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That did not prevent Gray from checking out the African fire ants with Byrne or from embellishing his character with some of his own dialogue and with gestures derived from a vintage volume on public speaking provided by the director. Byrne, indeed, remained approachable throughout his stay in Texas. Out dancing at night, he moved much more shyly and tentatively than he does onstage and even produced his wallet ID for skeptical clubgoers who demanded certification that the David Byrne was in their midst.
For their part, the folks in Texas were guarded but quickly won over. Some 130 acts showed up at the Arcadia Theater in Dallas to audition for a slot in the film's talent-show sequence. There was everything from dancing goldfish to a man who set his foot on fire. "No one treated it like The Gong Show," says Byrne. "No matter how outrageous or eccentric their act was, they were very sincere about it. There was a lot of heart in the performances." Byrne discovered that film can be as subtle and malleable as the tracks of a recording, which may account for the sense of glee, of risks that paid off, that pervade True Stories. Says Filmmaker Jonathan Demme (Melvin and Howard), who directed the extraordinary Talking Heads performance documentary Stop Making Sense in 1984 and served as an "active friend" to Byrne during the making of True Stories: "You couldn't name a more exciting new director. He can give you something brand new that you understand even as you're experiencing it. He's like Martin Scorsese in that regard. Experimentation becomes instantly accessible."
Looking at old videotapes of early Talk- ing Heads performances, Byrne now says he recognizes "how really strange we were. A lot of it was my lack of confidence and technical ability as a performer and a musician. We were an alternative to a lot of the overblown pop music that was around then, but it wasn't as simple as what I described. The music had this disturbing hue to it." Heads fans of long-standing will notice the difference, say, between an early song about America called The Big Country, with its disaffected chorus ("I wouldn't live there if you paid me to"); and True Stories' anthemic City of Dreams, with its poignant, lulling melody and amber-waves-of-grain imagery: "We live in the city of dreams/ We drive on the highway of fire/ Should we awake/ And find it gone/ Remember this, our favorite town." Byrne finds the contrast untroubling. "I discovered that it's more fun to like things, that you can kind of like things and still be gently critical, without blind acceptance," he says.
Spoken like a regular Thornton Wilder. But then part of Byrne's deft comic talent has always been that he is a quick study. Born in Dumbarton, Scotland, Byrne moved with his mother Emma and electrical engineer father Tom first to Hamilton, Ont. (where Sister Celia was born), and then to Baltimore. Young David arrived there at age seven with an already burgeoning interest in music. (His folks say he played his phonograph almost perpetually from age three and took up the harmonica at five.)