BEFORE: I've mentioned before how I'm currently replacing all of my old cassette tapes with digital files, and so far it's taken a year and a half to get where I'm at, at the rate of two tapes per week. After downloading some of the more "important" bands first, I did the rest alphabetically, and now I'm on the letter "T". Yup, the first band under that letter is Talking Heads, so today I downloaded the soundtrack to this film, along with their 1983 album "Speaking in Tongues". At the same time, I ripped their 2-disc Greatest Hits collection "Sand in the Vaseline" into an iTunes playlist, so I can now listen to them at work, or anywhere via my phone.
David Byrne carries over from "20 Feet from Stardom", and when I re-worked my rock doc chain to accommodate this film, there was really only one way to do that - to put this film between two other films that he appears in. He'll be in tomorrow's film too, though I don't yet know in what capacity, whether he'll be interviewed or just appear for a few seconds in some archive footage. Doesn't matter really, I'm doing what I have to do to get through the chain and work in every major music doc I missed over the years. I'm probably going to miss a few anyway, there's no way around it, but as long as I'm happy with the result, that's all that matters.
THE PLOT: An innovative concert movie for the rock group The Talking Heads.
AFTER: Well, it only took me 34 years to get around to this one. I first became aware of the Talking Heads after the video came out for "Burning Down the House", then I really got into their music during high school when the "Little Creatures" album came out, then when I was in college, I enjoyed the movie and album called "True Stories". I would often see their records like "Remain in Light" and "More Songs about Buildings and Food" in other people's record collections, but I wasn't intrigued enough to check out those past records, I only wanted to move forward with the band for some reason. Then their last album "Naked" came out in 1988, and it wasn't that great, so I lost some interest there.
If there were certain bands that encapsulated places and times, like Liverpool in the early 60's or SoCal in the early 1970's, Talking Heads seemed to spring out of the NYC downtown art scene of the early 80's, peaking at just the right time, when MTV was new and eager for material, the weirder the better. Suddenly music had to be visual too, sounding good wasn't enough any more. I remember watching that video for "Once in a Lifetime" and wondering what was up with that freaky guy who kept hitting his hand against his head, and making all sorts of jittery movements that were supposed to resemble dancing somehow. But he seemed really nerdy, which didn't seem to fit with rock and roll at all - before then it was only the cool people performing music, and Byrne seemed like a music nerd who had suddenly figured out a new way to get people's attention.
I can see why this film got so much attention, it manages to combine minimalist "black box" theater techniques with avant-garde video art installation elements, then throwing in pieces of fundamentalist revival preaching or 80's aerobics workouts as needed. The concert begins with an empty stage, and Byrne enters with a boombox to perform a solo acoustic version of "Psycho Killer", the song that only bilingual French & English speakers fully understand, then is joined by bassist Tina Weymouth (and an off-stage harmony singer) for the next song, "Heaven". For the third song, they add the drummer, and for the fourth they add the lead guitarist. During each song, the stage crew rolls in the equipment for the next addition, which is very meta - the typical rock concert would set everything up in advance before the audience arrived, but letting the audience see the band's equipment coming together piece by piece almost turns it into an interactive show. The audience was probably wondering how long they could keep that trend going, like would there be a 15-piece band by the end of the set?
They added the back-up singers for the "Slippery People" segment, and clips of this song appeared in last night's film, so I'm happy with this transition. It's happened before during this chain, with back-to-back films using the footage of Jimi playing Monterey, for example. The Clive Davis doc also repeated a lot of footage that was used in the film "Whitney: Can I Be Me", so they're all drawing from the same pool, really.
By the time they got to "Burning Down the House", the whole band was together, with an extra drummer and the keyboards necessary for that song, so at least someone with a brain put the set list together that would allow for the dramatic build-up of set pieces and instruments. I didn't know all the songs here, like I'd never heard "What a Day That Was" before, it turns out that song came from a soundtrack that Byrne wrote for a different film. It seems like a filler song, as does "Genius of Love", the one performed by the Tom Tom Club, presumably while David Byrne needed a break. He did do a lot of running around....
No, wait, he probably used that time to put on the infamous "giant suit", which became a cultural touchpoint at the time. Lots of TV comedy shows made fun of it at the time - but it's basically just a version of the same white suit he wore at the start of the film, only it's much, much bigger than it needs to be, which is like a staple of visual comedy. I remember there used to be a store down in Soho in NYC called "Think Big", where you could buy a six-foot pencil or a giant watch that you could wear around your waist like a belt. I never really understood the point of those things, but now everybody talks about the "Big 80's", like when everyone had big hair and over-sized bracelets and even giant cell phones (though we didn't know at the time that they'd be smaller someday). When Byrne takes off his jacket, you can see the extra padding that he had to stuff in there to fill up the suit, I guess so it wouldn't fall down, but it still affects the way he moved around, he seemed like maybe the Incredible Shrinking Man or something, but he only shrunk by a fraction, so his suit was really loose. Yeah, I never understood it either.
Also starring Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison, Tina Weymouth, Bernie Worrell, Alex Weir, Steven Scales, Ednah Holt (carrying over from "20 Feet from Stardom"), Lynn Mabry (ditto).
RATING: 6 out of 10 stage hands
No comments:
Post a Comment