I'd Love to Turn You On #148 - Brian Eno/David Byrne – My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

After Talking Heads released their fourth album and masterpiece, Remain in Light, the band went on hiatus while its members explored side projects. Guitarist Jerry Harrison released The Red and the Black, an underrated solo album which built on his work with The Modern Lovers and Talking Heads. Rhythm section and married couple, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, formed Tom Tom Club with Tina’s sisters and members of the Remain in Light touring band. Tom Tom Club’s debut functions like a release valve for the pressures building on Remain in Light and endures as a funky, energetic party album. Lead singer David Byrne and Brian Eno, producer of three Talking Heads albums, set off to create an album that draws upon similar archetypes as Remain in Light, but stands apart from anything these considerable talents have created before or since. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts sounds like Byrne and Eno discovered a way to tune into the radio signal of this entire planet and distill it into 40 minutes of genre-blurring, hypnotically engaging, and beautifully layered music.

Three and a half decades after its release, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts remains a ground-breaking and brilliant tangent from the minds of two of the most idiosyncratic and cerebral artists in popular music. Whereas Tom Tom Club seized upon the incredible pool of talent that had formed around Talking Heads and aimed it in a loose, upbeat, and fun-loving direction, Eno and Byrne set out on a concentrated, enigmatic, and exploratory mission into the unknown. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts contains some of the same DNA of poly-rhythms, experimentalism, and pastiche as Remain in Light, but this album grows into its environment without the frames and guidance of Byrne’s observational characters or recognizable song structures. Although both Eno and Byrne were known at this point for their skills and abilities as lead singers and songwriters, it may come as a surprise to some that this album features neither their voices nor their lyrics. The album’s liner notes credit both Brian Eno and David Byrne with, “guitars, basses, synthesizers, drums, percussions, found objects.” In place of Eno and Byrne’s vocals, nine of the eleven songs on the album contain elements cited in the liner notes as “voices” and include samples of radio hosts and callers, preachers, an exorcist, and singers from Egypt, coastal islands near the state of Georgia, and Lebanon. Among the eleven musicians who worked with Eno and Byrne on this album, eight are percussionists and three play bass. Eno and Byrne combine this robust rhythmic engine with the found, fragmented vocals to create a set of self-contained, evocative snapshots that, when regarded as a whole, reflect back to the listener like a mosaic formed from the pieces of a broken mirror.

Eno and Byrne reunited in 2008 for Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, an album that serves as a high point for both artists’ output in the last twenty years but bears no discernible connection to their first collaborative album. Everything That Happens Will Happen Today features some of Eno’s best recent production work as well as some of Byrne’s most natural vocals and most compelling lyrics since Talking Heads, but feels strangely orthodox and prosaic compared to the radical poetry contained within their first joint musical endeavor. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts merges elements of art rock, experimental music, funk, electronic music, African pop, folk music, field recordings, and minimalism into a highly influential sum, but few of its successors can compare with this fascinating musical exploration.    

John Parsell

I'd Love to Turn You On At the Movies #131 - Stop Making Sense (1984, dir. Jonathan Demme)

I assumed that anyone who had an interest would have seen this film by now, but I keep meeting people who haven’t seen it – fans of the Talking Heads even – so it felt necessary to write it up. If you’ve seen the film, you know about its irresistible energy, the joyous feel of the music (even when the band gets strange), the magnetic wonder of David Byrne’s performance. But maybe it’s been a while since you’ve seen it, or maybe you’ve never seen it. If so, this review is for you.

