Episode 603 - David Byrne
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:What the fuckaholics?
Marc:What the fuck is happening?
Marc:This is Mark Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:Thank you for joining me.
Marc:It's a very exciting show today.
Marc:It was a very exciting show for me to do.
Marc:I interviewed David Byrne, known from being himself, David Byrne, and also from the Talking Heads, one of the greatest bands of the 20th century.
Marc:So I was very excited to sit down with David at his office and have a conversation.
Marc:Did not know how it would go.
Marc:I think it went pretty well.
Marc:I'll give you a little background on that in just a second.
Marc:But this week is a pretty special week because you'll be able to hear the talk that I had with Terry Gross.
Marc:You'll be able to hear it in two different places, friends.
Marc:On Wednesday, Fresh Air on NPR will present a good chunk of the interview.
Marc:Then on Thursday, the full interview will be that day's WTF episode.
Marc:This was a big deal, people.
Marc:This is a big deal for me.
Marc:I'm sure I'll talk to you more about it before the show on Thursday, but Terry Gross is the standard.
Marc:She is the industry standard, the best, the best of the best interviewers, and I was nervous to interview her, especially in front of people, but it went great.
Marc:It was an amazing experience, and I'll tell you a little bit more about that on the day, that being Thursday.
Marc:Anyways, let's talk about David Byrne.
Marc:Let's talk about a genius.
Marc:You know, I love interviewing people and God knows I've interviewed a lot of people, but some people I get kind of nervous about, about interviewing because I have this respect for their output, this respect for their creativity, for the amazing things that they've done.
Marc:And David Byrne is one of those people.
Marc:And I had no idea what he would be like.
Marc:I didn't know if he'd be sociable.
Marc:I didn't know what it would be like.
Marc:because my experience of David Byrne is almost exclusively through the Talking Heads music and some of the solo stuff.
Marc:I was introduced by David Byrne by my first girlfriend in college, Sarah, who had half of her head shaved in a little patch, wore Doc Martens, and was basically pretty punk, pretty, yeah, more than me.
Marc:And I remember that she had, I think she had Remain in Light, if that's possible.
Marc:Is that when that came out?
Marc:And she would play that and I'd be like, yeah, I don't know if I get it.
Marc:And then she turned me on to, you know, the other stuff.
Marc:I believe Fear of Music and the first record, which I had when I was a kid because I got it from the record store that gave it to me.
Marc:They gave me a box of records because they only played R&B, gave me all these rock records.
Marc:But I think the only one, the only song I listened to when I was in high school of the Talking Heads was Take Me to the River, the cover.
Marc:And maybe big country.
Marc:I always liked big country.
Marc:But I don't think I really wrapped my head around the talking heads until later in college when I went to see Stop Making Sense.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:Oh, Stop Making Sense.
Marc:Oh, yeah, man.
Marc:Do you remember when that came out?
Marc:I don't know if you're old enough.
Marc:I don't know if you are.
Marc:But I had an experience there because I was dating Sarah.
Marc:It couldn't have been for that long.
Marc:It must have been one of our first few dates because it was at the Coolidge Corner Movie House, and I believe she was working at another movie theater that was also owned by the same people or they had an understanding.
Marc:I don't know, but it was a date.
Marc:Now, I had spent that day
Marc:tripping on mushrooms with my friends.
Marc:I remember that.
Marc:We spent the day tripping on mushrooms, but I had to meet her at the movie place at the theater to see the premiere of Stop Making Sense.
Marc:And I know she really loved the talking heads.
Marc:I didn't know what to expect.
Marc:I was a little trippy still.
Marc:But the one thing that I remember outside of the movie blowing my mind, we got there.
Marc:We got to the show.
Marc:I was sitting with her.
Marc:And this is early in the relationship, maybe one of the first few dates.
Marc:I don't even know if we had had sex yet or what.
Marc:I'm not sure what had happened at that point.
Marc:But we were towards the back of the theater, and I was sitting next to her, and the movie had started, and I was into it, but I was coming down, and things were tweaky around the edges.
Marc:And I dozed off, and I... In the movie, I dozed off, and I woke myself up with the sound of my own fart sitting beside a woman who I had been on maybe three dates with.
Marc:This was...
Marc:Not a good situation.
Marc:You don't know what to do in that situation.
Marc:It's unclear.
Marc:Do you bring it up?
Marc:I mean, I don't remember the depth of the experience.
Marc:I'm trying not to be too crass.
Marc:I don't remember if it was smelly or whether it was a big problem for everybody.
Marc:But I do remember the intense embarrassment.
Marc:of that moment and just kind of looking over at her and wondering if she heard it.
Marc:I don't know how she could not have heard it.
Marc:And all this is going on as David Byrne is jumping around in a giant suit on screen.
Marc:I can only say that he must have buffered that situation because we did end up staying together after that.
Marc:We made it through that horrendous experience so early in a relationship where that's really unacceptable.
Marc:It shouldn't be.
Marc:I mean, you should be able to do that, but it's just not the way life works.
Marc:It just isn't.
Marc:There shouldn't be that much shame carried around something that has to happen.
Marc:It's got to happen somewhere.
Marc:Not in your sleep at a movie theater, crowded movie theater next to a girl you just started dating.
Marc:That's not where it has to happen.
Marc:I should have controlled that, but I was sleeping and I was coming down from mushrooms.
Marc:So it was probably amplified, the experience for me.
Marc:But as I said, we made it through, and that's my memory of the Stop Making Sense movie.
Marc:Aren't you happy I shared that?
Marc:Folks, my experience leading up to the David Byrne interview, I was in New York.
Marc:It was set up.
Marc:You know, I went back and I listened.
Marc:I still listen to Fear of Music a great deal, like pretty compulsively.
Marc:But I went and listened to more songs about buildings and food.
Marc:I listened to Talking Hands 7 to 7.
Marc:I listened to Remain in Light.
Marc:Then I listened to the Knee Plays and I listened to David Byrne, the Catherine Wheel, the music for the Twyla Tharp dance production.
Marc:Knee Plays was for the, what's his name, Robert Wilson.
Marc:But I used to like that stuff.
Marc:And the stuff he did, oh, what is it, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts?
Marc:With Brian Eno, I mean, he did some great shit.
Marc:The later talking head stuff, and then the salsa music.
Marc:Anyways, David Byrne, I dumped my head full of David Byrne, and then I was waiting to go to his office, and I was walking around New York City, and I went and got a coffee down the corner, down on Canal Street somewhere, and the Bee Gees were playing.
Marc:It was a soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever, and then I thought that, like, wow, this was coinciding with the beginning of the...
Marc:of the Talking Heads.
Marc:I mean, the Talking Heads helped destroy disco.
Marc:It was part of the movement against that, but then evolved into sort of its own sort of dance music.
Marc:And all this was going through my head.
Marc:And I thought the experience of listening to that music as I was waiting to go talk to David Byrne, he would somehow appreciate that, that there was connections being made.
Marc:And I opened my mind up to musical textures and what that was provoking in my mind.
Marc:And maybe I just opened my conversation talking about the Bee Gees.
Marc:But I did not do that.
Marc:I did not do that.
Marc:What I did was I took the elevator up and I met David Byrne and I tried to, he was just a guy and I know he's just a guy, but David Byrne has his own groove in life.
Marc:You know, he has there's something so familiar about the way he moves and the way he talks and the way he looks.
Marc:If you're a fan of the talking heads or if you're a fan of anybody, you kind of lock in.
Marc:This guy was an important part of my life for many years.
Marc:I still play his music.
Marc:So I didn't talk about the Bee Gees.
Marc:I didn't.
Marc:I didn't.
Marc:I'll tell you what I talked about at the beginning.
Marc:we start talking about his new project, Contemporary Color.
Marc:These are color guard competitions that David Byrne conceived where the color guard teams perform with live music from St.
Marc:Vincent, Ad Rock, from the Beastie Boys, Toon Yards, Nelly Furtado, and a few other people.
Marc:This is going to be a live performance.
Marc:Leave it up to David Byrne to bring certain things together that you would never assume would work together.
Marc:And I know very little about Color Guard, so I was happy to talk to him about it.
Marc:It will be at Toronto's Air Canada Center on June 22nd and 23rd and the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on June 27th and 28th.
Marc:So with no further ado, let's enter the offices of David Byrne, which are filled with books and music and people working on things.
Marc:I think it's the Totomundo is the name of his company.
Marc:Nice people at his office and very, very inviting, warm, the kind of people you'd think would be working for David Byrne.
Marc:But it was it was very warm and it was a lovely conversation.
Marc:And I really didn't know what to expect.
Marc:I didn't know how forthcoming it would be or how it would go.
