Byrne approached songwriting with exactly the same playful spirit. “I felt the challenge was to take something that was lyrically purely structural, had no emotional content whatsoever, but then invest the performance with leaps of emotion,” he says. In some Talking Heads songs, Byrne plays a character, as if the song were a minimovie. In others, he plays with language itself. But however fragmented the narrative, the language in Talking Heads was always plainspoken, the sound of conversation or inner monologue, rather than poeticized. When it came to subject matter, Byrne’s songs swerved past the things that occupy the vast majority of rock’s attention (love, sex, various kinds of rebellion and misbehavior) and instead explored the whole vast realm of other stuff that makes up the world (bureaucracy, TV, animals, appliances, cities). Graced with a melody that shimmers like a hummingbird dipping for nectar, “Don’t Worry About the Government” (from the debut album, Talking Heads 77) broke with rock’s tired tradition of “Mr. Jones” songs and instead empathized with office drones everywhere. Inspired by Maoist ideas and management theory, Byrne was playing with the notion—sacrilegious, in rockthink—that “uniformity and restriction don’t have to be debilitating and degrading.”
More Songs About Buildings and Food, the second album, was the first made with Eno. It turned out to be Installment Number One in an Eno-produced trilogy of classic albums that were hugely diverse but unified by a loose concept: psychedelic funk. Both band and producer had been listening closely to the recent output of Parliament-Funkadelic, which had an ultravivid palette of heavily effected instruments. This color-saturated quality was especially ear-catching when applied to the bass, an instrument normally played without much processing. Bootsy Collins’s glossy, elasticated sound made him the Jimi Hendrix of the bass guitar. Parliament also pioneered synth bass on tracks such as “Flashlight” (a massive U.S. R&B hit in 1978), with keyboardist Bernie Worrell stacking multiple Moog bass tones to create the most lubriciously gloopy B-line ever heard.
The songs on Talking Heads 77 had all been written before Jerry Harrison joined, but with his keyboards integrated into the writing process on Buildings and Food, the group’s music grew ever more thickly textured. Eno loved creating strange, ultravivid timbres using effects and the studio as instrument. On Buildings and Food you can hear this chromatic quality at its most intense in the splashy, reverbed drums at the start of “Warning Sign” and the famous “underwater” sound of the Heads’ cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River.” Released as a single, the latter gave the band their first Billboard Top 30 hit and was a striking gesture of racial border crossing at a time when New Wave was at its most starchy white.
With 1979’s Fear of Music, Talking Heads plunged deeper into white funkadelia, but the feel is decidedly late seventies—psychedelia as media-overloaded disorientation, not trippy serenity. The title was inspired by a real (if rather rare) phobia Byrne had read about, but the phrase “fear of music” obliquely distills the ominous mood of 1979, a year of geopolitical instability (the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) and near catastrophe (the nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island). Germany’s Red Army Faction (aka Baader-Meinhof) and the Symbionese Liberation Army (Patty Hearst’s kidnappers) inspired “Life During Wartime,” Fear’s only overtly topical tune. Byrne goes beyond the obvious excitements of being an undercover terrorist (always on the move, switching identities, carrying several passports) by imagining the character’s secret regrets—no time for “fooling around,” for romance or nightclubbing. Elsewhere, the symptoms of disquiet and malaise are more quirky. “Air” is the lament of someone so vulnerable that even contact with the atmosphere hurts (“Some people don’t know shit about the air,” he whines), while “Animals” features an Archie Bunker–type grouch ranting about the wildlife being irresponsible and generally “making a fool of us.” The subliminal undertow of tension pervading Fear makes it a sister album to 1979’s other postpunk landmarks, Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures and PiL’s Metal Box. But unlike John Lydon and Ian Curtis, Byrne approached things in a more impersonal, elliptical manner.
Fear of Music represented the Eno/Talking Heads collaboration at its most mutually fruitful and equitable. By this point Eno felt that he and the four Heads had developed a group identity. His role encompassed being a kind of fifth player, “listening to what they were doing and picking out sounds and making new sounds from them…using delays to create new rhythms within their own,” and being an editor who spotted “little playing ideas that may have been accidents, or accidents of interaction” that the band might otherwise have missed. In a way, he’d become the group’s George Martin. Indeed, the trilogy of records Eno and Talking Heads made together recalls the runaway evolution of the Beatles across Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper’s in the way that each album’s most radical tracks became the starting point for the next record.
