“Let the flood come down / And wash it all away / Baptized in black light / I feel your touch / And I’m whole again”
Introduction:
So fun fact—this article is actually long-delayed. It was supposed to come out in the tail end of February, back when the hype for the Stop Making Sense re-release was in full swing and Paramore had just released their cover of the song. Of course, life got in the way and I was unable to publish this as scheduled. I thought of pushing it back to the first week of March, but things did not get any better schedule-wise and I was forced to push back certain articles, including this one. Soon, the hype for the re-release began deflating, and I thought of maybe pushing this article back later in the year just so I could focus on other things. But in the weeks leading up to the last week of March, this happened —
And that was my sign to keep this going. So excuse me if parts of this article feel a little outdated; I had stopped working on this midway through March and only found the strength to pick back up again after the Lorde cover was released. But anyway…
Welcome back to Cover Me Badd, where we look at good covers, bad covers, and what makes them tick. And boy oh boy, what a weird time it is to go back to this column after two straight months of dedication to my pop song columns, which zapped up so much of attention that I almost felt like I was a young man still able to keep up with modern musical trends. That’s an abject lie, of course, but hey, we need to persist in our delusions every now and then to keep us going, don’t we? But to be fair, it’s not like the music world has given us a shortage of activity. Like I mentioned in that previous article, there have been plenty of newsworthy pop music blockbuster events to keep us going, but while most if it has been reserved for either the contemporary pop market or for aging millennials seeking to turn the current era into the Gen Y equivalent of the late ‘80s Boomer Revival, those of us music geeks who are quietly aging out of the pop department haven’t been entirely excluded from the party.
In late 2023, indie darling film production company A24 acquired the distribution rights to Stop Making Sense, the legendary 1984 concert film by new wave titans and indie godfathers the Talking Heads. Or, wait sorry, just Talking Heads, no “the” included. The acquisition caused quite a buzz amongst music geeks, and for good reason, because Stop Making Sense is the quintessential concert film, perhaps the concert film to end all concert films. It’s gone down in history as one of the most skillfully and artfully produced concert films ever recorded, not only for managing to showcase a dynamic creative force at their absolute peak, but also because of how stunning and eye-catching the visuals, the camerawork and the attention to detail all are. And considering how fraught the relationships between the members of the band currently are, a move like this serves as a nice little testament to a band that influenced generations of weirdos to embrace who they really are. So of course, in view of the impending rerelease and remaster of the film. they had to have a currently popular band release a Talking Heads cover.
Yeah, this is the cover that set the internet ablaze in the weeks since Stop Making Sense 2024 was announced. The reception surrounding this little cover was surprisingly mixed, with some pretty antsy reactions from people who didn’t quite see the point of this little enterprise. It’s… fine, I guess. They pull it off a lot better than I was expecting them to, it’s a perfectly serviceable cover. It’s not the one I chose to talk about today.
Instead, we’re talking about a cover I’ve been wanting to discuss for a long, long time, one of the very first covers that came to mind when I conceptualized this column all those years ago. That’s right, today, we’re discussing “Take Me To The River”, one of the band’s earliest hits and, ironically enough, one of the songs that really helped cement their artistic direction moving forward, even if it wasn’t really their song. In 1978, fresh from their debut album and looking to branch out from their typical CBGB base to a wider, more eclectic audience, the band was convinced to include the song on their second album More Songs About Buildings and Food, but only after being persuaded by their main producer Brian Eno. Despite the initial reluctance of lead singer David Byrne, the song did surprisingly well upon release, even managing a tiny bit of crossover pop success by managing to get all the way up to #26 on the Hot 100, which was a remarkable feat considering that these guys were nobodies coming off a very niche genre that was in stark opposition to the trends of the time. Nothing on the radio sounded like the Talking Heads, at least for the moment.