Marc:But I never do.
Marc:So enjoy my conversation with David Byrne.
Marc:That does not include the Bee Gees.
Marc:It's a privilege and an honor to meet you, David Byrne.
Guest:You too.
Guest:You too.
Marc:Do you hear that a lot?
Marc:An honor?
Guest:Once in a while, and it's always very, very flattering.
Guest:It never wears thin.
Marc:I have strange memories of you on record and on screen, but there's two very specific memories I have of you in person that you would not share with me.
Marc:You would not know that they happened.
Marc:I was on an airplane with you once.
Marc:It was much younger.
Marc:I don't remember.
Marc:It must be like 25, 30 years ago.
Marc:Big fan.
Marc:And I saw you sitting there.
Marc:And then after everyone got off the plane, we were all standing around a baggage claim that there was nothing coming out.
Marc:And it was going on a long time.
Marc:And then you had somehow gone to another baggage claim.
Marc:And this is just very specific to what I know of you.
Marc:And you just went over here with a very unique David Byrne movement.
Marc:tell everybody right but the movement our bags are over here now but it was so specifically you that like you know there was just a way that you know you move through the world I'm like that was so David Byrne that movement oh it was very very choreographed kind of movement exactly oh geez okay and then there's another time I saw you drive by on a bicycle in Chelsea and you had lights on your maybe on your ankle
Marc:Is that possible?
Marc:That is possible.
Marc:That's possible.
Guest:Yes, I tried that for a while.
Guest:You did?
Guest:Yeah, like a little trouser clip that actually had flashing lights on it.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:Very geeky, but... Right, but there was something to me like, I saw you drive by and I didn't say anything.
Marc:I'm like, that's David Byrne.
Marc:But then it became more significant to me that it was David Byrne when all I saw was a bouncing light.
Marc:I was like, that's very creative.
It's...
Marc:He's effortlessly artistic.
Marc:He's just a fading light.
Guest:Just a fading light on a leg going up and down.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:It's so minimal.
Marc:This is perfect.
Marc:This guy's amazing.
Marc:So we should start talking, I guess, about what's going on now, what I just watched, and then move backward.
Marc:Now, I don't know anything about color guard.
Marc:It seemed to at one time be a military thing.
Marc:Is that...
Marc:Probably way, way back, way back.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Really, long story short, in mid-June, we're doing these events, these spectacles at Barclays Center Arena in Brooklyn and the Air Canada Arena in Toronto.
Guest:And they bring together 10 color guard teams and 10 musical acts.
Guest:So it's color guard doing their thing, but 10 six minute programs with live music that's been written specially for them.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Now, but then you go, well, yeah, but what is that?
Guest:Right.
Marc:And I didn't know until recently.
Marc:It's obviously a culture.
Marc:Like many things have this culture that we don't know about until someone goes, have you seen this?
Guest:And you're like, oh my God, that's been around all the time.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:It's one of those kinds of things where it's like,
Guest:That's been going on all day.
Guest:People do that?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So this one, I know that it's during the fall season.
Guest:It's associated with football, marching bands, drum lines, all that kind of stuff.
Guest:And they're outside and they kind of get in formation and toss their flags up and toss their rifles up in the air and all that kind of stuff.
Guest:Off season is when they get more creative and that's kind of what I saw first.
Guest:I saw a DVD of their championship because they licensed some music.
Guest:So they move into gymnasiums and they get very creative where it's kind of thematic.
Guest:aspects of dance and still tossing the flags and rifles.
Guest:And they sometimes have a message or a story or some subject that they're dealing with.
Guest:So it's no longer connected with football or marching band or any of that kind of stuff.
Guest:And they usually use pre-recorded music, a song or instrumental or whatever like that.
Guest:And that's what I saw.
Guest:And I thought, this is kind of an incredible art form out there in America, kind of vernacular art form.
Guest:Nobody where I live knows about it.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And I thought, but what, yeah, what if it had live music instead of the prerecorded stuff that they use?
Guest:Wouldn't that kind of kick it all up a notch and make it more exciting?
Guest:So that's what this thing is.
Guest:And it's...
Guest:Yeah, so when I and our little office here started approaching them, I was like, what?
Guest:Who are you?
Guest:What could this be about?
Guest:This is not our world.
Guest:To them, this was like a foreign world intruding into their world.
Marc:These worlds you're talking about, you're talking about basically the art and music world of New York.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:And the greater America.
Guest:To some extent.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:There's no color guard teams in New York City.
Guest:In Soho.
Guest:No, there's no Soho color guard represented.
Guest:Although that could be coming.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But that's an interesting sort of straddling of worlds that I think you've done a lot.
Marc:Throughout your career, your understanding of what America is has sort of shifted in something you've engaged in.
Marc:I mean, even a song like, let's go back now.
Marc:So even a song like Big Country, where there's this idea of flying over America.
Marc:What do you think your evolving relationship with the difference between New York and America is at this point?
Marc:Is that too broad?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:At that time, I intentionally wrote that song, Big Country, that Talking Hits song.
Guest:I wrote that in a way to kind of have this kind of cliched idea of the New Yorker, you know, the Bohemian New Yorker kind of looking down their nose at the rest of the country.
Guest:Right, right, yeah.
Guest:So there's a satire.
Guest:It's a bit of a satire, but it's also a satire of kind of the image of what I'm supposed to be.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I'm supposed to be that kind of jaded New Yorker who looks down on the countryside.
Guest:But you're not.
Guest:But I'm not.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I'm not.
Guest:Or at least I try not to be.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I've kind of chipped away at that.
Guest:I find things going on out in the country that I go, that's incredible.
Guest:And it's kind of completely under the radar somewhere else.
Guest:And look what they're doing out there.
Guest:We should learn from that in some cases.
Guest:Or we should...
Guest:appreciate that we should elevate it it's just as good as any of the kind of fancy schmancy stuff that's going on here and uh they're doing it by themselves and nobody nobody in the kind of one of the worlds of new york times or whatever else knows about this stuff right
Guest:wouldn't it be nice to give it some support or or put it in a new context where people kind of look at it in a different way yeah don't just they don't just see it as oh yeah that's that's crazy stuff that high school kids do right well it's interesting that dialogue though is that because like even through like you know true stories and all like because I to me in my mind when I was younger
Marc:that what you were doing with the Talking Heads and even after the Talking Heads was so specific and so uniquely yours, but also very specific.
Marc:It was an integration of popular culture, popular music, and the art world.
Marc:Yeah, to some extent, yeah, yeah.
Marc:You seemed to be the guy that it ran through somehow or another.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And I never felt that any of it needed to be...
Guest:distant or hard to understand or i felt like there's there's always got to be a way to make it accessible right no matter how arty it is you can make it accessible if it's a if it's a cool idea or makes you feel good or whatever there's a way to do that without it being like oh that's
Marc:Yeah, that's not for us.
Marc:Yeah, that's not for us.
Guest:No, you can make it so it's kind of accessible to everybody.
Marc:When did you start thinking that way, though?
Marc:I mean, was it before the music?
Marc:I mean, was it something that you entered your creativity knowing that you're like, I can make this understandable or I can make, you know, what I do mainstream in a way?
Marc:Yes, yeah.
Guest:I think I heard that in the music growing up, when I was growing up.
Guest:Oh, stuff in the late 60s when I was in high school, early 70s, and whether it was R&B or rock or whatever it was called at that point.
Marc:What were you listening to, do you think?
Guest:It was just really normal stuff, you know, like rock stuff, like whether it would be the Beatles or Jimi Hendrix or the... Right.
Marc:When was your first memories of music?
Marc:Like how young were you when you started playing things?
Guest:I must have been about 13 or something like that.
Marc:When you started playing instruments?
Guest:Trying.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Not very well.
Guest:What was the first one?
Guest:Oh, I remember trying to play guitar, and I had violin lessons as a child.
Guest:It didn't take very well.
Guest:Thank goodness.
Marc:You wouldn't be doing this color guard thing if you were a violinist.
Guest:But some of the rock groups, some of the R&B groups, whether it was Curtis Mayfield, Temptations, whatever it all, they all started getting a little more experimental and adventurous in kind of late 60s, early 70s.
Guest:People doing all kinds of different things.
Guest:Isaac Hayes, whatever.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Not to kind of make any kind of nostalgia.
Guest:I don't have...
Guest:nostalgic bone in my body but that's that's when I grew up that's when I heard that stuff and I thought this is possible it's possible to do really kind of not difficult but sophisticated stuff that's experimental that pushes the edge and it's still popular it's still in the top 40 sure and
Guest:it still appeals to ordinary people like me.
