Heaven, Heaven is a Place, A Place Where Nothing, Nothing Ever Happens

In the course of writing this I discovered that David Byrne was born in Dumbarton, about ten miles from where I was born.

Heaven, Heaven is a Place, A Place Where Nothing, Nothing Ever Happens

Excuse me madam, do you have a few minutes to talk about letting the music of Talking Heads into your life? Who are the Talking Heads? That’s an excellent question and I’m very glad you asked. The Talking Heads are a new wave, post punk band from New York that were active in the 1970s and 80s.

Sorry? Yes, that is a long time ago, but anything is contemporary if you’ve only just heard about it. I myself only started properly listening to their music in 2010. Their albums I mean, not just the greatest hits. You’ve heard of Radiohead, right? Well Radiohead are named after a Talking Heads song. Not a very good Talking Heads song if I’m honest, from probably their weakest album, but still pretty cool, hey? Sorry? Yes, I suppose Radiohead are quite old too.

Well I can only speak to what I feel makes Talking Heads so great. They were always innovating, probably ‘cause Brain Eno produced a lot of their albums. Even before they started working with Eno though they were trying things. What other band would be brave enough to feature a steel drum solo on the opening song of their debut album? There’s a lot of Beefheart in that first album. Beefheart. Captain Beefheart? Aw man, you haven’t heard music till you’ve heard Beefheart.

But we’re talking about Talking Heads here. Their music, it’s punk and post-punk, gospel and country, new wave, art rock and straight up pop, with African and Caribbean rhythms and sounds thrown into the mix. They increased the size of the band from their four core members in the middle of their career to create increasingly complicated songs. David Byrne on guitar and vocals, Jerry Harrison on guitar and keyboards, Chris Franz on drums and Tina Weymouth on bass. You don’t think I wouldn’t know that do you? Well, Tina Weymouth was Chris Franz’s girlfriend, still his wife. She started playing bass ‘cause the band couldn’t find a bass player. Amazing bass player. Amazing singer too. Check the Tom Tom Club, Chris and Tina’s side project.

Gotta love David Byrne though. You should YouTube some of their videos, ‘cause David Byrne is what a pop star imagined by David Lynch would look like. Funny looking, funny dancing, but with unbounded energy. Here, I almost forgot, take this, it’s a complimentary copy of Stop Making Sense. Stop Making Sense is Talking Heads concert film from 1984. The greatest concert film ever made. Why? Well, a) because it’s got Talking Heads in it. But b) ‘cause it’s a concept concert film. David Byrne come on stage at the beginning and the stage is all bare and he sings Psycho Killer off of their first album with an acoustic guitar and a back beat. And then Tina comes on bass for Heaven, then Chris for Thank You for Sending Me An Angel and Jerry for Found a Job. Then it’s the rest of the expanded group, Lynn Mabry and Edna Holt on backing vocals, Steve Scales on percussion, Alex Weir on guitar and keyboardist Bernie Worrell. And as the concert goes on, the crew build the set around them, wheeling on bits of kit. It’s the most high concept, high energy film of a rock gig you’ll ever see. It’ll make you a convert to Talking Heads in 90 minutes flat. Does contain some strobe lighting though, so be warned.

Then there’s their lyrics. Byrne is one of the best lyric writers ever. The best as far as I’m concerned, but I guess I’m biased. Like this, check this out, “Heaven, heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.” Get it? Well, you see, heaven is supposed to be like paradise where we get everything we want, right. Except, what’s heaven to you might be hell to me. What if you like listening to Justin Bieber or One Direction, that I think are shit? Who gets to be in heaven then? You by listening to that garbage or me by blasting it out of existence with Burning Down the House and New Feeling? So the only way there could be a true heaven is if no one was allowed to do anything, so heaven must be a place where nothing ever happens.

