged, by a Times Magazine profile that focused on the “creative mind” of Bruce Springsteen. The difference, of course, was that Weinberg, Tallent, and Bittan were employees, not partners, of the Boss. But it was not the economic relationship of Talking Heads that caused Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, and Jerry Harrison to feel so offended by the Times piece. Rather, it was their long-overdue confrontation with the way that the aristocracy of talent had supplanted the democracy of their band. In addition to Little Creatures, Talking Heads would go on to release two more albums over the next three years, beginning with True Stories, the basic tracks for which had already been recorded. But by the summer of 1985, as a collaborative group, much less a musical “family,” they had all but ceased to exist.

36

And They Were

I’m hoping to discover, as much as a lot of people I write about, some way of living that resolves alienation. Sometimes I write about it, and sometimes I write about the possibility of relief from that, of communion or release.

—DAVID BYRNE

Livid as they were with the Times profile, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison could take some consolation from the way the attention and anticipation generated by the success of Stop Making Sense helped to turn Little Creatures into the fastest- and bestselling album Talking Heads had ever released. The record took less than two months to sell a half-million copies, a million by the fall. Central to its appeal was its status as “the simplest, happiest, most tuneful—and potentially commercial—album this archetypal New York art-rock band has made yet,” as John Rockwell put it in the Times. “Too smart to kid itself about the current pop era, the most intellectually respectable rock group in America realizes it has a responsibility to be fun,” James Hunter wrote in the Boston Phoenix, suggesting that Little Creatures “needs time to sink in after the initial response of simple delight. Once it does, watch out, because its virtues of restraint and concise production are validated with a vengeance.”

The delight, restraint, and concision that Hunter cited were all epitomized by the album’s opening track, a perfect pop production called “And She Was.” Set in the suburban milieu the Heads had last visited in “The Big Country,” the song describes a woman who lies down on the lawn of her house to take in the sounds of the night (“and she could hear the highway breathing”), only to feel herself rising off the ground and ascending into the sky. The musical impetus behind her “pleasant elevation” comes from a time when the pop charts resounded with the atmospherics of chiming electric guitars: the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride,” the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting for You.”

The Heads had toyed with these timbres before, in songs like “Paper” and “The Girls Want to Be with the Girls.” But the arpeggiated eighth notes that run through “And She Was” are fused with the ubiquitous heartbeat rhythm of 1980s rock—dum . . . dum-dum—in a way that makes the old seem new. The same goes for the key change on the line, “See the lights of her neighbor’s house / Now she’s starting to rise,” with the melody falling on “neighbor’s house” and lifting on “starting to rise.” The stop-start rhythm of the verse defaults to a steely backbeat in the chorus as David, Tina, and Jerry combine to sing, “The world was moving, she was floating above it, and she was . . .” What began as a strange sensation becomes an act of liberation when the woman removes her dress and, “drifting this way and that,” leaves her old life behind. In the final chorus, David affirms the song’s sixties roots with interjections of “hut-hut” and “gotta-gotta” in homage to Otis Redding, before ending with an outburst of gritty, slashing chords that harken back to the elemental joy of guitar group rock ’n’ roll.

With its anxious intro of wails and whimpers on guitar, “Give Me Back My Name” is also a bit of a throwback—in this case, to David Byrne’s tendency to substitute ambiguity for artistry, as Twyla Tharp would say. “There’s a word for it, and words don’t mean a thing,” David intones as the melody sags over a pair of minor chords. “There’s a name for it,” he continues, “and names make all the difference in the world.” After a series of cryptic references to “things that can never be spoken” and a “word that does not exist,” David calls on a man he describes as his “hero” but refers to only as “X.” “Give me back my name,” he demands in the song’s release, where the harmony shifts to major and Jerry and Tina join in. “Something has been changed in my life,” they sing to a shimmery trill of guitar. “Something must be returned to us,” they repeat again and again. Just what that something is, of course, is anybody’s guess.

There’s nothing cryptic about “Creatures of Love,” a country-and-western song with the impeccable Nashville pedigree of a pedal steel guitar that starts with a modest revision of the Book of Genesis. “A woman made a man, and a man he made a house,” David declares over Chris’s hokey rim-clicks and the clucks of a rhythm guitar. “And when they lay together, little creatures all come out.” So much for original sin. Having fulfilled the conventions of its genre, this faithful pastiche then does something that no song in the history of country music had ever done before: in a song about procreation, it refers to sex by name. “Well I’ve seen sex and I think it’s all right,” the Heads all sing together in the second half of the verse. “It makes those little creatures come to life.” With that the chorus opens up on the title line—“We are creatures, creatures of love”—to which David adds the eloquent aside, “From the sleep of reason, a life is born.” The verses that follow evoke both the Rascals’ “Good Lovin’” and the Stones’ “Dear Doctor” in soliciting medical advice on the maladies of love. For all its erudition, the marvel of the song is the way, instead of spoofing the genre, it embodies the very qualities of earthiness and tunefulness that make country music so appealing to its legions of fans. “Little creatures of love,” the Heads proclaim, “now they cover the bed!”

“The Lady Don’t Mind” marries a classic title to a classic groove and a classic romantic theme. The groove is a sinuous syncopation that migrated from Cuba to the Stax studios in Memphis, where it became known as a “blues rumba” on records by Rufus Thomas and Albert King. The theme is the allure of the elusive female, who comes and goes at will, without warning or explanation. “You might think she would say something,” David remarks in the verse, “but you’d have to wait a while.” What goes without saying is that the singer of this song has come a long way from the earnest cybernetician who once regaled his listeners with analytic discourse on the need, or not, for love. “She just turns her head and disappears,” David sings in the chorus, “And I kinda like that style.”

Side One of Little Creatures ends with a song that took its title and chorus from a dreamy lyric about a perfect girl in a perfect world that Chris Frantz wrote on Chrystie Street in the infancy of the band—which David Byrne revived and reworked into a melodious pop song that reflected his and Chris’s mutual love of soul music. Chris responded to David’s gesture of collaboration by contributing some exceedingly powerful fatback drumming to the verses of “Perfect World,” which turns on a series of banal, this-but-that polarities (“Well I know where it is, but I don’t know what it looks like”) that combine with the song’s bright melodic contours to bring out an exceptional warmth in David’s singing. The high point of this comes in the chorus, where he ends the lines, “Riding on an incline / I’m staring in your face / You’ll photograph mine,” with a lilting falsetto melisma that evokes the ghost of John Lennon. Joined by Lani Groves’s backup singers and a chorus of saxophones, he goes on to affirm one of the boldest romantic sentiments Talking Heads have ever expressed in a song, answering the lines, “Somebody said that it happens all over the world / I do believe that it’s true,” by asking, “Doesn’t everybody here believe in the things that we do?”

Side Two of the album begins with a companion piece to “Creatures of Love” called “Stay Up Late.” “Mommy had a little baby, there he is, fast asleep,” David announces over a dull thud of bass drum and booming chords on piano that suggest the sardonic muse of Randy Newman is lurking somewhere in this song. “Why not wake him up?” he adds, and it’s hard to ignore the connection between this passive-aggressive ode to childcare and the arrival of baby Robin in the lives of Talking Heads. (“My attitude about children and pets is they’re something to touch or poke, to get a reaction,” Byrne said around this time.) Some of the sly wit of this cheerfully menacing song involves some ambiguity about the identity of its narrator. The initial reference to “Mommy” points to Brother Dave, but the refrain of “Sister, sister, he’s just a plaything,” and the prospect of keeping the little one up to the wee hours of the morning—presumably in the absence of his parents—suggests this may be the babysitting Uncle Dave, reviving long-festering feelings of sibling rivalry by tormenting his sister’s kid. “I know you want to leave me,” he bellows like a jealous lover in the bridge, quoting the opening line of the Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” as Chris picks up on the reference by playing four bars of the old-school R&B pattern known as a boogaloo.

There’s no real funk on the first side of Little Creatures, but “Walk It Down” gives the Heads a chance to revel in that side of their rhythmic sensibility. The track is further evidence that Eric Thorngren and Chris Frantz were a marriage made in audio heaven, as Thorngren lends a visceral thickness to the sound of Chris’s drums, and Chris responds with some of his best playing on record, embellishing the sultry, faintly sinister groove of the song with quick kicks on his bass drum and the sort of snappy snare fills he hadn’t played in years. “Walk It Down” contrasts a state of emotional subsistence with the promise of ecstatic deliverance, as David sings, “I . . . am just a number,” reviving the disembodied “megaphone” voice he used in “Swamp.” “And I . . . just want to stay alive,” he adds, before entertaining the possibility of a “life without surrender” that would bring him the “togetherness” and “ecstasy” he needs. “I can laugh, but I should cry, when love and understanding are the ultimate crimes,” he sings in the leadup to the chorus, echoing Nick Lowe (“what’s so funny ’bout . . .”) over a change of key and ascending organ chords as the Heads join in on a refrain of “Walk it down, talk it down, oh-oh-oh / Sympathy, luxury, somebody will take you there.”

A rambling six-minute paean to the pleasures of watching TV, “Television Man” carries still more musical resonances of the 1960s, beginning with a guitar riff derived from the R&B standard “But It’s Alright.” “And I’m looking and I’m dreaming for the first time / And I’m inside and outside at the same time,” David sings, before pausing to ask, “Do I like the way I feel?” with a plaintive lift in his voice. By allowing its viewers to observe social behavior in a context that doesn’t require social interaction, the capacity of television to provide a window on the world can serve as a special source of fascination and education for people on the autism spectrum. It is telling that the first thing David Byrne did with the advance he received from Sire Records in 1976 was to buy a color television for the apartment where he was living alone for the first time in his life. “When the world crashes in, into my living room, television made me what I am,” David sings over Tina’s funky bass bends in the chorus. “But we are just good friends / I’m a Television Man.” “We are just good friends” was the dubious romantic disclaimer that the Gene Kelly character said of the Debbie Reynolds character in the musical Singin’ in the Rain, which then became a catchphrase when Paul McCartney used it repeatedly during the Beatles’ press conference parody in A Hard Day’s Night—a touchstone of Byrne’s adolescence that further serves to personalize the song.

After the somber finales Brian Eno orchestrated on Fear of Music and Remain in Light, Speaking in Tongues had revived Talking Heads’ earlier practice of ending their albums on an emotionally high note. The last track on Little Creatures continues in that vein. At the same time, “Road to Nowhere” was the only song on the album that was recorded in the ground-up manner that Eno taught the group, starting with Chris Frantz’s street-beat drumming, adding Tina Weymouth’s synth bass, and building things up from there. Before it gets to that, though, the track opens with a full gospel choir singing a fervent a cappella prelude that begins with the qualified promise, “Well we know where we’re going, but we don’t know where we’ve been,” and ends with the qualified plea, “And the future is certain, give us time to work it out.” Then the bass and drums kick in, joined by the reedy aspirations and scratchy counterpoint of a Cajun accordion and rubboard.

“We’re on a road to nowhere,” David announces, inviting his listeners to “come inside” and “take that ride.” “We’re on a road to paradise, here we go,” he sings as a churchy organ summons the congregation. Jimmy Macdonell’s accordion swirls brightly into the spaces between his lines, its quick, breathy phrases lending the song a festive air. When the gospel chorus returns to exult in the refrain of “We’re on a road to nowhere,” their dense harmony is answered by a trailing tenor sax and David’s monosyllabic interjections of “ha!” “There’s a city in my mind, come along and take that ride,” he sings in the last verse, ending each line with the assurance, “It’s all right, baby, it’s all right.” “We’re on a road to nowhere,” the chorus repeats over his mounting shouts and shrieks, until the music stops in its tracks and everyone sings those words, a cappella, one last time.

There are different ways to experience what David Byrne would later describe as this “happy, upbeat song [with] all these people singing about being on the road to oblivion.” Some listeners took it ironically, and heard its jubilant tone as a wry testament to the power of denial. But “Road to Nowhere” is a good deal more nuanced than that. Gospel music arose in the nineteenth century as the expression of an oppressed population of Black people who looked forward to death as a form of salvation from the endless suffering and indignity of their lives. Its rhythmic, melodic, and emotional conventions came to the attention of most white people in the form of soul music, which applied those conventions to the passionate expression of communal aspiration, sexual pleasure, and romantic love.

But while the techniques of gospel singing were institutionalized by a generation of African American musical artists who were raised in the church, the spiritual dimension of the music—its themes of forbearance, redemption, and deliverance, and its ecstatic embrace of salvation—had all but disappeared from mainstream African American popular music by the 1980s. This made it ripe for revival and reinterpretation by musically ambitious white recording artists like Paul Simon, Van Morrison, Ry Cooder, and in due course, David Byrne. Much as he had done with his exploration of Afropop, Byrne was following his fascination with the ardent emotionality of Black gospel back to its spiritual roots. Yet for a singer and songwriter who once described Heaven as “a place where nothing ever happens,” “nowhere” was a more acceptably agnostic destination than “salvation.” “Road to Nowhere” seeks to apply its spirit of jubilant communality to the journey, not the end.

37

An Anthropologist in Virgil

Mr. Byrne, dressed in a Sears Roebuck’s version of Texas chic and driving a red convertible, acts as the amiable anthropologist.

—JULIE SALAMON, WALL STREET JOURNAL

In the summer of 1985, flush with their earnings from the film and soundtrack of Stop Making Sense and encouraged by the surging sales of Little Creatures, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth bought a house on a pond in the suburban enclave of Fairfield, Connecticut, an hour outside of New York. The two of them had spent much of their youth growing up in suburban settings, and while they retained their loft in Long Island City for the time being, their decision to move reflected the feeling of many young, non-native New Yorkers that the city’s pervasive grunge, rampant crime, and lack of recreational space made it an inhospitable place to raise children. Another factor that contributed to the Frantzes’ decision to leave New York involved Chris’s entry into rehab, at Tina’s insistence, for treatment of a cocaine addiction. A sacrament of New York’s club culture, uptown and downtown alike, cocaine had served as Talking Heads’ favorite performance-enhancing drug on tour. In Chris’s case, its use had gradually taken over his home life as well. Tina would later attribute his addiction to his heartbreak over tensions in the band.

As Chris and Tina moved into their new home, David Byrne was taking up temporary residence in Dallas as he prepared to start production on the feature film he had announced in the fall of 1984. The inspiration for True Stories dated from the tour that ended with Stop Making Sense, when Byrne amused himself by collecting the sensationalistic articles he found in supermarket tabloids like The Sun and Weekly World News. Over the course of the following year, he made dozens of pencil drawings illustrating scenes and characters based on these articles—the lonely bachelor who installed a “Wife Wanted” sign on his front lawn; the married couple who haven’t spoken to each other, except through their children, in thirty years—which gradually filled the walls of the otherwise unfurnished house he and Adelle Lutz had rented in the Hollywood Hills. In the summer of 1984, a few months before the release of Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme invited a pair of friends, Beth Henley and Stephen Tobolowsky, to a screening of the film that was attended by all four Talking Heads. Henley and Tobolowsky were completely unfamiliar with the band’s music, but they were blown away by the film, and wound up spending an hour talking with Byrne, who deflected their praise and prevailed on them to critique the picture’s flaws. Soon afterward, he invited the couple, separately, to view his walls of drawings, and then, on the basis of an outline that Tobolowsky prepared, to write a screenplay for True Stories. He asked them to deliver a draft of the script in three weeks’ time.

Beth Henley had emerged from a lonely Mississippi girlhood and four years of drama studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas as a specialist in the depiction of small-town Southern life. Her stage play, Crimes of the Heart, had been a hit on Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1981. Stephen Tobolowsky was a native Texan, which led the two of them to set their script in a small Texas town called “Virgil” and tie it to a celebration of the 150th anniversary of Texas statehood that was due to take place, in real life, in 1986. (An earlier play of Henley’s, The Miss Firecracker Contest, had been based on a beauty pageant in Mississippi on the Fourth of July.) They drew some of their inspiration from such previous cinematic depictions of small-town eccentricity as Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Fellini’s Amarcord. The couple delivered a draft of the screenplay by the appointed deadline, and then, as Tobolowsky described it, heard nothing back from Byrne or anyone else connected with the film for nearly a year.

In the meantime, Byrne and Gary Kurfirst set out to raise the five million dollars they needed to make a movie. Edward Pressman was an atypically bookish A-list Hollywood producer with more than a dozen films to his credit, ranging from Terrence Malick’s 1973 cult classic Badlands to the 1982 Arnold Schwarzenegger extravaganza Conan the Barbarian. (Among the first-time directors he had produced were Malick, Brian De Palma, and Oliver Stone.) After attending a prerelease screening of Stop Making Sense, Pressman wrote to Byrne to express his admiration for the film. This led to a meeting with Byrne and Kurfirst in which Pressman agreed to serve as executive producer on True Stories. With Pressman on board, Kurfirst approached Warner Bros. Records, which agreed to put up most of the money for the picture, securing their investment with a commitment to release the songs on the soundtrack as an album by Talking Heads. Karen Murphy, the producer of This Is Spinal Tap, was brought in to coproduce with Kurfirst, and Ed Lachman, known for his work on the gospel documentary Say Amen, Somebody and, more recently, the Madonna vehicle Desperately Seeking Susan, was hired as cinematographer. Credited as a “visual consultant,” Adelle Lutz would play an unsung part in the production akin to the part that Sandy McLeod had played in the production of Stop Making Sense.

Casting calls were held in the summer of 1985 in New York and Los Angeles, with most of the roles filled by relatively unknown film actors, some of whom, like John Goodman and Swoosie Kurtz, went on to enjoy successful careers. The year before, Jonathan Demme had introduced David to the New York performance artist Spalding Gray, who was now cast as Earl Culver, one half of the town’s most prominent married couple, with Anne McEnroe (who was married to Edward Pressman) in the role of his wife. Following up on a 1984 cover version of “Slippery People” by the Staple Singers on which he played rhythm guitar, Byrne enlisted the group’s patriarch, Roebuck “Pops” Staples, to play the part of a vodou doctor of love. He also cast Tito Larriva, lead singer of the Los Angeles–based group Cruzados, as a plant worker named Ramon.

Through it all, Byrne spent many months rewriting the screenplay that Beth Henley and Stephen Tobolowsky had submitted the year before, to the point where, apart from the Texas locale, the sesquicentennial celebration, and sections of dialogue, little of the original remained. As Byrne described it, he felt a need to “fragment” the narrative of the script in order to make room for the musical sequences that, he hoped, would express the inner lives of the characters. He did eventually contact Henley and Tobolowsky after the film went into production, mainly to request that they keep their names on the picture, lest it seem like a “written and directed” vanity project on his part.

The resentments engendered by the Times Magazine profile all but guaranteed that the response of the other three Talking Heads to their bandmate’s ambitions as a film director would be ambivalent at best. The agreement with Warners to release the songs from the soundtrack as an album by the band virtually ensured that the film would be publicly perceived as a production of Talking Heads. But from the beginning, the other members of the group wanted little to do with what Tina Weymouth described as David’s interest in “becoming a movie star.” Chris Frantz would later claim that David offered him and Tina roles in the film playing a pimp and a whore—this despite the fact that there were no such parts in the film. Jerry Harrison, who had spent some time scouting locations in Texas with David, was more tactful in his disclaimer. “We made a group decision that it was going to be David’s project,” he said. “There was a great fear that being an actor directed by someone in your band could be humiliating, or in some way upset the normal balance that we have.” As it turned out, Jerry, Chris, and Tina did appear in two of the music videos that David directed as part of the film.

Filming began on location in and around Dallas in September 1985 and continued for seven weeks. By all accounts, the production was an absolute pleasure for the cast and crew. In stark contrast to Byrne’s dictatorial presence on the Stop Making Sense tour, he showed a very light touch as a director, encouraging his actors to experiment with their roles. According to Swoosie Kurtz, who played a woman so lazy that she never left her bed, “He loved it when I ad-libbed and improvised. I’d give him choices, and he’d point out what he liked.” “Talking to people who have worked with Byrne is like talking to a bunch of true believers,” the journalist Phoebe Hoban wrote in a well-reported New York magazine profile. “Byrne, they will tell you, is incredibly focused, yet open to other people’s ideas, generous, confident, a perfectionist, a man of inhuman energy, a workaholic and a very funny guy.” “He’s the most perversely wholesome person I ever met,” Spalding Gray added. “His core of innocence is still intact. I think if there is any piece of David’s pie missing, if there is anything that he is still struggling with, it is human relations. I don’t think he is solipsistic, but like any genius, and I do see him as that, he is operating in a very closed world. It’s a very large world, there’s a lot of room to thrash around in, but—and I don’t mean this in a bad way—in another lifetime he might be hospitalized. Luckily, he found his life raft in art.”

When the filming in Texas ended in December, the production shifted to Los Angeles, where the other members of Talking Heads participated in the overdubbing and mixing sessions for the songs on the soundtrack and acted their parts in the music videos for two of those songs, “Wild Wild Life” and “Love for Sale.” These sessions drew on the talents of the Brazilian percussionist Paulinho da Costa, a mainstay of the LA studio scene, and the steel guitarist Tom Morrell, whose playing transformed the two songs, “People Like Us” and “City of Dreams,” that provide the film with its climax and its coda.

True Stories was scheduled to make its debut at the New York Film Festival in October 1986 and open in theaters in New York and Los Angeles the week after that. In addition to the release of the eponymous album by Talking Heads, the film’s debut was accompanied by a well-orchestrated publicity campaign that yielded Phoebe Hoban’s profile in New York, Michiko Kakutani’s profile in the New York Times, James Wolcott’s profile in Vanity Fair (with photographs by Annie Leibovitz of Byrne, Adelle Lutz, and members of the cast in costumes Lutz had designed), and a piece in Vogue by Spalding Gray, recounting his experience of working with Byrne on the film. (“For me, he was a combination of Charlie Chaplin, Robert Wilson, Jacques Tati, and David Byrne.”) But the pièce de résistance of publicity came at the end of October, when Time magazine placed a multicolored photographic self-portrait of Byrne on its cover beside a headline that read “Rock’s Renaissance Man.” A Time cover was considered the gold standard of pop celebrity in 1986, the province of singing stars like Michael Jackson, David Bowie, and Madonna, and the editors’ decision to allow Byrne to design his own cover was a privilege that had previously been accorded only once, to Robert Rauschenberg.

The accompanying article, written by Jay Cocks, was illustrated with photographs of Byrne as a child, Byrne with Talking Heads, and Byrne with Adelle Lutz. It drew on interviews with his parents and sister Celia as well as the usual suspects—Jonathan Demme, Twyla Tharp, and Philip Glass—to present an overview of Byrne’s career that placed his achievements in a broader cultural context. “Talking Heads were a prominent part of a creative community that kicked avant-garde American culture into a newer, more accessible shape,” Cocks wrote. “Music, dance, performance art and rock all flowed together into a single swift stream, which Byrne navigated effortlessly.” The cover story was accompanied by an admiring review written by Time’s film critic, Richard Corliss, who praised True Stories as “a divine comedy for the ’80s,” and a follow-up article chronicling the success of “downtown” artists like Byrne, Tharp, Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Robert Wilson at blurring the lines between mainstream culture and what was once considered the avant-garde.

Priming this blaze of publicity was the publication by Random House of the True Stories screenplay in a lavishly illustrated paperback book that included some of the original sketches Byrne made in the early stages of the project, reprints of the articles in supermarket tabloids and legitimate publications like Texas Monthly that served as his source material, and more than a hundred color photographs and production stills by William Eggleston, Len Jenshel, and Byrne himself that influenced the art direction and cinematography of the film.

The book also gave Byrne the opportunity to write an introduction to the screenplay in which he described the genesis of the project and his intentions for the film, thereby giving reporters and critics all the material they needed in one neat package to write their profiles and reviews. “In True Stories I stay away from loaded subjects—sex, violence, and political intrigue—because as soon as you get on those subjects, everybody already has preconceived ideas about them,” he wrote. “I deal with stuff that’s too dumb for people to have bothered to formulate opinions on.” Mainly, Byrne used this introduction to clarify his attitude toward the film and its characters, and to preempt the assumption that his view of the American heartland was still filtered through the irony and condescension of “The Big Country.” “The people in Texas and the people who gravitate there have always had this fiercely independent spirit,” he wrote. “While they may not be tolerant of a lot of things, they seem to be fairly tolerant of personal eccentricities.”

After describing his fascination with the flatness, vastness, and emptiness of the state’s “existential” landscape, Byrne touched on political intrigue by describing the “new patriotism” associated with Ronald Reagan as a “trick.” “The government is selling the country down the river,” he wrote. “The real wealth of the country is in the people. Empires in retreat get into some pretty weird stuff. They get this intense pride and nostalgia for what they imagine they are and what they imagine they were because they can see it slipping away.” He went on to catalogue the ways people were responding to this sense of loss and decline: by awaiting the Second Coming, or fearing outsiders, or turning to drugs or drinking, or obsessing on their diets, going to India, investing in real estate, buying guns, or hoping for aliens to arrive. “Then there are the other kind of people. People who seem to have found some kind of ethical center. They might be floundering around a little bit but it’s a noble kind of floundering. Sometimes it’s hard to tell one kind from the other. . . . The thing is, all of these people are right. None of them is wrong. They are setting a good example, and in this film and book I’m teaching myself to appreciate them.”

Spalding Gray notwithstanding, True Stories is not a work of genius, but it is an original, witty, unevenly paced, and beautifully photographed ninety-minute film whose first and last half hours succeed on many levels. It opens with a shot of a young girl in a white dress ambling along a deserted stretch of road that extends as far as the eye can see, followed by David’s voice-over narrating a capsule history of Texas that begins in the Cretaceous era and presents a montage showing dinosaurs, prehistoric people, the first Native Americans, the arrival of the Spaniards, the wars between Mexicans, Native Americans, and white Americans, the advent of railroads, homesteaders, and the subsequent bonanzas in cotton, cattle, oil, and now microchips, to end with an announcement of the upcoming celebration of the 150th anniversary of the state.

Then David, in the anonymous role of the Narrator, appears on camera beneath an enormous black ten-gallon hat, sitting behind the wheel of a red Chrysler convertible. (“A lot of people assume this car is rented,” he says later in the film. “Actually, it’s privately owned.”) He’s on his way to the Varicorp plant, on the outskirts of Virgil, to meet some of the people who make circuit boards on the assembly line there. These include the Lying Woman, boasting about her affair with Burt Reynolds; Ramon, who believes that he can pick up radio signals from other people’s minds; and Louis Fyne, the film’s protagonist, played by John Goodman as a “panda-shaped” man in a hooded white jumpsuit. Louis explains that, away from work, he spends his time seeking “matrimony with a capital M,” as evidenced by the flashing “WIFE WANTED” sign he’s installed on the lawn of his house.

That evening, David meets Louis at a local hot spot, where the whole town seems to convene. After a few minutes, a three-piece band that that bears a faint resemblance to Talking Heads takes the stage in front of a wall of television monitors and launches into a charging rocker called “Wild Wild Life.” “I’m wearing fur pajamas,” it begins, as people of all sizes, shapes, ages, races, genders, and personae—including cameos of Jerry as a Billy Idol impersonator, David as a lounge lizard, Jerry and Tina as Prince and Apollonia, and Chris as a rhinestone cowboy—take the stage, one after another, to lip-sync and dance to a few lines of the song. Their performances are all charmingly distinct, but when Louis gets up to sing in the second verse, his portly choreography rivals the best of David Byrne’s.

The next day starts with the Lazy Woman, expertly played by Swoosie Kurtz, who lives in a McMansion version of the Victorian house in the middle of nowhere made famous by the film Giant. The ultimate consumer, she spends all day sitting in bed, perfectly coiffed, channel-surfing commercials while various mechanical devices and her manservant, Mr. Tucker, played by Pops Staples, attend to her every need. That morning, David drives to the local mall, where he again meets up with Louis to watch a fashion show that’s part of the “Celebration of Specialness” with which the town is honoring the Texas sesquicentennial. The show is hosted by Kay Culver, the prim wife of the local real estate magnate, whose commentary on the proceedings segues into a liltingly sentimental song called “Dream Operator.” (“Every dream tells it all / And this is your story.”) The fashion show becomes progressively more bizarre as it moves from men in yellow rain gear, women in waitress outfits, and children in formal wear to people dressed as plants and vegetables, whole families in suits and dresses made of Astroturf or imitation brick and mortar, and corpulent women decked out as top-heavy wedding cake figurines. Somewhere in this elaborately produced sequence, which ends with one of the figurine ladies toppling off the stage, the film crosses a line into the realm of ridicule that David Byrne hoped to avoid. For the first time, the people of Virgil are made to seem absurd in their eccentricity, planting a seed of doubt that isn’t fully dispelled until the end of the film.

That afternoon, Louis has a date with the Lying Woman, in the course of which she confides that she wrote Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and half of Elvis’s songs (“They pay me to keep quiet about it”). This prompts Louis to admit that he’s been writing a song of his own to sing at the talent show with which the town’s sesquicentennial celebration will end. That evening, David is invited to dinner at the home of Kay and Earl Culver, the couple who only converse through their children, where Earl, played by Spalding Gray, eagerly illustrates his vision for the future of Virgil by arranging fruits and vegetables around the platter of lobster he designates as the town center. (“Excuse me,” David interjects. “I forget what these peppers represent.”) This perfect comic set piece is followed by a scene set in the Victorious Life Church, an evangelical sect led by a fire-breathing pastor and conspiracy theorist (“Do you run out of paper towels, Kleenex, and toilet paper all at the same time? You know it’s true!”), who leads the choir and congregation in a song called “Puzzlin’ Evidence,” which seeks to expose the reach of the hidden hands that pull the strings behind the scenes. Here, too, the satire is overdone, needlessly illustrated with clips of Nixon and Reagan and other officious white men, but the gospel energy of the song carries it through.

Later that day, Earl Culver takes David to the desolate site of his next subdivision, where they encounter a group of 4-H campers who break into a New Orleans–style Mardi Gras chant. The idea of having a bunch of white kids in an empty field chirping a song associated with the Black Indian “tribes” of the Ninth Ward had comic potential, but their performance is awkwardly uninspired. However much Byrne felt a need to fragment the narrative arc of the script to make room for the musical sequences, a number of those sequences fall flat—nowhere more so than in the next scene, where the Lazy Woman zeros in on a television commercial that’s set to the song “Love for Sale.” Conceived as a music video to promote the True Stories album, the song is a parody of the type of hard rock that Talking Heads had always disdained. But as a commentary on crass commercialism, the video succeeds too well in exemplifying the glib surrealism that characterized much of the programming on MTV. Shots of the four Heads dressed in bright primary colors are juxtaposed with dozens of clips culled from commercials for a dazzling array of consumer products, culminating in shots of the band members themselves being covered in chocolate and wrapped in shiny foil. The grainy cinematography and cutaways to the Lazy Woman are designed to show that this sequence is indeed a television commercial and not a scene in the film, but the effect of the satire, in this context, is chaotic and banal.

