1986 - Rock's Renaissance Man

1986 - Rock's Renaissance Man Written by Time From: Time magazine, October 27, 1986 Got a movie. Got a record. Got some wild, wild life. "Oh," David Byrne said, "you want to see the African fire ants?" It was deep night out on a Texas plain flat as a pan bottom and just about burned through. A recent rain had slaked the land a little but brought forth legions of ants to infest the ground and pester a nearby film set. Exterminators were summoned, ants dispatched, but one actor, arriving late, felt he had missed out on some fun. "Follow me," said Byrne sympathetically, as he grabbed a flashlight and walked into the dark. This is a man whose first great song was called Psycho Killer. A man who is the formative force behind Talking Heads, one of the decade's most formidable bands, a group responsible for the sweetest, strangest, funniest rock to roll over the '70s and nestle into the '80s. A man who should be hanging close to the set, seeing to the details of directing his first feature film, not striking out on some weird nocturnal expedition in search of hymenopterous marauders. He may not resemble the manic murderer in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but he will never be mistaken for Mark Trail either. Is this a man to follow into the night? No question. It took a while, and a little stumbling, but Byrne found what he was looking for. He stood near a mound of earth and shone his light down and waited. This was no exterminator. He was more like an ally. And after just a little while, the fire ants came out for David Byrne. He has been, for ten years now, a cool hand at bringing up all manner of crawly things from just below the surface. Byrne and the Heads made music that examined some of the oddest, spookiest manifestations of modern emotional life, sang songs that turned grim tidings into deadpan jokes and disaffection into disarming social parables. Byrne's lyrics played four-wall handball with anomie and, floating all around the band's cunning and enterprising rhythms, moved the Heads past punk and over the crest of rock's new wave into a forefront they had sharpened up for themselves. The Heads were a prominent part of a creative community that kicked avant-garde American culture into a newer, more accessible 1 / 9 1986 - Rock's Renaissance Man Written by Time shape. Music, dance, performance art and rock all flowed together into a single swift stream, which Byrne navigated effortlessly. He also wrote scores for the spectacular theatrical ruminations of Robert Wilson (The Knee Plays, segments of Wilson's grand-scale project, the CIVIL warS) and the spirited, quirky choreography of Twyla Tharp. "He is very precise and very careful," Tharp says admiringly. "He doesn't waste things, but he is also capable of being very adventuresome and working with great imagination in a studio." Indeed, Byrne's 73-minute score for Tharp's The Catherine Wheel was a dazzling bit of aw-shucks virtuosity. In his younger years, Byrne's ambitions were not quite as grand. "Gosh, I'd love to be a mailman," Byrne, 34, sometimes thought as he was growing up. "Read postcards, walk around the neighborhood." If Byrne sent out cards of his own about his career, the messages might go something like this: "Heads bust out - six of our ten albums go gold"; "Heads albums make the Top 20 (Remain in Light to No. 19, Speaking in Tongues to No. 15)"; "Hi everybody. Gone to Hollywood. Love, David." True Stories, the movie Byrne directed between ant forays in Texas, promises to introduce its maker's quirky imagination to the widest audience yet. He also co-scripted it, helped design it, acts in it and wrote the score, which, as performed by the Heads, is currently selling fast in your neighborhood record store. True Stories, which opened in New York City two weeks ago, and will be playing in half a dozen cities by month's end, was made for under $5 million, slightly more than catering budget at a studio Christmas party. The film has no box-office stars, no sex appeal and no traditional production values. It is photographed in hues that look like a dishware party - color by Tupperware - and its biggest scene is a talent contest that concludes a sesquicentennial Celebration of Specialness in the mythical town of Virgil, Texas (pop. 40,000 and growing). Kind of a downtown Our Town, you might say, full of high boho spirits and jokey asides that illuminate with fondness as often as they satirize without malice. But do not doubt it for a second: True Stories is the most joyous and inventive rock movie-musical since the Beatles scrambled through Help! Byrne in person is unassuming