"And you may find yourself at Edison's house, on a beautiful bike..."

Motivated by Perfecting Sound Forever, David Byrne bikes over to Edison's house while on tour. (Unfortuntately, he finds it closed.) Coincidentally, he's in Montclair, site of the tone test that opens the book.

Way back in the '80's, Talking Heads was one of the bands that got me thinking about some of the central issues in the book. I bought the soundtrack to Stop Making Sense (before seeing the movie), in a "special edition" cassette release that came with an oversize booklet. (That day I also bought the "Survival Sampler," a Sire Records sampler cassette that came in a can made to look like army rations.) I remember thinking about how I liked the studio version of "Once In a Lifetime" better than the live version, because the studio version sounded more exciting, more "immediate" and "real," even though, like the rest of Remain In Light, it was obviously a very constructed document. That's the paradox of live recordings. The liveness makes the music sounds sort of diffuse, which imparts a certain distance between the listener and the music.

While we're on the subject, however, I gotta say I much prefer the solo-beatbox version of "Psycho Killer" to the one on Talking Heads '77. And now that we're on that subject, when I interviewed Tony Bongiovi, who produced that debut, he said he replaced some of Tina Weymouth's bass parts without telling anyone in the band. He recruited Bob Babbitt, a Motown session bassist, and instructed him to try not to make his playing sound too "professional," so that it would sound more like Weymouth's playing. Bongiovi didn't say which songs received the Babbitt treatment, but check out "Smiling Faces Sometimes" by the Undisputed Truth, and tell me that Babbitt's bass doesn't sound a lot like the opening of "Psycho Killer."

Anyway, it's nice to get some early feedback on the book from someone who inadvertently inspired it.