on our Stax Volt influences—and they were right. We were half art band and half funky groove band, something that the US press didn’t really pick up on until we mutated into a full-on art-funk revue a few years later. But it was all there, right from the beginning, though the proportions were completely different. Chris and Tina were a great rhythm section, and though Chris didn’t play fancy, he played solid. That gave us a firm foundation for all the angular shit that I was throwing around.
What does being tight mean? It’s hard to define now, in an age where instrumental performances and even vocals can be digitally quantified and made to perfectly fit the beat. I realize now that it doesn’t actually mean that everyone plays exactly to the beat; it means that everyone plays together. Sometimes a band that has played together a lot will evolve to where they play some parts ahead of the beat and some slightly behind, and singers do the same thing. A good singer will often use the “grid” of the rhythm as something to play with—never landing exactly on a beat, but pushing and pulling around and against it in ways that we read, when it’s well done, as being emotional. It turns out that not being perfectly aligned with a grid is okay; in fact, sometimes it feels better than a perfectly metric fixed-up version. When Willie Nelson or George Jones sing way off the beat, it somehow increases the sense that they’re telling you the story, conveying it to you, one person to another. The lurches and hesitations are internalized through performance, and after a while everyone knows when they’ll happen. The performers don’t have to think about them, and at some point that becomes part of the band’s sound. Those agreed-upon imperfections are what give a performance character, and eventually the listener recognizes that it’s the very thing that makes a band or singer distinctive.
The musician and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin once demonstrated an experiment he had devised at his research lab in Montreal. He had a classical pianist play a Chopin piece on a Diskclavier, a sort of electronic player piano. The piano memorized the pianist’s keystrokes and could play them back. Levitin then dialed back the expressiveness incrementally until every note hit exactly on a beat. No surprise, this came across as drained of emotion, though it was technically more accurate. Alternatively, the expressiveness could be ramped up, and playing became more florid and even less on the grid. This too was unemotional; it veered toward chaos.
Musicians sort of knew this already—that the emotional center is not the technical center, that funky grooves are not square, and what sounds like a simple beat can either be sensuous or simply a metronomic timekeeper, depending on the player.
Throughout the three-piece and four-piece periods, Talking Heads songs, and even the shows, were still mostly about self-examination, angst, and bafflement at the world we found ourselves in. Psychological stuff. Inward-looking clumps of words combined with my slightly removed “anthropologist from Mars” view of human relationships. The groove was always there, as a kind of physical body-oriented antidote to this nervous angsty flailing, but the groove never took over. It served as a sonic and psychological safety net, a link to the body. It said that no matter how alienated the subject or the singer might appear, the groove and its connection to the body would provide solace and grounding. But the edgy, uncomfortable stuff was still the foreground.
While we were on tour, we saw our contemporaries performing. We saw the Clash in a school auditorium in England. It was hard to make out what was going on musically, but it was obvious that the music that was emerging then was viewed as more of a coherent movement there, with the anthemic rabble-rousing aspect bringing that point home. Any rabble-rousing in our own music was buried pretty deep. I still thought the most subversive thing was to look totally normal. To look like a rebel was to pigeonhole yourself in advance as someone who spoke only to other rebels. I never completely achieved that normal look, but it was a guiding principle. So, although some of us might have alluded to the James Deans of the world with our attire, we drew the line at leather jackets and safety pins. Within a couple of years, I’d be wearing Oxfords and regular suit jackets in another weird attempt to fit in.
While in London I visited the Virgin Records office, which was then just off Portobello Road, and they let me watch a bunch of Sex Pistols appearances on video. I thought the band was hilarious—not a joke, but definitely a species of comedy. It was almost a parody of a rock-and-roll band; they couldn’t play, they could barely even stand up. Not everyone understood how I could like something and laugh at it at the same time, but don’t we love our great comedians?
By the time our second record came out in 1978, we were playing larger venues: small theaters rather than the familiar grotty clubs. We usually headlined, with one act playing before us. We traveled by van. Some other bands took the traditional career path of opening for more established acts, which allowed the emerging bands to play at bigger venues, but that sounded depressing and debilitating to me. The audiences weren’t there to see you, and they’d ignore you no matter how good or innovative you were. Remember Dr. John!
Hilly from CBGB bought an abandoned theater on Second Avenue, and we were the first pop act to play there—on New Year’s Eve, I think it was. For the occasion I decided to be festive, so I dressed up in primary colors: jeans and T-shirt, naturally, bright red and yellow. There was so much dust in the theater (they hadn’t cleaned it properly) that we saw it rise like a cloud as the audience got excited, and after a while we could barely sing. We were coughing for days afterward. The fashion gambit didn’t get much response, either.
When our third album came out the next year, we were still a four-piece band, but now there were more overdubs and wiggly treatments from our new friend Brian Eno, who had produced our previous record. We were still touring constantly, and we bought some of the latest gear for our live performances. There were guitar-effects pedals and echo units, and Jerry got a Yamaha portable mini-grand piano, an organ, and a Prophet-5 synthesizer. We could reproduce some of the more far-out studio sounds and arrangements we’d worked on, if only just, but we knew it was equally important to maintain our tight rhythmic core. We were still a live performing band and not simply a group that faithfully reproduced recordings. We knew that the groove was fun and essential for us, and it visibly moved our audiences. With the added instruments and effects, we could really begin to vary the textures from one song to the next. We made sure no song sounded exactly like another one, at least not to us. I didn’t dance on stage. I twitched a bit, mainly from the waist down. It wasn’t possible to really dance too wildly, even if I wanted to, as I had to stay close to the vocal mic and stomp on my guitar pedals every so often. I also sensed that we were pushing up against the edge as far as representing what we were doing in the studio; the textures, layers, effects, and palimpsest of sounds and rhythms—all of that we were just barely able to reproduce live with four people. It sounded great, and some of my more off-putting (to some) vocal mannerisms were even softening, or so it seemed to me. As the tour went on, night after night of performing, I was on the verge of actually singing.
After the band recorded our next record, Remain in Light, we were faced with a dilemma: this was not a record that a four-piece band would remotely be able to reproduce live. Even if one were to decide that a faithful reproduction wasn’t a priority, the feeling of that record, and of some that were to follow, was about the meshing of a multitude of parts—a more African approach to music making than we’d taken previously. Even though the music didn’t always sound particularly African, it shared that ecstatic communal feeling. The combination of groove and a structure in which no one part dominated or carried the melody by itself generated a very different sensation, and that also needed to be reproduced and evoked on stage. Getting that rhythmic texture right was as important to this material as any other element in the songs—possibly more so.
Although the public consistently thought we’d recorded that album with what soon emerged as our expanded live-band lineup, we didn’t. During the recording sessions, only Adrian Belew and a couple of percussionists were added to the core band. The magic of multitracking meant we could add parts ourselves; Jerry could play a guitar part and then add a keyboard track later. We built up twenty-four tracks of knotty interwoven parts, and by switching groups of them on and off, we could create sections that might work
