Talking Heads

Talking Heads followed a long and honored tradition of starting at an art school. For years, it has seemed that some of the best bands come out of art schools, which makes you wonder where the artists were coming from. At any rate, Talking Heads started when David Byrne met Chris Frantz and his girlfriend Tina Weymouth at the Rhode Island School of Design and they decided to move to NYC and get a Soho loft and do the whole downtown art scene. They recruited keyboardist Jerry Harrison from Jonathon Richman’s band The Modern Lovers and Talking Heads was born. Jonathon Richman is an important figure in the underground downtown music scene because he did not fall easily into either of the two big musical camps that had circled their wagons around their large and distinctive bonfires. Richmond sang quirky and sweet pop songs in a low key and charmingly amateurish, almost childish, way, and gave inspiration to musicians who didn’t want to be part of either the establishment or the established antiestablishment. The popular music scene was famously bloated and stagnant by that time, with bands like Fleetwood Mac and Foreigner spending obscene amounts of money and time in the studio crafting their elaborately ornate pop and getting farther and farther away from what rock ’n’ roll was “supposed” to be but, more importantly, they were starting to drift from what people wanted to hear. And, perhaps most importantly of all, they weren’t inspiring any other bands. What they were doing was so far from what was even conceivable by young guitar heroes with their axes slung over their shoulder as to make the whole enterprise of trying to be a musician seem impossible and unrewarding. As a reaction to this, of course, were the punks, named after a downtown ‘zine (before they were called that), and famously stripping rock back to it’s three-chord blitzkrieg bop, all energy and brevity with a refreshing DIY (do it yourself) aesthetic and an endearing lack of polish (or talent or taste, it might be argued). Punk was led by The Ramones, before the British stole it and politicized it and codified the look and re-imported back stateside, and the center of the punk universe, the venue at which the Ramones and their ilk held court, was a small Bowery dive known as CBGB’s.

Actually, what really made CBGB’s the epicenter was the unprecedented decision by owner Hilly Kristal to not only let bands play original material, but to demand that the bands played original material. At that point the only way to play at a club in New York City was either as a cover band – in which original material was strictly verboten – or if you had a recording contract. When Hilly opened the doors to original bands with no recording contracts, the flood began and punk and new wave were born.

This last point is often overlooked. Everybody knows that CBGB is where punk came from, but people tend to forget about the new wave. Not every band that played there copied the Ramones three-minute, three-chords formula. Blondie may have started slightly punky, but they were really a new wave band, and arguably the most successful band to come out of the CBGB stable. The other band that could challenge Blondie on all fronts (new wave stylings, influence on other musicians, and wide-spread popular success) was Talking Heads.

By this time, the Heads were all living together in a Soho loft, and practicing late into the night in their empty building. In trying to come up with a name for the band (always one of the most important, and often most contentious, decisions for a new band), somebody (probably David Byrne) suggested Talking Heads, which is a television production term for the kind of Meet the Press program that featured shots of, well, talking heads. Tina put the name on a t-shirt and was walking around town and some guy stopped her and asked if it was the name of a band. She said it was, and he shook his head, declaring it perhaps the worst band name in all of history. So they kept it.

Although they played regularly at CBGB’s, under no circumstances could Talking Heads be considered a punk band, except in the extremely broad definition that punk is anything that wasn’t blessed by a corporation. Talking Heads was geek rock, the antithesis of the kind of swaggering, testosterone soaked “cock rock” played out in huge arenas by bands such as Led Zepplin and the Rolling Stones. The were intellectual and proud of it – or at least unapologetic – and they sang quirky songs about working for the government (and being modestly happy about it) or trying to be an artist or flying over the countryside or making videotapes. Or, very occasionally, flying off the handle and killing everybody. In general, they were small people singing small songs about small things. Their early aesthetic is summed up in their second album title, More Songs About Buildings and Food (which, incidentally, pictures the band on the cover in hundreds of overlapping close-up Polaroids, a technique that would be, um, borrowed, shall we say, to great success and notoriety by David Hockney a few years later). The band was solid, even though their songs were quirky, but the real focal point was the vocals of David Byrne. His lyrics were literate and subtle, when they weren’t downright banal, but his vocal style was shrill and harsh. He sounded nervous and jumpy whenever he sang, and the effect not only inspired lots of other non-singers to take up the task, but also gave the band a slightly menacing sound, especially in their first hit, Psycho Killer, in which it’s very easy to imagine the tightly-wound Byrne coming undone and causing severe collateral damage.