Thankfully, beginning with another awkward romantic encounter between Louis and a local woman who has devoted herself to the cultivation of cuteness in all of its many forms, the film recovers its narrative drive, as Louis seeks out Mr. Turner, who moonlights as a vodou love doctor, and gains his assurance that, with the help of a little gris-gris, his romantic dreams will come true. Before that can happen, however, the town holds its “Celebration of Specialness Parade,” featuring pom-pom girls and majorettes, the Culver family waving from the back of a Cadillac, Shriners darting around in midget red Mustangs, and last but not least, a marching accordion band. This entire procession is over in less than three minutes, leaving the townspeople of Virgil staring ruefully at the empty street as they await the talent show. Held on a spectral stage that has been built, like so much else, in the middle of nowhere, the show begins with Earl Culver doing an imitation of Ed Sullivan before introducing an array of local talent that includes a pair of dueling auctioneers, a troupe of high-stepping cowgirls, and Ramon, backed by a Tex-Mex band, who delivers a stirring rendition of his theme song, “Radio Head.”

Meanwhile, back in town, Mr. Turner has been busy at his living room shrine, casting spells on behalf of Louis Fyne. This prompts him to sing a song called “Papa Legba,” which Pops Staples sings as only Pops Staples can, intoning a mellifluous chorus of “Rompiendo la monotonia del tiempo” (“Breaking the monotony of time”). Then, following performances by a group of geriatric line dancers and the Culvers’ own children as—what else?—a pair of ventriloquists, Louis’s moment has arrived. Backed by a band called the Country Bachelors, he takes the stage to sing the song he’s been writing all week, “People Like Us.” In this, its final half hour, on the strength of brilliant performances by Tito Larriva, Pops Staples, and John Goodman, True Stories fulfills its goal of celebrating and dignifying the lives of its characters. Standing at the microphone in a well-tailored suit and a Stetson hat, Louis is transformed into a commanding figure. Both his song and his singing are heartfelt and affecting as he belts out the chorus: “People like us / We don’t want freedom / We don’t want justice / We just want someone to love.”

And then it’s David Byrne’s turn to make his musical mark on the film. As the credits roll over a shot of the girl in the white dress as she slowly walks away on the local road to nowhere, David sings “City of Dreams.” Musically and lyrically, it’s like nothing he’s written before. Over ringing piano chords set to the slow, anthemic rhythm that another poet of small-town life, Bruce Springsteen, had perfected over the course of his career, “City of Dreams” begins with the words, “Here where you are standing, dinosaurs did a dance,” and recapitulates the history with which the film began: the arrival of white settlers, the murder of the Native Americans, and the legend of a harmonious world they left behind. The later verses recount the founding of the town, the wars that shaped the country and its people, and the trappings of modernity (“The children of the white man saw Indians on TV”), while “underneath the concrete, the dream is still alive.” And what dream is that? “We live in a city of dreams,” David declares at the head of a densely harmonized chorus. “We ride on a highway of fire,” they sing, as Tom Morrell’s ethereal steel guitar lifts the song into the overarching Texas sky. “Should we awake, and find it gone . . . remember this, our favorite town.”

38

Pleading for Mercy

True Stories is a great-looking and, with Byrne’s score, great-sounding film, but it’s marked by a flaw of sensibility, a too-great distance between the one who is looking and the ones who are being seen.

—DAVE KEHR, CHICAGO TRIBUNE

The response of critics and moviegoers to True Stories ranged from enthusiastic to dismissive, depending mainly on whether viewers were willing to take David Byrne at his word when he stated in his introduction to the screenplay that his goal was to celebrate the people of Virgil. In her New York Times review, Janet Maslin described the film as “a pure and jubilant extension of Mr. Byrne’s world view” and suggested that “The real world can be seen afresh when its simple absurdities are regarded, as they are here, with naïve fascination.” “A movie of effortless cool . . . joyous, daft, and hauntingly original,” Sheila Benson wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “Byrne’s running commentary as our guide is obviously ironic in its wide-eyed, deadpan enthusiasm. The question is, ironical in what sense? . . . A natural first reaction is to suppose that Byrne’s irony is sarcastic, the joke being that modern Virgil is a wasteland. But as the film progresses it becomes clear that the target of his irony is not Virgil as a wasteland but rather Byrne’s hip urban audience for their preconception that it is one. The joke is supposed to be on us, not the characters.”

In Rolling Stone, Anthony DeCurtis was having none of this, recoiling from Byrne’s portrayal of the Narrator, who delivers his lines in “the monotone of a Warholian alien.” “His distance from the other characters inevitably reads as irony, regardless of what his intentions may have been,” DeCurtis wrote. “The result is banal, postmodern slumming that indulges an arty, sentimental curiosity about what the simple folk do.” Jay Carr’s review in the Boston Globe described True Stories along similar lines as “a polite film about nothingness. . . . Byrne straddles the line between condescension and fascination with the idea of a rigid, reactionary society that nevertheless allows its members to live freely in their fantasies. He doesn’t seem to know whether to go with irony or affection, and winds up stranding himself and shortchanging his characters.”

Publicity campaigns and reviews serve to alert the public to the release of films, but they don’t necessarily sell movie tickets, and True Stories proved to be a commercial disappointment in the fall of 1986. Its release coincided with that of a number of highly touted films that were set in small-town American locales, including Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married and David Lynch’s horror comedy Blue Velvet, the cult sensation of the season. As might be expected, ticket sales were brisk in New York and Los Angeles, much less so in the fifty-odd theaters across the country that showed the picture when it went into general release. (Chris Frantz would later write with obvious schadenfreude that he and Tina watched people walk out on the film in their local Connecticut movie house.) At the same time, the publicity for the film did a good job of promoting the True Stories album, which entered the Billboard chart at the beginning of October and peaked at #17, selling a half-million copies by the end of November.

The album was a strange hybrid. The three songs David Byrne sings in the film—“Love for Sale,” “Wild Wild Life,” and “City of Dreams”—come at the beginning, the middle, and the end. The other six songs were written with the personae of the film characters in mind, and as Byrne made clear, he would have preferred to release a soundtrack album with the actors singing their parts, especially since the performances by John Goodman on “People Like Us,” Tito Larriva on “Radio Head,” and, Lord knows, Pops Staples on “Papa Legba” outdid his own singing on those tracks. But Warner Bros. had hedged its investment in the film on the prospect of a new album by Talking Heads. The result was a perfectly adequate collection of nine songs. The problem, of course, was that “perfectly adequate” was not a description that applied to any album Talking Heads had ever released.

Though the songs were written well in advance, the instrumental backings had been recorded at Sigma Sound while Little Creatures was being mixed. “We did it in five days,” Chris Frantz recalled. “We rehearsed it, and then we played it like a garage band.” This was incomparably faster than the Heads had ever worked before, but if the playing on True Stories was their idea of a garage band, they were one of the best-sounding garage bands in the annals of rock. The satiric track that opens the album, “Love for Sale,” illustrates its jaded premise by stringing advertising catchphrases (“So leave the driving to us / And it’s the Real Thing”) over the closest thing to a punk-rock groove the Heads had ever played, with bone-crunching drumming and a thrashing guitar that, if he were somehow capable of the emotion, would have put Johnny Ramone to shame. Striking an obvious pose, David sings it with a sneer that shades into the quizzical inflections that Lou Reed and Patti Smith helped to establish as hallmarks of punkish affront. “Wild Wild Life,” the song to which the residents of Virgil lip-sync on the first night of the film, is an even better example of generic rock, paced by a supple, growling vocal from David in the role of an appreciative narrator, cheering on his characters—the attending physician, the dashing businessman—as they let down their hair.

In keeping with the Texas locale of the film, six of the nine tracks on the album reflect vernacular styles of American music that are associated with the South in general and the Gulf Coast in particular. Despite its historic role in the birth of jazz and the rise of rock ’n’ roll, the indigenous music of New Orleans and Louisiana remained a surprisingly well-kept secret until the 1970s, when the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival began to serve as an annual showcase for the extraordinary musical diversity of the Mississippi Delta and its ties to the even more diverse musical traditions of Latin America and the Caribbean. As first evidenced by his use of New Orleans–style brass bands in his music for The Knee Plays in 1984, David Byrne was a latecomer to this musical party; rock artists like Paul Simon and Randy Newman, R&B singers like the Pointer Sisters and Labelle, and local heroes like Allen Toussaint and the Meters had been mining this vein for years.

The first of these tracks on True Stories, “Puzzlin’ Evidence,” derives its hypnotic groove from the rural Louisiana dance music known as zydeco. At some point in the musical mists of the nineteenth century, the poor Black Creoles of Louisiana appropriated the accordion from their poor white Cajun neighbors and used it to provide the accompaniment for their Saturday night “house dances.” In the late 1940s, a local genius named Clifton Chenier revolutionized this folk genre by plugging his accordion into a guitar amplifier, outfitting his brother Cleveland with a contraption called a rubboard, and marrying his playing to the backbeat of rhythm and blues, thus anointing himself the King of Zydeco. “Puzzlin’ Evidence” returns this groove to its roots by setting it in the context of a gospel shout, in which the congregation affirms the efforts of their wild-eyed pastor to connect the paranoid dots (“You got the CBS and the ABC . . . Time and Newsweek, well they’re the same to me”) by answering each of his apprehensions with the two words in the song title. Paranoia comes naturally to David Byrne, and his singing surpasses that of the preacher (played by John Ingle) in the film. But the true glory of “Puzzlin’ Evidence” is the way that Jerry Harrison’s organ alternates between impersonating the rhythmic drone of an accordion and punctuating the shouts of the gospel chorus with spasms of supplication and a pair of stirring solos at the middle and end of the track.

Next up is “Hey Now,” which taps into the tradition of classic New Orleans nonsense songs like “Iko Iko” and “Hey Pocky Way,” complete with a rumba-inflected rhythm and a shout-out to Aunt Mary and Uncle John, whose shaky marriage Little Richard immortalized in “Long Tall Sally.” As sung by a gang of grimacing 4-H campers, the abbreviated, one-minute excerpt of “Hey Now” in the film comes off as a weak joke. As sung on the album by David Byrne, the fleshed-out version of the song is incomparably more fun, as David flattens his voice into his idea of a drawl, and the Heads combine, in the song’s release, on one of their most exuberant group vocals. “I am the king of the world,” David proclaims in the last verse, “the boss of all the boys and girls!”

The last New Orleans–inflected track on Side One, “Papa Legba,” is a literally pale substitute for the version in the film, where the immense warmth of Pops Staples’s voice gives the song a quality that David Byrne can’t begin to match. (Papa Legba is a trickster god of Caribbean and West African vodou who rules over destiny.) But apart from driving the final nail into the coffin of “no singing like a Black man,” Byrne’s emulation of Staples’s performance is inspired in its way, while Paulinho da Costa’s layered percussion casts a musical spell analogous to the number that Mr. Turner does on Louis Fyne. Da Costa would routinely arrive at recording sessions with a half-dozen trunks containing hundreds of percussion instruments that he would mix and match as the spirit moved him. His playing on “Papa Legba” forms the basis of the most subtly sophisticated rhythm track Talking Heads would ever record: a delicately balanced blend of bells, congas, temple blocks, mallet percussion, Brazilian drums, and electronic rhythm, all of it anchored by a deep shudder of sixteenth notes that coils like a snake around the downbeat of each bar.

Framed by “Wild Wild Life” and “City of Dreams,” the two additional songs on the second side of the album are touched by other forms of hybrid musicality, beginning with the sound of Tejano or “Tex-Mex,” which shared with zydeco an appropriation of the accordion—in this case by Chicanos who put their own spin on the polkas and waltzes that were brought to the Southwest by their gringo neighbors. “Radio Head” gets the full Tex-Mex treatment, thanks to the playing of Esteban “Steve” Jordan, the reigning Tejano accordion virtuoso of his generation. Though David Byrne’s performance lacks the gusto that Tito Larriva brings to the song, the track is still exhilarating. The winsome waltz of “Dream Operator,” on the other hand, is rescued by David’s crooning, heartfelt performance from its deliberately stilted role in the film, where the Kay Culver character sings it as the unintentionally ironic accompaniment to the mall-court fashion show. Sung here without a trace of that irony, its melodious pop sentimentality comes across as an exotic moment on a record by Talking Heads: the sound of David Byrne, the kid who failed his audition for middle-school chorus, reveling in his newfound ability to simply sing a song.

The reviews of the True Stories album tended to be swallowed in the sea of publicity that surrounded the release of the film, but given the ambivalent nature of most critics’ responses, this was just as well. “For all its spunk and momentum, True Stories is also a major letdown,” Jon Pareles wrote in the New York Times, taking the group to task for “imitating its earlier self.” Noting the “Southern twang” he discerned in the songs on Little Creatures, Pareles felt that the continuation of that regional flavor on the new album sounded “borrowed for the occasion, not lived-in. They are roots the Talking Heads can’t rightfully claim.” Steve Pond put it differently in the Los Angeles Times, allowing that “the purposeful oddities of their earlier work have been replaced by a quiet virtuosity. . . . In a way, it’s disappointing to find a band that once broke new ground settling into a comfortable niche, but it is hard to hang onto nagging doubts in the face of a record as delightful as this.” The most prominent review of True Stories was written by Mark Coleman in Rolling Stone, and it was notable mainly for the fact that it was featured ahead of a surprisingly perfunctory review of Paul Simon’s latest album, Graceland, which would soon be heralded in virtually every critical forum as the record of the year. In Coleman’s view, the Heads’ exploration of their American musical roots was “a more sensible and successful mission than their pith-helmeted foray into Africa on Remain in Light.”

Jann Wenner once expressed a desire to become “the Henry Luce of the counterculture”—a reference to the imperious founder of the Time Life media empire who died the same year Rolling Stone was founded. By the mid-eighties, Wenner was close to fulfilling this goal, having turned Rolling Stone into an archly self-satisfied, establishmentarian oracle of the Baby Boom generation. In the ten years since their first album earned them a selection as one of the magazine’s “most promising new artists” of 1977, Rolling Stone had rewarded Talking Heads with generous amounts of coverage and, with the exception of Anthony DeCurtis’s recent pan of True Stories, consistently enthusiastic reviews. But in all that time, the Heads’ relatively modest record sales had denied them the promotional prize of a place on the cover of the magazine—that is, until the sight of David Byrne on the cover of Time elicited a predictable response from the publisher who aspired to the mantle of Henry Luce. In the fall of 1986, Wenner assigned David Handelman, a freshly hired Harvard grad from Scarsdale, to write a cover story on the band.

The article ran in January 1987 under the weighty headline: “Are Four (Talking) Heads Better Than One? The World’s Smartest Rock Group Talks About Confronting the David Byrne Media Blitz.” It began with Handelman’s description of a pair of supposed nightmares that Tina Weymouth recounted to him: “First she dreamed that she missed all the rehearsals for a tour because David Byrne had advertised them in the newspaper. When she finally arrived, the room was full of musicians, half of whom were novices on their instruments. Byrne asked where she had been. ‘David,’ she told him, ‘you know I don’t read the paper.’ Then she dreamed that the band went onstage and didn’t play a note. Just stood there. After three songs like this, the whole audience got up and left. Tina said, ‘Oh my God, this is terrible! What an abysmal show! We didn’t even play a note!’ But the next day the papers all raved; critics said the show was brilliant, a display of genius, conceptually perfect.” “Even in my dreams,” Handelman quoted Weymouth as saying, “David could do no wrong.”

Like any budding feature writer looking for a lead, Handelman welcomed Tina’s gift of these patently fictional “nightmares,” which expressed the seething resentments she harbored toward David Byrne. (Weymouth would later dismiss Handelman’s piece as “a hatchet job.”) Though the article was framed by an account of the band returning to CBGBs for a photo shoot at the scene of their first success, most of it was compiled from individual interviews that allowed the four of them to speak their minds. As a result, Talking Heads’ first and last cover story in Rolling Stone was almost entirely focused, as the headline read, on the strained relations in the band, with Weymouth doing most of the talking. “We kept pleading for mercy, but David himself was unable to put a stop to it,” she said of the media attention generated by True Stories and Byrne’s affiliations with what Handelman described as “highfalutin art-world types like Robert Wilson, Twyla Tharp, and Philip Glass.”

“It’s my fault as much as anyone’s, because I allowed this all to happen,” Tina continued, speaking for herself and Chris Frantz. “By being the friendly ones. By being the fair ones. By being the loyal ones. By being the ones who didn’t want to break anyone’s heart. But that’s all over now.” After sharing her stories of Byrne’s temper tantrums on Chrystie Street, Tina expressed her frustration at his reluctance to tour with Talking Heads in the most patronizing terms. “It is frightening,” she told Handelman. “I have a four-year-old at home. There’s not much difference. You can’t ask him to do it out of obligation or duty or love or money, but because it’s its own reward. Somewhere along the line, it stopped being its own reward for David.”

“There’s something unseemly about the no-holds-barred publicity for the movie,” Jerry Harrison volunteered. “If there was anything that Talking Heads was always about, it was restraint. We always stood for just being ourselves. Human. Many bands deal in fantasy. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that was not our intention. You can start to believe the fantasy about yourself, and as an artist, it can wear out quickly.”

Predictably, David Byrne was much less forthcoming about the tensions in the group. While agreeing that the amount of publicity he had received in recent months affected how other people perceived him, he also regarded it as a way of expanding the band’s audience. “You want to reach people you haven’t reached before,” he said. “It’s the same drive that led us to play in front of an audience in the first place.” Asked whether the publicity had contributed to the impression that their music was really the creation of David Byrne and Talking Heads, Byrne cited the Beatles as “a nice myth that everyone wanted to believe in the sixties, that there was this wonderful, democratic, egalitarian institution. It wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now.” In a collaboration, he speculated, “no matter how you work it out, everyone feels shafted in some way.” He did not offer to elaborate on how he felt his role in Talking Heads had been slighted by the other three.

A month after the Rolling Stone cover story appeared, Andy Warhol died of a heart attack after undergoing routine gallbladder surgery at New York Hospital. Like an immigrant repatriated to the land of his birth, Warhol was buried by his family in Pittsburgh. But the memorial service that was held for him at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral a month later was attended by more than two thousand people whose collective presence was a testament to the part that Warhol had played in the confluence of art, wealth, fashion, media, and celebrity worship that had come to define the cultural landscape of New York in the 1980s. The guests included the artists Claes Oldenburg, David Hockney, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Julian Schnabel; the actors Richard Gere, Sophia Loren, Liza Minnelli, and Raquel Welch; the pop singers Lou Reed, Grace Jones, Debbie Harry, and Yoko Ono; the writers Tom Wolfe, Terry Southern, and George Plimpton; the designers Calvin Klein, Halston, and Diane von Furstenberg; and the socialites Claus von Bülow, Bianca Jagger, and Jane Holzer. The consensus among those who attended the service was that “Andy would have loved it.”

Warhol would also have loved the outpouring of press attention that appeared in the wake of his death: the front-page obituary in the Times, the cover stories in New York and Artforum, the many assessments in newspapers and magazines of his career as an artist, a celebrity, and a cultural icon. Most of this coverage treated Warhol’s flirtations with the world of popular music as a footnote. But Ken Tucker, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, memorialized Warhol’s sponsorship of the Velvet Underground, his design for the cover of the Rolling Stones’ album Sticky Fingers, and his ubiquitous, ghostly presence at New York clubs and discos dating back to the heyday of Max’s Kansas City. In Tucker’s view, “the entire first generation of New York New Wave acts took part of its inspiration from Warhol’s vision of alienated dread. The most prominent graduate of that generation, David Byrne of Talking Heads, has borrowed much of his detached, poker-faced demeanor from Warhol, and the tone of a substantial number of Talking Heads songs and music videos owes a great deal to Warhol’s movies, paintings, and gnomic pronouncements. Warhol and Byrne share an inordinate fondness for the quotidian, the awkward, the everyday. The idea is to make art out of the ordinary, and Warhol had the notion well before Byrne.”

Andy Warhol was a self-described connoisseur of superficiality who was obsessed with celebrity, gossip, and social status in ways that meant little to David Byrne. But in years to come, as an awareness of Asperger’s gradually entered the public mind, Warhol would be one of many figures in the arts and sciences to receive a posthumous diagnosis. If true, this may have accounted for some of the affective similarities between him and Byrne. As far back as 1980, Mary Harron had written, “At times Warhol seems to be looking at the world with the naïve curiosity of a creature from another planet. The only person I can think of now who shares this vision is David Byrne of Talking Heads.” James Wolcott had addressed their similarities a few months before Warhol’s death in his Vanity Fair profile of Byrne. “Byrne is Andy Warhol without desiccation,” he wrote. “Byrne too has perfected his otherness, powdered his aura with ambiguity, polished to a rich marble gloss his big stare. But unlike Warhol’s, Byrne’s big stare isn’t blank, or even, on close inspection, passive. He isn’t in the alienation biz.”

39

Naked in Paris

Paris in the summer versus Eighth Avenue in New York City is really not too hard a decision to make.

—DAVID BYRNE

Jerry Harrison’s relationship with his longtime girlfriend Linda Alexsa had ended by the time Harrison moved back to Milwaukee in 1984 to care for his terminally ill mother. After her death, Jerry continued living at his family’s home in Shorewood. Milwaukee’s more laid-back lifestyle appealed to him, and the availability of first-rate recording facilities and capable local musicians made his work on a second solo album more efficient and much less expensive than would have been the case in New York. Harrison also produced a pair of albums in Milwaukee, one by an old friend from Boston, Elliott Murphy, the other by a group of local Velvet Underground acolytes (with a sideline in Christianity) called Violent Femmes. Around this time, Jerry met a twenty-three-year-old Milwaukeean named Carol Baxter and the two of them fell in love. Carol had grown up in suburban Waukesha, attended the private University School of Milwaukee, and was a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin. In the summer of 1986, she and Jerry had learned that she was pregnant; their son, Griffin, was born in March of the following year.

That same month, the four members of Talking Heads met in New York to discuss the prospect of making a new album. After the fast-paced experience of recording the eighteen songs on Little Creatures and True Stories two years before, Jerry, Chris, and Tina all expressed a desire to return to the collaborative approach the group had last taken on Speaking in Tongues of building the songs from the ground up, beginning with improvisatory grooves, to which David would add lyrics and melodies after the basic instrumental tracks were done. Their hope was that this would help to offset the effects of the media blitz around David by reaffirming the collaborative basis of their group. And that if all went well, it would produce a body of new material that might inspire David to tour, once again, with Talking Heads.

Seemingly unfazed by the animosity his bandmates had expressed in Rolling Stone, David was amenable to their wishes. After filling the last two albums with conventionally structured pop songs, he hoped to explore a more linear approach to songwriting in which the sections of a song would unfold rather than repeat in the usual verse-chorus manner. In addition, after drawing on vernacular American styles of music for True Stories, he wanted to return to the more cosmopolitan sound and outlook his work with Brian Eno had brought to the group. Paul Simon’s album Graceland had been a landmark in popular music in 1986, a brilliant synthesis of the melodic and rhythmic sensibilities of South African township music with the melodic and literary sensibilities of Simon’s distinctive brand of tuneful Western pop. Simon had cited both Remain in Light (“my favorite Talking Heads album”) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts as influences on his work. His long-standing practice of relying on top-flight studio musicians had led him to record the basic tracks for Graceland in Johannesburg (in defiance of a United Nations cultural boycott against South Africa’s apartheid regime) with a cross-section of the country’s best vocal and instrumental talent. Simon’s example now contributed to David Byrne’s proposal that Talking Heads record the basic tracks for their next album in Paris, which had emerged in the 1980s as a destination for elite musicians from the former French colonies of West Africa and the Caribbean in the same way that London had come to serve as a destination for reggae artists from Jamaica and the UK.

Prominent among those Parisian musicians was the Compass Point All-Star Wally Badarou, who had grown up in the city as the son of the former Dahomeyan ambassador to France. The Heads initially approached Badarou about coproducing their album, but when a scheduling conflict prevented that, he offered to connect them with members of his musical circle there. These included the Cameroonian guitarist Yves N’Djock, the Guinean kora harpist Mory Kanté, and the percussionists Abdou Mboup, who had previously recorded with the trumpeter Jon Hassell, and Brice Wassy, best known for his drumming with the Afropop pioneer Manu Dibango. Badarou also steered the Heads to Studio Davout, on the eastern periphery of Paris, in a neighborhood teeming with recent immigrants.

David, Jerry, Chris, and Tina began by jamming together on a daily basis at a rehearsal studio in Manhattan for a couple of weeks, recording dozens of rhythmic grooves. They then fashioned the most promising of these riffs into the frameworks of possible songs, most of them with distinct if fairly basic chord changes, and rehearsed the songs to the point where they could play them, instrumentally, from beginning to end.

In May, the Heads arrived in Paris with their children, partners, and newborn babies in tow. They were joined there by the English record producer Steve Lillywhite, whom they had hired, on the recommendation of Chris Blackwell and Gary Kurfirst, in place of Wally Badarou. Apart from his close relationship with Blackwell’s Island Records, Lillywhite was an unlikely choice to produce an album by Talking Heads. He was best known for his rather bombastic production work with the former Genesis front man Peter Gabriel, the new wave band XTC, and the Irish band U2 on their early Island albums. Along the way, Lillywhite gained a reputation for having an exceptionally cool head in the studio, as exemplified by his production on Dirty Work, the Rolling Stones’ first respectable album since the 1970s, which was recorded at a time when the animosity between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards was so intense that they refused to speak with each other. More recently, Lillywhite’s musical interests had taken an unusual turn. After assisting Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno with some of the mixes on U2’s newly released album, The Joshua Tree, he was now working with the other notable Irish band of the 1980s, the Pogues, on a raucous Christmas ballad called “Fairytale of New York,” the final version of which featured vocals by Lillywhite’s wife Kirsty MacColl.

David Byrne claimed to be unfamiliar with Lillywhite’s work with Gabriel and U2, but the endorsement of Chris Blackwell and Gary Kurfirst was enough for him. From Kurfirst’s perspective, Lillywhite was hired to keep the peace. “His job at this point was really to make sure that they didn’t kill each other,” he later said.

The mood of the sessions was influenced by the thrill of being in Paris, by the relaxed atmosphere of Studio Davout, a former movie theater with a slanted floor (like the famous Stax studio in Memphis), and most of all, by the succession of remarkable musicians that Wally Badarou supplied. Instead of relying on their previous practice of overdubbing additional instruments to color the sound, the Heads had the African musicians join with them, as much as possible, in rehearsing and recording the basic tracks, which allowed for their playing to have a more direct impact on the arrangements of the songs.

Prior to leaving for Paris, David Byrne had encouraged Chris Frantz to change his style of playing on this new material so as to downplay the convention of a rock backbeat. (Reflecting the state of communications within the group, Frantz recalled that Byrne sent him a letter about this.) Chris responded by playing with wire brushes on many of the tracks, which allowed the vibrant African percussion of hand drums, cowbells, woodblocks, and shakers to determine the shape of the grooves. Some of that percussion was fairly exotic; on a track called “Ruby Dear,” Brice Wassy danced with a pair of leggings made of bean pods that rattled in response to his every move. In addition to the French African musicians, Steve Lillywhite requisitioned a pair of Brits: James Fearnley, who played accordion with the Pogues, and Johnny Marr, a former member of the Smiths, who was now one of the top session guitarists in London. Lillywhite’s wife, Kirsty MacColl, also contributed backing vocals on two of the tracks.

Though Johnny Marr claimed the resemblance was completely coincidental, his ringing, jangly playing was often compared to the sounds of African highlife and soukous-style guitar. This affinity worked wonders on a bare-bones riff that Marr was presented with soon after he arrived: a groove of drums, skeletal bass, and percussion to which he added a joyful skein of electric twelve-string guitar that made the music come alive. Transformed by David Byrne into a song called “(Nothing But) Flowers,” the track became a high point of the sessions at Studio Davout.

Previously, Talking Heads had been notably frugal with their time and money in their approach to making albums, avoiding the sort of recording tourism that many successful bands indulged in. Their sojourn in Paris was an exception to this, as they wound up spending almost two months in the city, working in the studio during the day and enjoying themselves in the evenings. This gave David Byrne time to get started on writing the words and melodies that would turn the instrumental tracks into actual songs—to the relief of Steve Lillywhite, who was uncomfortable with the whole concept of recording backing tracks to songs that didn’t yet exist. Like nearly every rock record producer apart from Brian Eno, Lillywhite regarded the lead vocal as the through line of a song, and it was a stretch for him to produce in his usual manner without having the words and melody to work off.

The sessions in Paris wound down toward the end of June. After Jerry, Chris, Tina, and their families returned to the United States, David headed to London to work on a commission he had received to compose music for the soundtrack of The Last Emperor, a lavish biographical epic that the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci had filmed, with the unprecedented cooperation of the Chinese Communist Party, in Beijing’s Forbidden City. The movie was based on the life of Puyi, who ascended to the imperial throne as a toddler in 1908 and remained in the Forbidden City following the overthrow of the monarchy four years later. After serving as a puppet for the Japanese during their occupation of the country, Puyi was tried as a war criminal by the Red Chinese and subjected to years of “re-education” before living out his life as a lowly gardener in Beijing. Impressed by Stop Making Sense, Bernardo Bertolucci had hired Byrne to work on the soundtrack along with a pair of Asian composers, Ryuichi Sakamoto from Japan and Cong Su from China; the sections Byrne wrote, including the film’s stately title theme, featured lilting pentatonic melodies scored for strings, flutes, and gently resonant percussion. In the midst of this project, David and Adelle returned to Paris, where they were married in the middle of July.

Back in New York at the end of the summer, work on the album resumed at Sigma Sound, with David refining his singing on the tracks they had recorded in Paris. Those sessions had laid the groundwork for fifteen songs, and there was talk of releasing a double album until the decision was made to focus on the ten most promising tracks. Eric Weissberg was brought in to overdub dobro and pedal steel guitar, along with a veteran harmonica player named Don Brooks. In addition, the Heads wound up commissioning horn arrangements on three of the tracks: two by Lenny Pickett of the Saturday Night Live band, the other by Angel Fernandez, bandleader for the Cuban-born salsa star Celia Cruz. David Byrne had first met Cruz in 1986, when the two of them sang a spirited duet on “Locos de Amor,” a song he wrote for the soundtrack of the Jonathan Demme film Something Wild. A fascination with Latin American “music and sensibility” would become his consuming passion in the year ahead.

It is unclear how active a role the other three members of Talking Heads played in these New York sessions. Alex Sadkin had died in a freakish car accident at Compass Point in the summer of 1987, shortly before he was slated to produce the fourth album by Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers, a group of Bob Marley’s children led by his eldest son. Tina Weymouth’s brother Loric was working for the group’s record label, Virgin Atlantic, and suggested Tina and Chris as possible replacements for Sadkin. After meeting first with Ziggy’s mother, Rita, and then with Ziggy himself, the Frantzes agreed to produce the album in the fall of 1987 at Sigma Sound in New York, which would enable them to stay abreast of progress on their own album as well. Jerry Harrison, in the meantime, was also working at Sigma Sound, mixing the tracks he had recorded in Milwaukee for his second solo album. This meant that he, too, was working in the same studio, if not always on the same material, as David Byrne.

Several of the songs David wrote for the album touched on Edenic themes of instinct and innocence, including one called “Totally Nude” and another called “The Facts of Life,” which began with the words “monkey see and monkey do” and ended with the promise, “We will still be monkeys down deep inside.” This prompted the band to name their new album Naked, and to commission the design firm of M & Co. to produce a cover that presented the image, rendered by a professional pet-portrait painter, of a slack-jawed chimpanzee, clutching the stem of a purple flower, encased in a gilded frame.

