How Music Works

by David Byrne

  In the future we will see more artists mix-and-match elements of the models I’ve described to create hybrid deals. The business is more flexible than it used to be, which is a good thing for both veteran and emerging artists. We read over and over that the music business is going down the drain, but this is actually a great time to be making music—full of possibility. A life in music—which is what we’re actually talking about, not just fame and glory—is indeed still possible.

  The wealth of options can be paralyzing though. Many who take a good amount of cash upfront will never know the benefits of long-range thinking. Hanging on to more rights in exchange for less money is usually the wiser course of action. Mega pop-artists will still need that mighty push and marketing effort for their new releases, and that is something that only traditional record companies (or record companies in combination with concert promoters) can provide. For others, what we now call a record label could be replaced by a new entity, a small company that essentially funnels the income and invoices from the various entities and vendors and keeps all the different accounts in order. A consortium of mid-level artists who share the services of such an entity could make that model work—a kind of music business co-op.

  United Musicians, the company that Michael Hausman founded, is one such example. He mentioned to me that there is a scale below which such an organization cannot support itself. One needs to have a number of artists on board to amortize the costs of staff, publicists, administration, and rent. But since most artists aren’t in synch—one is often writing while another is recording—this can work. The administrative staff doesn’t suddenly find itself without work or the business without a steady income when one artist decides that he or she needs to hole up to write new material.

  No single model will work for everyone. There’s room for all of us. Like a lot of people, I liked Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and Christina Aguilera’s “Ain’t No Other Man.” Sometimes corporate pop is what I want, but I don’t want it at the expense of everything else. At times it has seemed that we have been offered a Hobson’s choice: corporate pop or nothing. But perhaps that’s no longer the case.

  This is exciting. Ultimately, all these scenarios have to satisfy the same human urges: What do we need music to do? How do we visit the land in our head and the place in our heart that music is so good at taking us to? Isn’t that what we really want to buy, sell, trade, or download? We can’t, though, not really. No matter what format music is delivered in, the experience we treasure, the thing we value, is still ephemeral and intangible. Advertisers have always tempted us with the idea that the pleasurable sensations, the joy and surprise of music can be bottled or affixed to some tangible artifact, like perfume, shoes, jeans, or a car—but it can’t be. It’s a slippery beast, and that’s part of its appeal.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  How to Make a Scene

  I’m not referring to how best to insult your host at a dinner party. I’m referring to that special moment when a creative flowering seems to issue forth from a social nexus—a clump of galleries, a neighborhood, or a bar that doubles as a music club. I’ve often asked myself why such efflorescence happens when and where it does, rather than at some other time, in some other place.

  The bar and music club CBGB that was located on the Bowery in New York was one such place. Over the years people have asked me if I sensed that something special was going on there in the midto late-seventies. I did not. It seems to me that there is at least as much musical creativity going on around town now as there was then—it just isn’t focused on one particular bar or neighborhood. I remember hanging out at the bar at CBGB watching other bands play, and sure, sometimes I’d think, “Wow, that band is really good,” but just as often I’d think, “That band really sucks, too bad they’re such nice guys.” The exact same thing happens now when I go out and hear music—sometimes I’m blown away, and other times it’s a wasted evening.

  Back then, my bandmates and I would rehearse in our nearby loft and then play at CBGB as often as was practical. But that was just what we did; it didn’t seem in any way special. We felt like a typical group of artists struggling to survive, as they always have. Our days (and even nights) were often routine, boring. It wasn’t like a movie, where everyone’s constantly hopping from one inspirational moment or exciting place to the next and consciously making a revolution. Besides, CBGB was a dump in a part of town that was pretty much ignored—a factor I might have undervalued.

  I was not aware of any revolution in the making—if one could even call it that. But I was conscious that I and many others were rejecting much of the music that had come before us, and that this sentiment was pervasive at that time. But so what? Everyone was doing that in their own way, rejecting things and moving on. It’s just a part of discovering who you are; it’s nothing special.

