Our second My First Record post today comes from the ridiculously prolific and talented Dave Depper. Tomorrow night, he stops by the Doug Fir Lounge to celebrate the release of his first solo LP, The Ram Project (out on Jackpot Records), wherein the multi-instrumentalist performs all the songs from Paul McCartney’s RAM album.
He will be performing the album live on Saturday night with an all-star band of collaborators, including members of Musee Mecanique.
Let’s get this out of the way: Remain in Light was not my first record, nor was it the first record that made an impression upon me. I was raised in a militantly pro-Beatles household. My parents had a CD player pretty early on in the game, and the then-novel first edition CD issues of all of the Beatles’ albums were on pretty constant rotation during my early listening years.
This meant that pretty much everything I listened to in those times was basically graded on a criteria related to how closely it resembled the Fab Four. Music like the Beach Boys and the Byrds rated favorably; Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell decidedly less so.
This was a comfortable enough existence for a time, but things completely changed when I was eight or nine years old and my uncle gave me a dubbed C90 cassette with Talking Heads’ Remain in Light on one side and Speaking in Tongues on the other.
I STILL can remember popping in the cassette and being hit with the full force of “Born Under Punches (the Heat Goes On). THIS was the first music I’d heard that, as far as I could tell, had absolutely nothing to do with the Beatles. All of my familiar reference points were gone. Where was the backbeat? These drums sounded sinister, electronically treated into laughing caricatures of what drums should sound like. Guitars, when played at all, weren’t strummed, they were bent into tribal, angular shapes, or thrown heavenward by Adrian Belew in an apparent attempt to lasso the moon.
And strangest of all: the singer wasn’t even singing! He was shouting, in a manner that initially made me laugh, until I realized it wasn’t funny (was it?), and then I was chilled to the bone. I remember those first words tumbling out of my boombox: “TAKE A LOOK AT THESE HANDS… TAKE A LOOK AT THESE HANDS! THE HAND SPEAKS, THE HAND OF A GOVERNMENT MAN!” WHAT DID THIS MEAN? Even with the erudite benefit of hindsight, it’s anyone’s guess what David Byrne was going on about, but at that tender age, devoid of the ability to interpret things figuratively or satirically, I was forced to picture Byrne’s vocal flagellations in the most literal terms: a bent, paranoid man, dressed nattily in his government-issue suit, tumbling, tumbling, some terrible affliction grasping his hands, a paranoid, grotesque stigmata.
I’m listening to this song right now and it’s giving me goosebumps.
I could say a lot more about the rest of Remain in Light, and how it’s the greatest album by one of popular music’s greatest bands (for instance, have you ever noticed the the album features NO KEY CHANGES and that the rhythm NEVER changes, yet it fools you into thinking the opposite? Pay attention: the only thing that ever changes are the vocal melodies and various instruments coming in and out. THAT’S IT) but I’m going to leave it here, so you can think about “Born Under Punches” some more.
This song truly changed my life. And the heat goes on.
