Sometime in the mid-nineteen-seventies, David Byrne bought a cheap gray polyester suit at a discount outlet in downtown Manhattan. The Talking Heads had just started playing regularly at CBGB, and Byrne was having trouble figuring out what his “look” should be. What he wanted, he writes in his book “How Music Works,” from 2012, was to find a way to “start from scratch, sartorially,” to strip the band’s clothing down to the basics so all that would be left was the sound. At first, he tried wearing polo shirts, he writes, but the garment “set us apart and branded us as preppies . . . we were accused of being dilettantes, and of not being ‘serious’ (read: authentic or pure).” Then, walking through the city, he realized that most New York businessmen were wearing nondescript suits, and he began to see it as a kind of brutalist anti-fashion statement. “This was a kind of uniform that intentionally eliminated (or at least intended to eliminate) the possibility of clothing as a statement,” he writes. So Byrne decided that he would become a Suit Guy, or what he calls “Mr. Man On The Street,” but the phase did not last long. He found that the polyester made him sweat profusely onstage; when he put the suit in the washer-dryer, it shrunk to the point that it became unwearable. The band went back to wearing polo shirts and button-up oxfords with rolled-up sleeves, items whose Waspy connotations Byrne continued to grapple with throughout his early career performing amongst punks and the leather jacket crowd. “I soon realized when it comes to clothing,” he writes, “it is next to impossible to find something completely neutral. Every outfit carries some cultural baggage of some kind.”
Byrne has always been intensely interested in the minute details of pop performance. He saw the Talking Heads not so much as a band but as a conceptual performance group. In 2014, when discussing “Stop Making Sense,” the Talking Heads concert film, which was directed by Jonathan Demme and released in 1984, Byrne said in Time that the goal was to show that “a pop concert could be a kind of theatre—not in the pretentious sense, but in the sense that it could be visually and even sort of dramatically sophisticated, and yet you could still dance to it.” Demme, who died in 2017, claims that all he had to do to make “Stop Making Sense” was show up and roll camera; Byrne had already planned out each beat to an almost obsessive degree. It was Byrne’s idea to build the show piece by piece, beginning with him standing alone onstage with a tape player performing “Psycho Killer,” then bringing on one band member at a time to show, explicitly, how the musical sausage gets made. In the film, the band’s many roadies are visible and essential: they wheel on drum kits and synthesizers (all painted black, by the way, to allow the band to stand out from the background). As one emblematic story goes, Byrne was so upset that one of his backup singers, the legendary Edna Holt, had changed her hair the day before filming that he paid for her to get a weave. “Hair-whipping was a big part of the show,” he explained.
It was also Byrne’s idea to wear the now iconic “big suit” in the second half of “Stop Making Sense.” While travelling in Japan, he had taken in Kabuki and Noh theatre, and was excited about the hyperbolic proportions of their costumes. The costume designer Gail Blacker—who, in 1984, described the big suit to the Times as “more of an architectural project than a clothing project”—lined the garment with needlepoint canvas to help it remain stiff and angular onstage. Pauline Kael, the film critic for The New Yorker at the time, devoted an entire section of her review of the film to the big suit’s power: “When he comes on wearing a boxlike ‘big suit’—his body lost inside this form that sticks out around him like the costumes in Noh plays, or like Beuys’ large suit of felt that hangs off a wall—it’s a perfect psychological fit,” she writes. “He’s a handsome, freaky golem. When he dances, it isn’t as if he were moving the suit—the suit seems to move him.”
Byrne, who is sixty-eight—and still both freaky and handsome, albeit now with a cockatoo-like puff of white hair—is less a rock star these days than the ringleader of a Broadway company. His latest project, “American Utopia,” most recently played in a limited engagement on Broadway, which ended in February; the show has been made into its own arresting concert film, this one directed by Spike Lee. (It was released on HBOMax, on Saturday.) And not unlike “Stop Making Sense,” which Kael wrote was “like going to an austere orgy,” “American Utopia” is a sumptuous spectacle built from a minimalist aesthetic. The stage is a stark gray box, adorned only with a chain-link curtain. The premise is simple: twelve performers, including Byrne, perform twenty-one songs, many of them from Byrne’s 2018 album, which was also titled “American Utopia.” The song list also includes a grab bag of greatest hits: “Once in a Lifetime,” “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),” and “Burning Down the House.” From out of this stripped-down formula grows a wild rumpus of percussion and modern dance, a slow-building explosion. Byrne starts out onstage alone, sitting at a small desk, holding up a pink plastic model of a brain like a middle-school science teacher. He is then joined by the dancer-singers Tendayi Kuumba and Chris Giarmo, who slither onto the stage like grass snakes. If you have not noticed the costumes before, you do now: all three figures onstage are wearing nearly identical, snug gray suits, with matching collared shirts underneath. They are also, somewhat incongruously, barefoot. As more and more band members enter the scene wearing the same uniform, the stage becomes a cacophony of global percussion, keyboards, and electric guitars, and the performers look like a business-casual army, a mildly stormy sea.