But it probably helped that the song was already an established classic by a soul pioneer like Al Green, the man who first co-wrote, recorded and released the song just a couple of years earlier. Green was already a superstar by the time he sang “Take Me To The River” in 1974, but strangely enough, his version of the song was not a big hit upon release. It wasn’t even released as a single, and was instead passed on to Green’s label-mate Syl Johnson, who was the first to score any real commercial success with it. Despite the relatively short turnaround, the song very quickly became an RnB standard, and in the mid-70s alone had already undergone numerous incarnations by acts as diverse and disparate as Foghat, Bryan Ferry, and the Grateful Dead. When that’s your competition for reinterpreting a song and you still manage to record one of its most definitive and well-known covers, you know you had to have made something special enough to stand out.
Or did they? Is the Talking Heads version really as good as we’ve all been led to believe? Well that’s what we’re here to find out, so put on your boxy oversized suits and stop making sense as we do a once in a lifetime deep dive into the cover that put the Heads on the map.
The original:
What is soul music?
The moniker “soul” music is such a broad umbrella term that encompasses so many genres that, if you stop to think about it for even a second, you’d realize how ridiculous it is to just lump in all of these disparate artists and styles into one monogenre. And yet, that’s basically how we’ve treated soul music for the past six and a half decades. Let’s strip away the bullshit from the get-go—the term “soul music” basically just means “Black music”. The word “soul” has been used as an exonym for African-American culture for so long that we don’t even question it anymore—”soul food”, for example. The term is such a signifier for race that there’s an entire subgenre of it dedicated to white performers called “blue-eyed” soul. And while it’s weird to have a musical genre so defined and segregated according to race, that’s largely a product of the way music was marketed to heavily segregated Black and White audiences back in the day. Charts were literally classified according to racial categories—for the longest time, the charts specifically measuring the listening habits of Black audiences were called the “Hot Race Records”, for one. So when it comes to genre monikers, things get real blurry when it comes to, say, the difference between soul music and RnB, for example.
And yet, there is still a particular sound associated with soul music, especially from the ‘60s and ‘70s when the genre was at its peak—that of lush, heavily orchestrated, multi-layered harmonies, meticulous productions, and silky-smooth vocals laid over top, and a whole lot of emotion pouring out, almost as if they’re signing to you personally. It’s pure, unmitigated passion captured on record, which is perhaps the factor that united soul music throughout its peak years even as it had begun to splinter into a billion separate regional movements. Of course, in the ‘60s, soul music had a spectrum which differed depending on who you are. The sound we most associate with the early ‘60s, when soul music first had its mainstream explosion, is of course, the Detroit-based Motown sound, arguably the sound that helped set the stage for Black performers to dominate the charts on their own terms, largely independent of white artists and producers. Music was still heavily segregated in the ‘60s, but Berry Gordy and his merry roster of artists on Motown Records helped to bridge that color divide, largely by adopting a very clean-cut image and making pop-friendly tunes palatable to white audiences, especially those turned off by the dangerous edge of ‘50s rock and roll. But Motown and their ilk did this primarily by pandering to white audiences and white standards of commercial success and decency. Once soul music began expanding its audience, other soul labels felt even less need to smooth out their sound for white America. Which brings us to the other big soul movement of the era—Memphis soul.
Where Motown was clean-cut, buttoned-up and tightly controlled, Memphis soul tended to be looser, funkier, and a lot grittier than their compatriots up north, and that’s in large part due to the history of the city, which had always been a hotbed for rhythm and blues music. It’s where the earliest forms of Blues, RnB, and rock and roll emerged, and even long before the ‘60s, Memphis was home to some of the most influential blues, rock and gospel recordings ever put to vinyl. It was where W.C. Handy and his proteges laid down the very first Blues recordings, where Blues turned into rock and roll through pioneers like Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin’ Wolf Ike Turner, B.B. King. So it made sense that the city would be greatly involved in pioneering the next big Black art form. By 1962, acts like Booker T and the M.G.s were pioneering a sort of lush, pulsating sound heavily punctuated by strong horn and wind sections, a sound that would become the template of Memphis soul music going forward, especially for the acts signed to Stax Records, which throughout the ‘60s was the premier Memphis soul label, spawning acts like Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Isaac Hayes, Eddie Floyd, Johnnie Taylor, and the Staple Singers. All these and more helped launch Memphis into the preeminent center of soul music by the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, especially as Motown began to fall by the wayside.
