Starkey Talking Heads

Every Album, Every Song
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78952-214-3
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten

Few artists can legitimately claim to be groundbreaking, but Talking Heads are one of them. Like Elvis, the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Radiohead (who took their name from a Talking Heads song), the band recorded some of the most memorable popular music of the past seventy-five years. In his song-by-song discussion of their work, American musician and journalist David Starkey looks at how David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison and Tina Weymouth emerged from New York's mid-1970s punk scene and quickly distinguished themselves as innovative musicians.
Led by the enigmatic and wildly original Byrne, Talking Heads' list of classic songs includes 'Psycho Killer','Take Me to the River', 'Once in a Lifetime', 'Burning Down the House', 'This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)', 'Road to Nowhere' and '(Nothing But) Flowers.' Two of their eight albums, More Songs About Buildings And Food and Remain in Light, are listed among Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums.
Drawing frequently on first-person accounts from members of the band, Starkey brings to life the composition and recording of each song, pointing out hidden patterns in Byrne's lyrics and ensuring that each member of Talking Heads receives credit for their contribution to this unparalleled body of work.

The author
David Starkey is an American writer and musician. A former Santa Barbara Poet Laureate and a long-time reviewer for the Santa Barbara Independent, he is also the author of the novel Poor Ghost, about a plane crash that killed most of the members of a legendary rock band. Toad the Wet Sprocket frontman Glen Phillips called Poor Ghost 'the best band that never was.') A lifelong musician, Starkey plays with various groups in Santa Barbara, California, including the Winehounds, and with drummer Eric Prothero, he records and performs as Falstaff Riley.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Starkey, David

Leseproben

Chapter 2

Talking Heads: 77 (1977)

Personnel:

David Byrne: guitar, lead vocals

Chris Frantz: drums, steel pan

Jerry Harrison: guitar, keyboards, backing vocals

Tina Weymouth (credited as Martina Weymouth): bass

Producers: Tony Bongiovi, Lance Quinn, Talking Heads

Recorded: January-April, June 1977

Studio: Sundragon, New York City

Release date: 16 September 1977

Running time: 38:37

Label: Sire

Album charts: US: 97, UK: 60 Singles charts: ‘Psycho Killer’, US: 92

By early 1977, Talking Heads had more than enough first-rate material for an album, and their constant gigging meant they had the songs down cold.

Making the record should have been an easy process. The band was hoping to work with former Velvet Underground member John Cale as producer, but he was considered insufficiently ‘commercial’ by Seymour Stein. Instead, the group entered the now defunct Sundragon Studio on West 20th Street with Tony Bongiovi ( Jon Bon Jovi’s second cousin), which resulted in what Byrne called in How Music Works, ‘by and large a miserable experience. Nothing really sounded like it did in our heads or like we were used to hearing ourselves on stage’. Byrne says while the group admired Bongiovi’s production of several disco hits, they felt that he ‘didn’t ‘get’ what we were about’.

In Remain In Love, Frantz further describes the less-than-satisfactory relationship the band had with Bongiovi: ‘Tony asked us to do six or eight tracks of each song, far beyond the point where a great take had already been recorded … We felt Tony was condescending to the band, reading magazines about airplanes while we worked. He was repeatedly rude to Tina. Let’s just say he appeared clueless and was not a gentleman’. Bongiovi was determined to have a hit, and he didn’t care how the band felt about his methods of getting there. As a result of their poor relationship with him, the band began to record when Bongiovi was out of the studio. They worked much better with co-producer Lance Quinn and engineer Ed Stasium, finishing ‘the basic tracks, guide vocals and a few guitar and keyboard overdubs in less than two weeks’.

At that point – spring 1977 – they were given the opportunity to open for The Ramones on a European tour, and they jumped at the opportunity. It was apparently a formative experience: Frantz spends more than 40 pages of his book on those few months. After the tour, feeling confident and worldly, they completed the final overdubs in New York, and the album was released in September.

The front cover, based on an idea by Byrne, is mostly day-glo orange, with the title at the top in a vibrant, practically vibrating green. The back cover photograph by Mick Rock is shot from above and shows the band looking, well, very average for a group of musicians. Their hair is well-coiffed, their clothes unspectacular. For instance, Byrne is wearing a plaid shirt. For a group who cut its teeth in the grime and noise of CBGB, they don’t look very threatening. Nevertheless, Talking Heads: 77 is a very punk album. Transform Harrison’s synthesizer into a Farfisa organ and turn the distortion way up on those trebly guitars, and the impact of their formative milieu would be obvious. But even in its actual incarnation, the record reflects punk’s energy: some of it jubilant, some of it nihilistic.

