Talking Heads: Naked poll

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

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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 Sax And Violins first appeared in the Wim Wenders movie Until The End Of The World, after that yeah it was added to Naked.
The liitle-seen video makes it look like a DB solo project, although Jerry appears briefly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FJ8x6wnZy8

iirc it was a naked-era jam that byrne picked up after the band technically broke up

one of my fav heads songs regardless

Any of y’all seen the rock and roll hall of fame performance ? Damn Byrne didn’t want to be there

Painful.

so was the performance

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.