Listening To Talking Heads With My Parents

Revisiting Stop Making Sense

I listened to this cassette A LOT in 1985 and 1986

A few quick links before we begin:

• My latest Stereogum column is out; it features an interview with bassist Jason Ajemian about his friend and collaborator jaimie branch, who died one year ago this week and whose final album, Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((World War)), comes out on Friday.

• I interviewed Michel Dorbon, founder of the excellent French out-jazz label RogueArt, for Bandcamp Daily; the piece includes recommendations for seven killer albums from their catalog.

• I wrote a guide to biker rock for Shfl. It starts with Link Wray, as it should, and includes Davie Allan & the Arrows and Steppenwolf and Motörhead and Judas Priest, of course, but there are some enjoyable surprises, too, I think.

• This retrospective review of Lyle Lovett’s Pontiac, by Nadine Smith, with whose work I was not previously familiar, is really well written. I loved that album in high school, and even though I haven’t listened to it in forever, some of its songs — the title track and “Give Back My Heart” in particular — still bubble up in my head from time to time.

• This Guardian writeup on Tom Waits’ first three Island Records albums — Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, and Franks Wild Years — is a lot of fun. The remastered versions of the albums really sound great; if you’ve never heard them, now’s the time.

And now, our main subject:

I wasn’t a fan of Talking Heads when Stop Making Sense came out. I was 13; I was just starting to be truly aware of the universe of pop music. I had no idea where musicians or records came from — songs were just on the radio, and some I liked (I remember listening to American Top 40 every Sunday for weeks, and being deeply invested, when the Clash’s “Rock the Casbah” was a single, in how high it would get in the chart) and some I didn’t (I was never a Michael Jackson fan to the degree other kids I knew were; a good song like “Beat It” didn’t outweigh a bad one like “The Girl is Mine”).

My parents split up in the early ’80s, when I was 11 or 12. My brother and I would go see my dad every other weekend, first for day trips and later for the whole weekend, staying overnight at his apartment in Brooklyn. (It was, I realize now, gigantic, with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room, a dining room, and an office on the sixth floor of a building from the 1920s. I have no idea how much the rent would be on a place like that now.) We used to go to a video store in his neighborhood a lot, and we’d rent pretty much anything we wanted. One weekend, I rented Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads live concert movie. Again, I wasn’t a fan, but I had one of those big Roger Ebert anthologies of reviews, and he swore the movie was great, so I decided I wanted to see it.

It really is great. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a rock concert as theatrical production — as opposed to a pop concert as Vegas revue — that begins with David Byrne walking onstage carrying an acoustic guitar and a small jambox. He presses play, a ticking drum machine beat starts up, and he sings “Psycho Killer” solo, at one point embarking on a weird, loose-limbed dance as the beat goes seemingly out of control. Over the course of the next few songs, other musicians take up positions behind him: bassist Tina Weymouth is first, and they perform “Heaven” together, with her almost jazzy extrapolations key to the arrangement; then drummer Chris Frantz and guitarist Jerry Harrison come out and they play “Thank You for Sending Me an Angel” in a manic folk-punk style. The next song, “Found a Job,” is funkier, with scratching electric guitar, but the arrangement is still pretty minimal.

Then, on the fifth song, “Slippery People,” the whole machine starts up. Now there are synths, extra guitars, and percussionists (oh my god, the fucking congas) and two backup singers, and it’s just huge, an explosion of sound. For the next 70 minutes, they expand songs from Fear of Music, Speaking in Tongues and Remain in Light — “Burning Down the House,” “Life During Wartime,” “Making Flippy Floppy,” “Swamp,” “Once in a Lifetime,” “Girlfriend is Better”) — into widescreen versions, intensely polyrhythmic and deeply layered in a way that really lets you swim around and appreciate every element and what it contributes to the whole. I feel like what they learned from African music while making Fear and Remain is exactly what I hear when I listen to Fela Kuti or King Sunny Adé, the idea of having eight or ten or fifteen people all working at once, but each doing one precise thing and leaving air in between so everyone can be heard. The music is joyous, funky, arty, and yes, weird but never off-putting. They’re not trying to push you away like Devo or Oingo Boingo might have been; they’re reaching out to pull you in. Talking Heads were having a very strange kind of party in 1983, but everyone was invited.

