These poor souls thrust in the limelight had to compete with the Beatles, Dylan, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder, who all seemed completely comfortable performing and had taken charge of their own creative destinies (or at least it seemed that way at the time). In a sense, these extremely talented artists made it harder on those whose middling talents needed a little help—whether that meant some coaching on how to sing as if you mean it, how to engage an audience in your performance, or on how to dress and move. Suddenly there was a prejudice against acts that weren’t able to hold all the creative reins and do everything by themselves. This prejudice now seems unfair. The highly coached acts—or, to be kind, the more collaboratively put-together acts—were not all bad. Some were the result of teamwork that produced things that were beyond any one artist’s or band’s vision or abilities, but many of them were underappreciated at the time, and only later were they seen as hip innovators: Nancy Sinatra, the Shangri Las, the Jackson 5, KC and the Sunshine Band. The fact that some of them weren’t great live performers made it doubly hard for them. At that time we couldn’t accept that making a great record was maybe all we should expect. As Lou Reed once said, people want to “view the body.”
More recently, composers, DJs, and pop, rock, and hip-hop artists have created their music on computers and not, as was often the case in the past, by playing with other musicians. Though this allows them to be more self-empowered—they don’t need a band, record-company funding, or even a recording studio—these artists are often (though not always) similarly lost when it comes to, well, showmanship. Some should never get near a stage, as their talents end with the laptop or with rhymes, but others eventually find their way. Expecting them to be good at both things sometimes seems unfair. I’ve seen too many creative souls who were suddenly expected to go on stage desperately imitating moves, clothing styles, and bits of stage business that they’d obviously seen elsewhere. We’ve all spent time imagining ourselves inhabiting the bodies of our childhood heroes, like avatars in a way, and it’s thrilling, but at some point it’s time to put those urges to rest. After all, those bodies are already being used by their original owners.
After auditioning at CBGB one afternoon for Hilly Kristal, the club’s owner, and a few others, Talking Heads got offered a slot opening for the Ramones. As twitchy and Aspergery a stage presence as I was in those days, I had a sense from my time busking in Berkeley and elsewhere that I could hold an audience’s attention. I wouldn’t call what we did then entertainment, exactly, but it was riveting in its own disturbing way. Not quite like looking at an accident, as one writer said, but not that far off either. My stage presence wasn’t fake, as weird as it looks to me in retrospect, but it wasn’t altogether unconsciously oddball either. Occasionally I’d cross over into something affected, but most of the time the poor soul up there was just doing what he thought was right, given the skills and techniques available to him.
Once we began playing at CBGB, we also got gigs at other venues in Lower Manhattan—Mothers, Max’s Kansas City, and eventually the Mudd Club. We played somewhere almost every week but held on to our day jobs. Mine was being a movie theater usher on 34th Street, which was perfect, as the first show wasn’t until 11 or 12. We didn’t always get much sleep, but the band got pretty tight.
Looking at early video footage of our three-piece combo at CBGB, I now sense that it was less a band than an outline for a band. It was a sketch, just the bare-bones musical elements needed to lay out a song. Nothing more. There was no real pleasure or pleasantness to these arrangements. This wasn’t music to seduce the ear, but it wasn’t intentionally aggressive or abrasive like punk rock, either. It was like looking at a framework, an architectural drawing, and being asked to imagine where the walls and sink might go.
This was all intentional. The range of pre-existing performative models from which to draw on was overwhelming—and artistically invalid, as I’ve argued, because those tropes were already taken. So the only sensible course was to avoid all of it, to strip everything back and see what was left. Some others in that scene had similar ideas. The Ramones didn’t allow guitar solos, for example, but we took reductionism pretty damn far. It was a performance style defined by negatives—no show-off-y solos (I remembered Nils Lofgren, and knew it was hopeless for me to go there, though I did love Tom Verlaine’s solos with Television), no rock moves or poses, no pomp or drama, no rock hair, no rock lights (our instructions to club lighting people were “Turn them all on at the beginning and turn them off at the end”), no rehearsed stage patter (I announced the song titles and said “Thank you” and nothing more), and no singing like a black man. The lyrics too were stripped bare. I told myself I would use no clichéd rock phrases, no “Ohh, baby”s or words that I wouldn’t use in daily speech, except ironically, or as a reference to another song.
It was mathematics; when you subtract all that unwanted stuff from something, art or music, what do you have left? Who knows? With the objectionable bits removed, does it then become more “real”? More honest? I don’t think so anymore. I eventually realized that the simple act of getting on stage is in itself artificial, but the dogma provided a place to start. We could at least pretend we had jettisoned our baggage (or other people’s baggage, as we imagined it) and would therefore be forced to come up with something new. It wasn’t entirely crazy.
Clothing is part of performance too, but how were we supposed to start from scratch sartorially? Of course, back then the fact that we were (sometimes) wearing polo shirts both set us apart and branded us as preppies.B
In the nineties, preppy was adopted as a hip-hop look, but back then it smacked of WASP elitism and privilege, which wasn’t very rock and roll. That wasn’t my background, but I was fascinated by the fact that the old-guard movers and shakers of the United States had an actual look (with approved brands!). And despite their wealth, the clothing choices made by ye olde masters of the universe weren’t super flattering! They could afford to pay for flattering clothes, but they opted for house dresses and schlubby suits. What’s the story here?!
After leaving funky Baltimore (a city with an eccentric character that had also come to be defined by race riots and white flight) for art school in little Providence, Rhode Island, I met folks with histories way different from mine, and I found it strange and wonderful. Trying to figure all that out was at least as informative as what I was learning in my classes. Some of these folks had uniforms of a sort—not military- or UPS-style uniforms, but they adhered fairly rigorously to clothing regimens that were way different than anything I was familiar with. I realized that there were “shows” going on all the time.
The WASP style was often portrayed on TV and in movies as a sort of archetypical American look, and some of my new friends seemed to subscribe to it. I decided I’d try it too. I’d tried other looks previously, like Glam dude and Amish geezer, so why not this one?
Photo by Patti Kane
I didn’t stay with it consistently. At one point I decided my look would be, like our musical dogma, stripped down, in the sense that I would attempt to have no look at all. In my forays outside of bohemia and away from the winos and addicts that littered the Bowery at that time, I realized that most New York men wore suits, and that this was a kind of uniform that intentionally eliminated (or was at least intended to eliminate) the possibility of clothing as a statement. Like a school uniform, it was assumed that if everyone looked more or less the same, the focus would be on one’s actions and person and not on the outward trappings. The intention, I guess, was democratic and meritorious, though subtle class signals were there.
So in an attempt to look like Mr. Man on the Street I got a cheap polyester suitC—gray with subtle checks, from one of those downtown discount outlets—and I wore that on stage a few times. But it got sweaty under the stage lights, and when I threw it in the washer and dryer at Tina’s brother’s place it shrank down and became unwearable. Before that I used to hang out at CBGB in a white plastic raincoat and sunglasses. I looked like a flasher!
The preppy look was at least more practical in a packed sweaty club than plastic or polyester, so I stuck with