How Music Works

by David Byrne

  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 fr
om 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.