FEATURE:
Happy Day
The Incredible Talking Heads: 77 at Forty-Five
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SURELY one of the best…
PHOTO CREDIT: Talking Heads in Amsterdam in June 1977/PHOTO CREDIT: Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns
and most important debut albums ever, Talking Heads’ Talking Heads: 77 is forty-five on 16th September. A landmark debut album, there aren’t that many articles and features about this amazing album from the New York band. Led by the genius that is David Byrne, I hope that people who have never heard Talking Heads: 77 dig it out ahead of its forty-fifth anniversary. Like I do with album anniversary features, I’ll come to a couple of reviews. In 2017, when the album turned forty, Annie Zaleski wrote a fascinating article for Salon regarding Talking Heads: 77. It is amazing to think that the best-known single – and maybe the band’s defining song -, Psycho Killer, only got to ninety-two on the U.S. chart! The album itself got to ninety-seven! Maybe too advanced, forward-thinking, and unique for audiences in ’77, this Talking Heads classic has been given a lot more affection and time in the years since. The band - guitarist/vocalist David Byrne, bassist Tina Weymouth, drummer Chris Frantz and guitarist/keyboardist Jerry Harrison – are absolutely phenomenal throughout their debut:
“This legacy began with the band's debut LP, "Talking Heads: 77," which was released on September 16, 1977. The words "minimal" or "minimalist" were often used at the time to describe Talking Heads, which is entirely correct. The record's music is spacious, almost self-indulgently so, and deliberate. Every sound — a frayed guitar riff, a lurking bass line, confetti-shower piano, a rattlesnake drum roll — has a purpose and place and works in meticulous tandem with its surroundings. Even the cover's stark nature is streamlined: It's a brilliant tomato-red color with green text spelling out the album's name in a classic typeface that recalls a storied newspaper.
Because things are so orderly, "Talking Heads: 77" possesses an aura of simplicity. On the watercolor soul-funk jam "The Book I Read" and the deceptively carefree "Don't Worry About the Government," this austerity is soothing. During other moments — the self-explanatory "Psycho Killer," the haywire twirl "New Feeling" — Talking Heads' methodical approach drums up tension. The push-pull between these moods gives "Talking Heads: 77" a balanced sound that speaks to the band's instinctual bent; the album is never too rigid or laissez-faire.
"None of us read music," Weymouth told Vivien Goldman in the June 26, 1977 issue of Sounds. "We all suspect technique, because so much of that early '70s technical prowess just turned out boring. I have a basic idea about what a rhythm section, bass and drums, should do. I dislike flashiness, I think it's ridiculous. If people clap because it sounds good, that's the point.
"It doesn't matter that they don't realize you're playing something complicated which sounds simple," she adds. "I'd sooner play something which sounds simple and repetitive than clutter up the sound. It's all a case of keeping the beat and carrying momentum."
Indeed, "Talking Heads: 77" has its own singular internal rhythms and structures governing the music. Calling the record post-punk or new wave makes sense, because it's a pastiche of granular influences (e.g., soul, dub, tropicalia, folk, '60s rock) stitched together in precise and different ways. Harrison's keyboards cushion the main melodies and instrumentation, buoying the music without taking up too much space, while hints of exotic percussion or unorthodox instrumentation add subtle accent colors.
“Despite such self-effacement, Talking Heads were special. Critics, to their credit, tried to dig into Talking Heads' nuances and how the band fit into the burgeoning New York scene. For example, the Rolling Stone review of the album wrote, "Dressing like a quartet of Young Republicans, playing courteously toned-down music and singing lyrics lauding civil servants, parents and college, Talking Heads are not even remotely punks. Rather, they are the great Ivy League hope of pop music."
The band members themselves also resisted being lumped in with the punk movement, as they recognized such a monolithic tag didn't make sense. "We don't feel that in our performance we typify that angry attitude," Byrne told Melody Maker's Caroline Coon in the May 21, 1977 issue. "We don't eschew the primitivism — you know, the less is more and the more is less — but that's not quite what we're doing.
