A major downtown scenester/catalyst until she was diagnosed with cancer in 1979, Anya Philips was a formidable character. “Anya was the one who more or less put my whole image together,” says Chance. “She made clothes, but most of the stuff we found in thrift stores—tuxedos, white dinner jackets, sharkskin jackets like sixties soul singers wore.” The look reinforced No Wave’s break with punk’s rock ’n’ rollness, resurrecting the elegance and razzle of prerock showbiz.
To the other Contortions, though, this manipulative Chinese American beauty was a Yoko Ono–like figure. “She began to cause a rift between James and the band, make him the star,” says Bertei. “Not that he wasn’t already the leader, but it became the James Chance Show after she became manager.” For Chance’s disco album
Off White,
the other Contortions were hired as session musicians and the project was credited to James White and the Blacks (Phillips had wanted “and His Blacks” but Zilkha balked at that). Live, they added a horn section and two teenage dancing girls called the Disco Lolitas, making the experience more like a traditional soul revue. For
Off White
’s launch party, ZE rented Irving Plaza and the group made a disco-style appearance, lip-synching to the songs with no live instruments. They staged a boudoir scene for “Stained Sheets,” the voluptuous Lydia Lunch pantomiming her cameo vocals reclined on a couch. The song resembles a sordid S&M twist on Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby.” It’s a phone sex duet between Chance and Lunch, juxtaposing his blasé contempt with her orgasmic whimpers and nonverbal moans of desperation.
Off White
and its sister album,
Buy,
probed the darker corners of sexuality.
Buy
’s cover featured Terry Sellers, author of
The Correct Sadist,
scantily clad in panties and a strange deconstructed bra of Philips’s own design. Inside, “I Don’t Want to Be Happy” confessed that Chance’s “idea of fun” was “being whipped on the back of the thighs,” while in “Bedroom Athlete” he yelps, “I won’t be your slave unless you will be
mine
.”
Off White
, meanwhile, verged on a musical essay about racial tourism, with the track “Almost Black” representing the most dubious homage to blackness as sexy sociopathology and virile primitivism since Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro.” The track features a white girl and a black girl bitterly disputing the attributes and defects of “James White”: “Well, he’s
almost
black”/“That nigger’s
white
”/“Well, he’s got some
moves
”/“But they
ain’t right
.”
Inverting James Brown’s pride and dignity to white bohemian self-abasement and cynicism, the Chance worldview stripped life of sentimentality, tenderness, and all values. In a nutshell, life’s cheap, love’s a lie, narcotics numb the pain. The lyrics hammered the same idea over and over: “I only live on the surface/I don’t think people are very pretty inside”; “Reduce yourself to a zero.” Appearing on both
Buy
and
Off White
in different versions, the anthem “Contort Yourself” evoked a jaded Dionysian frenzy, the joyless flailing of empty souls trying to evacuate even more of their consciousness. “Take out all the garbage that’s in your brain/Why don’t you try being stupid instead of smart?”
In interviews, Chance maintained an impregnable facade of nihilism. “It’s ridiculous to believe in things,” he told one interviewer, “it’s the height of absurdity.” This shtick—Chance as voidoid—often became comically overstated. “I
do not
relate to people!” he insisted to
New York Rocker
’s Roy Trakin. “I have no respect for a fan. A fan is the lowest creature on earth.” Today Trakin recalls that “James Chance and Lydia Lunch, they both kept up a front. I found them kind of sweet in a way. There was pain underneath, too. They were calling out. What was interesting was that they needed you to be the part of the equation. It’s a classic syndrome: You need an audience and you can’t stand your audience.”
Taken together, Chance’s double debut represented No Wave’s strongest and most enduring recorded statement:
Buy
captured the unsustainable intensity of the early scene, and the chic, sleek
Off White
pointed ahead toward “mutant disco,” the next phase of New York postpunk. But Zilkha’s attempt to make Chance into a star failed. He didn’t do much better with Lydia Lunch’s solo debut,
Queen of Siam
. “The idea was to take these characters and make them attractive,” Zilkha says now, wistfully. “Treat them like they were normal entertainers. For instance, I thought Lydia was a very attractive personality, but Teenage Jesus was a very tough listen. I thought she should be sex kittenish.” For
Queen of Siam,
Lunch temporarily dropped her banshee howl for a baby-doll voice, innocent yet coquettish, sweetness with an edge. “It was letting the sick little girl out to play,” she says. Slightly less than half the album featured orchestral arrangements by Billy Ver Planck, a composer and bandleader who’d done music for
The Flintstones
. “I’d been watching a lot of afternoon cartoons like
Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse,
where the music was always so fantastic. I told Billy my ideas and he translated them, but he hated the end result because we massacred his compositions. At seventeen thousand dollars, that’s the most expensive album I’ve ever done.” It might also be her best record—certainly the easiest on the ear—but it didn’t make her into the pop star Zilkha envisaged.
