You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack… you’re at a crossroads. You may find yourself in another part of the world… it’s college graduation, your 30^th birthday, or maybe it’s later in life. Let’s say you’re experiencing job frustration or the inevitable mid-life crisis. You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house… this is not my beautiful wife. And then it comes to you: My God! What have I done? This type of epiphany is known as a Talking Heads moment.

David Byrne was not yet 30 and the band—Jerry Harrison, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz—was just five years old when they wrote and began performing the prescient “Once in a Lifetime” (from which the above lyrics were taken). The song originally appeared on the watershed 1980 Talking Heads album, Remain in Light, with a spacious funk groove fully integrated into its compact, new wave sound. The combination of Byrne’s oddly perceptive observations and the band’s pairing of four-chord rock with West African polyrhythm was their singular contribution to rock as we know it. And yet, not coincidentally, somewhat ironically and perhaps fatefully, it is also the point at which a pile-up of circumstances led to full-blown dissent between band members. Artistic high watermark that it was, Remain in Light signifies the beginning of the end for the Talking Heads. Though their official break up was still on the horizon (another eight to 14 years away, depending on who you talk to), this was the time during which band members had begun to wake up to their own Talking Heads moment. In 1999 I spoke to all four of them about that crucial time in their history.

“I would not disagree that Remain in Light had the most influence on other musicians,” said Harrison, the band’s main multi-instrumentalist, attempting to play down the album’s legacy. “I think the things we were doing in that middle period have resonated in other people’s music.”

“It has a lot to do with what Peter Gabriel came out with; the moment we stopped touring,” noted drummer Frantz.

After debuting with the arty and edgy Talking Heads ’77 and after dabbling with deep soul on its follow-up, More Songs About Buildings and Food (including “Take Me to the River”), the Heads began their experimentations with rhythm on the startling set, Fear of Music (featuring the groove tracks, “Life During Wartime” and “I Zimbra”). For Remain in Light, their fourth album (and third produced by Brian Eno), the punk met the funk in a big way and nowhere was this new, visceral music better heard than when it was performed live on stage. The Heads demonstrated their fluidity with their unique form night after night, touring with a couple of line-ups of “big bands” in the early ‘80s. Following the release of another funk-drenched set, Speaking in Tongues, in 1983, they took to the road supplemented by some supreme backup singers (Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt) and three extra musicians of serious repute (Bernie Worrell, Steven Scales and Alex Weir).

“We were connecting with each other onstage,” bassist Weymouth said. “You felt like you were part of something, and each person was contributing to the whole, and it created something very special and very warm.”

Director Jonathan Demme captured the revue at its funked-up finest in his 1984 concert film, Stop Making Sense (so you don’t have to just take my word for it). Today it serves as a document of the glory of a band at its apotheosis. What you don’t necessarily see or hear onscreen is what’s going on behind the scenes—the band in the throes of their protracted and ultimately acrimonious breakup. Stop Making Sense captured the end of an era—the Talking Heads on their last ever tour. Fifteen years after the release of the film, on the day of its theatrical re-release, the band convened at the San Francisco International Film Festival. They’d financed Stop Making Sense with their own money and had come to promote and defend the achievement of their performances there within the film. It was only during the course of my interviews with them that I learned under what difficult circumstances the movie was made. Our conversations were occasionally splattered with still, raw emotion, and at points, I’ll admit, I found it difficult to navigate my impromptu interview with Byrne (solo) as well as my pre-scheduled interview with Frantz, Weymouth and Harrison (a roundtable). Let’s just say I was experiencing my own Talking Heads moment.

“Those people taught us how to be,” said Weymouth further rhapsodizing on the big band era. “… It probably saved the band, too… when we had been on stage before, my whole experience was just being David’s whipping boy,” she said. “And then it switched to Jerry.”

“You were Jerry’s whipping boy?” said Frantz, Weymouth’s husband, cocking an eye at Harrison, as the trio busted into laughter (the three have remained close through the years).

So why, if it was such a high time artistically, was it the last time they toured together? Did they have any idea at the time the end was near? I asked Byrne what he thought.

“Yeah, there were some backstage problems,” he said. “It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. When you get onstage, you can have backstage or personal problems, but when you get onstage, the music and the audience, etc. kind of carries you away. You just forget it,” he said. “So you’re there in that moment and you’re not thinking about, ‘oh that person is such an asshole.’ For a couple of hours, those problems don’t exist—for the most part—on a good night.”

“There’s been so much revisionism,” says Weymouth. “For instance, some people date our breakup to December 1991. We never broke up! One person left the group and that took place in May 1994,” she said, referring to Byrne.

“However, we stopped touring in 1984. And our last studio album was 1988,” said Harrison.

“David told us he was on sabbatical and to wait for him,” said Weymouth.

“What did you say I said at the time?” Harrison asked her.

“This is typical Jerry understatement,” she said, paraphrasing him: “I do believe this hiatus has gone a bit beyond what could be considered sensible.”

“It was pretty obvious we weren’t doing anything. We had deliberately decided not to say we’d broken up, although I think we were all pretty aware that we weren’t doing anything,” said Harrison.

“I think we hoped at some point we would continue,” said Frantz somberly.

Still unable to identify one single, back-breaking incident that led to the breakup, I thought of an image of Byrne from Stop Making Sense: flopping around in the big white suit, his trademark of the era. Earlier that day, I’d asked him if one might look at the ill-fitting suit as a symbol for his station within the framework of a rock band.

“Yeah, they could,” he said. “They could,” he repeated. Though he admits that at the time, he didn’t necessarily realize the extent of his own discomfort.

“I’ve noticed that it’s not unusual that I’ve written a song or performed something or whatever, and I’ve realized that it’s a prediction of what I’m gonna do and it happens the next year or very shortly afterward and I think, ‘I predicted I was going to do this in a song I wrote.’ In the song, I could put down my feelings that I wasn’t able to acknowledge to myself, and sometimes, it would take a year or a couple of years before I would act on those feelings, before they’d become manifest. It’s interesting. I’d better b
e careful what I write.”

Weymouth suggests the troubles that ultimately burned down the house began as Byrne was about to begin collaboration with Eno on their My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. A European journalist asked her, “‘How do you feel that David is leaving the group?’ And we said, ‘This is news to us.’ He told us he was going to make a solo record with Brian Eno.” Following completion of the recording, it’s Weymouth’s contention that Byrne and Eno had fallen out.

“But we didn’t know that. He didn’t tell us,” says Weymouth. “Chris and I, who had always loved Brian Eno, asked him once more to come in and jam with us…”

“But because we’d hired Rhett Davis…” Harrison attempted to explain…

“Uh yeah, that’s part of it too,” Weymouth agreed, referring to one of the album’s engineers. “So we went down to the Bahamas, we wrote all this stuff all together, and we made an agreement between us.”

The agreement was related to business arrangements and writing credits. The efforts to sort out a split regarding the origins of the resulting, history-making tracks resulted in the formation of two camps: Byrne’s and that of Harrison, Weymouth and Frantz. Like other bands before them, differences in creative and artistic control became the undoing of the Talking Heads.

Despite the trials and the lingering bitterness, three years after my interview with them, in 2002, the four Talking Heads finally reunited to play four songs at their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, exactly 25 years after their inception. But don’t get any hopes up for a reunion. The Talking Heads made it perfectly clear that this was a once, or maybe twice, in a lifetime thing—that perhaps it would take place again in another 25 years, though no sooner. Letting the days go by / water flowing underground would not seem to have resolved the chaotic and contentious history of the Talking Heads; rather it remains, same as it ever was.

Watch: “Once in a Lifetime” [at youtube.com]

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