In Talking Heads: Once In A Lifetime (hereafter referred to as Once In A Lifetime), Ian Gittins describes the album as a ‘minor masterpiece’. He calls it ‘minimalist yet complex, cerebral yet visceral, rudimentary and yet undoubtedly progressive. This was thoroughly modern music, lush with textural possibilities and pregnant with the anxieties of urban dwelling.

Forget any notions of arid, art-school rock: these urgent songs were coming equally from both the cranium and the loins’. Gittins is far from alone in his appreciation of the album. Writing in the New York Post in 1977, Carl Arrington noted, ‘Their lyrics are full of deceptively banal subjects … but are clever, and remind the reviewer of the type of pop lyrics Samuel Beckett might write if given the chance. They have been called ‘minimalists’, which, translated, means they write and perform without wasting musical space’.

Things were going well for Talking Heads. Frantz and Weymouth were married in June 1977, and the album was released on 16 September. Talking Heads: 77 placed seventh in The Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop poll of best albums. In his review in the Voice, Robert Christgau pointed out that ‘In the end, the record proves not only that the detachment of craft can co-exist with a frightening intensity of feeling – something most artists know – but that the most inarticulate rage can be rationalized’. Indeed, that would be a hallmark of Byrne’s performances with the band: a weird detachment coupled with an equally weird intensity.

‘Parsing the blend of sincerity and irony in any Talking Heads song is difficult’, wrote Andy Cush in a retrospective review of the album on the website Pitchfork, ‘but you never doubt their belief in the music’. Indeed, whatever one thinks of Talking Heads: 77, its energy and passion are palpable, and it deserves the enduring place it has found in lists like Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time and 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

‘Uh-Oh, Love Comes To Town’ (Byrne)

Right from the beginning, Talking Heads were an unusual band. Granted, the album’s opening track begins with Weymouth’s funky bass riff, which could have been the engine of many a pop song of the late-1970s. It’s pleasant and danceable until the singer interrupts. A white male tenor, he seems to be reaching for the highest notes in his range. ‘Love is simple as 1-2-3’, he says in the concluding line of the opening verse, apparently alluding to the Jackson Five’s ‘ABC’, although he doesn’t sound much like Michael Jackson or someone given to simplicity. Then Byrne veers from the standard love song cliché, telling his beloved that he’s the ‘smartest man around’, with Harrison’s menacing synthesizer note beneath the singing. A lovely and unexpected steel drum break played by Frantz seems to tug the song back toward the world of normality. However, the singer has other ideas. He has ‘called in sick’ to be with his sweetheart, ‘the smartest girl in town’. Indeed, he plans to neglect his duties and get in trouble, but that’s okay because he’s ‘been to college/been to school/met the people that you read about in books’.’ ‘Dude’, you can imagine his paramour saying to the singer. Whoa.

Then a horn section (uncredited in the liner notes) comes up behind the chorus, emphasizing the three unlikely descriptions we are about to hear, suggesting that the singer is like a ‘jet pilot gone out of control’, a ‘ship Captain on the ground’ or a stockbroker who has made a bad investment. Less than two minutes into the first song on their first album, and how far we have come from the opening invitation for the singer’s girl to take his hand and ‘believe in mystery’.

Back come the steel drums, adding grace notes to the singer’s admission that he has lost his common sense and is in ‘a jam like this’. All the while, the bass is following its predictable, syncopated pattern, though the horns on the final chorus are practically bursting through the mix as Byrne almost screams the final obvious answer to why he is behaving so erratically: ‘Love has come to town’.

‘New Feeling’ (Byrne)

Seven seconds into a funky lead guitar introduction, ‘New Feeling’ devolves into two trebly, off-kilter guitars playing against each other, one in each speaker, creating a sound that is not entirely pleasant. As in the opening number, the bass is upfront, accompanied by Frantz’s confident drumming. In a 2020 interview with Slate’s Kurt Andersen, Byrne described the song as ‘a little bit funky, but kind of stiff sounding, but to me it successfully didn’t quite sound like much else’. That’s certainly true. The opening verse lyric depicts the singer struggling with self-control and paradox. He goes visiting and he talks loudly. He tries to make himself clear, presumably without success. Then he’s in front of a face that is ‘Nearer than it’s ever been before’; ‘not this close before’, he repeats nervously. Uh-oh, a listener might think, what’s going on?

After the first verse, the opening guitar riff returns with its brief nod to normalcy before the off-balance second verse. (Apropos of its title, there’s no real chorus in ‘New Feeling’.) Now, the singer is claiming not only that ‘It is a million years ago’, but also that he hears music in his head which ‘sounds like bells’. He screeches a bit when singing the word ‘music’, as though it’s something greater than himself or something he doesn’t entirely trust or understand. Without any evident transition, he tells us that he wants to ‘meet everyone’ and bring them up to his room. One can picture that...