No Wave was an extremist gesture, the kind of cultural spasm that can only exhaust itself. “For Mars the scene ended just a couple of months after
No New York
came out at the end of 1978,” says Mark Cunningham. “Max’s closed and CB’s was becoming more of a megarock club. We didn’t feel we had a place anymore.” New spaces like Hurrah’s and Mudd Club started to take over, and the vibe of New York’s music scene began to shift toward fun and dance. The James White project had anticipated disco punk, but Chance would not reap the benefits. After the original Contortions split, Chance played on with endlessly shifting backing bands, but problems with record companies, drugs, and Phillips’s terminal cancer thwarted his career.
Lydia Lunch bounced between extremes, from the schmaltz noir of
Queen of Siam
to 8 Eyed Spy, an honest-to-goodness rock ’n’ roll band. Grinding out snake-hipped boogie steeped in Americana and Faulkneresque Southern Gothic, 8 Eyed Spy covered Creedence Clearwater Revival and Bo Diddley. Lydia even wore a jeans jacket at one show to complete her white-trash image. “More than anything I consider myself a conceptualist,” she says now. “I feel more akin to Marcel Duchamp than any musician ever. I wanted to contradict not just everything that preceded me but my own previous music, too.” Lunch describes her self-confounding musical trajectory as “purposeful and schizophrenic…contradictory, contrarian, conceptual,” words that distill the essence of No Wave itself.
TALKING HEADS, WIRE, AND MISSION OF BURMA
ROCK HAS NEVER REALLY
made its mind up when it comes to the
A
-word. For some, “art” is rock ’n’ roll’s opposite—genteel, gutless, elitist. Punk was partly a revolt against the high-culture pretensions of post–
Sgt. Pepper
’s progressive music and art rock. The No Wave bands shared this suspicion of artiness. Many of them came from art school backgrounds or practiced various forms of art in addition to music, yet they strove to distance themselves from the SoHo scene, which was perceived as overly conceptual and nonvisceral.
Another New York band of this era, Talking Heads, felt a similar squeamish ambivalence about the
A
-word, despite being products of art college themselves. “I object to us being called ‘artists who have chosen the medium of music,’” sniffed the band’s keyboard player, Jerry Harrison. “I find that distasteful and very unfunky. And we don’t perform in galleries.” Singer David Byrne disliked “art rock” as a label because of its connotation of dispassionate dabbling, the implication being that Talking Heads didn’t “have sincere feelings about our music or we’re just flirting with rock and roll and we’re too reserved and detached to rock out onstage.”
Yet for all their misgivings about art rock as a category, Talking Heads wore their Rhode Island School of Design background on their sleeves (including their record sleeves, usually designed by members of the band). The earliest version of the group—formed by Byrne and drummer Chris Frantz at RISD, which they attended along with Tina Weymouth, Frantz’s girlfriend and future Heads bassist—was even called the Artistics. As Colin Newman from Wire (another group composed of fine-arts and design students) put it, his band’s music “wasn’t ‘arty,’ we were doing fucking
art
. Punk
was
art. It was all art.”
Conceptualism and performance art were at their height in the early seventies, and the nascent Heads assimilated a post-Fluxus sensibility of “serious play” that would later inform their approach to making music. Byrne, for instance, once did a performance that involved his shaving off a long beard he’d grown while a friend played accordion and his girlfriend held up cue cards with Russian words on them. Because he didn’t have a mirror, Byrne’s face ended up a bloody mess. This kind of performance art, along with the “photo-conceptual” and text-based work he was also doing—“fake photographs of flying saucers, questionnaires that I’d pass out anonymously,” recalls Byrne—were a bit outré for RISD, and the college advised him to go to New York where that sort of thing was all the rage.
By Christmas of 1974, Byrne had moved into a communal loft on the Lower East Side with Frantz and Weymouth. Its Chrystie Street location was only a few scuzzy blocks from CBGB. Initially, though, Byrne felt the tug of New York’s cinema and experimental theater more than the nascent punk scene. “Seeing performances by Wooster Group, Mabou Mines, Richard Foreman, all this nonnarrative theatrical stuff that was a collage of music, text, stylized movement. Things you never thought possible to sit there and enjoy—boom, they did it! None of it was logical or linear, and it had that attitude of mixing together high and low culture.”
