Take Me To The River

See the complete Talking Heads series

The only cover that Talking Heads ever recorded was a tune co-written by Al Green and his guitarist Teenie Hodges.

Like all Al Green classics, this was produced by the great Willie Mitchell. Teenie’s brothers Charles and Leroy play organ and bass respectively, the drums are by Howard Grimes, the horns are by the Memphis Horns, and the strings are by the Memphis Strings. The Reverend Al dedicated the song to his cousin Junior Parker.

Several people recorded covers of “Take Me To The River” in the 1970s before Talking Heads got to it. Here’s Syl Johnson.

Here’s Foghat.

And here’s Bryan Ferry.

Here is one other more recent cover, by Annie Lenox.

And of course, the song haunts Tony Soprano’s nightmares when it is sung to him by a novelty fish.

These are all pretty good, but the Talking Heads version is the famous one, and rightly so.

The band had been playing “Take Me To The River” live for several years before they recorded it. (They performed “Love and Happiness” too.) Producer Brian Eno suggested playing it as slowly as they could without losing the groove. In his book Remain In Love, Chris Frantz describes the result as “sexier,” which is not a word you typically apply to Talking Heads. He’s right, though. The expanded version of the band plays it much faster and looser in Stop Making Sense.

In a Songfacts interview, Chris Frantz explains why Talking Heads never recorded another cover:

David got mad – this is so David Byrne – he got mad that the hit was not one of his songs. “Take Me To The River” was our first Top 40 single, and it was like a miracle, because we really weren’t expecting to have a Top 40 single. When that happened, it meant we could get a lot of gigs that we couldn’t have gotten as an unknown band, and everything started to move a lot faster for us. But David resented that it wasn’t one of his songs that was the hit, so he said, “I’m not doing any more cover songs.”

Let’s dig into the studio version. Here’s my chart, which was greatly assisted by my listening to the multitracks.

Chris Frantz holds down a rock-steady eighth-note backbeat groove. Tina Weymouth churns along on almost all the eighth notes too, but sustains through every alternating downbeat for greater funkiness. Jerry Harrison’s organ and David Byrne’s guitar scratch and scrape on the offbeats. Here’s a visualization of Noteflight’s MIDI output in Ableton Live, showing the first four bars of the first verse. It’s cool how the last phrase of the vocal ends just as the chords hit in the guitar and organ, they fit together like puzzle pieces.

The tempo ebbs and flows gently until the outtro when it picks up briefly but noticeably.

There are occasional quiet pings on percussion or stray organ notes for touches of asymmetry. In Song and Circumstance: The Work of David Byrne from Talking Heads to the Present, Sytze Steenstra explains:

Eno’s working method in the studio (in the days before digitized and computerized recording) was to preserve a few of the 24 available tape recording tracks for his own sonic experiments, while the band laid down instrumental and vocal tracks. On the spare tracks, Eno fed in an instrument of his choice to treat its sound electronically, feeding the signal through synthesizers, filters, delays, and other effects (p. 45).

The band chose to record their parts on “Take Me To The River” effectively live, using only a single layer of each part. Rather than doing full overdubs as is conventional in rock, the band added single notes here and there. Eno processed these extra little blips and Chris Frantz’s snare drum with weird delays and reverbs to give everything an “underwater” sound.

What is going on harmonically in this song? Let’s ignore the prechorus and bridge for a second and just think about the main groove. It’s very similar to the one in “Living for the City” by Stevie Wonder. Tina Weymouth’s bassline walks up and down from E to F-sharp to G and back. Together with the guitar part, this implies E Dorian mode. However, Jerry Harrison plays the tonic chord as E7, with an unmistakeable G-sharp, which implies E Mixolydian mode. Combining parallel Mixolydian and Dorian is a venerable formula for blues tonality.

In Al Green’s version, most of the sections are eight bars long, but the prechoruses are five and a half bars. The Talking Heads version regularizes the prechoruses to five bars. Let’s compare. Here’s Al Green’s prechorus. Each chord hits half a beat before you’re expecting it.

Here’s the Talking Heads prechorus. They regularize the harmonic rhythm, and for the last chord, they play G/E or Em7 (same thing) rather than A7. We will talk about that chord below.

The bridge is also different between the two songs. Al Green starts by alternating C#m and A, then moves though Em7, B7, and a very bluesy B7#9. As in the bridge, the chords all hit half a beat early.

The Talking Heads bridge has a more square harmonic rhythm. Tina Weymouth’s bassline implies A7 rather than A in the first half. The second half is dramatically different from Al Green’s version – after a brief gesture toward Dsus4, the band sits on Em7 for the next three and a half bars.

These Em7 chords are weird! In his article “Harmonic Function in Rock Music: A Syntactical Approach“, Drew Nobile says:

I advocate for the separation of harmonic function from chord identity. Such a theory would unlink, for example, dominant function and the V chord. In other words, a chord would be identified as dominant- functioning based on how it acts within a formal unit (phrase, section, etc.) rather than any internal aspect of the chord itself (p. 150).

Al Green’s bridge starts off-tonic and ends with a V7 chord. However, Talking Heads end the bridge on an extended i7 that “resolves” to I7#9. (Nobile hears the song as being in E minor in spite of Jerry Harrison’s E major triads on the organ; I respectfully disagree.) Nobile thinks that the i7 chord functions as a dominant because of its placement in the form. Harmonically, you wouldn’t think there would be any tension to resolve. However, Nobile points to all the non-harmonic tension-building devices: the repeated “Til I can’t” in the vocals, the sustained D-G in the guitar and organ, and the drums departing from the main pattern for the only time in the song to thump out eighth notes on the tom-toms. All of this tension resolves dramatically on the beginning of the next chorus. Nobile hears something similar happening in the hypermeter-breaking end of the prechorus. Since this is structural tension that builds to structural release, Nobile considers this a cadence even though the chord doesn’t really change.

