questions of how campy-cute they might go. (One of the three also expressed a fondness for “Chewy, Chewy,” though I don’t believe they ever pulled that molar-remover out of their candy box to perform.) Critics love dealing with raised questions, especially if they’ve raised them themselves from tiny qualms. I should have heeded—I later did—Pauline’s great throwaway perception in her review of Mailer’s cinema-verité Cassavetes-style police station psychodrama Wild 90, in which she compared Mailer’s Renaissance ambitions with Jean Cocteau’s multi-artistry as poet-filmmaker-novelist-designer. Mailer may be a two-fisted macho hombre, Pauline wrote, but those wiry cats like Cocteau are tougher than they look, making Mailer the moviemaker appear all blubber. No band or Symbolist poet wielding a Stratocaster below Fourteenth Street was carrying a blubber load, but compared with the cloudy turrets of the interior castles Television was climbing or the wood chipper the Ramones stuffed their sound into, the Heads could look deceptively light, a model airplane with an erratic flight pattern. But while so many others kept drilling the same woodpecker holes until their beaks bent funny, it was Byrne who would emerge as the Cocteau-esque Shiva figure—a visionary soundscaper (My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, his collaboration with Brian Eno), movie director (True Stories, which didn’t receive its due and still doesn’t), gallery artist, conceptual book designer, composer of string quartets and a song cycle about Imelda Marcos (with Fatboy Slim), America’s unofficial ambassador to Brazilian music, and, his hair now holy white, an apostle of urban sustainability, globally light-footing-it through his blog and the travel collection it produced, Bicycle Diaries. Byrne’s ambition was harder to spot at first because his voice broke like a choirboy’s and his head was always bobbing or askew, not Fixed in Purpose or rapture-lost. He was as willful as Verlaine, but his willfulness wove outward, toward the honeycombed world, whereas Verlaine’s narrowed to a shrinking portion of what he sought and fought to control. Byrne’s very accessibility, his approachability, set him apart from Verlaine and (later) Patti, whose don’t-bother-me-I’m-an-artist signs on their faces deterred those who might idly come knocking. One night a CBGB’s regular named Valerie, a gorgeous speed freak whose chat accelerated into gibberish the longer she hung at the bar, said to me, spotting Byrne, “I’m going to pick him up and swing him around.” “That I’d like to see,” I said. As David headed toward the stage area, nodding his bashful hellos, Valerie grabbed him around the chest in a skilled grappling move and twirled him around, and as he spun, he said, “Whoa!” like a teenager on an amusement park ride, and when she stopped, he pretended to act a little dizzy, as if bopped on the head by a fuzzy hammer. Had she tried that with Lou Reed, he might have burst into mummy dust.
As a unit the Heads got tighter, tougher, and yet looser, their Tin Man joints lubed, Byrne breaking out some funky-chicken moves as Chris and Tina laid a deeper bottom to their sound. They held their own on a billing with any band, even bands that acted as if they came up from the gutter and brought the gutter with them. And there was a personal tension that ticked between Tina and David, captured cunningly in a YouTube video that cuts between their faces as they perform “Warning Sign,” the dueling close-ups indicative, prophetic, of a hairline fracture building to something bigger. If I can pinpoint the moment the Heads burst through the attic and pointed north, it was the night when they introduced a new number, “Pulled Up,” where the joy-whoop of “you pulled me up, up, up, up, up, up!” expressed a giddy, salvational energy that left Warholism behind like a toy-model village as Astronaut Byrne shed gravity and saw angels knocking around. Not Blakean angels, like Patti’s, but Japanese toy ones.
The scene filled up, the club filled up, more and more of the sidewalk out in front of CBGB’s being taken up between