Talking Heads: Naked poll

You're not entirely alone on this Fruitless i can feel your pain. For me after Stop Making Sense there's maybe only a few songs i really love (Sax and Violins, In Asking Land, ...Flowers, maybe Mr Jones) and yeah the 2 previous albums almost entirely stink i think. This album allowed them to leave with a fair bit of dignity intact.

Nah. I'll totally defend Little Creatures on its own merits. You need to hear every note between 1977-1985, after which you're on your own. Naked is merely redundant, but True Stories is legitimately terrible.

This alone puts me off Little Creatures every time i see it: http://tralfaz-archives.com/coverart/T/theads_creaturesb.jpg

what about David Byrne in a ponytail grimacing while holding a photo of a banana?

was never moved by this album, but this

(Nothing But) Flowers all the way

is OTM.

mm it was a giant pickle i read!

nothing but flowers is great. piscesx is pretty otm imo

yeah the reception or lack thereof this got at release is curious to me also (although i guess byrne did get the cover of rolling stone, i recall that being a pretty good interview) but yeah it's not like it even bombed necessarily, it just didn't matter. that jerry harrison solo record a year later generated about as much interest as this thing did.

I was too young to know this as anything more than the album at target with a monkey on it, but i wouldn't be surprised if the failure of true stories sucked the wind out of david byrne's "renaissance man" status

yeah i'm thinking true stories has to be to blame except it didn't fail (or at the time wasn't regarded as such) - time mag cover, first rolling stone cover (after time mag cover lol), BIG hit w/ 'wild wild life', get's 4th in rolling stone crit list, much lower in p&j but still bizarrely high (someone who cares about rock criticism and esp rockcrit polls should do a thing on critical inertia, more interesting, influential on final tallies, telltale sign of a hackdom, and revealing look into the crit cw of a certain time than tokenism)(someone = matos obv). maybe by naked some overcorrection to true stories/little creatures (which WON p&j and topped rolling stone list - CRAZY even if 85 is a weak year for albums) has set in and the only ppl still caring about talking heads at that point are ones who totally bought into the 'back to basics' little creatures/true stories sound and so naked moving away from basics really didn't connect. plus by this point everyone knew this band was dying w/ a whimper and dead band walking albums get slighted even when they're great (cf. trompe le monde) which naked definitely wasn't. then again this thing had a solid if unspectacular finish in the 88 p&j so what i'm remembering as 'it wasn't relevant/discussed at the time' may be 'it wasn't relevant to/discussed by 13 yr old me at the time' when i'm way way way more interested in def leppard and luke skyywalker and sonic youth and new jack swing and inxs and whatever house i can hear on the radio and rakim and pixies and trying to find a copy of the black album and public enemy public enemy public enemy public enemy.

just to clarify, when I said True Stories failed I meant the movie, not the album.

with the band already running on fumes crit-wise, his failure to become King Of All Quirky Media couldn't have helped

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_qIdxc0EEs44/SJr9AYeFfWI/AAAAAAAAAQo/jo7ByRUrmac/s400/byrnesimon.jpg

They went from being counterculture to being culture. "The Big Country" leads into "(Nothing But) Flowers", but "Wild, Wild Life" is kind of their "Shiny, Happy People."

That above cartoon basically doubles as a review of Naked

where did my post go? weird. anyway, there is a fair amount of not good material here, but the stuff that is good is great. flower, blind, mr jones, ruby dear, cool water. yeah it sounds and feels more like a david byrne solo album. I don't listen to this very much, but it's better than LIttle Creatures or True Stories.

I've got a soft spot for the Democratic Circus, but my fave like many is Nothing But Flowers.

