Friday, May 9, 2008
A definitive new box set will proclaim the eclectic greatness of Talking Heads when the ugliness between David Byrne and Tina Weymouth has long been forgotten.
Dec 3, 2003 | The pages of "Anna Karenina" contain Tolstoy's renowned quip, "All happy families resemble one another while every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." His platitude also applies to those artificial family-like groupings called rock bands.
Consider Talking Heads. Led by art school dropout David Byrne, and manned by Army brats Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, as well as Harvard architectural graduate Jerry Harrison, Talking Heads' repertoire included everything from edgy love songs about Washington bureaucracy to African-influenced techno chants that could turn one's ears into savannas and jungles. Although Mick Jagger and Keith Richards started out as art students like Tina and Chris, the Rolling Stones never wrote a song called "Artists Only" that began with the line "I'm painting again!"
Talking Heads were born of the punk movement, but with their Brady Bunch haircuts and Lacoste shirts, they were obviously not of that brood. The band was also present at the birth of rock videos, yet they transcended the limits of MTV lip-sync fodder, instead producing videos that were the rock 'n' roll equivalent of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's surrealistic masterpiece "L'Age d'Or." Then there was David Byrne's "big suit." Byrne, normally the hipster generation's answer to Mister Rogers, would lumber onstage wearing a white suit padded to the size of a sumo wrestler, then sing, "Who took the money? Who took the money away?"
While your parents never knew that the Beatles almost broke up three or four times before they actually did, the members of Talking Heads aired their dirty laundry in public all the time. At the time of their first album, "Talking Heads '77," we all learned that Weymouth was a bass prodigy who only first began playing her instrument a few months before the band played in public. We also learned that after the band got a record contract David Byrne heartlessly made Tina re-audition. (Apparently she passed.)
Several years later, after the group began working with musical savant (and former art school student) Brian Eno, Weymouth bitterly remarked, "By the time Brian and David finished working together for three months, they were dressing like one another. I can see them when they're 80 years old and all alone. There'll be David Bowie, David Byrne and Brian Eno, and they'll just talk to each other." Doesn't that sound like something best said after your group has broken up?
Fans were surprised that Talking Heads lasted as long as they did. We wouldn't have been surprised to learn about such backstage backstabbing as Weymouth trying to pull a coup d'état by pleading with visiting guitarist Adrian Belew to replace Byrne as the band's singer. Belew wisely declined. On the other hand, in the early 1980s a Czech reporter surprised Weymouth by asking, "How do you feel now about the fact that David has announced he's leaving the group?" This was news to her. Byrne later changed his mind, but it came as no surprise that when he finally broke the band up for good in 1991, he did it in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
I dredge this up because the first Talking Heads box set, "Once in a Lifetime," has just arrived, and already the publicity wheels are turning to sanitize the band's history. Before anything more is said here, it must be pointed out that as an object "Once in a Lifetime" is the most intriguing box set ever created. Rather than some squat Kleenex box, it is a long rectangle the width of three CDs placed side by side, with a cover graced by a poppish painting by Vladimir Dubosarsky and Alexander Vinogradov of a baby among gentle wolf puppies. Inside the booklet are full-frontal nudes of naked suburban men and women, along with a smiling boy whose genitals are bleeding down his leg. On another page, a wolf triumphantly clutches the severed arm of another boy in his jaws. As we will soon see, this is the story of Talking Heads in a nutshell.
Interestingly, Rhino reports that the band was only gingerly involved in this deceptively psychotic package design. Mutilation aside, the box is a reminder that Talking Heads used to spend as much energy creating album covers as they did on recording the records themselves. Byrne and Weymouth labored together to create the mosaic of 529 Polaroids for the cover to the band's second album, "More Songs About Buildings and Food." Several years later, Jerry Harrison spent six months trying to find someone to manufacture the cover that artist Robert Rauschenberg had created for "Speaking in Tongues." Harrison finally found a company in Minneapolis that could do it -- it manufactured Oscar Mayer wiener packages.
As for the music in the box, the 55 tracks demonstrate that Talking Heads followed through on the Beatles-Dylan tenet that a band should change musical directions at least several times in its career. The box contains their early minimalist terse-titled numbers like "Pulled Up" and "No Compassion" as well as their brittle funk cover of Al Green's "Take Me to the River" and the neo-Eno-psychedelia of songs like "Drugs" to the neo-Funkadelic "Burning Down the House" to the simple pop of later Heads tracks like "Creatures of Love." Byrne once said, "I think Talking Heads can be as popular as the Carpenters." As unlikely as this goal seemed at the time, the box shows the band almost was.
The box set isn't a complete history, however. In their time, the songs on the Eno-Byrne album "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts," as well as the songs Byrne wrote (with production assistance from Jerry Harrison) for choreographer Twyla Tharp's "The Catherine Wheel," fit perfectly with Talking Heads' songs. Even the Shaggs-adelic record Weymouth made with her sisters, "The Tom Tom Club," goes well with some of the cartoonish songs from "Little Creatures." What's missing is worth mentioning because for 30 years now "greatest hits" collections have had as much credibility as original albums. In the early 1970s, the kids too young to have bought Beatles records snatched up "Beatles, 1962-1966" and "Beatles 1967-1970." Later, listeners too cheap to buy all the Eagles' albums made their "Greatest Hits Vol. 1" one of the best-selling records of all times. Lou Reed has almost as many "greatest hits" albums as full-fledged releases. The first R.E.M. record our children buy is likely to be a greatest hits collection as well.
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