Talking Heads: 77 ranks among the most striking, fully realized and important debut albums of the punk/new wave era that spawned it, though it doesn’t particularly sound like punk or new wave. In fact, it sounds like nothing else, before or since, unless you count the group’s own subsequent LPs.
That’s thanks largely to the idiosyncratic singing of Talking Heads’ lead vocalist, guitarist and primary songwriter David Byrne, who often comes across on the record as a musically gifted mental hospital escapee. Also playing key roles are his bandmates, Chris Frantz (drums) and Tina Weymouth (bass), who married about three months before the album’s September 1977 release; and Jerry Harrison (guitar, keyboards), a veteran of Jonathan Richman’s Modern Lovers. Their tightly knit, intense instrumentation perfectly complements Byrne’s anxious, quirky vocals. Listen, for example, to the ominous percussion that opens “Psycho Killer,” the bass lines in “Who Is It?,” and the stinging guitar in “New Feeling” and “No Compassion.”
Also distinguishing the LP are its minimalist cover art and unlikely assortment of influences, which include pop, folk, soul and R&B. (The group, whose members are Al Green fans, would later cover his “Take Me to the River.”) And then there are the lyrics, which limn urban angst and find Scotland-native Byrne variously personifying a crazed killer (“I can’t seem to face up to the facts/I’m tense and nervous and I can’t relax”), a robotic apartment dweller (“My building has every convenience/It’s gonna make life easy for me”), and a person talking in riddles (“If you were really smart/You’d know what to do when I say/Jet pilot gone out of control/Ship captain on the ground/Stockbroker make a bad investment/When love has come to town”).
An expanded, 2024 edition of Talking Heads: 77 offers a fresh look at this frequently electrifying album. The first of its three CDs delivers a remaster of the original LP while a second includes a dozen so-called “rarities,” though all but two of them have been featured on earlier records. A third CD contains the quartet’s previously unreleased final concert at New York’s famous CBGB club, which took place on Oct. 10, 1977. The package also embraces a Blu-ray disc with surround-sound, hi-res stereo and Dolby Atmos mixes of the remastered original album, plus a copiously illustrated 80-page hardcover book with essays by all four group members and recording engineer Ed Stasium.
Related: Our review of the band’s expanded Stop Making Sense live collection
If you don’t already own Talking Heads: 77—which sounds as vital as ever nearly half a century after its release—buying this boxed set should be a no-brainer. Even if you have the original album and many of the ostensible rarities, however, there are at least two compelling reasons to pick this up. One is the Blu-ray, whose surround-sound tracks add significantly to the power of the music. The other is the CBGB concert, which features fired-up performances of eight of the 11 numbers on Talking Heads:77 plus “(Love Goes to) Building on Fire,” a single that came out before that debut LP; three tracks that would show up on 1978’s More Songs about Buildings and Food, including the Green cover; and “A Clean Break (Let’s Work),” a number that also appears on the 1982 live set called The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads.
The expanded edition, comprising 3-CDs/Blu-ray, arrived November 8, 2024, via Rhino and is available in the U.S. here and in the U.K. here.
A top editor at leading consumer and trade magazines for more than 40 years, Jeff has interviewed dozens of musical luminaries, including Bruce Springsteen, Steve Van Zandt, Roger McGuinn, John Sebastian, Wolfman Jack, Tommy James, Tom Waits, the Righteous Brothers, and the members of Steely Dan.
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