I guess it’s like the idea of God, yeah. God is supposed to be infinite, so he must be infinitely good and infinitely evil, ‘cause good is a type of evil by being the absence of evil and evil is a type of good for same reason. So God or any infinite force would be one that like has no net influence on the universe. Every part of it cancels out every other part. Which is probably why he never speak to us. Except headcases like that Bush guy. And that’s why Talking Heads are brilliant and why David Byrne is a genius.

Or try this one for size, “Judy’s in the bedroom, inventing situations, Bob is on the street today, scouting up locations.” That’s like riffing on Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues, yeah. “Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the medicine, I’m on the pavement, thinking about the government.” Dylan! Bob Dylan. What are they teaching you kids these days? You should totally listen to Life During Wartime, ‘cause it’s about terrorists like we’ve got today, or New Feeling, that’s calling out people stuck living in the past: “It’s not. Yesterday. Anymore.” Sorry? Well I have to disagree with you on that. Don’t think being evangelical about Talking Heads is the same as living in the past.

Some great loves song from Talking Heads. This Must Be the Place (Native Melody) and Uh Oh,  Love Comes to Town. That’s the one with the steel drum on it. Oh, and The Book I Read. Great song.

Seriously, give them a try. Let the joy of Talking Heads into your heart. Sure they sound completely 80s, anything is bound to that has that much keyboard on it. Still, give the concert a watch and if you have any questions, our number is on the back. I am a member of The Church of Native Melody. We are dedicated to preserving Talking Heads music for all time. A contribution would be lovely, but not necessary. That’s quite alright, thanking for allowing to take up so much of your time. You enjoy the rest of you day now. E Glassala Tuffim I Zimbra.

Get it done.

The Community Strikes Back

A long time ago (five years to be exact)...

The Community Strikes Back

Season 5

The story so far:

It is a dark time for fans of US sitcom, Community. Series creator, Dan Harmon, has been sacked at the end of season 3 and replaced by David Guarascio and Moses Port for season 4. Harmon takes refuge in his podcast, Harmontown.

Although having its moments, Community season 4 is an enormous disappointment, stripping out much of what made the first three seasons exceptional in order to appeal to a broader audience.

Dan Harmon is asked to return to the reins for season 5 and accepts. Now, read on...

If you haven’t seen Community, what rock have you been living under? Only joking, it’s a line from the show.

In fact, you’re unlikely to have seen Community if you live in the UK as it’s only on Sony Television, a channel so far up the numbers on cable and Sky that you’re likely to lose the will to live trying to find something to watch before you ever get there. However, if you download the extension, Media Hint, or similar to your Chrome or Firefox browser, you can watch episodes new and old on the NBC website.

Community is set in a US community college. Its principal characters are members of a Spanish study group, based on series creator Dan Harmon’s own experiences of taking Spanish lessons at a community college. However, as Harmon himself has stated on his podcast, Harmontown, the setting of any sitcom is largely irrelevant. Good comedy and bad comes from its writing and delivery. The setting is just a construct. Scrubs would have been funny whether it was set in a hospital or on a construction site. The actors in Friends could have delivered their lines as they sky dived, it would still have been dire.

What singles out Community from most other sitcoms is the strength of its writing, its pop culture references and its tolerance to repeated viewing. Because I’m an obsessive ubernerd, I’ve been through the first three seasons four or five times now and still finding things to enjoy. Community’s nearest point of comparison is Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes’s sitcom, Spaced, which is the highest compliment I can possibly pay the show. Spaced remains the greatest sitcom ever made, even having seen its fourteen episodes countless times since it first aired in 1999. Community though is up there or thereabouts.

The first three seasons of Community run to 71 episodes. It can broadly be regarded as a satire of The Breakfast Club, Glee, Back to School, Real Genius, Animal House and countless other US films and TV shows set in college and high school. Its precedents are Police Squad, Son of the Beach and Scrubs in satirising police procedurals, Bay Watch and medical dramas respectively.  However, Community regularly steps beyond the bounds of its setting to pastiche spaghetti westerns, Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, buddy cop movies, court room dramas, zombie movies, Armageddon and Deep Impact, M*A*S*H, Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction and the Star Trek Mirror Universe. There are three episodes in the first two series involving paintball competitions, which owe a debt to the Spaced episode, Battles. It even mocks and shows up the laziness of just about every other American sitcom in living memory by featuring two clips shows that are made up of entirely fresh material.