Jerry Harrison’s album, titled Casual Gods, was released at the end of January, six weeks before the scheduled release of Naked. The album cover was a hellish black-and-white photograph by Sebastião Salgado showing swarms of Brazilian gold miners climbing the walls of an open pit. The promotional package that was sent out with the record included an earnest statement by Harrison in which he explained, “While making this album, I became increasingly aware of the deteriorating condition of the Third World. Where once there was hope, there are now only stop-gap solutions to the pressures of enormous debt and rapidly enlarging populations. . . . Parts of this album try to capture some of the mood of these momentous changes.”

If only. On The Red and the Black, the mediocrity of Jerry Harrison’s singing had served to mask the mediocrity of his lyric-writing. On Casual Gods, the marginal improvement in Harrison’s singing only called attention to the banality of the words he chose to sing. The eleven songs on the album contain not a single felicitous or memorable phrase. They consist instead of boilerplate rockers like the opening track, “Rev It Up” (“My teethy she-wolf, knocking on my door / She wants to roll the rug up and get down on the floor”), and oblique pronouncements on matters of political and emotional import. Veiled narratives like “Cherokee Chief” and “Let It Come Down”—one an account of a caudillo in his bulletproof Jeep, the other a call to arms on behalf of a downtrodden population—express no sense of outrage or solidarity with their subjects, while self-involved love songs like “A Perfect Lie” (“I’m so off-guard in the light that surrounds you”) and “Song of Angels” (“When you say it’s over, I’m so lonely”) conjure one awkward romantic image after another.

Apart from a polite review in Rolling Stone (“deeply felt tracks cut from the same fabric as Remain in Light and Speaking in Tongues”), Casual Gods was either ignored or savaged in the music press. In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Ken Tucker described Harrison’s “colorless and inexpressive singing” as an “insurmountable problem.” “Harrison is better known for his work as keyboardist with Talking Heads,” John Griffin wrote in the Montreal Gazette; “here’s hoping he won’t abandon his day job for more of what’s between the sleeves of this package.” One critic went so far as to suggest that by releasing his album shortly before the projected release of a new Talking Heads album, “Jerry Harrison is essentially committing solo suicide.”

In the years since Bob Dylan reconstituted himself as a pop star in the spring of 1965, a generation of gifted lyricists had helped to turn album rock into a new fictional art form whose range and impact, at its best, were comparable to that of short stories and novels. Over the years, David Byrne’s idiosyncratic songwriting had placed him in the company of gifted lyricists like Ray Davies, Paul Simon, Pete Townshend, Lou Reed, Randy Newman, Neil Young, Laura Nyro, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen, and Elvis Costello—the list goes on and on. Some of these songwriters showed a literary flair or an emotional eloquence from the dawn of their careers. But most of them, like Byrne, did not. Instead, they learned their craft the way that most ambitious artists do, by a process of observation, emulation, and reaction that led them, over time, to develop a personal style of expression.

What was notable about the other members of Talking Heads was how little they seemed to have learned about songwriting from more than a decade of working closely with David Byrne. This would not have mattered had they regarded themselves purely as instrumentalists. But the collective identity of Talking Heads made it seem to their listeners that Byrne was speaking on behalf of the group in the words he sang to their songs—the implication being that his lyrics emerged from a common reality and sensibility that the four of them shared. In fact, it had been many years since the members of Talking Heads had shared a point of view. The suspension of their career as a touring band in the winter of 1984 had marked the last time the four of them did much of anything together, as a group, apart from making records and going through the motions of promoting them. Upon its release in March 1988, their final album, aptly titled Naked, would lay bare the extent to which this was true.

40

Don’t Mention Harmony

For a long time the band hasn’t been this kind of communal activity that one imagines of rock ’n’ roll bands of the ’60s and early ’70s and that kind of thing. We don’t go out together all the time. We don’t hang out at each other’s houses. We get together and do Talking Heads stuff, you know?

—DAVID BYRNE, 1988

For all their fame and fortune, the Beatles were at an impasse in the spring of 1969. They had recently recorded the soundtrack for a concert film, tentatively titled Get Back, which was intended to compensate for the fact that they hadn’t performed in public in nearly three years. During that time, they had released a trio of acclaimed albums—Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, and The Beatles—that served to institutionalize rock music as a legitimate popular art form in Britain and the United States. During those same three years, however, the epic camaraderie that had carried these four young Englishmen to the pinnacle of their success had been steadily eroded by their newfound wealth and privilege, and by the unrelenting pressure of living in a fishbowl of pop celebrity that had turned John, Paul, George, and Ringo into four of the most recognizable people on earth. As suggested by its title, the Get Back film began as an effort to restore that sense of camaraderie by returning the Beatles to their roots as a performing band. But the project had turned into a fiasco, as the band members sniped and argued with one another and eventually wound up rebelling against their own idea. Confronted with the possibility that their ten-year career as a group might indeed be coming to an end, the Beatles returned to the site of their musical triumphs, Abbey Road Studios in London’s St. John’s Wood. There they recorded what stands to this day as the greatest last album in the seventy-year history of rock. Abbey Road was a heroic masterpiece by a collaborative group whose members could barely bring themselves to collaborate anymore.

Like the Beatles, Talking Heads had also released a total of nine albums (two of them live) in the ten years since the four of them first recorded at Sundragon Studios in the spring of 1977. And like the Beatles, it had been three years since they had last performed live as a band. During that time, David Byrne had been subjected to the sort of elevation in the public eye that had once been reserved for superstars like the Beatles, but which by the 1980s had become the standard practice of a voracious mass media that was hungry to celebrate distinction and notoriety in all of their many forms. By 1987, Byrne’s anointment, first as the Thinking Man’s Rock Star, then as Rock’s Renaissance Man, had eroded a form of personal and musical camaraderie that was far more fragile than the reflexive bond of working-class solidarity that had compounded the Beatles’ appeal in America by presenting a generation of middle-class teenagers with a collective, collaborative alternative to the creed of individualistic achievement with which they had been raised.

Back in Liverpool, no one had ever thought to ask working-class kids like John, Paul, George, and Ringo what they wanted to “be” when they grew up, and it was no coincidence that the members of Talking Heads had come together at exactly the point, at the end of college, when most middle-class Americans set out to “be” something on their own. Nor was it coincidental that the Heads had centered their group on the one member, himself the child of British working-class parents, whose lack of a college degree begged the question of what, if anything, he might “be” or do with his life. While David Byrne, like John Lennon before him, liked to exaggerate the modesty of his family background, his failure to finish college had put him in a predicament similar to that of Lennon when he dropped out of art school in 1961 to become a Beatle—a predicament that Byrne, unlike Lennon, did not share with his fellow Talking Heads. In this sense, Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, and Jerry Harrison had never been in a position to understand the social and psychological pressures that were driving the ambitions of David Byrne. It was not only Byrne’s Asperger’s that had placed him in a state of parallel play, alongside but distinctly apart from them; it was also the privileged circumstances in which the three of them had been raised.

The members of Talking Heads would never suggest that their tenth album was made with the knowledge that it could well be their last. But like Abbey Road, Naked represented a concerted attempt by the band to revive the collaborative approach to music-making that had characterized their most acclaimed and adventurous work. The contributions of a large and diverse supporting cast of “outside” musicians gave the album a musical density reminiscent of Speaking in Tongues and Little Creatures. And while the surging popularity of cassettes and compact discs had begun to eclipse the practice of programming albums by “side,” the two sides of Naked have dramatically different characters reminiscent of Remain in Light. Side One contains some of the most provocative and exhilarating music Talking Heads had ever made. Side Two presents a bleak and brooding vision of contemporary life that ends with a meditation on death.

The exhilaration begins with a track called “Blind” and an intro derived from an iconic 1950 recording by the Cuban bandleader Perez Prado called “Mambo #5”: three bars of jagged horns and piercing guitar, a full stop, a hit of high brass, and a quick exhalation of breath. David enters the song over a bubbly bed of congas, singing in anxious, hushed tones about “signs” that are lost or invisible. Signs of what we do not know, but in their absence, things do not bode well. The opening verses of “Blind” describe a dire if ambiguous situation, in which hungry dogs lie in wait and the sun rises on a dying man who has been branded as a terrorist, “all in the name of democracy.” “They’re blind,” David declares in the one-word chorus. “Blind, blind, blind, blind, blind,” he repeats over a gentle arc of melody. The pumping horns of the intro return to bring on the song’s release. “No sense of harmony / No sense of time,” David sings, wondering, “What is it? what is it? what is it?” He then revisits the scene from a public point of view, watching as people ride past the twitching body and a girl looks down from her window and pleads, “I don’t want to die.” Acknowledging his own complicity for the first time, David asks, “Now tell me what the hell have we become / Some dirty little bastards, what the hell is going on?” The bridge and chorus repeat, reprising their themes of disharmony and indifference, until the track ends with an extended outro of swaying brass, chattering saxes, and a high trilling line on guitar.

Of the many screeds that Bob Dylan delivered in the 1960s, none was more scathing than “Ballad of a Thin Man,” the last song on the first side of Dylan’s full-throated conversion to rock, Highway 61 Revisited. Sung to the dirgelike accompaniment of a gravelly piano and a screeching organ, the song presents seven verses of expert character assassination aimed at a hapless figure known only as Mr. Jones. Dylanologists would spend decades trying to determine the real-life inspiration for this figure of scorn, but whoever he was to begin with, Dylan’s genius transformed him into a well-bred, well-read paragon of squareness, helplessly out of touch with a world that is changing before his very eyes into the carnivalesque spectacle of the 1960s. Or as Dylan repeats in the song’s relentless refrain: “You know something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”

Two decades later, David Byrne revived this clueless protagonist in an eponymous song that, while it didn’t exactly rewrite history, brought it up to date in a way that turned Dylan’s eloquent scorn back upon itself. The track begins with a lyrical introduction of woodblocks, conga pops, synthesized flutes, and marimbas, which set a sylvan scene until a low growl of trombone cues the arrival of a full complement of sassy ballroom horns, which pick up where “Blind” left off in an homage to the “Mambo King,” Perez Prado. “Mr. Jones,” David sings, “put a wiggle in your stride / Loosen up! I believe he’ll be all right.” Mr. Jones responds by changing into something more comfortable—“ventilated slacks” and “patent leather shoes”—and heading for the hotel bar. “Mr. Jones is back in town,” David proclaims in the chorus. “He is not so square.” And sure enough, in place of the carnival geeks and one-eyed midgets Jones was confronted with back in 1965, he is now surrounded by a conclave of conventioneers, rock stars, short-skirted women, and people selling Bibles and real estate. How the world has changed! It would take another year for Dylan himself to perform for the first time at an Atlantic City casino, but as social commentary, the idea that his pariah from the 1960s is now surrounded by a posse known as “the Jones gang” carries a dose of satiric wit worthy of the master himself. Not to mention the rather obvious affinities between Mr. Jones and Mr. Byrne, who had gone to such lengths over the preceding ten years to put a wiggle in his stride.

“Totally Nude” is the track that gave Naked its name, on which David slips out of his Big Suit into nothing at all. “Totally naked, baby, totally nude / ’Cause if I want to who’s gonna stop me?” he sings over a driving steppers groove. David goes on to extol the freedom of “throwing it all away” in order to live with the “birdies and the bees” in the great outdoors, his every phrase answered by the effusions of Eric Weissberg’s pedal steel guitar. “Nature boy,” he calls himself, looking for “a life that’s undiscovered.” Coming from one of rock’s premier urban neurotics, this is quite a change of scene. But David does manage to inject some mystification into this seemingly straightforward song, singing in the bridge, apropos of God knows what, “Wake your daddy up it’s a quarter to five / Our little boat has lost its rudder / Dive to the bottom and we never come up / A polka party for Bob and Martha.”

Ellas McDaniel, dba Bo Diddley, grew up in Chicago, recorded for Chess Records, and in the miraculous year of 1955, along with Ray Charles (“I Got a Woman”), Fats Domino (“Ain’t That a Shame”), and Chuck Berry (“Maybellene”), had a #1 hit on the Billboard R&B charts. Unlike the other three, that was it for Bo Diddley as far as #1 records were concerned, which made his eponymous single one of the most influential one-hit wonders of all time. The record was distinguished by its nonsense lyric and its two-bar “clave” rhythm, emblematized by the expression “shave and a haircut, two bits,” that underlies nearly all forms of Latin American and Afro-Cuban music. When played by a drummer on the tom-toms of his kit, this ubiquitous rhythm epitomized the seditious “jungle beat” that its early detractors ascribed to rock ’n’ roll. On that basis, it would be appropriated by dozens of other recording artists in the years ahead, beginning with Buddy Holly and the Rolling Stones.

That the members of Talking Heads felt no compunction about enlisting a group of African musicians to play this “jungle” rhythm at a recording date in Paris speaks to their confidence in their own abilities, not to mention the fact that the groove was indeed second nature to the Africans. In the time-honored fashion, Chris Frantz pounds it out on his tom-toms, overlaid with layers of hand drumming and leg-shaking from Brice Wassy, a driving bass, and a trio of ringing guitars that includes Johnny Marr’s expert impersonation of Bo Diddley’s signature tremolo tone. For his part, David Byrne stays true to the nonsensical spirit of the original. “Round and round and we won’t let go, and where we stop, no one knows, uh-huh,” David sings against the storm of rhythm behind him, asking in the title line, “Ruby Dear, oh don’t you hear?” But as the song progresses, David’s impish wordplay yields to darker themes. “Angels and prostitutes, they might look the same,” he sings toward the end, conflating a pair of tropes, the fallen angel and the hooker with a heart of gold, that lead him to the cheerful conclusion, “And if to hell we’re going . . . I’ll see you there.”

By the end of “Ruby Dear,” the first side of Naked has drawn so much musical energy from so many diverse sources as to raise the question of what could possibly come next. The answer is “(Nothing But) Flowers,” a song that ranks with “Once in a Lifetime” as another of the greatest songs that David Byrne would ever write. Everything that Talking Heads had learned about the art of playing music over the previous decade was encapsulated in the five minutes of this track, making it one last enthralling testament to their greatness as a band.

It begins with a half-minute of hand drums and trap drums whose jolting rhythm is broken only by the slides and groans of Tina Weymouth’s bass until a trio of rhythm guitars descend on the music with a soukous-style riff of heartrending warmth and intensity. “Here we stand, like an Adam and Eve,” David and Kirsty MacColl sing together, introducing themselves as “two fools in love” in their personal Garden of Eden. But even as the birds smile down from the trees, a question hangs over this scene. “From the age of the dinosaurs, cars have run on gasoline,” David sings, before asking himself, “Where . . . where have they gone?” It hardly matters whether he means the cars or the dinosaurs; either way, “Now it’s nothing but flowers.”

The chorus that follows is a master class in irony. Twenty years after Joni Mitchell compared a rock festival to the Garden of Eden and heralded Earth Day by warning, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” here is David Byrne, surrounded by a pastoral landscape of fields and streams, casting a spell of nostalgia onto the factories, shopping malls, and chain restaurants he once decried in “The Big Country,” his every line seconded by the consumerist catchphrase “You got it!” “If this is paradise,” he declares, “I wish I had a lawn mower.”

David introduces his earlier self in the second verse of the song: the angry young man who grew up and “fell in love with the beautiful highway,” only to watch as all that precious real estate “was sacrificed for agriculture.” “I thought that we’d start over,” he sings, “but I guess I was wrong.” As a social satirist, this is Byrne at his best, bemoaning the loss of the parking lots, Pizza Huts, Dairy Queens, and 7-Elevens, making an example of himself on behalf of a future generation of people who have attained the world they thought they wanted, only to realize that their taste for the comforts of consumerism has made them part of the problem all along.

In the instrumental break, Johnny Marr, Yves N’Djock, and David Byrne turn the master class in irony into a master class in rhythm guitar, in which the African aesthetic of “sweetness” is given its fullest expression as the three of them trade riffs against the backdrop of a swirling organ and David’s wordless countermelody. He resumes his litany of loss in the final chorus, dreaming of “cherry pies, candy bars, and chocolate chip cookies” against the relentless chant of “You got it!,” until the music grinds to a halt on his plea, “Don’t leave me stranded here / I can’t get used to this lifestyle.”

The second side of Naked is dominated by David Byrne’s decision to engage with every one of the “loaded subjects”—sex, violence, and political intrigue—he resolved to avoid in the screenplay of True Stories. It was not a decision that served him well. “The Democratic Circus” reflected the dour prospects of the 1988 election year, which would see the Democratic Party fail, yet again, to stem the red tide of Reaganism. After a minute-long introduction in which the groans of Jerry Harrison’s keyboard-cello and the moans of Eric Weissberg’s dobro are paced by Chris Frantz’s jaunty brush beat, David renders the wistful melody in a world-weary tone of voice. “Found out this morning there’s a circus coming to town.” The circus metaphor for electoral politics is itself a political cliché, and the song doesn’t stint on its references to parades, cotton candy, and carnival rides as a way of characterizing the childish expectations of the people who come to see the show. “And when the ringmaster calls our names, we’ll be the first ones to go . . . ,” David sings, his voice trailing off as the song takes a sudden turn, “. . . to sleep / Stealing all our dreams / Dreams for sale / They’ll sell ’em back to you.” With that the mood darkens, as day turns to night, dogs start to howl, and a cloudburst sends everyone running for cover, all of it begging the question of how far a song can go in mixing its metaphorical clichés.

Deep in the rapture of “This Must Be the Place,” David Byrne described himself as “just an animal, looking for a home.” In “The Facts of Life,” David turns his fixation on the idea that our emotions are rooted in biology, not psychology, into a tendentious discourse on human nature that posits love as an infernal force, “a machine without a driver.” “Monkey see and monkey do, making babies, eating food,” it begins, to which David amends the amorous couplet, “Smelly things, pubic hair / Words of love in the air.” Unfortunately, that’s the last flash of wit in a lyric that strings together aimless references to “chromosomes, designer jeans, chimpanzees and human beings,” in the hope that they will bolster his contention that we are all “programmed happy little children” in our quest for love. At regular intervals, he intones the words “facts of life” and “machines of love” while the band drones on behind him. There’s a flaw in the machinery, it seems, which leads him to express his fear that “God has no master plan / He only takes what he can use.” Is there anything more to be said? Apparently there is. After allowing that humans will one day live on Venus and walk on Mars, David sings, “If chimpanzees are smart, then we will close our eyes / And let our instincts guide us, oh, oh oh oh, no.” By the end of this dreadful mess of a song, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, after all these years, David Byrne still knows next to nothing when it comes to the subject of love.

By all rights, the quivering accordion at the start of “Mommy Daddy You and I” signals the approach of a train. But when David sets the scene in the opening verse, it’s a bus, not a train, that’s taking his family on a journey that seems to reverse the route the Byrnes once took from Canada to Maryland when David was a boy. “Driving, keep driving,” he urges as the song picks up speed in the chorus, and the boy rests his head on his father’s shoulder. “And I’m wearing my grandfather’s clothes,” he sings, because “they say that up north it gets cold.”

“Mommy Daddy You and I” is the only bright spot on Side Two of Naked: a tender song that does something Byrne had done remarkably little of as a songwriter, applying his own lived experience to other people’s lives. “We’re not the only family to take this little trip,” he sings in the second verse. As the northward journey continues, the boy prevails on his parents to “hold me and don’t let me go, ’cause the sidewalks are covered in snow.” Like millions of immigrants before them, it’s hard for them to know what to say when their child asks, “How we gonna make our way in this foreign land?” The answer, for the moment, is “Driving, driving with all our might / Changing, still changing / Changing the water of life.”

“Big Daddy” is another major misstep. “It’s kind of a little Tennessee Williams scenario, but this story is told from the woman’s point of view,” Byrne would later say, somehow ignoring the fact that Maggie is the acknowledged protagonist of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The song may have been inspired by a piece in the New York Times announcing that the celebrated Black actor James Earl Jones was being cast as the white Mississippi patriarch Big Daddy in an upcoming production of the play. But if so, David Byrne was, as he puts it, “scraping bottom” in his effort to engage with this material. The track features an everything-but the-kitchen-sink production of horns and stereotypic blues harp that tries to put meat on the bones of a song that otherwise has little reason to exist. Its first half is based on yet another extended metaphor in which Big Daddy goes fishing for the girl of his dreams, who looks like Barbie and shops at Sears. He knows how to bait his hook, and once he lands his catch, he gives this woman whatever her heart desires. But it turns out the joke’s on him. “I seen you getting down, a-swimming back and forth, when Daddy’s not around,” David sings. Though her “velvet lies sing softly, each with a golden spoon,” the day comes when Big Daddy has had enough, leaving the girl with nothing but “a one-way ticket on a southbound train”—headed, no doubt, for New Orleans, to audition as Blanche DuBois.

Along with “The Facts of Life,” “Big Daddy” contributes to the impression that Talking Heads simply ran out of good material in putting this album together. As it was, the sessions for Naked produced at least four outtakes, three of which would be released on compilation albums in the years ahead. These included “Lifetime Piling Up,” a notably witty and accomplished track with a ringing, upbeat chorus that was a favorite of Steve Lillywhite’s, but which failed to fit with the gloom and doom on the album’s second side. On another of those outtakes, a deceptively placid ballad called “Bill,” David Byrne revisits the realm of psychopathology where his songwriting career began. (“Bill” followed “Big Daddy” as a bonus track on the cassette and CD versions of the album.) Its eponymous subject is an overgrown boy who scares all the girls in high school and suffers from their humiliation until one of them unaccountably takes a liking to him. Together, the two of them sneak in the woods, swim in the river, and spend their time “making up religions and dropping out of school.” “Never meant to hurt nobody,” David sings as the chorus preempts their idyll with the words, “Angel of God, take me along.” In the last verse, Bill has got himself a gun, and as his girlfriend smooths her dress, they’re preparing to meet their maker in the modern American ritual of a murder-suicide. “Who cares about the price we pay,” they ask. “Happy days, quiet life / We are not alone.”

Naked ends with “Cool Water,” on which Talking Heads return to form with a chilling song that drew at least some of its inspiration from the same Sebastião Salgado photograph of Brazilian gold miners, clawing at the earth, that Jerry Harrison placed on the cover of Casual Gods. “Cool Water” features one of David Byrne’s most eloquent lyrics, free of the syntactical dodges and deliberate obscurities with which he often decorated his writing. “Day by day, whistle while you work,” it begins. “Our backs are breaking, up from the hollow earth.” Over the deep-throated twang of Johnny Marr’s guitar, David sings “Cool Water” in his most elegiac voice as he paints a picture of life as a form of endless “work,” repeating the word again and again, that reduces human beings to “bags of bone and skin.”

The last stanzas of the song and the album present some of the most unreservedly poetic lines Byrne would ever write. “This rusted garden gate can barely even stand,” he sings. “Their work is over now and rest will be at hand.” Summoning the words “cool water” as a metaphor for the relief of death, he asks, “Is their skin not the same as yours? Can they sit at the table to drink?”

The release of Naked was welcomed by longtime partisans of Talking Heads as a return to experimentalism by the group. “The first confident step the band has taken forward since Remain in Light,” Joyce Millman wrote in the Boston Phoenix. “More than a return to peak form from a band that’s probably been the most consistently creative rock unit of the past ten years, Naked is a revelation,” Robert Palmer gushed in Spin, adding, in a statement that once would have been unimaginable from him, “There can no longer be any doubt that [David Byrne] is one of rock’s greatest singers.” “With humor and good-heartedness, hope, and fear, Talking Heads contemplate a world on the eve of destruction on this important record—and leave open the question of what the dawn will bring,” Anthony DeCurtis wrote in Rolling Stone.

Others were less impressed. For Ken Tucker at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Naked was “a disappointing series of exercises in rhythm. . . . David Byrne’s opaque lyrics seem coy this time around; their vagueness doesn’t carry its usual implication of wit.” Mark Jenkins’s review in the Washington Post took aim at his fellow critics as much as David Byrne: “Talking Heads have entered that rock-critic pantheon of bands that live to be Important. In sustaining this role, their art school training has served them well. Not as artists—head Head David Byrne is much more gifted at Being an Artist than at actually making art.” In the British weekly The Spectator, Marcus Berkmann agreed: “Rarely can an album have been greeted with quite such unanimous approbation—certainly not since the last Talking Heads album, anyway. Someone said recently that David Byrne’s group make rock music for people who don’t like rock music, and there’s much truth to that. Talking Heads albums aren’t for listening to, they’re for discussing at dinner parties.”

The reviews by Jenkins and Berkmann suggested the extent to which the crescendo of praise around Rock’s Renaissance Man was nearing a tipping point, a level of hyperbole that cried out for contrarian views. It didn’t help that shortly after the release of Naked, Byrne and his co-composers won the Academy Award for Best Original Score for their work on The Last Emperor, which virtually swept the Oscars that year. And Byrne himself didn’t help by giving a number of interviews to promote the album in which he seemed to be taking himself very seriously indeed. In speaking with Steve Turner of the British monthly Q, he suggested that the music of Talking Heads “acts as an oral model for a way of thinking or a way of looking at things. The words and the music, the attitude and the rhythm all function to make a model for living.” When Turner asked what he meant by this, Byrne snapped back, “I know exactly what it means. It’s not bullshit. I’m really saying something. I’m trying to explain what on the highest level music is.”

41

Independence Day

Waiting such a long time, waiting such a long time,

Waiting such a long time, and now it’s here!

Independence Day!

—DAVID BYRNE, REI MOMO, 1989

Naked sold a half-million copies in its first two months of release, peaking at #19 on the Billboard chart, in another respectable showing that fell far short of the platinum sales of Speaking in Tongues, Stop Making Sense, and Little Creatures. The prospect of Talking Heads touring in support of the album was something that David Byrne had dismissed from the start. As he explained it, “I’d rather do something new with my life than repackage the same things over and over. It [doesn’t] make sense to just take the hits with some new songs thrown in and kind of work up a new show out of it. They’re good songs and everything, but it doesn’t really justify going on the road.”

In lieu of a tour, Sire Records released “Blind” and “(Nothing But) Flowers” as singles, and the Heads commissioned music videos of the two songs to promote the new album on MTV. The video of “Blind” was directed by Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, an English couple who were best-known as co-creators of the Max Headroom franchise, a simulated computer animation of an uptight TV anchorman (himself a talking head) that had spun off shows on Channel 4 in Britain and the ABC network in the States. Before that, Jankel and Morton had collaborated with James Rizzi on animated music videos for “Genius of Love” and “Pleasure of Love.” But the slick, overproduced video they made for “Blind” had none of the charm of that earlier work. It consists instead of an awkward conflation of “Blind” with the scenario of “The Democratic Circus,” in which the shirtless, distorted image of David Byrne (later joined by Jerry and Tina) mouthing the one-word chorus is juxtaposed with elaborately staged scenes showing a political candidate, played by a man-sized monkey wrench, haranguing a crowd of credulous supporters on a stage filled with red, white, and blue go-go girls. The effect was to rob the song of its mystery and ambiguity, turning it into an election-year cartoon.

As codirected by David Byrne and Jonathan Demme’s capable understudy, Sandy McLeod, the music video of “(Nothing But) Flowers” was more successful, confining itself to a simulated performance of the song by a version of the Expanded Heads that might have toured in support of the album. It begins with a series of side-lit headshots in which Chris, Tina, Jerry, and David are joined by Yves N’Djock, Kirsty MacColl, and Johnny Marr, each accompanied by a caption stating where they were born. Side by side, David and Kirsty lip-sync the opening verse (“Here we stand . . .”) while animated images of the song lyrics stream around them. Then the full band comes on to simulate their playing on the chorus, which is intercut with blocks of text providing ecologically relevant statistics (“Acres of the world’s tropical rain forests that are cleared every day . . .”) that leave no doubt about the satiric intent of the song. The later verses and chorus are more of the same (“Number of Finnish women who have pledged not to have children until Finland bans nuclear power . . .”) as the camera jumps from one band member to the next singing the line “You got it!” in the refrain. While both videos received their share of airplay on MTV, neither of the singles they promoted made a dent on the Billboard charts.

In the spring of 1988, the members of Talking Heads went their separate ways. Jerry Harrison assembled an eight-piece band, with Alex Weir, Bernie Worrell, Steve Scales, and a pair of female backup singers, that looked a lot like the Expanded Heads, and embarked on a two-month tour of clubs in the Northeast, the Midwest, and California to promote Casual Gods. Though Harrison had been the architect of the original expanded version of the band, the sight and sound of him heading a similar group that included three of the musicians from Stop Making Sense led reviewers to make unflattering comparisons between him and David Byrne. Jerry would end the year by marrying Carol Baxter, who was pregnant with the couple’s second child.

Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth spent the spring of 1988 recording a third album by Tom Tom Club, Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom, and enjoying the success of Conscious Party, the album by Ziggy Marley they had produced at Sigma Sound. Sales of Conscious Party exceeded those of Naked by a wide margin, and the record went on to win a Grammy for Reggae Album of the Year. Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom, by contrast, fell on deaf ears when it was released in Britain in the fall, and then, in a revised version, three months later in the States. Though the album featured another kid-art cover by Frank Rizzi and its share of catchy grooves, on some of the songs, Tina Weymouth and her sister Laura tried to vary the formula by affecting a more punkish tone. Also included were a pair of 1960s cover tunes: one a cloying version of the Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale,” with instrumental cameos by Lou Reed, Jerry Harrison, and David Byrne; the other a rendering of Bob Dylan’s timeless ballad “She Belongs to Me,” with a spoken-word vocal by Chris Frantz. Following up on the retro-punk flavor of the album, Chris and Tina arranged with Hilly Kristal for a stripped-down, four-piece, leather-clad version of their band to play a three-week residency at CBGBs in the fall.

David Byrne did not lack for projects to occupy his time and energy in the year ahead. These included completing an orchestral score he had composed for Robert Wilson’s production of The Forest, a theater piece based on the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh that premiered in Berlin and Brooklyn in the fall of 1988; traveling to the Bahia region of Brazil at the invitation of a producer named Kiki Miyake to film an hour-long PBS documentary, Ilé Aiyé (The House of Life), about a spirit cult that had its roots in West Africa; and laying the groundwork for a record label called Luaka Bop that would fuel his growing obsession with Brazilian and Latin American music. In the winter of 1989, Byrne signed both a solo recording contract and, along with the other Talking Heads, a new, five-album deal with Warner Bros.

Byrne’s own label would be distributed by Warners as well. From the beginning, he saw Luaka Bop (the name came from a brand of tea that appealed to his sense of the absurd) as something different from the numerous indie labels that specialized in importing traditional or contemporary Latin American music. Rather, as he described it, “A lot of what we are attracted to are the impure, bastardized forms, not what would be considered pure traditional music.” The label’s first release was a case in point. Austerely titled Brazil Classics 1: Beleza Tropical, it was a compilation of popular artists who were affiliated with a Brazilian countercultural movement that began in the late 1960s called Tropicalia, which drew on disparate cultural influences ranging from indigenous Brazilian music to hard rock and psychedelia.