Rob Sheffield got this one right in the blue RS Album Guide: by '88 it was much easier to find Franco & Rochereau albums in record stores.

speaking of corrections:

Naked [Sire, 1988]

Where Paul Simon appropriated African musicians, David Byrne just hires them, for better and worse--this is T. Heads funk heavy on the horns, which aren't fussy or obtrusive because Byrne knew where to get fresh ones. What's African about it from an American perspective is that the words don't matter--it signifies sonically. The big exception is the glorious "(Nothing But) Flowers," a gibe at ecology fetishism that's very reassuring in this context. B+

Once in a Lifetime [Sire/Warner Bros./Rhino, 2003]

...Third disc loaded with True Stories and Naked, which I once thought overrated. I was wrong. They sucked. C

Also: Speaking in Tongues, Stop Making Sense, and Little Creatures are certified double platinum, while True Stories and Naked stopped at gold. Clearly they were stalling.

"Cool Water" has been scaring the bejesus out of me for 20 years now. So that.

was a swine trying to find this image. you still don't see it much
http://s.dsimg.com/image/R-924172-1217001869.jpeg

such a great album. Nothing But Flowers for sure

lol @ that Friedman cartoon, forever associated in my mind with Graceland and this record

Where Paul Simon appropriated African musicians, David Byrne just hires them,

I don't get this distinction? African musicians are all over Graceland, it's not like Simon did all those Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes vocals himself

another weird thing that's always stuck in my head about this album is the Mr. Jones video with the monkeywrench spewing water at the political convention.

no wait that video was for Blind

yeah was gonna say. that video freaked me out way before I'd heard anything else by the Talking Heads.

listening to this album for the first time ever right now.

video is here, though first I had to watch a skittles commercial with norma from twin peaks in it

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcuey1_talking-heads-blind_music

I bought this album my senior year of high school on the day of release, brought it to my AP English class, and we all lisened to it.

so far it sounds good, but not really like a Talking Heads album? it has lots of horns, good thing I like horns.

a poll for 'Sounds From True Stories' should be next! that was better than the actual album proper.

i was able to find the American link that worked, they kind of hid it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3t5nmgRVMs

a poll for 'Sounds From True Stories' should be next! that was better than the actual album proper.

Or a poll for which version from the movie is better than the Heads version from the album. Except the winner is so obviously Pops Staples' "Papa Legba" that there's no point in starting a thread.

i listened to most of this today. think of voting for "Totally Nude." i turned it off after awhile, the second side is really hard to get through at this point in time.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Easily their 2nd worst album *cover* after True Stories.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

A rout!

no votes for "Blind" or "Mr. Jones?" thought they should have received at least one vote each, but yeah the right song won.

Can't really imagine too many people tempted to vote "Blind" or "Mr. Jones" ending up not voting for "(Nothing But) Flowers" TBH.

then again this thing had a solid if unspectacular finish in the 88 p&j so what i'm remembering as 'it wasn't relevant/discussed at the time' may be 'it wasn't relevant to/discussed by 13 yr old me at the time' when i'm way way way more interested in def leppard and luke skyywalker and sonic youth and new jack swing and inxs and whatever house i can hear on the radio and rakim and pixies and trying to find a copy of the black album and public enemy public enemy public enemy public enemy.

otm

This album was part of the batch of 8-albums-for-a-penny Columbia House subscription I signed up for when I got a CD player in 1987.

I overpaid for it.

^^^^ Byrne quote?

I was in high school when Naked came out, and I loved it at the time. But the cool alterna kids didn't listen to them. The only people that did were me and my music geek friends. We'd smoke lots of dope, listen to Roxy Music, Lou Reed and the Talking Heads. What a shock there were no girls around.

I do distinctly remember an MTV promo for 120 Minutes that showed a clip of their new video Blind, referring to David Byrne as an "underground legend." So even back then he was being ushered nascent the adult alternative genre.

I've been listening to 'Totally Nude' and '(Nothing) But Flowers' almost daily for a month. I can't bring myself to like the rest of the album, but those two songs are irresistible.

Cool water tho?