But there were, of course, many centers of soul music in Memphis aside from just Stax Records, and by the turn of the ‘70s, as Stax itself began to enter a period of reorganization and label shakeups, another new Memphis label would stake its claim as the premier soul label of the next decade. In the early ‘60s, a bunch of Sun Studios alumni, including Elvis’ former bass player Bill Black, got together and founded a fledgling new label called Hi Records, which would struggle to find its footing before going on to massive heights of commercial success in the early ‘70s, primarily off the back of its biggest star, the (future) Reverend Al Green.
Memphis soul had begun to be displaced by the then-nascent Philly soul by the ‘70s, but it still managed to persist throughout the decade thanks to the efforts of Al Green, who was perhaps the genre’s defining figure past the ‘60s and one of the most critically acclaimed soul musicians of all time. And it’s not difficult to figure out how he achieved such a massive feat, because the man had talent flowing through his veins. An absolutely electrifying stage presence, Green was an engaging performer whose buttery-smooth falsetto and sultry horn-tinged arrangements helped pioneer a new variant of Memphis soul marked by greater sophistication and meticulous production, courtesy of Hi Records’ legendary label head and producer, Willie Mitchell. Together, Green and Mitchell made magic throughout the ‘70s, with Green opening the decade strong through a series of acclaimed soul records that were either critically or commercially acclaimed, but were most of the time both. The man had one of the most untouchable album runs of the early ‘70s (and considering the competition he was up against, this was no mean feat), with back-to-back releases like Al Green Gets Next To You, Let’s Stay Together, Call Me, Livin’ For You, and Al Green Explores Your Mind all becoming stone-cold classics.
But his journey into music was not the smoothest or the easiest, and there were multiple times when he came close to never becoming the Al Green we knew today. For one, he was never allowed to listen to any secular music, and he was beaten nearly an inch within his life after his father caught him listening to Jackie Wilson as a kid. He was kicked out of the home and lived as a hustler for a little bit, and it was only thanks to a chance encounter with Willie Mitchell that Green would find his big break. Even after Green reached smash heights, he’d soon find himself struggling commercially since, as with many soul musicians, the latter half of the ‘70s would not be kind to the likes of Al Green. As the entire soul music umbrella began to be displaced by flashier and more upbeat genres like funk and disco, Green would soon find himself struggling to cope with the changing tides of popular music. By the tail end of the disco decade, Green’s albums would begin to be seen as formulaic and out of touch, which negatively affected his once strong album sales.
Of course, it was more than just an inability to adapt that did him in. Green would also find himself mired in a string of mishaps and legal disputes, including several assault charges levied against him in the ‘70s by his former secretary and a woman named Lovie Smith, both on separate occasions. But there was a big incident that permanently shifted the trajectory of Green’s career. In 1974, a former girlfriend of Green’s, Mary Woodson, broke into his Memphis home and poured boiling grits on him as he was bathing, inflicting second-degree burns on his back, stomach, and arm. Right after the assault, she killed herself right in front of him, which affected him so badly that he saw it as a sign from God to dial down his pop music career and devote more of his energy to the ministry. By 1976, I kid you not, he was an ordained minister, with his own church in Memphis, and while he continued to record pop music sporadically, his full-time job basically became pastoring his own church. He still does it to this day—you can visit Memphis right now and attend one of his services, for free. This change did trickle into his music after a while; he did a full-on pivot into gospel music in the 80s, and while he did return to secular music in the ‘90s, his output has been primarily spiritual since then.
