Steve Reynolds Program - The Great Curve
Good Morning!
It’s been a hot minute. “Wha’ happened, Wampus?”You ask. Well, I kind of put this thing to the side and then forgot about it. Sorry! My bad!
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but an ex-president has been indicted. And, surprisingly, it isn’t W indicted in The Hague for war crimes. It’s good ol’ Penthouse Garbage getting caught shuffling money in a most sus fashion. The fact that a “billionaire” had his lawyer take out a home equity loan for the money, like you’d do to pay for a new garage door, to get someone to not talk is so bizarrely funny and sad. The unfunny part is, well, everything else about this case. Sigh.
I had made a note to recommend the podcast If Books Could Kill, so here it is. It’s a Dollop-style show (has anyone coined a phrase for this format of show- one host reads facts and the other goes off on it? Someone should.) with razor-sharp writer Michael Hobbes, who sounds like a cross between David Sedaris and Fran Liebowitz, and lawyer Peter Shamshiri reviewing nonfiction airport bestsellers and ripping them apart. It’s pretty fun and makes you realize how shakily conventional wisdom is established. Check it out!
Song #29
The Great Curve
by Talking Heads
I loved Talking Heads (don’t you dare put “the” in front of their name) when I was in high school. I even had a poster of David Byrne on my wall, making me now wonder what my parents thought of that black and white photo of a weird skinny guy with Michael Corleone hair with a dress shirt buttoned up to the top who stared deadpan at the camera—they probably added it to the list of things just not right with me. Talking Heads were a little smarter and weirder than other stuff on MTV, like I thought I was weirder and smarter than my classmates. So I gravitated to the band for a then-arrogant, now-embarrassing reason. Fortunately, their music was, and is still, very good .
I didn’t listen to their album Remain in Light back then. I knew “Once In A Lifetime” from its video, but that was about it. Purchasing True Stories and Little Creatures as they came out, both just very okay albums and with diminishing returns after the peak of Speaking In Tongues, chilled my curiosity of their previous albums. It wouldn’t be for years before I car-loud-listened (my tested best form of music listening) to RIL and realized how great it is.
The Eno-produced album from 1980 features Talking Heads blowing the roof off the status quo of pop music. With polyrhythms, modded synthyesizers, non-Western scale-based music and lyrics touching on discorporation and pantheism, it built on and expanded what their previous albums hinted at what they could do. Plus it has what could be the best three song run on an album ever. It starts with “Crosseyed and Painless” and ends with the one everyone knows, “Once In A Lifetime,” but it’s the one in the middle that I blare any time it comes on.
“The Great Curve” starts full force, almost like we caught the band in the middle of a jam. Tina Weymouth’s bass anchors the whole thing along with Chris Frantz’s steady drum beat. There’s a call and response of punctuated guitars along with persistent congas (or bongos) that add a complex tension. A blast of horns near the end of each riff fills in a space you didn’t know was there.
Then David Byrne’s tenor sings of the world as an elusive, mysterious thing. It matches the groove sounding so unique behind it. The lines “The world is near, but it's out of reach / Some people touch it, but they can't hold on” hit at that eternal strugggle to describe feelings or phenomena that are complex or ephemeral- the writer's grail. And even more elusive is when it is a songwriter's quest: trying to combine music and words to capture a thought or feeling.
Ultimately, the chorus is what raises the song to a favorite. Nona Hendryx, singer extraoridinaire and one third of Labelle ("Lady Marmalade"), provides a countermelody to Byrne's. As he sings about invisible forces guiding a woman, Hendryx sings staccato "Darker! Darker!" almost in the style of a horn chart. It evokes creativity and collaboration.
I haven’t even mentioned Adrian Belew’s guitar solo. It’s the perfect amount of Belewin’ for a song (Belew is a talent best modestly portioned out). It’s cacophonous and wails over the groove held down tightly by Weymouth and Frantz. And it will fire the imagination of a nerdy Oklahoman like nothing else.
back matter
This issue’s Song I’m Mad I Forgot To Put On The List is “All My Little Words” by Magnetic Fields. I’m really mad about this omission. Maybe I didn’t know how to choose just one of the 69 Love Songs? We just saw Magnetic Fields in Dallas and it was great. Stephin Merrit really crafts a song like nobody else.