Although it’s my own personal favorite B-52s release, the 1982 EP produced by David Byrne known as Mesopotamia is generally thought of as being one of their least successful records. At least it was critically savaged when it first came out, but to my mind it contains their very best work. The hiring on of Byrne, then at the height of his creative powers, I thought was an inspired move on the band’s (or label’s) part. Byrne introduced the polyrhythmic beats of Remain in Light and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts to the signature sound of the “tacky little dance band from Athens, Georgia’’ to great effect. I was a big Talking Heads fan, and a far bigger B-52s fan, so hearing elements of the Heads’ “Afro-Eno-era” sound melding with the wacky racket of the B-52s was heaven for me as a teenage rock snob. Byrne took the B-52s sound to a different place, and I felt nicely expanded on their sonic palette. The B-52s obviously felt differently, as Byrne was fired before a complete album could be recorded (hence why only an EP of the sessions was released).

Seriously, you have no idea how often I played this record. It falls into the “soundtrack of my life” category in a big way. But what many fans of the group do not know is that there are three very different versions of Mesopotamia: The “classic” shorter US/Warner Brothers EP version; the extended mix version mistakenly(?) released in Germany and in the UK by Island Records; and the 1991 CD version, which basically mixed David Byrne’s contribution right out of the proceedings…
 

 
The first two B-52s albums are classics, and to my mind perfect in every way, but a third album in that same style would have probably been one too many. Byrne’s involvement, for many fans and critics, took the band a little too far away from their inspired amateur beginnings. Perhaps, but who else but Byrne was capable of coming up with such amazingly funky polyrhythmic grooves back then? And haven’t the B-52s always been about the beat? David Byrne was on fire at that time creatively and was simultaneously working on his masterpiece score for Twyla Tharp’s Broadway ballet The Catherine Wheel. I’ve read that the B-52s felt that his production made them sound too much like Talking Heads, but hey, what a valid direction that was for them! True, certain elements of their signature sound were diminished (Ricky Wilson’s Venusian/spy-fi surf guitar for one, and Keith Strickland’s drums were crowded out by a drum machine), but other elements (Wilson’s striking use of dissonance in his compositions) are given freer rein with different instrumentation (like the nearly atonal “No Wave” brass section and sleekly synthesized bass lines) than the B-52’s normally employed. And it’s a much darker, dreamier vibe for them, for sure. Their sound was nicely expanded upon by Byrne’s “dubbier/trippier/hip hoppier” production approach, if you ask me, but the B-52s didn’t ask me, and it was their call, ultimately.

Still why not release a special collector’s edition of Mesopotamia with the original longer David Byrne mixes and the known outtakes: “Queen of Las Vegas,” (see below), the original “Big Bird” and “Butterbean” (both recut for Whammy) and the pretty Fred Schneider sung ballad “Adios Desconocida” (which you can hear here). In any case, the longer, “alt” David Byrne version of Mesopotamia, unavailable now for 40 years and never released on CD can be downloaded all over the Internet (it’s not hard to find). I don’t hate the 1991 remix of Mesopotamia, but I’d never choose to listen to it over either of the other versions. Ever. ‘Nuff said.

An absolutely slamming live “Mesopotamia” from the Rock Pop Festival, Dortmund, Germany, 1983:

 
Much more after the jump…

 
The death of one form brings forth life in another.

Something was going wrong. It wasn’t just with the band, it seemed to be happening everywhere across the country. The Specials were on tour promoting their second album More Specials. It should have been a happy time. But in every city they visited, every gig they performed the tension, the anger on the streets and in the concert halls was becoming more and more apparent. There was a feeling the country was falling apart.

In 1979, the newly-elected Conservative government gave a promise to “heal” the nation “and sow peace” after the failure of Labour’s policies in 1970s which had given rise to three-day weeks, power cuts, endless strikes, a “winter of discontent,” where the dead were left unburied and the garbage piled-up on city streets. But as soon the Tories were elected, they turned true to form crucifying the poor and helping the rich. They closed down factories, destroyed hope, and created mass unemployment. The promise of a better future and the opportunity to achieve was only intended for a select class.

