by David Byrne
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 i
n 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.