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CHAPTER TWO

My Life in Performance

The process of writing music doesn’t follow a strict path. For some composers, music is created via notation, the written system of markings that some percentage of musicians share as a common language. Even if an instrument (traditionally a piano) is used as an aid in composition, this kind of music emerges as a written entity. Changes in the score might be made at a later date by performing musicians or by the composer, but the writing is largely done without input from actual players. More recently, music began to be created mechanically or digitally, by an accretion and layering of sounds, samples, notes, and bits dragged and thrown together either physically or in the virtual world of a computer.

Though much of my own music may initially have been composed in isolation, it only approached its final shape as a result of being performed live. As with jazz and folk musicians, everything was expected to be thrown into the crucible of a gig, to see if it sank, floated, or maybe even flew. In junior high school I played in bands with friends, covering popular songs, but at some point, maybe after a rival’s friend pulled the plug on us at a battle of the bands, I contemplated playing solo.

After some time rethinking things and learning more songs written by others in my bedroom, I began to frequent the coffee house at the local university and realized that the folk scene represented there was insular and needed refreshing. Well, at least that’s how it looked to me. This was the late sixties, and I was still in high school, but anyone could see and hear that the purism of folk was being blown away by the need of rock, soul, and pop to absorb everything in their path. The folk scene was low energy too, as if the confessional mode and folk’s inherent sincerity was somehow enervating in and of itself. That couldn’t be good!

I decided to perform rock songs by my favorites at the time—the Who, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and the Kinks—on acoustic guitar, believing that some of those songs were written with as much integrity as the folkier stuff people in the café more often heard, and that they might therefore find a receptive audience. I seem to recall that it worked; they had somehow never heard these songs! All I’d done was move the songs to a new context. Because I performed them more energetically than the standard folk artist might present his own material, people listened, or maybe they were just stunned at the audacity of a precocious teenager. I played Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran on ukulele, shifting the context of those songs even further afield. I might have even risked scratching some dirges on a violin I’d inherited. It was an oddball mishmash, but it wasn’t boring.

I was incredibly shy at the time and remained so for many years, so one might ask (and people did) what in the world a withdrawn introvert was doing making a spectacle of himself on stage. (I didn’t ask myself such questions at the time.) In retrospect, I guess that like many others, I decided that making my art in public (even if that meant playing people’s songs at that point) was a way of reaching out and communicating when ordinary chitchat was not comfortable for me. It seemed not only a way to “speak” in another language, but also a means of entry into conversation—other musicians and even girls (!) would talk to someone who had just been on stage.

Performing must have seemed like my only option. There was also the remote possibility that I would briefly be the hero and reap some social and personal rewards in other areas beyond mere communication, though I doubt I would have admitted that to myself. Poor Susan Boyle; I can identify. Despite all this, Desperate Dave did not have ambitions to be a professional musician—that seemed wholly unrealistic.

Years later I diagnosed myself as having a very mild (I think) form of Asperger’s syndrome. Leaping up in public to do something wildly expressive and then quickly retreating back into my shell seemed, well, sort of normal to me. Maybe normal is the wrong word, but it worked. A study in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 1994 by Felix Post claimed that 69 percent of the creative individuals he’d studied had mental disorders.¹ That’s a lot of nutters! This, of course, plays right into the myth of the fucked-up artist driven by demons, and I would hope very much that the converse of that myth isn’t true—that one does not have to be nuts to be creative. Maybe some problem of some sort can at least get the ball in play. But I have come to believe that you can escape your demons and still tap the well.

When I was at art school in the early seventies, I began to perform with a classmate, Mark Kehoe, who played accordion. I dropped the acoustic guitar and focused on the ukulele and my hand-me-down violin, which now had decals of bathing beauties stuck on it. We played at bars and art openings, and together we traveled cross-country and ended up playing on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Busking, as it’s called in Britain. By this point we had a look, too—a variation on Old World immigrant, I guess is how you would describe it. Mark adopted a more Eastern European look, and I gravitated to old suits and fedoras. I had an unkempt beard at the time, and once a young black kid asked me if I was one of those people who didn’t ride in cars.

We played mainly standards. I would sing “Pennies From Heaven” or “The Glory of Love” as well as our own arrangements of more contemporary fare, like “96 Tears.” Sometimes Mark would play an instrumental and I’d strike ridiculous poses—bent over standing on one leg and not moving, for example. Something that absolutely anyone would be able to do, but that I—or my “stage” persona—seemed to think was show-worthy. We realized that in a short amount of time we could amass enough cash to cover a meal and gas for an old car I’d picked up in Albuquerque. One might say that the reviews of a street performance were instant—people either stopped, watched, and maybe gave money, or they moved on. I think I also realized then that it was possible to mix ironic humor with sincerity in performance. Seeming opposites could coexist. Keeping these two in balance was a bit of a tightrope act, but it could be done.

I’d seen only a few live pop-music shows by this point. At the time I still didn’t see myself making a career in music, but even so, the varied performing styles in the shows I had seen must have made a strong impression. In high school around Baltimore, one could attend what were called Teen Centers, which were school gymnasiums where local bands would be brought in to play on weekends. One act was a choreographed Motown-style revue, and at one point they donned gloves that glowed in the dark when they switched to UV lights. It was a spectacular effect, though a little corny. Another act did a Sgt. Pepper–type revue, and to my young ears they sounded just like the records. Their technical expertise was amazing, but it wasn’t original, and so it wasn’t all that inspiring. Being a cover band, even a really good one, was limiting.

It wasn’t only purist folk acts at the university coffee house. There were also rock bands, some of which had virtuosic musicians. Most would jam endlessly and aimlessly on a blues song, but one D.C.-based band, Grin, featured a guitarist named Nils Lofgren whose solos blew the others away. These displays of technique and imagination were humbling. My own guitar playing was so rudimentary that it was hard to imagine we were playing the same instrument. I figured these “real” bands were so far beyond my own abilities that any aspirations I had in that regard were hopeless.