Jerry Dammers the Specials co-founder, producer, chief song-writer and keyboard player thought the new Prime Minister “Margaret Thatcher had apparently gone mad”:

...she was closing down all the industries, throwing millions of people on the dole. We could actually see it by touring around. You could see that frustration and anger in the audience. In Glasgow, there were these little old ladies on the streets selling all their household goods, their cups and saucers. It was unbelievable. It was clear that something was very, very wrong.

While there was something wrong going on in the country, there was also something very wrong with the Specials. When the band got together to record their next single “Ghost Town” everyone stood “in different parts of this huge room with their equipment, no one talking.” Dammers left the recording twice in tears seeing his hope for the band falling apart.

As fellow bandmate Neville Staple recalled the Specials ended “differences of opinions”:

...some wanting to lead things in one direction, some in another. I guess we were such a mixed bag of personalities, with various skills and talents, we just wanted different things and couldn’t agree enough to stay together.

It was probably the wrong move but Staple took “the bull by the horns and got stuck in and just kept going…[..]..never stopped.”

In the summer of 1981, the Specials released “Ghost Town.” It became the band’s biggest hit spending three weeks at number one in the UK Charts. The song reflected the sense of despair that had spread across the country as riots erupted in London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. The country was burning. At the moment of their greatest success, the Specials split.

Staple teamed-up with his fellow bandmates Lynval Golding and Terry Hall. and formed a new band—the Fun Boy Three.
 

 
More on the Fun Boy Three, after the jump….

 
“Once in a Lifetime” is not only one of best-known tracks ever released by Talking Heads, in some ways it represents the culmination of the entire Talking Heads project. It appeared on the band’s fourth album Remain in Light, which represents the approximate midpoint of their run. David Byrne was in the arguably most creative phase of his career, working with Eno on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (a very relevant album for the messianic preaching found in “Once in a Lifetime”) as well as churning out the soundtrack to The Catherine Wheel. Shortly after the release of Remain in Light, Esquire magazine unveiled its list of 373 Americans under 40 who are “changing the world”—according to Sytze Steenstra in Song and Circumstance: The Work of David Byrne from Talking Heads to the Present, Byrne was the only figure from the rock world to be selected.

I was in middle school when “Once in a Lifetime” came out—I saw that video countless times on MTV. Nobody who’s seen the video can really forget it, what with twitchy, skinny David Byrne rapping himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand, backed up by a quartet of Byrnes all sync’d together in this hypnotic way. Toni Basil, who was also a choreographer on top of being a singer, and Byrne worked out the unusual movements, pitched (per Steenstra) “remained at midpoint between dance and muscular spasms.”
 

 
In the pages of the April-May 1981 issue of Musician, another David B.—namely Breskin—asked Byrne about the origins of the “voices” that inspired Remain in Light and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts:
 

Breskin: Do you think of the voices on Bush Of Ghosts as ghosts?

Byrne: No. But I think of the music on the record as very spiritual, so you might connect that with ghosts.

Breskin: How spiritual?

Byrne: It’s difficult to explain. I think it’s a combination of the rhythms and the more mysterious textures and sounds. Like Remain In Light, there’s a positive, affirmative feeling there but then there’s also a mysterious, other-worldly feeling. Almost all the vocals we put on it have to do with one kind of religious experience or another …

Breskin: Which in a couple of cases intersect with current political experiences, like with the “Unidentified indignant radio host” railing against our lack of nerve in the you-know-what crisis and on the other side of the coin, you include Algerian Muslims chanting Qu’ran. Where did you get the “Unidentified exorcist” vocal to take Kuhlman’s place?

Byrne: Right off the radio. It was a phone-in show, people called in to have this guy drive off the evil spirits. There’s another guy in California who has you put your hands on the TV screen and he puts out his hands to touch yours and heal you through the TV.

Breskin: Can you imagine yourself in a similar role?

Byrne: What, telling people to put their hands on the set?