"They tend to believe that if you do something in a slick way, then it has no feeling. We don't hold that to be true. That doesn't necessarily mean we want to be real slick. At the same time, just not being slick doesn't mean that it's coming from the heart.
"I like to leave it up to someone else to say whether we're New and that's Old," he adds. "I didn't think of the band as joining the new wave but I did start out by thinking that I'd like to do something a little fresher than what you see in the chart!"
"Talking Heads: 77" did sound fresh, and it didn't take long for people to catch on. Although the album stalled at No. 97 on the U.S. album charts and "Psycho Killer" reached No. 92 on the singles charts, the band's next record, 1978's "More Songs About Buildings and Food," peaked at No. 29 on the pop charts and spawned a Top 40 hit with a cover of Al Green's "Take Me to the River." Talking Heads added depth, texture and shading on future records, but the sturdy foundation the band built with "Talking Heads: 77" lingered for the rest of their career”.
I am going to get to some reviews for Talking Heads: 77, as this is an album that has received so much acclaim. In 2003, Talking Heads: 77 was ranked at 290 on Rolling Stone's list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The album was also included in the book, 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. This is what AllMusic noted in their review of one of the most astonishing debut albums in musical history:
“Though they were the most highly touted new wave band to emerge from the CBGB's scene in New York, it was not clear at first whether Talking Heads' Lower East Side art rock approach could make the subway ride to the midtown pop mainstream successfully. The leadoff track of the debut album, Talking Heads: 77, "Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town," was a pop song that emphasized the group's unlikely roots in late-'60s bubblegum, Motown, and Caribbean music. But the "Uh-Oh" gave away the group's game early, with its nervous, disconnected lyrics and David Byrne's strained voice. All pretenses of normality were abandoned by the second track, as Talking Heads finally started to sound on record the way they did downtown: the staggered rhythms and sudden tempo changes, the odd guitar tunings and rhythmic, single-note patterns, the non-rhyming, non-linear lyrics that came across like odd remarks overheard from a psychiatrist's couch, and that voice, singing above its normal range, its falsetto leaps and strangled cries resembling a madman trying desperately to sound normal. Talking Heads threw you off balance, but grabbed your attention with a sound that seemed alternately threatening and goofy. The music was undeniably catchy, even at its most ominous, especially on "Psycho Killer," Byrne's supreme statement of demented purpose. Amazingly, that song made the singles chart for a few weeks, evidence of the group's quirky appeal, but the album was not a big hit, and it remained unclear whether Talking Heads spoke only the secret language of the urban arts types or whether that could be translated into the more common tongue of hip pop culture. In any case, they had succeeded as artists, using existing elements in an unusual combination to create something new that still managed to be oddly familiar. And that made Talking Heads: 77 a landmark album”.
I am going to leave things by sourcing from Pitchfork’s 2020 review of Talking Heads: 77. It is a shame there have not been more articles written! I think this is an album that should be preserved and passed down through the generations:
“The band’s curiously multivalent relationship with pop music was already being negotiated. Across 11 songs, Talking Heads aspire to pop’s communal uplift while also creating distance from the genuine article. A few seconds into “Uh Oh, Love Comes to Town”— cymbal crashes, four chords ascending toward frenzy, the rhythm locking in—and we’ve arrived indisputably at the Talking Heads sound. Frantz plays like an R&B session drummer with a gun held to his head, just a little too edgy and insistent. Weymouth is bouncy and melodic, with no trace of a beginner’s tentativeness. A gleeful steel pan solo appears from nowhere, an early sign of the band’s disinterest in rock orthodoxy. Byrne yelps, proclaims, and carries on conversations with himself.