I caught one big outdoor rock festival back then—in Bath, a town a few hours east of London. Exhausted after hours of listening to music, I fell asleep on the damp ground. In the middle of the night I woke up and realized that Led Zeppelin was playing. I think they were the biggest act on the bill, but I went back to sleep. In the early morning I was awake again and caught Dr. John, who closed the festival. He was in full Night Tripper mode, and I loved that record, so I was excited to see him. He came out in carnival drag, playing his funky voodoo jive, and the UK audience pelted him with beer cans. I was confused. Here was the most original act of the whole festival, dumped into the worst slot, and he was completely unappreciated by this crowd. It was depressing. Maybe the costumes and headdresses made it seem like too much of a “show” for this bunch, who valued what they imagined as blues-guitar authenticity? But authentic blues played by white English guys? It made no sense. I couldn’t figure it out, but I could see that innovation wasn’t always appreciated and that audiences could be nasty.

Later, when I was in art school, I caught James Brown at the Providence Civic Center. It was the best show I’d ever seen; it was so tight and choreographed that it seemed to be from another planet, a planet where everyone was incredible. He had sexy go-go dancers who just danced the whole show, and though it was exciting as hell, this too put any thoughts of being a professional musician out of my head—these folks were in the stratosphere, and we were just amateurs. That didn’t take any of the enjoyment out of the amateur experience; I’m just saying I didn’t have some transformative moment after seeing these acts when I immediately knew that was what I wanted to do. No way.

I was musically curious, and sometimes I would check out performers whose music I was only slightly aware of. I saw Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the jazz saxophonist, at the Famous Ballroom in Baltimore, a downtown venue with glitter cutouts of rocket ships on the walls. I realized there that jazz wasn’t always the staid, almost classical and reserved style I’d presumed—it was a show too. It was about musicianship, sure, but it was also about entertainment. Kirk sometimes played two or three horns at once, which seemed like the musical equivalent of playing the guitar with your teeth or behind your back or even smashing it—a stage gimmick. But it got everyone’s attention. At one point he took audience interaction to new “heights”: he gave out bumps of cocaine on a little spoon to folks up front!

After having played on the streets of Berkeley, back on the East Coast Mark and I opened for a wonderful local band called the Motels at the art-school auditorium. I shaved off my scraggly beard on stage while Mark played accordion and his girlfriend held up cue cards written in Russian. I didn’t have a mirror and couldn’t manage the razor very well, so there was a fair amount of blood. Needless to say, that kept the audience’s attention, though the bloodletting drove some of them away. In retrospect, it seems I was saying goodbye to the old immigrant guy in the dark suit. I was ready to embrace rock and roll again.

A brief flash forward—when I first moved to New York, I caught Sun Ra and his Arkestra at the 5 Spot, a jazz venue that used to be at St. Mark’s Place and Bowery. He moved from instrument to instrument. At one point there was a bizarre solo on a Moog synthesizer, an instrument not often associated with jazz. Here was electronic noise suddenly reimagined as entertainment! As if to prove to skeptics that he and the band really could play, that they really had chops no matter how far out they sometimes got, they would occasionally do a traditional big band tune. Then it would be back to outer space. There was a slide show projected on the wall behind the band, commemorating their visit to the pyramids in Egypt, and much of the time Sun Ra was wearing spectacles that had no glass in them. They were “glasses” made of bent wire that looped into crazy squiggles in front of his eyes. In its own cosmic way, this was all show business too.

In 1973 my friend Chris Frantz, who was about to graduate from the painting department of the Rhode Island School of Design, suggested that we put together a band. We did, and he proposed we call ourselves the Artistics. Being more social and gregarious than I was, Chris pulled in some other musicians. We began by doing cover songs at loft parties in Providence. We must have done a Velvets or Lou Reed song or two, and some garage-rock songs as well—“96 Tears,” no doubt—but interestingly, at Chris’s suggestion, we also did an Al Green cover, “Love and Happiness.”

I began to write original material around this time, now that I had a band that I hoped would be willing to perform my compositions. I still had no ambitions to become a pop star; writing was purely and simply a creative outlet for me. (My other artistic medium at the time was questionnaires that I’d mail or pass out. Not many came back completed.) The song “Psycho Killer” began in my room as an acoustic ballad, and I asked Chris and his girlfriend Tina for help on it. For some reason I wanted the middle eight section to be in French, and Tina’s mom was French, so she had some skills there. I imagined that this serial killer fancied 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 was mathematics; when you subtract all that unwanted stuff from something, art or music, what do you have left? Who knows? With the objectionable bits removed, does it then become more “real”? More honest? I don’t think so anymore. I eventually realized that the simple act of getting on stage is in itself artificial, but the dogma provided a place to start. We could at least pretend we had jettisoned our baggage (or other people’s baggage, as we imagined it) and would therefore be forced to come up with something new. It wasn’t entirely crazy.

Clothing is part of performance too, but how were we supposed to start from scratch sartorially? Of course, back then the fact that we were (sometimes) wearing polo shirts both set us apart and branded us as preppies.^B

In the nineties, preppy was adopted as a hip-hop look, but back then it smacked of WASP elitism and privilege, which wasn’t very rock and roll. That wasn’t my background, but I was fascinated by the fact that the old-guard movers and shakers of the United States had an actual look (with approved brands!). And despite their wealth, the clothing choices made by ye olde masters of the universe weren’t super flattering! They could afford to pay for flattering clothes, but they opted for house dresses and schlubby suits. What’s the story here?!

