Here Is Where Time Is On Our Side

Talking Heads “Road To Nowhere (Early Version)” – Little Creatures is such a frustrating record. Even though it is home to three of David Byrne’s finest songs, I reckon that it signifies the beginning of the Talking Heads’ decline even moreso than the similarly uneven Speaking In Tongues. Even still, it’s a fascinating record, the sort of thing where even the weakest tracks are strangely compelling thanks to the car-crash magnetism of tacky mid-80s production, clever lyrical themes, and the sort of keyboard settings that I can’t imagine ever sounded cool, even in the context of 1985. The album’s aggressive tastefulness and intentional retreat from the experimentalism of the band’s work with Brian Eno took it to the top of the 1985 Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics poll, though as Robert Christgau notes in his corresponding essay, it was mainly due to that year being alarmingly short on great records, much less albums that could garner any sort of critical concensus at the time.

The dvd side of the dualdisc reissue presents the music in pristine surround sound so crisply articulated that even an ape-eared non-audiophile like myself could notice the superior quality of the mix on standard television speakers, though I’m not sure if it did much other than to call attention to my misgivings with the album’s production aesthetic. “Stay Up Late,” the world’s greatest song about babysitting, and “And She Was” benefit the most from the dvd audio treatment, though that could mainly be because those two tracks are so strong that the super-clean production only brought out the best in the compositions, whereas lesser tracks like “Creatures of Love” and “The Lady Don’t Mind” are swallowed whole by regrettable arrangements and horribly dated guitar tones.

Of the bonus tracks, the main draw is the early version of the album’s third great song, “Road To Nowhere.” Stripped of its backing vocals and reduced to a comparitively spare arrangement, the demo feels noticeably lonely, standing in stark contrast with the inclusive feeling of the final version, with the new context changing the meaning of the song considerably by forcing the impression that Byrne is using the royal we when he sings “we’re on a road to nowhere.” (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Talking Heads “Fela’s Riff” – Only five years earlier, the Heads were up to something a lot more exciting, resulting in a surplus of strong material that has now resurfaced as bonus tracks on the reissue of their finest album, Remain In Light. I posted the early version of “Once In A Lifetime” recently, but that track seems rather tame in comparison to “Fela’s Riff,” an intense Afrobeat/krautrock instrumental that now ranks among my favorite recordings by the band. It blows me away that they would dream of ditching a track like this. Bands go their entire career hoping to capture something as magical as this, and they opted to leave it on the cutting room floor. Going on the title, I would guess that the band felt that the song was overly derivative of Fela Kuti, but man, that is just no excuse! The four outtakes would have made a brilliant stopgap EP.

The videos of “Crosseyed and Painless” and “Once In A Lifetime” being performed live on German television on the dvd side of the dualdisc are just as jaw-dropping. The band is at the peak of their powers and augmented by several additional players, jamming for a couple minutes before launching into a jerky, sublime take on the former song that outdoes the quite remarkable LP version. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)