Guest:And I listen to it and I go, wow, that's really innovative.
Guest:And yet it's still in the top 40.
Guest:And that still happens.
Guest:That still happens.
Guest:But that was really formative.
Marc:Well, it was different then because, I mean, you were, you know, you're at least old enough to remember that, you know, a pop song was a pop song.
Marc:There was no experimenting.
Marc:I mean, when you were a young child.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:You know, you had your first verse, the second verse, refrain, then maybe a little instrument, and then the closing verse.
Guest:You had to do that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that was it.
Guest:And then you hear people kind of breaking the mold and changing the way the music sounds and the kind of words that they use and all this kind of stuff.
Guest:Yeah, the 60s broke it all open.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I thought, okay, that is a possibility.
Guest:When you say you don't have a nostalgic bone in your body, what does that mean, really?
Guest:I don't look back as like, oh, that was a golden age, or things were better when New York was shittier.
Guest:Not at all.
Guest:You don't do that.
Guest:No, I don't do that.
Guest:I mean, you can look at certain things and go, that was a good aspect.
Marc:uh at a certain time but i don't look at it oh things were better then or i don't think like that well because i was thinking about this coming over and because like i know like it's interesting because you know i looked at your book i was at mcsweeney's i think in san francisco when i first saw the hardback cover of the of the new book what's the new how music works
Marc:And I look through that and I'm like, oh my God, he keeps working.
Marc:He keeps doing things.
Marc:And there's things I've missed.
Marc:But what's interesting to me is I go back and I listen to Fear of Music fairly regularly.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:When you hear someone say that, do you think like, but I've got this other stuff that I do?
Marc:Or are you able to say like, that's great that you listen to that.
Marc:Yes, I'm able to say it's great.
Marc:I'm totally flattered.
Guest:Was it Jonathan Latham?
Guest:Yeah, Jonathan Latham.
Guest:He wrote a book, basically, on that record.
Marc:On the 33 and the Third series.
Guest:I think he did, based on that record.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Did you read it?
Guest:No.
Guest:I mean, I'm sure it's I'm sure it's well written and it's good and it's interesting.
Guest:And it's more, I think, about his experience, how it affected him, what he was going through at that moment.
Guest:It's not a song by song analysis of the record in that way.
Marc:When you when you think of the talking heads, because do you does it just feel far away?
Guest:no no it feels yeah a little bit I mean it feels like oh that was something I did at that point in my life I'm aware that certainly a certain generation knows more of that stuff than they know what I've done in the last 10 years but it depends there's other people who know what I did
Guest:recently more than they know the old stuff it was kind of like oh you did you were in a band before this and um oh really there's a little bit of that not that much but there's a little bit and what do you say to that you're like yeah that thing yeah yeah it was a thing and uh it was yeah it was pretty popular for a while
Marc:But to talk about, if we frame it in a non-nostalgic way and just talk about it as a creative evolution for you, I mean, where did you grow up?
Guest:Where were you born?
Guest:I grew up in, here comes Baltimore, and
Guest:My family came from Scotland before that with me when I was really little.
Marc:So you were born in Scotland?
Guest:Born in Scotland.
Guest:They came first to Canada and then, I don't know, five or six years later to Baltimore.
Marc:Do you remember Canada?
Marc:I remember just a little bit.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So Baltimore was most of it.
Marc:Cold.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And what was your dad, what did he do?
Guest:He worked at Westinghouse as an engineer, electronics engineer.
Guest:Designing things?
Guest:Yeah, designing things.
Guest:Not stoves and microwaves, but probably missile guidance systems.
Guest:Oh, in Baltimore.
Guest:They had something like that in Canada, but the main one that was doing that kind of stuff was in Baltimore.
Marc:So your dad would go away to a non-disclosed location and come back and, no questions, kid.
Guest:Yeah, it wasn't quite like that.
Guest:But yes, yes, there was kind of that.
Guest:And I would go, so what are you working on?
Guest:And it was just, it's not interesting.
Guest:It's not interesting.
Guest:I don't think he wasn't, you know, my parents were kind of peaceniks.
Guest:And he wasn't particularly proud of the, that he was maybe designing missile guidance systems or something like that.
Guest:He must be one of the guys that could.
Guest:He was one of the guys that could.
Guest:He loved the problem solving.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:uh aspect of it i remember there was one time they sent him somewhere because they were having a problem with a submarine like in uh newport news or wherever that that port is he came back and it was one of the i think one of the first times i saw him really proud of his abilities in that way he said i fixed it with a coat hanger
Guest:Fix the submarine with a coat hanger.
Guest:I thought, oh, geez.
Guest:Okay, that's... You know, I felt proud for him, too, that he had the ingenuity.
Guest:It sounds very Russian or whatever.
Guest:To do that, but I'm also kind of looking around the house and going...
Guest:that's the way he fixes stuff around the house and that doesn't always stick right yes and it holds for a while yeah right right right i don't know if i'd want to be in that submarine six months from now right so how uh so they weren't musical necessarily no no and what was it that like locked you into the music thing
Guest:Oh, like any kid, I think in my teens, you start to hear some stuff in those cases on transistor radio, but it's the same of hearing something on your phone or whatever.
Guest:And you realize it's coming from another world different than the little suburban place you're at.
Guest:And it's a world that sounds...
Guest:really exciting that's kind of directed towards where you're going to be in a few years, where you're going to be, where your head's going to be at in a few years and go, that's it.
Guest:It's like they're sending a signal and it's coming, it's directed to me and everybody like me around the country.
Guest:This is a direct thing.
Guest:Of course, it's coming through like AM radio or something like that, but we think it's being, we think they found us and we've found it and then we've got a common
Guest:link so then you just go here here it is i i need to be part of this this whatever it is this weird grown-up world yes yes elsewhere yes i'm gonna learn how to play guitar or i'm gonna buy some records and figure out what this is so guitar was the first love the first instrument yeah yeah so all right so now when you decide to get out what'd you in high school you did all right
Guest:okay it did okay and then you went to you went to where to go to college I went to an art school Rhode Island School of Design well that's right that's the fancy that's like RISD it's got its own mythos yes it does and I have to say that although I enjoyed the arts the art stuff it was more of a social I think revelation to me than an artistic one what was the art the medium that you were there for extensively
Guest:Well, what would it have been?
Guest:Did you have to have one?
Guest:Is that how it worked?
Guest:You had to have one, but I realized that a degree in fine arts or whatever it was going to be was basically useless for getting a job.
Guest:You realized that?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And you wanted to get a job?
Guest:Well, I did, I thought, I'll get, you know, at that time you thought, I'll get a day job, but this is... You're playing guitar already.
Guest:Yeah, and the creative stuff is what I really wanted to do.
Guest:I didn't have a career plan, but I thought, that's what I really want to do.
Guest:A degree is going to be useless, so I'll just get as much out of the school as I possibly can.
Guest:So I kind of switched my major all the time, from like photography to painting to whatever...
Guest:whatever else it might be, graphics, design, whatever.
Guest:I just kept switching.
Guest:And that way I got to use, I got to learn as many different techniques as I possibly could.
Guest:I got to work in a darkroom or use the printmaking stuff or whatever.
Marc:And also be exposed to what I imagine would be very contemporary artists at the time, that most of the things that were happening at that time, RISD was on top of.
Marc:It wasn't some dry kind of historical school.
Guest:But RISD might still be,
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:At that time, it was, there was a lot of cool stuff happening, but on another level, it was very traditional.
Guest:From the kind of first couple of years or whatever, you had to learn how to draw.
Guest:You had to learn, you had to sit and draw.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Still lifes and naked people and all that kind of stuff.
Guest:And other kind of schools, they didn't, they threw that out the window.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They kind of felt like, no, you have to learn.
Guest:Get a craft in place.
Guest:Yeah, you have to get a craft in place.
Guest:So, yeah, I went, but the thing that hit me the most was not the artistic stuff, which was great and everything, was the whole social thing.
Guest:I met people, you know, I grew up in a little suburb of Baltimore, and so all of a sudden I was meeting.
Guest:more black people, Jewish people, rich people, fancy people, people from California.
Guest:From California?
Guest:From California, yeah.
Guest:No, all of that.
Guest:And people like that, that sounds kind of... No, no, I get it.
Guest:It sounds really dumb.
Guest:It's mind-blowing.
Guest:Yeah, and it was mind-blowing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I might have had heard or read or something that these people existed.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That their lives were completely different than mine.
Guest:Their upbringings were completely different.
Guest:But you might have heard about it or read about it, but you can't really imagine it until you're talking, having a beer with somebody.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And you're just talking about how things were when they grew up and you realize that is not my world at all.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That person is from another world.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Their references are completely different than mine.
