The first time I laid eyes on David Byrne, he was shaving off his beard while his friend Mark Kehoe played the accordion and Mark's girlfriend Naomi passed out photocopied images of Lenin signed "Yours sincerely, Walter Kaputska." By the end of this performance, it had gotten a little bloody on stage, as David's lubricant of choice was beer.

It was 1972, and my group the Fabulous Motels (whose lubricant of choice, coincidentally, was also beer) were playing a show at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence,¹ where from 1970 to 1973 we were virtually the house band. David's little performance on this night was the intermission show. He had recently moved to Providence from Baltimore at the urgings of his pal Mark, who was attending RISD. David eventually enrolled at RISD, dropped out of RISD, started a band called the Artistics, and moved to New York's Lower East Side, where he teamed up with fellow RISDoids Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth.² The rest, as they say, is history.

-- Rudy Cheeks, Boston Phoenix, May 20, 1994

1 RISD (pronounced RIZ-dee) has produced its fair share of rockers.

2 Jerry Harrison joined the Talking Heads later.

They [Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth] met at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1971. Weymouth, who had taken art education classes as a youngster, had transfered from Barnard. Frantz was friendly with fellow student David Byrne; the two were in a college rock group called the Artistics. After leaving RISD, Byrne and Frantz (who had been drumming since the age of ten) started Talking Heads, and Weymouth went out and bought a bass guitar.

"We'd thought before about forming a band," Weymouth says, "maybe even a top forty-type group, but our hearts wouldn't have been in that." Her prior musical experience was as a handbell-ringer and self-taught guitarist, flautist and pianist. She chose bass for the new group because "keyboards seemed too typical for a girl"; Weymouth was also inspired by Suzi Quatro.

-- Scott Isler, Musician, August 1984

NEW YORK--The gaudy white awning of CBGB shines like a lighthouse for freaks amid the darkened, derelict-strewn doorways of the Bowery--where not even a 26-night summertime "Festival of New York's Top 40 Unrecorded Rock and Roll Bands"¹ can disturb the slumber of the damned.

CBGB used to be a biker's hangout and before that a plain old Bowery bum bar, a "zoo" where Mount Vernon and other brands of rotgut whiskey sold for 30¢ the shot. The Iceman Cometh decor is unchanged; the long utilitarian bar remains. The pool table has been moved behind the small bandstand, but an overall ambiance of piss and disinfectant remains. And it mingles with the sweat of the opening-night crowd milling around in the cavernous club as a band called White Lightning--straining to maintain the cool of future pop stars while doing the work of common roadies--sets up their equipment on the stand[;] and beaded, burly Hilly Kristal, a furniture mover by day and a club owner by night, confesses that he really has "high hopes for this thing."

"I auditioned most of these kids myself," he says as we sip our drinks and watch the band, "and I'm convinced that as a result of their exposure here, some of them are going to get recording contracts and become very big stars--the Led Zeppelins and the Grand Funks of the Seventies."

Although he modestly refers to himself as "an amateur," a mere moonlighter of an entrepreneur, Kristal goes back in both bar and concert business. He owned a club called Hilly's in Greenwich Village and helped found the Schaefer Music Festival in Central Park. While he might not mind managing one or two of the bands (should they become the Zeppelins of the Seventies), he claims that was not his reason for getting involved. The $3.50 per person minimum collected at the door will be divided among the bands, he says, and his motive for staging such an event seems entirely altruistic.

"There are just so many damned good musicians that nobody knows about[,] evolving their own unique music in obscure practice lofts around the city and in garages out in the suburbs[,] that it would be a sin for them not to get exposure,"² he exclaims with the bearded, table-thumping conviction of Peter Ustinov in one of his finer roles. "Of course, some of them are a little rough around the edges, need work," he concedes, "but a lot of them are really ready. You know about the Ramones, who have a sizable cult following already ... but there are others. Pay particular attention tonight to a band called Talking Heads. Now there's one band I guarantee you're not gonna believe.

-- Ed McCormack, Rolling Stone, October 23, 1975

1 I suspect NYC's Festival of Unrecorded Rock and Roll Bands influenced the staging of the Bicentennial Tournament of the Bands at the Club in Cambridge a year later. The Tournament of the Bands was, in turn, an inspiration for the first Rumble in 1978.

2 For a big city, Boston is quite small geographically; so the suburbs played a much bigger role, I think, than it evidently did in New York. Otherwise, this would be a perfect description of what was going on in the Boston area at just the same time.

[T]onight, and in the nights to follow, as an unrelenting roster of unrecorded bands too numerous and, in many cases, too embryonic to mention, roar on end to end. The impression emerging out of the din is that rock and roll seems to be in a period of eclecticism roughly comparable to that of current modern painting. Now that no one style predominates, the field is wide open to any off-the-wall contender with the innate chutzpa to enter the arena. And Hilly Kristal was right: Talking Heads is one aggregation whose terminal weirdness warrants attention.

Although the band is a trio, its lineup is reminiscent of early Velvet Underground, with a pale, poker-faced, Nico-esque woman playing a battleship gray bass; a loose, lizardly drummer swooning behind shades; and a short-haired lead singer in gabardine slacks and Hush Puppies. He looks like the bastard offspring of an unthinkable union of Lou Reed and Ralph Nader and he sings the way Tony Perkins would have[,], had Psycho been a musical: "The girls wanta be with the girls, and the boys don' understand why, and the boys wanta be with the boys..."

"The way we are onstage is just the same way we are off," mutters David Byrne, the Talking Head himself, seeming just as puzzled about the whole thing as everyone else. As with many of the other bands, this is Talking Heads' first real gig. They are all former art students who migrated last year from Providence, Rhode Island, to a loft in lower Manhattan, where they live and practice together and hold day jobs to pay the rent. Bass player Martina Weymouth, who sells shoes on 57th Street, doesn't expect success to come too soon. "We're kind of a specialized taste," she admits.

