Music of Sound

Can I tell you my Talking Heads story? It takes a little while, so bear with me.. and no, it doesnt involve me literally loving Tina Weymouth, mores the pity… but it does go right back to year zero for me with regards to the aesthetics of music…

When I was a kid my first ‘real’ exposure to music beyond what was immediately in front of me came via my older brother who by then was attending boarding school (we lived on a farm, too remote to commute to secondary school) and he’d return home for weekends with his ghettoblaster full of new music. Mostly he was into the Rolling Stones, Jethro Tull, David Bowie, Talking Heads… but one weekend he arrived home & had two new albums; ‘Remain in light’ and ‘My Life In the Bush of Ghosts’. Yep! home taping sure killed the music market. But he wasnt sure if he liked either of them – ‘its all too weird’ which immediately picqued my interest… I couldn’t assimilate the names of the albums let alone the music & the weird vocal samples but it had this otherworldly feel to it that inverted or at least initiated my aesthetic mind to the unknown… It was mysterious as all hell & yet felt grounded in multiple cultures, none of which I had any immediate experience with. It suggested a world far, far larger than my immediate neighbourhood & slowly it began to become both my favourite album & my starting point for developing a love for music; not the music anyone else told me I should like, but the music I loved.

The problem was it set a high tide mark for all the subsequent music I heard. How come most of the ‘new’ music was actually quite plain & boring? It took a year or five, but it slowly dawned on me; I had fallen in love with an eclectic kind of music that was equally esoteric & mostly ignored by pretty much everyone I knew or met for the following decade… Is that my fault or theirs? Such questions haunt you at that age…. but I persevered with the question…

Fast forward a decade & I’m at secondary school & there was a 12 hour long music festival called Sweetwaters South happening at the ex-Commonwealth Games venue in the small/big-for-me-then city of Christchurch & aside from such rock bands such as The Pretenders & Simple Minds there was also a band called Talking Heads…. needless to say I had big expectations & I wasnt disappointed; this was the Stop Making Sense Tour and MUCH thanks to the non-existence of the interweb the entire audience was oblivious to the stage setup… & when David Byrne walked out on stage in the crazy oversized suit & matching oversized ghetto blaster & asked if he could play us a song, of course the response was rapturous… And I specifically remember when first the bassplayer joined in & then they rolled on the drumkit – it was a beautiful de-construction of the ‘band’ concept..

But…

Nothing they did before, or since, has surpassed those two albums…. I guess it was just a moment in time; for them, for me & for anyone who it resonated with… but it is a rare & precious thing to be able to pinpoint an album that was so deeply influential in so many ways….

So of course we know Eno & Byrne’s egos & input were writ larger than life as to what & how, but actually what was the how of that formative album? How did it occur? Heres a quote from Tina on this very subject:

“When we were making Speaking in Tongues and Remain in Light, we were jamming. From that we were taking the best bits and then recording and improvising on top of those.”

Ah so! The core essence was jams; that makes a lot of sense, when I know from personal experience that the most transcendant moments of my musical involvement occurred during jams… but they just get written off as frivilous, fun-at-the-time jams unless of course someone is recording them in a way that they can later on be cut up & ‘organised’ into something more coherent than their freeform origins… Was that person Eno? or did he turn up afterwards? Who knows?
But as a bass player I know what provides the true basis of music: drums & bass. And on a personality basis I know who I trust most of any musicians in a band, the bass player. They tie the melody to the rhythm & contribute a major part of the ‘feel’ to a song… And so I stumbled across this interview with Tina Weymouth, bass player for Talking Heads & the fantastic Tom Tom Club…

>What do you remember most about the band’s early days?

