Which is why it feel like more than an ordinary act of betrayal if our best paranoid artists subsequently strike us as having produced complacent art: it is as though they are trying to suffocate the nourishing questions that their own earlier efforts fed in us. It might seem that they were only sampling paranoia as a temporary mood or style, a way of justifying “changing your hairstyle so many times now.” Tell me: do I look paranoid in this haircut?
Electric Guitar
For the first and only time, the singer’s voice reaches you before some instrumental overture (or backing chorus, in “Air”) — that is if you want to call this “singing,” as opposed to the sound of some guy doing a stand-up agony routine, or taunting his imaginary friend. The drummer strikes a couple of ill-considered beats and then settles into a ragged rhythm, while the guitar begins sandily tramping, like a zombie lost in seaside fog, and with no particular regret, since he was never very hungry to begin with. Then a moaning village-idiot bass line wanders in, except somebody’s phase-shifted this bass through a French horn or trombone, apparently. Maybe a producer’s joking act of revenge against the bass player. (You wanna get all froggy in my “Heaven”? Okay, poof, you’re a frog.) Meanwhile something else toots at random, just to say how-do-you-do, before vanishing: was it a kazoo, or a clown’s bicycle horn?
The track’s whole air is drunken, misguided, deranged, but rather harmlessly so. The band seems to be only half-willingly following the singer into this scenario, as if they’ve never heard the song before. Yet the singer only half-willingly leads them forward, seeming more like someone who’s snuck off to the bathroom during the party and forgot to come back, is instead making odd faces at himself in the mirror. Hey, you’ve got the rare early pressing of Fear of Music in your hands, the one where they accidentally substituted the demo of “Electric Guitar” (recorded in a plumber’s storeroom) for the finished track! Only three hundred copies leaked out before the mistake was caught — valuable! Oh, there’s no such thing? This is the finished track of “Electric Guitar,” keeping its appointment on the masterpiece artwork known as Fear of Music?
Well, you may be inclined to think, not so bad for the official worst song on the album. This track appears designated to attract such judgment, as if to throw us off the scent of some other weak member of the herd.
What is it about “Electric Guitar” that triggers defensiveness and embarrassment? Surely it’s something more than finding it tucked away in nearly any album’s official “hiding spot,” one-song-from-last, neither fish nor finale. What’s the word? Oh yeah, penultimate. But there’s nothing remotely “ultimate” about this song, which seems to wither from even the mildest responsibilities of being included in the proceedings. “Electric Guitar” needn’t further any “argument,” nor have one of its own, nor even tell a coherent story — all these expectations we’ve abandoned by now (though we keep remarking on their absence, as though feeling we’d been promised these things). But, please, at least, speak up, and quit talking with your mouth full. Pay attention to what you’re saying!
The song’s chagrin at its own gestures is fitting, since the subject, where we can make it out, seems to have to do with embarrassment at the imposture and pretense of finding themselves in the position of a rock band presenting rock music with electric rock guitars in the first place. Get a life! This is wartime! Don’t quit your day job, or do, but not for this. The disjointed, tinny, hobbled tone of the guitars on the track (the bass is an electric guitar too, remember) recapitulates the theme — the whole track is riddled with mortification at having anything to put forward at all. (The phrase “tune this electric guitar” sounds awfully like “tuneless electric guitar,” and we agree.)