Of course, this turn into the overtly spiritual was no surprise, considering that that element was always present in his work. Exhibit A—
Written by Green and legendary Memphis guitarist Teenie Hodges, “Take Me To The River” comes from the tail end of Green’s peak period, and it was not actually that big a hit upon its release. It only came about as an album track off his 1974 album Al Green Explores Your Mind, and it did not originally come into prominence as an Al Green song. Hell, the widest distribution the original Al Green version received as a standalone song was by way of goddamn Big Mouth Billy Bass, which famously used both this song and Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy”. Incidentally, this is the version from which they received more royalties than through any actual legitimate release of the song itself, and despite how ridiculous it may seem, it’s the toy version of the song which has most likely enshrined it in people’s minds, with figures like the Queen and Lemmy Kilmister owning copies. It sure as hell led to the song’s canonization on another iconic TV moment —
It actually only became a hit thanks to the rendition by fellow Hi Records labelmate Syl Johnson, released in 1975 and produced by Mitchell himself, which is likely why the song garnered some level of attention despite not coming straight from Green’s own mouth. And I don’t mean to be harsh on Syl Johnson, who has historically struggled with being in Al Green’s shadow especially during his time on Hi Records and wouldn’t come into his own until much later. Johnson does fine enough on the song, I like his rougher delivery, but I think Johnson’s voice just isn’t palatable enough to really mass-market the way an Al Green version in 1974 could have. Of course, though Syl Johnson’s rougher, less compromising voice was a harder sell to the pop market, the song nonetheless quickly became a favorite among rock and soul musicians, many of whom tried to do covers not too long after the song was widely circulated. ‘70s boogie butt-rockers Foghat tried their hand at it a short time after, as did suave new wave pioneers Roxy Music three years later.
And honestly, it’s not hard to see why, because the song is a stone classic right from the get-go, possessing a unique arrangement and a smoky, borderline psychedelic arrangement replete with horns and jazz organs and an opening drum riff which I’m pretty sure was directly interpolated into Vampire Weekend’s “Oxford Comma”. Though it comes from the deepest of the deep soul traditions, the song nonetheless has a cross-generational appeal which makes it palatable to white rock fans and other demographics outside soul. There’s something arguably classic rock about it, especially with its twisting, winding approach that departs from the typical structural conventions of pop songs. For one thing, it doesn’t repeat the chorus in the middle and it only really comes right back around towards the end, by which time the song is nearly over and is about to fade into oblivion. Second, it goes into so many places, changes up so many times, switching up tempos and going on wild key changes, at such a frenetic pace that The Who wrote it.
But the thing that really marks it out as a classic rock song is the posturing, because it’s got so much of that same passionate, demi-godlike, almost Jim Morrison-esque posturing that marks out the best classic rock sex songs. The thesis of the song is simple enough—Al Green has needs that aren’t being met, and though he goes through a bunch of his woes in the verses (“You stole my money and my cigarettes / And I haven’t seen the worst of it yet”) the primary need here is carnal. He wants you to take him to the river and wash him down, and I get the feeling this baptism he so badly craves is a lot more euphemistic than he’d like you to believe. Hell, you can practically hear him nutting into the mic at times; the desire for pleasure runs deep within this man. And yet, it still feels like a spiritual, a baptismal, a call for manna from heaven. His prayer feels as directed to God as it is to his girl, and as his voice rises from the soaring instrumentation, you begin to get the sense that by the end of it, there’s no real difference between the various recipients of his begging.
And considering which point of Al Green’s career we’re currently at, then it’s really not surprising that he’d be releasing songs where the spiritual and the physical are so deeply intertwined. This song showcases the duality of Al Green at his finest—on one end, the troubled penitent on the verge of a spiritual awakening, ready to take up his calling as a minister and reverend; and on the other end, you have the abusive philanderer who’s about to get boiling grits poured into his nutsack. Both sides of Al Green coexist, and you can hear the tension quite clearly in the song, which is desire personified. It’s so all-consuming that it swallows itself whole by the very end; as the music overwhelms Green, you begin to forget why he wants you to take him to the river. He even forgets to repeat his own chorus at certain points; by the song’s closing notes, I’m betting you even he doesn’t remember.
It’s a pretty compelling portrait of a man at a very specific point in his career and his life, which makes it all the more remarkable how universal the song has become as a portrait of desire. It also makes for an interesting case study in how to reinterpret a song with such a strong connection to its source.