The study group consists of Jeff Winger, a former lawyer who is studying to replace his fake bachelor’s degree; Britta Perry, a woman who dropped out of high school because she thought it would impress Radiohead (Jeff: You’d be surprised what gets back to those guys.); Shirley Bennett, a divorcee trying to set up her own business, and Pierce Hawthorne, played by Chevy Chase, the heir to a moist towelette empire, who takes classes out of boredom. There’s also Annie Edison, the high school over achiever who lost her scholarship through a pill addiction and Troy Barnes, the high school quarterback that she was secretly in love with. Finally, there’s Abed Nadir, the ubernerd who can only relate to the world in terms of TV and movie references.

What you come to realise is that the main characters are to one degree or another all extensions of Dan Harmon himself, which largely explains why the fourth season seems like a ship without a captain. Harman has said that Jeff Winger is pretty much a caricature of himself, having joined a study group whilst at community college and gradually came to drop his guard and get know the rest of the group. Jeff is undoubtedly the group’s leader (and manipulator), but the real driving force behind the show is Abed, as much a representation of Harmon as Jeff. Britta’s insane pronunciation of Bagel, Troy’s penchant for ‘butt stuff’ and the surly attitude of Pierce Hawthorne are all parts of Harmon too.

The show has a host of other characters that, as with Scrubs, start out as background scenery, but gradually come to have their own stories to tell. Community has a lot in common with Scrubs, the success of both shows in terms of execution coming from a lack of interference from the network. Scrubs was filmed in an abandoned hospital, meaning they were away from the glare of TV executives and could take more risks. Community’s success, you suspect, came from Harmon’s refusal to do what he was told in order to make the episodes he wanted to make, rarely taking notes from his superiors. It’s what ultimately got him sacked, but the fourth season shows how right he was.

Five episodes into the fifth season and Community is back to something approaching its best (episodes four and five up there with the very best). This season seems to be going down the road that Spaced took in its second series, abandoning pure plot for straight up pastiche of other genres, but that’s not a bad thing. The first episode is called Repilot, deliberately and systematically destroying any trace of the previous season’s incarnation, like the short lived reboot of Scrubs or a Doctor Who regeneration, and moved on to better things. Some characters have gone, some are new, some have returned or achieved greater prominence within the dynamic. The show has been cut back to thirteen episodes a season, but one hopes we get at least one more season out of it (six seasons and a movie). The second season was probably the high point, but season five is shaping up to be as good as the first or third, with a few surprises thrown in for good measure (no spoilers).

There’s very little other US comedy that I regularly watch these day other than The Big Bang Theory and that’s a very different beast. The Big Bang Theory is basically recycled Friends scripts with the addition of an occasional Star Wars joke (“I'm sorry, but I'm not going to watch the Clone Wars TV series until I've seen the Clone Wars movie. I prefer to let George Lucas disappoint me in the order he intended.”). The Big Bang Theory is my idea of trash TV.  The characters are poorly drawn stereotypes, the humour so broad and telegraphed that you can see each punchline coming from a mile away. Yet I continue to watch it. It’s like that relative that you constantly argue with, but secretly love just the same.

There’s also VEEP, but as that’s written and directed by many of the cast and creators of The Thick of It, I don’t even think of it as a American show (even though it’s cast are all American). The US office became better than the original UK version, but that’s finished. Parks and Recreation is not bad, but it doesn’t always hold my attention.

The Big Bang Theory occasionally makes me snort, but Community is laugh out loud funny. It has no audience or laughter track, which is always a good thing from a country whose studio audiences seem to need to whoop and cheer at everything all the god damm time. Community sometimes drifts into saccharine sentimentality, but Dan Harmon is enough of a evil genius to rein things in before they go too far (see his new Adult Swim cartoon, Rick and Morty, to see just how dark he can be). At such moments, the show’s tongue is usually planted firmly in its cheek, lampooning the sentimentality of the shows that it pastiches.

