Messages from the past to the future NOW! The Clues Are In The Words

Photo by Michelle Normoyle

“Sometimes we write things and we don’t know what they’re about until afterwards,” Byrne said. “There’s a sense of a premonition. I’ve looked at things I’ve written and I go, ‘Oh. That’s about something that happened in my life after I wrote the song.’”

David Byrne

Like a reverse déjà vu

instead of seeing something

and having that vague feeling

you’ve been here before,

you look back at something

you wrote 20-even 40 years ago,

A message in a bottle

from your past self to your present self,

you are living here in the now future.

I saw a quote this morning from David Byrne, on the rerelease of Stop Making Sense in IMAX. I’m thinking I need to go see this film. I did not think I saw it in the original day. My wife will correct me here, I am certain. I did see David Byrne’s solo show, the one he took to Broadway, a couple years back with my concert pal, my little sister Barbara. It was a birthday gift from her, and one of the best shows of so many of those.

My love of Talking Heads goes back 46 years, wow, just saying that ages me. I can feel the years zooming back in reverse, I hear the film slapping against the reel as the lights flicker, I am literally swallowing dust, and consuming memories. I loved the band Talking Heads more than just David Byrne himself, although he was a major influence. This love goes way back to their first single Love Goes To Building on Fire.

It's not love

Which is my face

Which is a building

Which is on fire

“Looking at my younger self is a really strange experience,” Byrne said. “He’s doing things that are profoundly odd, but kind of inventive. But also, he’s very serious and intent on what he’s doing.”

I look back at my younger self and I am equally fascinated and repelled by the early videos from Lenore Herb of my first band AKA. The performance is so honest and in your face, it is painful to witness. Yet there is a truth to the performance that goes beyond the prescribed punk mode of the time.

AKA was definitely on the edge, toiling under the outskirts of the Queen of Punk Rock Royalty, the inimitable Doreen Grey, who reportedly had videos stored in her attic. Or was it her crawl space?

Words from a young dense milt: The world of right is black and white, so says the blonde known as Miss Grey. Remembering a rendezvous, she had that day a déjà vu. What a way to live. And everybody walks around her. The thoughts inside her mind surround her, and yesterday they tried to drown her. I found a hidden map lying in her lap. All roads lead to scars, schoolyards and smokey bars.

45 years ago, Talking Heads released their second record More Songs About Buildings and Food. It was 1978. What was I doing in 1978? I tried to make a timeline between 1978 and 1980, but I am still filling in some holes. Digging through the dust of these memories, the holes resemble graves, with so many friends gone.

Back in 1978, I was going to Theatre School at Langara. I took acting very seriously, far too seriously in retrospect. Part of acting is to be in the moment. I had that down but there is another part where you must rise above to channel your third eye. You mustn’t go so deep into character that you become lost. It is essential to maintain control and treat your fellow actors with respect. After all, it’s acting not reality, right? That was a distinction that I failed to grasp then.

I remember an acting class where we explored what the teacher called “High Status and Low Status.”

It was an improvised scene. I was to be “High Status”, while a fellow actor was designated “Low Status”. What followed was a psychodrama where the shield of acting allowed me to ride roughshod over this poor actor, forcing him to grovel in what was basically S/M, until I broke him. He was a crying mess on the floor. At that point the teacher sent in another actor to “save” the actor I had reduced to tears.

It was cruel and irresponsible in retrospect that she let it go on so long, and that I let it go in at all. I remember feeling that I had crossed a line, which clearly I had. A few years before, I was playing another violent male character, in Tom Walmsley’s play The Working Man, and I actually kicked a fellow actor in the head. I was horrified, but as fate would have it, she was best friend to my future wife, and we are good friends today. Hi Susan!

A few months later, I was sitting in a lighting booth for a technical run through of a play at Langara, while Patti Smith played at the Commodore. Missing Patti Smith was the final straw that broke the actor’s back.

I decided then and there to abandon my fledging acting career, and to find myself a band, which was the birth of AKA. Our drummer Warren Ash got me job at Theodora’s Restaurant. Warren coincidentally was also high school buddies with Susan and Michelle. As was our bass and guitar player, Warren Hunter.

What I remember most about that Talking Heads was playing their second record, More Songs About Buildings and Food, every day when I would open the restaurant. I would pop in the cassette of the album, and play it again and again while nobody was there. Just me and the mice and the slugs on the wooden counters. My friend Susie and her mother Barb worked there. One morning Barb greeted me with, “You want to do some acid?” Actually I had not had my first cup of coffee, so I declined, but I remember coming in there one day after taking some Mexican blue cubensis, that Lenore grew in her basement. She had a psylocibin grow-op.

For the record, we did not microdose. In those days, it was full on or none at all. We were channeling Rimbaud, wanting to experience everything and damn the torpedoes. We damned anything and everyone. What memories. It is amazing that I remember anything. Fragments, shards, compressed diamonds stashed in the vaults of time.

Stop Making Sense? Did anything make sense? It was all senses on stun.