When Is A Solo Album Not A Solo Album?

Spin-off's from Talking Heads

David Fricke, Rolling Stone, 2/18/82

Spinoff albums are one of rock’s necessary evils. Usually
the product of overweening hubris and indulgent pop-star
wealth--i.e., member of a big-name band desires to "express"
himself and spares no expense to do so--they’re rarely much
more than massive ego massages.

But all that glitters isn’t gall. The best solo LPs by
members of working groups reveal: (a) what the artist
brings to the band in terms of influences and ideas; (b)
what role, creative or otherwise, he or she plays within
the group; and (c) what effect the experience of making a
solo album may have on the band as a whole. With this in
mind, consider the current windfall of solo efforts by the
four members of Talking Heads.

Besides the group connection, these discs have two things
in common: they’re neither "solo" records in the tiresome
superstar sense of the word nor are they collectively
concerned with the future of post-punk dance music.
Essentially the highlights of his score for choreographer
Twyla Tharp’s The Catherine Wheel, Head-master David Byrne’s
Songs from the Broadway Production of "The Catherine Wheel"
applies the lessons of the four Talking Heads LPs and his
avant garde Afro-rock collaboration with Brian Eno (My Life
in the Bush of Ghosts) to formalized ballet theater.
Husband-and-wife rhythm section Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth
assume the disguise of the Tom Tom Club for their busman’s-
holiday ramble through ethnic urban pop. And on The Red and
the Black, guitarist-keyboardist Jerry Harrison takes members
of last year’s expanded touring Heads even deeper into the
heart of funky darkness initially explored on the Heads’
Remain in Light.

In a way, Songs from the Broadway Production of "The Catherine
Wheel," Tom Tom Club and The Red and the Black are all
Talking Heads albums. What makes them so isn’t their
rhythms or their generally overriding seriousness.
Instead, it’s a unique combination of both: it’s a
volatile schizo-fusion of academic cool and barely
suppressed dance fever, epitomized by the band’s 1978
cover version of Al Green’s "Take Me to the River" and
the holocaust-party anthem "Life During Wartime" on 1979’s
Fear of Music.

Unlike most soundtracks and original-cast releases, David
Byrne’s score for The Catherine Wheel (which premièred
last September) has a life of its own. The wonder of
Twyla Tharp’s choreography for the seventy-three-minute
show is that she brings to the studied grace of modern
dance the sexual intensity and liberating spontaneity of
punk’s electric stomp. Byrne’s music and lyrics do the
same thing in reverse, creating a dazzling mixture of
rock & roll overdrive, R&B elasticity and ambient gimmickry
but with a sense of gripping dramatic purpose. You don’t
have to see Tharp’s dancers to know that this music moves
for them.

Five songs here boast familiar Byrne-Heads trademarks--
clipped melodic phrasing, a martial beat, the singer’s
strangled wail--but with a number of fresh and appealing
twists. "My Big Hands (Fall through the Cracks)," a
stunning expression of brute ignorance and greed, crawls
like a fat king snake, with drummer Yogi Horton’s slow-
motion strut punctuated by Byrne’s low, bubbling
synthesizer. Immediately, "Big Business" bursts in, a
frantic adaptation of African high-life music marked by
a ringing chorus of church-bell guitar harmonics.

The instrumentals are especially revelatory, as David
Byrne dissects the Talking Heads sound and adds,
subtracts and rearranges the parts to arrive at some
extraordinary combinations. Only four of the work’s
eighteen instrumentals appear on the record (all are
included on the cassette version, itself a four-star
investment). Of these, "Two Soldiers" features solid
multiple-bass rhythms while Byrne’s synthesizers and
Adrian Belew’s tensile guitars argue among themselves.
"The Red House" stars Eno’s electronically-altered
Moslem prayer call, and "Cloud Chamber" is Edgard
Varese-type music for kitschy percussion.

Compared to the weighty import of David Byrne’s
modern-dance inventions, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth’s
Tom Tom Club is light but learned entertainment, at once
a hip cartoon parody of and a sincere compliment to the
Third World beat they play with Talking Heads. In this
season’s rock-disco smash, "Genius of Love," the Weymouth
Sisters Chorale (Tina, Laura and Lani) read the black
music honor roll--Bob Marley, Sly Dunbar and Robbie
Shakespeare, Smokey Robinson, et al.--like some puckish
cross between Pink Lady and the Vienna Boys Choir over a
sunny Carib-funk rhythm track.

Still, it’s no easy task disentangling the playful mesh
of funk bump, reggae stride, punk moxie and lilting
"lover’s rock" whipped up by the Tom Tom Club, a baker’s
dozen that includes Frantz, the Weymouth women, Wailer
Tyrone Downie and auxiliary Heads Adrian Belew and Bernie
Worrell from the Remain in Light tour. The fact that you
can hear the inspirations through the gags--the
kindergarten word jive of "Wordy Rappinghood" and
coproducer Steven Stanley’s moccasin game-style dub
mixing--is a testimony to the group’s sincerity and skill.

Jerry Harrison’s The Red and the Black is the dark horse
of the bunch. Chastised at first as a cheap imitation of
Remain in Light, it’s actually a radical extension of that
album’s art-funk precepts. True, Harrison’s LP sounds a
lot like Remain in Light (which is understandable, since
Belew, Worrell and other members of the Heads funk family
play on it), but there are major differences. On Remain
in Light, such tracks as "Born under Punches" and "The
Great Curve" were straight 4/4 grooves, driven by the
rhythmic contradictions of the arrangements. On The Red
and the Black, Harrison sets groove against groove,
creating intense polyrhythmic arguments ("Things Fall
Apart," the herky-jerky "Magic Hymie") that are further
heated by his own combative lyrics and psycho-hipster
sing-speak. In Talking Heads, Harrison (a former Modern
Lover) specializes in counterpoint, emphasizing the
idiosyncratic flow of David Byrne’s tunes with jarring
guitar and keyboard figures.

He does the same thing to his own songs on The Red and
the Black. Springy guitar and keyboard parts lock gears
with competing drum patterns that range from sexy boogaloo
("Slink") to a regimental ten-beat loop ("No Warning, No
Alarm"). First, there’s ricochet percussion and an eerie
wail of singers who evoke a spooky jungle backdrop. Then
Adrian Belew’s guitar explodes into shards of Jimi Hendrix-
like metal. Reveling in this confusion, Jerry Harrison
never loses control.

And control is what’s at stake here. David Byrne is
usually credited with running the Heads shop, yet a
sense of unflinching adventure courses through each of
these records--bravely experimental in Byrne’s and
Harrison’s, sprightly and mischievous in the Tom Tom
Club’s. They all pull in different directions, and,
let’s face it, bands have split up for less reason than
that. But in making their solo albums, the members of
Talking Heads probably realize that they’ve broken ground
they may never have reached together. The next time they
go into the studio as a group, they should be that much
stronger for it.