This self-mocking theme of imposture is at odds with (and almost totally annihilates, or invalidates) the ostensible “tale” here, a paranoid scenario that sticks halfway between Kafka’s The Trial and some liberal-allegorical Rod Serling episode involving “music police.” These scraps of narrative, when not totally incoherent, display the self-aggrandizing overreach of a lot of counterculture persecution complexes: first they came for the electric guitars, and I said nothing, then they rounded up the bongs and Day-Glo posters …
* * *
The lyricist — if we posit such a being in this instance, as opposed to a mumbling morning-after dream-recounter — seems wholly dispirited, dumping out notebook scraps, latching onto received phrases (“the meaning of life,” “a crime against the state”), garbling syntax. What can we rescue from the scene? The figure of the electric guitar moves through this song like a horror-movie creature, assembled from unlikely parts and ill-advisedly given a version of life; at once a pitiable victim and a figure of threat; unkillable because undead to begin with. What’s the crime here? The highway accident? The untuned guitar? The ruse of elevating rock and roll to the status of art? Or the substitution of a copy for an original? (An Andy Warhol moment crops up, a bit of postmodern art-speak — “the copy sounds better” — but it’s another fragment.) The shadowy judge and jury feel as likely to be record company executives — or a “jukebox jury” on a radio game show — as an existential Star Chamber. Really, the artist sits in self-judgment, at finding himself playing the old card of rebellion. In this formulation rock ’n’ roll is a rote gesture, one likely exhausted before it began, before Elvis Presley borrowed a black leather cap and what spark it still carried from Marlon Brando in The Wild One. This is not an art for adults.
“Electric Guitar” might be a not-so-secret telegram to fellow musicians: your relationship with your instrument is tenuous at best. Do not trust it. You cannot tune it. It is fragile. It is controlled by something outside of yourself. If the first sensation of a rock musician is that you’re a font of authenticity, the second is that you’re a fucking fake.
Comedy’s the way out again, and the comedy’s good. The only problem might be that the best joke is right up front. “Electric guitarrrrr / Gets run o-verrrr / By a caaarrr / On the HIGH-way” — the singer paints this picture with the eye-rolling, one-thousand-percent non-sympathy and morbid glee of a five-year-old reporting on the death of a pet frog to his horrified parents. Have we given birth to a sociopath? But the kid knows what Pete Townsend did in 1965: the frog, like the guitar, is utterly replaceable. And its guts looked pretty cool on the outside.
This is the best joke not just for the priceless delivery, but because it lends its character to the whole experience of “Electric Guitar,” which sounds like it got run over by a car, too. Then, like a nightmare thing, like Jeff Goldblum’s “Brundlefly” in Cronenberg’s The Fly, it doesn’t have the taste to die.
* * *
Even “Electric Guitar”’s title conveys its impurity here. No other noun required a modifier to keep it upright. In Fear of Music’s Periodic Table of Elements, “Electric Guitar” isn’t gold, it’s fool’s gold.
* * *
So what’s “Electric Guitar” for? With its tone of luxuriant degeneracy it seems mainly to be demarcating just how bad things can get. Even if the tools of inquiry were disqualified in earlier chapters — “what good are notebooks?”; “science won’t change you”; “don’t think I can fit it on the paper”; and so forth — they were disqualified in what appears in retrospect to have been a spirit of inquiry, leaving the implication that they might give way to sturdier, more viable methods. All those spotty arguments now look rigorous by comparison to “Electric Guitar.” And each and every one of those arguments was conveyed to us in a — rock song! In this way, the unspooled languor and depressive haze of “Electric Guitar” may cast some effective shadow on nearly everything that preceded it. You thought you’d given up everything — you told yourself you were giving up the nightlife — but you were still clinging to your collection of rock LPs, especially that worn-out old copy of Fear of Music. (They’ll have to pry it from your cold, dead hands.)
Paper, for all its weakness, at least gets a minimally competent defense: “Hold on to that paper.”
On the other hand: “Never listen to electric guitar.” If I were electric guitar, I’d fire my lawyer.
* * *
Yet whether it’s “Electric Guitar” that’s guilty or not, let’s sing a tiny ballad to “the worst song on the album,” a fragile and beautiful notion owing its life to the unlikely demands of a listener for perfection and completion, in a region of the insistently irregular, impure and unlikely. Forget “concept albums” — album is itself a concept. Hardly a natural form, not sun or moon, not some inevitable God in our fannish sky. There used to only be “songs” — hits, singles, filler — jumbled into saleable compendiums, in a format called a “long player.” Then someone — Beatles? Dylan? — raised the stakes. And lately, the stretchiness and permeability of new formats and modes of transmission renders the concept antique. “Worst song on the album” means as little, probably, to an LCD Soundsystem fan as it did once to a Bo Diddley fan. (Or should.) Yet that window between the two is where my sensibility ran into Fear of Music, and likely yours too. And truthfully, that window between is where Fear of Music conceived and presented itself to us. And more, how we adore our disappointment! Our love wouldn’t be complete without it.