When Talking Heads began to play CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, they stood out from the punk pack immediately with their clean-cut, non–rock ’n’ roll image and anorexic sound. Byrne preferred a “thin, clean, and clanky” guitar sound rather the fuzztone-thickened chords of most punk. “I wanted it to sound like a little well-oiled machine where everything was transparent, all the working parts visible,” says Byrne. “Nothing hidden in the murk of a big sound. Somehow that seemed more honest. And probably more arty as well.” Because he mostly played rhythm guitar and didn’t solo, Weymouth’s bass became the band’s second melodic voice after Byrne’s singing. “It’s an enormous temptation to play lead parts and melodies, especially as I play in approximately the same range as the human voice,” Weymouth told
Melody Maker
in 1977. “I always tend to fill in the middle tones, because if I played very low bass there’d be this huge gap like the Grand Canyon between my bass and David’s guitar.”
With some help from contemporaries such as XTC and the Cars, early Talking Heads set the template for New Wave. The sound was as skinny as the ties worn by so many New Wave bands, consisting of choppy rhythm guitar (with hardly any lead playing), fast tempos, and often keyboards. The songs often had stop-start structures and melody lines that were angular and jumpy rather than gently curving. Talking Heads’ early stage fave “Psycho Killer” virtually patented that twitchy New Wave feel of abruptness and agitation. “I always liked slightly herky-jerky, spastic rhythms. I gravitated toward those,” says Byrne.
As part of its revolt against the “Old Wave,” New Wave purged many of the black-music-derived properties—a relaxed jamming feel, swing, bluesy note bending—that innately juiced rock music in the sixties and early seventies. Devoid of raspy blues grit or rock ’n’ roll drawl, New Wave vocals tended to be high pitched, geeky, and suburban. Punk and New Wave severed rock’s links to sixties R&B while steadfastly ignoring the new directions since taken by black music with funk, reggae, and disco. Unlike the rest of their peers, though, Talking Heads always had a subtle funk pulse. Not in the “passing for black” sense of, say, Scottish funkateers the Average White Band, but a more “authentic” middle-class Caucasian take. You could hear the urge to get down, but checked and frustrated by an uptight WASPishness—a square and stilted quality Byrne physically embodied onstage with what Barney Hoskyns called his “everything-is-so-normal-it’s-crazy!” persona.
Talking Heads’ rhythm section, Weymouth and Frantz, steeped themselves in funk and disco. Weymouth told
Sounds
that the couple jostled over the hi-fi controls—she boosting the bass, Frantz turning up the treble to hear the hi-hat patterns. Weymouth developed a style of playing bass using her thumb that was roughly equivalent to the slap-bass technique pioneered by Larry Graham from Sly and the Family Stone. “It gives an incredible piston action, like fuel-injectionfed,” Weymouth explained. Byrne, meanwhile, had started to believe that the production techniques in black dance music (disco’s extended remixes, the sumptuous layering, and thick textures of everyone from the Jacksons to Parliament-Funkadelic) constituted a bigger musical revolution than punk. “When you started getting people doing the early remixes—stretching the song out, chopping it up—it was great,” he recalls. “And it was all happening in the dance world, it wasn’t happening in the rock world at all.”
As if their art school backgrounds and disco sympathies weren’t enough, Talking Heads’ image also made them black sheep among the black-leather fraternity of CBGB. In the context of 1978—the soft-rock mainstream still dominated by perms and face-fuzz, punk hidebound by its own scuzzy style—the Talking Heads’ no-nonsense, “regular” image was both refreshing and a statement. “Some of those CBGB groups were really just continuing those rock ’n’ roll romantic archetypes, the rebellious attitudes and stage postures and all those inherited gestures,” says Byrne. “I thought it wasn’t saying anything new, it was just a sloppier version of the Stones, the same clothes and the same pose. I thought: Let’s see if we can just throw all that out, start from square one. Walk onstage in your street clothes and sing with no affectation in a kind of unromantic but passionate way.”
Byrne had started dressing “straight”—short hair, suits, double-knit pants—back at RISD. This un–rock ’n’ roll neatness was a dissident gesture against the let-it-all-hang-out mood of the early seventies. Back then, the only renegades against posthippie style and mores were Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, from nearby Boston. Appropriately, when Talking Heads were looking to fill out their scrawny sound, they approached Jerry Harrison, formerly the Modern Lovers’ keyboard player, to join the band. Also crucial to the Heads’ unique look was the matter-of-fact presence of Weymouth, gamine and androgynous with her short Jean Seberg hairstyle. “I think we were the first band that had a woman as a
journeyman,
not the front person/singer/sex symbol of the band, but just a working musician,” Jerry Harrison once said, forgetting Mo Tucker in the Velvets but being more or less on the money.
If Talking Heads had a polar opposite it was the Ramones, overgrown teenagers in black leather and torn denim. Curiously, both groups signed to the leading American New Wave label, Sire, and together embarked on a chalk-and-cheese tour of Europe in 1977 (with the Ramones thoroughly freaked by the way the Heads read
books
on the road rather than raised hell). Whereas the Ramones’ rock ’n’ roll classicism eventually led to their working with hit-making relic Phil Spector, during the tour’s stint in London Talking Heads met the future-minded Brian Eno and immediately formed a mutual admiration society.
