I've already told you the story of my eBay purchase of this second-hand vinyl double album, and the bargain-priced expanded CD version that followed it.
Unlike the later Stop Making Sense, this album never pretended to be a verité documentary of a Talking Heads live show. It includes recordings from three different years, so it's more of a history or anthology. Paradoxically, however, it follows the same 'accretion' dynamic as you get in SMS, but over a period of years rather than minutes — like time-lapse photography. Stop Making Sense starts with a man and a tape player, then further musicians are added in ones and twos and threes until there's a full-scale party on stage and everything is larger than life. At the start of TNotBiTH, David Byrne's febrile energy is taking up most of the canvas, but, as time passes, you hear the band — and the audience — slowly grow and crowd around him until he's just a single figure in a widescreen tableau.
I could have cheated and just listened to the CD again, but, no, I played my vinyl copy. It's barely more than half as long as the CD version, and, as usual with these things, there's a strong case to be made that the shorter edition has a tighter narrative, less fat, and is more digestible. The CD is an anthology of what was already an anthology (adding recordings from a fourth year, and providing the full verité version of the 1980 gig, with tracks re-sequenced to reflect the set-list). To be fair, the CD producers (and yes, I listened to the CD as well, just for fun and for comparison, when we drove down to Frant and back yesterday — Lucy loved it; the Boy slept) seem to have been aware of that: they tell you in the sleeve notes how to program the sequence of tracks to emulate the original release. And the CD is incredibly well priced these days: no excuse not to have it.
 MusicBrainz entry for disc 1, disc 2Wikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album Listen to this album in full at Last.fm |
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