In Fear’s case, the most advanced pieces, in terms of their structure and methodology, were the opening “I Zimbra” and the closing “Drugs.” “I Zimbra” combined Africa-influenced percussion, propulsive disco bass, and Byrne chanting nonsense syllables originally written and performed by Hugo Ball as dadaist sound poetry. “Drugs,” a slow, faltering groove riddled with hallucinatory afterimages and light streaks, evoked altered states. In order to nail the panic-attack vibe he wanted, Byrne tried to make himself hyperventilate. “I’d run around in circles until I was completely out of breath and then gasp, ‘Okay, I’m ready to sing the next verse!’” The most radical aspect of “Drugs” was its discombobulated gait and gap-riddled structure, full of lapses and phase shifts. “Brian and I tore the song down to its basic elements and then built it up again with new stuff, replaying certain parts and replacing certain instruments.” The resulting mosaic of live-band playing and sound collage was something almost impossible to reproduce onstage. “Drugs” was the germ of the next album, Remain in Light, on which the band would generate a mass of rhythms and riffs that were then sifted through and stitched together at the mixing board.
In the hiatus between Fear and Remain, Byrne and Eno launched a side project that also intended to expand on the ideas of “Drugs” and “I Zimbra.” The pair had become obsessed with African music. Byrne had long been a devotee of field recordings, but now he was reading books by anthropologists and ethnomusicologists like Robert Farris Thompson and John Miller Chernoff, experts on African civilization and the role of music in tribal societies. The project was initially conceived as a collaboration involving Eno, Byrne, and Jon Hassell, who coined the concept of the “Fourth World,” the merger of high-tech Western music and archaic ethnic music from all corners of the globe. The original idea for what became My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was a fake field recording of a nonexistent tribe. “We’d invent a whole culture to go with it,” recalls Byrne. “There would be ethnographic sleeve notes and everything.”
Speaking to Musician in 1979, Eno talked about the three areas he and Byrne planned to weave together: disco funk, Arabic music from North Africa, and West African polyrhythms. “Things sound really messy, and it’s a kind of mess I’ve never had on anything before,” he enthused. “It’s a sort of jungle sound.” Soon a fourth element entered the picture: found voices. Eno and Byrne became fascinated with American radio’s menagerie of evangelist preachers, right-wing pundits, and callers phoning in to live talk radio shows. Radio, it seemed to Eno, was America’s seething id, its political unconscious. “In Britain or Europe, the presenters are picked for their qualities of calmness and obvious rationality,” he told the Guardian. “Here you get the nuttiest people in charge of the airwaves.” Tuning in to the born-again fundamentalists, they soon noticed “a contradiction” at the heart of the ranting and raving, says Byrne. “Some of it was declamatory finger waving, but with a lot of the preaching there was this ecstatic element. The performance was saying the opposite of what the text was saying. The words were all ‘thou shalt not’ but the delivery itself was completely sexual. I t
hought, ‘Great, the conflict is embodied right there.’” Similarly, the fervor of Baptist and Pentecostal congregations struck Byrne as “very similar to wild rock concerts or disco, the communal feeling where everyone gets swept up.”
Collecting radio voices for their polyrhythmic collages, Eno and Byrne found themselves most attracted to the born-again Christian preachers because of their rocking-and-a-rolling speech patterns, midway between conversation and incantation. “When people speak passionately they speak in melodies,” Eno told the East Village Eye. Eventually they asked themselves why the fundamentalists sounded better than the regular announcers, and concluded it was because they transmitted “a sense of energy and commitment to some belief or other”—a fervor that felt weirdly alluring against the bland backdrop of anomie and drift that was Carter’s America. Byrne and Eno’s project began to coalesce around a central idea, the contrast between the spiritual void of faithless liberalism and the rival (yet weirdly similar) fundamentalisms of East and West. The duo imagined creating a ritual music for the postmodern West—a physically grounded transcendence connecting the holy-roller madness of born-again Protestantism with African trance rhythms and Funkadelic’s liberation theology of “dance your way out of your constrictions.” Researching African music, Byrne marveled at the fact that the tribes made no distinction between dance music and religious music. Dancing was worship.