After leaving funky Baltimore (a city with an eccentric character that had also come to be defined by race riots and white flight) for art school in little Providence, Rhode Island, I met folks with histories way different from mine, and I found it strange and wonderful. Trying to figure all that out was at least as informative as what I was learning in my classes. Some of these folks had uniforms of a sort—not military- or UPS-style uniforms, but they adhered fairly rigorously to clothing regimens that were way different than anything I was familiar with. I realized that there were “shows” going on all the time.

The WASP style was often portrayed on TV and in movies as a sort of archetypical American look, and some of my new friends seemed to subscribe to it. I decided I’d try it too. I’d tried other looks previously, like Glam dude and Amish geezer, so why not this one?

Photo by Patti Kane

I didn’t stay with it consistently. At one point I decided my look would be, like our musical dogma, stripped down, in the sense that I would attempt to have no look at all. In my forays outside of bohemia and away from the winos and addicts that littered the Bowery at that time, I realized that most New York men wore suits, and that this was a kind of uniform that intentionally eliminated (or was at least intended to eliminate) the possibility of clothing as a statement. Like a school uniform, it was assumed that if everyone looked more or less the same, the focus would be on one’s actions and person and not on the outward trappings. The intention, I guess, was democratic and meritorious, though subtle class signals were there.

So in an attempt to look like Mr. Man on the Street I got a cheap polyester suit^C—gray with subtle checks, from one of those downtown discount outlets—and I wore that on stage a few times. But it got sweaty under the stage lights, and when I threw it in the washer and dryer at Tina’s brother’s place it shrank down and became unwearable. Before that I used to hang out at CBGB in a white plastic raincoat and sunglasses. I looked like a flasher!

The preppy look was at least more practical in a packed sweaty club than plastic or polyester, so I stuck with it for a while. I was aware that our sartorial choice was not without liabilities. We were accused of being dilettantes, and of not being “serious” (read: authentic or pure). My background wasn’t upper class, so this caught me a bit by surprise, and I felt such accusations were a distraction from the music we were making—which was indeed serious, at least in its attempt to rethink what pop music could be. I soon realized that when it comes to clothing it is next to impossible to find something completely neutral. Every outfit carries cultural baggage of some kind. It took me a while to get a handle on this aspect of performance.

After a couple of years we felt ready to flesh out our sound, to add a little color to our black-and-white drawing. A mutual friend tipped us that a musician named Jerry Harrison was available. We loved the Modern Lovers demo record that had recently come out which he’d played on, so we invited Jerry to sit in. He had some trepidation, having been burned by his experience with that band (their lead singer, Jonathan Richman, dumped the band and went acoustic folkie just as they were closing in on the brass ring), so at first Jerry played with us on just a few songs during some out-of-town shows. Eventually he took the plunge. As a four-piece, we suddenly sounded like a real band. The music was still spartan, sparse and squeaky clean, but now there was a roundness to the sound that was more physically and sonically moving—even slightly sensuous at times, God forbid. There were other changes. T-shirts and skinny black jeans soon became the uniform of choice, at least for Jerry and me.^D

At that time one couldn’t buy skinny black jeans in the United States—imagine! But when we played in Paris after our first record came out we went shopping for le jeans, and, finding them easily, we stocked up. The French obviously appreciated what they viewed as the proto American Rebel look more than Americans did. But what’s more American Everyman than jeans and T-shirts? It was a sexier Everyman than the polyester-suit guy, and jeans and T-shirts are easy to wash and care for on the road.

But make no mistake—these weren’t ordinary blue jeans. These were skinny straight-leg black jeans, referencing an earlier generation (much, much earlier) of rebels and festering youth. These outfits and their silhouettes evoked greasers and rockabilly performers like Eddie Cochran, but also the Beatles and the Stones—before they had a wardrobe budget. Symbolically, we were getting back to basics.^E

Maybe the skinny, dark, stick-figure look alluded to other eras as well, like the tortured emaciated self-portraits of Egon Schiele and stylized bohemian extremists such as Antonin Artaud. The conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth only wore black in those days, as did a girlfriend I briefly dated. It was a uniform that signified that one was a kind of downtown aesthete; not necessarily nihilistic, but a monk in the bohemian order.

Photo by Barbara A. Botdorf

Courtesy of The Estate of Karlheniz Weinberger, care of Patrik Schelder, Zurich, Switzerland. Courtesy of Artist Management, New York

The retro suits and skinny black ties that became associated with the downtown music scene—those I just couldn’t figure out. What was that supposed to reference? Was there a noir movie I missed where the guys dressed like this? I’d tried suits, and I wasn’t going back there.

Jerry played keyboards and guitar, and he sang too, so we learned that with this arsenal we could vary the textures on each song more than we had before. Texture would became part of the musical content—something that wasn’t possible with the stripped-down three-piece band. Sometimes Jerry would play electric piano and sometimes a guitar part, often something contrapuntal to mine. Sometimes one of us would play slide guitar while the other played chords. Previously we’d desperately attempted to vary the texture from song to song by having Chris leave his drums and play vibes or having me switch to acoustic guitar, but before Jerry, our choices were limited. By the time we recorded our first record, in 1976, he had just barely learned our repertoire, but already some flesh was appearing on our bones.

We finally sounded like a band more than like a sketch of a band, and we were amazingly tight. When we toured Europe and the UK, the press commented 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 in place of conventional verses and choruses.

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 Worell on keyboards, Busta Jones on second 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 outside 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 musical 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 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 institutions. A lot of businesses might not be overtly racist, but by playing 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 of us grooving on stage, made actual dancing as opposed to thrashing about sort of okay. I got the sense that what was new was not just having black and white folks together on stage—there was nothing new about that—but the way in which we did it. Our shows presented everyone as being part of the band. Everyone played together; that was what was new.

