Talking Heads - True Creatures Demos

I've been on a real Talking Heads kick lately, listening to their albums and side-projects with a passion. I've also been reading This Must Be The Place by David Bowman which is an excellent history of the band through the 1999 reissue of Stop Making Sense on DVD. I'd love to read an updated version and catch up on details I've missed since, although the basic vibe the book left with me is that David Byrne IS the heart and soul of Talking Heads, Jerry Harrison is a great musician whose presence opened up new possibilities for the band, Chris Frantz is a great drummer who really enjoyed the ride, and Tina Weymouth is jealous and spiteful because she's not the leader. Maybe that sounds a little hard on Tina but in most of the interviews with her featured in the book she bashes David, complains about the labels, says their audience wasn't sharp enough for her other projects, tries to take credit for things she really had nothing to do with and attempts to re-write history. I don't know Tina, haven't spoken to her and don't know much about her outside of her works with Talking Heads and the Tom Tom Club, and while one could argue the book could be biased, I would assume that the writer, if he has any credibility, wouldn't alter things for his own gain, so I will take the text as is and my assumption is Tina is bitter. She seems to be the main reason that the group has not reunited, and while David may be the center of the group, he is not Talking Heads. And while I'm on it, Tom Tom Club wasn't that great and most of their best moments on the first album go uncredited to Adrian Belew, SO THERE!

It hurts to see something that was so inspiring get left behind because someone holds a grudge that no one else may understand. Talking Heads really impressed me as a child since they seemed to do whatever they wanted without worrying what others thought. Hire wonderful musicians for an African funk fest? CHECK! Make videos that people are still trying to emulate today? CHECK! Make incredible records that still hold up? CHECK! The Big Suit? CHECK! Etcetera, etcetera, and on and on, the point is they earned a permanent place in my consciousness and I know I'm not the only one that can attest to that.

In digging through my stuff and scouring the internet for interesting goodies, I found an interesting set of demos labeled True Creatures. True Stories and Little Creatures, while great albums, aren't my favorite periods of the Heads' works, but I was interested and grabbed them, and I'm really glad I did because these are great tracks! These appear to be David Byrne on his own with a drum machine, his guitar and more than half of the songs for the True Stories and Little Creatures albums, multi-tracking his vocals and guitar over basic beats that could have all been recorded at home.

Most of the songs on the True Creatures Demos are pretty much fully written, although there are differences in some of the lyrics from the finished versions. Road To Nowhere sounds rather rough lyrically, with Byrne's vocals garbled by his multi-tracking, making one assume the lyrics were waiting to be finished. Wild Wild Life is mostly the same but has a few slight changes in it's lyrics. It is also missing it's speed and attitude from the finished version, as is Love For Sale, making them mid-tempo songs rather than full-blown rockers. Things get really interesting though with the instrumental Hey, not to be confused with Hey Now. This appears to be Byrne experimenting with his synthesizers and samplers as several pitch adjusted samples of his voice make multiple appearances saying only Hey throughout. Overall a great experimental instrumental which is otherwise unreleased, but the shining point of this collection, for myself at least, is Byrne's stripped-down take on People Like Us, making it more ballad-like and reaffirming it's stance of personal strength.

At the moment, I don't have this in better quality than 128kbps MP3, so if anyone has a better copy and wants to share, drop me a line, I'd love to talk to you. As for where I got this from, credit goes to nic1233 at the guitars101 forums. Thanks for sharing man!


Talking Heads - True Creatures Demos

01 Wild Wild Life
02 Puzzlin' Evidence
03 Love For Sale
04 The Lady Don't Mind
05 Hey Now
06 Road To Nowhere
07 Hey (Instrumental)
08 Papa Legba
09 People Like Us
10 City Of Dreams
11 Radio Head
12 Give Me Back My Name


PS - No offense to Tina, I simply call 'em as I see 'em. I'd love to hear you prove the sources wrong.

Talking Heads - Remixes

Happy 4th of July to everyone! Today's post is an example of what a lot of my posts this month will feature, specifically weird or rare releases that are DEAD out of print. There will be a few features on unreleased things, but I've got such a backlog of things that were released but disappeared without a trace that I figured I should get around to sharing the best of those with all of you this month.

I'm sure everyone here knows about the Talking Heads, but if you don't you should run out and buy Remain In Light, Fear Of Music, More Songs... and Speaking In Tongues immediately and IN THAT ORDER DAMNIT! But seriously, their discography is pretty damn solid over all but I'm sure anyone will agree that those releases are their high points, with Remain In Light probably being tops. Their film, Stop Making Sense, is also amazing and should be hunted down on DVD or that other format I don't support. That said, this post is for those who already know about the joys of the Heads or are fascinated with their more obscure releases.

The first of the two singles by the Heads I'm featuring here today is a promotional 7" for Houses In Motion from Remain In Light. The single was for radio play and contains mono and stereo versions of a special remix which I assume was Warner Brothers Records attempt to break the song commercially. The single doesn't contain any info on who did the remix so we can only assume it was Eno or someone from the band. It's not terribly different from the released version but it does contain extra lyrics at the end which have never been released elsewhere and the mix allows you to hear the background vocals much better than on the album. The stereo version was released commercially on the original single and has never been reissued whereas the mono version doesn't seem to have ever been commercially available. Again, not a revelation of any sort but still very cool.

