"Life During Wartime" / The Talking Heads

Are we having fun yet?

The other day in a grocery store, frantically trying to assemble a pantry of shelf-stable food for riding out whatever self-quarantine might be in the offing, I scooped three jars of peanut butter into my cart -- and I heard in the back of my mind, "I got some groceries / Some peanut butter / To last a couple of days." In these troubling times, I'm in no mood for either dirges or upbeat diversions -- but a little apocalyptic swamp funk is just the ticket. 

In 1979, I'd been a Talking Heads fan for a couple of years already, entranced by the spare art-school weirdness of their first two albums. The sound of Fear of Music, however, was a shock: a funky poly-rhythmic base overlaid with chanting call-and-response vocals, horns and percussion layering on levels of cacophony. On first listen, I was baffled. By the third or fourth listen, though, I was enraptured by it, and now it just might be my favorite Talking Heads album. (Note to kids streaming music: You can't always "get it" on the first listen.)
  

And from the first, this track stood out. David Byrne, the Talking Head's front man, said it was "inspired by living in Alphabet City" (the then-grubby, shell-shocked Lower East Side), and as a newly arrived New Yorker, I knew those scruffy clubs he name-checked ("This ain't no Mudd Club / Or CBGBs"). But beyond that, the song's undertow of domestic terrorism had to resonate with any of us who'd grown up in the turmoil of the late 60s and 70s: civil rights protests, antiwar riots, ugly waves of urban violence. The bleak dystopia of this song made perfect sense, as we howled that indelible refrain: "This ain't no party / This ain't no disco / This ain't no fooling around!"

Indeed, indeed.

Listening to it now, in these haunted pandemic days, it seems weirdly prophetic. It's a survivalist's bible ("Heard of a van / That's loaded with weapons / Packed up and ready to go") for a time where communications are breaking down ("Transmit the message / to the receiver / Hope for an answer") and paranoia runs rampant ("I got three passports / a couple of visas, / You don't even know my real name"). And for those of us who can't wean ourselves from the nightly news or Facebook, the drumbeat of crisis keeps us all too well informed of the disease's spread ("Heard about Houston? / Heard about Detroit? / Heard about Pittsburgh, P. A.?").

With all this disaster looming, what's the point in making any effort, in laying any plans? "Why stay in college? Why go to night school?" he asks, and even though I have those degrees already in hand, I'm pretty sure they mean nothing now. (A year later, the American Dream would be further eviscerated in the Talking Heads' song "Once in a Lifetime".) No, the enemy is among us and we are it. "We dress like students, / we dress like housewives, / Or in a suit and a tie / I changed my hairstyle, so many times now, / I don't know what I look like!" (That last line does make me laugh now, thinking of all the women in lockdown who will finally discover how gray their hair really is under all those years of salon color.)

"Burned all my notebooks, / what good are notebooks? / They won't help me survive," Byrne sings, riding the crest of that relentless yet hypnotic rhythm track. "My chest is aching, / Burns like a furnace, / The burning keeps me alive..."

 Yes, yes, and yes. Stay well, friends.

"Burning Down the House" /
Talking Heads

In my musical memory, this track was on Fear of Music, that astonishing 1979 album whereon the Talking Heads -- my beloved New Wave New York compadres -- suddenly went from jerky fringe geeks to political provocateurs. (Note: Brian Eno and Robert Fripp were now on board; they even got Gene Wilder, the essential geek artist savant, to play congas on "Life During Wartime.") Most memorable line from that album: "This ain't no party / This ain't no disco / This ain't no foolin' around."

Hunkered down in NYC (I lived on the rough Upper West Side but in my heart I was an East Village squatter), I was so tuned into with that album. As I was with its 1980 successor, Remain in Light (featuring the iconic track "Once in a Lifetime".

But in fact this burn-all-the-bridges song didn't come out until 1983, on the Heads' Speaking in Tongues album. Wikipedia describes this album as their "commercial breakthrough," thanks to the fact that this groovalicious song actually was a Top Ten hit. (Really? I was so divorced from Top 40 radio at the time . . . but really?)

Yeah, okay, I'll buy that. But let's remember where we were in 1983. By then, Ronald Reagan had become the U.S. President, with Margaret Thatcher in charge as the U.K. Prime Minister. So is it any surprise that the counterculture would respond with a track like this?  Or that 4 years after "Life During Wartime," the Talking Heads would feel the need to light up some torches?