My own contorting on stage was spontaneous. I obviously had to be at the mic when I was singing, but otherwise the groove took me and I let it do what it wanted. I had no interest in or ability to learn smooth dance moves, though we all watched Soul Train. Besides, a white nerdy guy trying to be smooth and black is a terrible thing to behold. I let my body discover, little by little, its own grammar of movement—often jerky, spastic, and strangely formal.

The tour eventually took us to Japan, where I went to see their traditional theater forms: Kabuki, Noh, and Bunraku. These were, compared to Western theater, highly stylized; presentational is the word that is sometimes used, as opposed to the pseudo-naturalistic theater we in the West are more used to.^F

Everyone wore massive, elaborate costumes and moved in ways that were unlike the ways people move in real life. They may have been playing the parts of noblemen, geishas, or samurai, but their faces were painted and they spoke in voices that were far from natural. In Bunraku, the puppet theater, often a whole group of assistants would be on stage operating the almost-life-size puppet. We weren’t supposed to “see” them, but they were right there, albeit dressed in black.^G The text, the voices, would come from a group of guys seated off to the side. The character had in effect been so fragmented that the words they spoke didn’t come from close to or even behind that puppet, but from other performers on an entirely different part of the stage. It was as if the various parts of an actor’s performance had been deconstructed, split into countless constituent parts and functions. You had to reassemble the character in your head.

Was any of this applicable to a pop-music performance? I didn’t know, but over dinner in Tokyo one night the fashion designer Jurgen Lehl offered the old adage that “everything on stage needs to be bigger.” Inspired, I doodled an idea for a stage outfit. A business suit (again!), but bigger, and stylized in the manner of a Noh costume. This wasn’t exactly what he meant; he meant gesture, expression, voice. But I applied it to clothing as well.^H

On a break from the tour, I went south to Bali, a place the choreographer Toni Basil, whom Eno and I had met during the Bush of Ghosts sessions, had recommended as being transporting and all about performance. I rented a small motorcycle and headed up into the hills, away from the beach resorts. I soon discovered that if one saw offerings of flowers and fruit being brought to a village temple compound in the afternoon, one could be pretty certain that some sort of ritual performance would follow there at night.

Photo by Andrej Krasnansky

Photo by Maria Varmazis

Drawing by David Byrne

Sure enough, night after night I would catch dances accompanied by gamelan orchestras and shadow-puppet excerpts from the Hindu Ramayana—epic and sometimes ritual performances that blended religious and theatrical elements. (A gamelan is a small orchestra made up mainly of tuned metallic gongs and xylophone-like instruments—the interplay between the parts is beautiful and intricate.) In these latter events some participants would often fall into a trance, but even in trance there were prescribed procedures. It wasn’t all thrashing chaos, as a Westerner might expect, but a deeper kind of dance.^I

As in Japanese theater, the performers often wore masks and extreme makeup; their movements, too, were stylized and “unnatural.” It began to sink in that this kind of “presentational” theater had more in common with certain kinds of pop-music performance than traditional Western theater did.

I was struck by other seemingly peripheral aspects of these performances. The audiences, mostly local villagers of all ages, weren’t paying attention half the time. People would wander in and out, go get a snack from a cart or leave to smoke a bidi cigarette, and then return to watch some more. This was more like the behavior of audiences in music clubs than in Western theaters, where they were expected to sit quietly and only leave or converse once the show was over.

These Balinese “shows” were completely integrated into people’s daily lives, or so it seemed to me. There was no attempt to formally separate the ritual and the show from the audience. Everything seemed to flow into everything else. The food, the music, and the dance were all just another part of daily activity. I remembered a story about John Cage, who, when in Japan, asked someone what their religion was. The reply was that they didn’t have a strict religion—they danced. Japanese do, of course, have Buddhist and Shinto rituals for weddings, funerals, and marriages, but a weekly thing like going to church or temple doesn’t exist. The “religion” is so integrated into the culture that it appears in daily gesture and routines, unsegregated from ordinary life. I was beginning to see that theatricality wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It was part of life in much of the world, and not necessarily phony either.

Photo by Rick Wezenaar Photography, http://www.wezenaar.org

I guess I was primed to receive this new way of looking at performance, but I quickly absorbed that it was all right to make a show that didn’t pretend to be “natural.” The Western emphasis on pseudo-naturalism and the cult of spontaneity as a kind of authenticity was only one way of doing things on stage. I decided that maybe it was okay to wear costumes and put on a show. It didn’t imply insincerity at all; in fact, this kind of practiced performance was all around, if one only looked at it. The services in a gospel church are funky and energetic, but they are prescribed and happen in almost identical sequences over and over. That doesn’t make them any less real or less powerful. In the world of the ecstatic church, religion bleeds into performance, and there are obvious musical parallels with what we were doing.

In Los Angeles I collaborated with Toni to make a music video for a couple of the songs from Remain in Light. For “Once in a Lifetime,” I worked out an elaborate dance routine that borrowed from Japanese street dance, gospel trance, and some of my own improvisations. Toni had worked with untrained dancers before, so she knew how to get me to make my improvised moves, edit them, select the best ones, refine them further, and begin to order them into a sequence. It took weeks to get the moves tight. It was all going to be filmed in one master shot, so I had to be able to perform the whole thing from top to bottom without stopping on multiple takes. It was a song-and-dance routine, as she described it, though nothing like what one normally thinks of when one hears that phrase.

We added little film snippets during the editing that revealed the source material for some of the moves: a few seconds of a kid dancing in Yoyogi Park in Tokyo (dancing there is now forbidden!) and a few frames from an anthropological film about African dance, with the dancers crouching near the ground. I wanted to show my sources, not claim I invented everything, though my jerky improv versions weren’t much like the originals in any case.

Talking Heads recorded another record, Speaking in Tongues, that was made using a very similar process to Remain in Light, though this time without Eno’s involvement. In thinking of what kind of performance and tour would follow, I decided to apply my insights from Japan, Bali, and the gospel church. This show would be mapped out from beginning to end.