  As I remember it, things kicked in at CBGB in 1974, when Tom Verlaine and a few others persuaded owner Hilly Kristal to allow them to play for the door at what was then a biker bar on the Bowery. “Playing for the door” meant that the bar charged a small admission fee, which went to the band, and Hilly in turn reaped the money from all the new patrons who had wandered in and were now buying beers. It was an equitable deal. Both sides benefited—the bar hadn’t been drawing many customers at the time, so Hilly didn’t really have a lot to lose. I will argue in the rest of this chapter that the venue and its policies make a music scene happen as much as the creativity of the musicians. So Tom and Hilly deserve a lot of credit, because with their simple agreement, they opened the door just a crack, and that allowed the emergence of a scene.

  When my friends and I gravitated to New York City around 1974, I initially slept on the floor of a loft belonging to a painter who happened to live a block from CBGB. Patti Smith and Tom’s band, Television, had just started playing there, and my friends and I realized that maybe, possibly, our project, which was about to become Talking Heads, might be able to play there too. That prospect spurred us all on. We began to rehearse in earnest. I was already writing songs in dribs and drabs on my own anyway, and I suspect (despite my wondering in the previous chapter if artists would even create without an outlet) that I would have been doing so with or without CBGB across the street. But knowing there was a possible venue for our songs focused my energies, and I began to churn out more of them, and the band that became Talking Heads eventually began to rehearse them.

  CBGB was, from a structural point of view, a perfect, self-actuating, selforganizing system. A biological system, in a way: a coral reef, a root system, a termite colony, a rhizome, a neural network. An emergent entity governed by a few simple rules that Hilly established at the start, rules that made it possible for the whole scene to emerge, and, subsequently, to flow and flourish with a life all its own. Of course I didn’t know that at the time—it’s not like there was a policy statement or flyer with rules on it posted anywhere.

  Later on I came to realize that you can sometimes tell in advance whether or not a given situation will develop into a vibrant scene. As I’ve said, it doesn’t depend entirely on the inspiration and creativity of the individuals hanging out there. A confluence of external factors helps encourage the latent talent in a community to flower. In the rest of this chapter, I will elucidate some of those factors. This might not be definitive, but it’s a start.

  1. THERE MUST BE A VENUE THAT IS OF APPROPRIATE SIZE AND LOCATION IN WHICH TO PRESENT NEW MATERIAL

  This sounds kind of obvious, but it’s worth saying because not every space works for every kind of music. As I explained in chapter one, where music is heard can determine the sort of music created by the artists who perform there. It might seem dispiriting to acknowledge that humble brick and mortar can shape what pours out of a creative soul, but this reality doesn’t take anything away from the talent or skill of composers or performers. Their songs and performances will be, one hopes, absolutely heartfelt, passionate, and true—it’s just that we channel our ineffable creative urges, sometimes u
nconsciously, into figuring out what is appropriate for a given situation. The mere existence of CBGB facilitated the creation of the bands and songs that touched our hearts and souls. It was the right size, the right shape, and in the right place.

  It was fairly intimate, but not quiet. There was always bar chatter and jukebox music, so it didn’t have the aura of a concert hall or a vibe like the Bottom Line’s, a few blocks away, where people felt compelled to sit quietly and listen. The room, its physical and social setting, proposed that if there were to be any theatricality employed by the performers, it would be of a type that used limited technical means. There was no space for elaborate facilities or high-tech creations, and everybody who was in the “wings,” about to go on stage, was in plain view. That meant that no one would even consider staging theatrical spectacles that required elaborate lighting and sets—that sort of stuff just wasn’t physically possible there. I’ve always liked creative restrictions, and here, happily, many were already in place.A, B