In late 1983, the Talking Heads were riding their most successful album to date – Speaking in Tongues – which charted higher than any of their previous albums and contained their first top ten hit with “Burning Down the House.” With these accomplishments under their collective belt they decided it was time to make a concert film to document the band in one of its most exciting incarnations. To take the directing reins they hired Jonathan Demme, who worked with Byrne and the group to design a film that, unlike most rock docs, almost never takes us out of the performance for interviews, audience shots, or extraneous images. They also spent a lot of the film’s budget (raised by the band) on recording the sound with then-new digital technology and the expenditure paid off handsomely – this hardly sounds live at all and it takes full advantage of the audio capabilities of both DVD and Blu-ray. The core of the group is of course the quartet – David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison (in that order, as we shall see) – but here they’re augmented by extra percussion (courtesy of Steve Scales) extra guitar (Alex Weir sometimes chugging rhythm, sometimes playing the Adrian Belew role, sometimes shredding in his own style), extra keyboards (P-Funk’s synth wizard Bernie Worrell), and extra vocal support (Edna Holt and Lynn Mabry singing backing and harmony vocals). And Demme (along with cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, famed for his work on Blade Runner) have a gift for staying out of the way of the band while still putting us right in their faces to capture the energy of the performances. Demme also made the wise decision in the editing process to favor long takes and hand held camera to keep you in the moment – against the grain of the current MTV era of rapid fire, quick cut video editing.

The film begins with a shot of the floor at the front of what we’ll soon find out is a barren stage. A pair of sneakers – belonging to David Byrne – walk into the frame. The camera follows then to a mic stand and a boombox is set down next to the mic. Byrne’s voice announces “I have something I want to play for you” and he presses play, starting a rhythm over which his voice and guitar start to play “Psycho Killer” as he sometimes stands at the mic, sometimes stumbles and dances goofily around the stage. When he’s done Tina Weymouth walks out on stage, bass in hand, and joins him for a duet on the great song “Heaven.” As the song nears its end, roadies roll out risers and a drum kit and then Chris Frantz comes out – in his blue polo shirt, the only one not dressed in the industrial, neutral colored outfits that the rest of the performers are – and bounds up behind his kit to fire up the early Heads song “Thank You For Sending Me An Angel” as the trio that the band originally was. After the group had worked a while as trio, Jerry Harrison joined to make them a quartet and to signify it he’s out on stage next on guitar to join them for “Found A Job.” After they finish most of the rest of the band comes out, the curtain drops, blocking the open background for the first time and they kick into “Slippery People” from the then-new Speaking in Tongues album. Meanwhile Byrne gets goofy, dancing with the other singers, and everyone on stage feels the rhythm. For “Burning Down the House,” the last of the performers hit the stage and the full band kicks into high gear, with Byrne even running laps around the risers for the next tune. Though Byrne’s twitchy energy is often the focus, Demme wisely cuts away to give everyone featured time onscreen because they’re all clearly having a blast and the energy from all quarters is infectious. At the midpoint, Byrne yells into the mic “Thank you! Does anybody have any questions?” and there’s a quick fade to black. The film fades back up on a series of visual projections and the show is now in a higher gear too – adding in an additional visual component to augment the music. It hits a high during “What A Day That Was” (from Byrne’s excellent 1981 solo album The Catherine Wheel) where the band is lit from below by strong lights that cast giant moving shadows behind them. The focus is on Bernie Worrell later as they roll into “Once In A Lifetime” but Byrne’s eccentric movements (partially recreated from the video) again pull the focus up to the front line. As the film rolls out to a close, the energy remains high, going through a Tom Tom Club solo spot, Byrne wearing (and then slowly discarding) the film’s famous “Big Suit” during “Girlfriend Is Better,” an extended workout on their version of Al Green’s “Take Me To the River” and the closer, “Crosseyed and Painless,” which ends things on an energetic high before fading back down to the sounds of the boombox beats from “Psycho Killer” as the credits roll.

Writing about it can’t possibly do it justice. It’s a viscerally exciting audio-visual experience from beginning to end and if you haven’t seen it you owe it to yourself to witness what film critic Leonard Maltin (in one of the few times I agree with him) called “one of the greatest rock movies ever made” and critic Pauline Kael called “close to perfection.” They’re right - I can’t think of a better concert film that exists, rock or otherwise.

