I caught one big outdoor rock festival back then—in Bath, a town a few hours east of London. Exhausted after hours of listening to music, I fell asleep on the damp ground. In the middle of the night I woke up and realized that Led Zeppelin was playing. I think they were the biggest act on the bill, but I went back to sleep. In the early morning I was awake again and caught Dr. John, who closed the festival. He was in full Night Tripper mode, and I loved that record, so I was excited to see him. He came out in carnival drag, playing his funky voodoo jive, and the UK audience pelted him with beer cans. I was confused. Here was the most original act of the whole festival, dumped into the worst slot, and he was completely unappreciated by this crowd. It was depressing. Maybe the costumes and headdresses made it seem like too much of a “show” for this bunch, who valued what they imagined as blues-guitar authenticity? But authentic blues played by white English guys? It made no sense. I couldn’t figure it out, but I could see that innovation wasn’t always appreciated and that audiences could be nasty.
Later, when I was in art school, I caught James Brown at the Providence Civic Center. It was the best show I’d ever seen; it was so tight and choreographed that it seemed to be from another planet, a planet where everyone was incredible. He had sexy go-go dancers who just danced the whole show, and though it was exciting as hell, this too put any thoughts of being a professional musician out of my head—these folks were in the stratosphere, and we were just amateurs. That didn’t take any of the enjoyment out of the amateur experience; I’m just saying I didn’t have some transformative moment after seeing these acts when I immediately knew that was what I wanted to do. No way.
I was musically curious, and sometimes I would check out performers whose music I was only slightly aware of. I saw Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the jazz saxophonist, at the Famous Ballroom in Baltimore, a downtown venue with glitter cutouts of rocket ships on the walls. I realized there that jazz wasn’t always the staid, almost classical and reserved style I’d presumed—it was a show too. It was about musicianship, sure, but it was also about entertainment. Kirk sometimes played two or three horns at once, which seemed like the musical equivalent of playing the guitar with your teeth or behind your back or even smashing it—a stage gimmick. But it got everyone’s attention. At one point he took audience interaction to new “heights”: he gave out bumps of cocaine on a little spoon to folks up front!
After having played on the streets of Berkeley, back on the East Coast Mark and I opened for a wonderful local band called the Motels at the art-school auditorium. I shaved off my scraggly beard on stage while Mark played accordion and his girlfriend held up cue cards written in Russian. I didn’t have a mirror and couldn’t manage the razor very well, so there was a fair amount of blood. Needless to say, that kept the audience’s attention, though the bloodletting drove some of them away. In retrospect, it seems I was saying goodbye to the old immigrant guy in the dark suit. I was ready to embrace rock and roll again.
A brief flash forward—when I first moved to New York, I caught Sun Ra and his Arkestra at the 5 Spot, a jazz venue that used to be at St. Mark’s Place and Bowery. He moved from instrument to instrument. At one point there was a bizarre solo on a Moog synthesizer, an instrument not often associated with jazz. Here was electronic noise suddenly reimagined as entertainment! As if to prove to skeptics that he and the band really could play, that they really had chops no matter how far out they sometimes got, they would occasionally do a traditional big band tune. Then it would be back to outer space. There was a slide show projected on the wall behind the band, commemorating their visit to the pyramids in Egypt, and much of the time Sun Ra was wearing spectacles that had no glass in them. They were “glasses” made of bent wire that looped into crazy squiggles in front of his eyes. In its own cosmic way, this was all show business too.
In 1973 my friend Chris Frantz, who was about to graduate from the painting department of the Rhode Island School of Design, suggested that we put together a band. We did, and he proposed we call ourselves the Artistics. Being more social and gregarious than I was, Chris pulled in some other musicians. We began by doing cover songs at loft parties in Providence. We must have done a Velvets or Lou Reed song or two, and some garage-rock songs as well—“96 Tears,” no doubt—but interestingly, at Chris’s suggestion, we also did an Al Green cover, “Love and Happiness.”
I began to write original material around this time, now that I had a band that I hoped would be willing to perform my compositions. I still had no ambitions to become a pop star; writing was purely and simply a creative outlet for me. (My other artistic medium at the time was questionnaires that I’d mail or pass out. Not many came back completed.) The song “Psycho Killer” began in my room as an acoustic ballad, and I asked Chris and his girlfriend Tina for help on it. For some reason I wanted the middle eight section to be in French, and Tina’s mom was French, so she had some skills there. I imagined that this serial killer fancied himself as a grand and visionary sophisticate in the model of either Napoleon or some Romantic lunatic. “Warning Sign” was another song written then; I remember the live version being painfully loud. Another guitar player in that band, David Anderson, was probably even less socially adept than I was, and he was a great and somewhat unconventional performer. Chris joked that we should have called the band the Autistics.
Glam rock was the new thing. Bowie made a big impression on me, and at one point I dyed my hair blonde and sewed myself some leather trousers. No doubt this made for a striking image at the time in little Providence, Rhode Island. What might be okay as a stage get-up was maybe stretching things as street wear. I was flailing about to see who I was, switching from an Amish look to a crazy androgynous rock-and-roller—and I wasn’t afraid in the least to do so in public.A
There were also some discos in Providence, and I remember hearing the O’Jays and the Three Degrees and other Philadelphia acts that were staples on the dance floor. I became aware that the DJs were finding ways to extend the songs longer than what appeared on the records. Somehow, to us, this club music didn’t seem antithetical to the rock we were playing and listening to. Dancing was fun, too.
In the mid-seventies I was offered room and board in New York by a painter, Jamie Dalglish, who let me sleep on his loft floor in return for help renovating the place. This was on Bond Street, almost right across from CBGB, where Patti Smith would read occasionally while Lenny Kaye accompanied her on guitar. Television and the Ramones had started playing there as well, and we took advantage of our perfect location to go see these bands as often as we could afford. When Chris and Tina moved to New York, staying at her brother’s place in Long Island City, we’d all go there regularly. Soon Chris again took the initiative and suggested we form another band. This time, perhaps inspired by the acts playing at CB’s or perhaps by the fact that we already had some original material (that handful of songs I’d written for the Artistics), he suggested we try something with a little more integrity and seriousness. I agreed to give it a try, and if it wasn’t well received, well, we all still had ambitions to be fine artists, or at least I did. I began to write songs based on riffs and fragments, which I would cobble together, my guitar plugged into an old Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder that had a mic input. I filled notebooks with lyrics.
Talking Heads, the name we settled on, started off as a live band. This might sound obvious, but when you think of all the records and musicians that were out there then (and there are more now) who made their records before figuring out how to play their songs live, or how to hold an audience’s attention, it’s significant. We all remembered stories of naïve and ambitious acts, singers mostly, plucked out of obscurity and handed material—and then, if the song became a hit, they’d be assigned a band to do the inevitable promotional tour. They’d be styled and choreographed and, in most cases, they’d crash and burn before long. Some great stuff was created this way, and there were lots of pretty phony manufactured stars as well, but it seemed to be a bit of crapshoot whether any of these acts could actually get an audience to listen. They hadn’t learned the ropes of live performance.