In the spring of 1989, shortly before his wife, Adelle, gave birth to their daughter, Malu Abeni Valentine, Byrne began work on a solo album that further reflected his fascination with Latin American music and dance. Rei Momo (the title refers to the Brazilian King of Carnival) began as a collaboration between Byrne and a noted Puerto Rican percussionist named Milton Cardona. Byrne presented Cardona with demo recordings of a number of conventionally structured pop songs, several of which he had co-written with the Dominican salsa star Johnny Pacheco, and asked him to match each one to a different Latin or Afro-Cuban dance rhythm—mambo, merengue, bomba, and the like. Then, with help from the horn player Angel Fernandez, they arranged this material for a variety of Latin ensembles, from accordion bands to salsa orchestras. The album, produced by Steve Lillywhite and featuring Kirsty MacColl singing backup on several tracks, drew on the cream of New York’s Latin music community.

Somewhat overshadowed by the profusion of Latin rhythms and brass was the fact that the songwriting on Rei Momo seemed to shun the approach Byrne had taken on Naked and pick up instead where Little Creatures and True Stories left off, with simple verse-chorus songs that inspired some of the freest, funniest, and most accessible lyrics Byrne had ever written. As if to announce the start of a new chapter in his career, the first song on the album begins with the words, “Now and then I get horny / At night you do / At night you do.” It goes on to describe a pair of lovers strolling arm in arm through the streets of New York, taking in the sights like “squiggling honeymooners.” But the real message of the song was found in its title, “Independence Day.” “Though we struggle for our freedom,” David sings, “Our need for others still remains / We know what will make us happy / We know what will ease our pain.”

Rei Momo received mixed reviews upon its release in the fall of 1989. Several critics characterized it, in the words of one, as “Byrne’s Latin answer to Graceland” and praised it for its sensual synthesis of Latin physicality with Byrne’s off-kilter view of the world. Others were less impressed. Writing in the New York Times, Jon Pareles acknowledged the album’s obvious “intelligence and care” but felt that the texture of Byrne’s voice and his droning, “half-speed” melodies caused the whole production to “fall flat.”

Given the multiyear intervals that elapsed between Remain in Light and Speaking in Tongues, the True Stories sessions and Naked, it was not unreasonable for Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth to assume that David Byrne would spend a year or two pursuing his various muses, after which Talking Heads would reunite to record another album and possibly even tour. Apart from its abundance of new songs, some of which might have been suitable for Talking Heads, the specialized nature of Rei Momo made it comparable to earlier David Byrne side projects like My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and The Catherine Wheel. The first clear indication that this was not the case came with Byrne’s announcement of his plans to tour with a fourteen-piece band in support of the record, beginning, somewhat pointedly, with two shows in October at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles. The full tour itinerary consisted of dates in sixteen cities across the United States and Canada, to be followed, after an appearance on Saturday Night Live, by a twenty-city tour of Europe in December. In addition to the band, Byrne was accompanied by Margareth Menezes, a singer from the Bahia region of Brazil whom he had met while filming Ilé Aiyé (The House of Life), which aired on PBS to favorable reviews in the summer of 1989.

The Rei Momo tour was much more enthusiastically received than the Rei Momo album. “The closer they get to the dance floor, the better David Byrne’s new songs sound. By the end of his set at Roseland on Monday, the band’s salsa rhythms had carried the audience into motion,” Jon Pareles wrote in the Times, overcoming his earlier doubts, and noting that Byrne “has never looked so loose and happy onstage.” Other reviewers commented on the palpable sense of delight he exuded. From this, it was hard to ignore the possibility that what had soured Byrne on the idea of touring after the triumph of Stop Making Sense was not only the need to come up with a whole new form of presentation, but also the more mundane prospect of having to travel and commune for weeks on end with his fellow Talking Heads. With the Rei Momo band, by contrast, it was as if he couldn’t get enough. In the spring of 1990, the tour resumed with dates in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, followed by a second run of eighteen cities across the United States. By this time, their sets included versions of three songs, “Mr. Jones,” “Papa Legba,” and “Burning Down the House,” that David had sung with Talking Heads.

That same spring, Jerry Harrison released his third solo album, which drew on the network of amicable relationships he had formed over the years to produce a stunning improvement on his earlier solo work. The thirteen songs on Walk on Water included collaborations with Tom Bailey and Alannah Currie of Thompson Twins, a Milwaukee singer-songwriter named John Sieger, and the Heads’ old friend Arthur Russell. The instrumental backing on the record was provided by Harrison’s usual cohort of Alex Weir, Bernie Worrell, and Ernie Brooks (who was also listed as a co-writer on nearly all the songs), supplemented by Adrian Belew and a versatile Milwaukeean named Jason Klagstad on lead guitar. Harrison also imported the estimable Brice Wassy to play drums on half the tracks, joined by Abdou Mboup on percussion. The material ranged from Afropop to raw-edged rock to expertly rendered funk, and while some of the songs suffered from Harrison’s clichéd lyric-writing, the biggest surprise on the record was the significant improvement in his singing, which was bolstered by well-arranged female backup choruses. With the vocal support of his co-writer Joyce Bowden, Jerry even managed to sound convincing on a tender ballad called “Sleep Angel.”

Unfortunately, Walk on Water elicited little response from record buyers or the music press. Instead of touring to promote the record, which would have been prohibitively expensive given its large supporting cast, Harrison agreed to join Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth in an expanded version of Tom Tom Club and perform on a bill with the Ramones, Debbie Harry, and Chris Stein—all of whom were now clients of Gary Kurfirst—on a seven-week, forty-city punk-revival tour that took its name from John Carpenter’s dystopian 1981 film Escape from New York. In stark contrast to the last time the Heads and the Ramones toured together in 1977, the artists took turns headlining from night to night. Though Harry and Stein hadn’t played in public since Blondie disbanded in 1982, and the Ramones hadn’t had a record on the charts since the 1970s, the shows were generally well attended and well received, in some cases by fans who were barely born when these groups first began.

“Despite David Byrne’s beaver-like activities over the last few years, his persona and his work have gradually been losing much of their old allure,” Mark Cooper wrote in Q in 1989. Feature writers and editors are always ready to bring celebrities up or down a peg or two, and at a certain point, the media likes to congratulate itself by debunking its own hype. In 1990, Spy magazine turned its satiric sights on Byrne in a piece about the proliferation of Naifs and Waifs in contemporary popular culture: “In his many other projects, Dave has been introducing us to folk art, native Brazilian percussion and indigenous African ditties, just as the Mouseketeers used to sample Other Lands to learn about People and Their Customs. . . . Dave first became successful 15 years ago as a disturbing, amusingly tone-deaf geek, bleating songs like ‘Psycho Killer’; the wealthy, celebrated Dave has steadily mutated toward Naifdom. He’s not a jaded millionaire pop star; he’s just a big kid, the designer-outfitted mayor of Naifville, USA.”

This was all in good fun, but in the spring of 1991, GQ magazine published a venomous profile titled “Byrned Out” by a staff writer from Forbes named Martin Kihn. Kihn began his piece by recycling old file quotes from the other Talking Heads to play up the “bitterness” they felt toward Byrne. He then went on to question the entire basis of Byrne’s career by suggesting that his only real talent was as “anthologist, an assembler of other people’s work.” In support of this premise, Kihn, who had no background in music, wrote that “over the years, some people have made a strong case” that Jerry Harrison was the real creative force behind Talking Heads; that John Chernoff was largely responsible for the music to The Catherine Wheel; and that Beth Henley had turned Byrne’s “half-formed ideas” into a viable screenplay for True Stories.

Neither Harrison, Chernoff, or Henley had ever said anything to suggest that any of this was true, but Kihn’s profile saw print at an inopportune moment when all four Talking Heads were working together with the producer-engineer Nick Launay at Electric Lady Studio in New York on a 2-CD anthology of their recordings. Though Jerry Harrison was the only member of the group who had spoken, briefly, to Kihn, expressing his “disappointment” at the Heads’ failure to tour, the article gave the impression that Byrne’s bandmates were all actively furious with him.

In fact, that same spring, David had presented the Heads with a collection of newly written songs. “I brought in a whole batch of songs and played it for them. They were demos, some kind of bare-bones loop and one instrument, or something and me singing on top of it,” he recalled. “They rejected them all. They wanted to go back to the improvising thing where they all were involved in the creation of the music. That was more than I could deal with.”

In the years since, the other members of Talking Heads have never so much as alluded to this interchange, which effectively sealed the fate of their band. As a result, there is no way of knowing if they truly believed that they could compel David Byrne to revert to an approach to songwriting and recording—a legacy of the band’s honeymoon years with Brian Eno—that no longer worked for him. Having constructed an aggrieved narrative in which the entire history of Talking Heads was now construed as one long act of accommodation on their part, they seemed to feel that acceding to their wishes was the least that Byrne could do.

David responded to their professed lack of interest by immediately arranging with Nick Launay to record these new songs himself. He began by hiring a world-class rhythm section consisting of the Meters’ George Porter Jr. on bass and Oscar Salas, who had lit a fire under the Rei Momo band, on drums. As the sessions progressed over the spring and summer, he enlisted Nona Hendryx, Dolette McDonald, and Joyce Bowden to sing with him on the record, and Angel Fernandez to write horn charts for most of the tracks.

Eight months later, in December, a music columnist for the Minneapolis Star named Jon Bream was interviewing Byrne for a piece about the album release of his score for The Forest when he ventured to ask where things stood with Talking Heads. “You could say ‘broken up’ or call it whatever you like,” Byrne replied. “We’re still on speaking terms. We see each other once in a while. As far as I’m concerned, we haven’t had a huge fight. But things ran their course.”

Armed with this quote, Bream rewrote his story and sold it to the Los Angeles Times. Though he was unable to reach any of the other Talking Heads for comment, a spokesperson for Gary Kurfirst’s office confirmed the “termination of the group and maintained that it was done amicably.” This was hardly the case. Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, and Jerry Harrison first learned that their band had “broken up” when Bream called Kurfirst to ask him about Byrne’s statement, and Kurfirst had done his best to make it seem that they already knew.

One of the social traits that is often associated with people on the autism spectrum is a reluctance or inability to say goodbye. Stories abound of David Byrne disappearing from social situations or walking away in the middle of conversations. “I still can’t say goodbye; it seems clichéd and sentimental,” Byrne wrote around this time. “I’d just rather, all of a sudden, not be there.” In this sense, his failure to inform his bandmates in as many words of an intention he had been harboring for several years was very much in character. But from Byrne’s perspective, it was a bit more complicated than that. On at least one occasion, he had tried to speak with Chris Frantz about the future of the group. But Frantz, also staying firmly in character, insisted that he didn’t want to discuss it unless the news was good.

42

Hall of Fame

Talking Heads now holds an exalted place in American pop culture: a rock group that made it big without selling out.

—CHRIS HELM, CHICAGO TRIBUNE

December 1991, then, marked the unofficial end of Talking Heads—unofficial because, as Chris Frantz put it a few months later, “You could say that Tina and I saw the handwriting on the wall a long time ago. But we were shocked to find out about it via the Los Angeles Times. As far as we’re concerned, the band never really broke up. David just decided to leave.” As they saw it, one of their members had chosen to leave the group—in the way, say, that Peter Gabriel had left Genesis in 1975. The absence of a formal dissolution meant that everyone was free to believe what they wanted to believe about where things stood.

For her part, as Tina Weymouth told a reporter, “David never called us to say we broke up. He says things, and then he changes his mind. If he comes back, all is forgiven.” Not that she and Chris Frantz made any secret of their feelings. When Tom Tom Club released its fourth album, Dark Sneak Love Action, in 1992, it began with a song called “Love Wave,” which included the lines, “I played guitar with a media star / The entire event took place in a bar / Where’d the kid go, is he in a funk? / It’s not your fault they filled your head with junk.”

David Byrne and Adelle Lutz had spent the fall of 1991 in Los Angeles, helping to care for Adelle’s sister, Tina Chow, who had been diagnosed with AIDS eighteen months before. (Tina and Michael Chow had split up some years back; Tina was infected with the disease during a brief affair with a bisexual man.) Characteristically, after learning from her nurse that AIDS workers were being harassed and even murdered in Latin America, Tina had devoted the last months of her life to raising money to establish a secure AIDS hospice in Mexico City. She died a few days after New Year’s, becoming one of the first prominent women to succumb to the disease. Tina Chow was remembered as a great soul by the many people who knew her, and her family was devastated by her loss.

David Byrne’s second solo album, containing many of the songs he had offered to Talking Heads, was released in March 1992 to enthusiastic reviews. “Byrne is no longer dutifully reciting or reaching wistfully toward music that seems to come from exotic tropical utopias. Now, he’s just playing with what he likes, and the pleasure is contagious,” Jon Pareles wrote in the Times, while the capsule review in the Observer did not mince words: “David Byrne wraps his sharpest and most barbed songs in years in an instrumental setting whose sophistication and effectiveness exceed anything his former group might have produced.” Titled Uh-Oh (which Byrne insisted was not related to the catchphrase of the Dustin Hoffman character in Rain Man), the cover of the album showed a cartoon dog on a golden throne surrounded by a heavenly host of angels, and several of its songs took on God directly. “C’mon down, you old fart / Let’s see if you have got a heart,” David sings in “Something Ain’t Right.”

Once again, Byrne was eager to tour in support of the album, this time at the head of a band billed as Ten Car Pileup and led by George Porter Jr. Their sets included solo versions of “(Nothing But) Flowers” and “Road to Nowhere” and full-band arrangements of “And She Was,” “Blind,” and “Life During Wartime.”

The release of Uh-Oh was followed by that of Tom Tom Club’s Dark Sneak Love Action, which featured a cover version of Hot Chocolate’s “You Sexy Thing” and marked an avowed return to their signature style of flippant vanilla funk. In the interviews she gave to promote the album, Tina Weymouth continued to speak about “putting Talking Heads back together in the future.”

The CD compilation Popular Favorites 1976–1992 was released that same year, faced with an Ed Ruscha word painting from the mid-1970s that read “Sand in the Vaseline.” Its thirty-three selections presented a survey of the band’s recording career, supplemented by two tracks that predated Jerry Harrison’s entry into the band and four outtakes from the 1980s. Each member of the group was given the space to write a personal statement in the album’s extensive liner notes, and each of them tended to focus on the band’s beginnings on the Lower East Side. In his statement, David credited Chris and Tina with helping him “gain access to other worlds and people.” “I was too shy,” he wrote. “They were well-versed in social niceties, as befitted their family backgrounds. I was less accomplished and much more uncomfortable. . . . I’d have been a fool not to learn from them,” David added, with a parenthetical understatement, “(I hope I gave back something in return).”

The release of this anthology gave appreciative reviewers an opportunity to assess the band’s impact. “The most important band of the 1980s,” wrote one. “The most pervasively influential band of its generation,” wrote another. But the album’s tepid sales did not suggest that the record-buying public was mourning the loss of Talking Heads.

Over the next few years, Jerry Harrison spent most of his time with his wife and growing family in Milwaukee, where his career as a record producer flourished on the strength of his work with a pair of precocious young bands, Crash Test Dummies and Live. “If I were David Byrne / I’d go to galleries and not be too concerned,” Crash Test Dummies’ similarly brainy, similarly witty front man Brad Roberts sang in “When I Go Out with Artists,” a song on the group’s engaging second album, God Shuffled His Feet, which turned them into a top-selling act. Harrison first produced the hard-rock group Live in 1991, when they were still a quartet of R.E.M.-besotted teenagers from Hershey, Pennsylvania. Spurred by their appearances at the Woodstock ’94 festival and on Saturday Night Live, their third album, Throwing Copper, became a commercial sensation, spinning off three hit singles and selling more than six million copies in the United States alone.

In 1994, the continuing sales of Talking Heads’ two most successful albums resulted in both Little Creatures and Stop Making Sense being certified double platinum, with two million copies sold. In the fall of that year, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth began working at their home studio in Connecticut with Jerry Harrison and a guitarist they knew from Compass Point named Blast Murray on an album for Radioactive Records, a label Gary Kurfirst had started a few years before. Their plan was to invite a dozen musical friends and associates to play the role that David Byrne had played in writing and singing words and melodies over their improvised backing tracks. Though some of their more ambitious choices, most notably Iggy Pop, declined their invitation, Ed Kowalczyk from Live, Andy Partridge from XTC, and Michael Hutchence from INXS all contributed to the project as it took shape over the course of 1995, as did Debbie Harry, Richard Hell, and the lead singers of a trio of lesser-known bands, Virgin Prunes, Concrete Blonde, and Violent Femmes.

That summer, the pop diva Mariah Carey provided Chris and Tina with a publishing windfall when she became the latest artist to sample “Genius of Love,” on a multiplatinum single called “Fantasy.” At the same time, the song they co-wrote for Debbie Harry to sing on their album was placed on the soundtrack for the action film Virtuosity, starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. It soon turned out that the title of the track, “No Talking Just Head,” was going to be the title of the album as well, which Radioactive Records planned to release as the work of a band called the Heads. This prompted the first in a series of stern letters from David Byrne’s attorney Jeffrey Slade to Gary Kurfirst (who no longer managed Byrne), claiming that the use of “The Heads” was a trademark violation. The legal back-and-forth continued for nearly a year, until the imminent release of the album in September 1996 led Byrne to file a lawsuit against his former bandmates and their label on the grounds that their use of the name the Heads “will likely cause irreparable injury to the reputation of Talking Heads.”

The legal drama was thankfully short-lived, and a settlement was quickly reached that allowed Harrison, Frantz, and Weymouth to record and perform as the Heads in return for a formal dissolution of the band.

“The Talking Heads have officially been severed,” Jeffrey Slade told Billboard. To which Byrne himself might have added, “Watch out / You might get what you’re after.” Upon its release, No Talking Just Head earned Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, and Jerry Harrison the most damning reviews of their professional careers. One reviewer suggested that “Talking Heads without David Byrne is like the Police without Sting”; another compared the album to the disheartening sight of “watching a chicken run around after its head has been cut off.” That the coup de grâce appeared in a friendly publication and was couched in David Byrne’s own words only added to the affront. “You may ask yourself, What were they thinking?” Tom Moon wrote in Rolling Stone. “You may say to yourself, This is not my beautiful band.” “No Talking Just Head tarnishes the legacy of a late, great group,” Moon continued. “Minus the presence and vision of someone like David Byrne, Frantz, Weymouth, and Harrison prove to be an underachieving, under-grooving backing band, displaying little emotional connection to its material.”

In the midst of this, Tina Weymouth gave full vent to her feelings about David Byrne in a long interview with Jim Sullivan, the music columnist for the Boston Globe. Sounding like a Connecticut blue blood bemoaning the bad behavior of a family member who’s gone astray, Weymouth told Sullivan, “We tried very hard to reach him, but he’s surrounded by greedy people now, who will do everything in their power to keep him away from us. Because with us he was family, and now he’s a chameleon and he’s around people who are horrible, and he’s going to behave just like the people he’s around. He’s embarrassed himself enough now, let’s leave it alone.” Ignoring her own advice, she went on to describe Byrne as “a bully and a coward—don’t quote me on that. . . . He has a child, he has a wife, he has a mother and a father and a sister. They’ve suffered a lot because of David through the years because he’s a very difficult person. He has a totally different sensory perceptual thing going on. Read the book by Donna Williams, Nobody Nowhere.”

Sullivan did Weymouth the service of toning down her remarks in the piece he wrote about No Talking Just Head. But Tina’s condescending outpouring revealed the full intensity of the bitterness she had come to feel toward David Byrne. Published in 1990, Nobody Nowhere, by the Australian-born author Donna Williams, was a bestselling memoir of growing up with undiagnosed autism in a family racked by domestic abuse. Lucidly written, it was one of the first books to address the experience of a socially debilitating but high-functioning form of autism from a first-person point of view. That Tina had read the book and applied it to David Byrne suggests that she and Chris had decided for themselves that David was indeed “on the spectrum,” as people were starting to say, and that aspects of his personality and behavior were a function of his neurology, not his psychology. If so, this realization might have led them to a more sympathetic understanding of what Byrne had been dealing with in his relations with them and the rest of the world. Instead, Tina spoke of it as if it were a form of mental, even moral, deficiency. In 1979, Nick Kent had observed that Weymouth had a tendency to scold Byrne “like a mentally defective son.” Her interview with Jim Sullivan suggested that, for all of Talking Heads’ subsequent success, little had changed since then.

David Byrne remained on good terms with Jerry Harrison, who moved his family to the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-nineties, but he had no further contact with Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth until the spring of 1999, when Chris Blackwell’s film company, Palm Productions, marked the fifteenth anniversary of the premiere of Stop Making Sense by rereleasing the film in theaters and in the new digital format of DVD. At the same time, Warner Bros. released an expanded and remastered CD version of the soundtrack that included all the songs from the original film as well as those that were cut in the editing process.

To promote these releases, Palm arranged for the film to be shown in April 1999 at the San Francisco Film Festival, the site of its first screening in April 1984. The organizers of the festival invited all four former Heads to attend and participate in a panel discussion after the screening, where they sat together behind a long table in an exceedingly awkward tableau, with Tina at one end, David at the other, Chris and Jerry in between, all of them doing their best to face the audience and avoid any form of eye contact with one another.

There would be one more reunion in the years just ahead. As a concept, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame began in 1983, when a television producer named Bruce Brandwen managed to convince Ahmet Ertegun, the aristocratic founder of Atlantic Records, to lend his formidable mystique to Brandwen’s proposal for a cable show to honor the “Kings and Queens of Rock.” Ertegun took over the project and assembled an advisory board composed of a half-dozen music business insiders to nominate prospective inductees. Its members included his former partner Jerry Wexler, Bruce Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau, and Seymour Stein. As it turned out, Ertegun’s most important appointment to this board was Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone, who used his involvement to ingratiate himself as Ertegun’s protégé. The first induction ceremony took place at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York in 1986, and honored such progenitors as Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Buddy Holly, and Little Richard. From the beginning, the hall construed the concept of rock ’n’ roll as broadly as possible to include a wide range of pop, rock, rhythm and blues, country, and gospel. Performers became eligible for induction twenty-five years after they released their first recording. Music business professionals were also honored in the “Non-Performer” category, instrumentalists in the “Musical Excellence” category. In 1995 the Rock Hall achieved a physical manifestation with the opening of a lavish museum on the lakefront in Cleveland that was designed by I. M. Pei. By that time, with Ertegun’s blessing, the whole operation was effectively being run by Jann Wenner as an adjunct of Rolling Stone.

In September 2001, Talking Heads were nominated for the hall in their first year of eligibility. The other sixteen nominees included the Ramones, whose lead singer, Joey, had recently died of cancer, Patti Smith, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Isaac Hayes, Jackson Browne, AC/DC, and Gene Pitney. The nominations were announced just days after the cataclysm of September 11, which devastated the area of New York south of Canal Street that Talking Heads had regarded, twenty years before, as part of their sovereign turf. To be sure, TriBeCa in 2001 was a far cry from the desolate urban landscape that had once enhanced the louche allure of outposts like the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club, the Odeon restaurant, and the Mudd Club. It was now a gentrified, fashionably funky extension of SoHo known for its good public schools, fine restaurants, chic specialty shops, and celebrity residents (a handful of whom had lived there since the 1970s).

That December, Talking Heads and the Ramones joined Tom Petty, Isaac Hayes, and Gene Pitney as the five Performer inductees. Their selection was heralded as the first acknowledgment by the hall of the punk-rock phenomenon of the 1970s. Jim Stewart, the founder of Stax Records in Memphis, was also to be inducted in the Non-Performer category. The awards ceremony was scheduled to take place at the Waldorf Astoria in March. Along with Hayes, Petty, and the neo-punk band Green Day, standing in for the Ramones, the Heads were invited to perform.

In preparation for their first live performance as Talking Heads in eighteen years, the band members asked Bernie Worrell and Steve Scales to join them in New York to rehearse two of the songs, “Life During Wartime” and “Burning Down the House,” on which they had made an indelible mark as instrumentalists. (As Jon Pareles noted in the Times, both titles were “eerily timely” in light of the September 11 attacks.) The Heads also planned to perform “Psycho Killer” as a quartet. The awards ceremony customarily ended with a group jam in which the inductees and presenters took part; on account of the Memphis connection of Isaac Hayes and Jim Stewart, the organizers asked the Heads to make their version of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” the basis of this jam. At the rehearsals, from Chris Frantz’s Pollyannaish perspective, “everyone got along fine and we had fun together.” Not that any non-essential words were exchanged. It would turn out that both David Byrne and Tina Weymouth had personally invited Hilly Kristal to attend the ceremony, and failed to mention this to each other.

The induction ceremony at the Waldorf was a typically long evening of self-congratulation, bad-boy behavior, and score-settling. Isaac Hayes preceded a strong performance of his “Theme from Shaft” by berating the audience of music business professionals for all the unpaid royalties he was owed. Steve Cropper and Sam Moore (of Sam and Dave) spoke on behalf of Jim Stewart. Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam gave a rambling twenty-minute introduction of the Ramones, after which Green Day played a selection of their songs. When it came time for Talking Heads, Anthony Kiedis, the lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, was the inexplicable choice of the organizers to introduce them. Still, Kiedis was witty enough; he remarked that listening to Talking Heads as a teenager made him want to “have sex with a lot of librarians.”

Then the four Heads came to the microphone. Tina began, to David’s surprise, by inviting Hilly Kristal to join them on the stage. Her list of thanks began with Kristal and went on to include Seymour Stein, Gary Kurfirst, Chris Blackwell, their agent Frank Barsalona, and “our parents and our children for the sacrifices that they made, for telling us to hang in there when the going got tough, and for telling us that we had an obligation as artists to survive.” After seven increasingly ditzy minutes in which she unaccountably described herself, at one point, as “a hypocrite, because I’m actually a very large Black man,” Tina ended by thanking the Heads’ road crews and their fans, whom she urged to keep buying their music. The soul of brevity, Chris Frantz followed by thanking the Rock Hall “for giving this band a happy ending.” Jerry Harrison was no less concise, thanking “Tina, Chris, and David for ten great years, and for coming back after eighteen years so that my wife and my kids can finally see us play live.”

When it was David’s turn to speak, he relieved his anxiety by fussing with the microphone. He had been planning to ask Hilly Kristal to join them, but Hilly was already there, so it took a few moments for him to gather his thoughts and speak about the way the existence of clubs like CBGBs, where anyone could play and anything could happen, had seemed to summon the music into existence. He ended by thanking his bandmates by name, along with Bernie Worrell and Steve Scales.

With that the four members of Talking Heads took their places onstage and performed three songs. Their opening number, “Psycho Killer,” sounded oddly flat. This was not because there was anything wrong with the way they played it; on the contrary, it was rather because David Byrne, in 2002, could no longer credibly inhabit the anxious, repressed persona of the song. Joined by Steve Scales and Bernie Worrell (who was dressed in full P-Funk regalia), they followed with strong renditions of “Life During Wartime” and “Burning Down the House,” to a well-deserved standing ovation from a group of people they had done their best to have as little as possible to do with over the course of their professional careers.

Coda

American Utopia

The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges. . . . The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

—E. B. WHITE, 1949

By the time of September 11, David Byrne was the only former member of Talking Heads who still called New York his home. Byrne and his family were not among the twenty thousand city residents who were displaced in Lower Manhattan by the horror, smoke, and stench of the devastation at Ground Zero, but he spoke at the time of the impact this cataclysm and its aftermath had on him. “The behavior since September 11th is just completely atrocious, and it looks like it’s not going to stop any time soon,” he commented in the spring of 2002. “There was a brief moment right after the thing when New Yorkers were quieter, and helpful to one another. Then they settled back down. The horns started honking again, it went straight back to normal. All the flags came out, and it became paranoia and ‘We’re America, fuck you!’ It just got ugly.”

Though there’s no telling what the lasting effect of this experience was on him, it remains that six months after September 11, Byrne chose the night of Talking Heads’ induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to end his thirteen-year-marriage to Adelle Lutz. He did this in his characteristic manner, by quietly disappearing from the after-party at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. Ever the gentleman, Chris Frantz put Adelle in a cab and sent her home. By the time Byrne returned Frantz’s phone calls the following day, he had gotten around to telling his wife the news.

“I have really mixed feelings about home life,” Byrne had admitted in a 1997 interview. “I like it, but in another part of me, it doesn’t jibe with my self-image as a creative free spirit. My image of the musician and artist doesn’t necessarily include the image of bouncing a little girl on your knee.” “It’s not always been a happy marriage,” Byrne told Ira Gittins of the Guardian in the spring of 2001. He went on to explain that, after a lifetime of avoidance, he had recently submitted to his first experience of psychotherapy, with decidedly mixed results. “I guess I wanted a quick fix. I thought it’d be like taking my car into the garage—here’s your problem, here’s the solution! And it didn’t work that way. Did it relax me a little? Maybe. Did it solve my problems? No. And I’m not sure I wanted it to. I subscribe to the myth that an artist’s creativity comes from torment. Once that’s fixed, what do you draw on? Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?”

In that same 2001 interview, when asked about the prospect of a Talking Heads reunion, Byrne’s response was presciently revealing. “I’m always being told to do it,” he replied. “And it’s like being told, ‘You should get back with your first wife—you guys were good together.’ Well, I think most people would pass on an offer like that!” A year later, on the night of his Rock Hall induction, Byrne would wipe the slate of his life clean by laying both of those prospects to rest. His divorce was finalized in 2004; that same year, Byrne had “a very cordial dinner” with Chris Frantz at which Frantz raised the possibility of putting Talking Heads back together. Byrne declined, and, according to Frantz, “asked me to please never bring the matter up again.” In light of Tina Weymouth’s latest tirade about Byrne’s Asperger’s in the English music magazine Jockey Slut—“David totally lacks empathy. . . . It’s not within the realms of his social interaction. In the future people who have this will be given a drug which will grant them empathy”—Frantz can hardly have been surprised.

In the memoir he published in 2020, Chris Frantz made no mention of the later albums he and Tina Weymouth made with Tom Tom Club, the last of which, an avowed trip down memory lane called Downtown Rockers, they released after a twelve-year hiatus from recording in 2012. As documented in Chris’s daily postings on social media, the Frantzes’ lives over the past decade have appeared to center on their home, their family, their travels, and their semi-retired status as elder statesmen of the new wave. “We’ve enjoyed being Mr. and Mrs. Average Suburban Couple,” Frantz quipped in 2023.

Jerry Harrison wound down his lucrative second career as a record producer in the early 2000s to pursue a number of entrepreneurial projects, both in and out of music. These included garageband.com, a website he cofounded in 1999 to provide fledgling singers and bands with online exposure, CD sales, and ratings (a distant cousin, perhaps, of David Byrne’s “Nielsen-type rating system for the arts”). Apple licensed the website’s name for its music and podcast software in 2004. More recently, Harrison cofounded a nonprofit called Ophirex that has developed an inexpensive, easily administered drug that promises to revolutionize the treatment of snakebite injuries around the world. Returning to musical performance in 2022, Jerry reunited with Adrian Belew and the indie-rock group Turkuaz to revisit the Remain in Light tour he organized in 1980.

As for David Byrne, in the fifteen years after his cordial farewell dinner with Chris Frantz, Byrne continued to amass a body of artistic work whose scope and diversity are all but unparalleled in the annals of post–rock ’n’ roll careers. In addition to the six solo albums he released between 1989 and 2004, and the more than six hundred live concerts he performed in support of those albums in countries around the world, Byrne would distinguish himself in the new century as a virtuoso of the art of remote collaboration, capitalizing on the same technology of digital file sharing that was systematically devastating the economics of the recording industry.

