Lucking Out - James Wolcott [70]
When the Velvets made their reputation at the Balloon Farm, they were navigating through a storm of multi-media effects; mirrors, blinking lights, strobes, projected film images. Talking Heads works without paraphernalia in a cavernous room projecting light like a television located at the end of a long dark hall. The difference between the Heads and the Velvets is the difference between phosphorescence and cold gray TV light. These people understand that an entire generation has grown up on the nourishment of television’s accessible banality. What they’re doing is presenting a banal facade under which run ripples of violence and squalls of frustration—the id of the vid.
There was also a TV-kiddie-show rinky-dink troubadour echo of the influential cult band the Modern Lovers, whose lead singer, Jonathan Richman, who went solo, once did three encores of “Ice Cream Man” strolling up and down the bar aisle of CBGB’s, strumming his acoustic guitar as if leading a campfire sing-along. What I didn’t know, watching the Heads for the first time, was that David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth had all attended the Rhode Island School of Design, where experimental artiness and eccentric presentation were encouraged rather than roughed up in the hallways, as happened at lesser institutions where jocks and unaffiliated louts committed acts of unsportsmanlike conduct upon those suspected of sissy aspirations or other faun tendencies. Not that there was anything fey about Talking Heads, or that it would have mattered much if there had been, the New York Dolls having broken up that stigma for scrap metal. But in the hobo boho jungle preserve of the Bowery, the dilettanti were given a thorough surface inspection, and the collegiate clean-cutness of the Heads was regarded with skepticism until they played enough sets (it didn’t take long) for the regulars to recognize in Byrne a fellow misfit weirdo. His vocals, interspersed yips, head jerks, and boogie-down hip action suggested Norman Bates hitting the disco, and as soon as he began strumming the opening to “Psycho Killer,” his certification seemed complete. “David Byrne sings tonelessly but its effect is all the more ominous,” I wrote in the Voice. “The uneasy alliance between composure and breakdown—between outward acceptance and inward coming apart—is what makes Talking Heads such a central seventies band.”
And then there was Tina Weymouth, about whom nothing appeared haywire. My crush on Tina was instantaneous. It was the only correct way to respond. Everyone got a crush on Tina, apart from those who preferred their rock women in a gaudier state of disarray, more lip-licorice-ish and torn-stockinged, a downtown Anita Pallenberg type fished out of a Dumpster. Those Dutch-boy bangs, those blue eyes that crystal’d through the swimming murk of CBGB’s, the smile that broke mostly offstage, when her bass duties didn’t require her monitoring David’s every ostrich move—Tina was sexy precisely because she wasn’t striving to be sexy, her not-trying coming across not as a feminist statement or a de-gendering decision to function as a unisex tablet but as an efficiency model that any young woman could look cool emulating. Female rock stars were rare, the codpieces and princely egos still ruled, but female instrumentalists functioning as equals onstage were rarer. Tina was a small revelation. That (everyone soon learned, with a deflated sigh) Tina and drummer Chris Frantz were girlfriend-boyfriend made the crush even nicer to let slush around in the mind since that knowledge kept infatuation on a happy, unattainable