* * *
The whiny little guitar squiggle that appears following every utterance of the words “electric guitar” in the chorus (or what passes for a chorus, etc.) represents the ultimate dead end for its impulse — that of the guitar as “primary speaker” in rock music. It sounds like “needle-needle-nee”!, and it never progresses, nor occupies any larger role than it does at it first appearance. It’s laughable, yet, in its modularity as a figure floating in aural vacuum, the squiggle points forward to the spatial palace of “Drugs.” There, such lost sounds will act less as distress calls than as a kind of mental sonar, taking measure of an uncannily vast interior.
What Was the Fate of the Fear of Music Songs in Live Performance?
The Fear of Music tour, the one I glimpsed with Tom in New Jersey, was the band’s swansong as a performing quartet — that’s unless you count the moment in the Stop Making Sense enactment when the original foursome are alone on the stage. (It’s “Found a Job” — precisely what these four human beings did together when they signed their first record deal.) But that moment is more like an eloquent tombstone for what had been, isn’t it?
Almost the whole album was tried on stage at one point or another, in 1979 and 1980. Only “Drugs” would wait for the expanded band (and that song, as we’ll see, had a secret early life in live performance, under another name). Even “Animals” and “Electric Guitar” were given air. Some of the songs are tough to work up — not because they necessarily demand extra players (though “Life During Wartime” misses its bongos), but because Eno-aura, those treatments to which he’d subjected voice and instrument, needed an equivalent on other terms.
“Life During Wartime,” knowing it has the obligation of becoming a classic, nevertheless sounds, in Boston in August 1979, tentative and roller-rinky, much as Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” did at the Hollywood Bowl in 1965, mere months before it became the song that destroyed European civilization. Yet at that same Boston show “Memories Can’t Wait” appears with a new guitar part, scudding and nervous, to simulate the Enoreverb — the result has the skeletal ferocity of Gang of Four. (An even better 1979 version, at the State Theater in Sydney, Australia, is introduced by Byrne as “Memories,” reducing the title to its noun-essence.) Once in a while, the singer’s psycho-killer one-man-theater makes too much a cartoon of “Mind” or “Cities.” Yet the band’s total commitment, to what you’d think must still have struck them as an astonishing new burst of songs, rides over any limitations. These recordings, which fortunately circulate pretty widely, are essential. They halt the album in time and gaze at it in wonder.
On that 1979 tour, in Peoria, Illinois, Jerry Harrison invited Adrian Belew onstage, to add a guitar solo to the band’s encore of “Psycho Killer.” A year or so later, faced with the thrilling prospect of putting across live versions of the layered, polyrhythmic, diffuse Remain in Light tracks — themselves constructed out of things like Belew’s solos, and Nona Hendryx’s vocals — Harrison took the job of recruiting a larger band: Belew, a bass player named Busta Jones, a drummer named Steve Scales, and Bernie Worrell, a Julliard-trained architect of the Parliament-Funkadelic sound.
You must change your band.
By the time the nine- or ten-person ensemble working under the name Talking Heads had finished touring to support Remain in Light they were one of the greatest, most compulsively danceable, and certainly most unprecedented, live bands in the history of pop music. Many thousands of people knew this at the time.
Three years later, the successive evidence offered by The Name of This Band is Talking Heads, and the film and album Stop Making Sense, which documented the subsequent “Big Suit” tour, and the spotlight focused by “Burning Down the House,” the band’s first top-ten hit, ensured everyone knew it.
