Posts Tagged ‘David Byrne’

Write-a-thon, Day 35: They don’t pay me to sit here and look pretty

Posted: July 27, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
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I’m starting a new job on Monday. It’s a contract job, and it might only last until Thanksgiving, but I’m hoping for something longer. It’s a good job and I’m excited about it. Satisfying assignments! Interesting co-workers! Payday!

It’s been an unsettled time, filled with networking, interviews, freelancing, conferences, more networking, and too much time on LinkedIn. Do I wish I had written more during these months? Of course I do. But I wrote what I wrote and page by page I’m going to get where I want to go.

We celebrated my new status by eating too much pizza. We’re going to walk it off tomorrow while hiking around Mt. Hood. Mountain ridges, views of distant peaks, alpine meadows, mountain flowers. And in two weeks, payday!

One more day in the Write-a-thon is in the books. Literally.

Random Pick of the Day 1.0
David Byrne, The Catherine Wheel (1981)
Most of David Byrne’s solo work leaves me cold, but what I like I like a lot, and that includes about half the 23 songs on this disc. The lyrics are subpar by Byrne standards, but the music often rises above – way above. I was an idiot for not appreciating this album 30 years ago.

Random Pick of the Day 2.0
Bobby Fuller Four, I Fought the Law (1966)
Bobby Fuller (who died at 23) was a talented man who loved the music of Buddy Holly (who died at 22). This record is a vision of what Holly might’ve sounded like if he’d lived, except I have the feeling that if Holly had lived past 1959, he would’ve changed a heckuva lot by 1966.

Fuller’s work is particularly interesting in that it was recorded against the tidal wave of the British Invasion and on the cusp of psychedelia. Fuller is known today solely for his version of “I Fought the Law,” but frankly I think everyone else does it better. I prefer his originals, especially “King of the Beach,” “Baby My Heart,” and “Nervous Breakdown.” They were released on other albums or as singles, but later releases of the BF4 are usually called I Fought the Law and sometimes include them. Bobby Fuller’s catalog has been messed up by decades of nostalgia but is worth exploring.

 

Write-a-thon, Day 33: Someone left a train out in the rain

Posted: July 25, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
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Robert Louis Stevenson drew a map of an island and was inspired to write Treasure Island. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about a Hobbit and from there drew a map of Middle-Earth. Many writers start writing after being captivated by a drawing or a photo. Others cut pictures out of magazines to help them visualize their characters or some aspect of their stories. Writing is surprisingly visual.

For my book, I bought 10 irregular sheets of poster board at an art supply store. The biggest is about 2’x3’. I took all the book covers, magazine photos, and old postcards I’d collected with a mountainous, railroady theme and spray-mounted them on these boards. I glued a balsa-wood frame to the back of each to keep them from warping, then hung them on the walls around my corner desk. This way I write while looking at the physical setting my characters are moving through.

I also drew a map of the where the action is, but my illustration skills are stuck in the sixth grade, when I struggled to draw a creditable starship Enterprise. (Still working on that one.) I keep redrawing the map for practice but I’m not getting better at it. I know the look I want and at some point I’m going to hire an actual artist to do it.

Meanwhile, it occurred to be that I could one-up Tolkien and RLS. (Boy, I never thought I’d get to say that.) I love building models. My book is full of trains. Why not build a model of something I’m writing about?

Micro 1

Nature is always trying to come indoors and take over. If you leave your car parked too long, nature will grow under it and eventually over it. Same with trains. Open-top cars left on a siding will eventually support enough wind-blown dirt and weeds to initiate agriculture. I’ve hiked past abandoned bridges that were turning into gardens way up in the middle of the air. Look at what happened to the High Line in New York:

High Line

I thought I was going to have one such bridge in my book, with an abandoned gondola astride it. So I made one. (This was also a way to sneak a garden railroad into my wife’s garden.) The wood came from an old dish drainer. The plants are a type of sedum that’s pretty much indestructible. It all lives outside; I’ll bring it in when winter comes.

Micro 2

I tried to sell these photos to Classic Toy Trains, but for some reason they weren’t enthused about showing their readers how to destroy their classic toy trains. They were very nice about it, though.

