Talking Heads
Tentative Decisions: Demos & Live
SIRE/RHINO
David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison will likely never reunite. This could be a good or bad thing when it comes to upholding any mythology surrounding Talking Heads’ prickly art-pop prowess and quirk. Either way, they’re sticking with mystery, and so be it. In its stead, however, the band’s vaults have opened wide and deep for worthwhile peeks into the ensemble’s process as both a three-piece (prior to Harrison) and a quartet. With Tentative Decisions: Demos & Live, they technically go back just a little bit further to when Frantz and Byrne met as fresh-faced students at RISD and together wrote and performed as The Artistics before diving into the charms and nervous twitch pulsations of new-to-the-instrument bassist Weymouth. It is, however, that trio that created a spidery, throbbing set of demos, first, for CBS/Columbia Records in 1975, then additional demos in 1976.
Initially welcomed into NYC’s “punk” pantheon as skittishly flighty, tensed-up types, Byrne and his equally anxious bandmates executed a brand of queasy, ever-so-complicated pop that acted as both an antidote to the rough, two-chord approach of the Ramones and as taut tonic to the more exploratory Television. Dubbed “artsy,” it’s the edge-teetering sound of troubled minds and excitable handicraft they quickly made as their earliest signature, whether on September 1975 demos such as the sketchy likes of “Tentative Decisions” and “Warning Sign,” the rabid schematic “Happy Day” demo from 1976, or the haunted, hungry tones of their CBS stuff such as “Sugar on My Tongue” and “I Want to Live”—all of which materialize on Tentative Decisions, originally released last year for Record Store Day Black Friday.
What’s additionally interesting to note when it came to their shows documented in this collection, with gigs from the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club (August 1976), Max’s Kansas City (months later in October), and Syracuse’s Jabberwocky Club (January, 1977), is that it’s not as if Talking Heads’ trio expanded their reach or stretched out more languidly in a live setting. Instead, like trees that grow sideways, the interwoven inter-workings of each tense track grew more complicated—a practice I’d compare to the work of graph-painting artist-genius Chuck Close, whose every circular pustule held many individual universes of emotion.
There’s great change within each song and every concert taping, but the differences are as subtle as they are strangely alluring. Listening to these demos and live tracks that would eventually appear on Talking Heads’ first three studio albums (including covers such as Al Green’s “Take Me to the River”) forces you to focus more intently than you might otherwise, waiting for every Adam’s-apple-bouncing breath-hiccup from Byrne, every thick-blipping bass line from Weymouth, and every snare snap from Frantz. Oh, and they do a live version of Jonathan Richman’s nerve-jangling “Pablo Picasso” at Max’s Kansas City that out-weirds John Cale’s hollering hosanna take. Big ups to that.
