Cities have a lot of people in them, more than families do, but we go to them, often, to be unknown.
And then our cities become our families, and we might find we have to venture forth from those as well.
In the film Stop Making Sense it is during “Life During Wartime” that David Byrne begins running in circles around the stage, around the band, even behind Chris Frantz’s riser. The gesture is paradoxical — mute and eloquent, a singer running away from his microphone and at the same time seeming to say look at all I can encircle. Look at all that the alchemy of my fear and desire has brought into being. My wartime has become a party in my mind and yours. It is the running of a proud curator racing through the rooms of his museum gesturing at the wonders in his collection, implements from a war, once dangerous and ugly, but now transformed into Dada “readymades,” decanted into myth and symbol. It is the running of an animal measuring the limits of its cage.
Drugs
“Drugs” opens into room tone, only the room might be out-of-doors — a rain forest, or some vast arboretum dripping with birds. You can actually hear the air, and the animals. (These birds — of paradise? — offer a handy contradiction of “Animals,” as if another was needed: you know these animals aren’t hairy.) That’s to say, “Drugs” is aware that something else is out there, and isn’t particularly threatened. An interior landscape by definition, the song will persist in enclosing more stuff than some of the album’s ostensible panoramas. This includes a number of weightless sonic sculptures drifting through its doorways, but also conceptual glances in this or that direction — for “Drugs,” despite wandering attention, nods at many of Fear of Music’s themes. If the song is recessive, trapped within a starkly reduced subjectivity, it at least paints a generous view of this head’s quarters. There’s time to spread out and look around, and plenty of picture windows, even if these offer vistas only of other rooms. (As Dr. Aldous Leary said, The doors of perception have many mansions. Or something.)
These birds, though they’ll be pushed into the ambient-subliminal layer once other noises appear, stay with “Drugs” well past the first minute (they last for 1:16, out of 5:20, on the album’s longest track). You simply take them for granted, as anyone living in hearing range of real birds tends to do. You only might notice if they were gone. Or not. It depends on your attention to that sort of thing.
* * *
A synthesizer mimics the science-fictiony sound of an airlock opening, or an elevator door unsealing, then gives way to a twitchily distinctive rhythm figure. This will be one of the song’s constants — though from time to time it lays out, or is drowned in effects, the figure will persist in this first form all the way to the song’s fade, 5 minutes later. Untreated drum and bass, recognizable as themselves, pace some vast floor — are we back in Side One’s loft? — muttering to one another. The figure is punctuated by a heavily echoed “ping” sound, like that of a submarine’s sonar, or the singing note a metal hammer makes when striking a forge, or bare stone. In fact, this weird tone makes an explicit reference to another song featuring hammered beats — Lee Dorsey’s “Working in a Coal Mine.” The resemblance is clearest in the Dorsey song’s bridge, when other instruments fall away, leaving just the hammered beat and the bass line’s pulse, while the singer moans, “Lord, I am so tired … how long can this go on?” — lyrics that themselves wouldn’t be entirely out of place on “Drugs” (or “Memories Can’t Wait”). Still, the reference, if it is one, seems out of joint: one’s a song of labor and the other, presumably, of leisure. On the other hand, “Working in a Coal Mine” is one of those rare sixties pop songs not about love, a thing that obviously interested both Fear of Music’s songwriter and its producer. (It also interested Devo, whose cover of “Working in a Coal Mine,” released in 1981, was recorded in demo form much earlier, and was a demo Brian Eno would have heard while planning that band’s first album. Just a thought.)
What’s achieved, anyway, is the suggestion that this drug trip might actually be hard, sweaty work — and that journeying through “Drugs” could feel as fathomless and reverberant as entering a coal mine.
* * *
It will be two full verses and one chorus before the singer appears. We’re still in birdland. The next entrant into the space of “Drugs” is a guitar figure, another needle-needle-neep like that we’ve just met in “Electric Guitar” — but this one’s less insecure and whiny, far more self-possessed. It seems perfectly happy to migrate through, offering its peculiar intermittent contribution to the atmosphere. The guitar’s not looking to hook up, it’s playing with itself.
Keyboard offers a wash of color here and there. The synthesizer reproduces the airlock sound.
