I've been back to making a lot of mix CDs lately. I keep going on about David Byrne, so he ends up in the mix a lot because people want to know what the hell it is I'm talking about. But when I try to figure which songs I would recommend, it's too hard, because I got to thinking, There is a song of him for every year of my life.
So I tried to write that out.
]]>
* * *
1977 -- The Book I Read
I don't think my parents were listening to the Talking Heads in the year I was born. I remember them playing Jacques Brel in those early years, and Aram Khachaturian, and I remember the orange album cover for the Concert for Bangladesh, which rarely seemed to come off the shelf. But serendipitously, the year of my birth was also the year the first Talking Heads album was released.
My favorite song off that album is The Book I Read. Yeah, weird choice. It's not burdened with the tension of their other songs. I think it's that "na na na na" bit in the middle I like so much.
1985 -- The Lady Don't Mind
We spent a lot, a lot a lot, of time listening to the first album of the Talking Heads's my parents owned: Little Creatures. I'm not really sure why. Among other things it's a pretty family-friendly album -- Chris and Tina had their first baby around then, I think, and there's a lot of songs about kids on there.
With the sort of disjointed magical thinking kids muster, we decided this was Dody Bear's song. Dody Bear was a badly-worn Steiff-knockoff bear we "liberated" from a kindergarten classroom probably in the summer I turned seven, and took with us everywhere. Something about Dody Bear totally enthralled us. He was so beat-up he just looked like he had lots of stories. So we gave them to him.
Dody Bear was neurotic. His favorite drink was iced tea mixed with lemonade. Dody Bear loved to travel, but he also got horribly carsick and threw up a lot. He had really bad handwriting and a hyperactive little brother named Snowball who we used to throw across the room. Did I mention he had a butt? Dody Bear was the only stuffed animal I've ever seen whose stuffing had settled in such a way that he looked like he had buttocks. At some point, when he came a bit unsewed, my mother sewed a candy heart into him, just the way the nurse did in the story of Raggedy Ann.
I don't know why The Lady Don't Mind was Dody Bear's song. Maybe because it was sort of creepy, but sort of fascinating, like him. There was a story behind it, we were sure, but we never figured out what it was. Dody Bear danced to the song coming back from Mount Wilson, one of the few places we ever saw snow growing up. I remember a mystical fog and pale blue snow in the sandstone crevices, seeing my breath in front of me and seeing Dody Bear held up by the window, twisting in the way that stuffed animals dance as David Byrne crooned about a woman whose motives were unclear.
It can't have been too long after that Dody Bear travelled to Macy's and, on the uncareful watch of my younger sister Ariel, was left behind. We called and called to see if the lost and found had him, but we never got him back.
uh oh, uh oh
here we go again
I don't know, don't know what I'm thinking
I know, I see
it's like make believe
cover your ears so you can hear what I'm saying
1986 -- Life During Wartime
This was our dance song.
My aunt Martha, with the red hair and the hurricane laugh, was the one who introduced Dad and Mom to the Talking Heads. We knew Martha had been a dancer... I'm not sure how, but it could be a large picture of her as a teenager which was in one of our family albums. In the picture, she's smiling, wearing what appears to be a bathing suit, and posing holding out a giant beach ball. So I guess one of us may have asked her to choreograph a dance for us. Or it could have been one of those things that just happened.
It was called the Pillowhead Dance, so called because we danced with pillows on our heads. The dance in the picture may or may not have been the same dance -- I don't remember there being slippers on hands in the Pillowhead Dance, but who knows. What I do remember is performing the Pillowhead Dance with the blue velour pillows from Aunt Amy's couch, back before she and Robert had kids, and were newlyweds in the house behind ours. We were performing in the driveway between our houses for a family picnic, under the dark green leaves of the bent old avocado tree. We had to crank her stereo really loud so we could hear it outside. I know it was there because I remember being admonished not to keep putting the pillows on the spotty concrete. That same concrete I would later watch wave up and down under our leaping Packard Patrician during my first earthquake. A patch of concrete which belongs to someone else now, someone who can still afford to live in Pasadena.