In retrospect, the earlier tour with a big band had been a work in progress. My movements during rehearsals gradually became more formal as I realized which improvisations worked in which sections of which songs. It was a kind of organic choreography, like what I’d done on the video, but now involving more people and for a whole show. I storyboarded the whole thing, sometimes not knowing which song would go with which staging idea. The songs got assigned to the staging and lighting ideas later, as did details of the movements.^J

We decided that we’d all wear neutral gray outfits this time. I had realized that people on stage can either stick out (if they wear white or sparkly outfits) or disappear (if they wear dark colors). With music shows, there is inevitably so much gear on stage—guitars, drums, keyboards, amps—that sometimes the gear ends up being lit as much as the performers. To mitigate this a little bit I had all the metal hardware (cymbal stands and keyboard racks) painted matte black so that it wouldn’t outshine the musicians. We hid the guitar amps under the riders that the backing band played on, so those were invisible too. Wearing gray suits seemed to be the best of both worlds, and by planning it in advance, we knew there would at least be consistent lighting from night to night. Typically a musician or singer might decide to wear their white or black shirt on a given night, and they’d end up either glowing brighter than everyone else or be rendered invisible. We avoided that problem.

On all of our previous tours we’d maintained the lighting dogma left over from CBGB: white light, on at the top of the show and off at the end. But I felt it was time to break away from that a little bit. I still confined the lighting to white, though now white in all its possibilities, permutations, and combinations. There were no colored gels as such, but we did use fluorescent bulbs, movie lights, shadows, handheld lights, work lights, household lamps, and floor lights—each of which had a particular quality of its own, but were still what we might consider white. I brought in a lighting designer, Beverly Emmons, whose work I’d seen in a piece by the director Robert Wilson. I showed her the storyboards and explained the concept, and she knew exactly how to achieve the desired effects, which lighting instruments to use, and how to rig them.

I had become excited by the downtown New York theater scene. Robert Wilson, Mabou Mines, and the Wooster Group in particular were all experimenting with new ways of putting things on stage and presenting them, experiments that to my eyes were close to the Asian theater forms and rituals that had recently inspired me.^K

What they were all doing was as exciting for me as when I’d first heard pop music as an adolescent, or when the anything-goes attitude of the punk and post-punk scene flourished. I invited JoAnne Akalaitis, one of the directors involved with Mabou Mines, to look at our early rehearsals and give me some notes. There was no staging or lighting yet, but I was curious whether a more theatrical eye might see something I was missing, or suggest a better way to do something.

Robert Wilson performance by Stephanie Berger

To further complicate matters, I decided to make the show completely transparent. I would show how everything was done and how it had been put together. The audience would see each piece of stage gear being put into place and then see, as soon as possible afterward, what that instrument (or type of lighting) did. It seemed like such an obvious idea that I was shocked that I didn’t know of a show (well, a music show) that had done it before.

Following this concept to its natural conclusion meant starting with a bare stage. The idea was that you’d stare at the emptiness and imagine what might be possible. A single work light would be hanging from the fly space, as it typically does during rehearsals or when a crew is moving stuff in and out. No glamour and no “show”—although, of course, this was all part of the show.

The idea was that we’d make even more visible what had evolved on the previous tour, in which we’d often start a set with a few songs performed with just the four-piece band, and then gradually other musicians would take their places on pre-set keyboard and percussion risers. In this case, though, we’d take the concept further, with each player and the instruments themselves appearing on an empty stage, one after another. So, ideally, when they walked on and began to play or sing, you’d hear what each musician or singer was bringing to the party—added groove elements, keyboard textures, vocal harmonies. This was done by having their gear on rolling platforms that were hidden in the wings. The platforms would be pushed out by stagehands, and then the musician would jump into position and remain part of the group until the end of the show.

Stage and lighting elements would also be carried out by the stagehands: footlights, lights on stands like they use in movies, slide projectors on scaffolding. Sometimes these lighting instruments would be used right after their appearance, so you’d immediately see what they did, what effect they had. When everything was finally in place you’d get to see all the elements you’d been introduced to used in conjunction with each other. The magician would show how the trick was done and then do the trick, and my belief was that this transparency wouldn’t lessen the magic.

Well, that was the idea. A lot of it came from the Asian theater and ritual I’d seen. The operators manipulating the Bunraku puppets in plain sight, assistants coming on stage to help a Kabuki actor with a costume transformation, the fact that in Bali one could see the preparation for a scene or ritual, but none of that mattered, none of the force or impact was lost, despite all the spoilers.

There is another way in which pop-music shows resemble both Western and Eastern classical theater: the audience knows the story already. In classical theater, the director’s interpretation holds a mirror up to the oft-told tale in a way that allows us so see it in a new light. Well, same with pop concerts. The audience loves to hear songs they’ve heard before, and though they are most familiar with the recorded versions, they appreciate hearing what they already know in a new context. They don’t want an immaculate reproduction of the record, they want it skewed in some way. They want to see something familiar from a new angle.

As a performing artist, this can be frustrating. We don’t want to be stuck playing our hits forever, but only playing new, unfamiliar stuff can alienate a crowd—I know, I’ve done it. This situation seems unfair. You would never go to a movie longing to spend half the evening watching familiar scenes featuring the actors replayed, with only a few new ones interspersed. And you’d grow tired of a visual artist or a writer who merely replicated work they’ve done before with little variation. But sometimes that is indeed exactly what people want. In art museums a mixture of the known, familiar, and new is expected, as it is in classical concerts. But even within these confines there’s a lot of wiggle room in a pop concert. It’s not a rote exercise, or it doesn’t have to be.