 

From the very first line, we're in danger alert. "WATCH OUT / You might get what you're after." I love the ambivalence of this. Though our singer declares he's an ordinary guy, we already know that we are not in ordinary times. 

 

Everything's allusive, coded: "We're in for nasty weather," "The transportation is here," "You might need a raincoat," "Fightin' fire with fire." Look over your shoulder, my friend.

 

The rhythm section is tight (God bless Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth), the lead singer (David Byrne) tightly-wound.  (..."And you have not seen nothin' yet / Everything's stuck together / And I don't know what you expect / Staring into the TV set / Fighting fire with fire.") Which is actually the genius of this track -- the hard-driving inevitability of that beat, versus the neurotic protest of our protagonist. 

 

It's a brave new world, for sure, and all bets are off.

 

History repeating itself? 



T Is For...

26 artists, A to Z. Could be anybody, right? But when push comes to shove...

 Talking Heads / "Once in a Lifetime"

These are the questions I ask myself every day.

By the time this track came out -- it was the lead-off track of Side 2 on 1980's Remain in Light LP -- the Talking Heads had evolved from the herky-jerky nerds I first saw a year earlier at the Mudd Club and Central Park. Yes, the lyrics were still cryptic and not a little weird; yes, the production values were still stripped-down. But a world-music polyphonic groove had been added to the mix, and David Byrne's half-strangulated vocals now floated over a quite serious groove.

What makes this a great track -- and it is a truly great track -- is how these brainy New Wavers captured the seismic generational shift going on. Byrne, in an almost robotic monotone, marvels "And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile / And you may find yourself in a beautiful house / With a beautiful wife." Yeah, for an earlier generation that was the dream, but for our generation that was so explicitly NOT the dream. And yet and yet and yet...

"And you may ask yourself / Well...how did I get here?" HOW INDEED?

In contrast the choruses are legato, deeply grooved, and copasetic. He's "letting the days go by," with water flowing underground, erasing all contradictions. That sinuous rhythm ticks on, lifting everything, like the water dissolving whatever stands in its path. Overlapping motifs interweave, keeping it all blessedly fluid.

But questions and conflicts remain. In verse 2 he's still stressed out, questioning "How do I work this?" and denying the very existence of his supposed assets -- that beautiful house, that beautiful wife.

There we were, my generation, committed to doing things differently and yet now seduced by the trappings of material comfort. It wasn't a choice we could easily resolve, which is why the song rattles on and on, the water flowing underground. But in the long run, the line that hammers home is "Same as it ever was / Same as it ever was / Same as it ever was..." Because we baby boomers thought we'd changed the world, and yet -- did we?

And here were these art-school nerds, calling our bluff.

The 100 Best Singles In My Head
Nos. 36-40

By coincidence, all of today's songs were from late 70s or early 80s New Wave. I had just moved to New York, I had money to go to clubs and concerts, and I proceeded to do so with total abandon. These aren't just singles for me -- I bought the artists' albums too, I saw them perform live, and my associations run a lot deeper than the Obvious Hits.

[Click on the highlighted links to read my earlier posts on those songs]

36. "Steppin' Out" / Joe Jackson (1982)
Oh, Joe, Joe, Joe. We'd heard his earlier hits, pleasing pop tracks like "Is She Really Going Out With Him?", but when Night and Day came out, I realized we were in the presence of An Important Artist.