1987 -- Television Man
More songs from Little Creatures. This is by far my favorite on the album -- that bridge! -- though Sylvie and Ariel and I still wonder to each other what it means in the middle when David Byrne improvises what sounds like the word "Babaschnigahauzitsen."
What I remember to go with this song is on the other side of the driveway, a Cinco de Mayo party at our neighbor's house, who at the time was a boom mic operator by the name of Crew. (He can now be found on IMDB, by the way, as can his son, Case, who appears to have gone into the same business.) I remember bottles of Dos Equis on the tables, a dish of peanut M&Ms, wanting to go in the hot tub, thinking Hey, so this is a Mexican holiday. I don't think the song was even played at the party; it just feels like that party.
1988 -- Take Me To The River
It would be another seven or eight years before I really got Robert into the Talking Heads -- and then he went with gusto -- but in fifth grade he and I and Misasha shout-sang the refrain as we did cannonballs into her beautiful slate-blue pool. It would be seven or eight years, too, until I knew what the song meant, and read one of the band member's assessments of its sensual overtones, and also figured out that I would probably never marry Robert after all. It wasn't much more than a year later, though, that that particular friendship triad fell apart, and I didn't get to jump into that pool again.
drop me in the water
1989 -- Radio Head
The first time I remember really fixating on the huge bold letters on the cover of True Stories was leaning over the back of the couch dangling my arms down onto yellow shag carpeting. Might have been at an idle moment, with the TV on, or another album; might have been looking for a record to put on at a party Mom threw for her Russian class, high school students I wanted to impress. That was in the house on Washburn. So this would have been after the divorce.
What was going to happen to the Talking Heads albums was a bone of contention, or at least my sisters and I thought so. When it suited our purposes. Later, our purposes were to confiscate all of the Talking Heads albums for ourselves. Ariel grabbed '77, and I never saw it again until I ransacked her room looking for stolen things and things to steal. I grabbed the other early albums. I think my dad got most of the tapes.
I still have Dad's dubbed copy of True Stories, which is all on one side of a tape. Having it all on one side of the tape was weird. There wasn't the break between the two sides you expected. Also, I think Roxy Music was on the other side, and I resented Roxy Music as a perceived intrusion by my stepmother. It was weird and gross to put in the tape hoping for the Tejano raucousness of Radio Head, have it on the wrong side and come up with the misty moistness of Avalon instead.
baby I'm tuned to your wavelength
let me tell you what it said
Transmitter, ah
it's pickin up somethin good
ah, radiohead
it's the sound of a brand new world
1990 -- Ruby Dear
Divorce brought new ways of doing things, new patterns of chores. The only one I liked was vacuuming. As I did it, I'd crank up Naked, an album too new to have been played to death in the family car (which, though it spoke a sophisticated robotic English, was decidedly too old to have a CD player anyway). Most of the music I listened to was on my own little boom box, never above quarter volume, in my room; getting to explore grown-up CDs on the living room stereo was a special occasion. Ruby Dear has a certain abandon that I just love -- raucous drums able to hold their own over the vacuum cleaner.
1991 -- Don't Want To Be Part Of Your World
Rei Momo was a revelation. Before that album, a horn section was for supermarket arrangements of songs which had seen better days. It just about blew my mind that David Byrne was using horns in Rei Momo, and I actually liked how they sounded. I first heard it in a car on the way to a cross country meet, the rain beating down and Mr. Hatridge driving. Mr. Hatridge was a computer teacher and a mountain man, had biked all the way across the country and performed in a circus. By definition, he had taste. I think it was his copy of the album; I got mine later, through one of those Twelve CDs For One Penny Asterisk Asterisk Asterisk We Will Charge You Plenty Later While Pretending Things Are On Sale Of The Month Clubs.