Musically, Bush of Ghosts took the techniques first broached in “Drugs” and “I Zimbra” to the next level. In search of ultravivid and ear-baffling timbres, Eno and Byrne drastically extended the sonic range of conventional instruments through processing and effects. Inspired as much by Steve Reich’s cellular compositions as by African drum choirs, they explored a kind of maxi-minimalism, in which a multitude of instruments each played very simple parts but interlocked to form a complex, ever shifting mesh of textured rhythm. Two new approaches also informed the album: a “Fourth World” mix of the acoustic and the high-tech (so that hand percussion and the noise of wood mingled with state-of-the-art digital delays and synths), and a sensurround ambience that Eno called the “psychedelic wash.”
Byrne’s head was buzzing with all these ideas when he joined the rest of Talking Heads at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas in spring 1980, to begin work on the group’s fourth album, Remain in Light. Rather than start from Byrne’s melodies, the group decided to jam out tons of raw material—riffs, vamps, rhythmic pulses—and allow the songs to emerge later. The tracks were built up out of layers of percussion, tics of rhythm guitar, synth daubs, and multiple bass riffs (on “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On),” there were at least five basses, each doing simple one-or two-note pulses). Glyphs of keyboard coloration darted through the drum foliage like tropical birds. When it came to the vocal melodies, Byrne had to find new modes of delivery in order to weave his voice into this teeming, gleaming rain forest. He assimilated the radio preachers’ hypnotic cadences and commanding tones. He also picked up some tricks from early hip-hop and attempted a stiff-necked form of rapping on “Crosseyed and Painless.”
If Fear was about neurosis, Remain grasped for psychic wholeness, life newly reintegrated with nature and the body. Much of the album implicitly argued that Western values suck, they’re sick. “The Great Curve” was an ecofeminist rhythm-hymn to Mother Earth, its chorus (“The world moves on a woman’s hips”) inspired by the Yoruba’s Great Mother cosmology. “Listening Wind” makes us empathize with a North African man fighting neocolonialism by sending letter bombs and planting explosive devices. Says Byrne, “It’s the point of view of someone being swamped by the West, their lives and culture destroyed. His retaliation is so limited compared to the might of the global powers, it’s pretty easy to identify with—especially for someone who fancied himself an underdog in the music world.”
Remain in Light divides into “dry” and “wet” sides. The restless panoramas of side one’s triptych “Born,” “Crosseyed and Painless” and “The Great Curve” contrast with the flip side’s “Once in a Lifetime,” a rapt aquatic swirl, and the glistening dreamscapes of “Seen and Not Seen” and “Listening Wind.” Remain’s two sides make up a loose concept album. In “Born” and “Crosseyed,” Byrne’s protagonists are caged inside the clockwork grid of the industrial West, with its hamster wheel of schedules and time-is-money. In “Once in a Lifetime” a suburban man wonders how he ended up “here,” surrounded by beautiful possessions (house, car, wife). He’s “not upset or tormented,” Byrne explained, “just bewildered. And then in contrast the chorus is meant to convey a feeling of ecstatic surrender.” This shattering epiphany punctures the ordered absurdity of workaday life and opens up the possibility of rebirth and renewed wonder.
Or perhaps not, as “Once in a Lifetime” is followed immediately by the spooky “Houses in Motion,” in which a man is “digging his own grave” in daily installments of empty industriousness. Remain’s concept wasn’t especially original. In The Waste Land T. S. Eliot diagnosed Western soul sickness as a biorhythmic disconnection from natural cycles. There was also a tang of the sixties (Dylan’s “he not busy being born is busy dying”). Still, Remain brilliantly evoked both the illness (the itchy rhythmic unrest) and its cure (deep trance, timeless flow). At the end of the album, though, modernity’s malaise reasserts itself with “The Overload,” a droning dirge inspired by Joy Division in a uniquely oblique fashion. Talking Heads never actually heard Joy Division’s records, but had been intrigued by the record reviews. The whitest-sounding music on Remain, “The Overload” is also, appropriately, the most angst wracked, Byrne numbly intoning lyrics about missing centers, terrible signals, “a gentle collapsing.” It’s as if the African dream has dissolved, leaving the listener stranded once more in the psychic hollow lands of Fear of Music.