37. "Psycho Killer" / The Talking Heads (1977)
Having moved to Manhattan, I settled into a pack of music-loving friends -- all editorial peons at various magazines in Midtown -- who'd meet up after work on summer evenings and head for Central Park and the Dr. Pepper Music Festival at Wollman Rink. On August 16, 1979, we were dying to see the Talking Heads perform their geeky brand of art-school rock. More Songs About Buildings and Food had just dropped; we were mad for it, especially their herky-jerky cover of Al Green's "Take Me To the River." That night, however, it was this song -- their 1977 debut single -- that really riveted me (the Summer of Sam was only two years past; it still touched a nerve). Though there were three other band members on stage -- Chris on drums, Jerry on organ, waiflike Tina on bass -- you really couldn't tear your gaze away from David Byrne, like a stick-figure in brown trousers and short-sleeved plaid shirt. It wasn't so much that he had stage presence; it was more the utter lack of stage presence, as he clutched the mike stand, stared at the crowd with his enormous Seth Brundle eyes, scrubbed a few harsh notes out of his guitar, and yelped these strange lyrics in a strangulated voice. "Psycho killer!" he gasped, "qu'est-ce que c'est?" (I'd be lying if I said that David Byrne's French was as enticing as Paul McCartney's in "Michelle"). Then, over nothing but persistent drum thuds, he stammered like Otis Redding on angel dust, "Fa-fa-fa fa fa-fa fa-fa-fa fa, better / Run run run run run run run away." Who had any idea what it meant? But that didn't stop us from singing along like mad, and flinging our heads up and down in ritual New Wave spastic dance jerks.

38. "Love Shack" / The B-52s (1989)
I always associate these two bands, though on the surface they were total opposites -- uptight arty intellectuals (Talking Heads) versus giddy drama queens (the B-52's). Maybe it's because we saw them both in the same week in 1980, again at the Dr. Pepper Festival in Central Park (and me with a completely different boyfriend). One thing you have to say for the B-52s, they're always fun to watch, with Fred Schneider doing his lounge lizard act in front, beehived Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson bouncing around madly on either side. I always felt somehow that they were my friends, kindred spirits, like so many of us outsiders who came to New York to have fun as much as to make good. I too grieved in 1985, when Cindy's brother Ricky Wilson -- whose dynamic guitar work supplied most of the band's instrumentals -- died of AIDS-related illness. The B-52s could have packed it in after that; they'd pretty much done the novelty act to death. But wonder of wonders, they didn't; Keith Strickland just moved from drums to guitar and the carnival kept on going. Instead of high-concept songs about outer space, novelty dances, and crustaceans, they just relaxed into their Southern dance groove. Although the album Cosmic Thing came along much later, to me it's the fullest expression of who my friends the B-52s really are. In "Deadbeat Club" we joined the girls as they danced in the garden in torn sheets in the rain; in "Love Shack" we jumped in the back of Fred's car ("Hop in my Chrysler, it's as big as a whale / And it's about to set sail!") and cruised down some back country Georgia road to a dilapidated juke joint. There's no story, just impressionistic details flung around (if this were a film, it'd be shot with a handheld camera) -- there's a line outside, a secret knock at the door, and everybody inside is peeling off their clothes and dancing with total abandon. A tinny surf guitar jangles, and there's party glitter everywhere -- mattress, highway, front porch, hallway. Fred, Kate, and Cindy hand the vocal duties back and forth, their overlapping phrases really more percussion than anything. "The whole shack shimmies!" Fred exclaims; "Everybody's movin', everybody's groovin' baby," Kate and Cindy croon in harmony; "funky little shack, FUNK-y little shack," Fred raps out. They begin to tap quietly on the door, but the tom-toms build and build, and they're knocking louder and louder ("bang, bang, bang, on the door baby"), until Fred cries, "You're WHAT" and Cindy sasses back, "Tin RROOOFF, rusted!" And no, that phrase didn't mean she was pregnant -- Cindy claims she just made it up, picturing the rusty roof of the original cabin. It's all delirious nonsense, but sung with deep affection. "Love Shack" turned out to be their one big mainstream hit. But even in 1980, the band we saw in Central Park was the same whacked-out crew of kids from the love shack, cruising north in the Chrysler. The party still hasn't stopped.

39. "Whip It" / Devo (1980)
The term "novelty song" should have applied to this out-of-left-field 1980s hit -- but we New Wave insiders knew that its high-concept kitsch was the Next Big Thing.

40. "Roadrunner (Once)" / Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers (1976)
Funny that I had to go all the way to England to hear this eccentric, magical record by Boston's own Jonathan Richman. The nascent New Wave scene in London went mad for this single in 1977; being the only person in the room who'd actually driven on Route 128 and gone to the Stop and Shop gave me major cachet. It was like some eerie late-night connection . . . .