The cover:
To understand what led us to the cover version we’re talking about today, you need to understand what the entire punk and new wave movement was all about—namely, that it was all about pushing the envelope, baby. I kid, but in retrospect, it’s crazy to look back on this brief window of time where the biggest stars in the world were these scrawny, nervy art-school weirdos who were promoting their work with what amounted to five-minute Lynch or Cronenberg tributes. The narrative of pop music has always been so dominated by the big glamorous pop stars, the dreamboats and the beautiful people with conventionally attractive looks and easy-to-pronounce names, so those pockets of history where the offbeat weirdos take over are always fun to cover. And given how influential the movement would be to generations of alternative kids and weirdos later on, it’s worth zeroing in on this singular moment in pop music history.
In the late ‘70s, punk rock had taken the world by storm with its raggedy, violent lyrics and punchy abrasive three-chord songs about watching the world burn. It was a big damn deal, and had already done irreversible damage to flatulent and overly complex rock genres like progressive rock and old school classic rock. But despite its massive impact, punk rock had never become a commercial force, at least not Stateside. It was a notorious social movement and a convenient morality tale for people looking to wean their children off of Satanic rock and roll music, but you wouldn’t hear The Damned on the radio, the Sex Pistols were not selling out arenas across the pond, and it would be a couple of years before first-wave punks like the Clash and Blondie would break into American rock radio. Punk rock was a much bigger deal in the UK, where artsy mod hip acts had historically performed much better commercially. And in the UK, punk rock, despite its working class origins, had only exploded into the mainstream thanks to aesthetic marketing campaigns by the likes of Malcolm MacLaren and Bernie Rhodes that emphasized the image and lifestyle more than the actual music. And so, as punk splintered over there, its adherents naturally took punk rock into artsier, nervier and more cerebral directions.
By 1979, punk had already transformed into the genre that would come to define the ‘80s for better or for worse—new wave, with its flashy colors and outrageous fashions and eye-catching music videos, was poised to take over a decade that was all about glamour and excess. But the real characteristic that set punk apart from new wave was its eye for innovation and sonic expansion. It’s difficult to characterize what new wave was sonically, but as a movement, the thing that united all these disparate acts together was a unified drive towards expanding the sound of punk rock and breaking down sonic, aesthetic, stylistic and even gender barriers. Many of these guys were art-school dropouts who were largely but not completely connected to the first wave punk scene, and while they largely started out playing straight punk or punk-adjacent music, by the end of the ‘70s you started to hear a whole lot more synthesizers, drum machines and gated reverb, and the fashions went from the plain, ratty unassuming anarchic fashions most street punks wore, to more overtly stylized, outrageous and eye-catching outfits that were designed (at least initially) to expand the horizons of good taste.
You could make a decent enough case that it was these art-school weirdos and their flair for eye-catching visuals and high-gloss production that set the tone for what the ‘80s would become. Because the new wavers placed so much emphasis on visual aesthetics, their work was prime fodder for the music video, which started out as a new frontier for them to express their artistic visions. The music video was still in its infancy by the turn of the ‘80s, and in those wild west days, it was genuinely a hotbed for creativity, with artists taking the time to create what basically amounted to musical short films featuring mind-expanding visual concepts that really captured the imagination. This visual flair and experimental approach would eventually permeate its way into the rest of the pop world, seeing as the rest of the decade proved to be a glory era for outrageous eye-catching fashions, big hair and an unmistakable flamboyant which would only grow more pronounced with time.
