Search - Talking Heads :: The Name of This Band is Talking Heads

Remembering the great years of this band.

Christopher J. Jarmick | Seattle, Wa. USA | 05/29/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"In 1982 the original vinyl version of The Name of This Band is Talking Heads was released in 1982. Even though the sound quality was far from perfect it offered a gold mine of great live performance tracks mostly from the early incarnation of the band.



Talking Heads were THE alternative Band for at least a decade, (1977 to 1987). They brought African, Latin American, World rhythms into their music (courtesy of a great collaboration with Brian Eno) before Paul Simon re-invented himself with GraceLand. David Byrne was the hopeless geek who became a spazzing epilectic singer who fell in love with witty nosequiters that became unlikely catch-phrases -- `This is not my beautiful wife!"



The vinyl album was out of print for nearly 20 years. And following Jonathan Demme's super 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense; it became easy to forget about the `other' live collection of music--at least for a while.



However once the band stopped making new albums, fans wanted all of their recordings on CD and the missing one had been this album.



Rhino Records has reissued the album with 12 previously unreleased tracks, a generous booklet of photos and press clippings and a sound quality that is far better then the original album. The downside? A few tracks have been re-shuffled, a minute or two of intro and outro music has been trimmed (most for time reasons but in one case because of sound quality problems). So if you were in love with the original album and are a die-hard purist-- you can still whine about how they have released the album.



I find the album reason to celebrate big time.



Two discs, each one approximately 78 minutes long. Disc 1 covers 1977 to 1979. Disc 2 1980 to 1981. Some of the live tracks sound very close to the studio versions you have heard on Talking Heads. There is still a bit more spontaneity and range in Byrne's vocal, a few more grunts and odd cartoon noises and from the band a little bit more instrumental noodling than on the studio recordings. There's also the previously unreleased song: `A Clean Break (Let's Work)' which is a fine sounding mid-tempo kind or art pop alternative song.





The Talking Heads are nothing at all like The Ramones. David Byrne isn't really Iggy Pop--but they both seem to have at times a manic style. Byrne's was always actually in control, sometimes purposefully too tightly wound and it would explode on demand in glorious artistic pretensioness--that no one was ever supposed to take seriously.



What you hear is a very talented group of musicians wound tightly around the David Byrne show. His vocal style is treated as the lead instrument--but it's a jazz instrument and not put up on a pedestal, instead it represents sounds that the musicians can play with, improvise with. Byrne' grunts, squawks and creates guttural sounds in and around the jittery, just short of strained vocal delivery he gives his lyrics. And the lyrics range from semi-conscious, stream of conscious herky-jerky rants, to eerie imagery and those fascinating lists he comes up with. Sometimes the lyrics are beautifully simplistic, at other times they jump and leap frog from subject to subject and are delivered with tones that vary from blissful naivety to cynical spitefulness--sometimes within 10 seconds.



One of my all-time favorite tracks is #14 -- For Artists Only where we hear the childish rantings of a frustrated artist voicing both his joy and frustration with the creative process teasing and cajoling either his lover or muse (or both), your choice.



Disc 2 covers performance from 1980 to 1981. This included the tour in support of the brilliant Remain in Light album and the Talking Heads expanded it's original quartet: (singer/guitarist Byrne, drummer Chris Frantz, bassist Tina Weymouth, keyboardist/guitarist Jerry Harrison) to also include Parliament keyboardist Bernie Worrel, guitarist Adrian Belew, percussionist Steve Scales, second bassist Busta Jones and backup singers Nona Hendryx and Dolette McDonald. This resulted in a sound that wasn't just quirky but positively bursting with loud defiant kinetic funk--world pop style. It also made Byrne less odd-ball nerdy and more pretentious--but in the best way possible--with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Three different concert performances in Tokyo (previously available on a bootleg album), Cherry Hill N.J. and Central Park.



There's more melody and fleshed out musical highs when material from the stripped down Fear of Music album is played and that works well in terms of Animals. Sometimes a few bars of a suggestion that was on Remain In Light is fleshed out in the most entertaining way imaginable such as with Houses in Motion and Born Under Punches.



You have three songs that get two versions on these discs. The second disc's version of Psycho Killer is as expected complete with a longer funked out conclusion. The Take Me To the River rendition has a loose gospel feel but not as show-stopping over-the-top as in Stop Making Sense. The version of Cross eyed and Painless on this CD is minus an excellent musical interlude introduction. If you don't know it, you won't miss it, if you do know it, it's the one bit of editing you might find hard to figure. However this collection adds so much richness in terms of more material and much better sound--let's not quibble about that.



If you're a fan of the band, I can't recommend this collection highly enough to you. Over the last few months I've fallen in and out of love with various songs, embracing and rejecting and then embracing again just about every song on these discs. That's why I'm not doing a song by song run through of the entire 33 songs that are listed on this album. Some days I like some songs better than I do on other days. I listen to this one obsessively for a few weeks, than after a month or two return to it again and again.

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