MY 15 MOST SIGNIFICANT LIFE ALBUMS

I tried to resist, Betty, I really did. But how could I pass up an assignment like this? Here they are, for your delectation:

1. A Hard Day’s Night /The Beatles – my first album ever, from the band that sealed my fate as a rock & roll fan. The red cover is falling apart by now, mended clumsily with masking tape; those black-and-white head shots are suspiciously smudged, especially the one of Paul, the great love of my pre-teen life. I know the UK release was all Beatles tracks, but I still prefer my US version -- when “And I Love Her” ends, the schmaltzy easy-listening instrumental of “Ringo’s Theme” MUST come next.

2. Bookends / Simon & Garfunkel – Poetry, social commentary, and Existentialism Lite – just what I needed in the spring of 1968 (meanwhile over in the UK the Kinks were recording The Village Green Preservation Society -- who knew?). I took up smoking because of the line from “America”: “Toss me a cigarette / I think there’s one in my raincoat.”

3. The White Album / The Beatles – Christmas vacation, 1968. I had begun to think I had outgrown the Beatles. I was wrong. I may have outgrown my teenybopper crush on Paul, but this was something Much More Important. (Not that I haven't since dog-eared the head shot of Paul that was included inside that radical bare white cover.) My copy isn’t so white anymore, and side 4 is a scratched to hell from being played backwards during the Paul Is Dead uproar. But who needs to play it anymore? I’ve got the entire thing hard-wired in my brain.

4. McCartney – That bowl of cherries, the photo of bearded Paul with his baby inside his parka – I was in heaven. There WAS life after the Beatles! FYI, he wrote "Maybe I'm Amazed" for me, too. He just thought he'd written it for Linda.

5. Tapestry / Carole King // Sweet Baby James / James Taylor – Forever yoked in my heart. I saw Carole and James perform spring 1971 at the Indianapolis Coliseum, confirming my conviction that I was the hippest 17-year-old in Indy. (The rest of the audience were just extras in my head-movie.) The next fall I got to college and discovered that every freshman in my dorm owned both records. I had finally found my people.

6. Everybody’s in Show Biz / The Kinks – it arrived one day in my slush pile of records to review for the college newspaper. “Hmm, the Kinks – they’re still around?” One listen and I knew I had found my band for life. I went out the next day and bought every Kinks album available in Amherst, Mass. (unfortunately, a grand total of two) and became a card-carrying Kinkster forever.

7. O Lucky Man! / Alan Price – Summer of 1973, my first trip to London. As a Malcolm McDowell fan, I had to see this film in its debut run at the Leicester Square cinema. I went in a Malcolm McDowell fan, I came out an Alan Price fan. Serious, serious obsession for many years. Driven by groupie-love, I finagled my way to England for grad school; finally saw him perform live in 1975. (Saw him next 30 years later, igniting my Music Renaissance – see #11 below).

8. This Year’s Model / Elvis Costello – my first few months in New York City, my friend Craig invited me to his walkup in the East Village one afternoon to hear his new discovery. We listened all the way through in rapt silence, trying in vain to decipher all those clever lyrics, rattled off at lightning speed. Hostile wit from a skinny nerd with glasses – oh, I was so ready for New Wave.

9. More Songs About Buildings and Food / Talking Heads // The B-52s – The apogee of my New Wave mania: seeing these two bands on a double bill at SummerStage in Central Park, summer of 1980. Skinny little David Byrne wore a short-sleeved plaid shirt and nearly disappeared behind his tightly-clutched mic stand; the B-52s recreated an Athens frat party on stage, with Kate and Cindy in full beehive and Fred at his lounge-lizard best. Absurdist fractured lyrics delivered to a dance-party beat – priceless.

10. Get Happy! / Elvis Costello – My cubicle neighbor at work, Susan, was my music soul mate in 1979; we went out at lunchtime to buy this album at Sam Goody’s the day it hit the bins. Those savage R&B-drenched tracks, flung out feverishly one after another (20 tracks on one LP, nearly all of them under 3:00) – it was too good to be true. The critics panned it, but we knew better. My fave EC ever.

11. Artist’s Choice: Elvis Costello – fast forward to March 2005. I’m in a Starbucks in Park City, Utah. After two decades in the woods, musically speaking, I am in the first throes of my Music Renaissance (see #7 above). I casually pick up this album from the cash register display, thinking, “Now what has Elvis been up to?” Track 9 is “I’m a Mess,” by Nick Lowe. I listen to it at the ski condo in front of my whole family, and pretend it’s just another song. It is not just another song. I’m a goner.

