Talking Heads:77 & 2024
An Interview, a Remastered Album, and a Memory
Part One: Talking to Talking Heads, Oct. 1977.
IT IS only three years since three friends from the Rhode Island School of Design moved to New York, bent on developing their careers as artists. David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth and a fourth friend, Jerry Harrison, apparently accomplished last week what they set out to do.
They had to give up art supplies and pick up musical instruments in order to do that. They call themselves Talking Heads, and the quartet's debut album, Talking Heads: 77 has just been released by Sire Records.
The album lives up to the expectations of the cult of devotees that have followed the band in its appearances at CBGB, the Bowery rock club, during the last two years. It is vital, quirky, sometimes obtuse, but always intelligent. Though some of the music mixes the traditions of white 1960s rock and soul music with a dollop of reggae, the result is the most original interpretation of that source material that has been created in years.
Though the music most often associated with CBGB has been called punk rock, Talking Heads is anything but a punk band. The members look, in fact, like an advertisement for Brooks Brothers. Byrne, the songwriter, guitarist and lead singer, and Frantz, the drummer, are so clean-cut they could be young ministers. Weymouth comes from a socially prominent military family, and despite her energetic pulsing on bass guitar, hasn't totally rebelled against the values she was raised with. She and Frantz were married last summer in Frantz's tiny hometown of Washington, Ky.
Jerry Harrison, who joined the band in April, has long hair and a somewhat scruffy look, but he's entitled. He graduated Harvard, then played keyboards and guitar in Jonathan Richman's influential Modern Lovers.
The fact that none of them is a virtuoso musician has not been a handicap. "We moved to this big city with no connections in the music world, and we didn't have a whole lot of technical prowess," Frantz said last week at Sire Records' New York office. "By normal standards, we were probably below most standards of technical prowess. But by some weird drive, we rose from being fans of other groups — it was almost like mind over matter."
Songwriter Byrne doesn't feel the process was quite so dramatic, but that the development of Talking Heads was evolutionary. "Everything fell into place," he said. "It wasn't until we started working on songs that we knew what we'd sound like."
The group did know what it wouldn't do. "We knew we wouldn't jam a lot," Byrne said. "And that we wouldn't do guitar solos. And that we wouldn't dress up. It was mostly the matters of taste we had in common.
The art college education that Byrne, Frantz and Weymouth shared helped them develop an esthetic viewpoint for Talking Heads. "The idea I took away from school was to eliminate unnecessary things — to have everything serve a function," Byrne said.
"When we were in school," Weymouth said, "stress was put on trying to find an individual means of self- expression that was based on feelings, rather than on what would entertain people. That feeling is more sincere or real than something flashy and decorative, though the latter might make more immediate impact."
Frantz learned that it was important "to see yourself in a historical context. To be aware of what's already gone down while trying to avoid plagiarism." Artistically, Frantz sees the band's presentation as essentially simple. "It's the content that counts."
The content of Talking Heads' songs probably will perplex as many people as it thrills. Byrne's compositions vary in both mood and comprehensibility. Even his most accessible tunes, like 'Uh Oh, Love Comes to Town', have an elusive quality. The listener almost seems to be eavesdropping on a rather volatile person's conversation with himself. "Where, where is my common sense? How did I get in a jam like this? Believe, I believe in mystery. Love love love. Love is simple as 1-2-3," he sings.
Another song, 'Tentative Decisions', seems like minimalist trance music for a convention of psychoanalysts: "Now that I can release my tension/Let me make clear my best intentions/Girls ask: can I define decision?/Boys ask: can I describe their function?"
At the end of the song, the verse is repeated, with genders reversed. The similarly complex 'First Week Last Week... Carefree' intertwines images of love with images of business. "It's pretty oblique," Byrne admitted.
The song 'Psycho Killer' is a portrait of an everyday madman that has one of the strangest refrains in modern rock, combining elements of an old Otis Redding rhythm and blues chant with some high school-learned French: "Psycho killer, q'est-ce que c'est?, fa fa fa fa fa fa."
"The 'voice' varies," Byrne said. "Some of the songs are my own feelings at a particular moment. 'No Compassion', for example, is about a time I was angry. But it could really be another person, because I'm not angry all the time."
