Byrning Up the Music World <i> (cont’d)</i>

David Byrne has shown he can dish it out. Ever since Talking Heads surfaced more than a decade ago, the band’s creative leader has woven wry social observations about human foibles and vanities into arty, yet highly danceable rock music.

Some critics feel he went so far in underscoring those foibles in “True Stories”--his 1986 film about small-town cliches--that he came off a tad condescending.

So how does Byrne react when the joke is on him?

Pretty well.

He’s the butt of a marvelously funny cartoon by Drew Friedman in this month’s issue of New York’s Spy magazine.

The drawing shows a startled Byrne and Paul Simon--both in safari attire and holding portable recording equipment--running into each other in the thick of the jungle while searching for authentic new native musical sounds for their next albums.

Byrne hadn’t seen the cartoon, but he laughed heartily when told about the joke.

“That’s great,” he said by phone from Massachusetts, where the man who helped popularize African rhythms in this country with a widely admired 1980 album, “Remain in Light,” is on tour with more than a dozen Latin musicians.

(Simon also used South African rhythms extensively in his Grammy-award winning “Graceland” album in 1986 and has frequently turned to other cultures for musical inspiration. In fact, there are reports he is now working with West African and Latin musicians.)

“I understand the (humor behind the) cartoon, but this Latin music isn’t something you have to go out of your way to find,” Byrne continued. “The ‘Remain in Light’ album was more a conscious, analytical effort. Brian (Eno) and I were listening to some African records and were fascinated by the way different things sounded. It was very stimulating.”

But the new, Latin-influenced music that Byrne showcases in his solo album, “Rei Momo,” and on the tour was a more gradual involvement for him.

“This is stuff that I have been listening to in New York for eight or nine years,” the singer-songwriter said. “I can literally walk two blocks from where I live and hear musicians like Ray Barretto and Tito Puente. I remember hearing this conga drumming from this little club years ago and it would go on until 4 in the morning.

“But it seemed worlds away from what I was doing, so I just went to the clubs for fun . . . to listen to the music and dance. There was no bad vibe from anybody . . . nobody saying, ‘Oh, look at him. He doesn’t do the dance steps right.’ You were made to feel welcome.

“Gradually, I got to feel more comfortable with the music and I started to see how some of the songs were constructed and I wrote a song, ‘Loco De Amor,’ that was in ‘Something Wild.’ I enjoyed it and I started thinking, ‘Hey, I’d like to do a whole record like that.’ ”

Born in Scotland, but raised in Maryland, Byrne, 37, is one of rock’s most sophisticated and adventurous mainstream figures. But he started off like almost every other rock musician who grew up in the ‘60s--listening to bands like the Beatles, Stones and Byrds, and soul acts like James Brown and the Temptations.

“The exciting thing about the ‘60s for me was that everything was taking new shape,” said Byrne, who is married to costume designer Adelle Lutz and lives in New York’s SoHo district with their 3-month-old daughter, Malu. “It was a time when you could go anywhere musically and you could still get it on the radio.

“But the reins got pulled in eventually and radio got more conservative. Even though you didn’t hear all that freedom in music anymore (in the ‘70s), I think all that excitement in the ‘60s stayed with me and made me feel that anything was possible with music.”

Whereas most of Byrne’s contemporaries in pop only cite rock influences, Byrne--who was educated at the Rhode Island School of Design--said he was equally stimulated by what was happening in the ‘60s in other fields and it’s that multimedia enthusiasm, no doubt, that led to the sophistication and range in his work.

“Foreign films, especially, just knocked me out,” he continued, speaking in the speedy, anxious way he often sings--sounding at times like a man in a phone booth about to run out of change.

“They were to (conventional) films what rock ‘n’ roll was at the time to regular pop music. All those film makers . . . Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, Truffaut, Godard . . . were going in a 1,000 directions at once, filling you with all different ways of telling a story or making a point. That was another sign that there weren’t any creative limits.”

Byrne exhibited much that same free, experimental spirit with Talking Heads, the band that came up through New York’s underground scene--but which stood apart, musically and visually, from both the rest of that scene and much of rock tradition.

Rather than lean on leather jackets or other familiar images of rock, the four members of Talking Heads wore pretty much the same clothes (permanent press shirts; everyday, off-the-rack pants) on stage that they probably wore around campus--no apparent thought to fashion. Some critics called it the “preppie” look. Others described it as a clean-cut, WASP-ish image.

Byrne still seems amused at all the confusion caused by the band’s approach.