Of course, as we got further into the ‘80s, these videos would become slicker, glossier, and more high-budget, while the electronics, synths and gated drums would only grow more and more polished, so it’s wild to look back on those early days, before the titans of the ‘80s kicked out the nervy synth punks, and realize just how avant-garde and unpolished it all was. The videos on frequent rotation during the early days of MTV were as amateurish and bonkers as they come, even some of the videos that we now think of as all-time classics on par with the work of Michael and Madonna. You look at the video for songs like “I Ran (So Far Away)” or “Tainted Love” or “It’s Raining Men”, and my God, they look downright makeshift, almost like a high schooler’s hastily put-together student video project. And that’s the fairly “normal” stuff; we’re not even getting into the really weird shit MTV was pumping out —
But all that stuff I discussed pertains mostly to the chrome-tinted future of the ‘80s. Our story takes place in 1978, before the movement had even had the chance to really bloom. Just where was the post-punk and new wave movement at that year? Well, as it turns out, not in very many places, at least going by the charts of the country today’s subject originated from — America. 1978 was the peak of disco, where the genre was just about to reach the heights of oversaturation it would become infamous for; with acts like the Bee Gees, Donna Summer, Earth, Wind & Fire, Chic, Gloria Gaynor, and Alicia Bridges being some of the biggest damn deals around. Aside from that, the charts were far from the sleek, glossy synth utopia and chrome-tinted visual cornucopia that would follow in the next decade. Instead, you mostly had a bunch of schlubby, ordinary-looking musicians’ musicians who prioritized songcraft and radio airplay over flash and visual appeal. Hard rock was firmly in the throes of violent, rough-and-tumble types like Aerosmith, AC/DC and KISS, bands who were averse to the music video format for many years; meanwhile, the rest of the rock world was gripped by the cold, sleek, professionalism of the corporate arena rockers like Styx, Kansas, Toto, Foreigner and Dire Straits, and soft rock was split down the middle between yacht rockers like Player, Raydio, Steely Dan and Kenny Loggins; and the easy listening crooners like Barry Manilow, Olivia Newton-John and Barbra Streisand.
In short, we were a long, long way from the MTV era; and you’d think there wouldn’t be much room for the song we’re talking about today. And that was true enough; new wave didn’t really take off in America until MTV went on air in 1981 and gave these people the right platform to attract an audience. It was mainly in the UK, where punk had more of a mainstream presence, that new wave acts first began to take off. But in 1978 in America, the early new wave ats were mainly restricted to certain pockets, the most infamous of which was the iconic New York club CBGB, in which the American punk scene had first taken root. It was where punk pioneers like Richard Hell and the Voidoids, the Ramones, Television, Patti Smith and Blondie first got their start as performers, and it was also where punk first started indulging in the artsy pretensions that would go on to birth the outrageous aesthetics of new wave. And if we’re talking about the spirit of innovation permeating throughout new wave, then by golly, we have to address the most innovative CBGB band of them all —
That’s right. Talking Heads. Not the Talking Heads, mind you; yeah, it’s just “Talking Heads”. Crazy, I know. But if you asked me to name the point by which punk had transformed into new wave, you could name a whole bunch of inflection points—Television, DEVO, The Cars, Wire, Gang of Four, Nick Lowe, Blondie, XTC. But if you want to know who codified that transformation into its most recognizable form, then the only correct answer is the Talking Heads, the spunky CBGB lifers who, with every release, would slowly shed more and more of their punk roots until by the end of their career, it was downright impossible to classify what genre they actually belonged to. In the span of their eight-year imperial era, the Talking Heads released a grand total of seven albums, all of which ran the gamut from everything to punk, synthpop, new wave, funk, electronica, early hip-hop, disco, Nigerian afrofunk and worldbeat, just about everything you can think of. I wouldn’t be surprised if they later come out with a previously unreleased zydeco record on their belts.
And the way they got there is even more fascinating. After having spent the early part of their career opening for the Ramones in CBGB, the Talking Heads quickly set themselves apart from the rest of their contemporaries for their critically acclaimed debut, Talking Heads: 77, which spawned one of their best known songs, “Psycho Killer”. But this first album, as acclaimed as it was, was still mostly a scrappy punk-sounding album. The real wild stuff wouldn’t begin until 1978, when the band began working with rising ambient producer Brian Eno, who before then, had made bank working with artists like Roxy Music, David Bowie, John Cale and Robert Fripp of King Crimson. Eno’s addition brought the Talking Heads squarely into more experimental territory, where the band’s legendary dalliances with African musical elements would yield back to back critical successes with 1979’s Fear of Music and 1980’s Remain In Light, both of which were groundbreaking releases that either foresaw or helped inspire certain trends that would go on to take over the music world in succeeding decades. Among other things, the band’s experimentation with African polyrhythms, collaborations with Nigerian artists like Fela Kuti, and increasingly heavy reliance on sampling, presaged the boom of Afrobeats and hip-hop music.