(This is the verse.)
Just before the minute mark the rhythm track dampens, the hammer-pings cease, and the synthesizer projects a short film depicting some long-lost satellites whose orbit has taken them across our high ceiling.
(This is the chorus.)
We are experiencing a distinct sense of unhurry. “Drugs” is hard to get your brain around. But you’ll have time.
* * *
Preparing us to meet the trauma of the sound of human speech entering into this eerily becalmed chapel, an otherworldly harmony vocal may or may not be buried under the synthesizer sweeping through the chorus section. If it is there, rather than being produced by some unspecified Enofication of the synth tones themselves — you could listen a hundred times and be uncertain — it has the quality of wraithlike femininity we encountered once before, in the Sweetbreaths’ contribution to “Air.” This makes sense. We’re on a science fiction trip.
More absolutely, though, the birds are the track’s vocalists, until the singer arrives. Job finished, they’ll never return once he opens his yap.
* * *
Even at 1:21 he hasn’t sung, but we’re made aware of his presence. He breathes and gulps into our attention. Detecting a singer’s intake of breath isn’t uncommon on a closely miked vocal track (a few singers, like Diana Ross, scoop a little oxygen at the end of nearly every sung line, a thing I’ve done you no favor by pointing out since it can be ruinously distracting once you’ve begun noticing). A breath out, however, is an absolute unicorn in recorded music. Exhalations are meant to carry notes of song (or shouts of joy, or, once in a while, a James Brown grunt, or Bob Dylan syllable of laughter). This guy comes in panting. And goes on struggling to control his intake through the song. This effect is produced in the true manner of a method-actor, like Dustin Hoffman staying up all night before the torture scenes in Marathon Man: the singer, reportedly, did calisthenics before stepping to the mike, then jogged in place to keep from regaining his breath while he sang.
It’s a great performance, not a hammish one. You hang on every word, yet the vocal never chews the room’s extraordinary scenery — each word also hangs in the track’s uncannily spacious zone, equal player to the banners of keyboard color unfurling, the guitar’s relentless onanism, the what’s-he-building-in-there? puzzle of the rhythm track’s steady labors.
Of course, as in the other actorly tradition — Lawrence Olivier or Orson Welles stagecraft, that is — this performance is abetted by a generous portion of a singer’s equivalent of wigs and false noses. The producer runs amok, shading or distorting or compressing these syllables in any number of directions throughout, leaving barely any unmolested. It’s all good. Every disguise fits.
The singer will only sing for 2:17 of the song’s 5:21. Structurally, “Drugs” takes the form of a triptych: (1) birds (2) singer; and (3) some “found vocals” still to come. Occupying merely the middle-third of the whole imposes on this performance a kind of modesty. Big as he may feel to himself, this guy is just one thing moving through an even larger zone of our attention.
* * *
“And all I see is little dots.” There’s no way I can think to easily prove this, but “and” is surely one of the rarest common words to open the first line of song lyric. We’ve caught this
narrator in media res, a traditionally exciting narrative strategy, and one that here suggests this person may have been wandering in other rooms of the mansion before we bumped into him here. “Dots” is grasped in retrospect, working back from the rhyme with “spots” (or taken off the lyric sheet). What we hear instead has been reverbed until it sounds like “doubts.” The dots are what he sees; the doubts are what we feel.
“Some are smeared …” No, please, do go on, it’s fascinating. In “Mind” we’re informed that we’re not listening; here we’re told the singer doesn’t notice us, or whomever it is he might be supposed to be addressing — he’s too taken up with the hallucinations or phosphenes in his visual field. We’re in the position of a guide, then, a steady hand to hold while he discourses from the far side of his reality. We’re a designated driver.
* * *
He feels “like murder” but “that’s alright.” The album’s flow of equivocal statements becomes, in “Drugs,” a geyser, one which blankets its weirdest song in okayness. Never has this strategy been more necessary, or effective. “Okay,” “alright,” and “over in a minute or two” — these will mitigate murder, meanness, and too much light, just as the limp modifier “pretty” damps down whatever’s “intense.” Similarly, not knowing what they’re talking about takes the sting out of the laughter of the girls. (Maybe they’re really not laughing at the mess the boys made, but at some girlish joke among themselves.) You could slide through all kinds of disaster in a state like this, telling yourself it was “okay” the whole time. You only might wake up with blood on your hands. But then again you might also discover it was because you’d been sitting in a corner rhythmically scratching your own scalp or shin or earlobe until it bled.
