FEAR OF NORMALCY: TALKING HEADS GET FUNKED (AND LIKE IT)

I first met David Byrne and his very serious band of Talking Heads in 1976. That was before their first album had been released, and the trio were making a living as regulars at CBGB's on the Bowery, their button-down, clean-cut demeanor a peculiar, intriguing contrast to more primitive punk types. While the band's cherubic drummer Chris Frantz and ethereal bassist Tina Weymouth were easy on the eyes and ears, lead singer and guitarist David Byrne was the real Talking Heads focal point.

He was a nut, or so you could believe, staring at the way his face twisted as he sung his songs, the lines infuriatingly incomprehensible to outsiders. Tall and wiry, with conservatively cropped brown hair, Byrne wore a haggard, vacant look on his face sparked by wild eyes that cast him in a Tony Perkins psycho" role. He may have ac ieved internal deliverance via his ^ut the audience was never nervr>ncKmei in *act in the midst of a nervous breakdown.

Although most of that park; Hpads remember3? S'°Uded A ttaO remember telling Byrne that I loved the feeling conveyed in "The Book I Read," but couldn't discern the words in performance. Simple—he picked up an acoustic guitar and proceeded to sing the song right there—with exactly the same vocal distortion. I still couldn't understand him, but by then I was far too nervous to admit it.

David Byrne still bears a strong resemblance to Tony Perkins, but he's calmed down a lot, particularly since the release of Remain In Light, actually starting from the transitional rhythmic pieces such as "I Zimbra," which proceeded it. He admits, "I still like to make noises with my voice, but I don't squeal as much." Byrne has also been observed to smile onstage, even to dance around with backup singer Dollett MacDon-aid. Lately, he's having fun, which is a word that's rarely been synonymous with Talking Heads.

I think most new wave music is —crap —David Byrne

I'm optimistic about the potential of humans. —David Byrne

Following completion of an extensive American tour, and before taking the recently expanded nine-piece Talking Heads ensemble to Europe, Byrne had a few free days at home in New York, most of which he spent co-op hunting, trying to convince building boards that, just because he was a musician, he wasn't prone to throw wild parties. If you didn't know Byrne was a performer, you'd never guess it from looking at or talking to him. His taste still runs to slipover sweaters, sharply creased slacks, and loafers. The Warner Bros. receptionist didn't recogize him.

David Byrne will never be an easy conversationalist when it comes to dealing with relative strangers. He spends long intervals considering if he can answer a question, then takes another stretch to make his statement. But he is willing to discuss in detail the way in which the music of Remain In Light and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a soon-to-be-released collaboration with Eno, have given him a key to discovering his own well-being.

"I'm excited about this music and the kind of social and political implications that it has. For me, it's opened up a new way of looking at things. And seeing that it can work, musically, anyway, that makes me optimistic. Even when things look their bleakest, I'm optimistic about the potential of humans.

"The way this music's structured, it's completely based on the cooperation of all the different musicians. And since on some of the songs, 'Houses in Motion,' for instance, there's no one instrument that has the lead line, or does anything to be called the melody or the main riff—what you hear is a combination of about five different parts that fall together. The sound that you hear, the melody, the rhythm, is all composed of different parts interlocking, so none of the parts can really stand on their own, which is very different from most rock music. And what happens is, by doing music structured that way, I get a much more ecstatic feeling out of it, when it works, than I get out of rock music. It's part of this transcendental ecstasy that comes as the result of people working together.

I think I have less fits of depression now than I used to have. —David Byrne

"It goes against most of the American sensibility, which is an emphasis on individualism and an emphasis on freedom. In this kind of music the emphasis isn't on either of those things, but you can get something you could never get through either of those things. "

The cooperative attitude became obvious when Talking Heads expanded to a nine-piece band and invited comparisons with the Parliament-Funkadelic mothership as they toured during fall. "After we had just about finished this Talking Heads record, naturally the idea of touring came up. And I was determined for quite a while that if we toured it wouldn't be the way we had before. I thought, and the others did too, that if we wanted to perform the material we'd just recorded, we would need more people to do it. But more than that, part of what this music is about is a lot of people playing together. "

The nucleus Talking Heads then recruited a disparate crew for the road: Dollett MacDonald; former Bowie guitarist Adrian Belew; keyboardist Bernie Worrell, who had been a key P-Funk member; bassist Busta Cherry Jones and percussionist Steve Scales. Tina Weymouth played additional keyboards as well as bass, and Byrne was freed to play rhythm guitar and relax. The outfit was road-tested at Toronto's Heatwave Festival and in Central Park, and judged pleasurable enough to take cross-country. Typical of the dates was the group's New York show, in cavernous Radio City Music Hall. In a true testament to danceability, dozens of people poured into the aisles to jump around, and thousands more swayed at their seats. Along the road, the show was seen by black performers including many of P-Funk, and Byrne hopes at some stage to achieve a true "crossover" sound with Talking Heads.