In a 1978 interview with
Search & Destroy,
Weymouth
gushed
about the Englishman’s sensitivity, courtesy, intellect, and even his physical attractiveness. “You know what he reminded us of? A young Jesuit monk. And he was very handsome in person. Beautiful hands, very long, slender fingers. Very idealistic hands, I would say.” Eno was equally captivated by the New Yorkers and recorded the tribute song “King’s Lead Hat” (an anagram of “Talking Heads”) on his solo album
Before and After Science
. “I think they’re about the nicest four people I could ever hope to meet,” he told
Melody Maker
. He admired their music for clearly being “the product of some very active brains, constructing music in a kind of conceptual way.” The Eno/Talking Heads relationship was freighted from the start with a kind of mirror image narcissism. Eno embodied the very cerebral, well-brought-up qualities that made Talking Heads misfits at CBGB. The Englishman, in turn, saw the Heads as junior Enos, brilliant but still in need of a little avuncular guidance and nurturing.
In Byrne, especially, Eno found a soul brother. “It’s like David said to me the other day, ‘Sometimes I write something that I really can’t understand, and that’s what excites me,’” Eno told
Musician
magazine. “I felt such sympathy with that position.” Words had always been a problem for Eno, “in that I didn’t have anything to say,” he confessed in 1977 (a blasphemous comment in the year rock’s Meaning and Relevance returned with a vengeance). “I didn’t have a message and I didn’t have experiences that I felt strongly enough to want to write about…. All my favorite songs had lyrics which I didn’t quite understand…. I decided I wanted these picture-lyrics.” Instead of straightforward emotions like sorrow, anger, or joy, Eno preferred ambiguous mood-tones you couldn’t quite finger. And he rejected rock’s expressionist fallacy, the idea that emotive songwriting can only come from the personal depths. “There are some bands who want to give the illusion…that the music itself is the…result of incredible, seething passions and turmoil from within,” Eno told
Creem
. “The way I work…is to create music that creates a feeling in
you
.” Instead of unbridled subjectivity, the songs on his post-Roxy solo albums came out of a literally
objective
approach: Musically, they were sonic sculptures fashioned out of all sorts of unusual instrumental textures and treated sounds, while the lyrics were shaped from “syllable-rhythm” nonsense or methodically generated through language games.
Byrne approached songwriting with exactly the same playful spirit. “I felt the challenge was to take something that was lyrically purely structural, had no emotional content whatsoever, but then invest the performance with leaps of emotion,” he says. In some Talking Heads songs, Byrne plays a character, as if the song were a minimovie. In others, he plays with language itself. But however fragmented the narrative, the language in Talking Heads was always plainspoken, the sound of conversation or inner monologue, rather than poeticized. When it came to subject matter, Byrne’s songs swerved past the things that occupy the vast majority of rock’s attention (love, sex, various kinds of rebellion and misbehavior) and instead explored the whole vast realm of
other stuff
that makes up the world (bureaucracy, TV, animals, appliances, cities). Graced with a melody that shimmers like a hummingbird dipping for nectar, “Don’t Worry About the Government” (from the debut album,
Talking Heads 77
) broke with rock’s tired tradition of “Mr. Jones” songs and instead empathized with office drones everywhere. Inspired by Maoist ideas and management theory, Byrne was playing with the notion—sacrilegious, in rockthink—that “uniformity and restriction don’t have to be debilitating and degrading.”
More Songs About Buildings and Food,
the second album, was the first made with Eno. It turned out to be Installment Number One in an Eno-produced trilogy of classic albums that were hugely diverse but unified by a loose concept: psychedelic funk. Both band and producer had been listening closely to the recent output of Parliament-Funkadelic, which had an ultravivid palette of heavily effected instruments. This color-saturated quality was especially ear-catching when applied to the bass, an instrument normally played without much processing. Bootsy Collins’s glossy, elasticated sound made him the Jimi Hendrix of the bass guitar. Parliament also pioneered synth bass on tracks such as “Flashlight” (a massive U.S. R&B hit in 1978), with keyboardist Bernie Worrell stacking multiple Moog bass tones to create the most lubriciously gloopy B-line ever heard.
The songs on
Talking Heads 77
had all been written before Jerry Harrison joined, but with his keyboards integrated into the writing process on
Buildings and Food,
the group’s music grew ever more thickly textured. Eno loved creating strange, ultravivid timbres using effects and the studio as instrument. On
Buildings and Food
you can hear this chromatic quality at its most intense in the splashy, reverbed drums at the start of “Warning Sign” and the famous “underwater” sound of the Heads’ cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River.” Released as a single, the latter gave the band their first
Billboard
Top 30 hit and was a striking gesture of racial border crossing at a time when New Wave was at its most starchy white.