12. The Convincer / Nick Lowe – It’s the only Nick Lowe I could find in the record store in New York, the minute I got home. White-haired Nick doesn’t even resemble the guy I remember seeing in sloppy, raucous Rockpile, opening for Van Morrison back in 1979. Now, armed with an iPod, I can listen to this record constantly and my family won’t even know how deeply, deeply I have fallen in love.

13. Other People’s Lives / Ray Davies – next step in my Music Renaissance; re-connecting with the Kinks. I see a TV documentary about Ray Davies and go on-line for info about the Kinks (who have been dormant for 10 years). Six months later, I’m standing for hours in the chill November rain with my new Kinks fan club friends, waiting to see Ray preview his first solo album. It’s a masterpiece.

14. Bring the Family / John Hiatt – I learn that Nick Lowe was in a band called Little Village with John Hiatt. Johnny Hiatt? The fat kid who went to the Catholic school across the street from mine in Indianapolis? Can’t be. Out of curiosity, I look up Hiatt on iTunes. The song “Your Dad Did” tells me exactly what Johnny Hiatt’s been doing since the Immaculate Heart days. It's Music For Grown-Ups -- which means it really is OKAY to be a grown-up music fan.

15. Ole Tarantula / Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3 -- On impulse, I go with my Kinks buddy Dave to see these guys play at the Knitting Factory. I haven’t heard a single song of Hitchcock’s and know nothing about him. He rambles out on stage, tosses his gray mane, and starts to free-associate on stage. I am simply gobsmacked. Might as well stand and face it -- the fangirl is back with a vengeance.

"Found a Job" / Talking Heads

When More Songs About Buildings and Food hit the scene in 1978, this song seemed like it came from another planet. The herky-jerky rhythms, the automaton-like backing tracks, the tuneless melodies, the deadpan lyrics -- and yet for me and my friends, these songs were more relevant to our disaffected middle-class lives than any angry punk song or heavy-metal angst.

"So think about this little scene / Apply it to your life / If your work isn't what you love / Then something isn't right" -- whether or not the song's message was ironic was completely beside the point. We weren't sure whether we wanted to buy into our parents' work ethic, anyway; but at least we felt In On The Joke, and part of an exclusive club -- the cult of the hipster geek. Devo was geeky too, but no one I knew wanted to be Mark Mothersbaugh the way they wanted to be David Byrne, with his nerdy plaid shirts and ill-at-ease frozen stare.

It starts out abruptly with a random scrap of dialogue, a couple arguing over what to watch on TV -- "Damn that television!" David Byrne barks out, over a scrabbling guitar riff. My favorite line comes next, a tense staccato squawk that has become my personal mantra for dealing with daily crises: "Don't get upset! / It's not a major disaster." Then Byrne steps in like a sociologist narrating a cheesy infomercial, "We've heard this little scene before / We've heard it many times / They're fighting over little things / And wasting precious time." You can almost see his wooden hand gestures, the tightly-knotted skinny tie, the plastic pen protecter in his pocket.

And his solution? No I'm-okay-you're-okay psychotherapy crap; just create your own TV show! Everything will be all right! (Decades before webcasts and Youtube made every amateur a do-it-yourself auteur -- the Talking Heads were way ahead of the curve on this one. ) The chorus sketches their new-and-improved life: "Judy's in the bedroom / Inventing situations / Bob is on the street today /Scouting out locations" -- and if there's something knee-jerk and joyless about it, well, what did you expect?

A couple years later, in "Once In A Lifetime," David Byrne would be looking around him and yelping in disbelief, "This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife!" Speaks to me, all right: I too still find it hard to take adult life seriously.

As the Talking Heads developed, they actually turned into a great dance band, but when I re-listened to all those early Talking Head albums recently on a long car drive, I was amazed to notice what a polyrhythmic groove already lay beneath the choppy arrangements. While these songs are playing, it's almost impossible not to jerk around a little (I wouldn't necessarily call it dancing). They still sound punchy and fresh. And they still play with my head, in a good way.

"Don't get upset, it's not a major disaster" -- words to live by.