-Patrick Brown

Fables of the Reconstruction: 1980

My uncle recently “loaned” me a bunch of his records.

When I was growing up he was my rock and roll uncle, the guy who appears with the shaggy mop of hair and thick beard in all the family pictures taken in the 1970s. He’s all cleaned up now: short, graying hair; father of two; high school teacher; churchgoer. After I bought my turntable and started collecting vinyl again I called him and asked if he still had any of his old LPs. He told me he’d gotten rid of a lot of them, but he’d kept a couple hundred, though he almost never listens to them because CDs and radio better suit his busy lifestyle. So I thought it couldn’t hurt to ask.

He let me take about a hundred. As I was sorting through them, listening to old favorites and others I’d never heard before, I noticed that he had an unusually high number of selections from 1980, which isn’t typically hailed as a banner year in the annals of rock. Disco was thriving, Ronald Reagan won the presidency and John Lennon was murdered, among other horrible things. Yet here among the 60s classics and jazz and blues masterpieces were all but forgotten titles like Beat Crazy by Joe Jackson, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Cyndi Lauper’s first band Blue Angel and Sax Maniac by James White and The Blacks, which is the most unpleasantly strange album I’ve ever heard.

I called him and asked him about it. He told me he hadn’t really thought of it before, but that it makes sense because he was getting over a divorce that year, and he could buy records again without worrying about his ex leaving them out and ruining them. I told him I had a hunch it was more than that. If you were to line up all of his records chronologically, this sudden 1980 boon would stand out as a sort of paradigm shift, an explosion of bright colors and angular hair and lively music against the dull clouds of the late 1970s. These records are clearly documents of a new lease on life, a precursor to his second, still-going marriage and the career, family and life he’s brought into being. The reason I picked up on this fact so quickly, I think, because I shared this life change with him at the time, through the same music, in my own way.

The funny thing about this glut of 1980 disks in my uncle’s collection is that it doesn’t contain the two records he gave to me at Christmas in 1980: Talking Heads Remain in Light and The B-52s’ first record (actually ’79, I know, but close enough, right?). I was twelve. I hadn’t asked for them, and he hadn’t asked me what I wanted. He’d just decided that these were two albums I needed to have. And I did. They busted life wide open for me. Before I got those records, all I knew about was what was on the radio, which, in my memory’s ears, was all soul-suckingly lame R&B and pop, or disco, or a few pale shades of hard rock. And I was sneaking up on my teens, and I was starting to see that the world was kind of the same, at least in the small, Midwestern industrial, where the lake effect of Lake Michigan kept us shrouded in gray clouds for weeks and months on end. To my young eyes, everyone seemed the same, and they weren’t like me. I didn’t know who or what I was necessarily, but I knew I didn’t fit in.

So here was this music, and it revealed to me that there are worlds upon worlds outside the Main Street mainstream, and I might just belong in one or several of them.

I’d play “Rock Lobster” over and over again and jump around my room and dance, utterly unaware of my gangliness. I’d put a blue shirt over the lamp in my room to set the mood for the weird and eerie songs on side two of Remain in Light, like “Seen and Not Seen” and “The Overload.” Soon I was finding other bits and pieces of the counter culture hidden in unexpected corners of Elkhart, Indiana, most notably the picture book about new wave that I found at the Walden Books at Concord Mall. Here was a whole catalogue of possibilities for complete makeover as a young anti-Elkhartan. I raced off to the barbershop for a new wave haircut (now known as a mild mullet) as soon as my mom would let me. I started wearing white button down shirts with skinny ties I found in my grandparents’ basement so I could look like Fred Schneider on the cover of the B-52s’ album, or the Specials, or the English Beat, because by now my collection was starting to grow.

Elkhart, Indiana

Despite having more than a hundred free records courtesy of my uncle, I went out soon after he bequeathed them to me and bought the B-52s’ and Talking Heads’ right away. And after I listened to them a bunch of times, I called my uncle and said something like, “Do you know how important that was for me, you buying me those albums?” He demurred. But it’s true.