Those who get their kicks trying to analyze songs by finding hidden lyric meanings will be overjoyed with some Byrne songs. 'Don't Worry About the Government' first seemed to be like a song from a Broadway play, in which the actor or actress is trying to assure the parents that life in the city is not as bad as they think. "My building has every convenience/It's going to make life easy for me," Byrne sings. Later listenings led to the realization that the song could be about a President-elect about to move into the White House. The final verse says: "I see the states across this big nation/I see the laws made in Washington, D.C./I think of the ones I consider my favorites/I think of the people that are working for me/Some civil servants are just like my loved ones/They work so hard, and they try to be strong/I'm a lucky guy to live in my building/They all need buildings to help them along."
Weymouth agrees with the political interpretation of 'Don't Worry About the Government', but Byrne isn't so sure. "Here's a person who likes high-rise apartments, with modern conveniences, and also has compassion for the working man. He's in an elated mood."
Whatever the case, Talking Heads isn't typical of any kind of rock and roll band. The fact that the band developed a fanatically loyal following out of CBGB doesn't have anything to do with punk-rock consciousness. "I guess we're pretty much an aberration down there," Byrne said. Perhaps the New York audience finds Talking Heads appealing for the same reason audiences in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Holland and Britain took to the band on its tour of Europe last spring.
"They liked the conviction," Byrne said. "Even if they didn't understand the words, they felt the sincerity. That's a fairly rare thing these days."
The band is backing up its theory with action. It is beginning a tour of small clubs and campuses at which it will be the headliner. "It would be ridiculous for us to open for a group like Foghat," Weymouth said.
"We want to earn our own audience." The group doesn't really have a manager — though it may get one — but right now a high-powered hype isn't what the members have in mind.
"There's no well-oiled machine," Byrne said. "But we feel better."
Part Two: Talking Heads 77 Remastered, Expanded and Boxed
TALKING HEADS 77 was reissued on Nov. 8, 2024. It's no longer an 11-song album that punched way above its weight, living up to all the expectations of one of CBGB breakout bands. It's got 36 tracks on four CDs or vinyl LPs: It opens with a 2024 remastering of the Sire Records original; an assortment of singles, including "Love Goes to a Building on Fire," a recording that preceded the release of the debut album; and ends with a 13-track set recorded live at CBGB, including an early version of Al Green's "Take Me to the River." The fourth disc is a Blu-Ray/Atmos version. There's a book, of course, in this oversized package ($149.98) for the Super Deluxe edition of four albums and four 7-inch singles); $99.98 for the 3 CD plus one Blu-Ray audio; $34.98 for two LPs; but I don't see any one or two CD sets on the Rhino label catalog home page.
If it was just the remastered LP and maybe the live at CBGB package, I would recommend "it," depending on what your defintion of "it" is. But four versions of "Psycho Killer" are more than I need, and I love that song as the archtypical early Talking Heads tune and expression of David Byrne's persona.
I was at that Oct. 11, 1977, CBGB show, because I went to just about every Talking Heads show there. Often, I went to CBGB by myself, preferring to stand/sit at the bar, only a few steps from the stage, which itself was only one step up from the floor. I stayed late one night for a Talking Heads show, and got a ride back to my apartment from Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth in their van. They came up to my dingy railroad flat on E. 26th St. to unwind with a joint, and I rolled them one for the road back to their home in Connecticut.
But for this special show I had a date: Stacy, one of the prettiest, smartest, nicest girls from my high school who was way above my paygrade until my picture started appearing in Newsday. In 1977 I was only 10 years out of high school, and people now noticed me. Stacy, perhaps a year or two behind my class, had given me her number when she recognized me a few weeks earlier during intermission at another show at the Beacon Theater.
I reserved a table, and we stayed for both or all three sets. Around midnight, I asked her if she needed to catch a specific train or be home at a set time (she was staying with her parents), and she said no, gave me a little wink, and I said, "all right!" Something stuck in my head , about her being told to cut loose this weekend, have a blast, don't worry about anything.
The next morning she left me a nice note, as she woke up before I did. On Monday I called her house to thank her. Her mother answered the phone, terse and upset. "No, she's not here, you can't talk to her, please don't call again." It took a week or two to find out that the cancer that had been in remission had roared back. Before we went out, her doctor had told her to go have fun, hold nothing back. A week, two or three weeks later, Stacy died. The Talking Heads show and my date with her was her last good time. Listening to the live stuff over the weekend, 47 years later, still crushes my soul, breaks my heart.
Part one is from Newsday, October 9, 1977. Thanks to the Rock's Back Pages Library of London for digitizing my back pages and handling commercial requests for reprints. The rest, about the remastered 2024 edition of Talking Heads: 77 is new. (c) Wayne Robins, 1977, 2024.