What about Blind? And Ruby Dear.

i didn't realize 'sax and violins' wasn't on the original album! whoops. it's still my fave, asterisk and all

I like Big Daddy

coooooooooool water

cool water seems dated to me now. ruby dear is one of my favorites on the record.

xp yeah, and he didn't wanna be here either for that matter (the actual last-ever-perormance-of-the-original-members before that night)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ephPxOu0uDQ

Per Byrne's transition to solo, didn't a track or two from Naked end up on Rei Momo, too?

Hmm, maybe not. What am I thinking of? A Rei Momo era SNL performance?

This SNL perf sounds more like a True Stories jam

https://vimeo.com/252646301

(from 1989 that one)

it's always struck me as weird how much bad blood there was with heads.

I got into TH thanks to Rei Momo.

xpost
i don't know, i definitely wish they all got along but i can see how they ended up as enemies. i'm sure byrne was really hard to work with in many ways, but he was also just clearly on a different wavelength than the others. watching a few docs, the non-byrnes always emphasize what a collaborative unit they were in their earlier years, before the collaboration circle got bigger and bigger as the ilneup expanded. they seem to have been ok with the expanded lineup, too (making a couple of the best albums of the century probably helped to ease the tension), but they probably assumed that at some point they'd revert to being members of equal standing again. so they all felt burned. but i can see byrne's side of it too. what are you going to do when the other members just aren't as talented but they're demanding an equal share of the creative workload (and credit)? byrne doesn't strike me as the kind of person who would handle that kind of dilemma gracefully.

Watching Tina play psycho killer with Frantz years later made it clear they still had fun. Byrne was just a bit of a dick

"was"

Expected that yeah

It's the same old story of resentment, from CCR on down. Recall the split between Byrne and Eno reportedly came when he started to feel like Eno's backing band, which no doubt is how the others felt re: Byrne.

Thought this was pretty awesome. From a 2013 interview in the New Statesman:

Rob Pollard: One of my favourite tracks that you’ve appeared on is Nothing But Flowers. I absolutely love that song. Can you tell me a little bit about how you came to work with Talking Heads, and how you came up with that brilliant guitar part?

Johnny Marr: Thanks, I’m really glad you like it, no one really talks about that track! When I got invited to go over to Paris to play with Talking Heads, it came really out the blue and was very much a professional invitation because I didn’t know any of the band personally. It was one of those many moments in my life where I didn’t even have to think for a second because of course it was a ‘yes’. Talking Heads were one of the really important bands when I was a teenager, and I still like almost everything they did to this day, so off I went. When I got there, there was just this modal bass line with no chord changes on it, and a drum groove. That immortal phrase was being banded about: ‘it’s something of a blank canvas’. Usually, that’s music to my ears, but I was listening to it and, it being my very first day, I was a little nervous and not wanting to be inappropriate, but the truth is that I listened to it a good four, five times and I couldn’t think of anything, and I just thought: ‘right, Johnny boy, your moment has come, at the age of 23, that’s it, you’ve lost it,’ so I went for a walk around Paris and I was just beating myself up thinking ‘this is it, you’ve choked’. And that was the first time that had happened. Just as I was going back into the studio I thought to myself it’s because there’s not very much there for me to hang what I do on. So I just turned to Steve Lillywhite, who was producing, and said: ‘do you mind if I just put some chord changes on it?’ And he was like, ‘be our guest!’ David had just nipped out, so I took that opportunity whilst he wasn’t there to just throw a chord change on there, and pretty much treat it like it was my own demo, and take pure liberties, as they say in the north. Once I got a chord change on it, it just had a comical, quirky aspect to it. So I pulled out this 12 string, which now belongs to Bernard Butler, and just went for that amusing, catchy, American type riff.