Micro 3

After further thought I decided to put this bridge in my second book. At least I’m thinking ahead. For my next construction project, I considered a half-size caboose replica, but I had some doubts I could secure trackage rights for the backyard. Maybe I’ll build that miniature Cape Cod lighthouse after all. It could double as a doghouse.

Today I went to the gym for the first time since the Write-a-thon started, so I’m feeling particularly virtuous this evening. My new mantra is short and intense workouts rather than lengthy and laid-back. Blood, not just contusions.

Random Pick of the Day
Ministry, Filth Pig (1995)
Sometime in the early 1980s I saw The B-52s at Kane Hall at the University of Washington. The opening act was a Seattle band called The Blackouts. It was an unlikely pairing, as The Blackouts were dark and noisy and The B-52s are light and zany. But it’s a rock-concert tradition to pair like with unlike. A tavern here in Portland just had Wicked Sin opening for The Punctuals. I didn’t go. I knew it was wrong.

The Blackouts eventually met a heavy-metal industrialist named Al Jourgensen and under his leadership formed Ministry and became even darker and noiser. Filth Pig is a good example. On this disc, Ministry did everything it could to clear the dance floor. The album name was thought up by a 16-year-old boy with bad skin and no hope of getting laid. The cover art is grotesque. The track listing is unreadable. Most of the songs are as listenable as a space shuttle in need of a new muffler. The singing is not so much singing as it is screaming at Orcs.

But! This album has their cover of “Lay, Lady, Lay” (track 9, since you’ll never decipher the info on the CD). The first time I heard it, I thought it was a joke. I listened a second time because I was looking forward to the laugh, but I didn’t laugh. I just listened. Now I’ve heard it many times and I think it’s beautiful. (Dylan does it again.) “Lay, Lady, Lay,” and tracks 1, 2, and 10 redeem Filth Pig for me.

Random Pan of the Day
Fun Boy Three, Waiting (1982)
The musical equivalent of the plastic garbage floating around in the Pacific Ocean. David Byrne produced this thing, after producing another inept record earlier in the year, The B-52s’ Mesopotamia. But 1982 also saw Talking Heads’ first live album,  the excellent The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads. Strange year for David Byrne…The only FB3 song worth its weight in vinyl is one of their two collaborations with Bananarama, “Really Saying Something,” and in that one they let the girls sing the leads.

I know I said I wasn’t going to do anymore music reviewing while the Write-a-thon was on, but I can’t seem to rein myself in. So many bands to insult, so little time.

 

You may ask yourself, how did they get here?

Posted: April 9, 2013 in music, Record reviews
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True Stories
Talking Heads
1986

Every album Talking Heads released after Stop Making Sense (1984) was a disappointment. How could it have been otherwise? How do you top or even equal a record like that? Only The Beatles created a pop cultural icon and then came back to create a second: Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road.

(The only Beatles competitors I can think of are Bruce Springsteen for Born to Run and Born in the U.S.A. and Pink Floyd for Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. Doubt me on that last one? Even Special D, who would rather go bird-watching in the Mines of Moria than listen to Pink Floyd, just had “Leave those kids alone!” pop into her head.)

True Stories is the music from the film of the same name, directed by David Byrne. It appeared two years after Prince tried to pull off the same trick with Purple Rain. I haven’t seen either of these movies even though my TV remote has a Netflix button. However, I’ve heard all the music. On True Stories, Byrne’s vocals seem cold and detached, but his original plan was to have his actors sing the songs so I won’t subtract points here. But the various ballads and songs of love on this disc turn me off, which is kind of a problem if you’re writing ballads and songs of love, and the closer, “City of Dreams,” drags on like a really boring dream you want to finish so you can get out of bed already and get some breakfast.

On the plus side, I mostly like “Love for Sale” and I would’ve loved “Puzzlin’ Evidence” if it had been an instrumental. I get tired of hearing “puzzlin’ evidence” over and over. And over and over. The one track that broke into the Top 40, “Wild Wild Life” (which shot all the way to #2 in New Zealand), is infectious but might’ve worked out better for Wang Chung.

True Stories is not a bad record – I give it a solid B – but it suffers because of what went before it. That’s not fair but I get paid to be unfair. OK, I’m only pretending that I get paid, but I’m definitely unfair.

