Talking Heads

oh wait, trick daddy, "sugar sugar gimme some", that's a great one too

living colour's "memories can't wait"

angelique kidjo did a fucking great cover of the entire _remain in light_ album

So did Phish

*ducks*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d3BVds9eDk

Real talk though, I like Phish's Cities better than the original.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWmLI72Iv-8

So did Phish

I don't care for Phish, but I liked their live "Remain in Light" recording I heard.

Money stuff, who has it, who doesn't, it's just water cooler talk, but banal though it may be, it does often factor into reunions. Pixies, I know Joey literally said it was the difference between an OK and a great school district for his kid. LCD, iirc Nancy Whang literally said she needed the money. Pavement, I think at least a couple of them said it was all about the money. This isn't a bad thing, mind, nor is it greedy, it's just practical stuff, which is why I appreciate these kind of discussions in the context of people we often consider idols. Rock stars - they're just like us, you know?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7zQAifuyM8

Thanks for the kind responses, it felt like an oddly precarious post to make

My friend and I are chatting on this topic and he offered this simple counterpoint: “I think it’s good for people to know who’s rich” heh

I wonder if there will ever be a streaming-era example of an artist whose reputation grows over time such that they'll be able to do a late career nostalgia/cash-in tour. Maybe if it's based on a surprise algorithmic hit or Stranger Things-esque placement.

Duster!
https://www.songkick.com/artists/9637879-duster

I guess I was thinking of artists starting after say post-2015, starting after the '90s music industry and the blog era.

Real talk though, I like Phish's Cities better than the original.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWmLI72Iv-8

― peace, man, Friday, 2 February 2024 17:45 (twenty-six minutes ago) link

this is a joke, right?

Many xps, Related topic (not quite the same topic) I figure it wasn't that hard for Julian Lennon, Sean Lennon, or Jakob Dylan to get record deals. Just sayin.

I think Jakob Dylan claimed that the association hurt him more than it helped, but I do find that hard to believe…

Not least because he took his dad's fake last name. Fiction Plane sure got some opportunities, but a least Joe Sumner wasn't going by Sting, Jr. Same also with Inhaler/Elijah Hewson.

Bob legally changed his name, Josh...

was gonna say

I guess that's true, but Jakob could have changed *his* name, lol.

Pseudonym guys like Bono, Sting, et al., I assume by now they are legally both their birth names and invented names, right? Like, who do people make their checks out to?

jakob dylan: think it hurt his credibility, dunno about hurting his ability to get an album made initially. maybe.

I would have respected Jakob Zimmerman for sure

https://www.theonion.com/the-edge-still-introducing-self-as-such-1819567752

Other Dylan kids!

Jesse Dylan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Dylan (filmmaker, did the cover of Tom Waits' "Bone Machine"!)
Maria Dylan Himmelman (movie producer, married to Peter!)
Sam Dylan (photographer?)
Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan (once secret!)
Anna Dylan ("among the least visible")

when it comes to "psycho killer" covers the coneheads is my jam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to106Yj7MGU

and yes, i will rep for phish, _particularly_ their covers, since the songs they write tend to be cringe in the extreme (apparently they wrote a song that is called "gotta jibboo". that might be the best song in the world. i will never know.)

here's them playing "crosseyed and painless" for over half an hour in 2017. things of note:

1. crosseyed and painless is a much better song than, say, "tweezer"
2. they can, in fact, play "crosseyed and painless" extremely well, particularly consider they're a four-piece
3. i mean either you like jams or they don't. i personally do like their jams, and since they've spent decades developing a collective understanding of how to play with each other, they're perhaps the best there is at what they do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw6iltPJvBQ

you will be unsurprised to learn “gotta jiboo” is horrible, but is an excellent jam vehicle

I think they've done it a few times, the whole album? Here's one of them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upG2-48o1IQ

Looks like they have some extra players

Coneheads rule <3

A Stop Making Sense cover album is coming out soon
https://consequence.net/2024/01/paramore-a24-stop-making-sense-tribute/amp/

I wonder if there have ever been any covers of Talking Heads before

here's them playing "crosseyed and painless" for over half an hour in 2017. things of note:

Yeah, no. I'm open to lots of different kinds of things (really! stop laughing!) but jam bands, particularly Phish and the Disco Biscuits, are the hardest of hard nos. I shared office space with Relix magazine for almost four years and the things I heard in that time...I swear I could find a lawyer that would take my case.

I refuse to click on any of these Phish videos

It's OK, the'll still be playing if you ever get around to them.

I like this cover of Listening Wind by the Specials circa 2021 (rip Terry)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4bxtfjE0FY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oXIxXm3DyE

here's something orders of magnitude worse than phish's noodling

the phish full remain in light cover is quite strong, the separate 30-minute "crosseyed and painless" loses me pretty quickly though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhs2vVXEHwg

you will be unsurprised to learn “gotta jiboo” is horrible, but is an excellent jam vehicle

― ivy.

yeah one of the things i do like is this site called "phish just jams" that cuts out the song portions and just has them jamming.

and to be clear, i'm absolutely not saying "hey you have to listen to this sick jam". this is just music that a lot of people are _not going to like_. i don't think it's the best music ever, by any stretch of the imagination, but i do _like_ it.

i like phish in general. i mean if we're talking about privilege in music, i think their early years have some interesting stuff in them. ivy, do you know about richard wright, who wrote "halley's comet"? (he was going under a different name and pronouns when he wrote it.)

