Talking Heads - Speaking in Tongues

I was never really what you'd call a big fan of Talking Heads. I was a casual, and I knew more than a few songs. They were kind of cool, but also irritating.

I think part of my active ambivalence stemmed from when I was a kid watching them back in '79 on Saturday Night Live. It was their performance of "Artists Only," with the childlike lullaby, that I found befuddling. This was '79, and art rock was pretentious and stupid - at least to me. I wanted to hear the big guitars and rock out.

Why I still remember a performance I saw on TV a grand total of one time is a mystery.

This was the cornerstone of my reaction to Talking Heads for a long time, and while I'd freely admit to enjoying a lot of what I heard, on balance my opinion was primarily dismissive.

Then came the summer of '83, and I'm driving down the freeway in my little blue Nissan Pulsar. I've taken the sunroof out, and the top of my head is poking out of the hole in the roof. I have the radio cranked, and suddenly I'm bombarded by the opening salvo from drummer Chris Frantz as "Burning Down the House" blares through the speakers.

This was so good. It still maintained the good weird Talking Heads were known for, but it was different at the same time.

Of course, me being me, when it was confirmed to be a Talking Heads song I was less enamoured. I never bought the record, but when it came on the radio, the volume would go up.

Then a year later, when the band dropped their live album and concert Stop Making Sense, I couldn't pretend like these guys weren't the shit, and not shit. The live version of "Once in a Lifetime" remains one of my favourite songs - ever.

Then when they followed that up with Little Creatures and the oddly awesome Howard Finster cover (who would also contribute a cover to Adam Again for their '86 release In a New World of Time - that's another story), I found myself buying the band's records.

Although I didn't go too far back, nor did I keep going forward after these ones either.

I'm getting a bit off track... anyway, I would eventually get Speaking in Tongues, and it was this album that marked the tipping point where the band had figured out how to balance art and music.

It's not like the band changed to become more commercially accessible. It's just that it took a while for the rest of us to catch up, and for a brief period of time Talking Heads intersected with the mainstream.

It was glorious.

Yes, coming from a casual, this is what I thought, and this was based primarily on their big accessible songs. But a high tide floats all the boats, so by osmosis I took in all of the songs on the album.

I lost my original record (and the others I had) years and years ago, but in the early '90s I picked up Popular Favorites 1976–1992: Sand in the Vaseline, and it had everything I needed. So I was content.

When my favourite record shop had to shutter, they moved a bunch of their inventory to an auction site. For a while I managed to snag a lot of stuff at the minimum bid, which was a lot of fun, but also added up pretty quickly.

Among the sealed treasures I was picking up was the Rhino reissue (sadly the black vinyl, but hey, you can't hear colour) of Speaking in Tongues that was just like it was back in '83, but better.

Unlike the '80s, when there was a vinyl shortage and records seemed to be getting thinner and thinner, this was a solid 180 grams of goodness. I wonder if the rather flexible nature of vinyl records back then was the inspiration for "Making Flippy Floppy"... it is possible.

The album holds up remarkably well, and the big songs back then are still the big songs now. It's not like every song was a sparkling gem, but boy howdy, the album was a lot more fun than I remember.

Even the overly quirky songs were fun.

I suppose this was due more to changes in me than in the source material. With the passage of time, the band is now nicely interwoven into popular culture, which is a nice trick if you can pull it off.

I suppose I'll never really be a true-blue fan, but I like what I like, and there was a lot to like here. I'm still more or less a casual fan who has a little more knowledge than a bag of hammers.

For a glorious moment in time through much of the '80s, rock, dance, and good old-fashioned weird intersected in a musical Venn diagram that defined commercial music, and in the centre was Talking Heads.

This was really about as good as it got for the band. Sure, they'd follow up with a couple of really decent albums, but the band had peaked, and while we didn't really know it at the time, the band was running toward the dead wax.

Thanks for sticking around to the end. If you're wondering, I did actually read this before posting and realized it was quite a disjointed collection of snippets, anecdotal musings, and repeated thoughts that never quite resolve into anything coherent.

In a way, this would have fitted better if I was writing about Stop Making Sense. I suppose this whole streaming spew of silliness is more akin to (wait for it, you know it's coming)...

Speaking in Tongues.