Talking Heads

More Songs About Buildings and Food was their first album produced by Brian Eno, and he shepherded them through two more. The second of those, Fear of Music, finds the band polishing their sound, pushing the dynamics envelope, and developing their interest in rhythms and polyrhythms, especially with the previously mentioned I Zimbra. Fear of Music is a darker album than the two that came before, suffused with paranoia and uncertainty even as the music becomes more solid and self-assured, even funky. It took a while (and perhaps a nudge) before I realized that Fear of Music didn’t express a fear of music, but was music about fears. If you read down the song list – almost all of which are one word titles – the album becomes a list of phobias. So it isn’t so much that the songs are about Air and Cities and Paper and Heaven, but a fear of those things. All of the titles on the album (except, I suppose, I Zimbra and Memories Can’t Wait) can be prefaced by the words “fear of” and they more accurately reflect the tone and topic of the songs. Fear of Drugs, fear of Mind, fear of Animals, fear of Heaven and, their “hit” from the album and one of the best songs in their repertoire, fear of Life During Wartime (with the catchy name-checking refrain, “this ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no fooling around. This ain’t no Mudd Club, or CBGB’s, I ain’t got time for that now”).

Life During Wartime was the track that really started to turn the Talking Heads tide for me. Early in my exploration of new wave, I had very little money to spend, so each purchase was an agonizing decision, since I knew I’d have to live with it for a month until I had enough scratch to pick up another record. So cheap 10” EPs (Oingo Boingo, Nina Hagen) and compilations were especially appreciated, and one of the best compilations I ever picked up was a double-disc soundtrack to an awful movie (well, I haven’t seen all of it, but what I’ve seen is bad) called Times Square. Australian impresario Robert Stigwood made a fortune with his high-concept musical films (Grease, for one example, Saturday Night Fever, for another), before flaming out and losing popular credibility after the expensive disaster of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band (staring the Bee Gees as the band and Peter Frampton as Billy Shears) and the box-office failure of Times Square, which was supposed to be a gritty punk/new wave musical featuring cult actor Tim Curry as a DJ who discovers a girl band who plays on top of a movie marquee in Times Square. Or something like that. If the movie was bad and short-lived, the soundtrack turned out to be an extremely important document in my early collecting, perhaps the single most important collection in terms of introducing me to artists that would become significant to me. Although there are a few clunkers on the album, there is an astonishing number of tracks by significant bands, most of which I heard for the first time on this album. They didn’t always include the most well-known songs from these artists, but that hardly mattered. Any album that manages to include songs from Talking Heads, Gary Numan, XTC, The Pretenders, Joe Jackson, The Ruts, The Ramones, Lou Reed, Roxy Music, Patti Smith, and the Cure can’t be all bad, and, since it was the first time that I had heard most of these artists and led to many fruitful years of collecting, Times Square has become something of the Rosetta Stone in my collection.

At any rate, Life During Wartime is featured on the album, and I immediately took to it. The lyrics are great, for once Byrne’s downplayed, laundry-list style of mundane songwriting really fits the subject, and the track’s chilling, minor-keyed funkiness makes it a compelling listen. Fear of Music was a significant, though transitional, album, in that it was built up from jams, instead of being written like more traditional songs. Consequently, the groove became the overriding concern, and many songs hovered on the same key to facilitate the jams (the ridiculous predictability of the 12-bar blues makes it difficult to listen to, but lots of fun to play, as you always know what the next chord is and when it’s coming up).

This was to be a significant development in the band, and their next album, Remain in Light, exploited this jamming aesthetic. Capitalizing on both Brian Eno and David Byrne’s interest in African music (the two were busy working on their collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, what some (well, one, anyway) consider to be the best album ever recorded), Talking Heads expanded into an 11-piece outfit and took the principles of African music to heart in the song-writing and, especially, the arrangements. Rejecting the competition model of popular music, in which each member tries to outdo the others with their pyrotechnic solos, Eno and Byrne experimented with interlocking musical parts, in which no one instrument would carry the melody or could be considered a solo. Each part fit together with each other part, and no part could stand alone. The result was a dense, polyrhythmic weave, and it touched off a revolution in the way lots of bands approached music for the next several years (for details, hear the extremely erudite and entertaining taped lecture/demonstration Bridging the Gap: African Influences in American Popular Music During the Early 1980s, by, well, modesty prevents me).

I heard Remain in Light for the first time the same week that I heard Japan for the first time, early in my senior year at Interlochen, a heady time when every time I turned around, I was confronted with some amazing new sound or fantastic new band.

Although short of singles (only the sublime Once in a Lifetime cracked the charts, but just barely), Remain in Light was one of the most important albums of the 1980s. And it was fairly popular too. Somehow, Talking Heads had managed to achieve popular success without pandering to the masses. They were pioneers in what came to be known as college rock – slightly more cerebral and less popular than your garden variety pop, with somewhat more demanding song structures and arrangements as well as subject matter – paving the way for such bands as REM in later years. Remain in Light is a phenomenal album, and much more varied than one might expect for an album based on instrumental jams. Alternatingly bracing, heartbreaking, wistful, and invigorating, it is a tour de force, and generally considered their finest moment. It includes songs about mid-life crisis (Once in a Lifetime), third world resistance to first world “progress” (The Listening Wind), and closes with the dense, dark, molasses-slow one-chord dirge The Overload, which recasts Yeats’ The Second Coming as a fragmented tone poem. It raised the bar considerably and sent many bands back to the drawing boards. It must’ve burned the Heads out somewhat, too, as three years passed before their next studio release. To fill up the vacuum, Talking Heads released a wonderful live album (as wonderful as a live album gets, anyway, which usually isn’t very), called The Name of the Band is Talking Heads. Rather than a document commemorating a particular show, The Name of the Band includes tracks from their earliest days to their full-blown earthshaking 11-piece Afro-funk line-up. One side of the album cover shows the band at their muscliest, with their full Remain in Light complement on stage jamming, and the other, intriguingly, shows the original four, playing in what looks like somebody’s living room for about a dozen people.