This just smokes: Talking Heads, “Born Under Punches,” live performance, from nineteen eighty. That’s Adrian Belew, apparently, on guitar, and “oh my God I can’t breathe Tina Weymouth looks so much like an angel. A gorgeous, muscular, platinum blonde angel” on bass. (Via Merlin, who is also the source of the Tina quote.)
This astounding sort of complex multilayered music is still arresting and unusual today, but compare it to, say, the top records of 1980 to get an idea of how weird it was thirty years ago. Make time for this today, especially if your name is “Frank” or “Mike” or “Rick.”
Three guitarists, two bass players, probably Bernie Worrell on keyboards. And yes, that’s Ade on noisy guitar. Zowie.
There’s just no touching that caliber of ensemble playing. Insane. More than anything, as our proprietor already pointed out, they sound almost entirely, impossibly uncorrupted by the musical horror of the day. They seem to create and operate outside of time, especially live. I recently watched the Blu-Ray release of Stop Making Sense and just could not fathom at how unmercifully schooled I got, yet again. 900,000,000 octillion gigawatts of energy jammed into one gig. It’s enough to make you want to just pawn all your crap and take up organ grinding.
This whole album is a stunner. Yes, Born Under Punches is wonderful, but I think The Great Curve (which they didn’t do in Stop Making Sense) blows it away. Remain in Light is one of the best albums of the 80s, hands down.