'Talking Heads: 77' is ranked in the 'Rolling Stone' top 500 albums list. Robert Christgau, the hard-to-please, 'Dean of American Rock Critics', is a major fan who gave it an A- (what?!) rating. It scores 10/10 at AllMusic from appointed reviewer William Ruhlmann but perhaps that's undervaluing it. After all, it's been called rock 'n' roll's greatest debut, the best album of the 1970s, Talking Heads' finest hour and the greatest punk album of all time. Many believe Talking Heads left their contemporaries eating sackfuls of dust after the release of this monumental slice of vinyl.
Sure, Talking Heads copied aspects of Television during their early days, but this was before they became the superior brand in New York. Of my two favourite songs from their debut album, 'No Compassion' and the band's signature tune (killer bassline) 'Psycho Killer', 'No Compassion' is the song I feel best exhibits the influence Television had on their early sound (though it's been called infinitely better). To be fair, Richard Lloyd once declared David Byrne to be a comrade and this was long before he became a critics darling.
Opening song 'Uh Oh Love Comes To Town' had to be a dealmaker and it delivers the madcap quirkiness fans demanded. Television, Blondie, Pere Ubu and the Voidoids' early experiments with Caribbean rhythms were continually sculpted and reworked, yet said to pale alongside the majesty of Talking Heads' classic piece of magic which proved perfection from the get-go. 'Uh Oh Love Comes To Town' influenced the more soulful side of 1990s twee pop, became an anthem to members of the 2000s mumblecore indie film community and inspired a potent brand of "cutesy quirky" indie / alternative that grew and grew. Talking Heads asked listeners to strap in tight.
"Now I’m in New York, in a band with Chris Frantz and his girlfriend, Tina [Weymouth], and we didn’t have a super-duper plan. I had ambitions to be a fine artist and show in galleries, but I was also writing songs. This club, CBGB, had opened around the corner, and there were bands like Television playing, and Patti Smith was doing poetry readings. We thought, If we learn some songs, we can play there.
I had a day job as what was called a “stat man” for a company that designed Revlon counter displays. So I worked in a little dark room in the middle of this office—which meant I had a little radio in there, and I could listen to music. And nobody else would bother me.
Bowie was on the radio a little bit, and he was a huge influence for a lot of people. I was aware of all the Ziggy Stardust stuff, and then him moving onto the Berlin stuff. Somewhere around this time, in the late ’70s, after we made our first record, we met Brian Eno, who had worked with him on Low, and that was very cool for us.
In 1980, I went with Toni Basil to see Bowie in The Elephant Man. He was reading the collected speeches of Fidel Castro at the time, and he gave me the book and said, “You might enjoy this.” I dutifully read it. Castro could really ramble on. Really ramble on."
- David Byrne, Pitchfork
"My father played music that was wildly diverse when I was a kid. Like Talking Heads, he was a big Talking Heads fan; and he’d play Appalachian folk songs and Phillip Glass. It was kind of a nutty mix, so I never thought to reduce music to a style. To me, that’s like being racist. It’s like saying, I like redheads, redheads and only redheads. It doesn’t really inform your sensibilities in any useful way."
- Kristin Hersh, Uncut
'Uh Oh Love Comes To Town'
The album itself is one of 5 Talking Heads albums to be ranked by 'Hip Parade' among the top 50 American albums of all time. High praise considering this is only the first classic these celebrated Rock And Roll Hall Of Famers turned out. It'll be a cold day in hell before a band like Television even sniffs the Rock Hall, more likely David Byrne enters as a solo recording artist (a decision that's long overdue).
But let's not diminish the others in the band who ended up feeling marginalised, for they were a working band. When Jerry Harrison went back home to Milwaukee in the 1980s, he produced the Violent Femmes. In 2013, curator Brian Ritchie was thrilled to land headliner David Byrne and his pal Annie Clark for Mona Foma. Now the Violent Femmes can be found working with Tom Verlaine but that's their choice. Everybody I knew loved the Talking Heads back in the 1980s, mothers and grandmothers, sons and grandpas, people of all ages, even pets, all grooving on down to the heavy MTV rotation.
Tom Jones & the Cardigans were lauded for their spicy, sexed-up cover of 'Burning Down The House'. From boy bands to talent show contestants, many will look to Talking Heads for fresh cover material. Sadly, when Matthew Sweet (who worked with Richard Lloyd, Robert Quine, Ivan Julian & Fred Maher in the early 1990s) covered 'Marquee Moon' with Susanna Hoffs, he found it difficult to restructure a Television song because everything was so ingrained within the structure. Despite every effort to unravel the interlocking rhythm section and melodic guitar lines, Sweet somehow produced almost a carbon copy of the original because he found the instrumentation too specific and dominant, leading some critics to suggest that this is why artists stay far away from Television songs. Of course, some said they avoid them because they're crap.
'Elvis Costello may have pioneered the style, but it was Tom Verlaine who laid the blueprint for the Jazzmaster sound with his 1958 Fender model. Angular, crisp and in emphatic defiance of 70s rock ’n’ roll traditions, Verlaine’s tone and style in Television was as influential as all the Pages, Hendrixes and Claptons. From Sonic Youth and Galaxie 500 to The Strokes and Nels Cline, bands of the indie-rock persuasion owe a huge debt to the Television guitarist.
However, unlike how Costello stumbled upon his first Jazzmaster, Verlaine favoured the offset simply because it was cheaper. “They’re really problematic tuning-wise, but they were the cheapest guitars in the 70s, so I’m used to them,” he said. And his workaround for tuning instability – to use really heavy string gauges – also contributed to his signature sound.'
- Guitar.com
"Nothing beats meeting your heroes—especially when they’re happy to share their secrets. In the late 1960s, then-teenaged Richard Lloyd, the Television co-guitarist and new wave pioneer, managed to get backstage and into the dressing rooms and inner circles of people like Jimi Hendrix and John Lee Hooker. He asked questions, took mental notes, and absorbed lifelong lessons about the guitar. He put those lessons to good use, too, and developed an alternative, holistic approach to the instrument. That approach was enhanced by his left-brain orientation, plus his never-ending spiritual quest.
Lloyd also studied the teachings of mid-20th-century mystical teacher George Gurdjieff, and those studies—in addition to the impact they’ve had on his spiritual life—transformed his understanding of music. The result, which you can check out in a series of instructional videos and columns that appeared in Guitar World about a decade ago (now on DVD as The Alchemical Guitarist), is a complex, pattern-focused, vertical approach to the instrument based on an idiosyncratic understanding of the major scale.
Not surprising, his career has taken a similar, alternative trajectory."
- Premier Guitar
'Burning Down The House' / 'Marquee Moon'
..