* * *
He tells us two things, adamantly, and as if they’re one and the same. But strictly speaking, they’re not. When he says, “I don’t know what they’re talking about,” we believe him absolutely — to this guy, other human voices probably sound like the lyrics to “I Zimbra” right about now — but when he expands, to say, “Nobody knows what they’re talking about” we may doubt his reportorial capacities. In that gap lies the song’s crux: who else is present? And are they on the same trip? This is a breakdown along “Life During Wartime” versus “Memories Can’t Wait” lines. Either we’re getting a missive from the front lines of a new state of collective reality, or the song’s a minority report, from the one fellow who sees phantoms.
Yet mean and scary as things want to be, the whole drama is enacted within a sympathetic amplitude which keeps this song, and its narrator, well clear of “Animals” territory. Bottom line: he gets the joke — the joke of subjectivity, the joke of paranoia, the inside-outside problem of trying to make an effective observation of anything in particular when the specimens keeps shifting and sliding under the microscope, and the lens keeps reflecting your own face back to you. Contemplate the sequence of dorky confessions beginning at 2:59 (right after a gawky hiccup of what sounds like a violin sawed by a chimpanzee): I’m charged up I’m kinda wooden I’m barely moving I study motion I study myself I fooled myself! Like Groucho meeting Harpo in a doorway framed to look like a mirror in Duck Soup, the speaker’s caught sight of a version of himself that’s not quite right — or not right at all. His reaction is not only to be fascinated at his own impaired function, but to invite the fascination of others.
With that, and one more chorus (“don’t feel like talking,” declares the Talking Head), he’s out. Or not quite. He’s got another of those odd gaspy exhalations to deliver, at 3:41, but this one’s really a laugh, and a fairly relaxed, even self-approving one. The producer clears out all distortions to frame the little guffaw in sonic clarity, as if the singer had managed to stick his head out a window and gargle with a mouthful of fresh air.
* * *
He cedes the stage to something new that’s also prescient. It’s a male voice, sounding like some kind of public service announcement, indecipherably gobbled in echoey loops (if you listen hard to one channel, then the next, you might finally conclude you’d heard “great” on the left and “good deal of collective” or “good deal of molecular” on the right — and you might be completely imagining it). What “Drugs” sounds like once this “found vocal” appears is highly predictive of the Eno-Byrne collaboration coming just next, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (more on this subject, momentarily). But the garbled announcer isn’t given the last third of “Drugs” to himself, as the birds had rule of the first. He comes and goes, is haunted by some other buried ghost-voices, and then — gadzooks! — a bullfrog croaks, plain as day, plain as the singer’s laughter. It’s as though the producer raised the stakes on the bassist once more — still feeling froggy? Here’s that sound you were chasing. Side Two’s been colonized: One Nation Under Frog.
* * *
Authentic fact: “Drugs” has a secret identity, a true name. It was once called “Electricity,” and was demoed and played live and introduced to audiences under this title. It then suffered a name change. There could be a pragmatic reason for this: the song was due to nestle beside another, called “Electric Guitar,” creating risk of verbal static.
Playing it in concert in late 1978, the singer’s last sung words are, “Electricity — call it by name!” Six months later, in the recording sessions, he replaces these words with, “Electricity — that’s what I call it!” (Again, the distinction between a thing’s name, and what it is called.) As if he’s making a rueful, stubborn joke about a song title that isn’t quite willing to be banished — and it isn’t as if the word electricity has been demoted in importance within the song. (Amusingly, when I search my own stash for versions, studio or live, legalized or extralegal, I find the piece under four names: “Drugs,” “Electricity,” “Drugs (Electricity)” and “Electricity (Drugs).”)
