How Music Works (11 page)

nature of its structure took away nothing from the emotional impact. It was

tremendously gratifying.

I didn’t perform for a while after that. It was hard to top that experience. I directed a feature film, married and had a child, and I wanted to be around for as much of my daughter’s early years as I could. I continued to make records and launch other creative endeavors, but I didn’t perform.

In 1989 I made a record,
Rei Momo
, with a lot of Latin musicians. The joy of following the record with a tour accompanied by a large Latin band, playing DAV I D BY R N E | 59

salsa, samba, merengue, cumbias, and other grooves, was too much to resist.

There was a lot to handle musically on that outing, so the stage business

wouldn’t be as elaborate as on the tour that was filmed for
Stop Making Sense
, though I did bring in movie-production designer Barbara Ling, who suggested

a tiered set of risers with translucent fiberglass facing that would light up from within. (We used the same material for the stage set of my film
True Stories
.) The semicircular layer-cake design of the riser was based on a picture on an old Tito Rodriguez album cover, though I don’t think his risers lit up.

The band wore all white this time, and the fact that there were so many

of them meant that their outfits would allow them to pop out from the back-

ground. The outfits also alluded to the African-based religions of Candom-

blé and Santería, whose adherents wear white during ceremonies. There was

more than one Santero in the group, so the reference wasn’t for naught.M

I had referenced religious trance and ritual in earlier performances and

recordings, and I never lost interest in that facet of music. I made a documentary,
Ile Aiye (The House of Life
), in Salvador, Bahia (Brazil) partly to indulge my continued interest in these religious traditions. Santería, the Afro-Cuban branch of West African religious practice, and Voudoun, the Haitian manifestation, are both very present in New York music and culture. But it was the

M

60 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

Brazilian branch, Candomblé, that seemed the least repressed by either secular or church authorities in recent decades, and therefore the most open, so when I was given the opportunity to do a film, that’s where I chose to go.

As with gospel music, religion seems to be at the root of much Brazilian

pop music and creativity, and as with the Asian ritual and theatrical forms, costumes and trance and dance are completely formalized but incredibly moving. And similar to what I felt in Bali, the practice is completely integrated into people’s lives. It’s not just something one does on Sunday mornings or

Saturday nights. There are evening ceremonies, to be sure, but their influence is deeply felt in everyday life, and that affected my thinking as I prepared for the next round of performances.

I may well be idealizing some of what I saw and witnessed, taking aspects

of what I perceived and adapting them to solve and deal with my own issues

and creative bottlenecks. Somehow I have a feeling that might be okay.

Rather than having a discreet opening act, I brought Margareth Menezes

on board: a Brazilian singer from—surprise!—Salvador, Bahia, who would

sing some of her own material with my band and also sing harmonies on

my tunes. Some of her songs had Yoruba lyrics and made explicit references

to the gods and goddesses of Candomblé, so it was all one big happy family.

Margareth was great—too good, in fact. She stole the show on some nights.

Live and learn.

I bucked the tide on that tour. We did mostly new material rather than interspersing it with a lot of popular favorites, and I think I paid the price. While the shows were exciting, and even North Americans danced to our music, much of

my audience soon abandoned me, assuming I’d “gone native.” Another lesson

learned from performing live. At one point we got booked at a European out-

door music festival, and my Latin band was sandwiched between Pearl Jam and

Soundgarden. Great bands, but I couldn’t have felt more out of place.

I followed this with a tour that mixed a band made up of funk musicians

like George Porter, Jr. (bass player for the Meters) with some of the Latin

musicians from
Rei Momo
. Now we could do some of the Talking Heads songs as well, even some that Talking Heads themselves couldn’t have played live.

I intended to make explicit the link between Latin grooves and New Orleans

funk, or so I hoped. I had begun to do some short acoustic sets with a drum

machine. I’d start the show like that, alone on stage, revealing the big band upstage with a sudden curtain drop.

DAV I D BY R N E | 61

After that I decided to strip things down again. I recorded and toured with

a four-piece band that emphasized grooves. There was a drummer, Todd Turk-

isher, a bass player, Paul Socolow, and a percussionist, Mauro Refosco—but

no keyboard or second guitar such as one would see or hear in a typical rock band. I had written more personal songs, which were better suited to a smaller ensemble. There was little dancing, and I seem to recall I wore black again. The last few records had been recorded before their songs had been played live, so this time I wanted to go back to where I’d started. We played small, out-of-the-way clubs (and some not so out-of-the-way) to break in the material. The idea was to hone the band into a tight live unit and then essentially record live in the studio. It worked, but only sort of. I could hear discrepancies and musical problems in the studio that I had missed in the heat and passion of live performance, so some further tweaking was still required.

