"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 shape. Music, dance, performance art and rock all flowed together into a single swift stream, which Byrne navigated effortlessly (see following story). 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."