She Talks in Stereo

The Zoo Crew has a real Texas-to-Hollywood sparkler on the turntable for the Zoo Freaks, and it is "She Talks in Stereo" by Gary Myrick & The Figures. If you came up on freeform album rock, this one sits in that skinny-tie pocket where a Dallas guitar player still sounds like he learned his licks in a honky-tonk and then pointed the amp at the new wave. The chorus does not explain itself, and it does not need to. She talks in stereo, the picture is bigger than one speaker, and the groove locks in like a record that has already been played thin in the best way. Myrick wrote it himself, and the line that still gets the old heads nodding is the one about her moving steadily like the grooves on a record while his head spins. That is record-store poetry, plain and simple, and it belongs on a station that still believes in the long spin.

Folks sometimes file the cut with the second Figures album, Living in a Movie, because that record is the one with the Hollywood title and the deeper dive into the movie-screen life they were living out in Los Angeles. The single itself came off the 1980 debut, Gary Myrick & The Figures, on Epic. Epic put a promo copy out in July of 1980 and the stock single in September, backed with "Model." Tom Werman shared the production chair with Myrick. The band on that record was a tight four-piece: Myrick on guitar and vocals, Ed Beyer on keyboards, David Dennard on bass, and Jack White on drums. The whole album is Myrick originals except a Ray Davies number, "Who'll Be the Next in Line," which tells you whose songbook he was raiding when he was not writing his own. "She Talks in Stereo" is the one that walked out of the club and onto the radio, a minor cult hit that never quite became the big American chart monster the company might have hoped for, and peaked at number 56 on the Australian Kent chart. In the States it lived where a lot of the best album-rock records lived, on the stations that still trusted a guitar hook and a strange chorus.

Myrick has told the story the same way for years, and it is a good one for anybody who has ever argued with a program director. Asked if he expected the song to land, he said you never know, nobody knows, the record company does not know, the musicians do not know, you just have to do what you like. Do that. He did what he liked, and the song is still doing well. The label people told him at the time that they really liked "She Talks in Stereo," and his answer was about as Texas as it gets. Ok, great. So he recorded it. That is the whole philosophy in one shrug. Nina Blackwood, one of the original MTV VJs, played the heck out of his stuff and stayed a friend. Years later he noted on his own social pages that the song landed in KROQ's top 100 of the decade. A 1980 clip of the band turned up on the old video shows, Hollywood Heartbeat among them, skinny ties and all, which is how a lot of Zoo Freaks first put a face to the riff.

The song got a second life in 1983 when it turned up in Valley Girl, alongside another Myrick cut, "Time to Win." That picture, with Nicolas Cage and Deborah Foreman, was pure early-eighties Los Angeles, malls and mohawks and a soundtrack that still gets pulled off the shelf when somebody wants the feeling of that decade without the costume party. A lot of listeners swear they first heard "She Talks in Stereo" in that movie and then went hunting for the record. He cut the song again in 1985 for the solo album Stand for Love, a faster, hotter take that some of the old rock writers thought steamrolled the thing that made the original stick. There was yet another pass years after that. The first one is the one the Zoo Crew keeps. Angular leads, a wiggly line under hard-rock guitars, and a rhythm part that still has Texas in the right hand. Dated in the best way, like plastic sunglasses and a good car radio.

The man behind the record is Dallas born and raised, a fifth-generation Texan who has said as much whenever anybody asks where the blues in the playing comes from. He started on guitar at ten. His mother was the one who pointed him at it, and she drove him downtown to McCord's Music for lessons. By fourteen he was writing songs. At eighteen he had his first all-original band, Smiley, a three-piece glam and pop outfit. Out of high school he was already working the Dallas and Fort Worth rooms with his own groups. The room he talks about most is The Cellar, painted black, pillows on the dance floor, a runway in front of the band, and bouncers who carried guns. He has told the story of a break where a fellow hit a pistol on a table and it went off over his head. Myrick told him to put it away, and he did. Wild, very Texas, and not all of it right, but a place where an original band could get over. He was doing all his own music there, and word got around.

That is how Krackerjack found him. Uncle John Turner, the original drummer from the Johnny Winter trio, had a band in Austin and came looking for a guitar player. The chair had belonged to Stevie Ray Vaughan. Myrick went down because he wanted to learn more blues, the band was playing original blues-rock, and they were making the most money. He has laughed about the line on the resume ever since. People hear that he replaced Stevie Ray Vaughan and lose their minds. He is quick to say they fired Stevie, he does not know why, and that Stevie was a sweet and kind guy. They stayed friendly, shared bills in the Midwest once both of them were on Epic, and for years Stevie's guitar roadie was Myrick's guitar roadie. Before Los Angeles there was also Slip of the Wrist, another all-original Texas blues-rock band. He has also told a wild one from sixteen, meeting Jimi Hendrix in Dallas and finding him extremely nice to a kid who did not know anything yet. Duane Eddy was the early guitar hero, that big western twang, and Jeff Beck in the Yardbirds for the feedback.

A couple of years of Austin and he pointed the car at California. Late in the seventies he put the Figures together in Los Angeles, landed the Epic deal, and made the debut that carries "She Talks in Stereo." They toured the States and Canada behind it. The follow-up, Living in a Movie, arrived in 1981, cut at Cherokee Studios in Hollywood with Geoff Workman producing, the same crew of Beyer, Dennard, and White, twelve originals including the title track, "Penetrate My Heart," "Died on Television," and "Promises, Promises." After the North American tour for that record he broke the Figures up and went looking for a different approach. The 1983 solo EP Language brought "Message Is You," an MTV favorite, and "Guitar, Talk, Love & Drums." Then he wrote songs and played all the guitars on John Waite's No Brakes, the album with the number-one single "Missing You," a job he has since called one of the costly moves of his life and one of the great ones. Later he formed Havana 3am with Clash bassist Paul Simonon and Nigel Dixon of Whirlwind, a band that started with motorcycles in Los Angeles before it started with songs. He has kept recording, kept the blues close, and kept playing the old single because the old single still works.

That is the long road into a four-minute record. A Dallas kid, a mother hauling him to guitar lessons, a black-painted club with pillows on the floor, an Austin chair that used to belong to Stevie, a Hollywood studio, and a chorus that does not quite mean what it says and does not have to. The Zoo Crew will keep it in the stacks for the Zoo Freaks, right beside the rest of the Figures records, because album rock was never only the songs everybody already knows. It was the ones that stuck in the dashboard and never quite left. You can find Gary Myrick on Facebook and on Instagram, where he still talks about the song that started the whole ride. And you can keep the freeform going with the Zoo Crew over at THE ZOO, where the deep cuts still get their turn.