and unprepossessing, a still, shrewd presence. "I've seen David in a room full of people, acting like he was reading the newspaper," says Jo Harvey Allen, who enlivens the movie with her periodic appearances as the Lying Woman. "Two weeks later, he would make some comment about who said what, some tiny detail. He doesn't miss anything." On screen, as True Stories' Narrator chatting to the camera or wandering through the action in a red Chrysler convertible, there is something both warming and ominous about him. 2 / 9 1986 - Rock's Renaissance Man Written by Time The voice, maybe; flat, arrhythmic, dispensing stream-of-consciousness folk wisdom ("Things that never had names before now are easily described. It makes conversation easy") like an old-time pharmacist handing out a Bromo. Or just his presence: decked out in cowboy duds ("They sell a lot of these around here, but I never see anybody else wearing them"), moonstruck and heartfelt, with knowing eyes and open face and sloping, sculpted jaw, Gregory Peck dosed out o n lithium. He sure gives you pause. Then he makes you laugh. "People talk about how strange I am," says the man who dances onstage like a Bunraku puppet leading an aerobics class and ended his last series of Talking Heads concerts wearing a huge white suit cut like a tailored tennis court. "Of course, being inside myself, not having the perspective, I don't think I'm odd at all. I can see that what I'm doing is not exactly what everyone else is doing, but I don't think of it as strange." Not exactly, indeed. Byrne's band started out in the punk new-wave era but outlasted and outclassed it. His lyric for their 1979 song Life During Wartime has a spooky pertinence that sounds like sci-fi for a perpetual present tense: Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons, Packed up and ready to go, Heard of some grave sites, out by the highway, A place where nobody knows The sound of gunfire, off in the distance, I'm getting used to it now What made Heads songs like this so insinuating - so persistent, so haunting - was not just their edginess but their off-kilter humor.A verse full of imminent violence could almost scar you with surprise, scare you from laughing. Then a chorus ("This ain't no party, this ain't no disco,/This ain't no fooling around"/This ain't the Mudd Club, or CBGB/I ain't got time for that now") comes bouncing in to turn everything inside out and dare you not to. Byrne and the band are still looking for laughter and surprise, but the tune is different. Nowadays it has a larky up-tempo swing that sounds like a roadhouse Saturday night and goes like this: I'm wearin' Fur pajamas I ride a Hot potata' It's tickling my fancy Speak up, I can't hear you... I got some news to tell ya, Woahoho About some wild, wild life Wild Wild Life, currently jollying up Top 40 radio, could be the Heads' happiest hit yet. It is, additionally, the musical cornerstone for True Stories, perfectly capturing the sense of wonder that infuses the film. If True Stories hits American films the way Talking Heads hit music, things are going to be different around here. It's going to be a wild, wild life. "David is one of those people who has forced us to redefine what we mean by popular culture and serious culture, commercial art and noncommercial art," says Philip Glass, who has known and worked with Byrne since 1975. "He so resolutely does his own work regardless of whether it is commercial or non-commercial, and with so little regard for the canons of either those fields, that he creates something uniquely his own." 3 / 9 1986 - Rock's Renaissance Man Written by Time If all this seems a bit rarefied for the populist currents of rock culture, it should be remembered that Byrne and the Heads were one of the few new-wave bands to groove on black music and learn from it. Heads albums like Fear of Music (1979), Remain in Light (1980) and the stunning Speaking in Tongues (1983) have a heavy soul inflection and an African beat. When Byrne collaborated with Rock Producer and Theorist Brian Eno on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981), the results were like trance music programmed for a ghetto blaster. Lately Byrne's music has been swimming in odd, winding tributaries close by the mainstream. He will defend his independent writing away from the band by saying, "Just because you love pop or rock or whatever it's called, that doesn't exclude liking other kinds of things." He says the True Stories score is "pop songs, and, for us, it sounds fairly conventional," but it might be best to tread a little carefully here.

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