Talking Heads- Talking Heads '77

As part of the first wave of punk rock in New York in the late 1970’s, Talking Heads helped to usher in a new style of music that was unlike anything seen before. Some classify Talking Heads as a new-wave band, but for me, they are a punk band. Not punk as in hard guitars/moshing as seen in the current punk scene, but a whole other animal. It raises the question of what is punk. To me, punk is doing something totally different against mainstream thought and to think for yourself; it’s an attitude, not a T-shirt or style of music. If you look at punk as I do, there is no question that Talking Heads were punk, in their own way.

Ok, with that out of the way, Talking Heads came about in the mid 1970’s after meeting in college in Rhode Island. After moving to New York, the band began playing at the now legendary CBGB’s down in the Bowery. As one of the first bands to make a name for themselves playing at the club, the Heads developed a sound that would set them apart from many of their contemporaries.

The main catalyst of their sound was singer/guitarist David Byrne. His disjointed vocal performance style was a hallmark of the band’s sound. As for the other members of the band at this point, bassist Tina Weymouth utilized a minimal approach to her playing while still creating some timeless bass lines and her husband/drummer Chris Frantz held down the beat while the band went in many different directions. His and Weymouth’s versatility was key for the sound the Heads on subsequent albums.

The most impressive thing about ’77 (released on Sire Records..in 1977) is the fact that the music seems to shift song-to-song. It’s not like they stick to one basic sound and all the songs are tied together. It seems like three or four different styles are present on the album. The art/funk style of Uh-Oh Love comes to Town goes into the second track; New Feeling sounds nothing like the preceding track, it actually seems to have a punk-attitude to it while the music seems to foreshadow the new wave movement by a few years. Psycho Killer is probably the best known track of this album, and while good, it is not the best track on the album. As a album that did something totally different and started an entire new genre of music, Talking Heads ’77 was truly a classic album.

Grade-A-