
(Sire)
RECOMMENDEDSentiment alert: This two-disc career overview was, radio aside, my introduction to Talking Heads, a band that eclipses all others post-'60s for me. I could recount the moment in the middle of "Don't Worry About the Government" when I recognized that glimmer, that thrilling instant of discovery when I completely "got" what the band was about -- but really, so much of that will be covered when we discuss the individual albums. Being honest, I wouldn't any longer name this as the ideal way in to the Heads; its approach to their best albums is too haphazard, and the glut of material from their brief but wounding decline (would've been just a weak detour if they hadn't come to hate one another so much) is too much of a slog. If I were going to send a Talking Heads newbie to the proverbial record shop, I would point them in the direction of any of the three Eno-produced LPs plus the handy no-nonsense Rhino package
The Best of Talking Heads. But
Sand in the Vaseline, creepy title aside, is arguably as essential for harder core fans as the overhyped three-disc box
Once in a Lifetime, and the Heads compile well, so that if this is the way you first come across the breadth of their catalog, it will undoubtedly intrigue you.
Not really a greatest-hits package per se, this is more comparable to the Beatles' Red and Blue albums in its mix of most (but not all) of the big singles, some band-beloved album tracks, and a few rarities. The content is sandwiched by eight previously unreleased or non-LP cuts, four at the beginning of disc one and the rest at the end of disc two, that remain the selling point for fans and will doubtless keep the set in rotation after its utility as a jukebox has passed.
There are two performances from pre-Jerry Harrison demo sessions. "Sugar on My Tongue" is archetypal, clipped punk-bubblegum, but "I Want to Live" is flat-out remarkable. Byrne puts in one of his most riveting performances, and in many ways "I've had some friends... but I want more" is a moment that defines the band. Incredibly, this rough early runthrough of an abandoned track is one of their most accomplished, compelling recorded moments. The band already has a distinctive sound as a three-piece; on "I Want to Live" especially, the slinking funk of Tina Weymouth's oddball bass line is evocative of things to come.
Vaseline provides the first CD release of Talking Heads' legendary debut single, "Love -> Building on Fire," never offered on a studio album. Byrne's already infectious drama and twitchy psychosis peak with his wild and possessed devotion to "two loves" (the most breathless line is listed on the web as "Count 'em: one, two loves" but I've always heard it as the more unhinged "God, I want two loves"). The major body of the song is in the "Don't Worry About the Government"-predicting obsessive-compulsive tracking of a six-degrees link described in the title. Love is his face, which is a building (!), which is on fire. Jerry Harrison has yet to arrive, so the sound is filled out with somewhat goofy horns, the sort of overly twee maneuver the Heads would passionately steer clear of on their debut album (demanding, as recounted in the liner notes, that cellos be removed from "Psycho Killer").
In a storied career spanning fifteen years on record, Talking Heads only technically had one non-album b-side, duly but somewhat awkwardly provided with a home on
Sand in the Vaseline. "I Wish You Wouldn't Say That" hails from the sessions for
Talking Heads '77 and is clearly among the lesser numbers produced then, though it would have fit reasonably well on the first half of that LP. The arrangement is weak compared to the crazed precision of
77 at its best, or the massiveness of the Eno recordings, but Byrne has never sounded scarier, more paranoid, or more impassioned -- his childlike, desperate "now Jimmy's coming over" still sends a few uncomfortable chills my way.
The Talking Heads odyssey truly begins with track five, "Psycho Killer," which spearheads the same comic, life-affirming anecdote described by Jonathan Demme's
Stop Making Sense: the nervous nerd learning to loosen up and move his ass, and basically give in to the void. So he struggles to form the bizarre universe he inhabits into neat boxes, sometimes obsessive ("Psycho Killer"), sometimes wide-eyed and innocent ("Don't Worry About the Government"), sometimes outlandishly angry ("No Compassion"), but always self-denying and ingratiatingly crazed, weirdly glorious. Never has a drawn-out character study found such a warm and expressive home in rock & roll. It's easy to carp with the tracklist, of course, as how can "Uh-oh, Love Comes to Town" and "Pulled Up" really be left out of this odyssey, but
77 is still quite properly represented.
