David Byrne

i still am not sure where it all shakes out. genius of love is brilliant, and there are some other excellent songs on that first tom tom club LP as well. i've always been a big fan of "Lorelei". and then, yeah, the other three never caught traction after that. i think part of that was they were missing a compelling singer.

harrison managed to be a modern lover and also produce some of the very worst albums of all time, so i give him a bit more credit for being able to adapt himself to the situation. frantz and weymouth, they seem like the perfect bandmates for talking heads, like a key that only fits that particular keyhole

https://i.imgur.com/GHUylCh.png

xxxp (re The Catherine Wheel) Yeah, and Twyla Tharp's choreography was inspired, when I saw it. He should have taken more dance commissions. In How Music Works, he describes the tour where his dancers taught the musos how to dance, and they got the dancers playing instruments too, while dancing. And about all the busking he did in college towns, going back to the 60s. Considering also Stop Making Sense, The Name of This Band, as well as American Utopia, maybe he should always think and be live.

A weird conjunction for me was when Roddy Frame came into Tower Records on 4th and Broadway, where I was working the floor at the time, and asked if we had any "David Birrrne" albums.

Scot recognize Scot.

Byrne's had commendable collaborations outside of Talking Heads - My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, The Catherine Wheel and I'll even add The Knee Plays and The Last Emperor, all but the first done for projects that were much more than a recorded album - but otherwise I agree, his solo career has been massively disappointing.

I should say basically every album he's done after Talking Heads split has been disappointing - I wasn't a fan of the last one with Eno or the one he did with St. Vincent.

morrisp, it doesn't appear to happen in this press conference - at 29:36 they're asked whether they thought about reuniting after seeing the film and Weymouth wryly says "When we saw it in the studio ... we said, 'Wow! What a great band...'" Harrison jokes he hasn't seen the film yet and Byrne avoids the question altogether.

weymouth's comment is a bit more than that:

Q: has this reinspired you, seeing it again, to do something together again musically?

Weymouth: yes. when we saw it in the studio with Erik Thorngren (sp?0, who was remixing it, he said "wow, what a great band...._too bad_"

and she kind of gave a deadpan stare during the "too bad" part. i don't know though, it's hard to read her. they have a very complicated situation and, like most humans, they are incredibly ambiguous and there are a lot of different ways one could understand what she said and her intentions

There have been flashes of greatness--"Strange Overtones" comes immediately to mind--but in general he's just underscored the importance of the other three.

catherine wheel a very good album, indeed. not tons of fun by any measuring stick though.

xxxp Oh yeah, Music for The Knee Plays , also for a stage production--with horn players, and "inspired by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band," also, The Last Emperor was a soundtrack, so those continue w the live and/or collaborative stimuli of his best DB albs. (I need to get back to the ones with Eno.)

El alma del Perú negro is an outstanding collection.

The Catherine Wheel was fun to try to dance to, or so my younger self would say.

Yeah, Luaka Bop released tons of great stuff.

Byrne also wrote lyrics for good album version of Philip Glass's The Photographer, based on his multimedia production.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN7VRbnOm1U

Yeah, Byrne's has had a commendable career outside of making music himself. Luaka Bop is a good label - didn't they introduce Cornershop to the U.S.?

(didn't need that apostrophe s)

Tom Tom Club were only good for one album, but pop music is filled with one-album wonders. Don't hold it against them.

Third album is pretty good too. You can get a totally fun, solid Best Of out of the five C20th albums and b-side/soundtrack cuts.

(Haven't heard the later records.)

(throw Damage I've Done from the The Heads album in too. sucks that they didn't get to go on and try that second album with Johnette as full-time frontwoman.)

David Byrne got a song into Windows XP he's the most listened to artist on the planet

Hey, I'm also fond of the Franz-Weymouth-produced Ziggy Marley album

I like that record.

everybody's just doing great

xxxp Thanks for the tips, sic---"the five C20th": you mean they did five albums in the 20th Century?