Breskin: C’mon David, you know what I mean …

Byrne: Helping to heal people? Preaching? Yeah, in a way. I get a lot of inspiration from the evangelists one hears on the radio throughout the U.S. I think they’re dealing with a similar aesthetic; in the more exciting preaching I think they’re going after a thing similar to the music. But I’m not very direct about it though. I like to plant just the seed of an idea in someone’s head rather than telling him exactly what I think.

Breskin: With a lot of those testifyin’ preachers, there seems to be a contradiction — or a tension — between what they’re actually saying and the way they’re saying it.

Byrne: Yes, sometimes there is. Sometimes their delivery is real ecstatic, but what they’re saying is so conservative and moralistic. It’s hard to reconcile the fact that these guys are going absolutely berserk while they’re telling everyone to behave themselves. And they’re madly raving, jumping all over the place. In that kind of preaching — like in a music piece — as much is said in the delivery and the phrasing as in the words. What’s important isn’t what’s literally being said.

 
Not surprisingly, the isolated vocal track for “Once in a Lifetime” sounds very strange indeed—you almost wouldn’t think it was part of a song.

Listen after the jump…

 
The first episode of the PBS anthology series Trying Times (originally called Survival Guide) was directed by Jonathan Demme. “A Family Tree” stars Rosanna Arquette as a science major and aspiring astronaut on a nightmare first visit to her future in-laws’ place. Everything that can go wrong does, but nothing is worse than the behavior of her presumptive brother-in-law, Byron, the boorish pie-hoarder played by David Byrne. “Ask me what’s the most poisonous snake in the world,” he dares her.

I recommend the whole half-hour episode (split into 1 2 3 parts on the YouTube), but the “Who ate my pie?” scene below is a satisfying quick fix of David Byrne acting like a total asshole.

The New Yorker posted this review of “A Family Tree” shortly after Demme’s death.
 

Klaus Nomi

I’ve blogged about Sean Bright‘s fun pop-up cards featuring Roxy Music, Delia Derbyshire, Grandmaster Flash, De La Soul, and many other pop culture notable in the past here on Dangerous Minds. This time it’s his jumping jack puppets and felted dolls that have me swooning. They’re damned adorable. I’m especially smitten with his Moondog felted doll. Incredible!

The jumping jack puppets include Klaus Nomi, David Byrne, Adam Ant, David Bowie and Morrissey.

Prices for the jumping jack puppets are around $18.00. The Moondog felted doll is priced at $45.00.

 

David Byrne
 

 
More after the jump…

 
David Byrne writes on influential artist and “alt country” pioneer Terry Allen‘s classic 1979 album, newly reissued by Paradise of Bachelors.

A SLEEPING BAG IN THE WEST TEXAS SCRUB: Reflections on Lubbock (on everything)

Well, I’m here in NYC, chopping onions, and “Amarillo Highway” is playing—so I’m dancing and singing and crying all at the same time. It doesn’t get much better.

I once hitchhiked cross-country and got dropped off on that Amarillo Highway, just as it was getting dark, and a little cold (it’s the High Plains). I was tired, and it was the middle of nowhere (I was not in town), so I walked out into the West Texas Plains scrub and just pulled out a sleeping bag and lay down. That’s a way of saying that highway draws up some pictures in my mind.

So does Lubbock—it must have been 1979 the first time Talking Heads played there, and someone had made a banner to hang by the stage that said in big letters “this ain’t no disco.” These, as some might recall, were the days when disco was viewed as formulaic factory-made music that was threatening “real” music—rock or country, or whatever. The sign had nothing to do with the subject of the song— an imaginary scenario where urban warfare breaks out in the U.S.A., and the singer realizes the revolution is more important than nightclubbing. Whatever. I was a little confused—I liked some disco music!—but I kept mum about that, as I perceived it was meant as compliment.

So … years later … like the instrumental time segue in “The Wolfman of Del Rio” and the one in “The Girl Who Danced Oklahoma” (he does it twice!)…. I was living in L.A., and like many who wash up there, I had aspirations to make a picture. A writer I admired said, “You need to meet Jo Harvey Allen and listen to Terry’s music!” I took that advice. There was some hilarious miscommunication—I think when we first met, in Fullerton, I wrote my contacts on a McDonald’s bag that Jo Harvey promptly threw out. I persevered; I loved her show As It Is in Texas, and by then I was addicted to Terry’s music.

