How Music Works (8 page)

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. Lev-

itin 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 DAV I D BY R N E | 45

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 principal. 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 appear-

ances 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 per-

formances. 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

46 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

we’d worked on, if only just, but we knew it was equally important to main-

tain 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 tex-

tures, 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 repro-

duction 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 com-

munal 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. Get-

ting 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 in place of conventional verses and choruses.

DAV I D BY R N E | 47

Brian Eno and I had just finished collaborating on our own record, called

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
. It was created using the same technique we would soon use on
Remain in Light
, though in this case neither of us sang or wrote the lyrics, which all came from found sources. With its “sampled”

vocals, we couldn’t play it live back then. However, that experience gave us the confidence to argue that a pop record could indeed be made in that way.

But live performance was another story. In addition to Adrian, we added

Steve Scales on percussion, Bernie Worrell on keyboards, Busta Jones on sec-

ond bass, and Dolette MacDonald on vocals. Initial rehearsals were chaotic. I remember Jerry being especially adept at determining who would play what.

Of course, what came out in the end did not sound exactly like it did on the record. It became more extended, funkier, its joy in the groove more apparent.

Our first show with this enlarged band was at the Heatwave Festival out-

side Toronto. We were terrified. We were going to perform almost all new,

unheard material with a completely new sound, though I think to be safe we

started the set with some popular favorites played by the old four-piece band.

The festival crowd was with us. Audiences love it when a performer walks

the tightrope in front of them; like sports fans, they feel like their support is what keeps the team winning. It had the desired effect. We were nervous, but ecstatic too, and the audience sensed that. In the end we might have been a

little sloppy, but it worked. Backstage afterward we all jumped for joy. Someone told me it reminded them of Miles’s
On The Corner
, which I took as an extreme compliment. It was a totally new kind of performing for me.

I knew the music we’d just recorded was less angsty than the stuff we’d

done previously. It was about surrender, ecstasy, and transcendence, and the live performance tended to really bring those qualities to the forefront. It wasn’t just an intellectual conceit: I could feel lifted and transported on stage.

I think audiences sometimes felt this too.

We’d crossed a line somewhere. With a smaller group there is tight musi-

cal and personal interaction, and the audience can still distinguish among the various personalities and individuals on stage. When a group gets too big,

that isn’t possible anymore, or at least it wasn’t given the way we decided

to configure things. Though I was still up front as the singer, there wasn’t the visible hierarchy of players that one often sees in large bands. Everyone was both musically and visually part of the whole. The band became a more

abstract entity, a community. And while individual band members might

48 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

shine and take virtuosic turns, their identities became submerged within the group. It might seem paradoxical, but the more integral everyone was, the

more everyone gave up some individuality and surrendered to the music. It

was a living, breathing model of a more ideal society, an ephemeral utopia

that everyone, even the audience, felt was being manifested in front of them, if only for a brief period.

As I experienced it, this was not just a musical transformation, but also a

psychic one. The nature of the music helped, but partly it was the very size of the band that allowed me, even as lead singer, to lose myself and experience a kind of ecstatic release. You can sometimes feel transported with a

smaller group, but with a large band it is often the norm. It was joyous and at times powerfully spiritual, without being corny or religious in any kind of traditional or dogmatic way. You can imagine how seductive this could be. Its kinship with other more prescribed forms was obvious—the Gospel church,

ecstatic trance in many parts of the world, and of course other kinds of pop music that derived from similar sources.

Interesting also that we were bringing together classic funk musicians

(like Bernie) and white art-rock kids like ourselves. We used our own arty

taste to introduce weirdly mutated aspects of black American music to rock

audiences—a curious combo. American pop music was fairly segregated at

the time, as it often has been. Rock audiences were by and large white, and

funk, Latin, and R&B audiences were not. There was little mixing of the two in clubs or on stage. Disco, which had arisen in gay clubs but was also an R&B

form, was hated by rock audiences. When we performed in Lubbock, Texas,

the club strung a banner across the stage that said this ain’t no disco, inappropriately quoting a lyric from “Life During Wartime” and repurposing it as an anti-disco (and by implication anti-gay and anti-black) anthem.

Radio in the United States had more or less the same reaction. Despite

the heavy play that the “Once in a Lifetime” video got on MTV, regular

rock radio wouldn’t play it, or much else from that album. They said it was

too funky; not really rock. And the R&B stations wouldn’t play the song

either. Needless to say, the song got heard; the racism of US radio didn’t

hold it back all that much. Interesting how times have changed, and how

they haven’t. There are indeed media outlets whose audiences are interested

in music regardless of the race of the composer, but by and large the world

of music in the United States is only slightly less segregated than other

DAV I D BY R N E | 49

institutions. A lot of businesses might not be overtly racist, but by play-

ing to their perceived demographic—which is a natural business decision—

they reinforce existing divisions. Change does happen, but sometimes it’s

frustratingly slow.

Needless to say, white folks like to dance too. Maybe our shows, with some