What the FUCK, Smashing Pumpkins. God damn this was so bad I couldn't stop watching it. Holy hell . Why take a song as rhythmically interesting and groovy as Once In A Lifetime and reduce it to absolute turgid slop. I've managed to avoid the Pumpkins for a long time since they were good, I had no idea it had gotten that bad. Shit.

that's a cover they were doing back in 2000 and have inexplicably revived more recently

how soon we forget Tom Jones + The Cardigans

I know I forgot that, if I ever knew about it

note to self if I see this thread on browser: check it the Delakota mix is still good

I know the discussion has moved on, but for the sake of pure hilarity, I feel obligated to share this geneaology doc some maniac made purporting to show that Tina Weymouth is a direct descendant of King Edward III.

https://humphrysfamilytree.com/Royal/Larson/Edw3-TinaWeymouth.pdf

I fact-checked it and it appears to to mess up in the 1400s; her ancestors include an English nobleman named Humphrey Stafford but not the same much more famous/powerful one in Edward III's lineage.

Anyway, I don't know if I'm more embarrassed that someone made this, that I found it, or that I spent 30 minutes at my job checking it's accuracy.

This of course says and proves nothing about her immediate family's power and financial status in the 20th century! I just thought it was funny to share--supports fgti's point about the scrutiny women artists face about their privilege. Or maybe just that geneology people are kind of nuts.

She’s bass royalty, isn’t that enough?

I like this cover, too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ2omdkdk2k

lol, dinnerboat otm

Talking Heads 1377

More Listening Wind

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

Geoffrey Oryema

Not exactly a cover, but the version of Papa Legba sung by Pops Staples is better than the Byrne version.

Shawn Colvin's This Must Be the Place is a sentimental favorite of mine, because I am a softy. Sneaky woodwinds 2 minutes in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=486JJ6HaSyc

idk i'm still thinking a lot about privilege and art and marginalization, particularly with reference the part of david byrne's "how music works" on "how to create a scene", where he gives his perspective on the milieu that talking heads came out of

what i remember from it - and this is i think more than a decade ago that i read it - is that he talks about the rents being cheap and the place being undesirable. i think that's an important part of it! to me, though, i look at the larger history. in the early '60s there was the whole "inside llewyn davis" thing, you have hootenanies and woody guthrie is in a hospital there so some kid from minnesota comes by and hangs out there for a while and does really well and some other people do ok, phil ochs does ok until for a little while and then he does really badly for a little while and then he kills himself, dave van ronk does ok for a little while but mostly he winds up being locally renowned, the "mayor of mcdougal street", so when the cops go after a bar in his turf he goes out to defend the folks there, and winds up being arrested in the stonewall riots

because in the late 60s you have things like max's kansas city and you have warhol and his "superstars" and all of the people lou reed sings about in "walk on the wild side", and lou does ok for himself and the "superstars" and the women lou sings about wind up dead

i was jealous of the scene byrne described, when i read it as a struggling burnout weirdo in the midwest. i spent 20 years or so struggling to make it in the midwest. i was smart and i worked hard and then my dad died and left me $100,000 and i moved out to portland. and portland in a lot of ways reminds me of the kind of scene byrne describes. it's not _cheap_. i don't know how _cheap_ the east village actually was. out here there are a bunch of people talking about how "new portland sucks" and pining for the days when it was really cheap and not all gentrified like it is today

and i don't know what they're talking about really because i don't see portland as a super gentrified town. i see a couple big expensive hotels and chain restaurants and a bunch of grotty queer punks who are here because there aren't a bunch of other places who would have us, and i'm one of the relatively privileged ones.

which is i guess what brings me to godard college in vermont in the 1980s, which strikes me as a kind of privileged environment, this weirdo liberal arts college, and who winds up there are a bunch of the members of phish. and their drummer, you know, he gets up on stage and wearing a dress and sings old syd barrett songs while "playing" the vacuum cleaner, which is probably cringe but it's cringe in a way that i find pretty cool. sometimes you gotta embrace cringe. like, one of the people they're hanging out with is some 300 pound person who says they're a "lesbian transsexual" and goes by the name nancy butterbean something something i can't remember, which back then i think would probably be considered cringe by a lot of people. phish plays a couple of the songs this person wrote, and this person comes up on stage and sings sometimes, even though this person isn't necessarily a great singer. and eventually this person goes to see a psychic and the psychic says oh wait i see your problem, nancy is just the name of a lover you had in a past life, you're not actually a transsexual lesbian at all, and richard wright says ohhhh i see. and that's what some people would call "detransition" maybe, and i look at that and say so what if he's not actually a transsexual lesbian? it's cool that he got to be in an environment where he could figure that stuff out.

and of course phish wind up getting really famous which is the only reason i even know about him.

anyway i take my privilege and i move to portland and right now if you ask me i'll tell you i'm a transsexual lesbian.

like to me this isn't stuff that can be taken in _isolation_. out of the east village in the late 60s you had stonewall and you had david peel, and people know about one of those, and in san francisco in the late 60s you had the compton's cafeteria riot and the grateful dead, and people know about one of those.

i don't know what the fuck you have in portland today or what you're going to have in portland today. you have a city that's the "cheapest" on the west coast and you have queer refugees streaming in from all over the country but mostly from texas, mostly, and you have a bunch of incredibly brilliant, fucked up, desperate people in one place. and there's a lot of different art and music and writing that mostly people don't know about, _i_ don't know about it even though i live here, and maybe in six years you'll have a "scene". even if a lot of people here now say that it used to be better in the old days.

or maybe i'm wrong and portland is nothing like the east village used to be at all. fuck if i know. i've never even been to the east village.

For me one of the most revelatory bits in the Byrne book is the degree to which a space shapes the music (and vice versa).

You look at a medieval cathedral and you can see why Gregorian chant worked there; the long echo times and harmonic structure. A Viennese concert hall and see why Mozart worked there. The ovals of the balconies and resulting harmonic structure. And finally CBGB's - a long narrow hard-surfaced room, which makes sense (pun intended) if your music is spiky and trebly and tense and nervous.