I wrote a Voice piece (yes, one for every thread) about Luaka Bop's 15-track celebratory retrospective,
Twenty First Century Twenty First Year---archived here with comments about a few more later LB releases:
https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2009/07/luaka-being-and-boppingness.html

Adrian Belew was on Maron yesterday and mentions picking up a yet another sampling check for "Genius" (Latto - Big Energy).

Belew was on Tom Tom Club and Jerry solo records but never on a Byrne solo record, I think?

belew was on the catherine wheel

Ah of course. In the interview, Belew jumps from Remain to Tom Tom Club to solo Jerry.

tbh there are too many albums to discuss in this interview and some of the best and most detailed bits are about his cincinnati beatles cover band.

definitely give byrne props for luaka bop stuff.

Belew also talked about his good relationship with Jerry and playing on the Crash Test Dummies record, which I missed in the Jerry thread.

Thanks for the tips, sic---"the five C20th": you mean they did five albums in the 20th Century?

That’s right. I might try and relisten this week to see if I really can throw together a good C80 and YSI to Leo. Have never heard the unreleased new EP that got added to the US version of the third album!

has it been mentioned that belew and jerry harrison are playing together at hardly strictly bluegrass? https://www.hardlystrictlybluegrass.com/artist/jerry-harrison-adrian-belew-remain-in-light/

Speaking of former punk guys showing up as producers on '90s albums: Belew produced Jars of Clay.

The band is promoting a new website "with music, videos, photos, merch and bios written personally by David, Chris, Tina and Jerry."

Byrne's peronally written bio is brief, but mentions Frantz several times (Providence: "I believe Chris suggested we put a band together to play at school dances"; Manhattan: "Seeing bands playing original music at our local bar (CBGB) I believe Chris suggested we form a new band and audition once we had enough material.")

Frantz's bio is longer, but his recollections square with Byrne's ("I invited some of my friends to form a band to play at school parties and dances. One of those guys was David Byrne. [...] Tina and I graduated from RISD in 1974 and moved to New York City where we reunited with David and moved into a raw loft at 195 Christie Street. I asked David to form a new band").

So fwiw, Byrne seems to be giving credit where due there.

Harrison's bio lists his production credits! ("Crash Test Dummies, Live, The Violent Femmes, The Bodeans, Poi Dog Pondering, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, The Verve Pipe, Rusted Root, O.A.R, The String Cheese Incident, Stroke 9, Josh Joplin, The Von Bondies...")

They all seem determined to play nice. Tina credits David for teaching her "the basics of rock song structures."

btw - that site has tons of rapidly flashing images, if you're sensitive to / irritated by those (as I am)

seen and not seen

A more hooked nose

Website seems pretty nice. Despite their feud, they've all been good at maintaining their back catalog and doing whatever needs to be done to keep their legacy visible (short of reuniting and touring). IIRC all four are always involved in their reissues, whether it's Stop Making Sense or the two box sets they've put out.

I wonder how they share profits. Cheap Trick, for example, Bun E. is no longer in the band, but he's essentially a co-owner of the band that still gets a cut. Same with the members of Journey, many of whom are long gone but still make money from Journey tours, iirc.

Jerry was interviewed by Maron a couple months ago too. Very good interview - especially for the Jonathan Richman stories. Byrne remains an enigma. Also, I had no idea Harrison had worked with Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard?
https://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episode-1351-jerry-harrison

after my startup is funded, we'll all own a share or two of the next Journey tour.

and Talking Heads Reunion Tour contracts. We could write and sell them to naive young fans that don't understand -- David does not value friendship.

Excellent interview. Harrison involved in a start-up for antivenom!

but will it work on Chris' words?

You can get a totally fun, solid Best Of out of the five C20th albums and b-side/soundtrack cuts.

Tom Tom Club track for the Party Girl soundtrack was discussed on its own thread years ago but it deserves a re-up here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbfPBPu0mSk

Today I learned about the CD+G Museum, which collects the video files of graphics-enhanced CDs that were around for a heartbeat in the late 80s and early 90s. Always wondered what was going on in my copy of Talking Heads' "Naked." https://t.co/YiQFrOG9te

— Mark Athitakis (@mathitak) September 23, 2022