As for Purple Rain, for all its faults, it’s more exciting than True Stories and light years sexier. True Stories doesn’t have a Darling Nikki, who enjoys a good grind.

Random 1986 Could Go Either Way of the Day
The Mission U.K., God’s Own Medicine
They were called The Mission in the U.K. and The Mission U.K. in the U.S. I don’t know what they were called in the U.S.S.R. Their music was perfect if you were a moody teenager who came home from school and locked yourself in your room so you could be all moody.

Rhapsody calls them “goth’s answer to The Monkees.” Allmusic.com describes them as “pompous, melodramatic, and bombastic.” Why are they being so mean? The answer is right at the beginning of this record, when singer/guitarist Wayne Hussey intones, “I still believe in God, but God no longer believes in me.”

If you like The Cure and The Cult, two moody English bands that hit it big, you might like their younger, less-talented but moderately OK brethren, The Mission.

Random 1986 Pan of the Day
The Dead Milkmen, Eat Your Paisley
This album’s a snore, but the Milkmen had a knack for titles, from the name of their band to “The Thing That Only Eats Hippies.” R.E.M. could only dream of being so witty.

What we talk about when we talk about Talking Heads

Posted: July 24, 2011 in Concert reviews, music, Record reviews
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Stop Making Sense
Talking Heads
1984

I’d like to have a few words with you today about the value of friends. And I don’t just mean how much money you can borrow from them. My friends have more than once straightened me out about music. Today I’d like to tell you about my friend Donald and the gift he gave me: Talking Heads.

Donald was a great guy, but there was this one thing about him. He was weird. He was bookish and hyper-intellectual, a guy who, in 1983, when this story begins, listened to King Crimson, Yes, Neil Young at his most cheerful (“Cortez the Killer”), and contemporary classical – a subgenre of classical music that most people avoid because it makes their teeth fall out. One of Donald’s heroes was Béla Bartók. Have you ever spent any time with Béla Bartók? You can easily reproduce Bartók’s most renowned music by cranking up an orchestra inside a revolving cement mixer. However, I once heard something melodious by this man. I was eager to tell Don about it:

Run-DMSteve: I heard something I liked by Bartók!
Donald: What was it?
Run-DMSteve: It was called “Hungarian Sketches.”
Donald: That’s wimpy Bartók!

Everyone is trying/to get to the bar
The name of the bar/the bar is called Heaven
And you thought I was a snob. Later Donald was sorry that he didn’t encourage rather than disparage me. Let me add right here that in addition to the millions of books he’d read and songs he’d listened to, most of which I wouldn’t touch on a bet, Don was one of the best defensive centerfielders I’d ever seen. He could chase down fly balls that were barely in the same area code.

Don was the person who made me a fan of Talking Heads. Until I met him, I hadn’t thought much about this band, except to turn their songs off when they came on the radio. When I heard Talking Heads on commercial radio in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I didn’t hear much I cared for: The insipid “Love Has Come to Town,” for example, and the incomprehensible “Psycho Killer.” In fact I mainly knew “Psycho Killer” from the parody by The Fools, “Psycho Chicken”: “I plucked him once/why pluck him again?”

The band in Heaven/they play my favorite song
Play it once again/Play it all night long
I understood why Donald loved David Byrne, the main creative force behind Talking Heads, because Byrne was weird. And that voice. Where have I heard that voice? On a Saturday morning cartoon, perhaps. Byrne’s voice is otherworldly (like David Bowie, Lady Gaga, and Gary Numan) and comical (like Weird Al, Fred Schneider, and the guy who did the yodeling in the Dutch prog-rock band Hocus Pocus). At any moment you expect him to de-materialize. Or else say “Well fuck it then” and pull out an accordion.

It didn’t help that Andy Warhol did some early radio commercials to support the band in which he a) acted like a total nerd, and I don’t think he was acting, and b) basically said that he liked Talking Heads because they were nerds. And those of you who have met me and are now asking why I couldn’t get down with a heightened degree of nerdiness can just shut UP.