My copy of Rei Momo is on tape, and a few seconds at the beginning of one of the songs is wiped out because I accidentally hit record on my old yellow Sony boom box, and for some reason it worked. You can hear me gasp as I figure out what I've done. The song is Carnival Girl, which I like almost as well as Part Of Your World. The latter is a samba; Carnival Girl is mapeye. Without Rei Momo, I would hardly know samba from salsa, much less mapeye. Rei Momo was just the beginning of it all.
we promise to be better,
say the folks at home
but it really doesn't matter,
say their daughters, and their sons
1992 -- Sax and Violins
An overture, said our high school chorus teacher, serves to make people feel smart when they hear an excerpted melody later. I realize I must have heard Sax and Violins once, as an overture, on the day it became clear I wasn't alone. Elaine Nelson and I, Raoul and Edith, and probably Kenji, Kermit, or Elana and a handful of other people from public school were gathered in someone's attic. I knew some of them from music camp, but I'd never been in the middle of them, on their turf before. They talked about Kermit and Kenji's band, about initiating me into Rocky Horror and Clockwork Orange; suggested hanging out at the E Bar, where they let high schoolers smoke and people drank what were known in the early 90s as "smart drinks," but we were there for the poetry readings and intellectual conversation.
The lights were out; we had candles. Unnoticed, a boom box played the soundtrack to Until The End Of The World. The gang wwas passing around notebooks. That was the habit of this group -- writing poetry with and for each other, notes and stories too, handing them back and forth, a current of mutual support in which I instantly felt at home. I stopped dressing normal; I didn't need to match colors anymore. I was going to be all right.
Sax and Violins, which was on that background soundtrack, was included soon after in a Talking Heads compilation. Nowadays it sounds high camp -- the sex of it is a little over the top -- but I remember listening to it one dateless February during a Southern California monsoon. A tree in the neighborhood had been struck by lightning, leaving the damp air full of ozone and spice. The smell strung me out with longing. "Why that tree?" I asked the poetry journal I had begun to keep. "Why not me?"
1993 -- The Big Country
Some Talking Heads songs and other songs by David Byrne go in my canon of perfect road music. The Big Country is one. It was probably on the class trip bus I was listening to it first, on a big clunky yellow Walkman knock-off, staring out the window to the plains and a big grey sky.
I wouldn't live there if you paid me
I wouldn't live there, oh, no sirree,
I wouldn't do the things the way those people do
I wouldn't live there if you paid me to
Writing down those lines now I think maybe David Byrne was in semi-ironic mode when he penned them. They sound written for the kind of kid I was, in full-on Holden Caulfield mode, hating the normalcy and falseness around me, wishing for another country to live in. But then there's those big, wide-open guitars, played the way country singers do, liquid and clean. Those guitars which are automatically sad. I think they're wondering where everyone is on those empty plains. You put those guitars with those lyrics and the tense strumming at the end and you get a song which is confused and doesn't really know which way it's going. Which I think the man does a lot.
1994 -- Dura Europus
The Big Country was the song of the Green River trip, when I was going with EriQ. There was other music for travelling later, a cassette of The Forest I bought for $1.50 at Target. Never had such fabulous luck with music purchases since! That album calmed me down as I made my first cross-country flight on my own. It was Ava or Macchu Picchu I was listening to as I decided that since there was nobody I knew to hear me whimper about my fear of flying, there was really no reason to be afraid. And then a two-hour layover at Dulles, and still I maintained travel zen even when frightfully late to the writing workshop.
And then the workshop. Fireflies on arrival. I was renamed Gus. Origin stories. I must have shared the tape with Kube at some point, because I loved it and he had such exotic taste. And I taught myself to play Dura Europus on the accordion. And then I was with Kube, not with EriQ anymore.
The stove will burn our hands
Will we go to hell?
Anyone can make another cry,
but do we really still believe this lie?
These things remind me of you
Broken down
Sick as a dog
And still we dream at night
One shot from the gun and we will be blown apart
But I feel
In our hands
Made of skin and bone
God is laughing at us all.
These things still remind me of you.
1995 -- Road to Nowhere
Well we know where we're going
But we can't say
Where we've been.
Robert and I and the rest of our friends had sung something for eighth grade graduation, and we figured we should do something for high school graduation, too. We picked Road to Nowhere. Certainly a title that needed some explaining, so we gave a little preamble beforehand. It's not that we're going nowhere, we said; it's just like the song says, we don't know where we're going. We need some time to work it out. Eventually, it'll be all right.