The same can't be said of the three albums to follow, the ones that unquestionably represent Talking Heads' peak -- and maybe Brian Eno's. But the thing is, you should own them anyway, so why does it matter?
More Songs About Buildings and Food is the band's expansive, assured masterpiece, one of the rare times in history when a fabulous group at the initial rush of its greatest creativity has been captured in full by a brilliant renegade producer sympathetic to and cognizant of their power. It's not that "Warning Sign" isn't great, it's that
More Songs contains all of the original Heads material that made them such a hot attraction at CBGB and was held off from their first record until they met up with a more ideal producer. Eno rammed unheard-of electricity and mystery into "Stay Hungry," "Thank You for Sending Me an Angel," "The Girls Want to Be with the Girls," and "Found a Job" -- in his hands, the band was permitted to sound as stomping and enormous as they were. "Warning Sign" is marginal stuff compared to those live killers. Of course the surprisingly reverent, sweet-natured take on Al Green's "Take Me to the River," their first stroke with mainstream success, has to be here, so
Vaseline gets points for including the band's greatest song ever, never a hit or even a single, "The Big Country" -- an impossibly articulate ode to alienation and depression that I've been telling people for years now is my choice for best ballad in rock & roll. I don't think I'm wrong. The complexity of emotions when David Byrne slips into gibberish in the end makes this the "Waterloo Sunset" for those of us too young and cynical for "Waterloo Sunset" to mean as much as "Dead End Street" did.
In tackling
Fear of Music,
Vaseline weirdly skips its signature "Life During Wartime" (but offers a bad edit of the
Stop Making Sense rendition on disc two), replacing it with "Memories Can't Wait," an excellent and completely uncommercial, eccentric song that under no circumstances belongs on a greatest hits package. "Heaven" -- the record's most reassuring moment, which is amazing considering how bleak it is -- and "I Zimbra" are crucial. So the biggest gaffe is only allowing two songs from
Remain in Light, the album for which the band will surely be remembered, both of which the prospective buyer is nearly guaranteed to have already heard ("Once in a Lifetime" and "Crosseyed and Painless") -- the same weird error Allen Klein made when only offering two
Revolver cuts on
The Beatles 1962-1966. And all, it would seem, in the interest of dividing the story in half between the increasingly abstract progression of the band through their commercial peak in 1983, and the rootsy slickness that came to preoccupy them starting in the mid-'80s.
Speaking in Tongues is not nearly as difficult a record to pare down as its predecessors, so offering "Burning Down the House" (their biggest hit, maybe?), "Swamp" (David Byrne's cattiest rant), and "This Must Be the Place" (the Heads' only love song) is logical enough. Then an inviting detour into
Stop Making Sense, then we arrive at the band's return from synthpop and polyrhythm and get to study what exactly ripped them apart.
Losing Eno -- or getting rid of Eno, rather -- was probably not much help, but
Speaking in Tongues did continue to show a sure-footed band, particularly coming along after a three-year hiatus. The reboot
Little Creatures is the band's finest non-Eno moment, but it marked the first signs of a sharp decline in commercial fortunes. A key to this: Whoever chose the leading singles from each of the last three Talking Heads albums was clearly out of their mind.
Creatures, an album whose dark subject matter was hidden by musical levity, was anticipated by "The Lady Don't Mind," the subtlest, most low-key track on an album overstuffed with pop hooks. It came equipped with a Jim Jarmusch-directed video, even. But it isn't even acknowledged as a Popular Favorite here, replaced by three subsequent and better-received singles (hymnal "Road to Nowhere," silly and disturbing "Stay Up Late," powerfully surrendering "And She Was"). Preceding the following year's
True Stories, a flawed but brilliant film tie-in, was the Heads' worst and most grating single, "Wild, Wild Life." And if you had been considering giving up on America's greatest band since the Velvet Underground, "Blind" -- the promo for their final LP,
Naked -- couldn't have changed your mind, with its hamhanded video, politely painful horns, and Byrne's ridiculously inexpressive caterwauling.
Little Creatures was far friendlier than "The Lady Don't Mind" suggested, and while hardly its siblings in quality, the last two records certainly weren't as awful as those songs indicate.