I shudder to think what paths my life might not have taken had he not decided that his precocious little nephew might appreciate something weird.

What Are You Listening To Lately (Part 2)?

I think I can speak for many record store employees when I say that the most dreaded question a customer can ask is “What are you listening to lately?” Most of us are on our own strange little personal journeys that are miles away from what anyone else we know is interested in. But I can promise you, we all have a pretty similar reaction when that question comes up: we brace ourselves and usually throw back a quick "What have YOU heard lately that you've liked?", because it would take too long to explain exactly what we’re actually listening to lately and why. With that in mind, here's a snapshot of what I have actually been listening to lately – what’s in the walkman, on the stereo, what I’m picking when I’m at work, and what I’ve been playing when I’m in the shower.

Talking Heads – More Songs About Buildings And Food
This is where their interest in R&B (and by extension, all black music) really starts to infect what they’re doing (and I mean that in the best possible way, of course). From the Al Green cover that they first cracked the U.S. top 40 with to the Shirley Ellis single they copped “double beating, double beating, double beating” from to the disco whistles buried deep in the mix in “I’m Not in Love,” this is a real move away from the quirks that so defined the debut. Of course, there are several songs of the same vintage as the ones that made up Talking Heads '77, but mixed in alongside the improved musicianship, their slicker feel for rhythmic motion, and most importantly the added depth of production that Eno helped them achieve, it really makes this record shine in a special way that the lankier, sparer debut doesn’t. Even if the tunes of the '77 may overall be at a (slightly) higher level (an 8.7 as opposed to an 8.6, say), the best stuff here is easily the equal of anything there, and the devotion to actually developing the music to another level, to working it over in the studio gives this the nod for me if you were to force me to choose. If only every band was this committed to developing their sound with each record.

Rahsaan Roland Kirk – Compliments of the Mysterious Phantom
It’s tough after listening to and reviewing a dozen or so great live performances by one artist to pinpoint exactly what makes this one of that one as good as others. It’s more like it’s one point along a continuum of great music and if it’s not immediately distinguishable from all the others, it’s at least at or above a certain level of quality at all times. Song selection is there to scan and certainly doesn’t tell you anything about the playing anyway – which in the pre-stroke Roland Kirk is always amazing. Humor is high here (both musical and in the spoken interludes), hard-blown saxes are at a high too. Multi-horn playing is minimal and it’s light on manzello and stritch, though nose flute has a full feature. Excellent, yet again. I expect nothing less. And if you have some doubts that he’s serious, you should require no more proof than the first two tracks to understand – he’s major. For real.

Jungle Brothers – Done By the Forces of Nature
For the long term, I’d have to say that the Jungle Brothers have been the most disappointing prospect of all the major Native Tongues groups. Nobody else of the movement showed such boundless promise that blanded out over their (sadly, intermittent) career into such so-so music. Listeners coming in late to their music at Raw Deluxe or the reduced-to-a-duo version of the group that made V.I.P., when they actually gained some mainstream radio play may not understand thius, but their great debut and this masterful follow-up – which, I might add, came out the same year as De La Soul and Queen Latifah’s debuts and a year before A Tribe Called Quest debuted – made it seem like the could’ve been the best group of the bunch. Like all the Native Tongues Posse, they drew influences from everywhere musically (especially James Brown, of course), but what stamped them as unique was how up, how positive, how pro-Black they were, always. All their compatriots touched on these things, but the JB’s never went to in-jokes, as De La was wont to do, never invested more in vibe than in words, as Tribe sometimes did, and they’re simply more consistent than Latifah – than any of the others, actually. At least that’s the case here, where their love for all kinds of pop music, their Afro-centricism, their humanism, their humor – all of it comes into play, molded into their best songs. They refined everything that their debut promised and they’ve never been as good since. Sigh….