Marc:I still feel that.
Marc:But that's fascinating to you all the way through the life, right?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But that was when it really hit me.
Guest:And it was simple.
Guest:That we're all the same in some ways, but we're all not the same in so many other ways.
Marc:But you remember that having that much impact, and these are just people maybe in California or from an inner city.
Guest:Yeah, these are all people in art school.
Guest:Right, exactly.
Guest:Yeah, this is hardly a wide range of society.
Marc:These are not people that escaped Russia necessarily.
Marc:Yes, no.
Marc:But that's funny because that weird kind of like, you're almost like shocked into this compulsive empathy about somebody else's life and world.
Marc:That curiosity has driven the music all the way through.
Marc:I guess so, yeah.
Marc:You think I'm overstating it?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:That has never changed, that kind of curiosity.
Guest:Did you have a band in high school?
No.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I had a band for a little while in high school.
Guest:Junior high did not go well.
Guest:How many songs?
Marc:Like a four-song band?
Guest:Yeah, something like that.
Guest:Four-song band.
Guest:You'd play like a battle of the band in the school cafeteria, and the other band would come over, sneak behind, and pull out the plug.
Guest:No.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I thought, oh.
Guest:Do you remember the set list?
Guest:There was a level of ruthlessness.
Guest:Yeah, and music.
Guest:Yeah, and music that I didn't know about.
Marc:A lesson you needed to learn early.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Do you remember the set list?
No.
Guest:It was probably whatever was, everybody was probably like, I can't get no satisfaction and stuff like that, that seemed fairly easy to play.
Guest:Three chord rock kind of stuff that you could play.
Guest:And then I kind of, without that band, kind of decided to go it alone.
Guest:And started learning acoustic guitar, started playing in kind of local coffee houses.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Kind of folk venues.
Guest:You were doing... And then, but not playing folk music.
Guest:I started playing kind of rock music in acoustic guitar, ukulele, and violin.
Guest:I still had the violin.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Like I would play fairly aggressive rock songs on a ukulele.
Guest:These original compositions?
Marc:No.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:It was nothing original.
Marc:It was all the discovers.
Marc:There was something ironic and funny about it then as well.
Guest:Yeah, or I was taking it and giving it a twist.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I wasn't, it wasn't, it was meant to kind of not skew the material.
Guest:but kind of throw it out of context so you heard it in a different way.
Guest:And what happened was, you know, because I loved the material that I was, the bands and stuff I was learning.
Guest:Do you remember what you were playing on the ukulele?
Guest:Heavy, heavy guitar stuff, but I would do it on a ukulele.
Guest:And it was to kind of throw it in a new context so people could hear the actual song instead of just hearing the cliche that they knew.
Guest:How were you received?
Guest:People really liked it.
Guest:They said, they said, who wrote the, I mean, this is like a folky crowd.
Guest:Right, right, sure.
Guest:And they'd never heard, oddly enough, they'd never heard any of these songs because they're isolated in their little folky ghetto.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they hear this stuff and go, who wrote that stuff?
Guest:And I go, I'm thinking to myself, this is just a big hit on the radio, on the, you know, pop, FM, AM radio.
Guest:And I thought, they're in, they don't know this stuff.
Guest:So I said, this is working in my favor.
Yeah.
Marc:I got something going.
Marc:I got to build out my catalog.
Guest:I got a bigger set list.
Marc:Yes, I do.
Marc:Yeah, come back with some Hendrix stuff.
Marc:I'm just not going to know what's going on.
Marc:So then at RISD, you put together the original heads.
Guest:Or a band that kind of led into it.
Guest:There was the drummer Chris and I and some other people were in a band there and we played school dances.
Guest:What was it called?
Guest:The Artistics.
Guest:And we played school dances and outdoors on the patios and things like that.
Guest:And we were incredibly noisy.
Guest:But then I started to write stuff for the band.
Guest:So then there was some original stuff and I realized...
Guest:Oh, I know how I can do this.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Right.
Marc:What was the first song you wrote that you thought like, wow, this is it?
Guest:Psycho killer.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Was that early?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was like proof of concept.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Let me see if I can write a song.
Guest:And I had a concept.
Guest:And I just followed the concept.
Guest:It wasn't me expressing something about myself.
Guest:It was kind of like, let me see if I can write a song.
Guest:And here's what the subject is going to be.
Guest:And here's the way I'm going to approach it.
Guest:And I realized, oh, it works.
Guest:And then further on you go, oh, it works and people like it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I guess I know how to do this.
Guest:And after that, after that one song, I thought, okay, I used that to see as, you know, writing about something that basically I didn't care about at all.
Guest:I didn't give a shit about the subject.
Guest:But then I thought everything else is going to be actually come from me and a little bit more from now on.
Guest:Right.
Guest:After song number one.
Guest:Point of view.
Marc:Point of view.
Guest:Yeah, everything else is not directly me, but it's more I can defend it in some way.
Marc:In Psycho Killer, so that was just sort of an experiment?
Marc:It was almost a joke in a way?
Guest:Well, not really a joke, but kind of a, yeah, definitely an experiment to see, like, can I write a song?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was just you and Chris?
Guest:It was me and Chris and his girlfriend at the time, Tina.
Yeah.
Marc:Oh, so she was there too.
Guest:Yep, yep.
Guest:She was helping with the French part there.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Oh, definitely.
Marc:You didn't know any French?
Guest:I knew it a little bit, but not well enough.
Guest:How did you meet Jerry Harrison?
Guest:We were a trio.
Guest:So we went to New York, formed what became Talking Heads.
Guest:Where'd the name come from?
Guest:Do you remember?
Guest:A kind of B-movie that was on television.
Guest:We were looking at TV Guide.
Guest:It was called, whatever, The Talking Head.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Or something like that.
Guest:And we thought, oh, that's some kind of sci-fi horror movie.
Guest:And we thought, oh, that's a good, let's try that one.
Guest:Because we changed band names.
Guest:This is before we auditioned and played anywhere.
Guest:I would make drum heads for the bass drum, for the kick drum, and put a different band name on every week.
Guest:Just kind of like, let's see how it feels to be called The Dots.
Guest:You did that every week.
Marc:Yes, I'd make a, you know, a circular piece of cardboard.
Marc:Yeah, and then as your fan base group, people were going like, why don't they get their own drums?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Why do they got to use other bands' drums all the time?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Who are the dots?
Guest:What is this?
Guest:So...
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Eventually we realized, okay, we got this.
Guest:We can kind of do this.
Guest:I think we need to have a fourth person to kind of actually flesh out the sound.
Guest:And we were all big fans of this group that Jerry was in, the Modern Lovers.
Guest:Jonathan Richman.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Great record, that first record.
Guest:Just amazing.
Guest:And so we knew that Jerry was...
Guest:Sort of I guess what you would say out of a job in some way that band kind of parted ways they did quickly, right?
Guest:They did it fairly quickly right after they recorded these incredible demos that got released as a record they Jonathan decided that he wanted to do Go kind of more acoustic and right and more childlike more childlike And that that stuff was a little more too aggressive and it's sad or angry or whatever for him and
Guest:So the band was kind of left at loose ends, or some of them anyway.
Guest:So we went to Jerry and said, you want to try playing with us for a little bit?
Guest:Come down and rehearse.
Guest:See if you like it.
Guest:And we tried a few gigs.
Guest:We did a gig in Worcester, Mass.
Guest:Worcester.
Guest:Yeah, to see if...
Guest:Jerry liked the idea because he was really scared of dipping his toe in the water.
Guest:Really?
Guest:After... He'd just been through the band.
Guest:So he's a little heartbroken.
Guest:His heart was broken.
Guest:He didn't want to like... I'm not going to go back into that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And eventually he did.
Guest:And it really kind of took us to another level because then with four people, the songs...
Guest:Everybody wasn't trying to carry everything in the songs.
Marc:Right, right.
Guest:You could change the texture.
Guest:He could play a keyboard on one song and a guitar on a different song.
Marc:You could trust people a little more, like you do there.
Guest:Yeah, you do that.
Guest:You play this part, I'll play this part, and together it kind of will flesh things out.
Marc:Well, that became sort of like, because it seems to me that as the more musicians you play with and even the talking head stuff, that there was a real consciousness of keeping it sparse but letting things stand on their own.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:That was kind of an art school thing in a way.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:That the sounds had to have integrity.
Guest:Every sound had to be what it was and not pretend to be something else.
Guest:And everything... This is the way I interpreted it.
Guest:And that everything... You should be able...
Guest:to hear it in its kind of pristine form.
Guest:So there was very little distortion or any of that kind of stuff.