The movie was incredible. I hadn’t even been to a concert in real life yet, but the performance set a bar that few acts I’d see over the next few decades could clear. (My first concert, Dio at Madison Square Garden in 1986, did clear the bar; just imagine if Talking Heads had had a giant robot dragon with laser eyes, though!) I don’t remember if my dad, his girlfriend (who later became his second wife), or my younger brother liked it or not. My dad’s taste mostly ran to doo-wop and the Fifties and early Sixties rock ’n’ roll he grew up on; his favorite song was the Moonglows’ “The Ten Commandments of Love.” But I was blown away.

At some point later, probably mid-1985 or even 1986, my mom signed up for the Columbia Record & Tape Club and we got a whole pile of cassettes in the mail. Amid the things that were definitely chosen by Mom — The Best of The Band; Time Pieces: The Best of Eric Clapton; the Gordon Lightfoot best-of Gord’s Gold — was a copy of Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense. It only had nine tracks, half of the music in the movie, and/but the cover promised extended versions of six songs (“Swamp,” “Slippery People,” “Girlfriend is Better,” “Once in a Lifetime,” “What a Day That Was,” and “Life During Wartime”) and a different mix of “Slippery People.” (Different than the LP version, I guess. I never heard that, though. Even in the ’80s, I was a tape kid and a vinyl hater.)

I played that tape to death. I had a Walkman that I took everywhere, and Stop Making Sense was one of my favorite cassettes. The versions of “Life During Wartime” and “Burning Down the House” were pure pulsing energy; “Swamp” and “Slippery People” and “Girlfriend is Better” struck me as ominous and darkly poetic, while also totally kicking ass; and the other songs were all really good, too. I never bought any of the band’s early studio albums except Speaking in Tongues, though I borrowed Talking Heads: 77 from the older kid across the street. (I didn’t really like it. Where were the keyboards? Where were the backup singers? Where were the congas?) And I really didn’t like Little Creatures, True Stories (one or two songs aside) or Naked. But Stop Making Sense was amazing. And my mom liked it, too. (Every once in a while, we’d bond over a record — she liked Iggy Pop’s Blah-Blah-Blah, and New Order’s Substance 1987, but she haaaaated AC/DC.)

In 1999 or so, an expanded version of Stop Making Sense was released, containing almost all the music from the movie. I didn’t remember that Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth had performed the Tom Tom Club song “Genius of Love” in the middle of the set; I didn’t like that song, and still don’t. (They also played “What a Day That was,” from Byrne’s solo album The Catherine Wheel.) But there was a lot of other great stuff on there.

Then in 2004, their first live album, The Name of This Band is Talking Heads, was reissued as an expanded 2CD set. I discovered that they’d done the expanded-lineup thing in 1980/81, too, and that shit totally ripped, though it didn’t have the same exuberant sense of fun that the Stop Making Sense performances did. If you watch the 1980 band live — there’s a concert from Rome all over YouTube — they’re noisier, meaner, harder. If Stop Making Sense is Talking Heads as P-Funk, the Rome concert and the second disc of The Name of This Band… are Talking Heads as Miles Davis’s 1975 septet, the band from Agharta and Pangaea.

I finally caught up to their whole studio catalog when it was remastered and reissued in 2005, in the white plastic “Brick.” I liked Fear of Music and Remain in Light and Speaking in Tongues, but the rest of their catalog remained Fine But Not Really For Me.

Now, Stop Making Sense has been reissued again. This time, it’s a double LP with every single song from the movie included; the two previously unavailable tracks are “Cities” and a seven-minute medley of “Big Business” and “I Zimbra.” And I can’t prove this, because I no longer own the cassette or the 1999 CD or a copy of the movie, but I feel like the new mix prioritizes the keyboards and the bass a little more, giving the music even more whomp than it had before. It sounds incredible.

The movie has been remastered and will be put back into theaters, and on September 11 (ha ha), the movie will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, including a Q&A with all four bandmembers, moderated by Spike Lee. People are kind of in shock about that last part, because Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth have had a public hate-on for David Byrne since the band broke up. Some idiots are even mumbling about how maybe there’ll be a reunion.

There won’t be. And there shouldn’t be. Talking Heads were great from 1980 to 1983, but they peaked with the tour documented on Stop Making Sense. Everything after was creatively misguided or aimless, and they overstayed their welcome. But when they were on…holy shit.

That’s it for now. See you next week!