  A show using extremely modest means still left plenty of room for gesture, costume, and sound. “Poor theater,” as Polish theater innovator Jerzy Grotowski called it. He wrote that theater is about “the discarding of masks, the revealing of the real substance: a totality of physical and mental reaction.” He went on to write, “Here we can see the theater’s therapeutic function for people in our present-day civilization. It is true that the actor accomplishes this act, but he can only do so through an encounter with the spectator.”1

  Taking Grotowski at his word, I would argue that some of the most innovative and viscerally moving theater in America at that time was not being made in proper theaters, but taking place on the stage of this grotty club on the Bowery and in the clubs that imitated it in the years that followed. There were some innovative theater groups that emerged downtown around that same period—the Wooster Group and Mabou Mines come to mind—and they were similarly direct, immediate, and real, despite being in no way naturalistic. But in CBGB a new theater was emerging that was both naked and confrontational. And you could dance to it—in a manner of speaking.

  2. THE ARTISTS SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO PLAY THEIR OWN MATERIAL

  This might seem obvious, too, but it’s important. Hilly was open to original music, and much of what happened there flowed from that stance. There were very few outlets then for bands and musicians who didn’t already have record deals (and the promotional and financial support that used to go with them) or who weren’t willing to cover other people’s songs. There were some folk clubs over on Bleecker Street, but they didn’t seem to be interested in rock music as a serious musical form (by “serious” I don’t mean difficult or virtuosic). Jazz clubs could be found in some nearby lofts and lounges, but they wouldn’t work as venues for a rock band either. To most club owners, it must have been inconceivable that any sane person would be interested in hearing a band they’d never heard on the radio before—or heard of at all, for that matter.

  When Hilly and a few others took the tentative step of letting bands play their own material for small groups of friends and beer drinkers, it was therefore a big deal. When Talking Heads eventually made our first record and began playing outside of New York City, no such network of open-minded club owners existed. As a result we played in whatever ridiculous venue would let us play our own material—like a student center at a university where some kid thought we could amplify our music through his home stereo, a pizza parlor in Pittsburgh, and a kid’s birthday party in New Jersey. However, over the course of a few years, a network of small clubs established itself, and bands like ours could connect the dots and play all across North America and Europe. But that came later.

  The fact that there came into existence a forum within which anyone with a band and some songs could broadcast their insights, fury, and lunacy did not just get the water flowing, it actually helped bring the water into existence.

  3. PERFORMING MUSICIANS MUST GET IN FOR FREE ON THEIR OFF NIGHTS (AND MAYBE GET FREE BEER TOO)

  There wasn’t much camaraderie among the bands at CBGB. Not that there was antagonism, but everyone wanted to stake out their own creative territory, and aligning oneself with others might have run the risk of dilution. Nevertheless, Hilly let many musicians in for free once they’d played there, so it soon became a de facto hangout. None of us complained that our fellow musicians weren’t paying to see us—we weren’t paying to see them, either. There were always a few local band members leaning on the bar with a beer in hand, a precursor to the way, years later, club and restaurant owners would ply models with free drinks to get them to linger at downtown lounges, and thus draw more (mostly male) customers. At CBGB, this was a more organic process, less calculated and cynical. It also meant that there was always an audience for whatever band was playing. They might not be paying all that much attention, but at least there were bodies there. So even a band that had no following had some folks listening—sort of.

  Drawing by David Byrne

  Drawing by David Byrne

  4. THERE MUST BE A SENSE OF ALIENATION FROM THE PREVAILING MUSIC SCENE

  A successful scene presents an alternative. Some of us eventually came to realize that we wouldn’t feel as comfortable anywhere else, and that the music in other places would probably be terrible. The hangout, then, is the place for the alienated to share their misanthropic feelings about the prevailing musical culture.

  That didn’t mean we all reacted to this alienation in the same way. If you were to believe the press, the CB’s scene was only made up of a handful of bands—but that just wasn’t true. Despite being lumped under the punk-rock moniker, all sorts of bands played there. There were progressive-rock bands, jazz-fusion acts, jam bands, and folk singers who seemed as if they’d strayed to the wrong end of Bleecker Street. The Mumps were power pop, and one might even say that the Shirts were the precursors to the musical Rent. We were all disaffected and dissatisfied with the rock dinosaurs who roamed the earth back then. We expressed that disaffection in different ways, but here was a place where we could commiserate and plot a new course.