This song is a major challenge to classify into a genre. I guess you could call it “rock”, but that is an odd fit. I heard lots of Talking Heads songs before I found out that people like to group them in with punk. I know they played at CBGB and opened for the Ramones on tour, but the songs I like of theirs sound more like anxious funk. In the aforementioned Songfacts interview, Chris Frantz says that Seymour Stein, head of their label Sire, invented the term “new wave” specifically for Talking Heads.

I give him credit for that because the problem we were encountering was that radio programmers in the United States – Top 40 and Album Oriented Rock stations – their program directors would say, “We don’t play punk music. We only play good music.” Seymour had to figure out a way to get around it, so he said, “Talking Heads are not punk music, they’re new wave.” Then, the program directors would say, “Oh, new wave. I guess we can play that.”

John Covach parses out the differences between punk and new wave in a chapter of Understanding Rock:

Punk rock, in an effort perhaps to reestablish a directness of personal expression, tended to celebrate musical amateurism, and clearly such an aesthetic is antithetical to the drive to virtuosity and textural complexity found in the music of most progressive groups. The simplicity of new-wave music, however, is often something of a deception. The music of Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Joe Jackson, Devo, and other late-1970s new wavers is far more sophisticated that it may at first appear; most of this music is carefully written, arranged, and produced, and all this to the highest of pop-music professional standards… much new-wave music is actually more sophisticated in production terms than some progressive music of the same period (p. 5).

Aside from David Byrne’s yelpy voice, I don’t hear anything punk about “Take Me To The River” at all. This is probably because punk didn’t make much direct contact with Black music, Bad Brains and ska notwithstanding. New wave makes more contact–consider Blondie’s embrace of reggae, disco and rap. Talking Heads explicitly modeled songs on Fela Kuti and P-Funk. They haven’t tried to conceal their influences, but the word has not really gotten out. Many people who hear “Take Me To The River” assume that it’s a Talking Heads original. It would be nice if they had shouted out Al Green from the stage in Stop Making Sense.

And while we’re talking about that movie: “Take Me To The River” is the “blackest” song in Stop Making Sense by a wide margin. It’s audible in the Motown-style backing vocals, the open-endedness of the groove, David Byrne’s James Brown screams, and especially the moment at 2:48 when Steve Scales takes David Byrne’s vocal mic to encourage Jerry Harrison’s keyboard solo: “Get down Jerry! Get down!” This seems more like good-natured mockery than straightforward encouragement. What is going on here?

Matthew Morrison coined the term ”Blacksound” to describe ”the sonic legacy of blackface”. He argues that America’s popular music industry developed out of blackface minstrelry, and that popular culture continues to promulgate minstrelry’s sonic and embodied legacy. While white performers no longer wear literal blackface, they do routinely affect the sounds, speech mannerisms, clothing styles and bodily affect of Black people. This is not usually meant as a hateful act; to the contrary, white performers from Al Jolson to Miley Cyrus have been motivated by sincere admiration. My own use of hip-hop slang in my everyday speech has an inescapable element of Blacksound to it. Talking Heads’ “love and theft” is motivated by undeniable love, and it means something that five out of the nine people onstage in Stop Making Sense are Black. But the theft is there too. David Byrne wore literal blackface in his interview with himself, a choice he later came to regret.

In a chapter of One-Hit Wonders: An Oblique History of Popular Music, Robert Fink writes about “Play That Funky Music White Boy” by Wild Cherry.

Admit it—you’ve danced to it, maybe at a wedding, or a bat-mitzvah, or even a quinceañera; and I’ll bet you’ve actually, at least once, made that obligatory half-turn on the dance floor and shouted out its irresistible hook; and even if you’ve never lowered yourself that far, you’d certainly recognize those eight lightly syncopated syllables anywhere, as one of the most stinging memes in American pop music, journalistic shorthand for anyone, from white rappers and reggae musicians to Republican presidential candidates, who try to act more Black than they have a right to.

Play that funky music, white boy.

Ouch. PTFM/WB, as we’ll henceforth abbreviate it, is ubiquitous as a catchphrase because the phenomenon it indexes is so problematic, and yet so ubiquitous as to be completely unremarkable. It denotes the societal privilege inherent in reverse crossover: the tendency of non-Black members of the dominant culture to assume that they can just go ahead and do things like play the distinctive music of Black people and take on the Black cultural style they admire without somehow paying for it. Reverse crossover has been the morally dubious engine of popular music since the first white boy strummed a banjo and started dancing in a style picked up from the Black men who labored alongside him; it shadowed the birth of ragtime, jazz, swing, and (oh my god yes) rock ‘n’ roll; it will undoubtedly still be a pop music reality on the day you read this chapter (p. 79).

Steve Scales might as well be yelling, “Play that funky music, white boy!” to Jerry Harrison. What does it mean that Talking Heads’ first top 40 hit was also their first overt reverse crossover? And that their first top 10 hit was another reverse crossover? David Byrne has apparently undergone some evolution in his racial politics, but when he covers “Hell You Talmbout“, it is awkward, to say the least. He deserves credit for trying. But there has to be a better way.