Heaven/Heaven is a place/A place where nothing/nothing ever happens
When Talking Heads came to Seattle in 1983, Don insisted that I go with him, his wife, their precocious grade-school daughter, and a couple of his fellow hyper-intellectuals (minimalists, surely). Don might have even bought my ticket. If he didn’t, he should have.

The concert wasn’t what I expected. The songs I had previously disliked or had never heard were accelerated and deep-fried in funk. The concert followed a storyline, with Byrne opening the show alone and welcoming his bandmates singly and in groups as the songs progressed. By the time Byrne climbed into his Big Suit to sing about his girlfriend with bows in her hair (and nothing is better than that) and suggest that we stop making sense, I was banging my face into the stage. I never felt that way in a synagogue.

There is a party/everyone is there
Everyone will leave at/exactly the same time
The following year this tour was immortalized by Jonathan Demme in Stop Making Sense. I saw this film three times when it was released and I saw it again on the big screen with a younger generation of nerds in 2009 when it was rereleased. It was every bit as powerful in 2009 as it was in 1985 and I was surprised at how well I remembered it, whereas I don’t remember much about the concert at all and in fact I don’t even connect the band I saw live with the band I see in this film. (One of the few things I do remember from the concert is that everyone on Don’s side of the family brought a book.)

If you’ve been to a rock concert, you know that musicians who have been on the road a while forget what city they’re in and sometimes what song they’re in. They forget the words, make up new ones, hit the wrong key, crash into an amp or the bass player. Guitar strings break. Drums fall over. On The Clash’s From Here to Eternity, Joe Strummer croaks “Take it from me” to Mick Jones in the middle of “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais” because his voice is shot.

It’s hard to imagine that/nothing at all
Could be so exciting/could be so much fun
There are no mishaps or indecisive moments in Stop Making Sense, a record of a concert that never was. It was filmed by multiple cameras over three nights. The sound was run through a studio the way milk and ice cream are run through a blender. It makes Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones look crude and The Last Waltz look stagy. Bob Dylan’s Renaldo and Clara is a pebble on its shoe. Stop Making Sense is so powerful that I hate to think what my life would’ve been like if Demme had decided to make his movie about Queensrÿche or Kenny G.

Writing in The New Yorker in 1984, Pauline Kael said she loved the film but that the songs all sounded the same to her. What makes Stop Making Sense irresistible? Is it the way the tension builds in the first half as the band multiplies and the black-shirted roadies wheel out the equipment? Is it that supreme moment in “Once in a Lifetime” when the two female singers with outstretched arms rise behind the ranting David Byrne? It is all the quotable lines?

–       Same as it ever was
–       You may ask yourself, how did I get here?
–       I feel like talking to someone/who knows the difference between right and wrong
–       This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no fooling around
–       Changed my hairstyle so many times now/don’t know what I look like

I have the answer and here it is in one sentence: Stop Making Sense is to a real concert what high-end pornography is to real sex.

Table 1. Shared characteristics of Stop Making Sense and high-class porn

  • Lengthy Bolero-style build-up
  • Everybody knows where everything goes
  • Everything is illuminated
  • Everything is audible, too
  • No time-outs
  • No encore

Stop Making Sense is a fantasy that musicians and audiences can all aspire to. And no one has to take their clothes off.

When this kiss is over/it will start again
It will not be any different/ it will be exactly the same
I play the Stop Making Sense soundtrack a lot but only a few of Talking Heads’ other songs: “Cities” (which was cut from the film), “(Nothing But) Flowers,” and “Sax and Violins.” One of Byrne’s collaborations with Brian Eno produced a gorgeous song called “Strange Overtones.” But mostly it’s Stop Making Sense for me – one of the pillars of my musical universe.

In 1984, Donald walked into a costume party at my house wearing a suit and a tie and carrying a guitar and a boom box. He placed his boom box on the floor and announced, “Hi. I have a tape I want to play.” Wherever you are, Don, I thank you again. If it weren’t for my friends I’d still be listening to Three Dog Night. In my parents’ basement.

It’s hard to imagine that/nothing at all
Could be so exciting/could be so much fun
Rest in peace, Amy Winehouse. I have rarely heard a voice like yours.

Heaven/Heaven is a place/A place where nothing/nothing ever happens.