“A lot of bands start out trying to be just like someone they admire,” he explained. “But we set out to eliminate all the obvious signatures, both in our music and in how we looked.

“It was also part of our effort to start from scratch. I loved some of those ‘60s bands too, but I didn’t want to dress like them. So we tried to strip away everything so we could discover who we were and build from there. What happened was that we stripped away so much that we had this ‘non-look’ that people thought was a statement.”

The music was inventive from the beginning--filled with quirky, original rhythms and equally unique, off-center lyrics that underscored Byrne’s themes about life in the tense, unsettling times. He sang in an equally original way that was once described as “lying somewhere between a hiccup and a cry.”

But Byrne has continued to flex his artistic muscles--usually successfully--in ways that few imagined possible in the early days of the band. Dubbed “Rock’s Renaissance Man” in a 1986 cover story by Time magazine, Byrne not only has helped move the Heads into new directions, but he has also found time to do a striking number of outside projects.

They include writing or co-writing film scores (“The Last Emperor”--for which he won Academy Awards--and “Married to the Mob”), an orchestral score for Robert Wilson’s opera “The Forest” and the score for Twyla Tharp’s “The Catherine Wheel.”

Besides the new solo album, which features songs in such varied Latin styles as cumbia, merengue and salsa (see adjoining review), Byrne has put together two compilations of Brazilian music. The first, “Beleza Tropical: Brazil Classics, Volume 1,” was released early this year. The second, “O Samba: Brazil Classics Volume 2” is due shortly.

Yet, he remains best known for his work with Talking Heads, a band (also including drummer Chris Frantz, keyboardist-guitarist Jerry Harrison and bassist Tina Weymouth) that has reigned as a standard of excellence ever since its debut album was released by Sire in 1977.

Byrne’s local concerts--he’ll be at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood for four nights starting Wednesday, at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa next Sunday and at the Starlight Bowl in San Diego on Oct. 17--are part of his first tour since the triumphant “Stop Making Sense” shows at the Pantages in 1983 that served as the basis for director Jonathan Demme’s widely heralded concert film.

One reason the band hasn’t toured since then, Byrne said, was that it was a bit intimidated by those shows. The group didn’t want to have to try to “top” what they had accomplished. So, they took advantage of the time away from touring to work on various individual projects.

Byrne was concerned at the start of this tour last month on the East Coast that some of the Heads fans--after all this wait--would be impatient for the old songs.

“I was worried that someone was going to start yelling out ‘Psycho Killer’ and stuff, but it hasn’t happened,” he said. “People always talk about how conservative radio is, but I find that audiences are ready for new stuff.

“We just played Springfield and the audience might have only (been familiar with) the two Talking Heads songs we do in the show, but I felt they had a great time. They responded to the same things in the music that attracted me to it. They just said, ‘Hey, this is fun. . . . Let’s have a good time.’ ”

Byrne may laugh at the Spy magazine cartoon, but he knows the danger in changing musical styles so often that fans start wondering if you are committed to any of them. Yet, he also realizes the greater danger of stagnation.

“I’ve been around long enough to see bands sort of rocket to the top and then disappear because they kept doing the same thing over and over,” he said reflectively. “So, I can’t pretend that in the back of my mind (in the early days) that I didn’t realize that you’ll probably have more room (creatively) and a longer career if you don’t just do one thing.

“But that’s really in the back of your mind. The thing that is in the front of your mind is whether something is exciting and whether it takes you somewhere you haven’t been before.”

On the same point, he added, “If I came out next year and said, ‘I’m going to be a folkie’ and then I switched to something else the following year, people were going to start getting confused and suspicious.

“But I think you find a thread through everything I’ve done with the band and on my own. I’ve done some clinkers in that process, but luckily most of them have escaped a lot of people’s attention.”

Referring again to the Spy cartoon, he noted a touch of irony in the talk about reaching out to other cultures.

“To be honest,” he said. “I worried about using the African (sounds) in ‘Remain in Light’ because it came out before there was a lot of African influence in Western pop and I was afraid we were going to get trapped into a sound. I thought, ‘Oh, God, let’s not get called the African art-rock band or whatever.’

“So there was an element in my head after we did that record that we didn’t want to do anything too similar. I’ve seen how silly it can get, all the labels people put on you. But now I don’t care as much. I think I’ve gained enough confidence to just do what I like. And the truth is that no matter what style you work in, you are still drawing upon the same emotions and experiences. That’s one thing that never changes.”