All in all, it’s good to get back to the Community we love and remember. It was touch and go for a while there. The fourth season had its moments (there’s an Unbreakable homage in one episode that I quite liked), but Community without Dan Harmon was like seeing The Magic Band without Captain Beefheart. Rudderless. It’s a victory for our community over the state.

Get it done.

In Appreciation of Captain Beefheart

Today, Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart

In Appreciation of Captain Beefheart

The first year of the millennium found me working at a temp job with a girl who would become my girlfriend during the course of the contract. There was only the two of us working in the room, so she brought in a tape deck and we would take turns to play music for each other. As we listened to The Kinks, The Beatles, The Clash, Stones, Elastica, Joy Division and Dylan (even Bill Hicks and Eddie Izzard), we’d also talk music to while away the hours.

One day the conversation turned to Captain Beefheart and how neither of us knew much about him, except that ‘Trout Mask Replica’ was supposed to be a masterpiece that sounded like white noise when you first heard it. We ended up driving to the local library that lunchtime to see if they had it. They did, but the CD was out and someone had it reserved for when it came back. I ended up buying a copy from HMV after work and putting it on tape for the next day.

She was either hung over or hadn’t got much sleep the night before, but what I remember is her with her head cradled in her hands, begging me to turn it off because it was making her brain bleed. She’d lasted twenty minutes into an hour and twenty minute long album.

Someone once told me that if you’re going to be drinking mixed spirits, like rum and coke, you should always have the first one neat. This will make every subsequent drink taste mild by contrast. I mention this only because the comparison with Captain Beefheart’s back catalogue is apt. Listening to ‘Trout Mask Replica’ first renders everything else the Captain did mild by comparison. ‘Trout Mask Replica’ is a masterpiece by a twisted genius, who kept his band under cult-like conditions in a house in the suburbs of LA for eight months, where they were made to practice the tortuously complicated compositions for fourteen hours a day. On coming to record the album, produced by Frank Zappa, the majority of the music was recorded in one four and a half hour session.

‘Trout Mask Replica’ is a difficult album, full of free jazz and irregular rhythms and off key horns. Not being a musician, the only thing I can compare it to is that perennial favourite of mine, the novel ‘Finnegans Wake’. The first time through it simply makes no sense and even by the tenth, the hundredth time even, parts of it will remain bafflingly obscure forever. Like jazz, you have to learn to speak a new musical language in listening to Beefheart. ‘Trout Mask Replica’ is like a Latin primer for everything that sits around it. I read somewhere that ‘Dachau Blues’ is the song you play at the end of a party when you want to get rid of the last stragglers. I agree. A masterpiece to be sure, but fourteen years after first hearing it, ‘Trout Mask Replica’ is a still a masterpiece I have to be in a very particular mood to be able to listen to.

It’s only the first shot of the evening though. If you can survive ‘Trout Mask Replica’ then you’re well on your way to appreciating Captain Beefheart’s genius. His first two albums, ‘Safe As Milk’ and ‘Strictly Personal’ almost sound like typical 60s pop records when placed next to his third. Almost. ‘I’m Glad’ could be a Motown single, but with ‘Ah Feel Like Acid’ and ‘Electricity’ we’re in more familiar Beefheart territory. What makes his music unlike almost any other artist in musical history is Beefheart’s refusal to conform to anything like a regular rhythm. His music rarely does what is expected of it. Even reggae isn’t as offbeat as Beefheart.

The first couple of offerings are as near to mainstream as anything Beefheart ever recorded, mixing blues, rhythm and blues and 60s psychedelia. His dig at the Beatles and Rolling Stones in ‘Beatle Bones ‘N’ Smokin’ Stones’ (“strawberry moth; strawberry caterpillar strawberry butterfly; strawberry fields”) signified the change that was about to occur.

