After a couple of years we felt ready to flesh out our sound, to add a little color to our black-and-white drawing. A mutual friend tipped us that a musician named Jerry Harrison was available. We loved the Modern Lovers demo record that had recently come out which he’d played on, so we invited Jerry to sit in. He had some trepidation, having been burned by his experience with that band (their lead singer, Jonathan Richman, dumped the band and went acoustic folkie just as they were closing in on the brass ring), so at first Jerry played with us on just a few songs during some out-of-town shows. Eventually he took the plunge. As a four-piece, we suddenly sounded like a real band. The music was still spartan, sparse and squeaky clean, but now there was a roundness to the sound that was more physically and sonically moving—even slightly sensuous at times, God forbid. There were other changes. T-shirts and skinny black jeans soon became the uniform of choice, at least for Jerry and me.D
At that time one couldn’t buy skinny black jeans in the United States—imagine! But when we played in Paris after our first record came out we went shopping for le jeans, and, finding them easily, we stocked up. The French obviously appreciated what they viewed as the proto American Rebel look more than Americans did. But what’s more American Everyman than jeans and T-shirts? It was a sexier Everyman than the polyester-suit guy, and jeans and T-shirts are easy to wash and care for on the road.
But make no mistake—these weren’t ordinary blue jeans. These were skinny straight-leg black jeans, referencing an earlier generation (much, much earlier) of rebels and festering youth. These outfits and their silhouettes evoked greasers and rockabilly performers like Eddie Cochran, but also the Beatles and the Stones—before they had a wardrobe budget. Symbolically, we were getting back to basics.E
Maybe the skinny, dark, stick-figure look alluded to other eras as well, like the tortured emaciated self-portraits of Egon Schiele and stylized bohemian extremists such as Antonin Artaud. The conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth only wore black in those days, as did a girlfriend I briefly dated. It was a uniform that signified that one was a kind of downtown aesthete; not necessarily nihilistic, but a monk in the bohemian order.
Photo by Barbara A. Botdorf
Courtesy of The Estate of Karlheniz Weinberger, care of Patrik Schelder, Zurich, Switzerland. Courtesy of Artist Management, New York
The retro suits and skinny black ties that became associated with the downtown music scene—those I just couldn’t figure out. What was that supposed to reference? Was there a noir movie I missed where the guys dressed like this? I’d tried suits, and I wasn’t going back there.
Jerry played keyboards and guitar, and he sang too, so we learned that with this arsenal we could vary the textures on each song more than we had before. Texture would became part of the musical content—something that wasn’t possible with the stripped-down three-piece band. Sometimes Jerry would play electric piano and sometimes a guitar part, often something contrapuntal to mine. Sometimes one of us would play slide guitar while the other played chords. Previously we’d desperately attempted to vary the texture from song to song by having Chris leave his drums and play vibes or having me switch to acoustic guitar, but before Jerry, our choices were limited. By the time we recorded our first record, in 1976, he had just barely learned our repertoire, but already some flesh was appearing on our bones.
We finally sounded like a band more than like a sketch of a band, and we were amazingly tight. When we toured Europe and the UK, the press commented on our Stax Volt influences—and they were right. We were half art band and half funky groove band, something that the US press didn’t really pick up on until we mutated into a full-on art-funk revue a few years later. But it was all there, right from the beginning, though the proportions were completely different. Chris and Tina were a great rhythm section, and though Chris didn’t play fancy, he played solid. That gave us a firm foundation for all the angular shit that I was throwing around.
What does being tight mean? It’s hard to define now, in an age where instrumental performances and even vocals can be digitally quantified and made to perfectly fit the beat. I realize now that it doesn’t actually mean that everyone plays exactly to the beat; it means that everyone plays together. Sometimes a band that has played together a lot will evolve to where they play some parts ahead of the beat and some slightly behind, and singers do the same thing. A good singer will often use the “grid” of the rhythm as something to play with—never landing exactly on a beat, but pushing and pulling around and against it in ways that we read, when it’s well done, as being emotional. It turns out that not being perfectly aligned with a grid is okay; in fact, sometimes it feels better than a perfectly metric fixed-up version. When Willie Nelson or George Jones sing way off the beat, it somehow increases the sense that they’re telling you the story, conveying it to you, one person to another. The lurches and hesitations are internalized through performance, and after a while everyone knows when they’ll happen. The performers don’t have to think about them, and at some point that becomes part of the band’s sound. Those agreed-upon imperfections are what give a performance character, and eventually the listener recognizes that it’s the very thing that makes a band or singer distinctive.
The musician and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin once demonstrated an experiment he had devised at his research lab in Montreal. He had a classical pianist play a Chopin piece on a Diskclavier, a sort of electronic player piano. The piano memorized the pianist’s keystrokes and could play them back. Levitin then dialed back the expressiveness incrementally until every note hit exactly on a beat. No surprise, this came across as drained of emotion, though it was technically more accurate. Alternatively, the expressiveness could be ramped up, and playing became more florid and even less on the grid. This too was unemotional; it veered toward chaos.
Musicians sort of knew this already—that the emotional center is not the technical center, that funky grooves are not square, and what sounds like a simple beat can either be sensuous or simply a metronomic timekeeper, depending on the player.
Throughout the three-piece and four-piece periods, Talking Heads songs, and even the shows, were still mostly about self-examination, angst, and bafflement at the world we found ourselves in. Psychological stuff. Inward-looking clumps of words combined with my slightly removed “anthropologist from Mars” view of human relationships. The groove was always there, as a kind of physical body-oriented antidote to this nervous angsty flailing, but the groove never took over. It served as a sonic and psychological safety net, a link to the body. It said that no matter how alienated the subject or the singer might appear, the groove and its connection to the body would provide solace and grounding. But the edgy, uncomfortable stuff was still the foreground.
While we were on tour, we saw our contemporaries performing. We saw the Clash in a school auditorium in England. It was hard to make out what was going on musically, but it was obvious that the music that was emerging then was viewed as more of a coherent movement there, with the anthemic rabble-rousing aspect bringing that point home. Any rabble-rousing in our own music was buried pretty deep. I still thought the most subversive thing was to look totally normal. To look like a rebel was to pigeonhole yourself in advance as someone who spoke only to other rebels. I never completely achieved that normal look, but it was a guiding principle. So, although some of us might have alluded to the James Deans of the world with our attire, we drew the line at leather