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| "Animals like earthquakes, tornadoes and volcanic activity. Rich people will travel great distances to look at poor people. There is always a party going on somewhere." - from the liner notes I can remember when I didn’t like the Talking Heads. I first heardtheir music in college when my favorite bands were U2 and Pink Floyd, and these Talking Head characters were silly and ridiculous. I took my music seriously and U2 was serious music. Thankfully, I had the big “a ha” that allowed me to hear the juicy, swirling genius in the Heads’ silliness. No other band is as accomplished at ridiculousness as the Talking Heads, and there is no better recording of their feverish carnival sounds than Stop Making Sense. The soundtrack to what many consider the greatest concert film ever (of a performance at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood in 1983), Stop Making Sense is so wall-to-wall with supersonic, polyrhythmic delights that listening to it in one stretch is like eating half a dozen pints of Ben & Jerry’s in one sitting. There are so many places to begin in describing the miracles of this music that I’ll start at the end - the final track on the newly remastered Special Edition CD is the song “Crosseyed and Painless.” This rollicking, spiraling monster of a groove from their wildly ambitious masterpiece Remain in Light is so gooey and chunky that it needs to be programmed earlier in the mix once in a while just so you can get it down. The musicianship throughout is dazzling - imagine poppy, punky, funky, chinga-changa new wave rhythms and grooves played with the fervor of barroom blues or Zeppelin crunch! Pretty hard to imagine, and that’s the fun. On tracks like “Making Flippy Floppy,” “Slippery People,” “Girlfriend is Better,” “What A Day That Was,” and the sweaty, go-for-broke “Burning Down the House” (obliterates the studio version), David, Tina, Jerry, Chris and P-Funkster Bernie Worrell playing the keyboard like some acid-tripping Phantom of the Opera succeed at nothing less than crafting their very own genre of music from scratch - extremely danceable, consistently sing-alongable and totally hilarious. For much of the concert, David Byrne doesn’t sing so much as howl, holler, wail, warble and yodel. Somehow, all of his wacky vocal gymnastics work and work brilliantly - even the warped growly whines of the song “Swamp” are inspired. If you find yourself growling along, don’t hold back - that’s the pulp in the juice, the fudge in the swirl. And there’s so much more - the riveting lyrics of “Life During Wartime”; the spirituality of “Take Me to the River”; the party groove of “Genius of Love”; the sweetness and light of “This Must Be the Place”; the epiphanous ascent of “Once in a Lifetime” - sixteen tracks worth, almost twice as many as the original release, all of the music from the film. This special edition also features a groovy booklet with a color photocollage from the film. So whether you need to replace the original or jump in cold, Stop Making Sense is a mesmerizing 16-ring Circus of Wonders for serious music lovers only. --David Beckman (email)
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