What was Mr. Psycho Killer doing there? The answer is self-evident—listen to this music. Why did Joe Strummer and Terry’s friend Joe Ely become fast friends?

Fast forward… we all became great (if sadly often long distance) friends. I never thought much about it—it all seemed as natural as breathing—but later I realized that, although Terry and I come from different worlds, we do a lot of the same things—music, theater, art—with complete disregard for definitions and boundaries. It all made perfect sense to me, but it didn’t always make life easy, as not everyone gets that. Terry has navigated those waters (or highways, I guess I should say) with skill and maybe some West Texas dance moves, managing to avoid some of the rocks and perils that are strewn about such a hairy career path.

Anyway, back to the record. Terry sometimes sings from his own, or what I assume to be his own, POV—his commentary on Joe Bob, the local football star who “goes bad,” is Terry’s version of schadenfreude, as is “Truckload of Art,” a well deserved comeuppance. “Oui” lays out the painful dilemma many a struggling artist or musician has to consider. But just as often Terry is singing from the POV of the character in the song—like the braggart in “Amarillo Highway.” And sometimes he sings in the third person too—he describes what someone in the song does or feels, and suddenly we’re watching them, watching from Terry’s West Texas vantage point … watching the waitress or the kid who gets his first “release” (took me a while to figure out what that meant!) on “that vinyl tuck and roll.” They’re all described with tender, loving sarcasm, which is a default with Terry. You know you’re OK when he starts seriously teasing you.

The music—first of all, God bless Lloyd Maines, whose hands are all over this album. Secondly, having sat in with Terry more than once, I know that these songs are not as easy to play as I, for one, might have assumed. Sometimes there is an “extra” bar, and sometimes there’s an “extra extra” bar, as the music often follows the lyrics and the peculiar phrasing of the singer. Terry is a storyteller, after all, and the cadence and timing of the words cue the punchlines. Though the music might be vernacular—a mix of country, Latin, and Texas rock—he blends those genres to fit his own ends. It’s familiar sounding, but at the same time something’s off, and that something is what intrigues; it’s what keeps you paying attention.

I’ll point out that there are Latin rhythms present in some songs—not that surprising, as Buddy Holly, that other son of Lubbock, did the same. The Latin and Mexican tinge is ever present in music of all types from that part of Texas. It is absorbed and becomes part of the songwriting and musical grammar of everyone who emanates from that region. It adds a lilt and swing and some ironic references as well (e.g., cocktail lounges) … it adds to the meaning of the songs. The border is fluid, when it comes to music at least.

These songs were written and recorded quite a while ago— so how do they hold up? Pretty damn well, I would say, but I’m not an impartial judge. Musically, this record could have been made this year—“Americana,” it’s called now—and it would be judged an amazing record still.
 

 
What does the title mean? To me it means that Lubbock, the town where (this is not my joke) it’s so flat, if you stand on a chair you can see your own backside, is like a sauce that flavors all of these songs. What’s the leather chair on the cover mean? I don’t know. There have to be some mysteries left unexplained, I guess.

So if you’re reading this, it’s too late—my words can’t convince you to buy the album. But maybe I can convince you that appreciation for Terry’s art, and this is surely art, is widespread. It goes well beyond Texas. In my opinion it’s art that uses a popular form, hijacks that accessibility and familiarity, and says things you’d never expect those forms to say. This is not regional music or regional art—it touches folks cutting onions (now sautéed) here in NYC and wherever folks’ ears and hearts aren’t stuck in a rut.