After ‘Trout Mask Replica’, he never looked back. ‘Lick My Decals Off Baby’ is almost a continuation and again I have to be in the mood. Yet, ‘The Spotlight Kid’, ‘Clear Spot’ and especially, ‘Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)’ are extraordinary albums that can lift the mood in a heartbeat. Boy bands and a thousand and one guitar orientated rock clones send the workforce somnambulistically to production line office death camps for the soul. Try listening to ‘Bat Chain Puller’, ‘When I See Mommy I Feel Like a Mummy’, ‘Sun Zoom Spark’ on your way to work and see how long it is before you despair of your situation. I doubt many ‘X-Factor’ contestants who sang ‘Run Paint Run Run’ or ‘Big Eyed Beans From Venus’ would get through the auditions, or whatever it is they do. I don’t know, I’ve never seen ‘X-Factor’. I have thumbs.

Tom Waits’s fans subdivide his back catalogue into two eras, the one before he heard Captain Beefheart, and the period after he heard Captain Beefheart. The Captain’s influence on his music is obvious and it is revolutionary, for which we have to thank Waits’s wife, Kathleen Brennan, who got him deeper into Beefheart (Waits and Beefheart shared a manager in the 70s). Waits released some great albums pre-Beefheart, like ‘Blue Valentine’ and the live album ‘Nighthawks at the Diner’, where he’s virtually channelling the spirit of Jack Kerouac. Since1983’s ‘Swordfishtrombones’ up to 2011’s ‘Bad As Me’ inclusive, Waits has been on another level. In recent years, he has eclipsed even Dylan as my favourite recording artist. The influence of no-one else seeps through to his music quite like Captain Beefheart.

Beyond Waits, Beefheart’s influence is wide. You can hear ghosts of his rhythms in many ‘Talking Heads’ albums, particularly ‘New Feeling’ and ‘Psycho Killer’ from their debut, ‘Talking Heads: 77’. ‘Beck’ and ‘The White Strips’ have covered songs by Captain Beefheart. You also hear his influence in much of ‘The Fall’. It’s what makes ‘The Fall’ so great, Mark E Mark the Mancunian Beefheart (compare, ‘Who Makes the Nazis?’ with ‘Dachau Blues’). He even recorded a version of ‘Beatle Bones ‘N’ Smokin’ Stones’ on one of their peerless performances for John Peel (see ‘The Complete Peel Sessions’ disc 5). Peel himself said, “If there has ever been such a thing as a genius in the history of pop music, it’s Beefheart.”

Then there is Beefheart’s influence on PJ Harvey, a woman whom I can’t say enough about (though I had a go, see ‘The Sombrer Opacities of the Gloom’). Up until his death in December 2010, Harvey would send Beefheart advance copies of her albums. This fact alone makes her more boss than virtually any other artist alive. Her early albums are infused with Beefheart’s influence, but of all his musical godchildren, Harvey found her own way. PJ doesn’t stay still for very long and by the time of her own masterpiece, ‘Let England Shake’, very little trace of Beefheart remained.

In 2004, I saw former members of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band perform a full set of his tracks at the Manchester Bridgewater Hall. It wasn’t all that. Without the Captain’s effervescence, it felt like we were watching session musicians going through the motions. The middle section of the set was entirely instrumental. I saw a few hard core Beefheart fans walk out in vocal disgust. The real deal hadn’t recorded an album in over thirty years, not since 1982’s ‘Ice Cream for Cow’. His music never gained the widespread appeal it deserved and he abandoned the music industry for painting. He became a ‘recluse’ (a label used by journalists for people with who don’t want to talk to them). He’d also started to suffer symptoms from the onset of multiple sclerosis.

Sadly, as is often the way, it was only after the Captain’s death that I went back and discovered the rest of his back catalogue. ‘Trout Mask Replica’ should have opened to doors to discovery, but I was too engrossed by his disciples. We get where we need to be in the end. Now Beefheart is ingrained deep down in my soul. Safe as milk.

Get it done.