A masterpiece, then—but Remain in Light shook Talking Heads to the core. Making the record had involved deconstructing the band. Assigned roles got thrown into flux. For instance, everybody contributed keyboards and almost everybody played some bass. Recreating such multilayered music onstage required the expansion of Talking Heads into a nine-piece ensemble modeled on Parliament-Funkadelic (whose keyboard player, Bernie Worrell, was recruited, along with two other African Americans, backing vocalist Nona Hendryx and second bassist Busta Jones). Before the band even played a note, the racially and sexually mixed lineup of the expanded Heads made a multiculturalist statement, their onstage presence embodying the all-gates-open, communal uplift that Remain was precariously grasping for.
Offstage, however, tensions had emerged within the core quartet that could be traced back to the Remain sessions. In the studio Weymouth, Frantz, and Harrison would come up with material but had “no idea where it would end up,” says Byrne. “Everyone was pretty enthusiastic about cutting the tracks at the start. But during the process of taking all the parts and forming them into songs, less people became involved. They probably felt a little bit left out. Their playing was still there but the vibe at the end might be completely different.” A rift opened up between Weymouth, Frantz, and Harrison—effectively demoted to the level of session musicians—and Byrne and Eno, now incredibly tight. Emotions and loyalties were at stake as well as questions of creative control. “By the time they finished working together for three months [on Bush of Ghosts] they were dressing like one another,” Weymouth sniped in one interview. “They’re like two fourteen-year-old boys making an impression on each other.”
The conflict extended to the fraught questions of writing credits and royalties. Song publishing traditionally assigns copyright to the composer of the top line melody and lyrics, but this was obviously inadequate for the radically decentered music on Remain. Eno, understandably, wanted appropriate credit for his role and pressed for double billing: Talking Heads and Brian Eno. The band refused, but when the artwork came back Weymouth, Frantz, and Harrison were horrified to find the songs credited to Byrne and Eno. In the end, the back cover declared, “All Songs by David Byrne, Brian Eno, Talk
ing Heads,” a compromise that satisfied nobody. Weymouth, Frantz, Harrison, and eventually Byrne, too, began to suspect that Eno was trying, consciously or unconsciously, to turn Talking Heads into his backing band—a new Roxy Music, but with Byrne far more amenable to Eno’s ideas than Bryan Ferry. “It wasn’t really a problem while we were making Remain, but when we were considering what to do next,” says Byrne. “By this point the others were fed up with me and Brian and our ideas. And I probably thought, ‘Okay, I won’t push it down their throats anymore.’”
For his part, Eno felt Remain could have gone so much further if he’d had carte blanche. He was also irritated that the album had effectively stolen Bush of Ghosts’s thunder. The Byrne and Eno album was originally meant to come out before Remain, but got delayed, partly because of legal wrangles over the use of one evangelist’s voice, partly because the Remain sessions gave the duo loads of new ideas for where to take Ghosts. Released in January 1981—four months after the massively acclaimed Remain—Bush of Ghosts felt like an afterthought, not the ambush of new ideas Eno had planned. It also caught a critical backlash. Some characterized Byrne and Eno as bloodless eggheads working in sterile laboratory conditions, while others chastised them as sonic neocolonialists appropriating Third World exotica.
Despite the doubters, Ghosts was a career peak for both men. Even more than Remain, the record’s panoply of tactile rhythms, disjointed pulse grooves, and eerily pitch-smeared arabesques of melody looked ahead to the innovations of sampladelic genres like hip-hop, house, and jungle. Ghosts both preempted and influenced albums as diverse as Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, A Guy Called Gerald’s Black Secret Technology, and Moby’s Play. According to Byrne, the record was obliquely affected by hip-hop, but not rap music as much as breakdancing. While working on the record in Los Angeles, the duo met dancer Toni Basil (who would later do the choreography in the video for “Once in a Lifetime”). Basil was working with body-popping troupes like the Electric Boogaloos and the Lockers. According to Byrne, “She was going to do a whole program of choreography based on these street dancers. Brian and I thought it was the most amazing dancing we’d ever seen and in some way the music we were doing was intended for her to use in some television program with these dancers. But it never panned out.”
Rip It Up and Start Again Page 24