The first of these collaborations was a 2008 reunion with Brian Eno called Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, on which Byrne grafted lyrics and melodies onto a selection of prerecorded instrumental tracks that Eno supplied. He next joined with another English maestro of electronic rhythm, Fatboy Slim, to write and record a song cycle based on the life story of the former Philippine first lady, fashion plate, and would-be disco diva Imelda Marcos. Titled Here Lies Love, this double-CD album featured guest appearances by a who’s who of female vocal talent that included Tori Amos, Cyndi Lauper, Natalie Merchant, Kate Pierson, Nellie McKay, Sharon Jones, and more than a dozen other women. Following its release in 2010, Byrne worked with the director Alex Timbers and the choreographer Annie-B Parson on turning Here Lies Love into a full-scale “disco musical” that went on to enjoy extended runs at the Public Theater in New York and the National Theatre in London. (It has since been revived on Broadway.) In 2012, he collaborated with one of the album’s guest artists, Annie Clark, who performs as St. Vincent, on a record called Love This Giant, whose twelve co-written tracks were set to a sonorous backdrop of brass and electronic percussion.

Byrne also made numerous guest appearances as a singer and co-writer on albums by contemporary artists like Arcade Fire and De La Soul; composed music for the soundtracks of the HBO series Big Love and, with Brian Eno, the Oliver Stone sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps; and published several books, most notably a treatise called How Music Works, which examined the art, craft, and business of music-making from a variety of personalized perspectives that included a trove of insightful commentary on his work with Talking Heads.

In the spring of 2018, thirty years after he last made a record with Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, and Jerry Harrison, David Byrne released his first solo album since 2004. American Utopia began as yet another collaboration with Brian Eno along the lines of Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, with all but two of its ten tracks co-written by Eno and Byrne. This time, however, Byrne enlisted a quartet of young producers, Daniel Lopatin, Mattis With, Rodaidh McDonald, and Pat Dillett, who drew on their familiarity with the contemporary music scene to farm these tracks out to some two dozen potential collaborators, many of them quite obscure, with instructions to “reimagine” the material. Byrne and his team then selected the most promising of their offerings and incorporated them into the work. American Utopia ends with yet another of the greatest songs David Byrne will ever write, a track of exquisite simplicity called “Here,” in which he presents a slyly autobiographical taxonomy of the human brain. “Here is a region of abundant detail,” David sings. “Here is a region that is seldom used / And here is a region that keeps on living / Even when the other sections are removed.”

“Here” went on to serve as the opening number of an acclaimed touring show that Byrne, working with Annie-B Parson, Alex Timbers, and the lighting designer Rob Sinclair, conceived as an ambitious elaboration on the minimalist aesthetics of staging he had been refining, first with Talking Heads and then as a solo artist, since the start of his career. The American Utopia tour began in March 2018 and ran through the end of the year. It reappeared ten months later, substantially unchanged, as a show on Broadway that opened to rave reviews and sold-out houses in the pre-pandemic fall of 2019, when it was filmed as an HBO special by Spike Lee.

In stark contrast to the electronic basis of the music on the American Utopia album, Byrne was accompanied in this production by an eleven-piece band composed of two backup singers, a guitarist, a bassist, a keyboard player, and six percussionists, all of whom were untethered from their amps and carried their instruments on straps and harnesses. The deconstruction of the drum set into its component parts eliminated the immovable object around which virtually every live performance of rock has revolved for fifty years, thereby allowing the performers complete freedom of movement on and off an otherwise empty stage that was framed on its back and sides by an evanescent chain-link curtain. Dressed in matching gray suits whose formality was offset by their bare feet, Byrne and the band members, who formed a mosaic of races, genders, and nationalities, were choreographed at every step of the way in a concert that lasted for ninety minutes and comprised more than twenty songs.

The staging of American Utopia bore an unmistakable resemblance to Stop Making Sense, and the dramatic arc of the show made it a sequel of that earlier filmed concert. Once again, it began with Byrne alone, this time seated at a table as he performs “Here” while contemplating a life-sized model of the brain. “And here is an area that needs attention,” David sings, pointing to the spot as he delivers the line that could serve as his epitaph, “Here’s the connection—with the opposite side.” Picking up where Stop Making Sense left off in dramatizing Byrne’s transformation from a caricature of isolation and repression into an ecstatically disinhibited performer by its end, American Utopia showed him now as a calmly commanding figure whose reflective self-assurance, by turns earnest and amused, revealed how far he had come in the intervening thirty-odd years. “This jubilant production transforms an icon of alienation into a cosmically cozy senior statesman,” Ben Brantley wrote in the Times. The rock singer who began his career by eliciting comparisons with the Anthony Perkins character in Psycho now exuded an aura of benevolent decency that reminded Brantley and a number of other critics of “the cardigan-wearing children’s television host” of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

The show also served as a self-curated retrospective of David Byrne’s musical career. Along with selections from the American Utopia album, it drew another five of its twenty-one songs from Byrne’s earlier solo work. The rest of the music, comprising half the show’s running time, came from his albums with Talking Heads. Night after night, the tittering guitar that introduces the first of these songs, “Don’t Worry About the Government,” brought the cheering audience to its feet—a response that was repeated with the opening bars of “This Must Be the Place,” “I Zimbra,” “Slippery People,” “Once in a Lifetime,” “Born Under Punches,” “Blind,” “Burning Down the House,” and the show’s exultant finale, “Road to Nowhere.” It was as if the very DNA of this music had been encoded into the culture in which the members of this multigenerational Broadway audience had been raised. Some knew the songs from their youth, some had been introduced to them by parents or older siblings, some had encountered them on a film soundtrack or online. Performed live by the stripped-down American Utopia band (with but a single keyboard synthesizer), the songs lost none of their power, a testament to how much of their essential character lay embedded in their words and music, signature riffs and grooves.

In the long run, the prediction that Philip Glass made in David Byrne’s “Thinking Man’s Rock Star” profile—“We are watching someone realize a very deep talent. . . . I think he will be writing music that everyone is going to have to think of as concert music, and not just Talking Heads”—turned out to be half-true. Byrne would indeed go on to write a great deal of interesting and compelling music in the years since Glass made that assessment. In addition to his instrumental compositions for film and television, each of his solo albums contained a handful of memorable songs. But as American Utopia demonstrated, for its distinction and originality, nothing he would produce in the long second act of his career would compare with the body of work he created between 1975 and 1988 with Talking Heads.

The mythos of the “rock group” that the Beatles bequeathed to popular music in the 1960s would retain its hold on the public imagination for decades to come, as succeeding generations of young people in their teens and twenties have continued to identify with the prospect of other young people like themselves, banding together and setting out, like John Lennon’s alter ego Mr. Kite, to “challenge the world.” The vast majority of these efforts at musical bonding have eventually come to naught. And even among the hundreds of groups that have achieved some measure of popularity or commercial success, the vast majority have been expressions of competent, even expert, forms of mediocrity, a testament to the boundless capacity of human beings to imitate what has come before. Yet in every generation, a handful of these bands of brothers and sisters have drawn on some distinctive combination of talent, imagination, determination, and providential good luck to create a body of musical work that has not only stood apart, but has also stood the test of time. Such a group was Talking Heads.

A key to their artistic success may well have depended on David Byrne’s conviction that creativity comes from torment—the torment, in his case, of a lifelong struggle to comprehend a world whose outlines, contours, and customs were often a mystery to him, and to connect with the preponderance of people around him, including the other three members of his band, who seemed to feel at home in that alien world. If American Utopia affirmed that the music Byrne made on the ten albums he recorded with Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, and Jerry Harrison between 1977 and 1988 was indeed the high point of his career, it’s a fair assumption that the tension, dissension, and compromise that went into the making of that music was the grist that he needed to nurture and fulfill his talent. “Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?” Byrne asked when it was over, inadvertently paying tribute to the three bandmates who spent the prime of their professional careers rubbing against those edges on a regular basis.

Having emerged in an era when popular music was dominated by flamboyantly decadent pop stars and no end of singers and groups that traded in the panoramic forms of social and cultural nostalgia that were available to a generation of young people raised on films and TV, Talking Heads distinguished themselves from the beginning by expressing an outlook on the world that was distinctly and unabashedly modern. They did not pretend to be Western outlaws, Regency dandies, Dead End kids, or Shakespeare in overalls. “We were one of the first bands to say, Hey, you don’t have to be someone you aren’t,” Jerry Harrison recalled. Instead, in their prime, they made music for a cultural constituency that was composed, for the most part, of people like themselves: educated urbanites and haute bohemians who listened to records and attended clubs and concerts the same way that they might attend gallery and museum shows, dance and theater performances, book readings and independent films—fans whose passionate identification with the band and its music was part of a larger and more diverse range of cultural interests and pursuits, but for whom the ability to respond to the emotion of a melody, the mystery of a song lyric, and the eroticism of a backbeat would continue to serve as touchstones of their self-regard, providing a critical link to their younger selves and to succeeding generations of young people, including their own children, who shared their outlook on the world. Spurred by anniversaries and promotions like the recent reissue of Stop Making Sense, which brought David, Jerry, Chris, and Tina back together for a carefully circumscribed and professionally cordial reunion, the music of Talking Heads has been “rediscovered” at regular intervals in the half-century since a trio of rank amateurs first set foot in the dystopia of Lower Manhattan to begin their unlikely ascendency as the most original, musically ambitious, and rigorously creative rock group of their time.

When the lights went down after each performance of American Utopia on Broadway, the star of the show changed out of his stage clothes, strapped on his helmet, and made his way out of the theater through a cordon of appreciative fans. After acknowledging their accolades with the shy smiles and bashful shrugs that people had come to expect of him, David Byrne climbed on his bicycle and rode off into the night, navigating the traffic, pedestrians, and potholes around Times Square like a true son of the city, a New Yorker to his core. Earlier in the evening, surrounded by the multicultural embrace of his band onstage, he had inquired of his listeners, “Did I find you, or you find me? There was a time before we were born. If someone asks, this is where I’ll be.”

Acknowledgments

When I began work on this book on the eve of the Covid pandemic in 2020, I had high hopes of speaking with the former Talking Heads about their lives, their music, and their career as a band. I was well aware that the four of them subscribed to very different versions of that narrative. In addition to the dissension that was played out publicly in the press, I knew that, twenty years before, a Brooklyn-based novelist named David Bowman (since deceased) had obtained the cooperation of the former band members to write an “authorized” biography of the group—only to see his book devolve into yet another contentious chapter in their history. “‘Everything in here is wrong,’” Bowman quoted Tina Weymouth as telling him. “‘That’s why I have to rewrite your book for you. It’s all wrong, David. You know nothing about us.’”

I had my own issues with Bowman’s book, which convinced me that a comprehensive artistic biography of Talking Heads had yet to be written. Given the passage of time, I hoped that David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, and Jerry Harrison would welcome the chance to speak with a musically knowledgeable writer about their experience of working and playing together.

It soon became apparent that this was not to be. Though they were all polite in their disavowals, each member of the group had his or her own reasons for declining to speak with me. David Byrne was consumed with the production of American Utopia on Broadway and otherwise disinclined to revisit the music he made forty years ago. Chris Frantz was preparing to publish a memoir, and told me that he wanted to “save his stories” for that. Tina Weymouth also claimed to be writing a memoir. Jerry Harrison expressed a willingness to speak with me, but allowed that he didn’t want to be “the only one” to do so. Still, despite their lack of cooperation, I want to begin by acknowledging that, from beginning to end, the prime inspiration for this book was the extraordinary music that the four members of Talking Heads made together between 1975 and 1988.

Fortunately, there were a good many other people who were willing and able to speak with me about their impressions and recollections of the group. Combined with the vast trove of contemporaneous articles, interviews, and reviews that were written about a band that was a darling of the music press during the heyday of the music press, I did not lack for source material. This has made me profoundly indebted to the scores of journalists and authors whose names are cited in my bibliography. Among the many writers whose work I have drawn on, special thanks are due to John Rockwell, who covered the Heads from the beginning in the New York Times; Tim Page, whose brilliant memoir, Parallel Play, served as my introduction to the fascinating subject of Asperger’s syndrome; Will Hermes, who literally wrote the book, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, on the mid-seventies music scene in New York; and Bill Flanagan, the lead author of the 1986 Musician magazine series paperback Talking Heads, published under the pseudonym “Jerome Davis,” which provided a brief but notably well-reported biographical account of the band.

In addition to these published sources, my work on this book has benefitted from the trust and testimony of numerous people whose lives intersected with those of the band members both before and after they became public figures. Sadly, many of the people I would have liked to speak with about those early years were deceased, and several more of them have passed away during the time it has taken me to write this book.

Celia Byrne read an early draft of the “Anthropologist in Arbutus” chapter and offered valuable corrections and comments. Mary Carson Grayson put me in touch with a number of David Byrne’s middle and high school classmates. These included Joe Sappington and Patrick Coogan, who provided a firsthand account of playing in Revelation; Bob Tyson and Doug Simpkins, who supplied me with class photographs and a copy of the Lansdowne High School yearbook from their senior year; and the late Michael Yockel, who was a special source of encouragement and corroboration.

Marc Kehoe served as a thoughtful sounding board and a generous guide to his friendship with David Byrne and their exploits in Baltimore and Providence. Joan Lobell, Melissa Kearney Zilberstein, and Naomi Reichbart recounted their memories of Marc and David at MICA. A trio of former Flying Frog Farmers—Paula Brach Brown, Al Levenson, and Rachel Claire Hopkin—recalled David’s visit to their commune in Kentucky.

A cohort of RISD classmates led by Shelley Lake, Andy Lackow, Susan Nininger, and Elisca Jeansonne spoke or corresponded with me about the time they spent with David, Chris, and Tina in Providence. Bruce McCrae and Dan Gosch brought me up to speed on the Fabulous Motels, and Hank Stahler shared his impressions of playing in the Artistics, along with a copy of the only known recording of the group.

The late Jamie Dalglish recalled his early days on Bond Street with David and their friends from RISD. Michael Zieve recounted his stay with the band in their loft on Chrystie Street and his role in naming the group. The late Andrea Kovacs corresponded with me at length about her art career, her relationship with David Byrne, and the spiritual practices that sustained her throughout her adult life. Tom Zafian and Paul Dougherty at Metropolis Video were instrumental in arranging for me to view their archival footage of Talking Heads performing at CBGBs back in the day.

Special thanks are due to my old and dear friend Mary Clarke, who was an incomparable source of encouragement and information about RISD, the Fabulous Motels, the scene on Bond Street (where she lives to this day), and her relationship with David Byrne.

As a biographer, I’ve always been more interested in what people had to say at the time than in their curated memories of events that took place many years in the past. As a result, as Talking Heads entered the public eye, most of the information I relied on came from contemporaneous sources. That said, Ernie Brooks and Andy Paley filled some gaps in the narrative for me, as did Ken Kushnick from Sire Records, and Jeff Jones and Michael Murphy, who worked on Talking Heads’ road crew at different points in their career. John Illsey of Dire Straits recalled opening for the Heads in Britain in 1978; Leigh Blake provided lively commentary on her interactions with the group; Julie Fast and Steve Lillywhite shared details of the recording sessions they participated in; Sandy McLeod illuminated me about the making of Stop Making Sense; and Julia Heyward recounted her involvement with the video of “Burning Down the House.”

I owe a special debt of thanks to Adelle Lutz, whom I was privileged to meet toward the end of my work on the book. Adelle was kind enough to read sections of the manuscript that pertained to her and offer her comments and corrections, in the course of which she served as an invaluable source of corroboration and new information.

Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of working with a number of eminent editors, including William Shawn, John Glusman, and Dominic Anfuso, whose influence has remained a literary lodestar for me. My editor on this book, Matt Harper, was no less a presence, and I am grateful for Matt’s careful and considered contribution to the refinement of my work. His commitment was all the more gratifying given that he was not my original editor on a book that was acquired, with great enthusiasm, by Geoff Shandler at Custom House Books, to whom I owe an enormous debt of thanks. Under the capable supervision of the production editor, Rachel Weinick, the completed manuscript was scrupulously copyedited by Greg Villepique, legally vetted by Andrew Jacobs, proofread by Evan Hulka, and transformed into an elegant book by Renata De Oliveira, who designed the interior, and Brian Moore, who designed the cover. Lindsey Kennedy and Liz Psaltis worked tirelessly on the often thankless job of promoting and marketing the finished product.

As always, my unflappable agent, Richard Pine, looked out for my interests and did his best to keep me on an even keel. And through it all, day in and day out, during the long months of Covid isolation and beyond, my beloved partner, Lisa Corinne Davis, played her usual role as my fiercest critic, my fiercest champion, my guide to the New York art world, and my constant source of companionship and inspiration. It is to Lisa, once again, that I dedicate this book.

Bibliography

BOOKS AND PERIODICALS

Aron, Michael. “Talking Heads Is Used to Saying Why It’s Not a Punk Band.” Morning News (Wilmington, DE). Oct. 23, 1977.

Auletta, Ken. The Streets Were Paved with Gold. New York: Random House, 1979.

Baker, Rob. “A Talking Head Speaks Out.” Daily News (New York). Aug. 15, 1982.

Bangs, Lester. Blondie. New York: Fireside, 1980.

———. “Brian Eno Is More Dark Than Shark.” Musician. Nov. 1979.

———. “David Byrne Says ‘Boo!’” Village Voice. Aug. 20, 1979.

———. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. New York: Knopf, 1987.

Barlow, Sean, and Banning Eyre. Afropop. Edison, NJ: Chartwell, 1995.

Bayles, Martha. Hole in Our Soul. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Bell, Max. “Ramones [et al]: Roundhouse, London.” New Musical Express. July 10, 1976.

Bender, Marilyn. “The Empire and the Ego of Donald Trump.” New York Times. Aug. 7, 1983.

Benson, Sheila. “True Stories: Touring Texas with David Byrne.” Los Angeles Times. Sept. 24, 1986.

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Turner, Steve. “Talking Heads: Still Making Sense?” Q. Apr. 1988.

Valentine, Gary. New York Rocker. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2006.

Valentine, Penny. “Talking Heads.” Melody Maker. Jan. 28, 1978.

Veal, Michael. Fela. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.

Wallace, Benjamin. “Autism Spectrum: Are You on It?” New York. Nov. 5, 2012.

Waller, Don. “Talking Heads: Whole Lotta Rhythm.” Los Angeles Times. Aug. 10, 1982.

Watts, Stephen. “The Beatles’ ‘Hard Day’s Night.’” New York Times. Apr. 26, 1964.

Weisman, Steven R. “Koch’s Performance Wins Mixed Reviews.” New York Times. Oct. 22, 1979.

Werde, Bill. “Punks in the Hall.” Village Voice. Mar. 19, 2002.

Wertsch, Mary. Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress. New York: Crown, 1991.

White, E. B. Here Is New York. New York: Harper & Bros, 1949.

White, Tim. “Inside Talking Heads: Seventeen Years of Popular Favorites and Naked Truths.” Billboard. May 14, 1994.

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1948.

Williams, Martin. “Energy Fails the Magician.” Melody Maker. Jan. 22, 1980.

———. “Talking Heads: Rock Garden, London.” Times (London). May 16, 1977.

Willig, George. “Why I Did It.” Daily News (New York). May 27, 1977.

Willis, Ellen. “Into the Seventies, for Real.” The New Yorker. Dec. 9, 1972.

Wing, Lorna. “Asperger’s Syndrome: A Clinical Account.” Psychological Medicine 11. Feb. 1981.

Wolcott, James. “The Big Stare.” Vanity Fair. Oct. 1986.

———. “The Conservative Impulse of the New Rock Underground.” Village Voice. Aug. 18, 1975.

———. Critical Mass. New York: Doubleday, 2013.

———. Lucking Out. New York: Doubleday, 2011.

———. “Patti Smith: Mustang Rising.” Village Voice. Apr. 14, 1975.

———. “The Ramones: Chord Killers.” Village Voice. July 21, 1975.

———. “Talking Heads.” Village Voice. Aug. 15, 1975.

Wooton, Adrian. “Interview with Jonathan Demme.” The Guardian. Oct. 10, 1998.

Yates, Robert. “Talking Head.” The Observer. Mar. 1, 1992.

Young, Kirsty. “David Byrne.” Desert Island Discs. BBC Radio 4. Mar. 18, 2018.

FILMS AND VIDEOS

“Burning Down the House.” Directed by Julia Heyward and David Byrne. 1983. youtube.com/watch?v=_3eC35LoF4U.

“Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth at the Red Bull Music Academy.” 2014. youtube.com/watch?v=WhUq52YmeLA&t=2090s.

“Crosseyed and Painless.” Directed by Toni Basil. 1981. youtube.com/watch?v=yHoqH-26UDk.

“Love for Sale.” Directed by David Byrne and Martin Sololsky. 1986. youtube.com/watch?v=I4IiGBwSBUE.

“Once in a Lifetime.” Directed by Toni Basil and David Byrne. 1981. youtube.com/watch?v=5IsSpAOD6K8.

Stop Making Sense. Directed by Jonathan Demme. 1984.

Talking Heads: Chronology. Eagle Vision Entertainment; Talking Heads Tours. 2011.

“Talking Heads: Live at the Entermedia Theater.” Aug. 10, 1978. youtube.com/watch?v=oTEVC_KD3ml.

“Talking Heads: Live in Rome.” Dec. 17, 1980. youtube/watch?v=0wp2qhoop9U.

“Wild Wild Life.” Directed by David Byrne. 1986. youtube.com/watch?v=616-QGQyx-I.

AUTHOR INTERVIEWS AND EMAILS

Interviews with the sources listed below were conducted in person, on the telephone, and/or by email. Many of the sources were contacted multiple times.

Alvarado, Melissa Kearney. Baltimore friend of David Byrne and Marc Kehoe

Bayley, Roberta. Photographer and doorkeeper at CBGBs

Behl, Tim. RISD student and member of the Artistics

Blake, Leigh. British publicist and friend of David Byrne

Brooks, Ernie. Harvard classmate of Jerry Harrison and bassist in the Modern Lovers

Brown, Paula Brach. Flying Frog Farm resident

Byrne, Celia. Sister of David Byrne

Clarke, Mary. RISD ’74, member of Tantalizing Tampoons, girlfriend of David Byrne

Dalglish, Jamie. RISD friend and NYC housemate of David Byrne

Doe, Douglas. RISD digital archivist

Gosch, Dan. RISD friend and member of Fabulous Motels

Grossman, Bobby. RISD friend and NYC photographer

Heyward, Julia. NYC video artist, codirector of “Burning Down the House”

Hopkin, Rachel Claire. Flying Frog Farm member

Hornyak, Gregor. RISD friend of Chris Frantz

Jeansonne, Elisca. RISD friend and housemate of David Byrne

Jones, Jeff. Talking Heads road crew member

Kehoe, Marc. Artist; friend, bandmate, and housemate of David Byrne

Kovacs, Andrea. Artist; RISD classmate and girlfriend of David Byrne

Kushnick, Ken. Manager of Sire Records

Lackow, Andy. RISD classmate of Chris Frantz

Lake, Shelley. RISD friend of Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth

Last, Julie. Engineer on Remain in Light

Levenson, Al. Flying Frog Farm resident

Lillywhite, Steve. Record producer on Naked

Lobell, Joan. MICA classmate and girlfriend of David Byrne

Lutz, Adelle. Designer, ex-wife of David Byrne

McCrae, Bruce. Member of Fabulous Motels

McLeod, Sandy. Filmmaker, “creative consultant” on Stop Making Sense

Murphy, Michael. Talking Heads tour manager

Nininger, Susan. RISD friend of David Byrne

Penna, Fred. Talking Heads road crew member

Reichbart, Naomi. Artist, Bizadi member, and MICA classmate of David Byrne

Sappington, Joseph. Childhood friend of David Byrne

Stahler, Hank. RISD ’75 and bassist in the Artistics

Yockel, Michael. Journalist; high school friend and housemate of David Byrne

Zieve, Michael. RISD friend of David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth

Notes

1: A CITY IN MY MIND

“The residents of Manhattan”: White (1949): 9–10

“Boos Greet Abe at Budget Quiz”: New York Daily News, June 5, 1975: 1–3

teetering on the brink of bankruptcy: On the New York fiscal crisis, see Auletta (1979); Philips-Fein (2017); Oreskes, New York Times, Sept. 20, 1982; and Gottlieb, New York Times, June 30–July 6, 1985

“worst band I ever heard”: Kristal in Billboard, June 1, 2002: 87

“our moms sent us for Christmas”: Frantz (2020): 113

“a seagull talking to its shrink”: Goldstein, Village Voice, Feb. 2, 1976

“anti-mythic in stance”: Wolcott, Village Voice, Aug. 18, 1975

“an effect on local rock as well”: Rockwell, New York Times, Mar. 24, 1976

“like our Cavern Club”: Frantz (2020): 73

“It is this third city”: White (1949): 26, 31

young adults in their twenties and early thirties: Oreskes, New York Times, Sep. 20, 1982

“agreed to shake hands”: Sante (1991): 374

2: ARTISTS ONLY

most revealing chapters in the book: Davies (1968)

feature articles and fan magazines: On the Beatles and Swinging London, see Gould (2007)

band called the Velvet Underground: On Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, see DeCurtis (2017)

“their version of Black music”: Marcus, Rolling Stone, Jan. 21, 1970

“powerful way of being white”: Hamilton (2016): 16

3: THE HARVARD OF ART SCHOOLS

“going to be a painter”: Frantz in Brandt, Trouser Press, November 1979

“Harvard of art schools”: Frantz (2020): 25

stationed at the time: On Chris Frantz’s family background, see Frantz (2020); Brandt, Trouser Press, November 1979; Kent Brown, stay.thirsty.media.com; Tolleson, Modern Drummer, May 1984

special resonance for him: Frantz (2020): 19, 212

left the theater in protest: theshockoeexaminer.blogspot.com/2013/05/bob-dylan-mosque-richmond-virginia-1964.html; Richmond Times-Examiner, Mar. 12, 1966

“in love with this guy”: Frantz (2020): 20

“going home to my family”: Frantz (2020): 22

“believe that they did”: Frantz (2020): 28

“pair of flannel trousers”: Huxley (1954): 36

4: AN ANTHROPOLOGIST IN ARBUTUS

“dash of autism is essential”: Page, The New Yorker, Aug. 13, 2007

Byrne was born in May: On David Byrne’s family background, see Davis (1986); Himes, Baltimore Sun, Jan. 27, 1985; Cocks, Time, Oct. 27, 1986; Considine, Baltimore Sun, Oct. 31, 1997; Segal, Washington Post, Aug. 13, 1997; White, Billboard, May 14, 1994; D. Byrne, Obituary of Emma Byrne, davidbyrne.com/journal/emma-byrne; Young, Desert Island Discs, May 18, 2018; emails to author from J. Sappington and M. Yockel

family arrived in Canada: Cocks, Time, Oct. 27, 1986

came to his house: Gittins, Guardian, Apr. 27, 2001

“My parents aren’t American”: Byrne in Annik Honore, youtube.com/watch?v=9zP3CMm6AxI

“my shy behavior was quite extreme”: Byrne in Young, Desert Island Discs, Mar. 18, 2018

“scenes from James Bond”: White, Billboard, May 14, 1994

every aspiring rock musician of their generation: J. Sappington, conversation with the author

he could perform overdubs: White, Billboard, May 14, 1994

called their group Revelation: J. Sappington, conversation with the author

country hit “Act Naturally”: Davis (1986): 5

“fake Bob Dylan songs”: White, Billboard, May 14, 1994

separate itself into the rival tribes: Davis (1986): 5

drawing, painting, and making tapes: Cocks, Time, Oct. 27, 1986

a handful of votes: Davis (1986): 8

“I had this romantic idea”: Considine, Baltimore Sun, Oct. 31, 1997

“graffiti in the halls was better”: Connolly, Rolling Stone, Oct. 27, 1983

phenomenon of child psychology: see Kanner, Nervous Child 2, 1943; Wing, Psychological Medicine 11, 1981; Frith (1991): 1–36; Sacks, The New Yorker, Dec. 27, 1993

“little professors,” he called them: Wallace, New York, Nov. 5, 2012

what she called Asperger’s syndrome: Wing, Psychological Medicine 11 (1981)

“creative artists or scientists”: Wing, Psychological Medicine 11 (1981)

precise and compelling terms: see Grandin (2014); Sacks (1995)

“Nothing exists until it has a name”: Wing, Psychological Medicine 11 (1981)

nearly fifty before he diagnosed himself: Byrne (2012): 33

“within and without them”: Page (2010): 3

“the rest of humanity”: Page, The New Yorker, Aug. 13, 2007

“It sounds very calculated”: Byrne, youtube.com/watch?v=vtX6emk6U5k

“school themselves in empathy”: Sacks, The New Yorker, Dec. 27, 1993

“those feelings less genuine”: Page (2010): 6–7

famously declared, “Only connect”: Forster (1910)

5: RISD & MICA

“art school is a real racket”: Breskin, Musician, April–May 1981

dubbed him “Mad Dave”: Frantz (2020): 56

“a very withdrawn persona”: Frantz in Handelman, Rolling Stone, Jan. 15, 1987

deans and the curriculum: see RISD Press, Sept. 7, 14, 21, 1970

“RISD had it all”: Frantz (2020): 35

exploits with his friends: Frantz (2020): 40

“that person is from another world”: Byrne to Marc Maron, open.spotify.com/episode/2X6k9ZLMNbriFLBwdz3mEQ?

“learn how to draw”: Marc Maron, open.spotify.com/episode/2X6k9ZLMNbriFLBwdz3mEQ?