Vaseline would seem an ideal opportunity to delve more seriously into the 1985-88 material to ward off suspicions about it and maybe get a few more people interested in those twilight-period efforts. There is, after all, plenty of room, since we squeezed the bulk of the band's career onto one disc already. Alas, we get just three songs from each of these albums. "City of Dreams" isn't a terrible choice for an album track from
True Stories, but there were better ones ("People Like Us," "Dream Operator," and where is the charming single "Radio Head"?), and instead of the delightful "Mommy, Daddy, You and I" (casting Byrne, like "Found a Job" a decade earlier, as a punk-rock Shel Silverstein) or bracing "The Democratic Circus,"
Naked offers the weightless, inconsequential "Mr. Jones," whose Muzak trumpets seem only to serve the worst prejudices about what's wrong with
Naked.
If side projects (mostly excellent ones, which put them in an unusual position) and a dooming sense of impending repetition seem to have hurt Talking Heads, and if
Sand in the Vaseline fails to give serious lie to the concept, it also offers a counterargument in the form of "Sax and Violins," a holdover from the
Naked sessions ultimately completed and used for Wim Wenders'
Until the End of the World in 1991 that suggests both everything the final album could and should have been, and the splendidly evocative direction they might have taken if not for the now-crippling acrimony that destroyed them the year this compilation was issued. It integrates its West African influences and international army of musicians with a sense of beauty and assurance almost entirely missing from
Naked, the best moments of which are its simplest; on "Sax and Violins," the Heads reacquaint themselves with the sound of mass unification that made
Stop Making Sense such a moving experience -- people gather to play and chant and sing in the service of a simple romantic message. That is the notion of Talking Heads I wish could've lived into the '90s, and it seems as though they were conscious of this, only a bit too late -- just a tantalizingly tiny bit too late. (And not that anyone remembers, but "Sax and Violins" was also a surprisingly sizable radio hit.)
The chronology of all this is hard to suss out, but before David Byrne's bandmates learned of their breakup from an interview in a newspaper, they managed to finish a new song that's included here. The very last Talking Heads track completed, "Gangster of Love" uses some interesting sampling techniques (integrating a drum loop from the
Remain in Light period) but is little more than a loopy slow-jam in the end that fails to go much of anywhere despite its infectious bassline and ghostly backing vocals. It's not nearly the soaring, disarming swansong "Sax and Violins" could've been.
Though newly released as a single in 1992, "Lifetime Piling Up" -- a pandering new-song-for-a-best-of title if ever there was one -- is a
Naked outtake and rises above that album's dregs only through Byrne's amusing lyrics and the celebratory, catchy chorus.
Vaseline closes with the
Speaking in Tongues reject "Popsicle," a fun and mildly sexy bit of radio pop that was overhauled to become "Walk It Down" on
Little Creatures -- but one wishes they'd found a way to appropriate Byrne's fantastic "gimme gimme gimme" and "summertime, boy" hooks someplace, as they sound like they belong on your FM dial.
Sand in the Vaseline deserves high praise for one thing, surely: the best liner notes for any release I've ever bought. Good Lord, they're fantastic. Lavishly and cleverly illustrated with picture sleeves, bootlegs, rare band photographs, and, especially unmissable, a bombastic anonymous note sent to the band in the mid-'70s, the two booklets contain interesting band comments for every track. Plus, each member of the band contributes an essay, all funny and observant, with only Byrne's drug rant seeming a bit aloof, and he makes up for it with a "Talking Heads FAQ" almost as deadpan funny as his promotional "David Byrne Interviews David Byrne" featurette. This package was obviously a labor of love, twice as impressive for a band that had just called it quits.
Again, although I think the Heads would be better served with a simpler way in, I'd consider this an essential package (much better than the Rhino boxed set), and you will fall in love with the band; I certainly did. If you love them already, you need "Sax and Violins" and "I Want to Live," and the other new ones out of sheer curiosity. Plus those goddamn booklets, seriously. Troll your local used bins now.
[Heavily expanded from a review posted at d-b.com in 2004.][
SEE ALSO:]
Bonus Rarities & Outtakes (1975-92)