The high school choir director, though he came off as nerdy, was certainly still a musician's musician and hip enough to understand our choice and pick up the piano part on far-too-short notice. He patiently helped to the best of his ability, but we barely got in any practice after our last school trip. We sounded pretty crappy, for our well-trained group -- heaven knows I did -- but it was a good song to have sung at your high school graduation. It went over well even with the oldsters, and everyone's cool older siblings commended us.
1996 -- A Long Time Ago
And in the land where I grew up
into the bosom of technology
I kept my feelings to myself
but that was a long long time ago
that was a long, long time ago.
I may still have been buying audiocassettes after my first year of college. I finally had my own CD player -- it was the one in my Mac PowerPC, I was never a sucker for sound quality and didn't care that the speakers were crap -- but I still found myself at Penny Lane that summer finally treating myself to David Byrne's self-titled album. Or maybe not that summer, my timing may be all off. It would make sense, though, since I was working that job at a rinky-dink little PR firm over on the west side near Old Town, where my boss was a failed entrepreneur whose huge idea was going to be patenting triangular road flares. "So they won't roll," he said. It didn't go anywhere.
Anyway there I was at the record store, and I know what I was wearing -- palazzo pants were cool, and mine had an interesting burgundy and ochre stripe that looked kind of like mud cloth -- and when I was buying the album the heavyset but very cool-looking, probably-listened-to-good-jazz young black cashier said he liked those pants. And I felt cool. I should have asked him out.
1997 -- Light Bath
At some point I decided I had to start looking harder for music than what showed up in the BMG Club. My strategy has always been crawling all the way along the branch of one artist, then crossing over to another by who they've collaborated with. The Catherine Wheel was what I found when I first went to flesh out my knowledge of Mr. Byrne, I love Light Bath, which is where it starts. I think I'd seen the album in record stores for years, but didn't want to risk shelling out for something I wouldn't like. You remember how it used to be before you could pick up a song or two on Napster? It's a wonder they ever sold any albums, and that we ever did anything but gaze longingly at those albums which always carried the threat they wouldn't live up to their beautiful covers.
1998 -- You Don't Know Me
If love is alive, why can't I touch it?
Does it feel like jello, or a fire?
I can tell by the taste it was not poison
but it sure did mess up my insides
What can I say about the two years I cheated on my boyfriend in the week between his birthday and Valentine's Day?
At the time I blamed it on the thaw. It was unseasonably warm in Western Massachusetts those years; the grass appeared, you could smell everything stretching up, and I wanted to sleep with the window open.
Looking back on the half-dozen stream of consciousness pieces and failed homework assignments on Love I was trying to write at the time, other reasons pop out. Evan was a dominating prick when it came to politics and lifestyle choices, and I was getting fed up. But it mostly didn't feel like that. What I wrote about then was sensation -- the thaw, the smell of a distant tree hit by lightning. I still hadn't figured out the subtler points of depression by then.
And I was three or four relationships away from the chagrin building up -- the guilt at my carelessness, the shock at myself for being so callous as to just leave, to not even try to talk out problems, to just turn off like a faucet in an attempt to keep out of the messy puddle of negotiating an ending. It's hard to read about this stuff, now.
You Don't Know Me wasn't what I was listening to that Valentine's Eve when I drove out with the other boy in the middle of the night, just going and going and going until we found something that was still open, or worked those tensions to their crisis, whichever came first. It was some sort of trance music we were listening to driving through that one incredible arch of trees, lit up silver in the headlights of his expensive car. But I listened to the album Feelings in the weeks leading up to those days, thinking over the words. Why was I doing any of this? Why couldn't I stop? Why did it feel like the only way out?