“shapes, colors, or materials”: Kosuth, Art Bulletin 78, Sept. 3, 1996

“the machine that makes the art”: LeWitt, Artforum, Summer 1967

Kosuth wrote in 1969: Kosuth, Studio International, Oct.–Dec. 1969

“the whole art scene”: Byrne in Kent, New Musical Express, Dec. 22, 1979

“I did copier art”: Breskin, Musician, April–May 1981

“infiltrating the art community”: Gilmore, Rolling Stone, Nov. 29, 1979

“I felt socially inept”: Gittins, Guardian, Apr. 27, 2001

surely the most outlandish: On Marc Kehoe, see Davis (1986): 10–21; M. Kehoe, interview with the author

straight man and sidekick: see Davis (1986); M. Zilberstein, email to the author

discerning musical taste: Rorem, New York Review of Books, Jan. 18, 1968

followed him ever since: Byrne (2012): 34

young instructors like David Franks: npr.org/2010/02/15/123747163/remembering-poet-david-franks; obituary in Baltimore Sun, Jan. 20, 2010

6: THE ADMIRAL’S DAUGHTER

“Life in the military is about fronts”: Wertsch (1991): 1

Battle of the Philippine Sea: texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1605642/; usnhistory.navylive.dodlive.mil/Recent/Article-View/Article/2687049/passing-of-vice-adm-ralph-weymouth-usn-ret/; valor.militarytimes.com/recipient/recipient-27160/

“ride horses. Tomboy stuff”: Dalton, TheQuietus.com, July 14, 2011

comparing herself to Nan Ryan: Bowman (2001): 12

“dictated by some inner torment”: O’Connor (1981): 456

“their whole heart to it”: O’Connor (1981): 457

strong opinions to herself: Davis (1986): 30

“support or reward it”: Wertsch (1991): 94–95

taste for Camel cigarettes: Frantz (2020): 44

assumed that Chris was gay: Heath, Smash Hits, Nov. 20, 1985; Jacques, Independent on Sunday, Mar. 17, 2013

“Sport Fisher,” and “Charles Rocket”: On the Fabulous Motels, see ripopmusic.org/musical-artists/musicians/young-adults-fabulous-motels-rudy-cheeks; also M. Clarke, interview with author

across the country together: Lobell, email to the author

with one of her professors: Frantz (2000): 48; A. Kovacs and E. Green, conversations with author

Soul Train on Saturday mornings: Frantz in Marszalek, TheQuietus.com, June 3, 2009

dated back to the 1700s: On Potomac Handbell Ringers, see Tufts (1961); Schudel, Washington Post, Sept. 22, 2012

they first got together: Frantz (2020): 53

7: THE AMAZING ARTISTICS

“an anti-sixties backlash”: Willis, The New Yorker, Dec. 9, 1972

was Bizadi’s signature song: Davis (1986): 21; M. Kehoe, interview with the author

fantasy called Metal Madam: M. Kehoe, interview with the author

Anderson on bass and guitar: On the Artistics, see Davis (1986): 26–29; Frantz (2020): 54–60, 67–70

mid-sixties cover tunes: Byrne in Kent, New Musical Express, Dec. 22, 1979; Frantz (2020): 68

“on a national tour”: Kaye, liner notes to Nuggets, October 1972

help with the lyrics: E. Jeansonne, email to the author

expression of utmost approval: Davis (1986): 24

“Randy Newman doing Alice Cooper”: Flanagan (1987): 345

an immediate cause célèbre: RISD Press, Feb. 8, 15, 22, 1975

“something he did wrong”: Reichbart in Davis (1986): 14

“We thought we sounded good”: Frantz (2020): 68

“staring at us in utter bewilderment”: H. Stahler, email to the author

as “a terrible band”: Hansen in Davis (1986): 26

to confirm Hansen’s view: H. Stahler, digital file provided to the author

“he could barely play the guitar”: Davis (1986): 29

8: CBGB & OMFUG

“If you have an art orientation”: Byrne in Rockwell, New York Times, Mar. 24, 1976

a “man on wire”: New York Daily News, Aug. 8, 1975

prestigious MFA program at Yale: On Kovacs, see Davis (1986); Lesy (1985): 131; Conrad, The Yale Revue, Feb. 5, 1975; A. Kovacs, emails to author

“a crazed lumberjack”: Kovacs in Davis (1986): 35

“concept of being in love”: Kovacs in Davis (1986): 36

“creation of music and art”: Byrne in Emerson, New York Times Magazine, May 5, 1985; Byrne in Lorberer, Rain Taxi, Winter 1999–2000

adjust to changing conditions: see Wiener (1948)

included Pete Townshend and Brian Eno: On Roy Ascott, see Sloan (2022)

“design a persona and then animate it”: Kovacs in Davis (1986): 38

immobilized for hours on end: A. Kovacs, email to the author

right around the corner: On CBGB, see Hermes (2011); Kozak (1988)

they were “god-awful”: Kristal in Murray, New Musical Express, Mar. 4, 1978

“and they know it”: Soho Weekly News, Apr. 25, 1974

“get out there and sell it”: McNeil & McCain (1996): 281

part-time male hustler: see McNeil & McCain (1996): 282, 289, 292

Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell: On Television, see Mitchell (2006); Kane (2017)

rehearsing early in 1974: youtube.com/watch?v=C4r0-rYtqo0

“he got me excited about it”: Kozak (1988): 14

they called the Ramones: On the Ramones, see True (2002); J. Ramone (2012); D. Ramone (1997)

9: CHRYSTIE STREET

“a ruin in the making”: Sante (1991): 364

received their rejections: Bowman (2001): 52

less-than-fervent “I guess so”: Frantz (2020): 76

deflated her aspirations: Bowman (2001): 55

“dangerous place for women”: Weymouth in Girl in a Band: Tales from the Rock ’n’ Roll Front Line. BBC Films (2015)

a woman in the group: Coon, Melody Maker, May 21, 1977

“slipping into the mainstream”: Cocks, Time, Oct. 27, 1986; Connolly, Rolling Stone, Oct. 27, 1983

“he didn’t want to break character”: Davis (1986): 81

“Wrong note so what”: Smith, Soho Weekly News, June 26, 1974

“an extraordinary rock singer”: Wolcott, Village Voice, Apr. 14, 1975

10: A CONSERVATIVE IMPULSE

“ideal place to sound a clarion call”: Smith (2010): 245

“actor playing a rock star”: Robinson (2014): 88

“no singing like a Black man”: Byrne (2012): 39–40

Harry politely declined: Frantz (2020): 86

“the focus be on one person”: Davis (1986): 44

“only in Conceptual art”: Conrad, Yale Revue, Feb. 5, 1975

body parts were represented in: Davis (1986): 46; A. Kovacs, email to author

“always a collaborative effort”: Frantz (2020): 81

“Chris join in on drums”: Zieve in Davis (1986): 45

“cerebral enough name for them”: Zieve in Davis (1986): 43

“It was an emotional quality”: Kristal in Kozak (1988): 40

series The Twilight Zone: Frantz (2020): 93

“the Ramones’ monomaniacal tightness”: Wolcott, Village Voice, July 21, 1975

“the New Rock Underground”: Wolcott, Village Voice, Aug. 15, 1975

“convert when the invite came”: Wolcott (2011): 134

developed an “instantaneous crush”: Wolcott (2011): 133

11: BORN TO RUN

“consisted of about sixty people”: Robinson (2014): 106

“was a quintessential experience”: Davis (1986): 55

personally inspired by her: Davis (1986): 61; Brandt, Trouser Press, November 1979

“become his art form”: Kovacs in Davis (1986): 54–55

accentuate her big eyes: Girl in a Band: Tales from the Rock ’n’ Roll Front Line. BBC Films (2015)

“primitive rock bands are gone”: Byrne in Birch, Melody Maker, July 29, 1978

immediately corrected the habit: Davis (1986): 51

“It wasn’t for real”: Vega in Heylin (2005) (unpaginated)

“really found their band”: Heylin (2005) (unpaginated)

“camaraderie among the bands”: Kristal and Byrne (2005) (unpaginated)

“other bands didn’t like it”: Coon, Melody Maker, May 21, 1977

“the arrival from elsewhere”: Kristal and Byrne (2005) (unpaginated)

“certain kind of cushion”: Davis (1986): 42

“send me to art school”: Frantz (2020): 99

almost as a point of pride: Rockwell, New York Times, Sept. 16, 1975

launched Bob Dylan’s career: Shelton, New York Times, Sept. 29, 1961: 31

“prevent a default”: New York Times, Oct. 29, 1975

“Ford to City: Drop Dead”: New York Daily News, Oct. 30, 1975

makes it look antique: Metropolis Video, screening for the author, March 2022

“David’s writing and singing”: Davis (1986): 43–44

“pleasantness to these arrangements”: Byrne (2012): 39

12: PUNK IS COMING

“a fake street credibility”: Frith & Horne (1987): 20

“London rock in the ’60s”: Murray, New Musical Express, Nov. 8, 1975

“star singer for Talking Heads”: Harron & Zilka, Punk, February 1976

“best band in New York”: Harron & Zilka, Punk, February 1976

“anti-individualist stance as a group concept”: Howell (1992): 14

“almost an entertainer”: Rockwell, New York Times, Mar. 24, 1976

“he ever played a drum roll”: Valentine (2006): 86

Jewish family in Brooklyn: see Stein (2018); Goldberg, Rolling Stone, Oct. 9, 1986

drew him inexorably inside: Stein (2018): 123; Davis (1986): 59

track record and business sense: Beserkley Records had only two artists under contract, the Rubinoos and the Greg Kihn Band, neither of which had enjoyed any chart success.

café and introduced himself: Frantz (2020): 116

found their music somewhat “strained”: Gans (1985): 47

13: THEY’RE SO CUTE

“something fresh and new”: Rockwell, New York Times, July 2, 1976

“preppy RISD kids”: Hannah (2018): 332

“They’re so cute”: Hannah (2018): 341

“one total person rather than three”: Loud, Interview, August 1976

the “Rock Critical Establishment”: Christgau, Village Voice, Jan. 26, 1976

“‘hype’ or inflated praise”: Rockwell, New York Times, Sept. 11, 1977

“I love this record—love it”: Christgau, Village Voice, 1976. http://www.robertchristgau.com

“bold swipe at the status quo”: Sculatti, Creem, August 1976

“authentic American primitives”: Nelson, Rolling Stone, July 29, 1976

“other associations get left behind”: Rockwell (2006)

“wouldn’t touch the Ramones with a toilet brush”: Stein (2018): 125

acoustic twelve-string guitar: Rock Scene, January 1977

purchase a color television: Davis (1986): 61

Bongiovi, while still in his early thirties: Crane, Tape Op, September–October 2018

“stalwarts of the New York punk rock scene”: Billboard, Feb. 19, 1977

“I was a founding member”: Grabel, The Face, January 1981

“immediately dropped the subject”: Frantz (2020): 120

14: LONDON CALLING

“how brilliant they were to be this bad”: Marcus (1989): 49

reached with Sgt. Pepper: Heylin (2005) (unpaginated)

“sexy like a girl on a tennis court”: Miles, New Musical Express, Apr. 2, 1977

“the cult band in New York”: Miles, New Musical Express, Apr. 23, 1977

“It’s not dumb enough”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meco#cite_note-3

“songs that he thought were the best”: Birch, Melody Maker, July 29, 1978

“forever to get to the chorus”: Crane, Tape Op, September–October 2018

“horrible to work with”: Parsons, New Musical Express, July 22, 1978

“some semblance of order”: Bell, New Musical Express, July 10, 1976

Steve Jones, was a petty thief: Savage (2001): 75

“pretend that he’s cool”: Savage (2001): 122

“We’re into chaos”: Spencer, New Musical Express, Feb. 21, 1976

“what have we done?”: McNeil & McCain (1996): 244

“Everyone agreed he had the look”: Lydon (2008): 143

15: A YOUNG JESUIT MONK

“we’ll sound like mosquitos”: Goldstein, Crawdaddy, February 1977

Johnny did not despise: Ramone (2012): 94–97

the “unbearable” Tina Weymouth: Ramone (2012): 95

“twenty minutes on the same subject”: Ramone (2012): 95

“they liked to smoke a lot of hash”: Ramone (1997): 135

“Some of those CBGB groups”: Reynolds (2005): 161

NATO air bases during the 1950s: see Sheppard (2008); Rose, Village Voice, Mar. 28, 1977

“formed a band of their own”: Sheppard (2008): 49

“maudlin sincerity of the blues movement”: Bracewell (2007): 368

“a young Jesuit monk”: Reynolds (2005): 161

“He was a kindred spirit”: Cosyns, The Sun, Feb. 11, 2006

his “secret career”: Rose, Village Voice, Mar. 28, 1977

“organizer of musical events”: Bangs, Musician, November 1979

to “despise funky music”: Sheppard (2008): 247

reordering the “hierarchical organization”: Sheppard (2008): 247

“stunningly rich bass guitar”: Dadomo, Sounds, May 21, 1977

“click out like on disco records”: Goldman, Sounds, June 25, 1977

“stopping to look at a bunch of rocks”: Ramone (2012): 95; Davis (1986): 71

“cold arch-romanticism of Television”: Kent, New Musical Express, June 25, 1977

“make him even more edgy”: Kent, New Musical Express, June 25, 1977

“articulate logically for the band”: Kent, New Musical Express, Dec. 22, 1979

“the band, especially David”: Coon, Melody Maker, May 21, 1977

“preconceptions about women than most”: Coon, Melody Maker, May 21, 1977

“infiltrating his neighborhood folk club”: Williams, Times, May 16, 1977

16: SUMMER OF SAM

“something almost mystically wonderful”: Savage (2001): 133

“all this hullabaloo”: Willig, New York Daily News, May 27, 1977

a thousand buildings were set ablaze: Phillips-Fein (2017)

“from the gutters of NYC”: Breslin, New York Daily News, May 31, 1977

“it was pretty Southern”: Clarke in Davis (1986): 76–77

her description of the scene: M. Clarke, interview with the author; Bowman (2001): 108

“and his girlfriend Linda”: Clarke in Davis (1986): 62

“I Can See for Miles” by the Who: Jason Feddy podcast, KX93.5, Dec. 19, 2014

when Bongiovi wasn’t around: Davis (1986): 79; Jason Feddy podcast, KX93.5, Dec. 19, 2014

Weymouth’s parts an octave below: Crane, Tape Op, September–October 2018

Weymouth’s perfectly adequate bass lines: Crane, Tape Op, September–October 2018

“they didn’t want to hear about it”: Bangs (1987): 439

“blues-derived rock of the past”: Bangs, Village Voice, Apr. 30, 1979

“stemmed from the rhythm section”: Heylin (2005) (unpaginated)

17: DON’T CALL IT PUNK

“Some of that lingo”: Sheppard, Mojo, Apr. 2008

Inspired by Al Green: Isler, Musician, Nov. 1, 1985

“the least sentimental band”: Cosyns, The Sun, Feb. 11, 2006

“Rock Your Baby”: Considine, Baltimore Sun, Oct. 31, 1997

“something to do with the song’s attraction”: Gilmore, Rolling Stone, Nov. 29, 1979

distributor, had other ideas: Stein (2018): 137

proud but demoralized metropolis: Rose, Village Voice, Oct. 31, 1977

“rock’s claim to greatness”: Rockwell, New York Times, Sept. 11, 1977

“Punk-rock it isn’t”: Rose, Village Voice, Oct. 31, 1977

“hope of pop music”: Demorest, Rolling Stone, Nov. 3, 1977

“upper-class rock ’n’ roll band”: Goldman, Sounds, Oct. 22, 1977

18: THE BIG COUNTRY

“We played Antonino’s Pizza Parlor”: Gross, Soho Weekly News, Apr. 13, 1978

“an aberration down there”: Robins, Newsday, Oct. 9, 1977

back in the game: Stein (2018): 136

fervent admirer of the band: Brennan, Tape Op, September–October 2024; Jeff Jones, interview with the author

“he’ll spit in your face”: Aron, Morning News, Oct. 23, 1977

“unremitting tension of the Americans”: Gill, New Musical Express, Jan. 28, 1978

“powerful, disciplined economy”: Rambali, New Musical Express, Feb. 4, 1978

“another posturing clown”: Valentine, Melody Maker, Jan. 28, 1978

“the mentally gifted elite”: Lott, Record Mirror, Feb. 11, 1978

“hospitalized for exhaustion in London”: Billboard, Feb. 18, 1978

“For the maid”: Bicknell in Davis (1986): 89; Frantz (2020): 229; Lee Blake, interview with the author

“listening to Talking Heads”: Flanagan (1987): 241

19: COMPASS POINT

“commonplace, expressionist punk groups ”: Gans (1985): 57

“I always record everything”: Gans (1985): 57

“context really isn’t interesting”: Williams, Melody Maker, Jan. 22, 1980

“visitors from another planet”: Sutcliffe, Sounds, September 1978

“disco-punk tightness”: Piccarella, Village Voice, July 17, 1978

“sinuous rock bottom of the music”: Christgau, Village Voice, July 31, 1978

Debbie Harry into an international pop star: Rockwell, New York Times, Dec. 22, 1978

“preppie as Talking Heads”: Emerson, Rolling Stone, Oct. 19, 1978

“clearly a one-man show”: Carson, Boston Phoenix, Aug. 15, 1978

20: TAKE ME TO THE RIVER

“I found that attractive”: Byrne in Gilmore, Rolling Stone, Nov. 29, 1979

Saul Steinberg’s iconic: The New Yorker, Mar. 29, 1976

“mean-spirited . . . tacked on”: Weymouth in Manning, Jockey Slut, February 2004

21: FEET ON THE GROUND

“merely a New York cult band”: Emerson, New York Times, Jan. 2, 1979

performance at the Entermedia: youtube.com/watch?v=oTEVC_KD3mI

“prestigious showcase in the nation”: Rockwell, New York Times, Dec. 15, 1978

the island’s annual Carnival: Stein (2018): 153

smattering of girlish squeals: youtube.com/watch?v=oTEVC_KD3mI

Mudd Club opened its doors: see Boch (2017); Gendron (2002)

“dead rock stars themselves”: Haden-Guest (1998): 161

keep “the kids from Brooklyn away”: Slesin, New York Times, Apr. 21, 1979

“the essence of femininity”: Eno in Sheppard (2008): 306

22: FEAR OF EVERYTHING

“These are mutant times”: Bangs, Village Voice, Aug. 20, 1979

“as if the group was on a mission”: Harrington, Washington Post, Feb. 10, 1985

performance at the Mudd Club: South Bank Show, youtube.com/watch?v=f5EzLDD1D_Q

“thinking man’s New Wave band”: Cohen, Oui, August 1979

“raw passion of many of the songs”: Rockwell, New York Times, Aug. 3, 1979

“band playing Byrne’s songs”: Rambali, New Musical Express, Aug. 18, 1979

rambling eight-thousand-word exegesis: Bangs, https://legacy.npr.org/assets/music/THChronology_LBangsEssay.pdf

“called Fear of Everything”: Bangs, Village Voice, Aug. 20, 1979

23: THIS AIN’T NO PARTY

“Threepenny Opera—only with a beat”: Goldstein, Creem, March 1981

Ball’s poem was such a work: “Gadji Beri Bimba,” allpoetry.com/Hugo-Ball

Beatles’ hallucinatory classic “Rain”: Hull, Washington Post, Oct. 28, 1979

parents hung on the wall: Cocks, Time, Oct. 27, 1986

Tonight’s the Night and Zuma: Flanagan (1987): 347

the animal kingdom instead: Sella, Slash, November 1979

“official worst song on the album”: Lethem (2012): 111

Beatles’ milestone of acid rock: Lethem (2012): 72

24: TWO FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOYS

“I can’t do two things at once”: Sella, Slash, November 1979

Byrne was “leaving the band”: Frantz (2020): 259

“the deal with Sire was signed”: Kent, New Musical Express, Dec. 22, 1979

trumpeter named Jon Hassell: Palmer, New York Times, Nov. 20, 1981

“the sense they have”: Rose, New Musical Express, July 26, 1980

“The Recording Studio as a Compositional Tool”: golancourses.net/2009ems1/pdf/sound_eno-the-studio-as-a-compositional-tool.pdf

apartment in Venice Beach: Sheppard (2008): 327–35

“play toward the beat”: Chernoff (1979): 42–60

“irrelevant, and ultimately alienating”: Chernoff (1979): 140

“ridiculous, or even sinful”: Chernoff (1979): 141

vibe of Venice Beach: Rambali, New Musical Express, Nov. 8, 1980

“everyone to behave themselves”: Breskin, Musician, April–May 1981

“I never thought they were right”: Coon, Melody Maker, May 21, 1977

“impression on one another”: Grabel, The Face, January 1981

the bassist Busta Jones: see Doering, Musician, Sept. 1, 1982

nuances of funk bass playing: Davis (1986): 108

25: MELODY ATTACK

“kill an idea than democracy”: Breskin, Musician, April–May 1981

“to make another album”: Frantz (2020): 260

“than a simple production”: Davis (1986): 111

“play them over and over”: Breskin, Musician, April–May 1981

“in our earlier stuff”: Breskin, Musician, April–May 1981

“became nightmarishly hard”: Thomson, Uncut, November 2010

“Eno and we didn’t”: Thomson, Uncut, November 2010

“exasperated by the whole thing”: Thomson, Uncut, November 2010

fraught the sessions had become: Frantz (2020): 264

“But I had to”: Loder, Rolling Stone, Mar. 5, 1981

“and lost his reserve”: Thomson, Uncut, November 2010

capability of a four-piece group: Davis (1986): 113

Eno proposed a convoluted variation on this formula: Davis (1986): 119–20

an unqualified success: DiMartino, Creem, Nov. 1980; Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, Aug. 31, 1989

“last time we were here”: Kozak, Billboard, Sep. 13, 1980

“Talking Heads with eager curiosity”: Rockwell, New York Times, Aug. 30, 1980

“produce a single entity”: Trakin, Time Out, Nov. 28, 1980

“egocentric in the extreme”: Frith and de Vignemont, Consciousness and Cognition, Dec. 2005

“taking credit for everything”: Rambali, New Musical Express, Nov. 8, 1980

26: ONCE IN A LIFETIME

“as far away from that as possible”: Byrne in Morse, Boston Globe, Nov. 13, 1980

“Byrne will ever write”: Christgau, Village Voice, 1980. http://www.robertchristgau.com

27: EXPANDED HEADS

“Mr. Byrne appears to be”: Rockwell, New York Times, Oct. 5, 1980

“1970s in Black music”: Rockwell, New York Times, Oct. 5, 1980

“often hostile musical community”: Tucker, Rolling Stone, Dec. 11, 1980

make the best of it: Frantz (2020): 269

“being David’s whipping boy”: Reynolds (2005): 141

Weymouth as the tour progressed: Davis (1986): 116–17, 122–23; Tolleson, Guitar Player, March 1984

Park Avenue duplex in the week ahead: Purnick, New York Times, Dec. 6, 1980

“We love you if you are rich”: Weisman, New York Times, Oct. 22, 1979

28: BUSH OF GHOSTS

“seductive or move you in some way”: Palmer, New York Times, Mar. 13, 1981

“Don’t let me ruin your fun”: Davis (1986): 134–35; Tannenbaum and Marks (2011): 76

“worked with the music”: Tannenbaum and Marks (2011): 77

new artists in the pop marketplace: On the birth of MTV, see Tannenbaum and Marks (2011)

“height of tulip mania”: Hughes (1991): 655

the Times Square Show: Goldstein, Village Voice, June 16, 1980; Pincus-Witten, Artforum, December 2012

P. S. 1 Contemporary Art Center: Larson, New York, Mar. 16, 1981

“Byrne’s large-format color photographs”: Flood, Artforum, Summer 1981

“public might like it”: O’Brien, Interview, April 1981

“This sleek new New Wave extravagance”: Schjeldahl, Village Voice, Mar. 4–10, 1981

dance troupe of her own: On Twyla Tharp, see Tharp (1992)

“mega-hit with my next collaboration”: Tharp (1992): 257

“our ambition to succeed”: Tharp (1992): 257

“intimidated by his own innocence”: Tharp (1992): 258

“sections by different names”: Tharp (1992): 260–61

“threat to smash the TV”: Tharp (1992): 266

“achievements of the album”: Orme, Melody Maker, Feb. 14, 1981

months after its release: Carson, Boston Phoenix, Apr. 14, 1981

29: GENIUSES OF LOVE

“forget the pop world”: Isler, Trouser Press, Apr. 1982

spin-offs of Talking Heads: Frantz (2020): 274

“approach of the Island people”: Gans (1985): 94

a world-class melodic hook: Trakin, Musician, November 1983

“the best I’ve done on any record”: Doering, Musician, May 1982

“Black heroes who have been put down”: Boehm, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 10, 1992

“matched in the choreography”: Kisselgoff, New York Times, Sept. 23, 1981

“pieces of the pineapple”: Tobias, New York, Oct. 12, 1981

“dark side of Tharp’s world”: Croce, The New Yorker, Oct. 12, 1981

“His style is sort of a given”: Gosse, Rock’s Back Pages Audio, September 1980

30: THE NAME OF THIS BAND

“more famous than we are successful”: Harding, Juke, Jan. 2, 1982

“teeth clenched at all times”: Christgau, Village Voice, 1981. http://www.robertchristgau.com

“Harrison can’t sing for shit”: Piccarella, Boston Phoenix, Jan. 12, 1982

“steamy clutter”: Christgau, Village Voice, 1981. http://www.robertchristgau.com

“pale funk-ism and pop-sophism”: Gosse, Musician, February 1982

“a welcome relief”: Palmer, New York Times, Nov. 18, 1981

“continue as a four-piece group”: Palmer, New York Times, Mar. 13, 1981

“because Eno went away”: Palmer, New York Times, Nov. 18, 1981

“coming from above 110th Street”: Palmer, New York Times, Nov. 18, 1981

pair of enormous ghetto blasters: New York Rocker, January 1982

recommit himself to Talking Heads: Stein (2018): 198

“songwriting credits used to read?”: Cohick, Fort Lauderdale News, Apr. 16, 1982

“they were this good”: Gosse, Village Voice, June 8, 1982

31: GIRLFRIEND IS BETTER

“feeling of a band playing”: Rea, High Fidelity, Sept. 1983

“It will be an interesting exercise”: Harding, Juke, Jan. 2, 1982

“a real interesting relationship”: Kozak, Billboard, Sept. 26, 1981

royalties on the Tom Tom Club LP: Doering, Musician, May 1982

“two kings in one palace”: Weymouth in Tolleson, Guitar Player, March 1984

“friends in a lacquered bowl”: Lutz in O, The Oprah Magazine, April 2006

first met Adelle Lutz: Women’s Wear Daily, Aug. 13, 1981

his “transcendent abandon” onstage: Bowman (2001): 237

“David felt differently”: Tharp (1992): 266

“write and rehearse the material”: Palmer, New York Times, Nov. 18, 1981

response from the police: Snow, Q, October 1990

“We’ve cleaned it up a bit”: Baker, New York Daily News, Aug. 15, 1982

antidote to the “Me Decade” ethos: Schrage, Rolling Stone, Aug. 19, 1982; Pond and Levy, Rolling Stone, Oct. 14, 1982

“America’s premiere dance bands”: Waller, Los Angeles Times, Aug. 10, 1982

“inspired and inspiring evening”: Palmer, New York Times, Aug. 23, 1982

“its formerly claustrophobic songs”: Himes, Baltimore Sun, Aug. 25, 1982

named Wally Badarou: de Whalley, International Musician & Recording World, February 1986

“the gibberish fit the music”: Byrne in Tate, Musician, September 1983; Hoskyns, New Musical Express, Aug. 27, 1983

more of a call and response: Adelle Lutz, interview with the author

“everyone thought it was a good idea”: Rea, High Fidelity, September 1983

art galleries at one thousand dollars apiece: Rea, High Fidelity, September 1983

32: SPEAKING IN TONGUES

“according to some other rationale”: David Byrne on Facebook, Feb. 9, 2018

show he attended in 1979: Frantz (2020): 287

“I simply combined aphorisms and non sequiturs”: Myers, Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2020

referred to the atom bomb: see aasc.ucla.edu/cab/200708230003.html

the advent of science fiction: Davidson, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 11, 1982

“most direct love lyrics I’ve ever written”: Thompson, Rolling Stone, Apr. 21, 1988

33: PREPPY FUNK TRIUMPHANT

“a great American rock band”: Rockwell, New York Times, Aug. 21, 1983

“pop music and deep Black funk”: Fricke, Rolling Stone, June 9, 1983

“killer grooves and meta-hooks”: Hampton, Boston Phoenix, July 5, 1983

“disjointed opacity of the lyrics”: robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?name=Talking+Heads

“the mode of panicky exclamation”: Hoskyns, New Musical Express, Aug. 27, 1983

“formularized way of selling music”: Jackson in Billboard, June 16, 1984

“Are you fucking kidding me?”: Tannenbaum and Marks (2012): 77

“more like fashion shoots than films”: Tannenbaum and Marks (2012): 77

“commercial for a product”: Rea, High Fidelity, September 1983

considered them a waste of time: Tannenbaum and Marks (2012): 66

concert at Wembley: Channel 4 film, youtube.com/watch?v=XlIdydFcaLI

cash payments or “payola”: Bowman (2001): 257–58

the greatest vulgarian showman: Bender, New York Times, Aug. 7, 1983

“Bali and other places”: Tucker, Chicago Tribune, Aug. 28, 1983

“normal life or on the street”: DeCurtis, Record, February 1984

“coat hanger from his jacket”: Hepworth, Smash Hits, Mar. 5, 1981

realized on a grand scale: Bowman, Ear In, Oct. 14, 1999

obscurity of its song lyrics: see youtube.com/watch?v=2nInQoboxh4

“It was really embarrassing”: Sella, New York Times Magazine, Apr. 29, 2001

David adamantly refused to leave: Matt Murphy, interview with the author

34: A MOVIE WAITING TO BE FILMED

“get what they had onstage”: Demme in Goddard, Toronto Star, Sept. 15, 1984

“They didn’t perform”: Gelmis, Newsday, Oct. 29, 1984

“a movie waiting to be filmed”: Kaplan, New York Times, Mar. 27, 1988

“David liked that a lot”: Kaplan, New York Times, Mar. 27, 1988

“put on by mistake”: Watts, New York Times, April 26, 1964

“little tweakings and brushstrokes”: Wooton, Guardian, Oct. 10, 1998

translate the live performance to film: McLeod, email to the author

sequences of the film: McLeod, email to the author

uncredited role of an assistant director: McLeod, email to the author

goal was to screen Electric Guitar: London, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 21, 1983

“same thing would happen every night”: filmlinc.org/daily/david-byrne-stop-making-sense-video/, Aug. 19, 2014

“a lack of editorial confidence”: Locker, Time, July 15, 2014

eight-year career as a performing band: Bowman (2001): 267–68

“gentle humor, and sexy amusement”: Tucker, Philadelphia Inquirer, Aug. 14, 1983

“meaning of life in the tropics”: robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?name=Tom+Tom+Club

“Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz”: Variety, “Film Reviews,” Apr. 25, 1984

Sragow described the film as “exhilarating”: Sragow, Film Comment, May–June 1984

35: CLOSE TO PERFECTION

“David just doesn’t know his limitations”: Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 1, 1985

“Stop Making Sense is close to perfection”: Kael, The New Yorker, Nov. 26, 1984

“he lets it hang by his side”: Denby, New York, Nov. 5, 1984

“as coolly iconoclastic as Talking Heads itself”: Maslin, New York Times, Oct. 19, 1984

Thorngren try his hand: Frantz (2020): 319; Crane, Tape Op, January–February 2023

“tales in the National Enquirer”: Variety, Sept. 5, 1984

“I relate to pop songs”: Byrne in Bell, The Face, June 1983

solo album and a film soundtrack: Black, Sounds, July 27, 1985

“a lot of times it clicks”: Flanagan (1987): 347

“never would sing a note out of tune”: Crane, Tape Op, January–February 2023

“out of his system now”: Black, Sounds, July 27, 1985

northwest corner of the state: Cummings, Spin, September 1985

“THINKING MAN’S ROCK STAR”: Emerson, New York Times, May 5, 1985

“Nobody told us”: Handelman, Rolling Stone, Jan. 15, 1987

“damage has been done”: Handelman, Rolling Stone, Jan. 15, 1987

“It’s art. It’s all trickery”: Bowman (2001): 291–92

36: AND THEY WERE

“of communion or release”: Isler, Musician, November 1985

“this archetypal New York art-rock band”: Rockwell, New York Times, July 14, 1985

“validated with a vengeance”: Hunter, Boston Phoenix, July 16, 1985

“they’re something to touch or poke”: Isler, Musician, Nov. 1, 1985

“the road to oblivion”: Cohen & O’Brien, Spin, June 1985

37: AN ANTHROPOLOGIST IN VIRGIL

“acts as the amiable anthropologist”: Salamon, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 9, 1986

heartbreak over tensions in the band: Jacques, Independent on Sunday, Mar. 17, 2013; Scott, Sunday Times, Mar. 26, 2023

