Andy Zax, who lovingly prepared Talking Heads’ oeuvre for CD re-issue a few years back (including the stellar 5.1 surround mixes) in conversation with novelist Jonathan Lethem about his new “33 1/3” series book on Talking Heads’ Fear of Music for The Los Angeles Review of Books podcast.

Jonathan Lethem is a novelist, critic, and professor of English at Pomona College. His new book Fear of Music (reviewed tomorrow for the Los Angeles Review of Books by Evan Kindley) is the latest in Continuum’s 33 1/3 series of monographs on individual record albums. Andy Zax is an L.A.-based writer and record producer who, in the mid 2000s, prepared Talking Heads’ entire catalog (including Fear of Music) for CD reissue. In this podcast, they discuss the ins and outs of this highly unsettling record (the band’s third), air some rare ephemera from the archives, and share some reminiscences of adolescence. Produced by Oliver Wang.

It’s two articulate guys sitting around bullshitting about music, so if that’s your kind of thing, listen below:
 

 
Another great vintage Talking Heads concert, this one an energetic outing at the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, TX on September 9, 1979 during the Fear of Music tour.

The set list: 
Artists Only
Stay Hungry
Cities
Paper
Mind
Heaven
The Book I Read
Air
Warning Sign
Love - Building On Fire
Found A Job
Memories Can’t Wait
Psycho Killer

There’s more great live Talking Heads footage on the recently released Talking Heads: Chronology DVD.
 

 
Another stellar Talking Heads concert for you lucky people, a 50-minute performance from the Westfalenhalle, in Dortmund, Germany, on December 20th, 1980 for the Rockpop TV show.

Set List:
Psycho Killer
Cities
I Zimbra
Once In A Lifetime
Animals
Crosseyed And Painless
Life During Wartime
The Great Curve

Can you tell what I’ve been listening to around the house, lately? Is it that obvious?

The final, 8-minute-long romp on “The Great Curve” will fry your synapses.

(For those of you unaware of its existence, there is an amazing 5:1 remix of Remain in Light from 2006 that is a treat for the ears. If ever there was an album meant to be heard in multi-channel audio, it is this polyrhythmic masterpiece. Cheap, too.)
 

“The big difference between us and punk groups is that we like KC and the Sunshine Band. You ask Johnny Rotten if he likes KC and the Sunshine Band and he’ll blow snot in you face.

—Chris Frantz

As I mentioned in a recent post about the excellent new Talking Heads: Chronology DVD, for me, the apex of the band’s career was, hands down, Remain in Light. This 1980 concert, shot with the expanded Talking Heads “Afro-funk orchestra” line-up in Rome, captures these musicians in fine, fine form with four out of the eleven numbers coming from that classic album. Featuring future King Crimson guitar god Adrian Belew wringing all kinds of impossible noises out of his guitar.

Play this one LOUD, it’ll knock you sideways. Just imagine what a Blu-ray DVD release of this with a 5.1 soundtrack would be like? I’d take this over Stop Making Sense any day.
 

 
The recently released Talking Heads: Chronology DVD is must-see TV for fans of the legendarily Caucasian 70s art school quartet who mutated into a futuristic Afrofunk-orchestra that rivaled Parliament-Funkadelic within just a few short years. Chronology charts the band’s progress from their stiff early days at CBGB and The Kitchen, through TV appearances on American Bandstand, The Old Grey Whistle Test, and Late Night with David Letterman, with clips from the US Festival and the reunion performance of “Life During Wartime” from their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2002.

For years Talking Heads could do no wrong in my eyes. I have dropped untold amounts of LSD listening to Fear of Music, Remain in Light, The Catherine Wheel, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Tom Tom Club, but after a point I soured on them a bit. I don’t think I’m alone among “first wave” Talking Heads fans when I say that I’m not really all that interested in anything that came after Remain in Light so I’m glad to see mostly early and mid-period material represented here.

Don’t get me wrong, there were some great tracks on Speaking in Tongues (and that limited edition Robert Rauschenberg cover was tres excellent) but their later work started to feel really kinda forced to me. Prior to this release, “live” Talking Heads video material was mostly limited to Stop Making Sense. Frankly, I thought they were already well on the decline by then. These earlier performances are more alive—and certainly more spontaneous, looser, rawer, fresher and funkier—to me than what was staged for the Jonathan Demme film. That’s why the material on Talking Heads: Chronology is so essential. Hell, after watching the live performance on the DVD of “Crosseyed And Painless,” I’d contemplate anything short of murder just to see more footage from the era covered on the latter half of The Name of This Band is Talking Heads. See for yourself, it’s a scorcher.

Extras on Talking Heads: Chronology include audio commentaries from the entire group, a 1979 episode of The South Bank Show devoted to Talking Heads and a David Byrne interview from 1978. There is both a deluxe version of the DVD that comes packaged like a hardback book (with a fantastic essay by Lester Bangs) and a regular version. Since you can get them both for just about the same price on Amazon, go with the deluxe version of Talking Heads: Chronology for sure.

