While in London I visited the Virgin Records office, which was then just off Portobello Road, and they let me watch a bunch of Sex Pistols appearances on video. I thought the band was hilarious—not a joke, but definitely a species of comedy. It was almost a parody of a rock-and-roll band; they couldn’t play, they could barely even stand up. Not everyone understood how I could like something and laugh at it at the same time, but don’t we love our great comedians?
By the time our second record came out in 1978, we were playing larger venues: small theaters rather than the familiar grotty clubs. We usually headlined, with one act playing before us. We traveled by van. Some other bands took the traditional career path of opening for more established acts, which allowed the emerging bands to play at bigger venues, but that sounded depressing and debilitating to me. The audiences weren’t there to see you, and they’d ignore you no matter how good or innovative you were. Remember Dr. John!
Hilly from CBGB bought an abandoned theater on Second Avenue, and we were the first pop act to play there—on New Year’s Eve, I think it was. For the occasion I decided to be festive, so I dressed up in primary colors: jeans and T-shirt, naturally, bright red and yellow. There was so much dust in the theater (they hadn’t cleaned it properly) that we saw it rise like a cloud as the audience got excited, and after a while we could barely sing. We were coughing for days afterward. The fashion gambit didn’t get much response, either.
When our third album came out the next year, we were still a four-piece band, but now there were more overdubs and wiggly treatments from our new friend Brian Eno, who had produced our previous record. We were still touring constantly, and we bought some of the latest gear for our live performances. There were guitar-effects pedals and echo units, and Jerry got a Yamaha portable mini-grand piano, an organ, and a Prophet-5 synthesizer. We could reproduce some of the more far-out studio sounds and arrangements we’d worked on, if only just, but we knew it was equally important to maintain our tight rhythmic core. We were still a live performing band and not simply a group that faithfully reproduced recordings. We knew that the groove was fun and essential for us, and it visibly moved our audiences. With the added instruments and effects, we could really begin to vary the textures from one song to the next. We made sure no song sounded exactly like another one, at least not to us. I didn’t dance on stage. I twitched a bit, mainly from the waist down. It wasn’t possible to really dance too wildly, even if I wanted to, as I had to stay close to the vocal mic and stomp on my guitar pedals every so often. I also sensed that we were pushing up against the edge as far as representing what we were doing in the studio; the textures, layers, effects, and palimpsest of sounds and rhythms—all of that we were just barely able to reproduce live with four people. It sounded great, and some of my more off-putting (to some) vocal mannerisms were even softening, or so it seemed to me. As the tour went on, night after night of performing, I was on the verge of actually singing.
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