The latter, in particular, would serve the band well later on, given how many hip-hop artists would go on to sample the work of all four of the band’s members, especially the work produced by bassist Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, who formed their own side project in 1980, the Tom Tom Club, which went on to produce a steady stream of hits in their own right throughout 1981-82. You might recognize this little number from the billions of rap songs that have sampled it.
The band’s balls-to-the-wall approach was revolutionary for its time, and directly paved the way for the absolute bizarro madness that made the early MTV era so memorable. And as the ‘80s got weirder, flashier and more visually-driven, the band paradoxically began to fit right into the new world they helped create, which eventually helped propel them to actual commercial success by 1983. The album they released that year, Speaking in Tongues, became their biggest ever album, yielding their first Top 10 hit, “Burning Down The House” (recently covered pretty damn well by Paramore), and some of their best known and most enduring hits, including “Girlfriend Is Better” and “This Must Be The Place” (the latter being my favorite Talking Heads song). It all culminated in what may be the peak of the band’s success, when in 1984, the Jonathan Demme-helmed concert film Stop Making Sense, which depicted one of the band’s shows in support of Speaking In Tongues, was released to critical and commercial acclaim, going on to become one of the most beloved concert films of all time and spawning no end of unforgettable visual moments driven in no small part by David Byrne’s frenetic, energetic, and downright discombobulated dancing. And of course, the biggest of big suits —-
Unfortunately, I pinpoint 1984 as the band’s peak, because after this, it would all go downhill. The band put out two more albums in 1985 and 1986, both fo which were decently received but represented an overall downward slide into diminishing returns for the band. Their success ebbed and flowed with the commercial viability of the new wave moment that they helped create, and unfortunately for them, 1986 was the year new wave and synthpop would begin its precipitous decline. There wasn’t a lot of room for the Talking Heads in all the Bon Jovi and Whitesnake we were soon to be swimming in. soon, the band was overtaken by petty squabbles and infighting, especially between the eccentric and controlling leader David Byrne and the long-suffering and resentful rhythm section composed of Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz. Given that this feud went on to become one of the most infamous in rock and roll history (and is still pretty much ongoing to this day, save for a few brief reconciliations), you can imagine what that spelled for the future of the band. By 1991, they were splitsville.
But that’s all far off into the future. We’re still at 1978, and in 1978, the band were still finding their artistic footing. they had just recently shacked up with Brian Eno, and it was only in this year when the start of their artistic evolution began, in the form of their second album, More Songs About Buildings and Food. It’s an interesting transitional point into their musical journey, where they still retained a somewhat conventional prto-new wave sound, while already bearing hints of the frenetic experimentation they’d soon become known for. it set the stage for things to come, that’s for damn sure, and it launched the band to its first taste of mainstream success, which was impressive considering that in 1978 America, punk rock and the whole CBGB scene were fringe movements that had barely registered in the public radar except as a nighttime news story. Of course, it probably helps that they got there by covering a well-known soul song, and it’s perhaps fitting given the band’s history that they should make it big by engaging with their first bit of melding with Black music —-
The Talking Heads’ “Take Me to The River” relies primarily on one singular sonic trick—taking a fast-paced soul song, zeroing in on the tight funky groove that defines it, and slowing it down. When you get right down to it, that’s really all that they do to the song; it is the foundational trick that forms the entire cover’s conceptual bedrock. And yet, it’s that one singular trick that allows the band to flesh out the song and uncover new and exciting angles with which to approach it. It was certainly the right trick to pull for a producer like Brian Eno, a man who made his entire career off of exploring the spaces between notes. And on this song, he delivers on those promises. The band went into the recording with one strict rule — “no additional playing”. This rule applied to everything except single notes, and it allowed the band to keep its focus as tight as ever, forming an almost phalanx-like rhythm section that never wavers and allowing those singular pings, bass licks, drum hits and riffs to hit with maximum impact. Weymouth and Frantz don’t quite reach the same heights as the Hi rhythm section does on the original, but they do form a tight and unshakeable groove that plays well with the rest of the song, allowing for the sparse guitar and keyboard instrumentation to really shine. The restraint displayed by all of the band members here is astounding, quite frankly—there’s nary a keyboard note or guitar lick out of place; it all comes in at the right time.