While we were performing the shows in Los Angeles that would eventually become the Stop Making Sense film, I invited the late William Chow,^L a great Beijing Opera actor, to see what we were doing. I’d seen him perform not too long before, and was curious what he would make of this stuff. He’d never been to a Western pop show before, though I suspect he’d seen things on TV. The next day we met for lunch after the show.

Courtesy of Hiro

William was forthright, blunt maybe; he had no fear that his outsider perspective might not be relevant. He told me in great detail what I was “doing wrong” and what I could improve. Surprisingly, to me anyway, his observations were like the adages one might have heard from a Vaudevillian, a burlesque dancer, or a stand-up comedian: certain stage rules appear to be universal. Some of his comments were about how to make an entrance or how to direct an audience’s attention. One adage was along the lines of needing to let the audience know you’re going to do something special before you do it. You tip them off and draw their attention to you (and you have to know how to do that in a way that isn’t obvious) or toward whoever is going to do the special thing. It seems counterintuitive in some ways; where’s the surprise if you let the audience in on what’s about to happen? Well, odds are, if you don’t alert them, half the audience will miss it. They’ll blink or be looking elsewhere. Being caught by surprise is, it seems, not good. I’ve made this mistake plenty of times. It doesn’t just apply to stage stuff or to a dramatic vocal moment in performance, either. One can see the application of this rule in film and almost everywhere else. Stand-up comedians probably have lots of similar rules about getting an audience ready for the punch line.

A similar adage was “Tell the audience what you’re going to do, and then do it.” “Telling” doesn’t mean going to the mic and saying, “Adrian’s going to do an amazing guitar solo now.” It’s more subtle than that. The directors and editors of horror movies have taught us many such rules, like the sacrificial victim and the ominous music (which sometimes leads to nothing the first time, increasing the shock when something actually happens later). And then while we sit there in the theater anticipating what will happen, the director can play with those expectations, acknowledging that he or she knows that we know. There are two conversations going on at the same time: the story and a conversation about how the story is being told. The same thing can happen on stage.

The dancing that had emerged organically in the previous tour began to get increasingly codified. It still emerged out of movement that was improvised in rehearsals, but now I was more confident that if a singer, player, or performer did something spontaneously that worked perfectly for us, it could be repeated without any risk of losing its power and soul. I had confidence that this bottom-up approach to making a show would work. Every performer does this. If something new works one night, well, leave it in. It could be a lighting cue, removing one’s jacket, a vocal embellishment, or smashing a guitar. Anything can eventually grow stale, and one has to be diligent, but when a move or gesture or sound is right, it adds to the emotion and intensity, and each time it’s as real as it was the first time.

Not everyone liked this new approach. The fact that some of the performers had to hit their marks, or at least come close, didn’t seem very rock and roll to them. But, going back to William Chow’s admonishments, if you’re going to do something wild and spontaneous, at least “tell” the audience) ahead of time and do it in the light, or your inspired moment is wasted.

But where does the music fit into all this? Isn’t music the “content” that should be guiding all this stage business? Well, it seems the juxtaposition of music and image guides our minds and hearts so that, in the end, which came first doesn’t matter as much as one might think. A lighting or staging idea (using household fixtures—a floor lamp, for instance) is paired with a song (“This Must Be the Place”) and one automatically assumes there’s a connection. Paired with another lighting effect the song might have seemed equally suited, but maybe more ominous or even threatening (though that might have worked, too). We sometimes think we discern cause and effect simply because things are taking place at the same moment in time, and this extends beyond the stage. We read into things, find emotional links between what we see and hear, and to me, these connections are no less true and honest for not being conceived and developed ahead of time.

This show was the most ambitious thing I’d done. Although the idea was simple, the fact that every piece of gear had to come on stage for tech check in the afternoon and then be removed again before the show was a lot of work for the crew. But the show was a success; the transparency and conceptual 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 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 background. The outfits also alluded to the African-based religions of Candomblé 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 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.

Photo by Clayton Call

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 outdoor 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.

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 Turkisher, 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 gradually, 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 Stardust 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, harmonically 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 of every bad piano bar, but the songs themselves are innovative and radical in their way. Later, younger generations of composers there absorbed influences 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 orchestrations (strings and occasional winds) do the harmonic work that guitars and keyboards often do, and once again there were drums and plenty of percussion, 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 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 seeing and hearing, and they wanted to let us know. I sometimes think the audience was in a funny way also applauding for themselves. Some of them might also have been a little bit nostalgic, applauding our joint legacies as performers and audience. One forgets that part of one’s performance is one’s history—or sometimes the lack of it. You’re playing against what an audience knows, what they expect. This seems to be true of all performers; there’s baggage that gets carried into the venue that we can’t see. The audience wasn’t all aging Talking Heads fans either. There was a healthy percentage of younger folks as well, which was great to see. Maybe keeping the ticket prices affordable helped.

Photo by Tony Orlando

In 2008, I did a tour that in some ways harkened back to the Stop Making Sense extravaganza. I had collaborated on a record with Brian Eno that was more electronic folk/gospel in tone than the fierce funky workouts of Remain In Light. I realized that in order to perform this music, I’d need an ensemble similar to that touring band from more than twenty years before—multiple singers, keyboards, bass, drums, and percussion. Conveniently, with this band I could also do some of the songs we’d both been involved in, with Talking Heads and on other projects.

Once again, I had to think about what sort of a show this could be given the financial means available to me. I wanted to do something visual and theatrical again, since there wouldn’t be lush strings to wash over the audience anymore. Just standing there and playing wouldn’t be enough with this outfit—but what else was feasible? Lots of acts now use elaborate video screens and similar techniques to “make it bigger” on stage. I’d seen a few of these shows. I saw a Super Furry Animals show during which the video was totally in synch with the songs throughout the whole night. Very impressive. I’d seen pictures of U2 and other acts’ arena shows; those bands had massive screens and all the latest technology. They hired teams of creative types to make the videos. I couldn’t compete with any of that. It costs a fortune, and their results were probably better or at least as good as anything I could pull together. And in any case, they’d already done it.