Around this time I’d discovered standards. I never lost the enjoyment I

had in high school of playing other people’s songs in my bedroom, and gradu-

ally, going through songbook after songbook I picked up, I was adding more

chords and an appreciation for melody to what I knew. Willie Nelson’s
Star-dust
was an inspiration, as were Philadelphia soul songs, bossa novas, and songs by my favorite Brazilian and Latin singers and songwriters. But I didn’t play any of them in public. They felt delicious on the tongue, but I didn’t get them all right. I didn’t grow up on those songs, but I began to feel an appreciation for a beautiful melody and harmonies—harmonies in the chord voicings

and not just in what a second singer might sing. Beauty was a revelation, and these songs were unashamed to be beautiful, which was a difficult thing to

accept in the world of downtown musicians and artists. Anything that sounds

or looks beautiful would seem to that crowd to be merely pretty, shallow, and therefore deeply suspect—morally suspect even, I found out. Noise, for them, is deep; beauty shallow.

Well, for a while I’d suspected that wasn’t a point of view shared by the

wider world. Around 1988, when I began to compile some of my favorite

tracks by Brazilian composers (pop musicians are referred to as composers

in Brazil), I realized that although many of their songs were rich, harmoni-

cally complex, and, yes, beautiful, they definitely weren’t shallow. Some

of these composers and singers were forced into prison and exile for their

“merely pretty” songs, so I began to realize that depth, radical visions, and beauty were not mutually exclusive. Sure, bossa novas had become a staple

62 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

of every bad piano bar, but the songs themselves are innovative and radical

in their way. Later, younger generations of composers there absorbed influ-

ences from North American and Europop, but they didn’t feel the need to

go ugly to be serious. With my new appreciation for songcraft, I wanted to

have songs of my own that made me feel that way. I was no longer content

to just sing other people’s songs in the shower.

Inspired by these standards I’d been listening to and by a couple of

Caetano Veloso’s records, I wrote songs that emptied out the middle of the

sonic spectrum of the usual pop-band instrumentation. I let the orchestra-

tions (strings and occasional winds) do the harmonic work that guitars and

keyboards often do, and once again there were drums and plenty of percus-

sion, so the grooves were strong and thus avoided the tendencies one might

associate with a nice melody and traditional balladry. Since both guitars and keyboards are close to the same range as the human voice, limiting their

use meant the singing had a clearing in which to live, and I was increasingly enjoying singing in there.

In the early days, I might have gotten on stage and begun to sing as a

desperate attempt to communicate, but I now found that singing was both

a physical and emotional joy. It was sensuous, a pure pleasure, which didn’t take anything away from the emotions being expressed—even if they were

melancholic. Music can do that; you can enjoy singing about something sad.

Audiences, likewise, can dance to a tragic story. It happens all the time. My vocal technique had somehow expanded, or maybe just moved into another

place, and I realized that though I could still do the desperate yelp, I wasn’t inclined to write like that anymore. My body, and the physical and emotional enjoyment I was getting from singing, was in effect telling me what

to write.

I gathered a group that helped me express this: a rhythm section and a

six-piece string section. We toured, and it worked. We could play arias from operas, Talking Heads songs, covers of other people’s songs, and even an

extended house track. There wasn’t much show biz, but the group sounded

gorgeous, which was the goal anyway.

To some extent, I let the tour finances dictate what that performance would

be. I knew the size of the venues I’d be playing, and from that I could figure out how much income there would be. Carrying all these musicians along at that

point in my career (I wasn’t filling halls as big as the
Stop Making Sense
tour DAV I D BY R N E | 63

did) was a financial consideration, but I was happy to be restricted in that way.

I didn’t give up on the visuals completely, though. I wanted us to wear outfits that would unify us on stage, have us appear like a slightly less ragtag bunch, but the budget was limited. First I had jumpsuits made for everyone, modeled on one that I had purchased in a store. The copies didn’t turn out to be as flattering to everyone else as I’d hoped; they looked like pajamas.

A fashion mutiny understandably began building steam. We switched to

Dickies—workwear with matching tops and bottoms, brown or blue or gray.

Those looked somewhat like the originally envisioned jumpsuits, but now

there was an everyday workwear angle. Some of the outfits got tailored a bit (the shirts got darts so they accentuated the female string players’ figures, for example), but mostly they were right out the box. I often looked like a UPS

man, but I thought that in its own way it was quite elegant.N

The audiences sat and listened quietly at times, but they were usually up

and dancing by the end. Best of both worlds. I had loosened up on stage by

then, and I began to talk to the audience beyond reciting the names of the

songs and saying a quick “Thank you very much” afterward. Often—and this

never failed to surprise us—audiences at these shows would stop the show

in the middle and engage in a lengthy round of applause. Standing ovations,

many times. Sometimes this was after a song or two that might have been

somewhat familiar and that really showed what this ensemble could do, but

I sensed the audience wasn’t just clapping for specific songs. They realized that they were happy, that they were really, really enjoying what they were