The Sun and Weekly World News: On True Stories, see Byrne (1986)

inner lives of the characters: Byrne (1986): 9

“becoming a movie star”: Cohen & O’Brien, Spin, June 1985

Chris Frantz would later claim: Frantz (2020): 322

“We made a group decision”: Goodyer, Music Tech, December 1986

“bunch of true believers”: Hoban, New York, Sept. 8, 1986

“he found his life raft in art”: Hoban, New York, Sept. 8, 1986

well-orchestrated publicity campaign: Hoban, New York, Sept. 8, 1986; Kakutani, New York Times, Oct. 5, 1986; Wolcott, Vanity Fair, October 1986; Gray, Vogue, October 1986

“Jacques Tati, and David Byrne”: Gray, Vogue, October 1986

“Rock’s Renaissance Man”: Cocks, Time, Oct. 27, 1986

the True Stories screenplay: Byrne (1986)

“to formulate opinions on”: Byrne (1986): 9

“tolerant of personal eccentricities”: Byrne (1986): 12

“see it slipping away”: Byrne (1986): 17

“I’m teaching myself to appreciate them”: Byrne (1986): 18

38: PLEADING FOR MERCY

“the ones who are being seen”: Kehr, Chicago Tribune, Oct. 31, 1986

“here, with naïve fascination”: Maslin, New York Times, Oct. 4, 1986

“movie of effortless cool”: Benson, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 24, 1986

“what the simple folk do”: DeCurtis, Rolling Stone, Nov. 6, 1986

“and shortchanging his characters”: Carr, Boston Globe, Oct. 24, 1986

local Connecticut movie house: Frantz (2020): 334

“We did it in five days”: Cocks, Time, Oct. 27, 1986

“roots the Talking Heads can’t rightfully claim”: Pareles, New York Times, Sept. 28, 1986

“face of a record as delightful as this”: Pond, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 14, 1986

“foray into Africa on Remain in Light”: Coleman, Rolling Stone, Oct. 23, 1986

“the Henry Luce of the counterculture”: Hagan (2017): 88

“David Byrne Media Blitz”: Handelman, Rolling Stone, Jan. 15, 1987

“a hatchet job”: Turner, Q, April 1988

“Andy would have loved it”: Glueck, New York Times, Apr. 2, 1987

front-page obituary in the Times: McGill, New York Times, Feb. 23, 1987

New York and Artforum: Kornbluth, New York, Mar. 9, 1987; Liebmann, Artforum, April 1987

“Warhol had the notion well before Byrne”: Tucker, Philadelphia Inquirer, Mar. 1, 1987

“a creature from another planet”: Harron, Melody Maker, Feb. 16, 1980

“He isn’t in the alienation biz”: Wolcott, Vanity Fair, Oct. 1986

39: NAKED IN PARIS

“Paris in the summer”: Chernoff, Spin, April 1988

“my favorite Talking Heads album”: Fricke, Rolling Stone, Oct. 23, 1986

“make sure that they didn’t kill each other”: Bowman (2001): 319

a letter about this: Frantz (2020): 335

high point of the sessions at Studio Davout: Marr (2016): 264

words and melody to work off: Lillywhite, email to author

“mood of these momentous changes”: Harrison, notes to Casual Gods (1988), dated Dec. 14, 1987

“deeply felt tracks cut from the same fabric”: Guterman, Rolling Stone, Mar. 10, 1988

an “insurmountable problem”: Tucker, Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 24, 1988

“between the sleeves of this package”: Griffin, Montreal Gazette, Feb. 11, 1988

“essentially committing solo suicide”: Hall, St. Petersburg Times, Feb. 21, 1988

40: DON’T MENTION HARMONY

“the band hasn’t been this kind of communal activity”: Pond, Los Angeles Times, Mar. 27, 1988

upcoming production of the play: Nemy, New York Times, Nov. 27, 1987

“first confident step the band has taken forward”: Millman, Boston Phoenix, Apr. 15–21, 1988

“one of rock’s greatest singers”: Palmer, Spin, May 1988

“what the dawn will bring”: DeCurtis, Rolling Stone, Apr. 1, 1988

“usual implication of wit”: Tucker, Philadelphia Inquirer, Mar. 20, 1988

“at actually making art”: Jenkins, Washington Post, Apr. 3, 1988

“discussing at dinner parties”: Berkmann, The Spectator, Apr. 9, 1988

“highest level music is”: Turner, Q, April 1988

41: INDEPENDENCE DAY

“doesn’t really justify going on the road”: Robicheau, Boston Globe, Oct. 26, 1989

“considered pure traditional music”: Cromelin, Los Angeles Times, Mar. 15, 1992

“Latin answer to Graceland”: Denselow, Guardian, Oct. 12, 1989

whole production to “fall flat”: Pareles, New York Times, Oct. 22, 1989

“loose and happy onstage”: Pareles, New York Times, Nov. 1, 1989

“losing much of their old allure”: Cooper, Q, November 1989

“mayor of Naifville, USA”: Rudnick, Spy, October 1990

Forbes named Martin Kihn: Kihn, GQ, January 1991

“They rejected them all”: Crane, Tape Op, Sept.-Oct. 2010

“things ran their course”: Bream, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 8, 1991

“it seems clichéd and sentimental”: Byrne in notes to Talking Heads, Popular Favorites 1976–1992 (1992)

unless the news was good: Bowman (2001): 352; Adelle Lutz, conversation with the author

42: HALL OF FAME

“big without selling out”: Helm, Chicago Tribune, Oct. 22, 1989

“David just decided to leave”: Boehm, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 10, 1992, Sept. 12, 1992

“If he comes back, all is forgiven”: Robicheau, Boston Globe, Oct. 30, 1992

devastated by her loss: Adelle Lutz, conversation with the author; Gross, New York, Mar. 2, 1992

“the pleasure is contagious”: Pareles, New York Times, Mar. 22, 1992

“his sharpest and most barbed songs”: Yates, Observer, Mar. 1, 1992

Hoffman character in Rain Man: Sutcliffe, Q, March 1992

“back together in the future”: Weymouth in Boehm, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 10, 1992

“I hope I gave back something”: Byrne, notes to Talking Heads, Popular Favorites: 1976–1992 (1992)

Iggy Pop, declined their invitation: Catlin, Hartford Courant, Oct. 6, 1996

“reputation of Talking Heads”: Rosen, Billboard, Sept. 7, 1996

“have officially been severed”: Slade in Newman, Billboard, Oct. 5, 1996

“like the Police without Sting”: Spencer, Observer, Nov. 3, 1996

“its head has been cut off”: Righi, Morning Call, Oct. 26, 1996

“little emotional connection to its material”: Moon, Rolling Stone, Oct. 17, 1996

columnist for the Boston Globe: rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/talking-heads-tina-weymouth-1996

an adjunct of Rolling Stone: Hagan (2017): 440–47

titles were “eerily timely”: Pareles, New York Times, Mar. 19, 2002

“we had fun together”: Frantz (2020): 362

failed to mention this: Adelle Lutz, conversation with the author

Coda: AMERICAN UTOPIA

“black headlines of the latest edition”: White (1949): 54

“It just got ugly”: Dalton, Glasgow Sunday Herald, Apr. 14, 2002

marriage to Adelle Lutz: Adelle Lutz, conversation with the author

telling his wife the news: Frantz (2020): 363–65

“a little girl on your knee”: Garcia, New York Times, June 8, 1997

“not always been a happy marriage”: Gittins, Guardian, Apr. 27, 2001

“never bring the matter up again”: Ross, Glasgow Sunday Herald, Mar. 21, 2004

“will grant them empathy”: Manning, Jockey Slut, February 2004

“Mr. and Mrs. Average Suburban Couple”: Frantz in Brodsky, Stereogum, Mar. 25, 2023

“cosmically cozy senior statesman”: Brantley, New York Times, Oct. 20, 2019

“someone you aren’t”: Harrison in Chernoff, Spin, April 1988

Index

A specific form of pagination for this digital edition has been developed to match the print edition from which the index was created. If the application you are reading this on supports this feature, the page references noted in this index should align. At this time, however, not all digital devices support this functionality. Therefore, we encourage you to please use your device’s search capabilities to locate a specific entry.

A&M Records, 127, 154

Abbey Road, 405, 406

Achebe, Chinua, 272, 304

Adé, Sunny, 247, 305

African Art in Motion, 245

African Rhythm and African Sensibility (Chernoff), 246–48, 289

Agora Theatre, 224–25

AIDS, 281, 428

“Air,” 239

Akalaitis, JoAnne, 339

Albatross, 131

Albers, Josef, 25

Alexsa, Linda, 170, 395

Ali, Rashied, 79

Alpert, Herb, 154

Altman, Robert, 349

American Bandstand, 220

American Utopia, 440–45

Anderson, David, 65, 72

Anderson, John, 279

Anderson, Laurie, 335, 357, 378

“And She Was,” 366, 428

Angel and the Snakes, 98

“Animals,” 240

Arcade Fire, 440

Arista Records, 95, 127, 137

Aron, Michael, 190

Artforum, 394

Artistics, 65–66, 68–72, 90, 98, 119, 207

“Artists Only,” 98, 102, 197, 209, 219

Ascott, Roy, 76, 159, 161

Asperger, Hans, 36–37, 262

Asperger’s syndrome and autism, 36–39, 201, 262–63

Byrne and, 38–39, 77, 90, 145, 180, 263, 271, 330, 356, 370, 394, 406, 426, 432, 438–39

Astor, Brooke, 279–80

Australia, 347–48, 357

B-52’s, 189, 222, 223, 229, 243, 260, 294–95, 317

Babbitt, Bob, 172

Badarou, Wally, 318, 319, 324, 338, 397, 398

Bailey, Tom, 423

Bali, 287, 338

Ball, Hugo, 234, 319

“Ballad of a Thin Man,” 407

Baltimore Sun, 318

Band, the, 3, 41, 66, 345

Bangs, Lester, 136, 172–73, 232

Barfield, Tinker, 293, 303, 339

Barsalona, Frank, 435

Baryshnikov, Mikhail, 288

Basil, Toni, 282–84, 287, 314, 316

Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 223, 286, 287, 336, 393

Bauhaus, 25, 43

Bayley, Roberta, 113

Beach Boys, 27, 47, 288

Beame, Abraham, 1, 74, 116, 167, 337

Beatles, 3, 5, 6, 10–14, 18–22, 27, 32–33, 47, 48, 52, 57, 58, 66, 81, 84, 85, 97, 118, 130, 131, 136, 145, 147, 148, 153, 154, 173, 182, 187, 212, 227, 231, 235, 239, 241, 255, 275, 280, 281, 284, 288, 327–28, 334, 366, 404–406, 443

Abbey Road, 405, 406

collaboration in, 363, 393

Get Back, 404–405

A Hard Day’s Night, 344–45, 370

Beefheart, Captain, 48–49, 57

Bee Gees, 218, 220

Behl, Tim, 65, 69

Belew, Adrian, 259–61, 267, 268, 272, 275–78, 289, 296, 297, 300, 303, 305, 309, 312, 316, 423, 439

Bell, Max, 151

Benjamin, Walter, 14

Benson, Sheila, 385

Berkmann, Marcus, 415

Berkowitz, David (Son of Sam), 168–69, 237

Berry, Chuck, 85, 408–409, 433

Bertolucci, Bernardo, 399–400

Beserkley Records, 127–28, 139

Bicknell, Ed, 149

“Big Blue Plymouth,” 306, 316

“Big Business,” 306, 316, 347

“Big Country, The,” 199–203, 212–14, 366, 379, 410

“Big Daddy,” 413, 414

Big Love, 440

“Bill,” 414

Billboard, 126, 138, 143, 194, 212, 216, 217, 243, 291, 300, 307, 310, 312, 332, 334, 408–409, 417, 418, 431

Bittan, Roy, 109, 364

Bizadi, 47, 63–66, 118

Blacker, Gail, 339

Black Uhuru, 317

Blackwell, Chris, 134, 188, 196, 294, 296, 297, 318, 347, 357, 397, 398, 432, 435

Blake, Peter, 13–14, 52

Blank Tape Studios, 298, 308, 315

“Blind,” 406–408, 417–18, 428, 443

Blondie, 98, 105, 117, 121, 125, 141, 202, 212, 286, 295, 423

Blow, Kurtis, 275

Blue Velvet, 386

Bohannon, 173

Bongiovi, Tony, 141, 149–50, 171–72, 177, 197, 204

Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, 57

“Book I Read, The,” 128, 180, 340

Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom, 419

“Born Under Punches,” 265–66, 277, 443

Boston Globe, 386, 431

Boston Phoenix, 202, 291, 304, 365, 415

Bottom Line, 91, 109, 189

Bowden, Joyce, 423, 425

Bowie, David, 3, 17–18, 61, 66, 72, 97, 158, 159, 172, 191, 197, 224, 259, 276, 283, 303, 319, 378

Bowman, David, 364

Brandwen, Bruce, 433

Branson, Richard, 154–55

Brantley, Ben, 442

Brazil Classics 1: Beleza Tropical, 420

Bream, Jon, 425–26

Breslin, Jimmy, 168

Brewster, Rick, 33

Britain, 149, 151–55, 163–65, 174, 189, 192–94, 315

Brooks, Don, 400

Brooks, Ernie, 100, 128–29, 131–33, 423

Brothers Johnson, 312

Brown, James, 27, 48, 126, 131, 147, 163, 207, 226, 247, 297, 302, 318–19, 363, 433

Buckley, James, 116

“Burning Down the House,” 323–24, 330, 332, 333, 335–36, 340, 350–51, 422, 434, 436, 443

Burroughs, William, 16, 223, 319

Byrds, 366

Byrne, Celia, 31, 378

Byrne, David, 3–4, 9, 30–36, 51, 59–61, 67, 72, 76–77, 83, 87–90, 334, 357, 405, 419–21, 423–24, 437–40, 443, 439–40

American Utopia, 440–45

in Artistics, 65–66, 68–72, 90, 98, 207

Asperger’s traits of, 38–39, 77, 90, 145, 180, 263, 271, 330, 356, 370, 394, 406, 426, 432, 438–39

in Bizadi, 47, 63–66, 118

The Catherine Wheel, 287, 289–90, 293, 298, 305–308, 314, 316, 317, 328, 338, 340, 351, 422, 424

cybernetics as interest of, 76–77, 178, 179, 361, 368

early life and family of, 30–36, 45–46, 114, 406

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, 440–41

The Forest, 419–20, 425

the Heads and, 430–31

Here Lies Love, 440

How Music Works, 440

The Knee Plays, 317, 357, 360, 362, 388

The Last Emperor, 399–400, 415–16

Love This Giant, 440

Lutz and, 312–15, 317, 321, 339, 348, 357, 374, 375, 378, 400, 420, 428, 438

move to New York, 72, 75–77

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, 248–50, 254, 257, 269, 290–92, 293, 305, 306, 396, 421–22

photography of, 286

record label of, 420

Rei Momo, 420–22, 425

at RISD, 5, 36, 41–45, 49, 50, 64, 70–72, 76, 122, 209, 328, 361

Tharp and, 289, 293, 314, 339, 361, 366, 378, 392

Time cover story on, 378–79, 391

Times profile on, 361–62, 364, 365

True Stories (film), 357, 374–84, 385–86, 390, 392

Uh-Oh, 428

Warhol compared with, 394

Weymouth and, 89–90, 102, 112–13, 143–45, 164–65, 182–83, 431–32, 438–39

see also Talking Heads

Byrne, Emma, 30–34, 114, 378

Byrne, Malu Abeni Valentine, 420

Byrne, Tom, 30–35, 114, 378

Cader, Andrew, 359

Cage, John, 15, 159, 160

Cale, John, 15–17, 100, 132, 139, 143, 158–60

Calloway, Cab, 328

Capitol Records, 125

Cardona, Milton, 420

Carey, Hugh, 116, 337

Carey, Mariah, 430

Carr, Jay, 386

Carson, Tom, 202–203, 291–92

Carter, Jimmy, 167, 279

Casual Gods, 401–402, 414, 419

Catherine Wheel, The, 287, 289–90, 293, 298, 305, 307, 314, 316, 328, 338, 340, 351, 422, 424

Songs from the Broadway Production of “The Catherine Wheel,” 305–308, 317

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams), 413

CBGBs, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 77–84, 87, 91–95, 96, 98, 104–107, 110, 113–14, 117, 121, 125, 127, 128, 133, 134, 135, 151, 152, 158, 170, 172, 174–75, 184, 221, 237, 336, 436

Talking Heads at, 2–4, 6, 104–108, 111, 113–15, 117–20, 123, 134, 135, 138, 140, 149, 170, 182, 187, 188, 191, 193, 199, 202, 209, 392, 419

Central Park, 78, 260–63, 275, 309, 342

Charles, Ray, 146–48, 212, 408–409, 433

Chenier, Clifton and Cleveland, 388

Chernoff, John, 246–48, 263, 289, 424

“Cherokee Chief,” 402

Chow, Michael, 313–15, 428

Chow, Tina, 313, 428

Christgau, Robert, 136, 137, 173, 202, 270, 304, 306, 333, 349

Cinecom, 349

Circus, 136, 185

“Cities,” 236, 237, 340

“City of Dreams,” 377, 384, 386, 389

CIVIL WarS, The, 317, 360

Clark, Dick, 220

Clarke, Mary, 169–70, 221

Clash, 151

Claverie, Charlie, 56–57, 72

“Clean Break (Let’s Work), A,” 309

Clemons, Clarence, 110

Clinton, George, 275, 363

Close to the Bone, 338, 348–49

Club 82, 336

Coan, Peter, 55, 87, 169

cocaine, 159, 223, 297, 373–74

Cocks, Jay, 378

Cohen, Leonard, 130

Cohen, Scott, 231

Cohick, Cameron, 309–10

Cohn, Roy, 223

Coleman, Mark, 390–91

Columbia Records, 49, 109–10, 125, 128, 140, 172, 194, 219, 334

Coolidge, Rita, 312

Compass Point, 196–99, 201, 206, 225, 254, 256–57, 294, 296, 298, 301, 312, 318–20, 326, 338, 348, 357, 400

Compass Point All-Stars, 318, 338, 397

Conceptualism, 43–44, 75–77, 99, 103

Concrete Blonde, 430

Conway, Barbara, 67, 68

Cooder, Ry, 49, 371

Coogan, Pat, 33

Cook, Paul, 152

Cooke, Sam, 21

“Cool Water,” 414

Coon, Caroline, 164–65, 250

Cooper, Alice, 67, 68, 91

Cooper, Mark, 423

Coppola, Francis Ford, 386

Corliss, Richard, 378

Corman, Roger, 342

Cortez, Diego, 286

Costello, Elvis, 193–95, 219, 239, 260, 302, 403

Counihan, Adrian, 35

County, Wayne, 79

Crash Test Dummies, 429

“Creatures of Love,” 359, 367, 368

Creem, 92, 136, 137

Croce, Arlene, 299–300

Cronenweth, Jordan, 344–46, 354

Cropper, Steve, 435

“Crosseyed and Painless,” 266–67, 277, 282, 283, 295, 340, 354

Cruz, Celia, 400

Currie, Alannah, 423

cybernetics, 76–77, 159, 162, 178, 179, 361, 368

da Costa, Paulinho, 377, 389

Dadomo, Giovanni, 163

Dalglish, Jamie, 72, 76–78, 83, 87, 88, 90, 104, 117, 170

Damned, 153

Dark Sneak Love Action, 427–29

Daugherty, Jay Dee, 94

Davies, Hunter, 10–11

Davies, Rhett, 197, 198, 254

Davis, Clive, 95, 127, 135, 137–38

Davis, Miles, 226, 254–55, 305, 363

Davison, Mabel, 52

Day, Lisa, 346

Dead Boys, 184, 185

DeCurtis, Anthony, 386, 391, 415

De La Soul, 440

Del Gatto, Lew, 171

Delsener, Ron, 78

Demme, Jonathan, 342–48, 354, 355, 374–76, 378, 400, 418

“Democratic Circus, The,” 411, 418

Demorest, Stephen, 185–86

Denby, David, 356

Denver, John, 2

Devo, 197, 224

Dibango, Manu, 397

Diddley, Bo, 408–409

Dillett, Pat, 441

Di Meola, Al, 246

Dire Straits, 192, 205

Domino, Fats, 408–409

“Don’t Worry About the Government,” 164, 181, 184, 185, 193, 200, 214, 265, 442

Downie, Tyrone, 312, 338

Downtown Rockers, 439

“Dream Operator,” 390

Dr. John, 48, 49, 67

“Drugs” (“Electricity”), 225, 241–42, 256, 277

Duchamp, Marcel, 43, 44

Dunbar, Sly, 250, 318, 326–27

Dunlop, Geoff, 334

Dunn, Ged, 122

Durang, Christopher, 131

Dylan, Bob, 14–16, 27, 34, 47, 78, 85, 110, 115, 128, 133, 137, 180, 197, 304–305, 330, 402, 407, 408, 419

Eagles Club Ballroom, 131

Eggleston, William, 379

Egleson, Jan, 131

“Electric Guitar,” 240–41

Electric Lady Studios, 424

Eliot, T. S., 107

Ellington, Duke, 226, 363

Emerson, Ken, 202, 361–62, 364

EMI, 153–54

Emmons, Beverly, 339

English Beat, 317

Eno, Brian, 76, 158–62, 191–93, 197–201, 204–205, 207, 210, 211, 224, 225, 228, 229, 233–34, 241–42, 244–48, 276, 283, 286, 289, 296, 301, 307, 318, 319, 325, 361, 362, 370, 396, 398, 399, 425, 440, 441

Bowie and, 159, 191, 197, 224

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, 440–41

on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, 248–50, 290–92, 305

on The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads, 309–10

on Remain in Light, 253–64, 266–68, 270, 272–73

in Roxy Music, 158, 161, 162, 204

Entermedia Theater, 216–17

Epstein, Brian, 13, 126, 149

Ertegun, Ahmet, 433–34

Escalators, 251, 260

Europe, 149, 150, 155, 156–58, 189, 192, 196, 201, 229, 311, 315–17

Evereteze, Juan, 55

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, 440–41

Expo 67 World’s Fair, 34

Fabulous Motels, 56–57, 63, 65, 71, 72, 75

“Facts of Life, The,” 401, 411–13

“Fantasy,” 430

Fatboy Slim, 440

Fearnley, James, 399

Fear of Music, 200, 228–32, 233–42, 243–44, 256, 260, 276, 277, 282, 298, 316, 329, 356, 357, 370

see also specific songs

Felker, Clay, 106

Fernandez, Angel, 400, 420, 425

Ferro, Pablo, 349

Ferry, Bryan, 158, 161, 170, 204

Ficca, Billy, 81

Fields, Danny, 91, 125, 126, 131–32, 140, 151, 157

Film Comment, 349

Finkel, Shelly, 188

Finster, Howard, 359–60

“First Week/Last Week . . . Carefree,” 150, 181

Fleetwood Mac, 112

Flood, Richard, 286

Flying Frog Farm, 59–60

Forbes, 424

Ford, Gerald, 116, 117, 138, 167

Forest, The, 419–20, 425

Forster, E. M., 40

Fort Lauderdale News, 309

“Found a Job,” 199, 208–209, 350

Fox Pass, 133

Franklin, Aretha, 112, 255

Franks, David, 49–50

Frantz, Bob, 25–27, 29, 52, 189, 320

Frantz, Chris, 25–29, 61–62, 77, 348, 357, 438, 439

in Artistics, 65–66, 68–72, 90, 98, 207

Caribbean trip of, 250–51

Connecticut home of, 373, 374

early life and family of, 25–29, 55, 114, 169, 406

in the Heads, 430–32

move to New York, 86–88

in rehab, 373–74

at RISD, 5, 25, 29, 30, 41–42, 51–52, 64, 69, 72, 86, 162, 307

and Times profile on Byrne, 362, 364, 365

True Stories film and, 376–77, 386, 387

Weymouth and, 52, 55, 61–62, 69, 86–88, 145

Weymouth’s marriage to, 169

see also Talking Heads; Tom Tom Club

Frantz, Robert Weymouth “Robin,” 320, 341, 357, 368, 392

Frantz, Rodgers, 26

Frantz, Sue, 25–27, 29, 189

Fraser, Robert, 13, 14

Fricke, David, 306, 332

Fripp, Robert, 233, 244, 259, 296

Gabriel, Peter, 216, 397, 398, 427

Gallagher, Frank, 157

Gamble and Huff, 61

Gaynor, Gloria, 141, 149

Gelmis, Joseph, 355

Geldzahler, Henry, 111

“Genius of Love,” 296–97, 300, 301, 307, 308, 340, 348, 352, 418, 430

Get Back, 404–405

Ginsberg, Allen, 15

“Girlfriend Is Better,” 325, 330, 340, 347, 353

“Girls Want to Be with the Girls, The,” 4, 104, 208, 366

Gittins, Ira, 438

“Give Me Back My Name,” 366–67

Glass, Philip, 357, 361, 378, 392, 443

Goetzman, Gary, 344

Golden, Annie, 104

Goldman, Albert, 105, 209

Goldman, Vivien, 163, 186

Goldstein, Richard, 123

Goodman, John, 375, 380–81, 384, 387

“Good Thing, The,” 206–207, 210

Gosch, Dan, 56–57

Gosse, Van, 306, 310

Gottehrer, Richard, 126, 141

GQ, 424

Grabel, Richard, 143, 251

Graham, Bill, 188, 288–89, 318

Graham, Elizabeth “Lally,” 55, 86

Grandin, Temple, 38, 39

Grandmaster Flash, 295, 308

Grateful Dead, 3, 16–17, 19, 67, 82, 219

Gray, Spalding, 376–78, 380, 382

“Great Curve, The,” 267–68, 277

Green, Al, 65, 179, 199, 211, 435

Green, Derek, 154

Green, Sharon, 295

Green Day, 434, 435

Griffin, John, 402

Gropius, Walter, 25

Groves, Lani, 368

Guardian, 438

Guest, Christopher, 345

Haden-Guest, Anthony, 223

Haley, Bill, 344

Hamilton, Jack, 22

Hamilton, Richard, 14, 76, 161

Hanayagi, Suzushi, 317

Hancock, Herbie, 276

Handelman, David, 391–92

Hannah, Duncan, 134

Hansen, Dave, 56–57, 71

“Happy Day,” 179

Hard Day’s Night, A, 344–45, 370

Haring, Keith, 223, 286, 336, 393

Harris, Bob, 154

Harrison, Carol Baxter, 395, 419

Harrison, George, 84, 255, 404, 405

Harrison, Griffin, 395

Harrison, Janice, 129–30, 340, 348, 357, 395

Harrison, Jerry, 100, 128–33, 251, 252, 289, 293, 298, 312, 316, 334, 340, 348, 357, 395, 419, 424, 429–30, 439

Casual Gods, 401–402, 414, 419

early life of, 129–30, 140

in the Heads, 430–32

marriage and children of, 395, 419, 429, 432

in Modern Lovers, 128–29, 132, 140, 145, 304

The Red and the Black, 303–307, 401–402

Talking Heads joined by, 6, 129, 133, 139–40, 143, 145, 149, 156, 171, 174, 175, 197–98

and Times profile on Byrne, 362, 364, 365

True Stories film and, 376–77

Walk on Water, 422–23

see also Talking Heads

Harrison, Richard, 129–30, 340

Harron, Mary, 122–23, 142, 152–53, 394

Harry, Debbie, 83, 98, 174, 202, 295, 393, 423, 430

Hassell, Jon, 244–46, 259, 397

Hawn, Goldie, 343, 344

Hayes, Isaac, 434, 435

Heads, the, 430–31

Hearst, Patty, 93

Heatwave festival, 260–63, 275

“Heaven,” 239–40, 340, 350, 371

Hell, Richard, 80–83, 94, 107, 114, 151, 174, 184, 185, 430

Hendrix, Jimi, 3, 47, 93, 118, 119, 131, 147, 148, 182, 188, 276

Hendryx, Nona, 251, 257, 259, 268, 304, 320, 326, 425

Henley, Beth, 357, 374, 376, 424

Hepworth, David, 339

“Here,” 441, 442

Here Lies Love, 440

“Hey Now,” 388–89

Heyward, Julia, 335

Hilburn, Robert, 355

Himes, Geoffrey, 318

“His Wife Refused,” 306

Hoban, Phoebe, 377, 378

Holmstrom, John, 122

Here Is New York (White), 7–8

Holly, Buddy, 409, 433

Holt, Ednah, 339, 340, 346, 350–54

Holzman, Jac, 66

Hood, Sam, 91

Hooker, John Lee, 255

Hornyak, Gregor, 51

Horton, Yogi, 293, 303

Hoskyns, Barney, 333

“Houses in Motion,” 259, 262, 270–71, 277

Howlin’ Wolf, 48, 255

How Music Works (Byrne), 440

Hughes, Robert, 285

Hunter, James, 365–66

Hunter, Meredith, 20, 21

Huot, Bob, 288

Hutchence, Michael, 430

Huxley, Aldous, 28

“I Feel It in My Heart,” 124

“I Get Wild / Wild Gravity,” 327, 330

Ilé Aiyé (The House of Life), 420, 422

Imlay, Michael, 60, 64

“I’m Not in Love,” 4, 119, 209–10

“Independence Day,” 421

Ingle, John, 388

Interview, 134–35, 287

INXS, 348, 430

Island Alive, 347, 349

Island Records, 134, 188, 196, 229, 251, 294

“It’s Nasty,” 308

“I Want to Live,” 124

“I Wish You Wouldn’t Say That,” 69, 98, 119, 128

“I Zimbra,” 233–35, 240, 254, 261, 277, 292, 319, 340, 347, 442

Jackson, Joe, 333

Jackson, Michael, 332, 334, 378

Jagger, Mick, 3, 20–21, 58, 59, 231, 309, 398

Jankel, Annabel, 417–18

Japan, 311–13, 338, 339

Javits, Jacob, 116

Jeansonne, Elisca, 64, 67–68

Jenkins, Mark, 415

Jenkins, Wendy, 34, 59

Jenshel, Len, 379

Jerden, Dave, 246, 254, 258, 259, 298

Jockey Slut, 439

Joel, Billy, 91, 133, 180, 333–34

Johansen, David, 58–59

John, Elton, 3, 61, 66, 97, 158

Johnson, Syl, 211

Jones, Brian, 18

Jones, Busta, 244, 251–52, 258–60, 275–79, 312

Jones, Butch, 298, 315

Jones, Grace, 318, 393

Jones, Jeff, 188–89

Jones, Quincy, 334

Jones, Raymond, 312, 316, 338

Jones, Steve, 152

Jordan, Esteban “Steve,” 390

Joy Division, 273

Just Around Midnight (Hamilton), 22

Kael, Pauline, 355–56

Kakutani, Michiko, 378

Kanner, Leo, 36–37

Kanté, Mory, 397

Kaufman, Matthew, 127–28

Kaye, Lenny, 66, 92, 93, 95, 96, 173

Kearney, Melissa, 47, 60–61, 77

Kehoe, Marc, 46–50, 59–61, 63–65, 70, 72, 77, 114, 124, 210

Kelly, Ellsworth, 111

Kent, Nick, 154, 164, 244, 432

Kesey, Ken, 16, 19

Kiedis, Anthony, 435

Kihn, Martin, 424

King, Albert, 251, 367

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 21

King Crimson, 233, 296, 312

Kinks, 13, 35, 56, 65, 66, 366

Kinsey, Donald, 251

Kirchherr, Astrid, 12

Kirschenbaum, Barry, 70

Kisselgoff, Anna, 299

Kitchen, 57, 99, 101, 123–24, 128, 151, 193, 245

Klagstad, Jason, 423

Klein, Allen, 18, 19

Knee Plays, The, 317, 357, 360, 362, 388

Knight, Gladys, 150

Knopfler, Mark, 192, 363

Koch, Ed, 167–68, 280, 337

Kool & the Gang, 255

Kosuth, Joseph, 43, 44

Kovacs, Andrea, 75–77, 83, 87, 98–99, 111–12, 119, 179, 180, 200

Kowalczyk, Ed, 430

Kozak, Roman, 312

Kral, Ivan, 94

Kristal, Hilly, 2, 78–80, 82, 83, 87, 91–92, 94, 95, 104, 105, 115, 419, 435, 436