The best thing about doing that song, was the very start of it when it all falls in and the bass player’s sort of warming up – and this is down to Steve Lillywhite’s great production technique – I just started playing completely absentmindedly, almost lighting a cig whilst talking to somebody because I assumed the machine wasn’t on, and he said: ‘right, OK that’s the intro done, next, verse two’, and I was like, ‘hang on a minute,’ and he just said ‘no, that was perfect’.

Basically, the short version of that is that I just had to throw a load of stuff at it to get to where I could be inspired. It taught me to not be too timid when you’re doing sessions. When I worked with Beck, even though I was totally sleep deprived, I just said ‘plug me in, and the very first thing I record just let me go with it, and let me overplay and don’t be too precious’. But I’m glad you like the track. I couldn’t believe it when he put his vocal on it, it was so inspired. The lyrics are the complete opposite to Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi.

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/03/johnny-marr-everyone-should-get-fair-shout-and-no-one-can-tell-me-conservative-party

I'm not a fan of the album, but I love this one track, and after reading this, I'm tempted to give Johnny Marr most of the credit. The guy was hot off of Strangeways, Here We Come while Talking Heads had just done the very uneven True Stories (the first album they did that I didn't like, much less love).

My parents had this CD and I mainly remember it for the cover, which I thought was hilarious. I don't remember anything about it other than this song. Was pretty surprised to find they were a well-respected band because this was the only CD of theirs they had.

It's crazy to me that he was only 23 at that point, and already a legend

He talks about it like it was this great break for him to get to play with this band he looked up to, and sure it was, but he'd already had a career that was every bit as distinguished as the Talking Heads.

Kind of amazing he doesn't get writing credit.

Yeah thats wild. Not knowing who played what, I always assumed his presence on that track was just a sort of a cameo. Maybe if the song had been a smash single he'd be bitter about the writing, but its nice that he just seems so proud of it.

It's a top ten Heads track in my canon, and the combination of Marr's riffing and the high life guitar gives it its magic.

maybe he did get writing credit? i'm just checking the credits using spotify, and that track is the only one with a credit to "N-Jock"
https://i.imgur.com/io1B8W0.png

He's the other guitarist, I think.

There's a Cameroonian guitarist of that name. I seem to recall some funny David Byrne story about bringing in an African guitarist based in Paris for the sessions and finding out only too late that he had picked up the wrong African guitarist.

Anyway, there are like seven or eight guitars going on in that song, It's hard to know who does what.

Byrne plays the hard rhythm lines, Marr and Jock the fluttering things.

I don't know about this story, the bass line on the finished record seems to be outlining a definite chord progression...unless they re-recorded the bass and other instruments to the chord changes that Marr devised?
I'd have voted for "Blind", anyway. A friend of mine said that "Cool Water" was one of the great career-closing songs (if you don't count the handful of tracks that dribbled out over the next couple of years) for its apocalyptic tone, Talking Heads and the world ending at the same point.

I seem to recall some funny David Byrne story about bringing in an African guitarist based in Paris for the sessions and finding out only too late that he had picked up the wrong African guitarist.

Theres a story in the Chris Frantz book like that, about a day they were expecting a certain African guitarist at the studio and a messenger showed up for something and bluffed his way into the session by answering "yes" when they asked him if he was the guitar player. They start and the guy cant do the parts and suggests they rearrange the song to fit his playing. Eventually when the actual guitarist shows up he is too polite to step in bc he doesnt want to embarrass the guy and take gig away from another African. No info on what song it was or if any of it made it on the album or anything iirc.

https://pixhost.icu/avaxhome/84/cb/0038cb84.jpeg

Sad that I missed this poll 11 1/2 years ago, but I would've voted for "Blind". One of my favourite Heads songs.

The anecdote's also in the liner notes to Sand in the Vaseline.

Yeah, that's where I saw it. Also where I first saw the picture just posted.

I spent 30 years wondering wtf David Byrne is holding in that photo and today I learned that it is the world's largest siamese pickle.

Oh! i always thought it was the tongue of some giant beast