Listening Post: Talking Heads - David Byrne - The Catherine Wheel

David Byrne - The Catherine Wheel - 1981

Ah, the early 80s. When we would all traipse to BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) to see Philip Glass's The Photographer. Or go to the movies to witness Koyaanisqatsi. You could see Laurie Anderson perform or bowl at the University Lanes and we all had a copy of Big Science.
For a couple years it seemed like art had won. And then it all came crashing down with, I think the advent of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous". And art was sent back to where it belonged: in the poverty strewn lines of the decrepit in the East Village.
But, as I said, there was a moment.
And during that time David Byrne was a leader. Talking Heads were bridging pop with art in a way that The Cars only dreamt of. See, TH wasn't gonna sell out and make POP SONGS. They were going to do it on THEIR terms. Well, on Byrne's terms. When he and Brian Eno came out with My Life in the Bush of Ghosts it seemed like the really knew what the world needed. The world of art, that is. Lord only knows what Julie Taymor would have done when presented with the likes of Byrne. But, Twyla Tharp (long before her involvement with Bully Joel's music) jumped on the David Byrne bandwagon and commissioned him to create music for her.
The result was The Catherine Wheel.
From the very beginning couple of tracks I find myself feeling the same way I did in 1984 when I first heard it: I wish I could have seen what this looked like on stage. This music seems so singularly appropriate for dance (where My Life in the Bush of Ghosts certainly did not).
"His Wife Refused" suggests what Byrne was trying to accomplish with lesser musicians that he had been saddled with. But, now with the likes of Brian Eno, Adrian Belew and, yes, Jerry Harrison, Byrne seems like a fuller artist, a dictator, yes, with a singular elliptical and nervous vision.
The music of The Catherine Wheel never suggests that it should be superior to the images that one can lay over it. It's made to be moved to. But it isn't just a series of beats without purpose. It's a soulful, post-punk, proto-funk, purposeful album.
About halfway through, as the ambient dissolved african tapestry starts to get a wee dull, Byrne comes back in full voice with r&b backing on "Poison". The timing couldn't be better. (And it couldn't sound closer to the pop sound his nemeses would be churning out in Tom Tom Club the same year, though nowhere near as accessible and twice as ominous)
Toward the end, after a more and more intensely building ambient climax, we are treated to the song "What a Day That Was", one of Byrne's best tracks and a high point of the Talking Heads live album, Stop Making Sense. And the equally satisfying, "Big Blue Plymouth".
Byrne took everything he's learned over the years with Talking Heads and Brian Eno and art school and made one helluva great soundtrack.

Grade: A
ASide: His Wife Refused, What a Day That Was
BlindSide: Ade, Two Soldiers, Combat, Big Blue Plymouth