Originally published in Rock and Roll: The 100 Best Singles

#79 Talking Heads, “Take Me to the River”

Every great performance has the ghosts of past performances inside it. In this case our screams (you’re not listening to this record right if you don’t find yourself screaming along with the chorus) are no doubt requesting transportation to that greatest of American waterways, drainer of the heartlands, the Mississippi, because although David Byrne and Talking Heads may have laid down this deep groove in some ofay New York City recording studio, the song and performance they’re emulating is by Syl Johnson and Willie Mitchell out of Al Green and Teenie Hodges out of Little Junior Parker, that is to say, MEMPHIS MEMPHIS MEMPHIS (now I’m screaming), the great portal of American music, delta on one side and southside Chicago on the other, south and north, country and city, and Memphis in between (in the meantime, as John Hiatt has it)… “Take Me to the River” was first recorded by Al Green in 1974, one of the climaxes of his live act but it didn’t catch on as a single until Willie Mitchell, who produced Al’s version and just about everything else Hi put out in the early ’70s, recorded Syl Johnson’s version, which was a Top 10 R&B hit in 1975. It’s a weird song, lyrically—the singer seems to be referring obliquely to an affair with a 16-year-old girl, asking for redemption, spiritual cleansing, and an opportunity to go on with the relationship. “I haven’t seen how to help you yet… I want to know, won’t you tell me, I’d love to stay…” Talking Heads take hold of the song and put the emphasis almost entirely on the spiritual side of things, which they can do precisely because baptism is an exotic concept to them and their audience, unlikely to be taken literally and therefore able to pull forth all sorts of unspoken feelings and images. David Byrne, as is his wont, swallows the lyrics (“I haven’t seen worst of it yet… I want to know, can you tell me? I uh to ayyyyyyy…”), focusing the entire energy of the performance on the title phrase and its echo (“take me to the river, drop me in the water”), repeated and reshuffled (“drop me in the river, push me in the water”) in a hypnotic chant. As for Junior Parker, Al Green refers to him overtly in a spoken introduction to his recorded version, “Like to dedicate this song to Little Junior Parker, a cousin of mine, he’s gone on but we’d like to kind of carry on in his name.” This bit of talking actually gets in the way of Al’s record, but it’s important because Talking Heads are doing the same thing just by recording a “cover” version, the I Ching says “the best way to study the past is not to confine oneself to mere knowledge of history but, through application of this knowledge, to give actuality to the past,” and this process is a lot more central to rock ‘n’ roll than you might think. We sing about God and sex. And always, at the same time, we sing about music—expressing what we’ve learned from music—expressing what we’ve learned from music about God and sex. The past is the river, as Heraclitus or somebody told us (present and future also), and the music—

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