himself as a grand and visionary sophisticate in the model of either Napoleon or some Romantic lunatic. “Warning Sign” was another song written then; I remember the live version being painfully loud. Another guitar player in that band, David Anderson, was probably even less socially adept than I was, and he was a great and somewhat unconventional performer. Chris joked that we should have called the band the Autistics.
Glam rock was the new thing. Bowie made a big impression on me, and at one point I dyed my hair blonde and sewed myself some leather trousers. No doubt this made for a striking image at the time in little Providence, Rhode Island. What might be okay as a stage get-up was maybe stretching things as street wear. I was flailing about to see who I was, switching from an Amish look to a crazy androgynous rock-and-roller—and I wasn’t afraid in the least to do so in public.A
There were also some discos in Providence, and I remember hearing the O’Jays and the Three Degrees and other Philadelphia acts that were staples on the dance floor. I became aware that the DJs were finding ways to extend the songs longer than what appeared on the records. Somehow, to us, this club music didn’t seem antithetical to the rock we were playing and listening to. Dancing was fun, too.
In the mid-seventies I was offered room and board in New York by a painter, Jamie Dalglish, who let me sleep on his loft floor in return for help renovating the place. This was on Bond Street, almost right across from CBGB, where Patti Smith would read occasionally while Lenny Kaye accompanied her on guitar. Television and the Ramones had started playing there as well, and we took advantage of our perfect location to go see these bands as often as we could afford. When Chris and Tina moved to New York, staying at her brother’s place in Long Island City, we’d all go there regularly. Soon Chris again took the initiative and suggested we form another band. This time, perhaps inspired by the acts playing at CB’s or perhaps by the fact that we already had some original material (that handful of songs I’d written for the Artistics), he suggested we try something with a little more integrity and seriousness. I agreed to give it a try, and if it wasn’t well received, well, we all still had ambitions to be fine artists, or at least I did. I began to write songs based on riffs and fragments, which I would cobble together, my guitar plugged into an old Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder that had a mic input. I filled notebooks with lyrics.
Talking Heads, the name we settled on, started off as a live band. This might sound obvious, but when you think of all the records and musicians that were out there then (and there are more now) who made their records before figuring out how to play their songs live, or how to hold an audience’s attention, it’s significant. We all remembered stories of naïve and ambitious acts, singers mostly, plucked out of obscurity and handed material—and then, if the song became a hit, they’d be assigned a band to do the inevitable promotional tour. They’d be styled and choreographed and, in most cases, they’d crash and burn before long. Some great stuff was created this way, and there were lots of pretty phony manufactured stars as well, but it seemed to be a bit of crapshoot whether any of these acts could actually get an audience to listen. They hadn’t learned the ropes of live performance.
Courtesy of David Byrne
These poor souls thrust in the limelight had to compete with the Beatles, Dylan, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder, who all seemed completely comfortable performing and had taken charge of their own creative destinies (or at least it seemed that way at the time). In a sense, these extremely talented artists made it harder on those whose middling talents needed a little help—whether that meant some coaching on how to sing as if you mean it, how to engage an audience in your performance, or on how to dress and move. Suddenly there was a prejudice against acts that weren’t able to hold all the creative reins and do everything by themselves. This prejudice now seems unfair. The highly coached acts—or, to be kind, the more collaboratively put-together acts—were not all bad. Some were the result of teamwork that produced things that were beyond any one artist’s or band’s vision or abilities, but many of them were underappreciated at the time, and only later were they seen as hip innovators: Nancy Sinatra, the Shangri Las, the Jackson 5, KC and the Sunshine Band. The fact that some of them weren’t great live performers made it doubly hard for them. At that time we couldn’t accept that making a great record was maybe all we should expect. As Lou Reed once said, people want to “view the body.”
More recently, composers, DJs, and pop, rock, and hip-hop artists have created their music on computers and not, as was often the case in the past, by playing with other musicians. Though this allows them to be more self-empowered—they don’t need a band, record-company funding, or even a recording studio—these artists are often (though not always) similarly lost when it comes to, well, showmanship. Some should never get near a stage, as their talents end with the laptop or with rhymes, but others eventually find their way. Expecting them to be good at both things sometimes seems unfair. I’ve seen too many creative souls who were suddenly expected to go on stage desperately imitating moves, clothing styles, and bits of stage business that they’d obviously seen elsewhere. We’ve all spent time imagining ourselves inhabiting the bodies of our childhood heroes, like avatars in a way, and it’s thrilling, but at some point it’s time to put those urges to rest. After all, those bodies are already being used by their original owners.
After auditioning at CBGB one afternoon for Hilly Kristal, the club’s owner, and a few others, Talking Heads got offered a slot opening for the Ramones. As twitchy and Aspergery a stage presence as I was in those days, I had a sense from my time busking in Berkeley and elsewhere that I could hold an audience’s attention. I wouldn’t call what we did then entertainment, exactly, but it was riveting in its own disturbing way. Not quite like looking at an accident, as one writer said, but not that far off either. My stage presence wasn’t fake, as weird as it looks to me in retrospect, but it wasn’t altogether unconsciously oddball either. Occasionally I’d cross over into something affected, but most of the time the poor soul up there was just doing what he thought was right, given the skills and techniques available to him.
Once we began playing at CBGB, we also got gigs at other venues in Lower Manhattan—Mothers, Max’s Kansas City, and eventually the Mudd Club. We played somewhere almost every week but held on to our day jobs. Mine was being a movie theater usher on 34th Street, which was perfect, as the first show wasn’t until 11 or 12. We didn’t always get much sleep, but the band got pretty tight.
Looking at early video footage of our three-piece combo at CBGB, I now sense that it was less a band than an outline for a band. It was a sketch, just the bare-bones musical elements needed to lay out a song. Nothing more. There was no real pleasure or pleasantness to these arrangements. This wasn’t music to seduce the ear, but it wasn’t intentionally aggressive or abrasive like punk rock, either. It was like looking at a framework, an architectural drawing, and being asked to imagine where the walls and sink might go.
This was all intentional. The range of pre-existing performative models from which to draw on was overwhelming—and artistically invalid, as I’ve argued, because those tropes were already taken. So the only sensible course was to avoid all of it, to strip everything back and see what was left. Some others in that scene had similar ideas. The Ramones didn’t allow guitar solos, for example, but we took reductionism pretty damn far. It was a performance style defined by negatives—no show-off-y solos (I remembered Nils Lofgren, and knew it was hopeless for me to go there, though I did love Tom Verlaine’s solos with Television), no rock moves or poses, no pomp or drama, no rock hair, no rock lights (our instructions to club lighting people were “Turn them all on at the beginning and turn them off at the end”), no rehearsed stage patter (I announced the song titles and said “Thank you” and nothing more), and no singing like a black man. The lyrics too were stripped bare. I told myself I would use no clichéd rock phrases, no “Ohh, baby”s or words that I wouldn’t use in daily speech, except ironically, or as a reference to another song.
It