Below, a fucking killer live “Crosseyed And Painless” videotaped at the Capitol Theater in Passiac, NJ, 1980 included on Talking Heads: Chronology:
 

 
Welcome to part III of my multimedia dossiers on the wild and wonderful recording career of that great American band, the B-52s. Today’s topic, my personal favorite of all of their releases, the 1982 EP produced by David Byrne known as Mesopotamia.

Yes, what is generally thought of as being one of their least successful records—it was critically savaged when it came out—is to my mind their very best work. The hiring on of Byrne, then at the height of his creative powers—he was simultaneously producing the seminal score he did for Twyla Tharp’s Broadway production, The Catherine Wheel—I thought was an inspired move on the band’s part. Byrne introduced the polyrhythmic African beats of Remain in Light and his Brian Eno collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts into the signature sound of the “tacky little dance band from Athens, Georgia’’ ” to great effect. I was a huge Talking Heads fan, so hearing elements of their “African/Eno-era” sound melding with the trademark B-52s wacky racket was heaven for me as a teenage rock snob. Byrne took their sound to a different place, and I felt nicely expanded on their sonic palette. The B-52s obviously felt differently, as Byrne was fired before a complete album could be recorded (hence an EP of the sessions was released).

Seriously, you have no idea how often I played this record. It falls into the “soundtrack of my life” category in a big way. But what many fans of the group do not know is that there are three very different versions of Mesopotamia: The “classic” short (US/Warner Brothers) EP version; the extended mix version mistakenly(?) released in Germany and in the UK by Island Records; and the 1991 CD version, which basically mixed David Byrne right out of the proceedings…

The first two B-52s albums are classics, and to my mind, perfect in every way, but a third album in that same style would have probably been one too many. Byrne’s involvement, for many fans, took the band a little too far away from their inspired amateur beginnings perhaps, but who else but Byrne was capable of coming up with such amazing grooves back then? And haven’t the B-52s always been about the beat? David Byrne was on fire then creatively. I’ve read that the B-52s felt that his production made them sound too much like the Talking Heads, but hey, what a valid direction that was for them!. True, certain elements of their sound (Ricky Wilson’s Venusian surf guitar for one) were diminished, but other elements (Wilson’s striking use of dissonance in his compositions) are given free rein with different instrumentation (like the nearly atonal horn lines). Their sound was nicely expanded upon by Byrne’s “dubbier/trippier” and more-layered production approach, if you ask me, but the B-52s didn’t ask, and it’s their call, ultimately…

Still why not release a special collector’s edition of Mesopotamia with the original David Byrne mixes, the longer Byrne mixes and the known outtakes: “Queen of Las Vegas,” (see below), the original “Big Bird” and “Butterbean” (both recut for Whammy) and the out of character Fred Schneider ballad “Adios Desconocida” (which I found here)? In any case, the longer, “alt” David Byrne version of Mesopotamia, unavailable now for nearly 30 years and never released on CD can be downloaded at The Same Mistakes blog and elsewhere)

PS I don’t hate the 1991 remix of Mesopotamia, but I’d never choose to listen to it over either of the David Byrne versions. Ever. Nuff said.
 

Kate, Fred and Cindy on the set of The Guiding Light soap opera in 1982 (see below for video clip)

Compare the nearly 8-minute version of “Cake” with the shorter version that was released ex-UK and Germany. This song minus the horns at the beginning? A sacrilege!
 

 
And to think that at one point, I actually thought this song really was about baking a cake… Short version of “Cake” (US version):
 

 
Below, “Deep Sleep.” It’s true that this would very much sound at home on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, but would anyone doubt that this is the B-52s once the vocals come in?
 

 
A slamming live “Mesopotamia” from the Rockpop Festival, Dortmund, Germany, 1983:
 

 
After the jump, the B-52s make a guest appearance on “The Guiding Light” soap opera in 1982… and more!

 
In 1993, Rough Trade records put out Lipstick Traces, a “soundtrack” to the book by Greil Marcus. It’s one of my favorite CDs of all time, with tracks by The Slits, Essential Logic, The Raincoats, The Mekons, Buzzcocks, The Gang of Four, Jonathan Richmond and the Modern Lovers, Situationist philosopher Guy Debord and others. It’s an amazing collection, but one track in particular stands out from the rest, a recitation by none other than Marie Osmond, of Dada poet Hugo Ball’s nonsensical gibberish piece from 1916, “Karawane.”

Hugo Ball was a follower of anarchist philosopher Mikail Bakunin and became one of the founders of the Zurich nightclub, Cabaret Voltaire, the nexus of the Dada art movement. He would go onstage dressed like this and basically, uh, do avant garde things:
 

 
Ball’s unusual costumes were later ripped off by David Bowie and then Klaus Nomi. Another of Ball’s Dada poems, “Gadji beri bimba” was adapted into the Talking Heads number “I Zimbra” on 1979’s Fear of Music album.

Here’s the story behind this, I think you’ll agree, most excellent clip. From the Lipstick Traces liner notes:

As host of a special (Ripley’s Believe It or Not) show on sound poetry, Osmond was asked by the producer to recite only the first line of Ball’s work; incensed at being thought too dumb for art, she memorized the lot and delivered it whole in a rare “glimpse of freedom.”

Incredible, isn’t it?