-- Ed McCormack, Rolling Stone, October 23, 1975

A week into the festival, some of the other musicians are already grumbling that such headliners as the Ramones and ex-Doll Johnny Thunders' group, the Heartbreakers, are commanding a larger cut of the door receipts than other bands, that even among the Top 40 Unrecorded Bands there is a hierarchy of headliners who demand a higher cut than the lesser-known unknowns. But Talking Head Martina Weymouth does not begrudge other bands their popularity: "For the two nights we played here I only came out with about 20 bucks for myself, but I don't mind. If it wasn't for people coming to hear the more popular bands, people like us would get no exposure at all," she says, standing up to get a better look as Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers come on.

-- Ed McCormack, Rolling Stone, October 23, 1975

"The problem is that the record companies don't seem to know what they want," Martina Weymouth says. "They are interested in an Elton John type thing, when the groups here in New York are moving in a totally different direction. People come expecting to see another Velvet Underground. They miss the whole point. We've thrown off the pretentious glitter and the whole romantic-fantasy trip. The lyrics are real important to us."

-- Ed McCormack, Rolling Stone, October 23, 1975

The first time I saw Talking Heads play was at the wedding reception of some mutual friends in the spring of 1976. They were a trio then; they'd played CBGB's only a few times yet managed to get an impressive write-up in the Village Voice. The band did "Psycho Killer," "The Boys Want To Be with the Boys" (which became "The Girls Want To Be with the Girls"), "1-2-3 Red-light," and pretty damn near the whole Troggs catalogue. I remember thinking to myself, "Hey, they really are pretty good. No way is America going to buy David's act, though." So much for my credentials as New England's answer to Nostradamus.

-- Rudy Cheeks, Boston Phoenix, May 20, 1994

"[W]e used to have vibes. We used them on a couple of songs, but they became impossible to lug around in station wagons and we just abandoned those songs."

-- David Byrne, Boston Phoenix, May 20, 1994

By the time Michael Aron wrote his November 17, 1977, Rolling Stone article, the Talking Heads had experience "touring Europe with the Ramones, opening at the Bottom Line for Bryan Ferry and selling out CBGB's regularly for two years.

"What I thought was healthy about punk rock was that it was a reaction to over-professionalization and technique replacing meaningfulness in music," says Harrison.... I think in a way what punk rock means is intensity of expression, intensity of meaning, and I think that's what we share ... although we convey emotions not exactly limited to anger and aggression."

A few minutes later, Talking Heads take the stage for a sound check. With the possible exception of Harrison, they look too straight to be rock and roll musicians. But, of course, they look this way on purpose. "Normalcy" is part of their pose--a way of saying hipness is passe and safety pins are irresponsible. As soon as they begin to play, you realize you're in the presence of a stunningly original rock ensemble whose roots go back to such classicists of abnormality as the Velvet Underground, David Bowie's Spiders from Mars and Harrison's old group, the Modern Lovers.

-- Michael Aron, Rolling Stone, November 17, 1977

Harrison, a late-comer to the band ... had returned to Harvard for graduate studies in architecture a few months before Talking Heads lured him back to music.

I first saw Talking Heads two years ago when they were breaking in as a trio at CBGB's. The music was more raw then, more hard-edged, and the lyrics more pessimistic. Talking Heads usually played on the same bill with Television (a coincidence in that "talking heads" is a name lifted from TV terminology), and those were special nights. Each band had a cult following: Television drew the punks and rowdies, Talking Heads the young professionals, college students, and the critics--in particular, John Rockwell of the New York Times, who used the term "art rock" to distinguish Talking Heads from New York's 8,000 other punk bands, and James Wolcott of the Village Voice, who raved about a band still a year and a half away from cutting its first record.

Byrne, Frantz and Weymouth are so serious about their music and so careful about controlling their careers that for the next year they rebuffed half a dozen management offers and resisted the temptation to deliver themselves up to a large record company. Instead, they worked on their musicianship, built their repertoire beyond fourteen songs and began searching for a fourth musician who would, in Weymouth's words, "make us sound more like a band and take some of the pressure off of David."¹ After finding Harrison, they signed a deal with Sire--"a small, independent company that'll always take your calls," says Byrne--and in mid-September released an album, Talking Heads '77.

-- Michael Aron, Rolling Stone, November 17, 1977

1 To my way of thinking, that is exactly what Jerry Harrison did with Jonathan Richman in the Modern Lovers. The combination of Harrison's keyboards and Richman's guitar gave the band a fantastic instrumental sound and can be heard to its best advantage on The Original Modern Lovers (CD, Line, 1981).

Having not seen the band in more than a year, I had almost forgotten how incredible David Byrne is onstage. Everything about him is uncool: his socks and shoes, his body language, his self-conscious announcements of song titles, the way he wiggles his hips when he's carried away onstage (imagine an out-of-it kid practicing Buddy Holly moves in front of a mirror). But it only makes you love him....

Byrne is aware of his effect but has, he says, "really no idea what I look like onstage. I know people talk about me as being a gone cat, wacko, and I guess in the context of rock and roll bands that's valid. But if I cultivate it, I'm completely unaware. My only effort is to play well, sing the lyrics with conviction, on pitch and so they can be understood."

-- Michael Aron, Rolling Stone, November 17, 1977

Visitors, do you have e-mail or postal addresses for any of the authors of these pieces, Ed McCormack or Michael Aron? We have managed to reach Rudy Cheeks. Well, sorta.

-- Alan Lewis, October 18, 2001

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