Then I saw a Sufjan Stevens show at BAM (a piece about the BQE, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) during which he brought out dancers who did simple repetitive movements with hula-hoops or other such silliness.^O It was charming and effective, moving even, something obviously low-tech that almost anyone could do. I thought to myself, “I’ve never had dancers on stage. Why not?”

I thought I would go a little further with the idea than Sufjan, who had a million other things going on during that show, like films and costume changes. I worked with my manager on a budget. I had learned over the years that we could predict, based on the size of proposed performance venues, how much we might make on a tour, so we could predict if singers, dancers, choreographers, and the cost of carting all of them around along with the band was feasible. In this case, it was. Money and budgets are as much a determining factor in music and performance as anything else, but that’s for another chapter.

Hoola Hoope Dancer, Sufjan’s BQE show, by Lawrence Fung

For the dance elements, I decided to approach “downtown” choreographers rather than the ones who typically do music videos, R&B shows, or Broadway musicals. The dance vocabulary of those shows is emphatic, energetic, and exciting, but everyone has seen that stuff before, so why bother? I thought I’d spread the creative risk to increase my odds, so I approached four choreographers—Noémie Lafrance, Annie-B Parson, and the team of Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs—rather than seeing if just one could do the whole show. This way, if one person’s contribution didn’t work out for some reason, there were still others who could carry the load. (Luckily, that didn’t happen.) Likewise, I suggested that each choreographer initially pick just two songs to work on. (They ended up doing quite a bit more than just six songs.) I provided a proposed set list, and left the choice of what to work on to them. All of the choreographers had worked with untrained dancers before, and often incorporated vernacular movement into their work—moves that weren’t based on ballet or typical modern-dance stuff. That was important for me, too; I didn’t want worlds in collision. I see dance as something anyone can do, though I knew that inevitably the dancers would have some special skills, as we all do.

Choreographer Noémie Lafrance had recently done a video with Feist that was widely seen. It used mostly untrained dancers, and though I didn’t necessarily require my performers to have no formal dance training, I knew that I didn’t want them to obviously look like dancers. I wanted them to blend in with the rest of us. Noémie had also done a lot of site-specific work in swimming pools and stairwells, so I knew she was interested in getting dance into new venues—like a pop-music concert. Annie-B Parson I’ve known forever. I’m a fan of her company, Big Dance Theater, and she’s worked with musicians like Cynthia Hopkins, so she seemed perfect, too. Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs are a performing/choreography duo whose work I saw in a video at an art gallery. In that piece they wore matching primary-colored off-the-rack outfits and did mostly pedestrian moves in unison. Sometimes they rolled down a gully and sometimes they clambered on rocks. It was often funny and beautiful. I didn’t know if they’d ever choreographed a “show” like this before, so they were the wild card.

I could afford three dancers and three singers in addition to the band, some of whom I’d worked with on two previous tours: Graham Hawthorne on drums, Mauro Refosco on percussion, and Paul Frazier on bass. Mark De Gli Antoni joined on keyboards. (He was new, though we’d once played together when he was in the band Soul Coughing.) The singers were easy: folks I had crossed paths with or worked with before. They were told that they’d be expected to “do some movement.” I used that phrase rather than “dance” because I didn’t want to give them the fearsome idea that they’d be expected to do Broadway jazz dance. To find appropriate dancers, the choreographers sent out word to dancers and performers they knew personally. We didn’t go the route of taking out an ad, as we’d have been flooded with inappropriate people. Even so, at the beginning of the dance audition there were fifty dancers in the room.

We had two days to whittle them down to three. Cruel, but, well, fun too. We decided that the dancers would be asked to do three types of things: exercises in which they made up their own movement, short routines which they would be asked to memorize, and bits where they would receive notes and suggestions as to how to improve what they’d just done. Noémie began with an exercise I’ve never forgotten. It consisted of four simple rules:

1. Improvise moving to the music and come up with an eight-count phrase. (In dance, a phrase is a short series of moves that can be repeated.)

2. When you find a phrase you like, loop (repeat) it.

3. When you see someone else with a stronger phrase, copy it.

4. When everyone is doing the same phrase the exercise is over.

It was like watching evolution on fast-forward, or an emergent lifeform coming into being. At first the room was chaos, writhing bodies everywhere. Then one could see that folks had chosen their phrases, and almost immediately one could see a pocket of dancers who had all adopted the same phrase. The copying had begun already, albeit just in one area. This pocket of copying began to expand, to go viral, while yet another one now emerged on the other side of the room. One clump grew faster than the other, and within four minutes the whole room was filled with dancers moving in perfect unison. Unbelievable! It only took four minutes for this evolutionary process to kick in, and for the “strongest” (unfortunate word, maybe) to dominate. It was one of the most amazing dance performances I’ve ever seen. Too bad it was over so quickly, and that one did have to know the rules that had been laid out to appreciate how such a simple algorithm could generate unity out of chaos.

After this vigorous athletic experiment, the dancers rested while we compared notes. I noticed a weird and quite loud wind like sound, rushing and pulsing. I didn’t know what it was; it seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere. It was like no sound I’d ever heard before. I realized it was the sound of fifty people catching their breath, breathing in and out, in an enclosed room. It then gradually faded away. For me that was part of the piece, too.

