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Talking Heads, formed in 1975, was an art school band: Byrne, Drummer Chris Frantz and his wife, Bass Player Tina Weymouth, all attended the Rhode Island School of Design, and Keyboard Player Jerry Harrison came from Harvard with a B.A. and a semester of graduate school in design behind him. They were used to the behavioral extravagances and shock-therapy experimentation of the young avant-garde art world, and brought that same go-for-it attitude to their music. Playing at Manhattan's CBGB, the proto-punk club on the Bowery, the Heads dressed in strictly Ivy spiff, like floorwalkers from Brooks Brothers. Byrne, eyes bulging, long neck turning like a periscope, sang like a carny geek who could not digest his chicken. Then there were the songs. "Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est/ Run, run, run, run away," Byrne would blurt, contriving to sound simultaneously like the murderer and his victim. Perfect new-wave icons, then: psychotic preppies. The pure products of America in the process of going blissfully crazy.
The mid-'70s nourished punk, which had been born in London out of rage and poverty. By the time it crossed the Atlantic, however, punk was more attitude than anything else, a rallying cry for a kind of aesthetic housecleaning. Artists, who are perpetually reinventing themselves, copped on to punk's foot- to-the-floor energy. Rockers hung out with painters all over lower Manhattan, and there was a loose alliance drawn from other forms of dance and theater and music too.
Byrne and the Heads took a prominent lead in all this. They adopted their thematic boldness from artists and their musical inventiveness from sources as diverse as Glass and James Brown. The band found a niche where the avantgarde and the mainstream could nicely accommodate each other. Says Byrne: "The band and I existed in a kind of middle ground, somewhat art, somewhat popular, so we ended up being caught in that whole phenomenon."
Byrne had a knack for making the everyday seem paranormal and the bizarre just something on the lee side of ordinary. His sister Celia, 29, a graduate student in public health at UCLA, calls this "David's different way of looking at something old." Beth Henley, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her play Crimes of the Heart and who collaborated with Byrne and Stephen Tobolowsky on the True Stories scenario, says he "avoided anything flashy. He went for the specialness of the ordinary."
"David has a very bewildered sense of humor," Henley adds. "I wouldn't call it wry because that implies a sarcasm that he doesn't have. He laughs really loud at things and then gets embarrassed because he did." Still, getting on Byrne's wavelength takes adjustment. "I didn't put a lot of emphasis on the psychological motivations of the characters, and some actors found that a little troublesome," he admits. Ask John Goodman, whose portrayal of the earnestly romantic Louis Fyne is a memorable one, what he thinks about Byrne, and he will smile and say, "That man uses a different dictionary." Spalding Gray, the gifted monologist who appears as the civic leader of Virgil, notes that "David's a paradox. He's the most absent-present person I've ever met. He has two worlds going at the same time."