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you up”), especially since the spindly Joey, holding on to the mike stand as if for support, as if it were a sturdier spinal column, looked so much like an awkwardly assembled praying mantis that one couldn’t imagine him throwing a punch that wouldn’t completely creak him out of alignment. They saved their antagonism mostly for each other, like feuding brothers. Johnny and Dee Dee looked like the genuine reform-school sluggers, often barking onstage at each other before, during, and after numbers, looking as if they might have a throw-down right then and there, using Joey as a pike to thwack each other. (Tuning up at CBGB’s became its own subgenre of psychodrama for the Ramones, as if they were taking batting practice before swinging aggression outward.) The uniform persona and unison attitude, the slashing zoom of their chords and lyrics, the ritualistic formalism of each set—“It’s like a set of karate stances,” Albert Goldman later observed with his customary cackle. Kiai! The intensity of the Ramones, the relentlessness of their chain-saw attack and paroxysms of anger that erupted whenever that attack was interrupted because a guitar strap snapped loose, was the intensity of a methodical strike force that didn’t want to waste a second or a note or a needless word. The mark of mission accomplished for a typical Ramones show was looking pissed off as they left the stage, the exchange of well-done grins and tired beams of satisfaction having no place in their pit-crew operation. (I remember seeing Dee Dee backstage after a New Year’s Eve concert where he was slumped against the wall, a model of exhaustion. I asked him about his holiday season. “Gonna take a few more days off,” he said, “then it’s back to writing those hits.” I thought he was kidding, being self-deprecating, given that the Ramones hadn’t had any real hits yet. But, no, irony wasn’t the language he spoke. This was simply the work he had waiting for him at the assembly plant in his head.)

Even then, in howling embryo, the Ramones were a tough act to follow and a tough act to precede. Whoever opened for them might as well have been setting out the paper plates on the picnic table, so innocuous would they look by comparison. The band that opened for them that night looked innocuous even without anything as contrast. A trio, two smoothie-faced young men in preppy Izods or Polo tops and a young woman with short strawberry blonde hair who strapped on her bass as if donning a white lab coat, took the stage, looking as if they had wandered into the wrong campus bar. Or Pop-Tarts that had popped out of the same toaster. They didn’t seem to belong in a Bowery dive where the very air seemed sometimes to be ovulating with amoebic dysentery, and yet they threw off no awareness or discomfort that they didn’t belong, and so slid right into a slot that was theirs for the slitting. The lead singer, whose voice sounded as if perpetually about to break, his Adam’s apple working like a baby’s rattle, introduced the group: “The name of this band is Talking Heads, and the name of this song is ‘The Girls Want to Be with the Girls.’ ”

“These people call themselves Talking Heads,” I wrote in the Voice.

Seeing them for the first time is transfixing: Frantz is so far back on drums that it sounds as if he’s playing in the next room; Weymouth, who could pass for Suzi Quatro’s sorority sister, stands rooted to the floor, her head doing an oscillating-fan swivel; the object of her swivel is David Byrne, who has a little-boy-lost-at-the-zoo voice and the demeanor of someone who’s spent the last half hour whirling around in the spin drier. When his eyes start ping-ponging in his head, he looks like a cartoon of a chipmunk from Mars.

They were strange, but straight-strange, a collegiate facsimile edition of a set of bland-seeming Warholian ironies about everyday objects, brand merchandise, and candy-pill colors bestowed on its citizens by a big, shiny, bountiful milkshake-machine America. “Don’t Worry About the Government” went one song title, a sentiment that cut against the paranoid