(TV on the Radio)
It’s hard to think about the early 2000s without TV on the Radio on the soundtrack. Actor and performer Tunde Adebimpe takes us back to that heady time, when cocaine and free love were the main course in post-9/11 NYC.
I’m gonna go chronologically with my embarrassing stories. We’d been signed to Touch and Go Records around the end of 2002. Usually, the way that Touch and Go did things was to see a band live and make the decision whether or not to sign them. Corey Rusk had already heard what we were doing because Dave Sitek was roadie-ing for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. 9/11 had happened, and no one was going outside. During that time, we made an EP that sounded like an actual record. He played that for Corey, who loved it. He signed us right away, and we were the first band that he’d signed without having seen us live.
There’s a big difference between sitting in a bedroom studio and putting things together piece-by-piece versus having an actual live band. We didn’t have the live band because I was singing and using a loop pedal. Dave had a sampler, and our first shows were at this club called The Stinger in Brooklyn. Those early shows were essentially just a free-for-all. We had a monthly residency there, and all the shows were basically a big fucking mess.
We would take song suggestions, and the shows would sometimes end with complete strangers onstage holding microphones, totally drunk, while trying in vain to play our instruments. We’d be sitting in the booth watching them, saying to whoever cared, “That’s TV on the Radio.” It was more like poorly rehearsed karaoke. We’d leave the drum machine on, and it’d be a bunch of drunk, coked-up white kids trying to rap over it. We were not a polished live act.
Kyp Malone joined the band right as we were getting signed, and we decided to go out and play the whole EP a cappella. We hadn’t rehearsed enough for any of it to sound good, so our live show was an even bigger fucking mess than before. It was three guys behind briefcases with microphones, and it was horrible.
We took it to Chicago, and our first show playing for the label, we were opening for The Fall at the Empty Bottle. Corey was really excited and kept saying how much he loved our EP and how talented we were. Five minutes into the set, and it was already a complete mess. Ten minutes in, it was even worse. People were touting us as the next big thing, and you could see the wave of disappointment as it washed over the crowd’s faces as we kept playing. One of the keyboard stands went down, fell into the audience, and we were scrambling to set it back up. It was ugly. You could tell everyone was wondering how we could have had such hype behind us. Afterwards, we went up to Corey and sheepishly said, “Yeah, that was kinda rough.” The look on his face was a mixture of terror and confusion, and you could almost hear him thinking, What have I done?
Corey had to admit that he’d give us another shot. If that wasn’t embarrassing enough, we had to walk past Mark E. Smith from the Fall, who basically told us we sucked. If that guy says you’re a mess, you’re a big fucking mess. There’s a strange sense of calm that comes when you’re onstage and realize that you’re totally failing. You just have to keep your head down and finish. The worst thing you can do in that situation is stop. If you finish, there’s at least the hope that people might think that what they just witnessed was exactly what you intended. People might think it was some weird, stylistic choice to go up there and completely suck.
Quite magically, sometime around 2003, it was like somebody landed with forty barrels of cocaine and began distributing it all over Brooklyn. I was suddenly being offered this shitty eighties drug every night. It wasn’t my thing, but everyone was doing it and suddenly becoming talkative assholes. One night we were playing at this place called Star Foods on the Lower East Side, and the place had that coke vibe, where everyone was going crazy.
I remember seeing two people sitting on one of our monitor amps on stage. It was really crowded in there, so I figured they had climbed up for a better vantage point. At first, it looked like they were making out, but I quickly realized they were having sex on our amp as we were playing. I got away from that side of the stage pretty quickly. It’s not like you tap someone on the shoulder and ask what they’re doing in that situation. The crowd realized what was going on, and we all just kind of watched the couple go at it. It was kind of like a freak show, where you know you shouldn’t be watching it, but you can’t look away.
There was no S&M-type vibe to that place either. It was more like an eatery, but that’s just what was going on at the time. There was a lot of public sex going on post 9/11. The vibe was that if we were gonna die, we might as well be getting laid in the streets. One time after a show, I remember standing on a street corner and hearing this chain-link fence rattling behind me. I turned around, and it was two people who had just left the show going for it against the fence. That was Brooklyn in 2003.
On our second tour of Europe, we were playing a festival in Rotterdam, so, of course, we had to stop in Amsterdam first. It was still so mind-blowing that you could legally purchase weed, and we really went for it. We got some really powerful stuff and got high before going onstage at Rotterdam. This was the last time I ever got high before a show because I was so stoned that, after playing only three songs, I thought we were done. I thought the show was over. I just walked off the stage and left everyone behind. No one had a clue what I was doing or where I was going.
I left the stage and walked right out of the venue. I strolled down some avenue and went and sat down in a park. I sat there and watched these kids run around the playground. I was thinking, Man, that was a crazy show. I hung out in that park like a weirdo for the better part of an hour. Eventually, I walked back to the festival. Everybody was yelling, “Where were you? What the hell happened?” I was so confused and sputtered, “Well…we were done, so I left.”
They said, “Uh, no. We weren’t done, and we were all standing onstage, wondering what happened to you.” They thought that maybe I had gotten hurt, and they were all looking for me backstage. Our manager was completely freaked out and was off searching for me. We went to Sweden after that, and someone came up to me and said, “We heard the rumor that you smoked too much powerful marijuana in Rotterdam and walked off the stage!” I really wish there was somehow video of me in that park, having this introspective moment—this weird, sweaty man, watching the kids play.