Talking Heads

“This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco

This ain’t no fooling around

This ain’t no Mudd Club, no C.B.G.B.’s

I ain’t got time for that now.”

    Talking Heads, “Life during Wartime”

 

I listened to a CBGB OMFUG tribute CD that contained the Talking Heads classic “Life during Wartime,” which contained the line ”No time for dancing, or lovey dovey,” from the band’s “Fear of Music” album. Opening in 1973 in New York City’s East Village, the club’s founder Hilly Kristal used initials standing for “Country, Bluegrass, Blues, and Other Uplifting Gormandizers (voracious consumers).  Rather seedy, CBGBs came to be renown as one of the birthplaces for punk, with house bands such as the Ramones, Television, Patti Smith, Blondie, and Talking Heads, led by frenetic David Byrne, whose first hit was “Psycho Killer.”

 

In a New York Review essay titled “This Ain’t No Disco” Dan Chiasson wrote:

    The constructed family called Talking Heads was a band led by a couple, with a strange, alienated man-child at the microphone.  The Ramones, their friends and touring partners, were a family all right but in comic-nightmare form: a feral, sniping brood, a nest of eels.  [Chris] Frantz, Byrne, [Tina] Weymouth, on the other hand, spruced up the dangerous commercial loft where they lived together on Chrystie Street with rattan furniture from Frantz’s parents’ porch.

 

Byrne wrote “Life during Wartime” in 1979 and later claimed it was about Baader-Meinhof, Patty Hearst, Tompkins Square, and living in Alphabet City.  Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof were part of a terrorist anti-American West German gang who were both killed while in custody (authorities claimed Mainhof’s death was a suicide). Patty Hearst was kidnapped in 1974 by Symbionese Liberation Army radicals and was either forced or brainwashed into participating in robberies for which she served seven years in prison. Tompkins Square was located in the East Village, with avenues named A, B, C, and D.

 

Several years ago, Miller mainstays George Rogge and Gene Ayers arranged for the classic 1984 documentary “Stop Making Sense” to be shown at Gardner Center. It opens with Byrne alone on a stage with a cassette player.  He begins singing “Psycho Killer” and is later joined by fellow band members and finally several other musicians and singers, who follow with “Burning Down the House.” During the film Byrne appears in an absurdly huge business suit, at which time Rogge darts out in similar apparel and does a spectacular imitation of Byrne’s gyrations.  Unforgettable.