Guest:That all came later, but it was kind of like, we're going to strip everything down to its basics.
Guest:It's going to be very clean and just like a clean sketch.
Marc:the barest bones of what you need to.
Marc:And you all agreed on that.
Marc:There's a discussion you had.
Guest:I don't remember the discussion, but it was all tacitly.
Marc:Understood.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That that's, that's what we were going to do.
Marc:And you did that for like at least the first two albums.
Guest:Yes, I would say so.
Guest:And then, then, then we can kind of, we can do add more people.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:And if we're not willing to compromise the integrity of the sound, we can bring that guy in.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:He's the master of that noise.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And then we can do that.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:all right so i guess the other question that i have and we'll move through it we're not being nostalgic we're just discussing okay the scene in new york because like i've been curious personally after reading like you know i read mcneil's book you know the please kill me book and that you just the thought of of how many different types of bands were here in the in the early to mid 70s and and running around this this neighborhood pounding away at cbs and everything else and how they all define themselves
Marc:Do you remember that period well?
Marc:Was there a competitive nature to the scene?
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:I remember it pretty well.
Guest:I was maybe a little socially withdrawn, so I wasn't hanging out with everybody.
Guest:But we were all in the same bars and hanging out and playing music.
Guest:I remember it as being fairly...
Guest:uh, supportive that each band was kind of very supportive of each other.
Guest:Um, they would check out each other's sets and applaud and hang out at the bar when the other one is playing.
Guest:And, um, do you remember bands that you liked watching?
Guest:Oh yeah.
Guest:Like who?
Guest:Um, in that period kind of playing sometimes on the same bill with us would be television or Ramones or Patti Smith.
Guest:There were other groups like the mumps, uh,
Guest:later on like dead boys and oh yeah but oddly okay those are the ones some of the those are ones that people remember and they get documented in some of the those books that have been written but there was all these other ones there was like folks there was like a kid um steve forbert a folk singer from mississippi who came in and he became part of the thing not punky at all yeah there was another like progressive jazz group i forget what they were called they were like a progressive jazz group where they'd gone to berkeley or whatever really
Guest:And these kids could really, really play.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And sing and, you know, all that kind of stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We were just, our jaws dropped and it was kind of like, what is that doing here?
Guest:And what are we doing?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:But...
Guest:All that was kind of accepted, which was kind of great.
Guest:It wasn't until later where things maybe got a little more competitive, but at that point, it was... Everyone's just doing it.
Guest:Everybody's doing it.
Guest:Everybody's supportive.
Guest:Everybody's just trying to survive.
Marc:And did you find that people influenced their sound?
Marc:Do you remember listening to people and going, like, that's interesting how they're handling that, and that there was mutual influence going on?
Guest:I'm sure there was.
Guest:It's hard.
Guest:Yeah, but I'm not so aware of it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Do you have friends from that time still?
Guest:Wow.
Guest:I don't think I do.
Guest:I mean, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Kind of some of the more artier people.
Marc:Oh, yeah, right, right.
Guest:I sort of... Still hanging around?
Guest:I'm still hanging around, still in touch with it, but... Musicians.
Guest:Musicians, not as much.
Guest:They get pretty beat up, some of them.
Guest:Some of them do.
Guest:Some of them do.
Marc:I listen to the song Heaven a lot because I think it's hilarious.
Guest:Was it supposed to be hilarious?
Guest:Well, it's supposed to have a little twist.
Guest:I have a little twist in the lyrics there.
Guest:Do you write for comedy sometimes?
Guest:I do kind of.
Guest:If I can make myself laugh or chuckle or go, oh, that's the craziest idea.
Guest:Or...
Guest:Sometimes it's a very small laugh.
Guest:It's kind of an amused laugh.
Marc:Well, heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.
Guest:I can defend that idea as a concept, but it is backwards from what you expect.
Guest:What the assumption is.
Guest:Backwards from the assumption.
Guest:But I can defend it as an idea.
Marc:I think it is defensible.
Guest:Yeah, and so I thought, it's not crazy.
Guest:I'm not just doing this as a kind of crazy joke, but at the same time, it is kind of, you get a little bit of amusement out of it.
Guest:Right, right.
Marc:But I like the idea that it's not offensive, and if you really think about it, you're like, wow, that is kind of true.
Marc:It might be a little boring up there.
Guest:It's all perfect, and it just never changes.
Guest:It's all the same thing over and over again.
Guest:And there's another song, I think, from that same album called Animals, where I had the idea of like,
Guest:Oh, you know, everybody thinks we think of animals as being more pure, more ideal, less corrupted, whatever, than we are.
Guest:And I thought, I'm going to write from the opposite point of view, that animals are fucked up and annoying, whatever.
Guest:They don't know how to behave, whatever.
Guest:All the kind of things like that.
Guest:And that...
Guest:And somehow you put it into a song, what sounds like an intellectual idea or a joke or whatever when you start, you put it into a song and you sing it and you've suddenly invested this, what might be kind of a goofy idea with all this emotion.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because it's being sung.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:With a groove and everything else.
Guest:And which gives it a whole different meaning.
Guest:It's not just like me telling you I'm going to write a song about this.
Marc:Right.
Guest:It has a more visceral feeling.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You're not just sharing an idea.
Guest:There's an emotion attached to this thing that is kind of nutty.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And also open for interpretation and able to affect everyone differently.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:That's the magic of it.
Marc:So now I think that we can, without getting hung up on, and now I'm self-conscious about the past, but the relationship with Brian Eno lasted until it still goes on.
Marc:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Marc:I saw him a couple of weeks ago.
Marc:Now, how did that start?
Marc:How did that creative relationship start?
Marc:Because it happened in the second record, and it lasted throughout your career.
Guest:We were fans of his from Roxy Music and some of his other stuff that he'd done.
Guest:The solo stuff, right?
Guest:Yeah, a little bit.
Guest:Some of the solo stuff that we knew about.
Guest:And this would be late 70s.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Quite a while ago.
Guest:Another musician that we knew from CBGB's in downtown New York, this guy, John Cale, who was in Velvet Underground.
Guest:We were doing, I think, our first ever London gig.
Guest:And Cale happened to be there, but he'd seen us a lot in New York.
Guest:And he brought Brian and said, oh, this is... Brian, I think you're going to like this group.
Guest:And we got along really well with him.
Guest:We just chatted and...
Guest:And we weren't talking about music, we were talking about who knows what.
Guest:Which was exciting for us to have a kind of, in this case a producer or somebody like that, who could talk about other stuff besides music.
Marc:Like what?
Guest:Art?
Marc:yeah art or science or the one thing that amazed me about him was he said that his favorite band was the Velvet Underground specifically because of I think the way that they produced that the sound sounded produced like like and I never really put it together how why that would make sense but when you listen to like live in 69 or something where there's long periods of and you can hear the rhythms you know kind of layered up like that you know I could see how that would influence him but it did at that moment
Marc:I realized that his musical sensibility was vast and very unique.
Marc:You must have influenced each other through this partnership somehow.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I think it was kind of mutual.
Guest:Shortly after that, he was writing stuff that was his attempt to sound like us.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And, of course, we're already fans of his stuff.
Guest:So, you know, we started working together with him producing our records.
Marc:And how does that, like, I never quite understand how, what is that?
Marc:Because when I listen to, like, My Life and the Bush of Ghosts, like the stuff you just did with him, and then you listen to the Talking Heads album, you know, they all are fairly different sounding.
Marc:But, I mean, what is that dynamic?
Marc:How does the creativity work between the band and a guy like Brian Nino?
Marc:What does he say?
Marc:Just basically, what does he go like, no, could you turn that up?
Marc:I mean, what is it?
Guest:there's a little bit of that can you turn that up can you make that sound a little more whatever yeah there's a little bit of that but actually not very much of that it's more like the first record we worked with him on it was he basically just said you guys sound great my job on this record anyway is just basically to capture what you sound like live but do it in the studio
Marc:And that was Fear of Music?
Guest:That was the one before that.
Guest:It was called More Songs About Buildings and Food.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then Fear of Music was...
Guest:a record, our third record.
Guest:So we'd come to the point where we were about to exhaust the early kind of material that we'd written and accumulated.
Guest:So you get to the point of, oh, now we got to write new stuff, which is always the big kind of like issue with bands and musicians and whatever.
Guest:Can you write new stuff or was it just like I had one idea
Guest:it's i've drained it and there's nothing more yeah um and it's not selling big enough for us to repeat it over and over again necessarily yes not quite right so we were we still had this incredible fear of going recording studios it seemed like a foreign environment the third record yes around that time but just all in general and he sensed that he and so he said okay we'll record all the tracks
Guest:At home in your loft, where the drummer and bass player lived, we'll just bring up a remote truck, one of those recording trucks.