—David Byrne, 2016

 
A loft in Manhattan, New York, 1979: Talking Heads are working on their latest album Fear of Music. A TV crew from England are present making a documentary for the UK arts series The South Bank Show. They interview and film the band at work—writing, rehearsing and recording songs. At times, listening to Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, Jerry Harrison and David Byrne talk they all make it seem what they’re doing is really quite ordinary, almost mundane. Frantz says he considers his life quite normal when not on tour. He gets up early rather than sleeping all day and going to the clubs at night. Byrne, who sounds at times like Andy Warhol—nervous, shy—discusses his thoughts about dressing like ordinary working people in ordinary everyday work clothes, though he soon discovered keeping up with ordinary fashions was expensive. Tina Weymouth points out the band plays under full house lights and eschew spotlights on solos. They are earnest, conscientious, and make it sound as if what they are doing, what they are creating, is quite workaday when in truth this talented quartet are producing something very, very extraordinary.

As the documentary develops, the disparity between their artistic aspirations and their personal points of view of what they’re all about becomes apparent—with Frantz musing on whether it’s good old rock ‘n’ roll or actually art that they are producing. History’s jury has already returned the verdict on that—a unanimous decision in favor of art—great art.
 

 
Weymouth, Frantz and Byrne first played under the name The Artistics. They had an idea of “combining conceptual and performance art with popular music (their sound earned them the nickname The Autistics).” Then a friend suggested the name “Talking Heads” lifted from the TV Guide—which appealed as it had no genre defining angle. Dressed in button down shirts, sensible shoes and corduroy in amongst the ripped T-shirts, leather jackets of New York’s punk clubs, Talking Heads was a vision of the future, belonging to no genre or scene, ultimately. This became more than evident through the eight studio albums the band produced between 1977 and 1988.

Keep reading after the jump…

 
In 1987, the B-52s produced an incredible public service announcement for AMFAR (The Foundation For AIDS Research) with the late NYC-based video artist Tom Rubnitz (best known for the “Strawberry Shortcut” and “Pickle Surprise” videos) and several of their closest famous friends. The colorful tableau vivant recreated the Beatles’ iconic Sgt. Pepper’s album cover with the flowers spelling out “Be Alive”

Along with the B-52s, you’ll see Korean video artist Nam Jun Paik, Allen Ginsberg, Dancenoise, “voguing” pioneer Willi Ninja, Nile Rodgers, Joey Arias, Tseng Kwong Chi, Mink Stole, ABC’s David Yarritu, “Frieda the Disco Doll,” John Kelly as the Mona Lisa, Lady Bunny, performance artist Mike Smith, Kenny Scharf, David Byrne and then-wife Adelle Lutz, model Beverly Johnson, NYC “It Girl” Dianne Brill and Quentin Crisp among many others.

If this isn’t eighties enough for you already, note the presence of “Randee of the Redwoods” (comedian Jim Turner) the acid-fried MTV “presidential candidate.”
 

 
It’s common knowledge that Radiohead got its name from a song written by David Byrne called “Radio Head” that appears in the movie True Stories. What’s less well known is that Byrne wrote that song about Stephen Tobolowsky, a familiar character actor and raconteur whose signature role is Ned Ryerson in the classic 1993 movie Groundhog Day.

This remarkable happenstance was revealed on Tobolowsky’s recent appearance on the Nerdist podcast hosted by Chris Hardwick. The story is told around the 40-45 minute stretch of that episode.

So what’s going on? Let’s start with the premise that Stephen Tobolowsky claims to be more than a little bit psychic. Add to it the fact that Tobolowsky is credited as one of the co-writers of True Stories, along with the playwright Beth Henley. So if nothing else, Tobolowsky and Byrne were hanging out a bit during the mid-1980s, while they toiled on this movie. (In the Nerdist interview, by the way, Tobolowsky says that Byrne threw out most of Tobolowsky’s contributions as a writer.)
 