The second single is for remixes of Slippery People and Making Flippy Floppy, both from Speaking In Tongues. Both remixes are credited to David Byrne and John "Jellybean" Benitez. Who knows how involved Byrne was with the remixes, he may simply have been present and gave his opinions to Jellybean, but Byrne takes his art seriously so I'm sure he was involved to some extent. As for the mixes, they are basically extended versions of the songs, although it's clear these are remixes as opposed to re-edited versions of the masters. I can imagine it being likely you could hear these at a New York dance club in the early eighties, with the call and response soul of Slippery People working great somewhere in the mix and Making Flippy Floppy, with it's truly funky bass and percussion, getting folks on the floor with ease. Making Flippy Floppy, in particular, would probably have sounded incredible on a huge disco system, as the aforementioned percussion, with it's multiple rhythms beyond the simple drum machine beat, can wake a dead man. Byrne's opening line, Everybody, get in line!, is a call to arms to get on the floor that can't be ignored!

It's peculiar to me what didn't get reissued when the Talking Heads catalog was released in the short-lived DualDisc format in 2005. For those unfamiliar, DualDisc releases were a standard CD on one side and a DVD on the other, making it impossible for you to play the disc in your car without messing up the DVD side. The DVD side almost always contained a hi-def version of the album if not a 5.1 remix, and the Talking Heads reissues delivered in that area with all of those features and music videos for each album. Regarding these singles though, I would have imagined their inclusion would have been quite worthwhile, especially the version of Houses In Motion. You could argue that the label was simply ignoring single versions or remixes which isn't abnormal, but then why include a remix of Television Man on the Little Creatures reissue? The Speaking In Tongues reissue had a rough mix of Burning Down The House as a bonus track which is great since it shows some of the foundations of the track, but if you're going to include that why not additional mixes? There was a great collection rarities and outtakes named, wait for it..., Bonus Rarities & Outtakes but it was only released digitally and still didn't feature any of the tracks in this post. I guess the people handling the band's catalog did want to see more of the stuff they'd unearthed get released, but it's a shame they couldn't have gotten releases like these mixes reissued.


Talking Heads - Houses In Motion 7" Promo

01 Houses In Motion (Remix) (Stereo Version)
02 Houses In Motion (Remix) (Mono Version)

Talking Heads - Remixes 12"

01 Slippery People (Remix)
02 Making Flippy Floppy (Remix)

Talking Heads - 1975 CBS Records Demos

The original Talking Heads lineup consisted of David Byrne, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth. Jerry Harrison didn't join until 1976, partly due to his experience in the original Modern Lovers with Jonathan Richman. They secured the opportunity to record some demos for CBS Records in 1975 but it didn't get them a contract. Just growing pains, because Seymour Stein signed them up to Sire Records shortly thereafter and the band released their first album, '77, in 1977 (what an inventive title for an album!).

These demos started circulating a few years ago, probably after having been dug out of the vaults while the TH catalog was being remastered. There are a few other interesting finds available, but most everything circulating has been released. Thirteen of these tracks are exceptions, never having been released officially in any form and showing a young but very developed band. There are some differences between these and the final versions, like the tempos of Psycho Killer and I Wish You Wouldn't Say That, but these are minor. The most notable differences are the less hearty arrangements which would come when the band's lineup was finalized and they went into the studio. It's also interesting to hear songs like Love --> Building On Fire without Toni Bongiovi's production excesses like horns or Psycho Killer without strings.

This isn't my favorite period of Talking Heads' work, but I still love these songs and it's great to study their early work closer. If you dig the Heads, give this a listen, I'm sure you'll find it interesting.


Talking Heads - 1975 CBS Records Demos

01 Psycho Killer
02 Sugar On My Tongue
03 Thank You For Sending Me An Angel
04 I Want To Live
05 I Wish You Wouldn't Say That
06 The Girls Want To Be With The Girls
07 Who Is It
08 With Our Love
09 Stay Hungry
10 Tentative Decisions
11 Warning Sign
12 I'm Not In Love
13 The Book I Read
14 Love --> Building On Fire
15 No Compassion


PS - The two tracks from these sessions which were released are Sugar On My Tongue and I Want To Live, both initially available on the two disc Sand In The Vaseline retrospective compilation. Also, for those wondering, yeah, Tony Bongiovi is Jon Bon Jovi's cousin. And yeah, while I said he brought some unnecessary elements to the '77 album, he's still a great producer and is also responsible for several of the Ramones early records. He's also responsible for getting Jon his first professional singing gig on R2-D2 We Wish You A Merry Christmas from the Star Wars Christmas album, Christmas In The Stars. There is also a Meco connection there for anyone so enamored with that man's weird-ass productions. Okay, none of that has anything to do with Talking Heads but I thought you'd find it interesting nonetheless.