1999 -- Don't Fence Me In
My compulsion to cross the continental US back and forth, over and over, had not abated by graduation, so before I settled into Real Life I bought myself one of those Greyhound multi-passes and braved the three-day nonstop ride across the U.S. There was an international student who shared a bag of cherries with me; a woman who loudly made much of her cancer survivorship to the line waiting for the bus; a kid from southern Indiana who gravitated to me because of my trenchcoat and told me all about the societal persecution of his little band of Wiccan friends, and the place they liked to smoke pot down by the crick. A lady had her purse stolen right off the front seat of the bus. The driver angrily abandoned a slow-moving family of passengers whose diapers and medications were still on board, and the cops had to pull us over. Then, in Denver, we drove -- CLUNK! -- right over the front end of a little white Japanese sedan.
By the time I made it to the West Coast and tooled around for a while, hitting Seattle, Portland, and Arcata, I started to wonder why I was doing this. I didn't have particular things I wanted to see. I was feeling awkward staying on couches, and frightened or lonely staying in hostels. I remember staring off the balcony of the Green Tortoise in San Francisco, thinking I could throw myself off and nobody, me included, would care. I was just out of college and not getting any responses to job queries or article pitches. What the hell was in this world for?
Balm came on return to Pasadena and the rounding off of the trip with ol' Jen, her strange friend Robin, and Rufus the dog. Being in company was much, much better, even when I was worried about staying in abandoned campsites where I was sure we'd contract Hantavirus. And especially when we discovered at a hundred degree, 1pm rest stop that the town of Needles had a marina. And when an entire Pennsylvania hamlet showed up to pull us out of the ditch we'd accidentally backed into.
My road music then was a wonderful mix made for me by my friend Heather, which included a Gypsy Kings cover of "Volare;" a real Gypsy song titled "Sar Me Khere Avava" ("When I Come Home"); our favorite, "Do You Know The Way To San Jose;" and Byrne's rendition of "Don't Fence Me In," with its wide-open guitar and big, ambling Brazilian drums. I don't think Heather knew how hard I was hitting the road, but she sure captured it.
2000-2001 -- The Democratic Circus (or Miss America)
At some point you listen to an artist from your childhood and realize there's a lot more there than you originally thought. The ideas of songs start to come into better focus. I listened to things with new ears during the first Bush election; among other things, Jacques Brel's war songs became ever more necessary for survival.
2000-2001 was my one of my most political years to date. I made a video of the inauguration festivities in DC, which were creepy. They took place under a leaden sky. A drizzle required an ugly poncho to keep me and my camera dry, but scared off the multitude of snobby-looking women in fur coats who I was trying to get to say stupid incriminating things on tape as they carelessly stomped down the plastic barriers put up to keep us all off the grass. I wanted to be like my hero, Michael Moore. You know. When I edited the video together, Miss America and The Democratic Circus went in the soundtrack. I thought the wobbly-sounding guitar on Miss America summed it up perfectly.
And I miss America
And sometimes she does too
And sometimes I think of her
When she is fu(k!ng you.
2001 -- Neighborhood
There lived a little song, in the way that things looked small later that year in September when the towers came down and all we could do was cling to each other and wonder if anything would ever be OK again... Neighborhood was one of the last songs I played to my last group of students at the writing workshop, where I'd returned to be a counselor. It was another miserable summer for me, in some ways, but all I can remember now was the way the kids danced and held spontaneous parades, how they were sad to leave, and how I sheepishly hoped that they heard this CD playing on the boom box, as they had their last bleary-eyed breakfast and said their goodbyes, and would fondly peg it to the summer in memory.
And everything looks good
Say boy
Say girl
All in my neighborhood
Say boy
Say girl
We've got peace, love, monkey business
Gonna reach the very top...
2002 -- Theodora is Dozing
2003 -- Waters of March
Not really sure which of these songs would go with which year. These were years when I really went hunting. After work I'd be sitting at my terminal in Sunnyside sending signals to a world I increasingly forgot to visit face to face, putting out peer to peer queries looking for the name Byrne. I found his collaborations this way, and through them found many other artists and styles of music. David Byrne played with Bollywood stars, Latin legends, Japanese composers; I went to Basement Bhangra, and subway concerts, and Dance Dance Revolution competitions. He proclaimed in the media that rock was entirely dead. I found his Knee Plays, which include the lovely Theodora, an arrangement of a Bulgarian folk song. They got me to settle down at times when I otherwise couldn't.
