How Music Works

by David Byrne

  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 suitC—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 rin
g), 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 principal. So, although some of us might have alluded to the James Deans of the world with our attire, we drew the line at leather jackets and safety pins. Within a couple of years, I’d be wearing Oxfords and regular suit jackets in another weird attempt to fit in.

  While in London I visited the Virgin Records office, which was then just off Portobello Road, and they let me watch a bunch of Sex Pistols 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 wer
e. 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.