Pop history marks the fact that the word “God” didn’t appear in the title or chorus of a pop song until The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows.” Despite the association of sixties rock with drugs, the actual word “drug” endured a similar quarantine into the seventies, when glam and punk made it a commonplace (Roxy Music’s “Love is the Drug,” Ian Dury’s “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll,” The Clash’s “Julie’s Been Working in the Drug Squad,” Mike Hall’s “Let’s Take Some Drugs and Drive Around,” East River Pipe’s “Druglife,” Wilco’s “Handshake Drugs,” the Karl Hendricks Trio’s “Naked and High On Drugs,” etc.).
The sixties drought may have been self-censorship for fear of radio boycott. It also might be that using the word would have named something sacred too bluntly. Except when being warned against, drugs were understood as exalted and esoteric, an agent for self-transformation that was a kind of twin to the music itself, and so were named allusively or not at all. To say the word is to treat the stuff irreverently, as a material, daylight fact. Drugs could even be embarrassing hippie stuff, like sex, to be denounced by punks overthrowing oppressive countercultural norms.
Yet the title “Drugs” sounds unironic, and unembarrassed to be. It’s also a better noun for the album’s collection, more grounded. It makes the song less arty-farty, more human, since who gets high on electricity? Only Dr. Frankenstein’s exquisite corpse, that Dada collage of body parts. Whereas we living can all get wired on drugs. Even the brainiest nerds must get stoned. This matter-of-factness also points to one of the paradoxes of the song: that despite drugs being a “head trip,” you must first convey them through your body (lungs, veins, or stomach). On an album partly about the plight of disembodied minds, the mind in “Drugs,” wedged between bird sounds and frog noises, dwells contentedly in the vehicle of its animal nature.
* * *
On the other hand, a Frankenstein reference would have been appropriate, since “Drugs,” more than any other song on the album, is its mad-scientist producer’s monster, or rather the monster produced by two mad scientist falling into happy collaboration — the producer and the songwriter. The extent of this is proved by t
he track’s earlier life as “Electricity,” for, along with a live version, if you seek you’ll find you can hear an instrumental demo track testifying to the song’s nature Before and After Eno. The song was spooky from the first, but it was also a conventional “rock” song: guitar-laden, propulsive and full-sounding — strummable, hummable. (It is also marvelous.) David Byrne: “Brian and I listened to it over and over again and then I suggested starting to remove things from the mix. First, my vocal came out, and then all the other parts, and then all we were left with was the snare drum and some of my guitar. The problem was that, since all the old parts were ingrained in our heads, we couldn’t come up with anything new to replace them. So what we did was work on the parts simultaneously but without each other’s knowledge. Brian would play half a bass part and I would play half a bass part and then we’d put them together as if it was one part …” The method described is, precisely, that of the Dada art-generating game called Exquisite Corpse. The two men killed “Electricity” to bring “Drugs” to life, and so the most retrograde item on the album became the most futuristic, the first-existing placed last. Though “I Zimbra” is routinely billed as the bridge to a place beyond Fear of Music, “Drugs” is arguably even more prophetic, in the manner of its construction as well as the sound.
What’s missing from the anecdote are the names of the other three members of Talking Heads, erased as fully as the sound of their instruments (apart from that snare). To fall in love with “Drugs” is to fall in love, a little, with the future death of this band. The boy in his room did, but was oblivious to his complicity.
* * *
But wait, wait, what does “Drugs” mean? We’re so near the end, let me try shuffling this tarot deck once more: “I Zimbra” (no-mind, non-sense), “Mind” (not a working number), “Paper” (old methods doubtful), “Cities” (flee, dance), “Life During Wartime” (quit dancing, find barricades), “Memories Can’t Wait” (party and war are in your mind), “Air” (no release on earth), “Heaven” (release from mind only in death), “Animals” (no dignity in bodily release), “Electric Guitar” (doubt rock) — so, does “Drugs” counsel a mixed state of happy impurity, an ecstatic surrender on temporary organic terms? Conclusion: Fuck up the mind. Or maybe the key phrase is “I study motion,” as the songwriter was about to do, and you should too. This is a disco! (Or at least it ain’t not no disco.) Quit staring at your phosphenes, wallflower. You may be overthinking things. In fact, free your mind and — hey, at last I get it! — your ass will follow. Anybody have Bernie Worrell’s phone number?
Fear of music Page 11