And the result is that it somehow exceeds the original in terms of achieving that thematic cohesion. For all that the original has a solid conceit and central metaphor behind it, whatever thematic cohesion it achieved with its riverrine and baptismal imagery was confined mainly to the lyrics, whereas the music did not exactly capture that feeling of being swept away by the currents or washed clean by the rainfall that the song was otherwise supposed to convey. But by slowing it down to a more sluggish pace, by keeping the instruments tight and restrained in order to have each individual moment hit harder, it somehow captures that feeling of torrential downpour and tempest and puts a darker spin on this song about spiritual rebirth and cleansing. The impression you get from the original is that the man walks away from the river clean and restored, but ready to sin again. The Talking Heads’ cover, meanwhile, is a cleansing in the sense that a ritual sacrifice is. It sounds like the poor narrator is about to be sacrificed to some ancient river deity, what with the foreboding atmosphere and chaos in the backdrop.
That’s an interpretation bolstered in large part by the lyrical changes made by the band. Where Al Green’s version emphasizes the baptismal aspect of the song much more overtly in the chorus—“Take me to the river / and wash me down”—Byrne instead opts for something much more ominous and threatening—“Take me to the river / Drop me in the water”. If that weren’t enough, Byrne and co add a whole ass bridge that wasn’t there in the original “Hug me, squeeze me, love me, tease me / Till I can’t, till I can’t, I can’t take no more” — which just ramps up the tension even more. And then it just keeps on going, like a lumbering monster trudging closer and closer. Unlike Green and Mitchell’s original arrangement, which is actually quite untethered to structure and feels more like an improvised jam session at points, the Talking Heads’ version is nailed-on throughout, in every aspect aside from Byrne’s singing, which is what really takes it over the top.
Byrne’s vocal performance is deceptively simple in how it seems to ape Green’s performance, only to transform into a different beast entirely by the end of the song. What at first seems like a pale imitation of Green’s powerful delivery, instead reveals itself to be a deliberate distortion of the original, a skewed refraction of the earnest pseudo-spiritual pleading that defined the original. And it’s here where Byrne first showcases to the world a vocal technique which would become a recurring staple of the band’s material. His voice here sounds like a nasally approximation of soul singing, a cold, confused and neurotic imitation of a fundamentally warm and passionate art form, and it just adds to the unease as he continues singing lyrics like “Dip me in the water, drop me in the river / Push me in the water, drop me in the river”. It’s a trick that would find its way through all of the band’s future recordings, especially as they slowly transformed from a four-piece new wave band to a full-on funk ensemble at the height of their fame.
Though the song sounds almost like a note for note recreation of the original, the truth is that the Talking Heads version fundamentally transforms Green’s version inside and out, while somehow still keeping its mystical foundations intact. The song remains a prayer to the very end, but one that’s a cry for mercy to a much darker, more mysterious entity. And to have achieved that by just slowing the song down is nothing short of remarkable.
The verdict:
It’s a goddamn good cover.
Seeing that the Talking Heads’ version of “Take Me To the River” has since become the version by which all other reworkings of the song are measured, I don’t think there was ever any doubt as to what I thought of it. It was the first Talking Heads song I ever really loved, and it opened my eyes to a whole new way of interpreting music. And the best thing is despite how thoroughly it outdoes Al Green’s version, it doesn’t completely erase the original either. The Stop Making Sense version of the song speeds it up again and brings it a little closer to the original, which is always nice. So I leave you with this.
In The Loop 