On a recent morning, I spoke with Byrne about how he devised the look of “American Utopia.” He said that when he made “Stop Making Sense” he thought of suits as a way to smuggle radical ideas under a guise of conservatism. He was inspired by figures like the experimental theatre director Robert Wilson, who presented himself more like a banker than a member of the cultural vanguard. “You can kind of infiltrate, and you’ll get taken more seriously, maybe, if you dress like a professional,” Byrne said. With “American Utopia,” his approach was more pragmatic: suits were merely the easiest way to insure that everyone onstage looked both elegant and alike. “We’re not going to allow a lot of variety,” he said. “There’s not going to be arguments about I want this and I want that.” For Byrne, creativity is what grows up through the cracks of a controlled environment. Because the performers in “American Utopia” all look so similar onstage, each person’s small adornments appear for the viewer in a kind of bas-relief. Your eyes might fixate on Kuumba and Giarmo’s sparkly blue eyeshadow and crimson lips, on the drummer Jacqueline Acevedo’s bouncy platinum bob, the percussionist Gustavo Di Dalva’s duotone mohawk, the guitarist Angie Swan’s glittery ear studs. You might focus on the different ways the performers point their toes and shake their hips, and the exuberant, sometimes spasmodic dance moves of the choreographer Annie-B Parson. “We’re all dressed more or less the same, but everybody really maintains their individuality,” Byrne told me.
One thing about the big suit is that it left Byrne room to maneuver. Creating twelve tidy suits that the performers of “American Utopia” could squat and kick in was something else entirely. When Byrne was first conceiving the show, in 2018, he called Humberto Leon, one of the founders of the avant-garde fashion boutique Opening Ceremony, where Byrne was a regular shopper. At the time, Leon was also designing for the Parisian house Kenzo, and Byrne had the idea that Kenzo might want to make the performers’ suits. Leon jumped at the challenge. “I think he’s one of the early, early musicians who really used clothing to tell a story,” Leon told me recently. He ended up cutting holes underneath the armpits of each costume to provide mobility. “We had to build a suit almost as if it was performance wear,” he explained. When Leon left Kenzo, in 2019, just as “American Utopia” was transitioning to the Broadway stage, he recommended as his replacement the longtime Brooklyn tailor Martin Greenfield, who has made suits for Barack Obama, Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Great Gatsby,” and Joaquin Phoenix in “Joker,” among others. When Greenfield and his son Tod stepped in for the Broadway run, they kept the gray-suit idea, but chose a stretchier, more breathable wool blend than Leon had used for the touring costumes. Each cast member had two custom suits—one to sweat through and another to wear while the first one was at the cleaner’s. In order to keep the suits from smelling between uses on two-show days, Greenfield told me, the wardrobe manager would spray them down with vodka.
Toward the end of the Talking Heads’ two decades together, the band was plagued by rumors of creative tension between Byrne and the other members. In 1992, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison told the Los Angeles Times they’d only found out that the band was finished after Byrne was quoted in the paper as saying, “You could say (we’ve) broken up, or call it whatever you like.” In “Stop Making Sense,” Byrne was prominently placed onstage, an outsized front man in that eye-catching big suit, while the rest of the band often receded into a shadowy blob. It is striking how the gray suits of “American Utopia” accomplish the very opposite, telegraphing a rare kind of harmony, and a lack of hierarchy, within the group performance, even if that performance is Byrne’s brainchild. Each member of the company gets a chance to solo, to stand out, to fly separately from the flock. But then they return, again, to the drum line, a single organism suggesting not just coöperation but a kind of joyful sublimation. In starting from common ground—a blank stage, a drumbeat, a bolt of Italian wool—the show finds a kind of shared language to build upon, which perhaps is part of Byrne’s vision of utopia.
