Talking Heads – Totally Nude

By any criteria, this is a strange choice of song to showcase Talking Heads (there is no The in the band’s name, as underlined in their 1982 live double album, The Name of the Band is Talking Heads). Throughout their decade-long career, Talking Heads changed sounds and revolutionized popular music a number of times, and those milestones are much better served by choosing more typical fare from those vaunted albums. You couldn’t do better to encapsulate their nervous, jittery early sound then to include their first hit, Psycho Killer, or almost any track from their sophomore effort, and first of their Brian Eno produced trilogy, More Songs About Buildings and Food. You could illustrate their growing rhythmic awareness with the wonderful I Zimbra from Fear of Music, which foreshadows their reinvention as an African-styled band on the landmark Remain in Light album, which was instrumental (some pun intended) in kicking off the world-music movement of the 1980s and beyond. You could even argue for inclusion of something from the more stripped-down, funky, Speaking in Tongues album, or even their return to guitar-driven pop documented on Little Creatures or True Stories. But nobody is going to pick a track that’s buried on their largely ignored final album, an album that saw them (heard them?) shifting gears again and taking on a whole new sound right before they disintegrated. But, as has been amply proven by now, this isn’t about Talking Heads, its all about ME, and, of their long-limbed reach into my own personal music collection, perhaps there is no more significant track.

I first encountered Talking Heads (even though I know, it’s very difficult not to add an article in front of their name) before I had heard of Talking Heads. I was on the cusp of adolescence, and I was visiting my grandmother, Oma, at her house in Seattle. Wandering around the neighborhood on my own one day, I walked down an alley behind the QFC grocery store. It was an exciting and confusing time. I was well on my way to manhood, but was still very much a child. I wanted to be on my own, but wasn’t quite old enough to be trusted yet. There were many things I felt secure and smug about my knowledge of, and many others that were terrifying and intriguing mysteries. In other words, I was thirteen, just entering my adolescence without having any idea what that really meant. I had recently stumbled into the heady and fathomless worlds of both music and sexual awareness and was struggling to come to terms with both of them. Walking down the alley, I felt dangerous and capable in an urban environment (I was far from either dangerous or capable or even an urban environment, but it all seemed pretty edgy at the time). I noticed that somebody had sprayed some graffiti on the wall. Among the usual boasts and obscenities, “the girls want to be with the girls” was dripping down the whitewashed brick wall in sloppy red spray-painted letters. That stopped me. What did that mean? Was it a sexual thing? A political thing? A gender thing? I didn’t understand. I knew someday I would know what that meant, but I also knew that day was a long way away, and as sophisticated and capable as I sometimes felt, seeing those mysterious words – which meant so much to somebody that they painted it on a public wall in direct violation of the law – I knew I was still just a kid. I kicked a can hard down the alley, and scuffled back to Oma’s house for lunch.

Years later – three, to be exact – I was in dance class at Interlochen, a junior who had recently made the jump to the higher levels of study to become a full-fledged dance major. I had entered Interlochen refusing to pursue the viola any more and aiming to be an actor. I had just seen A Chorus Line in Seattle and was so affected by it and had such a longing for that kind of life and attention that I dropped out of the local junior high to enter the Arts Academy a year earlier than I had planned. But acting wasn’t really for me. I liked being on stage and performing, but I could not get my damn voice to behave and do what I thought it should. No accents came out correctly, no inflection was plausible, I was able to suspend nobody’s disbelief for even one moment – especially, and most critically, my own. I tried my hand at photography for my sophomore year, but I hadn’t developed much of a visual sense by then and the few interesting prints I came up with that year were entirely accidental – I had to rely solely on other people’s opinions of what was good. So, I switched to dance. That way I could be on stage without having to worry about being betrayed by my voice. I made the switch despite (or, perhaps, because of) my parents’ deep misgivings. They were both dancers, so they knew from whence they spoke, but I didn’t care. I had been taking dance class for those first two years because there was a physical education requirement for underclassmen and I didn’t want to suffer through phys ed any more, after having survived the humiliating and downright dangerous junior high gym classes.

I really liked the physical challenge and sense of accomplishment I got from dance class. I advanced quickly through the introductory levels and, against the active lobbying of my own mother who was the ballet teacher and head of the dance department, had jumped the enormous chasm between Level 2 and Level 3 (1 led to 2 and 3 led to 4, but 2 did not, by any stretch, lead to 3). Part of my rapid rise through the ranks was because I was a guy, and there’s a different set of criteria (and much less competition) for male dancers as there is for female dancers. And part of it was that I was, perhaps, genetically predisposed to do well in dance, as both parents were accomplished classically trained ballet dancers.

At any rate, at the end of the year there was a student choreography showcase for those dancers (Level 4) that took choreography class. Although not in the choreography class (Level 4, the hardcore dancers, took their academics in the morning and danced all afternoon, Level 3 had their three hours of dance in the morning and sat, sweaty and stinking, through their afternoon academics, so rarely did the two groups meet), I was in the pool of eligible dancers to be used for the choreography workshop performance and was recruited into a couple of pieces. One of them used a piece from Talking Heads’ second album, More Songs About Buildings and Food, called Take Me to the River. I didn’t know it at the time, but it’s a cover of a famous Al Green soul classic. What I did know about it was that, with the exception of the treated drums that introduced the piece, I hated it. The vocals were pinched and grating, the music lurched more than it flowed, and the whole affair seemed awkward. But, since I was in a dance piece that was choreographed to it, I had the dubious pleasure of getting to hear it several dozen times over the course of a couple of weeks, and it did start to grow on me. I never liked the song as much as those few treated beats that set the tempo for the song (still don’t), but the door had been opened to the world of Talking Heads.