As he would again and again, he addresses human connection in the stilted language of an atomized and impersonal society. He frets that falling in love might cause him to “neglect my duties,” as a stockbroker might make a bad investment—so concerned with performing his role that love becomes an incursion, an obstacle toward getting work done. Crucially, however, “Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town” is not black-witted satire. It may be a postmodern send-up of a love song, but it’s also a love song. The rhythm section does a stiff imitation of the Funk Brothers, but they still lay down a pretty good groove for dancing. Parsing the blend of sincerity and irony in any Talking Heads song is difficult, but you never doubt their belief in the music.
For New York, 1977 was a difficult year—economic freefall, neighborhoods ravaged by arson fires, a blackout that threw the city briefly into anarchy, the shadow of a serial killer who stalked the outer boroughs the summer before—and Talking Heads 77 occasionally embodies that darkness. “Psycho Killer,” the catchiest song ever written about a sociopathic murderer, is more disquieting in footage of an early CBGB performance than it is on record, where it evolved into a campy performance of violence, turning the killer’s chilling laughter into a goofy refrain.
“No Compassion” is more mundane, and more menacing because of it, with a narrator who calmly rationalizes his own refusal to empathize with anyone. Opening with an uncharacteristically hard-rocking riff and lurching between two drastically different tempos, it feels like a last vestige of affinity with the punk scene’s heavier and more nihilistic tendencies. Still, its message probably shouldn’t be taken at face value. “So many people have their problems/I’m not interested in their problems,” Byrne moans at one point, a rich sentiment coming from a guy beset by problems on all sides and eager to tell you about it, whose response to the joys of new love is a resounding “uh oh.”
These moments of intensity arise as occasional spasms across an otherwise upbeat and approachable album. At times, Talking Heads ‘77 seems to leapfrog the stormy minimalism the band would pursue across the trio of Brian Eno collaborations that followed this album, and instead offer a budget approximation of the pancultural dance party they threw on 1983’s Speaking in Tongues. Talking Heads ‘77 abounds with ecstatic rhythms and bright sonic details: a honky-tonk piano disguised as a disco bassline on “The Book I Read”; mallets and Latin percussion building toward a sultry sax refrain on “First Week / Last Week … Carefree”; a toylike synthesizer on “Don’t Worry About the Government,” a song whose cheeriness in the face of alienation is both heartening and unsettling. The Talking Heads of ‘77 come off like enthusiastic collagists rather than master sculptors: these sounds are thrilling on their own, but they don’t always cohere with the holism of later albums.
On “Tentative Decisions,” Byrne engages in a one-man call-and-response, switching between his usual whine and a cartoonishly stentorian low register, simulating the interplay of lead and backing vocalists on any number of old pop and soul records. This was a new kind of self-awareness for rock bands, who by the mid-’70s were steeped in decades of pop history, and anxiously searching for their own place within it. Talking Heads articulated that self-awareness without ever sounding smug or lapsing into parody, twisting pop’s stock gestures into new shapes while maintaining their core musical appeal. It was a feat no one had accomplished in quite the same way before them, and no one would repeat in quite the same way. No one except the Talking Heads, that is: Byrne would closely replicate the “Tentative Decisions” vocal arrangement on the chorus of “Slippery People,” from Speaking in Tongues. But by 1983, he had an actual chorus of slick-sounding backing singers—the distance between Talking Heads and the rest of the world growing smaller, but never collapsing entirely.
After its tense final chorus, “Tentative Decisions” explodes into the most jubilant stretch of music on Talking Heads ‘77, an instrumental coda with a four-on-the-floor drumbeat, congas tapping at the edges, and high-stepping piano from Harrison—all of it repeating with minimal variation as the song fades out. More than anything, it sounds like house music, a genre that wouldn’t come along for a few years, but would eventually leave a seismic imprint on pop. Talking Heads stumble into the resemblance on “Tentative Decisions,” and stumble quickly out of it. Still, in 1977, they didn’t need to rush toward the future. They were already there”.
One of the all-time great albums, Talking Heads: 77 turns forty-five on 16th September. Less than a year later, Talking Heads released the sensational More Songs About Buildings and Food. A band that had this incredible quality and consistency right from the beginning, it all started with…
A masterpiece from 1977.