 
In his college years, Tobolowsky more or less stumbled on psychic powers of considerable potency, if the stories he tells are to be believed at all. As he puts it, he developed the ability to “hear” or “read” people’s “tones,” that is, to intuit a whole lot of private and even situational information about a person just by being in the same room with him or her. One story involves blurting out that a quasi-mentor of his was living under an assumed name and that his initials were actually “M.L.” or “M.K.” (they were “M.K.,” in the event). He tells a couple more stories of that level of mind-boggling ability—stories that, if true, would cause quite a few skeptics to give up the argument entirely. Tobolowsky continues:
 

So my girlfriend Beth at the time thought, “We have a real money-making thing here! ... You know, we’ll have people pay a quarter or a dollar and have you read their tones.” She would round up people, bring ‘em in to the green room or whatever, and you would think it would be funny, but I would go, like, “Ah, you just got an inheritance and you want to know how you’re going to spend that money,” and they would get up and cry, and everyone would have these creepy, creepy, creepy feelings.

Beth loved me for it, and she thought, “This is so cool, what are my tones?” and I said, “I gotta quit doing this, because this is way creepy, and I don’t really like it.” So—while that nineteen furious days that we were working on True Stories, Beth says, “Tell David. Because David wants to put all these true stories in his movie, Stephen. Tell him the true story about you hearing tones.” And I said, “No, baby, no, I don’t want—” “No, tell him the story about you hearing tones.”

So I sat and told David the story of me hearing tones. And he looked and says, “You’re kidding!” And I said, “No, David, that’s really the story but I don’t do it anymore, I don’t like to do it anymore, it was too creepy, and I don’t like to do it anymore.”

So anyway—sure enough, a year later, David has written into True Stories a character that hears tones, and he wrote the song, that day he came over and played “Wild Wild Life,” he says, “Here is a song that I wrote for you, Stephen.” And we put it in the thing, and it was “Radio Head.”

[Hardwick gasps.]

“I’m pickin’ up somethin’ good…. Radio Head….”

So Radiohead got their name from the song David Byrne wrote based on my psychic experiences when I was in college!

 
Continues after the jump…

 
Max Headroom, now there was a weird-ass experiment. In hindsight the digital character is the very definition of a “curio.” It takes only a few seconds of watching Max to remember just how irritating he was, a stuttering, condescending, smarmy non-entity (literally) who is devoid of content (making him a natural pitchman for Coca Cola, which he was for several national advertising campaigns). Watching authentic artists like Sting and David Byrne interact with Max is a little painful. 

Before the narrative sci-fi show Max Headroom descended on U.S. shores in 1987, British audiences had been “enjoying” The Max Headroom Show, which featured interviews and music videos, throughout 1985 and 1986. In the first clip, Sting is promoting The Dream of the Blue Turtles as well as The Bride, his first movie after Dune, so it must be 1985. True to Max’s essential vapidity, they discuss shoes for most of the interview. The strategy of intersplicing unmotivated stock footage resembles nothing so much as a short film by Lelaina Pierce as recut by Michael Grates, to invoke the Winona Ryder and Ben Stiller characters from Reality Bites.
 

 
Of course Sting is inherently annoying—check out his shades—but it’s really not his fault in this case; David Byrne’s naturally distanced temperament works a lot better. Unfortunately, the clip, put up by the official Talking Heads YouTube account, gets badly out of sync after a couple of minutes, but given that it’s Max Headroom, it hardly matters. Byrne is there to promote True Stories, his only directorial feature, so it must be about a year later than the Sting interview.

The Max Headroom Show, not to be confused with the narrative show Max Headroom, was the original Short Attention Span Theater. As many have noted, it was the perfect plastic entertainment for the Reagan era, so much so that Garry Trudeau in Doonesbury turned the sitting president into an unfunny imitation called Ron Headrest.

In retrospect what’s interesting is that the technology was so evidently driving the car—the technical feat of an electronic Matt Frewer cackling at Sting is actually impressive, but the form was miles ahead of the content. Space Ghost Coast to Coast, which hit in the 1990s, evened the scales a bit more successfully.
 
Max Headroom interviews Sting:

 
Max’s interview with David Byrne after the jump….

 
Here’s Kermit the Frog covering “Once in a Lifetime,” wearing the David Byrne oversized suit from Stop Making Sense and faithfully reproducing Byrne’s spastic movements from the video.