“I remember how committed we were, but also how tough it was. We were on Christy Street, near the Bowery, and it was simply a space that was both affordable and non-residential, so we could play our music. We lived on pasta and cottage cheese. We had no shower and no hot water–just a hot plate and a mini fridge. Our big refrigerator was the window ledge. The toilet was down the hall, and I was the only one who ever cleaned it. But it never really got clean, so eventually I just spraypainted it silver, a la Andy Warhol.
The whole setup was really unsanitary and dangerous and weird. This was right when Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver came out, and I had to cut off all my hair to avoid being propositioned by pimps on my way to CBGB’s. I still looked 15, and after seeing little Jodi Foster in that movie, I just said, “No more!” But I think being absolutely bone poor is the most motivating thing in the world. We were so committed; we rehearsed seven days a week.

> In the early ’80s, you embraced synth bass when many bass players swore it was the end of the world.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t have that sort of macho identity with my bass. I’m not that wrapped up in being a bass player. I am like a jealous lover if I hear someone playing my bass, though–it’s like they’re making love to my lover. How dare they? [Laughs.] I’ll hear the voice of my bass calling, and I have to go stroke it and play it again.
Another reason I ended up on keyboards so much was that David assembled the big band for the Remain in Light tour. It was really just the four of us on the record, with occasional appearances by Robert Fripp or Adrian Belew on guitar for eight bars or so. But then, to keep from getting bored, David and Jerry added [keyboardist] Bernie Worrell and [bassist] Busta Jones for the tour. Having Busta in the band was fun for me, because it allowed me to do other things besides play bass, and to see the structure of a song from another perspective.
It really just made me more flexible. Like with “Burning Down the House” [Speaking in Tongues]–I originally wrote my part on bass guitar, but when I got into the studio it didn’t sound tight enough for me. So I ended up playing it on a Prophet 5 [synthesizer]. Now we’re playing “Burning Down the House” live on tour again with the Heads, and I’m back to playing it on bass guitar and it sounds really good. You serve the song; that is of utmost importance.”

> How did the band’s partnership with Brian Eno affect things?

“We were huge fans of his, and even when David began acting weird we brought Eno back into the picture for Remain in Light because he was so full of ideas–and I think that record is wonderful for having had Eno as part of it. He’s very good at pushing and stretching boundaries, and only people who are willing to put their hand in the fire should work with him. He and David had some sort of falling out during their My Life in the Bush of Ghosts [Sire] project in 1980, and that created tension. But it was good for the group to have so many ideas bouncing around in the studio. Sometimes Brian wanted more of his ideas than ours, but I don’t think that’s frustrating–that’s just him. What’s frustrating is when you don’t have ideas.”

> Were David and Brian responsible for the cut-and-paste approach to bass on Remain in Light, where multiple bass tracks were recorded and then pieced together during mixdown?

“Yes, those lines were created by Eno, purely with the studio. Both Brian and David were constantly playing bass during those sessions, and I encouraged it. But whenever I would show up to the studio in the morning, before the two of them had arrived, the engineer would take me aside and say, “Look, this is really bothering me. These guys keep missing beats.” So he’d have me replay what they had recorded the night before.”

Hah! God bless engineers at simultaneously problemsolving & preserving egos!

“When it comes to effects, I go through periods of change,” Weymouth admits. “Right now I’m using just a little MXR Flanger; it gives me a bit of extra sustain and chorusing. I think effects are great in the studio–I say, ‘Go for it!’ But onstage, you must simplify. Everything breaks in the live situation; it’s amazing. My mother calls it la malaise des choses–the malaise of things.”

Check this fantastic Tom Tom Club video for Genius of Love: LIVE at McCarren Pool, Brooklyn

& such is youtuber (who would name a TV channel after a potato?) you can either watch the fantastic animated version with mono sound, or the static version with stereo sound… & they try to pretend its progress eh?

A final note: yes, I did get excited when they released the multi-tracks of a few songs off Bush of Ghosts for all & sundry to remix. Did I remix them? Nope. Did I listen to the raw tracks? Hell yes!! There is a saying that I personally think is very relevant to this, attributed to Basho, a haiku poet from the mid 1600s: “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.”