Are Four (Talking) Heads Better Than One?
Tina Weymouth recently had two nightmares about Talking Heads. First she dreamed that she missed all the rehearsals for a tour because David Byrne had advertised them in the newspaper. When she finally arrived, the room was full of musicians, half of whom were novices at their instrument. Byrne asked where she had been. “David,” she told him, “you Know I don’t read the paper.”
Then she dreamed that the band went out onstage and didn’t play a note. Just stood there. After three songs like this, the whole audience got up and left. Tina said, “Oh, my God, this is terrible! What an abysmal show! We didn’t even play a note!” But the next day the papers all raved; critics said the show was brilliant, a display of genius, conceptually perfect.
“Even in my dreams,” explains the wry, angel-faced bassist, “David could do no wrong.”
I‘ve never taken a limo to CBGB’s before,” says Tina’s husband and college sweetheart, Chris Frantz. The drummer looks out the tinted window at a run-down building in New York’s Bowery. “Hey, there’s Debbie Harry’s old apartment.”
But Talking Heads have been silent for most of this cramped ride to a photo shoot at the one-time biker bar that helped launch them eleven years ago. It’s December, and they haven’t worked together as a four-some since March, when they made some videos for the album True Stories. Meaning, not since the release of lead singer David Byrne’s film True Stories and the ensuing media blitz, which was capped by a Time cover story that called Byrne “Rock’s Renaissance Man.”
That’s the one in which composer Philip Glass was quoted as saying, “The Talking Heads will go on… [but] for many of us, it’s the other ways in which David will be developing that will be the most interesting.” There are signs that Byrne agrees: the group hasn’t recorded together in a year and a half or played live in three years. Though the others are itching to tour, Byrne has been noncommittal. And the group seems edgy.
Earlier, lounging around the photographer’s studio, Frantz was leafing through a newspaper. He stopped at a concert review: “Hey, David, you’re called a master in here. Listen. ‘Peter Gabriel can be compared to only a few other masters – David Bowie and David Byrne.'” Byrne smiled bashfully and looked at the ground. Weymouth said, joking, “David Bowie, David Byrne, David Berkowitz.”
Tension is nothing new for Talking Heads. Blame it on artists’ temperaments – keyboard-guitar man Jerry Harrison was an art major at Harvard, the others went to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) – but since the band’s inception there have been constant quarrels: about musical input, about credit, about press attention, about album covers, about power. And the last time they played a concert, Byrne was so miffed by imperfections in the performance he walked offstage three times in the middle of songs.
Even the pose for this photo shoot was an issue. David wanted to be in glitter tuxes; Jerry suggested David play Father Time, while the other three dressed in diapers. Tina, a Bon Jovi fan, wanted to dress up as a heavy-metal band. Chris, typically, just wanted it to be “fun – we don’t wanna look like old Talking Heads.”
So they ended up back on the Lower East Side at CBGB (Jerry’s idea), wearing the leather boots and jackets they wore in art school (Tina’s idea), Tina’s hair hennaed like in the old days. “We’re starting all over again,” says Tina, half-gung-ho, half-melancholy. No one replies; her words seem too acute. For this is no simple return from vacation; the band’s future is as uncertain as at any time in its history. During the hiatus, Byrne’s film and outside projects with highfalutin art-world types like Robert Wilson, Twyla Tharp and Philip Glass have made him a mass-media darling, the kind of rock star The New York Times and Esquire find acceptable.
It’s not just the public that’s beginning to perceive the band as “David Byrne and the Talking Heads.” “We kept pleading for mercy,” Tina says, “but David himself was unable to put a stop to it. Why did it happen? Because David assumed credit for everything that ever happened in Talking Heads. And we allowed that to happen.”
In the beginning, the tension was put to good use. It was in this grungy, graffiti-dense bar that they had come out in tennis shirts and jeans and played their quirky, rhythmic music for a punk crowd, Byrne’s clenched vocals and the band’s stripped-down sound working against pop-song structures. They played three-day weekends once a month, trading off sets with an array of soon-to-be-discovered New Wave talent like Patti Smith, the Ramones, Blondie and Television. But unlike those bands, the Heads didn’t fade away, drug out, get stuck in cult status, die a fashion death or explode with ego clashes. They stuck together as their popularity slowly grew and as their sound deepened from psycho-postfolk to African polyrhythms to their recent homespun melodies.
Are Four (Talking) Heads Better Than One?, Page 1 of 5