I can’t decide if Kermit’s endlessly reasonable (never truly frantic) voice actually fits this material—does it matter?—but it’s a hoot either way. This appeared on Muppets Tonight in 1996, and the voice of Kermit is provided by Steve Whitmire in this instance.

And it leads into a perfect Statler & Waldorf parting shot. Of course! 
 

 
It’s cellist/composer Arthur Russell’s great triumph that his influence became so massively widespread, and his great tragedy that he never knew it. His AIDS-related death in 1992 happened before the world caught up with him, but his vision impacted genres as widespread as acid house, jazz, minimalism, ambient, folk, hip-hop, dub… this could go on, as a concise summation of Russell’s improbable career is just flat out impossible. DM’s Niall O’Conghaile did an insightful post on Russell about a year and a half ago, and frankly, I can’t touch it. If you want to know more, I strongly recommend you have a look at it. Now is fine, I’ll wait.

There’s a lot of GREAT personal and musical background on Russell here in this rarely seen video. It features his friends and collaborators David Byrne, Philip Glass, and Allen Ginsberg, and it was recorded in 1994 as a video press kit for the posthumous Another Thought, a collection of unreleased late-career recordings. Bonus: David Byrne’s heroic pony tail.
 

 
More after the jump…
 

 
Oh what a time it must have been on Manhattan’s Bond Street in the mid-1970s. Bond Street connects Broadway and the Bowery exactly where CBGB’s used to be, and a lot of cool folks used to live there when it was still considered a pretty sketchy part of town—before NYU moved in. Today Bond Street is mostly known for very expensive co-ops.

David Byrne used to live at 52 Bond Street back in the day, just a few steps away from CBGB’s. He crashed with an old RISD buddy of his, an artist named Jamie Dalglish. Dalglish was and is a painter but at that time he was obsessed with video. In 1975 he had the idea of a video art project that would consist entirely of interviews. The idea was that Dalglish would compile hours and hours of footage of his artist friends talking with Byrne—but Byrne would be offscreen the entire time. The name of the project was “Talking Heads.”

As David Bowman relates in his book on Talking Heads (meaning the band, not the video project):
 

But back in 1974, Dalglish spent most of his energy on ideas about video as a replacement for language. At year’s end, Dalglish would undertake a massive seven-and-a-half-hour video consisting of more talking than images. It would be composed of fifteen static shots of fifteen different people sitting in a chair listening to David Byrne.

David was talking—jabbering actually—performing a stream-of-consciousness dialogue off-camera. Tina said, “The tape was David spouting off what other people thought. Memorizing anecdotes and advertisements from TV. Things that he’d heard other people say.”

—snip—

This video disappeared years ago and has become the Holy Grail of Talking Heads research. Dalglish is convinced that Talking Heads manager Gary Kurfirst has it. Kurfirst says he doesn’t know what Dalglish is talking about.

I’m not a private detective or anything, but to me it sure sounds like those tapes are lost for good, fellas.

As Byrne blandly tells it in his 2012 book How Music Works, “In the mid-seventies I was offered room and board in New York by a painter, Jamie Dalglish, who let me sleep on his loft floor in return for help renovating the place. This was on Bond Street, almost right across from CBGB, where Patti Smith would read occasionally while Lenny Kaye accompanied her on guitar.” And that’s the last we ever hear about Dalglish—and no word at all about Dalglish’s “Talking Heads” video project.

Here’s a little more about Bond Street, taken from a 2007 article in the New York Observer—the whole thing is worth a read:

My other neighbors included a struggling and somewhat unstable artist, an ex of David Byrne’s, and a lesbian novelist who would later publish to considerable acclaim but who then worked at a rickety table I could see out my window, where she’d gently masturbate with one hand and hunt-and-peck type with the other. Our doormen were typically prone and pungent skid-row types. There were several Bowery hotels, a.k.a. flophouses, nearby, but no Bowery Hotel, and certainly no trendy restaurants.

The only semblance of uptown chic arrived with visitors slumming at CBGB. Which may be why, after Talking Heads shows, David Byrne would escape to visit my downstairs neighbor, a fellow Rhode Island School of Design grad, [this is almost certainly Dalglish—Ed.] while Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, who shared a cold-water loft on Chrystie Street, would come to my place for hot showers and quick pick-me-ups.