2004 -- Happy Suicide
Not about suicide at all, actually about consumerism and globalization. During my second year of grad school, I played it on endless repeat as I studied at the library. I was beginning to wonder if I had missed out on a diagnosis of ADD as a kid -- every little noise and movement seemed to distract me, and I had an especially hard time reading for our core theory course. Though the song rambles through snippets of music from about a dozen world traditions, loopy tablas always following close at heel, it made an ideal sort of obsessive background rhythm. Never too predictable, always a little new on every repeat.
Oddly, without having heard this song, my mother produced a song which tasted very similar. It was during her GarageBand kick. The song's called World Gone Mad. I sent her Happy Suicide and she agreed there was a kinship there. Mom met David Byrne once. She had him sign a copy of his book Strange Ritual which she gave me. She told him the three copies were for her daughters, who had grown up listening to his music. He seemed delighted. "Gus!" reads the inscription in mine.
There's also a photo sandwiched in there which is of "Space Age St. Michael," a plaster lawn ornament in a bright silver scaled breastplate. Priced at $74.95. On the back, my mother's handwriting says "I'm giving you this because you need it! I took it in Indianapolis." My own photos from Sicily also look like this -- startling moments of familiarity abroad and strangeness at home. It's why we tune in to David Byrne -- that's what he's out looking for, too.
I worship obsessive behavior in others. I worship meaningless images.
2005, 2006 -- Liquid Days, Bonfires of Sao Joao
We are old friends
I offer love a beer
Love watches television,
sits on the couch
Love has an answer for everything
Love smiles gently
and crosses its legs;
Well, here we are;
well, here we are...
More obsessive-listening music. Finding one of the collaborations from out on the fringes of things -- Phillip Glass and the Roches, a bunch of unknown Brazilians from the Lower East Side -- always feels lucky, like a really nice stone you find and carry around to look at.
2007 -- Glass, Concrete, and Stone
Ariel has moved to Dad's place, for the moment, in the Ann Arbor area. Over Christmas we shared the guest house, where she was in the midst of making presents -- silkscreened shirts and mix CDs -- stepping over me with screens of foul-smelling chemicals and sending the computer whirring on a new burn cycle. This was the first song on one of the CDs. Mournful.
And it's glass, concrete, and stone
And it's just a house
Not a home
Ariel said that was the story of her life in San Diego, before she returned to the family homestead. Didn't know anybody, trouble with the boyfriend, job which didn't let her loose in the chaparral to tag lizards or find endangered plant species. Not a home. It hurt, lying there listening and knowing she was going through the exact same loneliness I was, at a distance. I wish we could at least have each other. It wasn't any better to be home -- it felt like home, even though I'd never lived in the Ann Arbor place myself -- and know that soon I'd have to go back to my separate house, my apartment, and be alone again.
* * *
A month ago, David Byrne brought Here Lies Love, his musical about the life of Imelda Marcos, to Carnegie Hall, and I went to see it. It unbelievable. When you say "stage piece by David Byrne," the first thing one thinks is generally not "commercially viable, possibly even on Broadway." But there it was, like a politically sensitive American response to Evita. Highly recommended for anyone, once it's staged for multiple showings, which I imagine it will be soon.
I went to two of his performances -- there were four at Carnegie, but I only had the money for two. There he was in front of me LIVE for the first time in my life, his toe tracing arcs behind him while he played like a lady doing a curtsy. He was bashful despite years of showmanship, awkward in a way that's comforting to those of us who feel alienated by the macho varieties of rock.
I came away feeling like I'd awakened from cryogenic storage or a coma. School has dulled me out really badly, and I go for stretches where I just want to gnaw my leg off for lack of creative input. I came away from the concerts feeling like I just had to rethink things.
How amazing, to have an artist who grows up with you! To have someone as relevant as he was when you were a kid. Who retains that mysticism, even. Who else? A David Byrne song in every year of my life. The most I can do is remain in conversation, "keep circulating the tapes." Do a little dance, maybe, if I see him around town. How do you thank the man?]]>