The boy in his room — well, by this time increasingly out of his room — was aboard this bus. At the Forest Hills tennis stadium in Flushing, NY, in August, 1982, the “evolved” Talking Heads dragged the boy bodily through transformations he couldn’t have known to invite but didn’t remotely care to resist. At that concert, undergoing a state of rapture that easily rekindles in memory, the boy turned to his best friend Joel and gave the simplest and most unguarded expression possible to a feeling nearly anyone has had at least once (I hope), perhaps most often at the perihelion of some sexual experience, or drug experience. I don’t remember the exact words the boy used, but the gist was, “We must never, ever, miss a chance to do this again.” To be fair, this was a drug experience as well. And the boy was a week or two from leaving for his first days at college, which is to say at the door of his first departure from his city, from the city of prideful fear. Yet to doubt that recollection would be to doubt pleasure itself. If we all have two or three moments to which we’ll forever ache to return, this is one of mine.
At that concert the band debuted a song from the album that would become Speaking in Tongues. I couldn’t make out the title the singer announced (he may only have said “a new song”), nor much of the lyrics, which anyway prominently consisted of a nonsense phrase: “High, high, high, high, high, hiiiigh — woo-hoooo!” The song would turn out to be “Swamp.” It scared me at the time, and I liked that. David Byrne sounded devilish. Maybe Talking Heads were headed to an (even more) fearful place, on my behalf, as a lover of my own fear. Fear of Music remained my sentimental favorite, but you’d have been an idiot to argue with Remain in Light. In fact, it was easy to congratulate yourself in 1982 that you’d chosen your favorite band perfectly, for its capacity to grow at a rate that outpaced your wild expectations.
Some of the Fear of Music songs were swept up in this apotheosis: “Life During Wartime,” of course, and “Cities,” but also “Mind.” “I Zimbra” appeared, sometimes mated to “Big Business,” a Remain in Light-style Byrne solo track. “Heaven” went on to play a special role as semi-ironic interlude, its simplicity more and more in contrast to the dance-oriented swirl of the set-list. “Drugs” makes some surreally jubilant appearances. If you’d asked me then, I’d have sworn the songs had grown with the band, responding to their globalized treatments by evolving too, unfurling new avenues and implications only glimpsed on the original album.
Listening to these concerts now, and even watching the undeniably joyous Stop Making Sense, I’m not so sure. By now I will have plainly disqualified myself as anything but a Fear of Music purist and partisan, so I may as well go ahead and say that from the first time Adrian Belew stepped onstage — or maybe the first time Busta Jones stepped onstage — something was lost as well as gained, for these songs especially. Fear of Music’s special aura and tension seem to me now absolutely defined within the four-person band that held the name Talking Heads when they made the album. The negotiation of solitude with companionship, located in the space be
tween those four players, activates the deeper forces in the Fear of Music songs. David Byrne had been struggling with the format of “rock band,” and with the (implicitly confessional) role of “lead singer.” In Remain in Light and beyond, and in the expanded band’s performances, he solved it. But the sound preceding, the sound of that struggle just before it was solved, generated a field of meanings with an unstable but permanent power.
Not to be overly dramatic, but Fear of Music sounds to me now to have been almost instantly renounced. Its door closed. The anxiety, claustrophobia, and dread, but also the fascination, the solipsistic delight, all bound within a suite of internal self-references, has exploded. The pieces will never be put back together. In fact, David Byrne sings the Fear of Music songs beautifully with the larger band — sings them urgently, as if the songs are wildly alive to him. How could he do otherwise, in musical surroundings as fervent as any singer’s had the luck to inhabit? But the air isn’t close around him, generating the pressure of dread these songs once dramatized. He’s gained elbow room, room enough for him to learn to be a hilarious dancer, room enough to declaim and preach as the Remain in Light songs need him to do, room enough for a big suit and some groovy back-up singers. And fear is drained, like a snake’s venom.
Up to Fear of Music, the name of this band is Talking Heads. After, Talking Heads is what they’re called. It’s as though the original band was both too lonely and not lonely enough for the singer and songwriter of Fear of Music.
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