The full “Talking Heads” videos appear to be lost, but you can see four short snippets to get a taste of the whole thing. Here Byrne and artist Jeff Koons discuss authenticity in music, working in a key reference to The Bob Newhart Show:

David Byrne / Jeff Koons:

 
After the jump, Byrne talks with Jeff Turtletaub, Chris Frantz, and Vito Acconci…

 
There’s a book to be written about musicians who started their careers by playing the ukulele. The ten-year-old Leonard Cohen taught himself to play the ukulele long before he learned to play the guitar. The teenage John Lennon was taught by his mother Julia how to play uke before Paul McCartney helped him hold down a chord. Fellow Beatle George Harrison was a life-long enthusiast, and kept a car boot full of spare ukes to give to fellow fans. Joni Mitchell wrote all of her early songs on a uke, long before she could afford to buy a guitar. Bill Drummond of The KLF once said he was so in love with his ukulele he took it to bed. While David Byrne, who was proficient as a child on harmonica, accordion and guitar, started his show business career busking with a ukulele around New York, before forming Talking Heads with Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth.

It is also worth noting that these talented ukulele-players have achieved great success in a variety of other disciplines—writing, painting, film-making, and art—with David Byrne arguably being the most creatively diverse of the bunch.

Here the inspirational Mr. Byrne performs a cracking set from his Uh Oh tour, on Halloween, 1992. Recorded at The Count Basie Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, this excellent concert was released long, long ago on VHS as Between the Teeth, which leads to my only question, why no DVD release?

Track Listing

01. “Well”
02. “(Nothing But) Flowers”
03. “Girls On My Mind”
04. “Mr. Jones”
05. “Something Ain’t Right”
06. “Life During Wartime”
07. “Women Vs. Men”
08. “Hanging Upside Down”
09. “Lie To Me”
10. “She’s Mad”
11. “Blind”
12. “Make Believe Mambo”
13. “And She Was”
14. “Buck Naked”
15. “Road To Nowhere”

Enjoy!
 

 
Hidden in plain sight in the midst of his prodigious creative output, there is an unfairly overlooked gem in David Byrne’s discography that I feel is an absolutely monumental masterpiece of late 20th century music, one right up there with Talking Heads’ Remain in Light and his seminal collaboration with Brian Eno, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. I refer to the seamless funk opera score Byrne created for choreographer, Twyla Tharp in 1981, The Catherine Wheel. Unless you were a big Talking Heads or are David Byrne completest, chances are this one might have passed you by.

The Catherine Wheel is, to my mind, the third spoke (see what I did there) of a deeply psychedelic African-influenced polyrhythmic trilogy along with the above-mentioned Remain in Light and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts—all three were easily in my top ten “tripping soundtracks” as an acid-gobbling teenager and all three would still be on my Desert Island Discs list as a middle-aged rock snob. If you’re a fan of the two better-known albums, but have not heard The Catherine Wheel, well, you’ll be in for a profound treat, but especially if you drop some acid beforehand (I’d encourage it, no really!).

Musicians heard on the album include Jerry Harrison, the powerful drummer Yogi Horton, percussionist John Chernoff, Adrian Belew, P-Funk’s resident Minimoog genius Bernie Worrell and Brian Eno. It’s mind-blowing to me that there’s not a deluxe 2-CD set of the album that would include the 12” mixes and live Talking Heads performances of songs from the score, but I feel like this incredible piece of music has always gotten short shrift from whatever major label currently owns it. (The Catherine Wheel is one of the greatest “fuck albums” of all time, too. That’s how they should market it, if you ask me. I toyed with the obnoxious linkbait title of “David Byrne, of all people, recorded the ultimate fuck album” but thought better of it).
 

 
Above, Talking Heads performing “Big Blue Plymouth (Eyes Wide Open)” at Wembley Arena in 1982.
 
After the jump, much more including the full Twyla Tharp ballet as it aired on BBC and PBS in 1983…