Guest:Now you can do it on a laptop.
Guest:But at that point, you had to bring in a whole truck.
Marc:So it was a big deal.
Guest:We're parking the truck outside.
Guest:We're parking the truck outside, snake the cables in the window.
Guest:So you guys are comfortable.
Guest:Yeah, so we could be comfortable, which is a huge deal.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because otherwise, the playing suffered and it sounded terrible.
Guest:The sounds were terrible.
Guest:We played terrible.
Guest:We could actually kind of play and groove the way we liked, but...
Guest:It was the first time where on some of the songs, I had to then take those tracks and go home and make a song out of it.
Guest:It wasn't a finished song.
Marc:So you'd write in, the improvisation would be the writing of the song sometimes.
Guest:Yes, sometimes it'd be an improvisation, sometimes it'd be something that I would say to the band, do this, do this, and then do this, or repeat some kind of jam that we did, and I realized we can do that, I can write lyrics and a melody over it, and voila, it's a song.
Guest:and uh i think brian saw that too and maybe he'd written in that way in the past as well so kind of you know step by step it kind of takes you to not just that's interesting not just turn that louder and make that softer but your way of writing and evolving the sounds yeah this the whole thing evolves it's layering yeah yeah layering in a way and creating things in the studio right right as opposed to coming up with a pop song yeah
Guest:And then going, pow, there you go, and boom.
Guest:Yes, which is not to say that that's invalid, but just to say, oh, here's another way of working.
Guest:And by working this other way, you end up with stuff that you would never come up with if you just sat down and tried to write a pop song.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You end up with more kind of weirder sounds and outer arrangements because you're not thinking about, oh, here's the chorus or whatever.
Marc:You're taking chances and you're jamming.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so that was great.
Marc:Yeah, and then you started to add by Remain in Light, then you're broadening out the musicians.
Guest:Yes, we're adding other musicians.
Guest:We're taking that concept even further where we go into the studio with almost nothing.
Guest:Nothing.
Guest:Yeah, almost nothing, which nowadays I would consider an extravagance.
Guest:I mean, yeah, we were doing all right commercially.
Guest:So we could afford to spend two weeks jamming in the studio and just saving the good parts.
Yeah.
Marc:But at that point in the studio, were you involving how many musicians?
Marc:Did you bring in musicians to do certain things?
Guest:No, it was basically just the four of us.
Guest:Some other musicians would come in and do overdubs.
Guest:It gave the mistaken impression that we were a larger band in the studio because when we then had to reproduce that live, we had to double the size of the band.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because we'd kind of done all these crazy overdubs.
Marc:With Rural, Bernie Rural, and Fripp.
Guest:Yeah, all those people.
Marc:And Adrian Ballou was a part of that too.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:How's that guy doing?
Guest:He's doing great.
Guest:He's like a record producer and does his own stuff in Nashville.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It doesn't mean country.
Guest:It means, you know.
Marc:Oh, so he's down there?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like, you know, I learned a lot about a lot of different people through you.
Marc:That was the other thing that the Talking Heads and David Byrne solo and with the heads brought to me as just a kid or as a guy who was trying to learn about things.
Marc:I'm like, who's Twyla Tharp?
Marc:This record's fucking amazing.
Marc:What goes with it?
Marc:You know, like the Catherine Wheel.
Marc:I listened to the hell out of that record.
Marc:I never saw it.
Marc:I never saw, like, and I was in college, I should have been seeing things, but, like, the knee plays, too, when that came out, I'm like, I love this record.
Marc:I have no idea.
Marc:You know, like, I know Robert Wilson.
Marc:I know there's ladders involved, and it's long.
Marc:Yes, yes.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:You know, and I got it.
Marc:I read about stuff, but I wasn't getting out into them and doing it much.
Marc:So that stuff blew my mind.
Marc:But the whole, you know, Byrne-Eno matrix of people like, you know, John Hassel and Fripp and Baloo, these were all, you know, a type of music that was rare to me.
Marc:It was rare and exotic.
Marc:Yes, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And that was in a way...
Marc:me reproducing or us reproducing kind of the experiences I had with the transmission yeah the adolescence you were sending out it was your version of the signal now it's my turn to do that to make people go like where is this coming from yes to do what the same thing that happened to me but now well you did it yes to some extent yeah like I mean because I've talked to other bands like you know and I know other bands have had problems with it I have to assume at some point you looked out at an audience and said how is that guy like me
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yes, that's true.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Have I been misinterpreted in some way?
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:I remember that we had a song called Life During Wartime that had a chorus that goes, this ain't no party, this ain't no disco.
Guest:What it was meant to imply was I don't have time for nightlife because I'm involved in urban revolution at the moment.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Excuse me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But because of the wording, it came out at the exact time where there seemed to be this conflict between kind of disco music, discotheques, DJs, and kind of live hard rock music.
Guest:And it was like, there was a lot of racism involved in that kind of schism.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:but and so the song was picked up as being like an anthem an anthem of this ain't no disco yeah and we don't basically to say we don't like disco music right that's for whatever yeah fags and black people right and
Guest:But it was never intended that way.
Guest:I realized, oh, things can really get misinterpreted.
Guest:And how worried do I have to be about being clear?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Is this something that's really going to obsess me?
Guest:Well, it's a repercussion of mainstream success.
Guest:Yes, of course.
Guest:And the ambiguity that's in music and songs, that's part of the greatness of the form.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Is that it can be misinterpreted by morons and used as an anthem for negativities.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:There you go.
Guest:That's the liability.
Guest:Yes, like whatever.
Guest:Ronald Reagan wanting to use Born in the USA.
Marc:Right, exactly.
Marc:Yeah, it's tricky, huh?
Marc:Did that make you recoil?
Marc:I mean, did that, like once the top of the talking had this popularity, was there an element of you that was like, I got to pull back and insulate in a different type of creativity?
Guest:To some extent, yeah, to some extent, I felt like...
Guest:I don't want to be a big pop star.
Guest:I have all these interests and I want to maintain that and be a balanced, interested, curious human being and not be sucked into the whole world of celebrity.
Guest:And repetition.
Guest:Yeah, and repetition.
Guest:And then you're expected to do something like the thing you did before or you always have to top it or it always has to be bigger and better or whatever.
Guest:And I just thought, oh, that's like a treadmill.
Guest:I'm not sure I want to get on.
Marc:Yeah, and also just the fight, the fight to maintain and grow your creativity in the face of the record business.
Marc:There are people who can do it.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, not forever.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, usually not forever.
Guest:And yeah, I just thought, oh, I'm pretty happy.
Guest:I'm not sure I want to deal with that.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And I imagine that when you guys were making music, Chris and Tina, Jerry and you, that was highly collaborative, right?
Marc:Yeah, for the most part.
Marc:For the most part.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:It depended on the record.
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:Do you get along with them, all of them?
Guest:I get along with Jerry, yeah.
Guest:The others, we don't get along.
Marc:Oh, really?
Marc:Wait, just from old stuff?
Guest:Yeah, kind of old stuff, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, that's sad, right?
Marc:It is sad, yeah.
Marc:You seem to manage to maintain an artistic integrity and keep growing creatively in all these different areas.
Marc:I mean, you know, working with Twyla Tharp, working with Robert Wilson, you know, outside of music, that seemed to be at some point as compelling as just doing records.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:It had the feeling of the same feeling, some of it anyway, had the same feeling of the kind of excitement and genre-breaking and curiosity and let's see what happens and experimentation that I felt music was supposed to have also.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But here it was happening in theater or dance or some various other mediums, whatever it might be.
Guest:And I thought, oh...
Guest:it's the same feeling the same vibe the same excitement that i first started getting from music right but it also exists in some of these other areas as well you can be part of it and i can be part of that and i thought that's well that's interesting that's thrilling well it's interesting because in music you can integrate like in a lot as as as you grew creatively musically and you integrated a lot of different sounds and rhythms and textures from
Marc:from other countries and other types of music that with film, music is an integral part of the process, but it has to be collaborative.
Marc:So you are actually part of filmmaking if you are asked to be.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And yeah, if you're doing that, you're expected to collaborate, give and take.
Marc:And honor the vision of the director, I imagine.
Guest:And not everybody, not every musician enjoys doing that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That kind of puzzle solving or...
Guest:creatively supporting the vision of somebody else.
Guest:But you like doing it.
Guest:Yeah, I thought it was a great challenge, really, to solve that puzzle, but do something kind of exciting at the same time.
Marc:You probably have a little more freedom with dance, I would imagine.