Remain In Light was the result of Byrne's interest in African music, a fascination he's held for several years. For an ex-art student, properly educated in New England and experiencing some sort of internal upheaval, there could be no more alluring extreme than the communality of African rhythms. Byrne found Frantz, keyboardist Jerry Harrison and Weymouth equally receptive to following this relatively untrod path, and the group created Remain In Light totally in the studio, expanding upon the bare bones outline with which Byrne had provided them.

If Fear Of Music was a record which frightened its audience, Remain In Light lifted them out of the depths, in numbers sufficient to make the recording the band's most successful release to date. I mention to Byrne a review I had written of Fear Of Music, in which I stated that while the band wasn't afraid of music, they did appear to be afraid of everything else.

"I didn't mean for it to be so frightening. I was hoping it would be more melancholy. Closer to the kind of melancholy that you feel to the songs that are on the Threepenny Opera—-Only with a beat. But I guess I don't know exactly what I'm doing half the time. Oftentimes, I don't realize what a song's about until 1 read what someone else has written about it and then I think, well, maybe that's right."

Various Talking Heads songs, from each phase of the group's evolution, have stood out as beacons of the band's,state of mind. "Psycho Killer" still hangs around them like an albatross, its message unfortunately intact every time you pick up a newspaper. They perform it first tp get it out of the way. "Take Me to the River," from that same era, helped to counter the murder paranoia, and also put the group's affinity for black music in very specific terms.

And "Life During Wartime," with its survival era message of "this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around, I ain't got no time for that now," appeared to be the Talking Heads comment on the latest surge pf escapism, as new wave began to be mass merchandised. Says Byrne, "it v>as just a possibility I imagined. I could visualize it real easily, so I just sat down and wrote it out.

"I never thought most of the new wave music was revolutionary. I think most new wave music is—crap. Plain and simple. And the lyrics may have expressed rebellion or whatever, but I think in most new wave music the musical structures are real traditional and don't challenge one. They don't imply a different way of looking at things. /\nd for me, that's the way most of the statements in the music we've done are^in the way that the music is structured. And that can imply a different social view or political outlook, but in a way which I think it's easy for an audience to understand, but it's hard for me to describe. "

Ido still think of rock *n'roll as being an innocent kind of music. •>David Byrne

If one is to find a similar musical ethos on Remain In Light, one place to look might be "Once in a Lifetime." Its final refrain, assuring the listener of life continuing in a state, of nature, "same as it ever wa3," is like a forceful, purgative exhalation of breath following years of holding back. Talking Heads have beeh fortunate in that circumstances have permitted them to slowly and naturally, recognition coming to them first, fame and large record sales much later down the line, when they were better able to accept those rewards gracefully. David Byrne's album with Eno, originally recorded as a blueprint for Remain In Light, may not further the Heads commercially, but far more importantly to Byrne, creating it has enriched his skills at handling complex rhythms.

It no longer bothers Byrne that he and the Heads were once considered a bunch of artistic poseurs playihg at rock, or that they were frequently dismissed by mass audiences as the darlings of the intelligentsia. Byrne doesn't have time for that now. "I would figure, whoever said that must like rock 'n' roll. And I do still think of rock 'n' roll as being an innocent kind of music, like Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry, the older stuff. But by the time of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, people were already being academic and historical about it. Even those guys were record collectors and interested in obscure stuff. It wasn't innocent anymore." J ,,

These days, you can ask David Byrne if he is a happy man, and draw out a halfsmile. "Yeah, I think so. Probably. Uh-huh. I think I have less fits of depression now than I used to have. My, I guess, cheerier stage demeanor is due to the music. It's not that I'm a completely changed person. The music has a different kind of effect." Byrne takes his leave to watch some new videotapes, which will interpret several songs on Remain In Light in visual language. He doesn't hear a radio ad playing at the Warner's reception desk. It's for some group whose singer sounds like he wants to be David Byrne—but as he once was, and never will be again.