Head land

Doing it without David Byrne

by Brett Milano

Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison have to be smart enough to realize that by reviving Talking Heads -- even in the coy, not-really-a-reunion guise of the Heads -- they'd be competing with a lot of people's memories. This is mine: in November 1979, I saw a Talking Heads show that peaked with "Memories Can't Wait," the most chilling song on their most chilling album, Fear of Music. The song made a slow, steady build-up to David Byrne's cathartic yowls -- "These memories can't waaa-iii-it!"; and his shrieks were still echoing off the walls when the music stopped. Without giving us time to recover, the band slammed into the tension-releasing intro of "Psycho Killer." Maybe it's because I was young and hadn't been to a lot of concerts yet, but I've yet to see any band do a better job of going to the brink and back.

"Memories Can't Wait" was also the opening song of the Heads' local debut at the Paradise, a week ago Friday. "Psycho Killer" came 90 minutes later, at set's end. If neither song was quite the life changer it had been in 1979, their power didn't get shortchanged, either. And though singer Johnette Napolitano (ex-Concrete Blonde and standing in for David Byrne, who has dissociated himself from the project) didn't write the lyrics, she seems to understand exactly what it was that made Byrne write them. Performing a set tilted toward new material (including three unrecorded songs), these Heads may not have sounded just like the old group, but they did sound like a true band rather than a bunch of professionals cashing in on a name. There was a sense of territory being reclaimed, of the right threads being picked up.

That sense doesn't always come through on the Heads' No Talking, Just Head (Radioactive/MCA), which features the three core Heads (plus guitarist Blast Murray) doing 12 songs with as many lead singers/lyricists, ranging from punk cult figures (Debbie Harry, Richard Hell, and Violent Femme Gordon Gano) to near-unknowns (New York poet Malin Anneteg, who also turned up at the Paradise to deliver her track, "No More Lonely Nights"). The Heads' good taste in singers saves the project from being a mishmash (with two exceptions: INXS's Michael Hutchence and Black Grape's Shaun Ryder).

Still, with so many strong personalities up front, the core Heads sound like what they are: a good rhythm section. And that's not enough to leave a personal stamp on every song -- especially since Frantz programs as many drum parts as he plays. Sometimes they sound just like the singers' regular bands. The only real stab at a new direction is Napolitano's opener, "The Damage I've Done." Sultry, obsessive, and catchy as hell, it's the one perfect track that she never quite delivered with her previous bands, Concrete Blonde and Pretty & Twisted.

If the Heads' Paradise show proved anything, it's that they should have forgone the all-star concept and made the whole album with Napolitano. She's got what they need the most -- a distinctive voice that fits in while sounding nothing like Byrne's -- and she gives the line-up a kind of sexiness it never had before. The album's title track (originally sung by Debbie Harry), about a prostitute playing mind games on her customers, was as sinister in its way as anything of Byrne's. And the band's old chemistry was more evident than on the disc.

Reached by phone, Harrison defended the new band against some of the knocks they've taken, notably a pan in Rolling Stone. "A lot of people want to keep Talking Heads as this pure experience they had, so this is a hard thing to accept. We've had bad reviews before, so who cares, but you can't say that some of it doesn't hurt."

One of the harshest critics was Byrne, who took legal action, unsuccessfully, to prevent his bandmates from using a variation of the Talking Heads name. Does that close the door on any future work with him? "Let's say it closes the door, but perhaps it's not locked. It's certainly not a nice feeling to be sued. You might say that David thinks of Talking Heads as his museum. One of the main reasons we stopped touring was that he didn't feel he could top Stop Making Sense. The rest of us wanted to do something smaller -- like playing the Orpheum for a week -- and that might have happened if David hadn't gotten so involved with [the film] True Stories. I still think it was a big mistake for the four of us to stop working together."

A handful of Byrne's songs -- including the most obvious ones, "Life During Wartime" and "Burning Down the House" -- were still performed last weekend, along with "Genius of Love" (Frantz and Weymouth's hit with Tom Tom Club), and even a track from one of Harrison's solo albums. But these were saved for the close of the set, after the Heads had proved they could cut it as a sort-of new band and the oldies could be played without hints of desperation. For most of the show, the memories could wait.