Guest:yeah yeah yeah and with some film stuff yeah the director will kind of give you kind of a little bit of carte blanche and then he'll go yeah but that one didn't work right right right who yeah and you've worked with Bertolucci Bernardo Bertolucci right and then with Jonathan Demme a couple of times and well he's great yeah though you did some of the stuff on something wild right yes and then you did your own movie which I loved
Guest:Well, thank you.
Marc:I mean, I went and saw it immediately.
Marc:I mean, I forget sometimes just how into what you do I am.
Marc:Oh, boy.
Marc:Yeah, I know.
Marc:No, but it's true.
Marc:Because I was very excited to talk to you.
Marc:What was that movie based on for you?
Guest:It was based on... True Stories we're talking about.
Guest:Yeah, a movie's called True Stories and it was set in Texas and it fought a bunch of kind of quirky characters all in a little town in Texas.
Guest:And their stories and their characters were based on a lot of odd human interest stories that I'd read in the weekly world news, which is kind of one step down from the Inquirer.
Guest:And you kind of played this sort of like this guide character.
Guest:Yes, I was a guy from out of town who was kind of the guide and was kind of interested in what was going on in this town, that they were going to have this little, they were going to put on a show, the people in the town.
Guest:I was interested in talking to them.
Guest:I was fascinated by them.
Guest:And to try and fit in, because it was Texas, I wore a Western outfit.
Guest:Big hat.
Guest:Big hat.
Guest:The jackets and everything else.
Guest:Nobody else wore a western outfit, but for some reason, being the out-of-towner, I thought that's what I should do to blend in.
Guest:That makes sense.
Guest:It was kind of interesting in that
Guest:Well, I had a great time doing it.
Guest:I really loved it.
Guest:But I realized that in some places it was perceived as being hilarious and Texans, Texans in particular, loved it.
Guest:They did?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:They did not think it was, they thought the way it made fun of kind of the quirks of Texans and all that kind of stuff.
Guest:They loved that because they were actually kind of secretly proud of how kind of odd and quirky and whatever they can be.
Guest:Other people thought that it was being deeply ironic and... Condescending.
Guest:Condescending to them, which was never intended.
Guest:The intention was more like what I described with the color guard stuff, to kind of really celebrate...
Guest:The kind of uniqueness and originality and quirkiness and kind of vernacular creativity that goes on out in the middle of nowhere.
Guest:And I realized that...
Guest:I realized this again just the other day, too, that sometimes if you present things almost verbatim as what they are, because you're a New Yorker or whatever.
Marc:Or you're David Byrne.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And some of the people who are looking at it are sort of whatever arty types as well.
Guest:They bring the irony to it.
Guest:they look at it and because they look down their noses or they assume that I, they assume that I look down my noses at people in a small town in Texas, then they view it through those goggles.
Marc:Right, and they're not willing to take responsibility for their own condescension, they're gonna hang it on you.
Marc:Yes, yes.
Guest:And they just assume that I'm like them and so I'm gonna feel in the same way and that I couldn't possibly
Marc:be embracing and be embracing it yeah that's it well that's interesting I wanted to also say the knee plays yeah you're going with this well that I thought that was a celebration of American music yes yeah that was originally I wanted to Gershwin almost in some ways
Guest:It was kind of problem solving.
Guest:It was done for a theater piece, this Robert Wilson theater piece.
Marc:I can't imagine.
Marc:What's he like?
Marc:Is he still around?
Guest:He's still around.
Guest:He's still around.
Guest:He works mainly in Europe.
Guest:He gets more funding.
Guest:You guys were buddies?
Guest:I worked with him twice.
Guest:That's pretty good.
Guest:That's pretty good.
Guest:Big projects.
Guest:It's a big project.
Guest:uh, it can be pretty bizarre.
Guest:The whole work.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And it's so weird.
Marc:Cause I came to it just as a record and I listened to it.
Marc:I just got it.
Marc:I had to go find it again.
Marc:I got it again and I listened to it and I love it.
Marc:So it's problem solving.
Marc:What were you going to say?
Guest:It was problem solving.
Guest:You knew that in this particular case, the theater stuff was going to be done in these short little segments.
Guest:There was going to be, let's see, uh, scenery being changed backstage.
Guest:So there might be a little bit of noise.
Guest:The music had to be loud enough to,
Guest:It would cover up that stuff.
Guest:So I thought, okay, brass instruments.
Guest:We'll use brass instruments.
Guest:So you wouldn't hear the noise.
Guest:Yeah, so it would cover up the noise of the big sets being moved across the stage.
Guest:Horns.
Guest:Need horns.
Guest:Yeah, we need some horns to do this.
Guest:That'll do the job.
Guest:Horns and drums will do the job.
Guest:And a lot of Bob's stuff is very kind of trance-like as a visual director.
Guest:This is part of the Civil Wars, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I thought, well, there's a lot of kind of the groove and the...
Guest:In a lot of brass band music, especially out of New Orleans, that kind of thing that has a little bit of that, but it's a lot funkier.
Guest:It kind of moves your whole body, and it's not just kind of a repetition.
Guest:And I thought, maybe I can do that.
Guest:Maybe I can bring a little bit of swing and funk into that kind of repetition and trancy kind of thing.
Guest:So I first tried to work on the material with the Dirty Dozen brass band.
Guest:out of New Orleans.
Guest:And I went down there and hung out with them and tried to do that.
Guest:Didn't work because I had kind of everything written out.
Guest:And they kind of do head arrangements.
Guest:They kind of work things out in their heads through rehearsal and playing in clubs.
Guest:They kind of work it out that way.
Guest:And I realized, okay, this is a mismatch.
Marc:You're not going to be able to get them to follow what you need.
Guest:No.
Guest:And so I worked with other musicians, great musicians, and it worked out fine.
Marc:And you can write the music?
Guest:No, but I could kind of do it track by track, like I could play the trumpet line on something else.
Marc:And that's how you built it out?
Guest:Built it up that way, and then occasionally would write these odd little kind of stories to go over some of the songs, these odd little scenarios that, who knows what that was about, but I really enjoyed it.
Guest:But that's the kind of things he does, where it's just, it's about layers.
Guest:There's visual stuff, there's...
Guest:a layer of voice and maybe speaking or singing or whatever and there's music he and kind of other kind of the kind of artier fringe of that theater world they tend to think of that stuff as all running parallel like this what you're looking at is one thing what the way people dress might be another thing the sound the words whatever they're all running parallel but they're not always telling the same narrative story
Guest:It's more of an impressionistic, surrealistic thing going on where it all exists simultaneously.
Guest:And when it works, it's very, very ambiguous.
Guest:And you can kind of... But the trick is the balance.
Guest:The trick is the balance.
Guest:And the audience kind of, in some ways, makes the meaning in their heads.
Marc:Well, you worked with the... I mean, your first wife was an artist, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And you worked with her on True Stories.
Guest:She worked on True Stories.
Marc:I remember there was...
Marc:costumes and stuff, right?
Marc:Am I remembering that properly?
Marc:Yes.
Guest:Excuse me.
Guest:There was a shopping.
Guest:There was a fashion.
Guest:Oh, that's right.
Guest:A fashion show in the shopping mall.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:With the local people.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Made these kind of fantastic outfits.
Marc:And what about like the collaboration?
Marc:Like you were just so tapped in.
Marc:Like you know what I saw just the other day?
Marc:My buddy Dan, who used to own a record store here, Gimme Gimme Records down on 8th Street.
Marc:Now he's out in L.A.
Marc:by me.
Marc:He's got the... Was it Speaking in Tongues that Rauschenberg did the... Yes, yeah.
Guest:I love Bob Rauschenberg's work, especially the kind of photo-based work that he was doing quite a bit of at that time.
Guest:And so when we were kind of working on this record, I said to the band, what if I track him down and see if... Because Andy Warhol was doing record covers.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Other people were doing record covers, and I thought...
Guest:Oh, let me track down Rauschenberg and see if he'll do a record cover for us.
Guest:And he agreed, loved the idea.
Guest:But of course, he didn't want to just do an image that we could then slap onto a cardboard sleeve.
Guest:He wanted to rethink the whole idea of what the package is.
Guest:So you were in.
Guest:And I thought...
Guest:I love that.
Guest:That's so great.
Guest:Of course, it meant the record release had to be held up.
Guest:Well, it figured out the packaging and how to manufacture this turning.
Guest:Was that one of the me and my big ideas moments?
Guest:Yes, me and my big ideas, and now look how complicated it is.
Guest:I mean, it was beautiful, but yes, it was a little more than we bargained for.
Marc:Oh, that's hilarious.
Marc:I like what you're saying about funk and groove and movement because you have a very specific way of grooving.