  The glam acts that already existed—New York Dolls, Bowie, Lou Reed, and a few others—were considered cool and provocative, but almost everything associated in any way with the mainstream seemed hopelessly irrelevant. The radio was dominated by the Eagles and the “California sound,” hair bands and disco—all of which seemed to exist in another universe. We liked a lot of disco, but the prevailing rocker attitude was that dance music was “manufactured” and therefore not authentic or heartfelt.

  The highest ideals of live performance at the time seemed irrelevant to us as well. Arena rock and the mega-R&B ensembles were legendary for their elaborate shows—enormous spectacles with pyrotechnics and spaceships. These shows were light years away from any connection to our reality. They were an escape, a fantasy, and hugely entertaining, but they had no relationship to any sense of what it felt like to be young, energetic, and frustrated. Those artists sure didn’t speak to or for any of us, even if they did have some good songs. If we wanted to hear music that spoke directly to us, it was clear that we’d have to make it ourselves. If no one else liked it, well, so be it—but at least we would have some songs that meant something to us.

  Meanwhile, the art world in SoHo, just a few blocks west of the Bowery, was dominated by the twin poles of conceptualism and minimalism. Pretty dry stuff, for the most part, but the drones and trance-inducing repetition emanating from the avant-garde composers associated with that scene (such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich) somehow took that minimalist aesthetic and made it engaging, and aspects of it found their way into punk rock. You can trace connections from Tony Conrad’s one-note compositions to the Velvet Underground, Neu!, and Faust, and from there to bands like Suicide and onward. The trance sound made its way onto the club stages as well, with the volume and distortion turned way up.

  Pop art from the sixties lingered on as a movement, mutating and becoming more ironic as it drifted further from
its origins. Compared to some of the dour work of the conceptualists and minimalists, one felt that at least these artists had a sense of fun. Warhol, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Lichtenstein, and their kin were about embracing, in a peculiar, ironic way, a world with which we were familiar. They accepted that pop culture was the water in which we all swam. I think I can speak for a lot of the musicians in New York at that time and say that we genuinely liked a lot of pop culture, and that we appreciated for workmanlike song craft. Talking Heads did covers of 1910 Fruitgum Company and the Troggs, and Patti Smith famously reworked the über-primitive song “Gloria” as well as the soul song “Land of 1,000 Dances.” Of course, our cover tunes were very different than those we would have been expected to play if we had been a bar band that played covers. That would have meant Fleetwood Mac, Rod Stewart, Donny and Marie, Heart, ELO, or Bob Seger. Don’t get me wrong, some of them had some great songs, but they sure weren’t singing about the world as we were experiencing it. The earlier, more primitive pop hits we’d first heard on the radio as suburban children now seemed like diamonds in the rough to us. To cover those songs was to establish a link between one’s earliest experience of pop music and one’s present ambitions—to revive that innocent excitement and meaning.

  If I were to diagram the art/music connections, I might say that the Ramones and Blondie were Pop-art bands, while Talking Heads were minimalist or conceptual art with an R&B beat. Suicide was minimalism with rockabilly elements. And Patti Smith and Television were romantic expressionists, with a sometimes slightly surrealist slant. Of course it isn’t as simple as that—you can’t really align everything and anything with art movements. One thing the bands did have in common was that we were all working within the framework of a popular form we loved, and had in recent years become alienated from. As a result, we would all occasionally look for inspiration elsewhere—in other mediums like fine art, poetry, art actions, drag performances, and circus sideshows. All served as points of reference for us. Being forced to look outside of music was a good thing. It may have been done out of desperation, but it pushed everyone to make something new.