It’s funny to hear you guys, who surely followed Talking Heads more than I did, talk about tight Tina Weymouth’s groove was at the very beginning. I mention that because I know David Byrne apparently did not think much of her and he brought in Busta Jones during their funkiest period. The irony is that David Byrne never struck me as much of a guitarist, but more as a guy with a cool vision of what he wanted to do.
Byrne added Jones as he expanded the personnel to expand the musical layers in order to head off to Fela-land, or whatever it was he had in mind.
Fear Of Music(1979)was about the last time the band held on to their original sound, which ironically was, in its own artsy way, a facsimile of funk with all the scratchy staccato James Brown guitar style(just applied in a different manner). But even on
FOM, cyclical African rhythms started to appear, primarily on “I Zimbra”…
It’s interesting that King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp guested on that track and picked up some ideas that he carried over to the next incarnation of KC, with Adrian Belew(who had just spent time in the expanded Heads lineup, as well as playing on the album after
FOM,
Remain In Light, where the funk rhythms really came to the forefront). In the meantime, Byrne did the album with Brian Eno,
My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, that encorporated all sorts of world music motifs, but also a lot of would-be funk, as well as vocal sampling. Jones played quite a bit on that album, this being one of the more famous tracks(Fripp playing the weird guitar lines)….
The dual bass lines idea was carried over to the expanded TH line-up as they went in the different direction.
The relationship between Weymouth and Byrne was always complicated. David and Chris had been playing in an earlier band, with Tina(Chris’ then girlfriend)acting as a driver. When they needed a bass player, David suggested that Tina, having some basic skills on acoustic, jump on it. While her lines may seem simplistic, there’s always some quirky twists and turns that you never see coming, and that fit right in with David’s idiosyncratic rhythm/lead guitar work, which, in these stripped down versions, was fascinating to me as I thought Harrison was playing some of those bits. I never considered any of that stuff inadequate, just different, minimal, quirky in its own way.
As far as personality clashes go, Byrne suffered from Asperger syndrome, which leads people to act like they have no empathy or consideration for others. Nobody knew much about that stuff back then, and coupled with the fact that it was
his band, I’d guess that some things rubbed Tina the wrong way, so the tension went round and round.
I had the occasion to observe a sound check of theirs in ‘79(a band I had been in was the opening act, and I drove the van and helped them out). The Heads were doing “Air”, a fairly straightforward tune, and Byrne stopped it in the middle, getting all over Tina’s case, however I didn’t hear any mistakes on her part up to that point, so who knows what was up his butt that day. Later on, I did have a brief casual conversation with him, which was a whole ‘nuther level of beaming in from another planet.
While there’s certainly some wobbly parts on those early tapes, overall I found Tina’s playing dead on…just my two cents, adjusted for inflation.