Ku Klux Klan, 131

Kuhlman, Kathryn, 249, 290, 291

Kurfirst, Gary, 188, 189, 191, 192, 196–97, 216, 229, 250–52, 253, 262, 275, 289, 294, 311, 334, 340–41, 344, 346, 347, 375, 397, 398, 423, 425–26, 430, 435

Kurtz, Swoosie, 375, 377, 381

Kushnick, Ken, 169, 188, 220

Kuti, Fela, 162, 224, 233, 247, 301, 306, 327

Labelle, 388

Lachman, Ed, 375

“Lady Don’t Mind, The,” 367–68

Lampkin, Tyrone, 251

Landau, Jon, 109–10, 136, 433

Landry, Dickie, 326

Lanier, Allen, 92

Lanois, Daniel, 398

Larriva, Tito, 376, 384, 387, 390

Last, Julie, 234, 298

Last Emperor, The, 399–400, 415–16

Last Waltz, The, 345, 349

Late Night with David Letterman, 340

Launay, Nick, 424, 425

Le Braz, Anatole, 52

Lee, Spike, 441

Leibovitz, Annie, 378

Lennon, John, 11–13, 18, 66, 81, 84, 92, 101, 110, 111, 124, 197, 241, 255, 280–81, 309, 363, 368, 404–406, 443

Lesh, Phil, 16

Lester, Richard, 344–45

Lethem, Jonathan, 241

“Let It Come Down,” 402

Levine, Laura, 308

Lewis, Mingo, 246

LeWitt, Sol, 43, 44

Life, 105

“Life During Wartime,” 237–39, 243–44, 254, 261, 272, 277, 282, 316, 317, 340, 351, 356, 428, 434, 436

“Lifetime Piling Up,” 413

Lillywhite, Steve, 397–99, 413, 421

Lindsay, John, 74

“Listening Wind,” 272

Little Creatures, 357–61, 364, 365–72, 373, 387, 390, 396, 406, 417, 421, 430

see also specific songs

Little Richard, 148, 389, 433

Live, 429–30

Lloyd, Richard, 79, 81, 82

Lobell, Joan, 50, 59–60, 76, 77, 104

London, 149, 151–54, 158, 163–64, 201, 397

Lopatin, Daniel, 441

Los Angeles Times, 318, 329, 355, 385, 390, 425, 427

Lott, Tim, 192–93

Loud, Lance, 134–35

Loup Garou, 359

“Love → Building on Fire,” 127, 128, 141–43, 217, 309, 316, 323, 340

“Love for Sale,” 377, 383, 386, 387

Love This Giant, 440

“Love Wave,” 427–28

Lovin’ Spoonful, 131

Lower Manhattan Ocean Club, 138–40, 221, 434

Luaka Bop, 420

LuPone, Patti, 357

Lutz, Adelle, 312–15, 317, 321, 339, 348, 357, 374, 375, 378, 400, 420, 428, 438

Lutz, Miwako, 313

Lutz, Walter, 313

Lydon, John, 151–53, 190

Lynch, David, 386

Mabou Mines, 339, 357, 361

Mabry, Lynn, 339, 340, 346, 350–54

MacColl, Kirsty, 398, 399, 410, 418, 421

Macdonell, Jimmy, 359, 370–71

Mackay, Andy, 161

Madonna, 336, 375, 378

Maelen, Jimmy, 171

“Making Flippy Floppy,” 324–25, 330, 351

“Man with the 4-Way Hips, The,” 348

Manzanera, Phil, 158–59

Mapplethorpe, Robert, 75, 92, 93, 134, 138, 286, 287

Marcus, Greil, 20

Marden, Brice, 75, 89

Marley, Bob, 196, 312, 319, 357, 363, 400

Marley, Ziggy, 400–401, 419

Marr, Johnny, 399, 409, 410, 414, 418

Marsh, Dave, 136

Martin, George, 153

Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), 23, 36, 45–47, 49, 59, 60, 97, 209

Maslin, Janet, 356, 385

Mason, Robert, 244

Mass, Steve, 221, 222, 224

Massey, Edith, 60–61

Matlock, Glen, 152, 154

Max’s Kansas City, 17, 82, 90–92, 100, 117, 125, 394

Mboup, Abdou, 397, 423

McCartney, Linda, 112

McCartney, Paul, 6, 13, 84, 84, 101–102, 124, 197, 208, 309, 334, 363, 370, 404, 405

McCrae, Bruce, 56–57

McCrae, George, 180

McDonald, Dolette, 260, 267, 276–78, 289, 304, 312, 320, 326, 338, 425

McDonald, Rodaidh, 441

McEnroe, Anne, 376

McLaren, Malcolm, 59, 151–55

McLeod, Sandy, 344–46, 375, 418

McLuhan, Marshall, 235

McNeil, Legs, 122

McVie, Christine, 112

Mead, Taylor, 223

Melody Maker, 161, 163–65, 192, 232

Melvin and Howard, 342, 343

“Memories Can’t Wait,” 238, 239

Menezes, Margareth, 422

Mercer Arts Center, 57, 99, 100

Merkin, Richard, 51–52

Metzger, Bob, 130

Miles, Barry, 149

Military Brats (Wertsch), 54

Miller, David, 29

Millman, Joyce, 415

Mills, Tommy Dean, 117

“Mind,” 235, 316

Mingus, Charles, 189

Minneapolis Star, 425

Mitchell, Joni, 402, 410

Miyake, Kiki, 420

Modern Lovers, 99–101, 127–29, 132, 139, 140, 145, 304

“Mommy Daddy You and I,” 412–13

Monardo, Meco, 149

Monk, Meredith, 357

Montreal Gazette, 402

Moon, Tom, 431

“Moon Rocks,” 328–30

Moore, Sam, 435

More Songs About Buildings and Food, 199–203, 204–14, 216–19

see also specific songs

Morrell, Tom, 377, 384

Morrison, Jim, 95

Morrison, Sterling, 15

Morrison, Van, 95, 371, 402

Morton, Paul, 291

Morton, Rocky, 417–18

Moss, Jerry, 154

Mother’s, 117

Motherwell, Robert, 361

Mountain, 188

Moving Star Hall Singers, 291

“Mr. Jones,” 407–408, 422

MTV, 284–85, 333–34, 336, 347, 383, 417, 418

Mudd Club, 221–24, 230, 237, 244, 286, 294, 336, 434

Mumps, 134

Murphy, Elliott, 133, 395

Murphy, Karen, 375

Murray, Blast, 430

Murray, Charles Shaar, 121–22, 152

Murray, George, 293, 303

Musician, 306

“My Big Hands,” 306, 316, 317, 328

My Father’s Place, 138

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, 248–50, 254, 257, 269, 290–92, 293, 305, 306, 396, 421–22

Naked, 396–401, 403, 406–16, 417–19, 421

Name of This Band Is Talking Heads, The, 308–10, 311

Narara Festival, 348

Nath, Pran, 245

Nathan, Syd, 126

National Society of Film Critics, 357

N’Djock, Yves, 397, 410, 418

Nelson, Paul, 136, 137

Neon Boys, 81

“New Feeling,” 142–43, 178

Newman, Randy, 68, 164, 202–203, 208, 219, 236, 288, 368, 388, 402

New Musical Express (NME), 121–22, 149, 151, 152, 163, 164, 192, 232, 244, 245, 264, 333

New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, 388

Newsday, 187, 355

New York, 106, 299, 356, 377, 378, 394

New York City, 6–9, 73–75, 139, 166–69, 279–81

art world in, 25, 123, 139, 200–201, 285–87

blackout in, 168

fiscal crisis in, 1–2, 6–7, 74–75, 116–17, 167, 181, 213, 337

music business in, 58, 136–37

9/11 attacks in, 434, 437–38

real estate in, 336–37

Son of Sam in, 168–69, 237

New York Daily News, 1–2, 74, 117, 168

New York Dolls, 57–59, 83, 91, 100, 114, 151, 193

New Yorker, 121, 213, 299, 355

New York Film Festival, 378

New York/New Wave exhibition, 286–87

New York Rocker, 136, 308

New York Times, 5, 10, 115, 136, 185, 190, 202, 219, 224, 232, 261, 274, 279–80, 288, 299, 307, 308, 318, 355, 356, 365, 378, 385, 390, 394, 421, 422, 428, 434, 442

New York Times Magazine, 361–62, 364, 376

New Zealand, 347–48

Nico, 14, 17, 160, 222

9/11 attacks, 434, 437–38

Nixon, Richard, 74, 80, 382

Nobody Nowhere (Williams), 432

“No Compassion,” 111–12, 179–80, 271

No Talking Just Head, 431, 432

“(Nothing But) Flowers,” 399, 409–11, 417, 418, 428

Nuggets, 66, 67, 92, 95

O’Brien, Glenn, 287

Observer, 428

O’Connor, Frank, 53–54

Old Grey Whistle Test, The, 154, 193, 285, 285

“Once in a Lifetime,” 268–70, 277, 282–84, 316, 326, 333, 336, 352, 356, 361, 409, 443

Ono, Yoko, 18, 92, 280–81, 393

Ophirex, 439

Ork, Terry, 79, 81–83, 105

Ostin, Mo, 253

Oui, 231

“Overload, The,” 262, 272–73

Pacheco, Johnny, 420

Page, Tim, 38–40, 77, 271

Painting Club, 69

Palmer, Earl, 148

Palmer, Robert, 134, 135, 197, 306–308, 318, 415

Palm Productions, 432–33

Pantages, Alexander, 346

Pantages Theater, 344, 346, 422

“Papa Legba,” 387, 389, 422

“Paper,” 235–36, 239, 366

Pappalardi, Felix, 188, 251

Parallel Play (Page), 38–40

Pareles, Jon, 390, 421, 422, 428, 434

Paris, 396–400, 409

Paris, Jon, 130

Parker, Charlie, 16

Parliament-Funkadelic (P-Funk), 251, 255, 260, 275, 276, 296, 339, 323, 325, 436

Parson, Annie-B, 440, 441

Partridge, Andy, 430

Peel, John, 161

Peggy Sue Got Married, 386

Pei, I. M., 55, 258, 433

“People Like Us,” 377, 387

“Perfect Lie, A,” 402

“Perfect World,” 368

Perry, Lee “Scratch,” 294

Petit, Philippe, 73–74, 116, 166

Petty, Tom, 434

Philadelphia Inquirer, 349, 394, 402, 415

Phillips, Tom, 159–60

Piccarella, John, 202, 304

Pickett, Lenny, 400

Pink Floyd, 58, 128, 160, 161

Pitney, Gene, 434

“Pleasure of Love,” 338, 348, 418

Pogues, 398, 399

Pointer Sisters, 388

Police, 302, 317, 338, 431

Pond, Steve, 390

Pop, Iggy, 430

Popular Favorites 1976–1992, 429

Porter, George, Jr., 425, 428

Prado, Perez, 406, 408

Prager, Bud, 188

Presley, Elvis, 20, 57, 58, 118, 148, 175, 194, 218, 283, 344, 433

Pressman, Edward, 375, 376

Pretenders, 260, 348

Prince, 356, 363

Prince, Prairie, 246

Private Stock Records, 141

“Psycho Killer,” 4, 67–69, 98, 101, 118, 120, 123, 150–51, 171, 181–83, 193, 207, 211, 232, 237, 261, 276–77, 316, 323, 339, 349–50, 352, 356, 424, 434, 436

Public Theater, 357

“Pulled Up,” 172, 183–85, 200

“Pull Up the Roots,” 329, 330

Punk, 5, 122–23, 136, 153, 172

“Puzzlin’ Evidence,” 388

Q, 416, 423

Quinn, Lance, 150, 171, 177

Quinn, Owen, 115–16, 166

Radioactive Records, 430

“Radio Head,” 387, 390

Rain Man, 37, 428

Raitt, Bonnie, 112

Rambali, Paul, 192, 232, 264

Ramones, 2, 3, 6, 83–85, 87, 97, 104–106, 114, 115, 117, 121, 122, 125–27, 133, 135, 137, 138, 140–42, 148, 149, 151, 152, 155, 156–58, 163, 164, 174, 184–85, 212, 216, 219, 387, 423, 434, 435

Rantoul, Talbot, 70

Rat, the, 133, 189

Rauschenberg, Robert, 320–22, 378

Reagan, Ronald, 116–17, 279–81, 285, 379, 382, 411

Record Mirror, 192

Record Plant, 225, 229

Red and the Black, The, 303–307, 401–402

Redding, Otis, 4, 21, 27, 67, 68, 173, 183, 211, 366

Reed, Lou, 14–18, 51, 56, 58, 75, 95, 97, 100, 101, 114, 122, 127, 135, 139, 160, 272, 387, 393, 402, 419

Reich, Steve, 245

Reichbart, Naomi, 47, 59, 63, 64, 70–72, 114

Rei Momo, 420–22, 425

Reiner, Rob, 345

R.E.M., 332, 359, 429

Remain in Light, 253–64, 265–73, 274–78, 282–83, 291, 294, 306, 310, 312, 315, 316, 319, 325, 329, 340, 370, 391, 396, 402, 406, 415, 421

see also specific songs

“Rev It Up,” 402

Reynolds, Simon, 279

Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), 10, 23–25, 41–46, 55–57, 59, 60, 63–65, 69–72, 75, 87, 97–99, 104, 114, 115, 134, 169–70, 186

Byrne at, 5, 36, 41–45, 49, 50, 64, 70–72, 76, 122, 209, 328, 361

Frantz at, 5, 25, 29, 30, 41–42, 51–52, 64, 69, 72, 86, 162, 307

Weymouth at, 5, 55, 64, 69, 86, 307

Rich, Frank, 131

Richards, Keith, 58, 107, 309, 398

Richman, Jonathan, 99–101, 123, 127, 128, 131–32, 139, 140, 145, 304

Riley, Terry, 159, 245

Rimbaud, Arthur, 330

Rivers, Sam, 75

Rizzi, Frank, 348, 419

Rizzi, James, 300, 418

“Road to Nowhere,” 370–72, 428, 443

Roberts, Brad, 429

Roberts, Hugh, 41, 42, 64

Robinson, Cynthia, 112

Robinson, David, 100

Robinson, Richard, 220

Robinson, Smokey, 48

Rock, Mick, 172

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, 433–36, 438

Rockefeller, Nelson, 116

Rocket, Charles (Charlie Claverie), 56–57, 72

Rock Garden, 158, 159, 161, 163

Rock Scene, 220

Rockwell, John, 5, 10, 115, 119, 123–25, 136–37, 185, 202, 219, 232, 261, 274, 288, 355, 365

Rolling Stone, 49, 82, 92, 136, 137, 185, 190, 202, 274–75, 306, 332, 362, 386, 390–91, 396, 402, 415, 431, 433, 434

Talking Heads cover story in, 391–93

Rolling Stones, 13, 18–22, 33, 47, 48, 58, 66, 81, 97, 130, 131, 158, 173, 182, 202, 207, 284, 367, 384, 397–98, 409

Ronson, Mick, 18

Rorem, Ned, 47

Rose, Frank, 185

Rossy, José, 259, 276, 290

Rotten, Johnny, 151–53, 190

Roundhouse, 163–64

Roxy Music, 152, 153, 158–59, 161, 162, 197, 204, 213, 251, 275

Rubell, Steve, 223

“Ruby Dear,” 398, 409

Ruscha, Ed, 429

Ruskin, Mickey, 90–92, 138–39, 221, 320, 336

Russell, Arthur, 99, 151, 171, 423

Russell, George, 254–55

Russell, Kurt, 343

Sacks, Oliver, 38, 39, 201

Sadkin, Alex, 318–20, 327, 400–401

St. Vincent, 440

Sakamoto, Ryuichi, 400

Salas, Oscar, 425

Salgado, Sebastião, 401, 414

San Francisco Film Festival, 349, 433

Santana, Carlos, 246

Sante, Lucy, 8

Sappington, Joe, 32–33

Saturday Night Fever, 218

Saturday Night Live, 57, 117, 138, 171, 219, 295, 400, 422, 430

Sayles, John, 349

Scales, Steve, 260, 275–78, 289, 290, 309, 312, 315, 316, 323, 338, 340, 350, 352, 353, 419, 434, 436

Scharf, Kenny, 336

Schjeldahl, Peter, 287

Schmidt, Peter, 160

Schneider, Ronnie, 19

Schumer, Chuck, 131

Schwartz, Delmore, 15

Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 210, 375

Scorsese, Martin, 345, 349

Scovil, Gary, 188–89

Sculatti, Gene, 137

“Seen and Not Seen,” 271

Selby, Hubert, 16

September 11 attacks, 434, 437–38

Sex Pistols, 59, 151–55, 163–64, 219

Shakespeare, Robbie, 250, 318

Shapiro, Andi, 42, 52, 55

Sharks, 251

Sha-Rock, MC, 295

Shawn, Wallace, 357

Shearer, Harry, 345

Shelton, Robert, 115

Shepard, Sam, 92

Shirts, 104, 115, 144

Shore, Jeff, 72

“Sick Boy,” 69

Sieger, John, 423

Sigma Sound, 257, 259, 320, 358, 387, 400, 401, 419

Simon, Paul, 146, 371, 388, 390, 396, 402

Sinclair, Rob, 441

Singin’ in the Rain, 370

Sire Records, 6, 125–27, 137, 140–43, 149, 170–71, 185, 188, 201, 219, 220, 244, 249, 253, 257, 263, 282, 284, 289, 290, 293, 300, 305, 308, 370, 417

Slade, Jeffrey, 430, 431

“Sleep Angel,” 423

“Slink,” 316

“Slippery People,” 320, 326, 330, 340, 350, 376, 442–43

Sly and Robbie, 250, 318

Smith, Patti, 2, 92–95, 96, 105, 106, 108, 110, 113–15, 122, 134, 137–40, 147, 174, 185, 193, 219, 387, 434

Smith, Roger, 361

Sohl, Richard, 93

Soho Weekly News, 80, 92, 185, 207

“Something Ain’t Right,” 428

Something Wild, 400

“Song of Angels,” 402

Son of Sam, 168–69, 237

Soul Train, 61, 65, 283

Sounds, 163, 186, 201

South Bank Show, The, 230, 334

Soviero, Don, 91

Speaking in Tongues, 318–22, 323–31, 332–35, 338, 340, 347, 356, 396, 402, 406, 417, 421

see also specific songs

Spectator, 415

Spector, Mark, 128

Spector, Phil, 110

Spedding, Chris, 251

Spin, 415

“Spin Spin Spin,” 69, 72

Springsteen, Bruce, 109–11, 128, 133, 136, 202, 212, 288, 333, 363, 364, 384, 402, 433

Spy, 424

Sragow, Michael, 349

Stahler, Hank, 65, 67, 68, 71, 72

Stanley, Steve, 294, 296, 297, 338

Staples, Pops, 376, 381, 384, 387, 389

Staple Singers, 376

Stasium, Ed, 150, 171, 172, 177, 224

Stax Records, 142, 163, 173, 174, 367, 398, 434

“Stay Hungry,” 124, 197, 210, 277

“Stay Up Late,” 368–69

Stein, Chris, 83, 286, 423

Stein, Linda, 125, 126, 157, 169

Stein, Seymour, 125–28, 137, 140–42, 144, 149–51, 169, 170–72, 184–85, 188, 191–94, 196, 219, 220, 224, 249, 253, 289, 293, 297–98, 300, 308, 433, 435

Steinberg, Saul, 213

Stendhal, 304

Stewart, Jim, 434, 435

Stewart, Mickey, 157

Stilettoes, 83

Stipe, Michael, 359

Stone, Sly, 112, 255, 339

Stop Making Sense, 342–54, 355–57, 365, 373, 374, 375, 377, 400, 419, 422, 430, 432, 442, 445

soundtrack album, 356–58, 373, 417, 432–33

Studio Davout, 397–99

Studio 54, 222, 223

Su, Cong, 400

Suicide, 79, 113

Sullivan, Jim, 431–32

Sundragon Studios, 141–42, 149–50, 171, 405

Sutcliffe, Phil, 201

Sutcliffe, Stuart, 11–13, 81

“Swamp,” 316, 328, 330, 351, 369

Swing Shift, 343, 344, 346

Sylvester, 220, 303

Symbionese Liberation Army, 93, 237

“Take Me to the River,” 199, 211–12, 217–20, 225, 229, 261, 274, 277, 309, 340, 356, 435

Talking Heads

concert film of, see Stop Making Sense

disbanding of, 419, 425–26, 427, 429, 431

end of touring by, 348, 403

Expanded Heads, 275–79, 287, 293, 308–10, 312, 350–51, 361, 418, 419

formation of, 87–90, 96–98, 101–104, 161

Harrison’s joining of, 6, 129, 133, 139–40, 143, 145, 149, 156, 171, 174, 175, 197–98

name of, 102–103

reunions of, 438–39, 445

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction of, 433–36, 438

Rolling Stone cover story on, 391–93

tensions in, 362, 364, 391–93, 396, 398, 424

working relationship in, 226–28, 312, 362–64, 396

see also specific albums and songs

Talking Heads: 77, 170–72, 175, 177–85, 187–88, 190, 192, 197, 200–202, 217, 218

see also specific songs

Tallent, Garry, 364

Talley, André Leon, 71

Tantalizing Tampoons, 57, 67, 169

Television, 2, 79–83, 87, 92–93, 102, 105–107, 117, 164, 185, 216

“Television Man,” 369–70

Temptations, 255, 369

Ten Car Pileup, 428

“Tentative Decisions,” 104, 119, 178–79

Texas Monthly, 379

“Thank You for Sending Me an Angel,” 128, 205–206, 217, 220, 340, 350

Tharp, Twyla, 287–89, 298–300, 314

Byrne and, 289, 293, 314, 339, 361, 366, 378, 392

see also Catherine Wheel, The

“This Is a Foxy World,” 348

This Is Spinal Tap, 345, 375

“This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody),” 330–31, 333, 351–52, 411, 442

Thomas, Chris, 153, 158

Thomas, Rufus, 367

Thompson, Robert F., 245, 263, 267

Thompson, Uziah “Sticky,” 301, 318

Thorngren, Eric, 357, 358, 369

Thunders, Johnny, 58

Timbers, Alex, 440, 441

Time, 378–79, 391

Times (London), 165

Tobias, Tobi, 299

Tobolowsky, Stephen, 357, 374–76

Tom Tom Club, 294, 311, 316, 348, 352, 423

Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom, 419

Close to the Bone, 338, 348–49

Dark Sneak Love Action, 427–29

Downtown Rockers, 439

Tom Tom Club, 294–98, 300–301, 303, 304, 306–308, 311, 312

Tosh, Peter, 250, 326

“Totally Nude,” 401, 408

Toussaint, Allen, 388

Townshend, Pete, 76, 82, 161

Trakin, Roy, 207, 261

True Stories (album), 364, 378, 386–91, 396, 421

see also specific songs

True Stories (film), 357, 374–84, 385–86, 390, 392

screenplay for, 379, 411, 424

Trump, Donald, 337

Trump, Fred, 337

Tubes, 246

Tucker, Ken, 274, 349, 394, 402, 415

Tucker, Maureen, 112

Tufts, Nancy Poore, 61

Turner, Steve, 416

Turtletaub, Jeff, 70, 114

Tutuola, Amos, 249

T-Venus, 335

U2, 279, 397, 398

Uh-Oh, 428

“Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town,” 172, 177–78

Upstairs at Max’s, 91

Us Festival, 317–18

Valentine, Gary, 125

Valentine, Penny, 192

Vanity Fair, 378, 394

Variety, 349, 357

Vedder, Eddie, 435

Vega, Alan, 79, 113

Velvet Underground, 14–17, 21, 51, 91, 97, 100–101, 107, 112, 121, 125, 131, 132, 139, 160, 269, 394, 395, 419

Verlaine, Tom, 2, 79–82, 92–94, 107, 114, 164, 174

Verve Records, 14

Vicious, Sid, 154

Village Voice, 5, 88, 94, 105–108, 109, 115, 123, 136, 137, 173, 185, 202, 232, 287, 304, 306, 310, 332, 333, 349

Violent Femmes, 395, 430

Virgin Atlantic, 401

Virgin Prunes, 430

Virgin Records, 154–55

Vogue, 378

Vollmer, Jürgen, 12

Voormann, Klaus, 12

Wagstaff, Sam, 93, 94

Wailers, 91, 188, 255, 312

Walkers, 130

“Walk It Down,” 369

Walk on Water, 422–23

Waller, Don, 318

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, 440

Warhol, Andy, 14–17, 21, 51, 58, 82, 90, 91, 125, 134–35, 139, 223, 286, 336, 393–94

Warner Bros., 49, 140, 172, 190, 216–17, 219, 224, 249, 253, 275, 321, 336, 343, 344, 346, 375, 387, 420, 432–33

Warner-Elektra-Atlantic (WEA), 171, 184, 190, 201

“Warning Sign,” 69, 98, 101, 197, 207, 277

Washington Post, 55, 415

Wassy, Brice, 397, 398, 409, 423

Waters, John, 60–61

Waters, Muddy, 21

Weather Underground, 237

Weinberg, Max, 109, 364

Weintraub, Stu, 188, 189

Weir, Alex, 312, 315, 316, 338, 340, 350–52, 354, 419, 423

Weissberg, Eric, 359, 400, 408, 411

Wellikoff, Rick, 281

Wenner, Jann, 391, 433, 434

Wertsch, Mary Edwards, 54

West, Leslie, 188

Westwood, Vivienne, 151

Wexler, Jerry, 126, 353, 433

Weymouth, Danielle, 53

Weymouth, Lani, 53, 239, 294, 296, 304, 316, 340, 348

Weymouth, Laura (Tina’s mother), 52, 53, 64–65

Weymouth, Laura (Tina’s sister), 53, 239, 294, 296, 304, 316, 340, 348, 419

Weymouth, Letitia, 53

Weymouth, Loric, 53, 401

Weymouth, Ralph, 52–54, 64–65

Weymouth, Tina, 3, 52–55, 61–62, 89–90, 348, 357, 439

Byrne and, 89–90, 102, 112–13, 143–45, 164–65, 182–83, 431–32, 438–39

Caribbean trip of, 250–51

Connecticut home of, 373, 374

early life and family of, 52–55, 112, 114, 169, 406

Frantz and, 52, 55, 61–62, 69, 86–88, 145

Frantz’s marriage to, 169

in the Heads, 430–32

move to New York, 86–88

pregnancy of, 311, 315, 317, 318, 320

at RISD, 5, 55, 64, 69, 86, 307

Sullivan’s interview with, 431–32

and Times profile on Byrne, 361–62, 364, 365

True Stories film and, 376–77, 386, 387

see also Talking Heads; Tom Tom Club

Weymouth, Yann, 52–55, 86–88, 104–105, 138, 169, 230, 258–59

“What a Day That Was,” 316, 351, 356

“When I Go Out with Artists,” 429

White, E. B., 7–8, 114

Who, 3, 13, 35, 48, 58, 65, 66, 68, 81, 97, 118, 152, 171, 183, 188

“Who Is It,” 150, 179

Wiener, Norbert, 76

“Wild Wild Life,” 377, 381, 386, 387, 389

Williams, Donna, 432

Williams, Richard, 161, 165, 245–46

Williams, Tennessee, 413

Willig, George, 166–67

Willis, Ellen, 121

Wilson, Robert, 314, 317, 339, 357, 360, 361, 378, 392, 419–20

Wilson, Tom, 14–15

Wing, Lorna, 37, 38

Wings, 112

Winter, Johnny, 130

With, Mattis, 441

“With Our Love,” 104, 119, 206

Wolcott, James, 94, 105–108, 109, 114, 115, 118, 378, 394

Wolf, Dan, 106

Wolff, Christian, 160

Wonder, Stevie, 146–47, 276

Woods-Gerry House, 70–71

“Wordy Rappinghood,” 295–97, 300

Worrell, Bernie, 56, 251, 260, 267, 275–79, 289, 303, 312, 316, 317, 325, 339, 340, 350–52, 419, 423, 434, 436

Wozniak, Steve, 318

XTC, 192, 397, 430

Yeats, William Butler, 272–73

Yetnikoff, Walter, 219

Yockel, Michael, 34, 77, 104

Young, La Monte, 15, 245

Young, Neil, 240, 402

Yule, Doug, 17

Zapp, 296

Zappa, Frank, 49, 56, 57, 67, 276

Zieve, Michael, 98, 102–103, 197, 209

Photo Section

“THE CONSERVATIVE IMPULSE IN THE NEW ROCK UNDERGROUND,” 1975

© Linda D. Robbins/Getty Images

ON TOUR IN EUROPE, 1977

© Gijsbert Hanekroot/Alamy Stock Photo

ONSTAGE AT CBGBS

© Ebet Roberts/Getty Images

AT THE ENTERMEDIA THEATER, 1978

© Ebet Roberts/Getty Images

DAVID BYRNE AND BRIAN ENO

© Ebet Roberts/Getty Images

EXPANDED HEADS, 1980

© Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

TINA AND BUSTA: “TWO KINGS IN ONE PALACE”

© Rob Verhorst/Getty Images

TOM TOM CLUB IN JAPAN, 1982

© Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images

JONATHAN DEMME AND DAVID BYRNE

© Nick Elgar/Getty Images

“STOP MAKING SENSE IS CLOSE TO PERFECTION”

© Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

“THIS MUST BE THE PLACE . . .”

© TCD/Prod. DB/Alamy Stock Photo

THE BIG SUIT

© John Atashian/Alamy Stock Photo

AN ANTHROPOLOGIST IN VIRGIL, 1986

© Album/Alamy Stock Photo

TALKING HEADS, 1988

© Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME, 2022

© KMazur/Getty Images

About the Author

JONATHAN GOULD is a writer and a former professional musician. A contributing writer for The New Yorker, he is the author of Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America and Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life. He currently divides his time between Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Livingston, New York.

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Also by Jonathan Gould

Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America (2007)

Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life (2017)

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FIRST EDITION

Cover design by Brian Moore

Cover photograph © Marcia Resnick / Getty Images (Talking Heads); © Colors Hunter / Getty Images (red paper)

Digital Edition JUNE 2025 ISBN: 978-0-06-302300-0

Version 04252025

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-302298-0

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