Having learned from the Rei Momo tour, I decided to go back to the white outfits. That way the dancers’s movements would pop against the musicians, risers, and bits of gear. But as with the big Latin tour, I sensed that there was a spiritual aspect to the new songs we were playing, as well as many of the older ones, so white also hinted at associations with gospel, temples, and mosques.^P

We rehearsed for a month. For the first three weeks the band and singers learned the music in one room, while the dancers and choreographers worked in another room two floors below. I’d pop back and forth. In the fourth week we brought the dancers and musicians together. We then did what is called an out-of-town run: a series of shows in smaller towns to get the bugs out, where no one in the press would see what we were up to. Our first show was in Easton, Pennsylvania, in a lovely old restored theater in a little once-industrial town. There were some rough patches, but the big surprise was that the audience—hardly a contemporary-dance crowd—loved it. Well, they didn’t go nuts, but they didn’t balk at the dance stuff. It was going to be okay.

And it got better. I realized that the dancers, and the singers who sometimes joined them, raised the energy level of the whole show. I joined them when I could, and to do so felt ecstatic, but my interaction was limited by my singing and guitar-playing duties. Even so, they all became part of the whole, not a separate part tacked on. Over the course of the tour we took this idea further: some of the dancers would sing, some would play guitar, and eventually we added bits that blurred the boundaries between dancers, singers, and musicians. A little bit of an ideal world in microcosm.

The out-of-town tryout part was kind of a bust. That aspect of putting a performance together has been forever altered by cell-phone cameras and YouTube. Barely minutes after our shows were over, someone would announce that some of the numbers were appearing online. In the past, performers would at least try to limit amateur photographers and especially video cameras, but now that idea seemed simply ridiculous—hopeless. We realized there was a silver lining: they liked our show and their postings were functioning as free advertising. The thing we were supposed to be fighting against was actually something we should be encouraging. They were getting the word out, and it wasn’t costing me anything. I began to announce at the beginning of the shows that photography was welcome, but I suggested to please only post shots and videos where we look good.

I talked with the dancers and choreographers as the show began to gel, and we all agreed that contemporary dance, a rarified world where the audiences are usually very small, was indeed, as this show proved, accessible to some part of the general public. It wasn’t the movement or choreography itself that was keeping the audiences small for this stuff, but the context. The exact same choreography in a dance venue, without a live pop band? This audience in Easton, Pennsylvania would never go see it in a million years. But here, in this context, they seemed to like it. The way one sees things, and the expectations one brings to a performance, or any art form, really, is completely determined by the venue. Poetry is a tough sell, but with a beat it’s rap, which is wildly successful. Okay, it’s not exactly the same, but you get the idea. I once saw a theater piece that had a lot of music in it; it sort of failed as a theater piece, but I told the producer, “If you position it as an imaginatively staged concert, it’s incredibly successful.”

It’s not as if one can shift music, visual art, dance, or spoken word like pieces in a Tetris game until each art form plops into its perfect place, but it does give one the idea that some juggling of contexts might not hurt either.

I also realized that there were lots of unacknowledged theater forms going on all around. Our lives are filled with performances that have been so woven into our daily routine that the artificial and performative aspect has slipped into invisibility. PowerPoint presentations are a kind of theater, a kind of augmented stand-up. Too often it’s a boring and tedious genre, and audiences are subjected to the bad as well as the good. Failing to acknowledge that these are performances is to assume that anyone could and should be able to do it. You wouldn’t expect anyone who can simply sing to get up on stage, so why expect everyone with a laptop to be competent in this new theatrical form? Performers try harder.

Photo by Anne Billingsley

In political speeches—and I don’t think there’ll be any argument that they are in fact performances—the hair, the clothes, and the gestures are all carefully thought out. Bush II had a team that did nothing but sort out the backgrounds behind the places where he would appear, the mission accomplished banner being their most well-known bit of stagecraft. Same goes for public announcements of all kinds: it’s all show biz, and that’s not a criticism. My favorite term for a certain new kind of performance is “security theater.” In this genre, we watch as ritualized inspections and patdowns create the illusion of security. It’s a form that has become common since 9/11, and even the government agencies that participate in this activity acknowledge, off the record, that it is indeed a species of theater.

Performance is ephemeral. Some of my own shows have been filmed or have appeared on TV and as a result they have found audiences that never saw the original performances, which is great, but most of the time you simply have to be there. That’s part of the excitement; it’s happening in front of you, and in a couple of hours it won’t be there anymore. You can’t press a button and experience it again. In a hundred years it will be a faint memory, if that.

There’s something special about the communal nature of an audience at a live performance, the shared experience with other bodies in a room going through the same thing at the same time, that isn’t analogous to music heard through headphones. Often the very fact of a massive assembly of fans defines the experience as much as whatever it is they have come to see. It’s a social event, an affirmation of a community, and it’s also, in some small way, the surrender of the isolated individual to the feeling of belonging to a larger tribe. Many musicians make music influenced by this social aspect of performance; what we write is, in part, based on what the live experience of it might be. And the performing experience for the folks on stage is absolutely as moving as it is for the audience, so we’re writing in the anxious hope of generating a moment for ourselves as much as for the listener—it’s a two-way street. I love singing the songs I’ve written, especially in more recent performances, and part of the reason I decide to go out and play them live is to have that experience again. Evolutionary biologist Richard Prum proposes that birds don’t just sing to attract mates and to define their territory; they sometimes sing for the sheer joy of it. Like them, I have that pleasurable experience, and I seek out opportunities for it. I don’t want to have it happen only once, in the recording studio, and then have that moment get packed away, as a memory. I want to relive it, as one can on stage, over and over. It’s kind of glorious and surprising that the catharsis happens reliably, repeatedly, but it does.

There’s an obvious narcissistic pleasure in being on stage, the center of attention. (Though some of us sing even when there’s no one there.) In musical performances one can sense that the person on stage is having a good time even if they’re singing a song about breaking up or being in a bad way. For an actor this would be anathema, it would destroy the illusion, but with singing one can have it both ways. As a singer, you can be transparent and reveal yourself on stage, in that moment, and at the same time be the person whose story is being told in the song. Not too many other kinds of performance allow that.