Marc:And that became apparent in live performance and also in the different types of rhythms that you sort of talk about.
Marc:It's interesting because in talking to you and in just making assumptions about who you are, I wouldn't think that you grew up as a dancing man.
Guest:No, I did not grow up as a dancing man.
Marc:I was just socially fairly shy.
Marc:When did that confidence start to build?
Marc:I hear it in your voice as you progress, but there was some point where you just were wide open.
Marc:You started moving around on stage.
Guest:I'm going to say somewhere early, mid-80s.
Guest:where the band expanded from being kind of this core kind of rock band to this big kind of funk ensemble.
Guest:And so the vibe on stage was more ecstatic, in some ways trance-like, that it was repetitive, and you would just kind of... It would command you to kind of surrender to the groove.
Guest:And did you need that personally?
Guest:I needed it personally.
Guest:It was kind of personally liberating.
Guest:This was like...
Guest:I didn't go to a shrink, but that music was my shrink and it kind of liberated me personally, both physically and mentally and psychologically and all that kind of stuff.
Guest:And I thought, wow, here we go.
Guest:It's a total cliche, but here I am.
Guest:I'm getting healed.
Guest:The music is healing me.
Guest:It's kind of helped me out in my personal life.
Guest:I don't mean like introducing me to girls or whatever, but it's
Guest:really kind of helping me open up and have joy.
Guest:I'm starting to have a good time.
Guest:Whereas before I would kind of have a good time, but it was also kind of this desperation.
Guest:Well, you were like to be a sort of, you can hear it in the early stuff.
Guest:It's desperate.
Guest:Desperate, but also like awkward.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah.
And
Guest:There's something nice about that awkwardness that people hear and they identify it with because everybody has a little bit of it.
Guest:I can never get that back.
Guest:I'm glad it's gone.
Guest:I'm glad it was there and came out.
Guest:But yes, and then you move on to something else.
Guest:You grew up.
Guest:You grew up and you ask yourself, well, did I lose the thing that everybody really liked?
Guest:No, I don't think so.
Guest:You find something else.
Marc:Well, also, I think that what you answered, and I think it's a good way to sort of move towards the end of this, is that, you know, once you found that groove, once you found that joy, once you found that healing, it seemed to me that what you were doing through, you know, pursuing and embracing all these different types of music and these different types of rhythm was making an attempt to be a channel to share all that stuff.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Which is kind of what I do now more than kind of pointing to myself.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I find myself doing things like this color guard thing, and I'm doing this.
Guest:And the book, too.
Guest:The book is fascinating.
Guest:The book is a lot of Latin.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's a festival in August in England called Meltdown, which is basically you kind of invite a lot of bands and people to perform.
Guest:And...
Guest:It's not a big moneymaker, that way of life, but it's really nice to be able to kind of occasionally exercise that thing and do what other people did for me and for you and say, check this out.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Check this out.
Guest:You might like it.
Guest:A curator.
Guest:Yeah, it gets overused, but it's really nice.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:But I mean, you've got to be okay money-wise.
Guest:I'm doing fine.
Guest:I'm doing fine.
Guest:well enough that I can do this kind of stuff.
Marc:Well, what is going on here?
Marc:I mean, we're at, uh, what is it?
Marc:Todo Mundo?
Guest:Todo Mundo is the name of this office.
Guest:It's on lower Broadway.
Marc:Is it a label?
Guest:Is it a, no, it's just a kind of, it's just an overall thing.
Guest:It's not a record label.
Guest:is it a publishing label i mean yeah sometimes you do this is your office though yeah we do there's books occasionally and other kind of projects and so that's in like if we're doing like the color guard thing right that's comes through here that yeah how is this different than the walk a pop walk a pop was a record label okay still exists but my partner in the record label kind of does it somewhere else oh you're still involved with it
Marc:uh i still i'm on good terms with them but it was eating up a lot of hours right and money right and it's also interesting that like the towards the end of the the heads and then into your solo career that was sort like i because i was i was talking about with somebody else like the other day it seemed like like after a certain point the music just got sort of like happy that we moved through something
Marc:How was the, how was the dissolution of the heads into your, to the first record, which was more, uh, what was your first back?
Marc:Ray Momo.
Marc:Ray Momo was.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I did a full on Latin kind of thing after that.
Guest:Was that just to sort of like this?
Guest:We're, we're often a different thing.
Guest:You're often a different thing.
Guest:Uh, yes.
Guest:And to say like, well, we didn't break up just because I wanted to do, you know, my own kind of talking heads record.
Guest:I wanted, we broke up because I wanted to do something very different.
Guest:Was it bad?
Guest:The breakup?
Guest:It was not good.
Guest:I mean, there have been worse.
Guest:But it was not good.
Guest:I don't think any of them are really good.
Guest:But, okay, we got through it.
Guest:And doing kind of the Latin music was kind of taking that whole kind of...
Guest:surrender to the groove whatever thing one step further it's amazing um i really enjoyed it the touring part especially with a big latin band was ecstatic wow um although i think one of one of the guys at warner brothers records said to me david you're your own yoko ono oh my god wow that's that's probably the worst thing anyone could ever say to you
Marc:poor yoko do you know her i've met her yes now now let's close with the this site this same vincent business because you know i interviewed her and she's amazing and and you work with her yes specifically i have that record what is it out you know out of all the people like you know that she's an american artist and you know out of sort of like you know you being an international uh
Marc:You sort of somehow land with St.
Marc:Vincent on a record and supporting her career.
Marc:What was it about her?
Guest:I was a big fan of her stuff.
Guest:I'd seen her live in her first probably couple of records and thought, this girl's really talented.
Guest:I'm not talking about as a guitar player, but she's really doing something really interesting.
Guest:And...
Guest:So it was a little charity over on Crosby Street, this kind of AIDS place.
Guest:They would do these, in a used bookstore, they would do these little concerts as AIDS benefits.
Guest:And they would invite different artists to collaborate.
Guest:And I'd met her before.
Guest:And then we kind of crossed paths again at one of those events where they invited Bjork and this group called Dirty Projectors to work together.
Guest:And Dave from Dirty Projectors, he just, when they did that, he just went with it.
Guest:He wrote six new songs for this little tiny, you know, the size of this.
Guest:And I thought, geez, he's raised the bar awfully high for...
Guest:Just doing a benefit in a little store.
Guest:But they approached Annie, that's her name, and I, and I said, well, if she wants to do it, I'll do it.
Marc:It's almost like a challenge.
Guest:It was kind of a challenge.
Guest:And I said, okay, Annie, let's...
Guest:And she came and said, let's do it with a lot of brass instruments.
Guest:And I said, that's great because then you don't have to have a big sound system in a little bookstore.
Guest:And I said, let's just try a few things.
Guest:And if it works, great.
Guest:And if it doesn't work, we quietly put it away and nobody knows it ever happened.
Guest:But it worked great.
Guest:And we never did do the show at the bookstore, but they got benefit money from other shows we did.
Guest:And we made a whole record and did tour and all that.
Guest:It was really exciting.
Guest:And we kind of did this tour where we choreographed the brass players, where they were kind of moving around the stage and making formations and all this kind of stuff, interacting with us.
Guest:It was really a lot of fun.
Marc:Well, great, man.
Marc:This is a great talk.
Marc:I'm glad you made time for it.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:And I'm beside myself.
Marc:All right, that's our show.
Marc:Wasn't that amazing?
Marc:Wasn't that amazing?
Marc:It was David Byrne.
Marc:David Byrne.
Marc:I talked to David Byrne and he was amazing.
Marc:I just love talking to that guy.
Marc:It was a real exciting thing for me.
Marc:And it's funny because...
Marc:After the conversation, like a few days later, he sent me an email that said, do you remember my comment that some, in parentheses, younger folks don't know me from talking heads but from other things?
Marc:Well, this email story came in today, sort of a crazy extreme example, but here it is, and he forwarded me an email he received from somebody, and it said, I was at a bookstore in Chelsea Market on Sunday and overheard two high school girls talking.
Marc:One of them picked up a copy of How Music Works and said...
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:He's the color guard guy.
Marc:I see him at, like, every competition these days.
Marc:Isn't that wild?
Marc:How do you get them into the talking heads?
Marc:I think that everyone should know the talking heads.
Marc:Anyways, that's our show.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com for all your WTF needs.
Marc:Please watch my show, Marin, on IFC, Thursdays at 10.
Marc:And please enjoy yourself or something.
Marc:You know, I hope...
Marc:Oh, God.
Marc:I got to get ready.
Marc:I got to go do a show.
Marc:Boomer lives!
Boomer lives!