The Alternative Number Ones: Talking Heads’ “Sax And Violins”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

Talking Heads had an assignment: They had to come up with a song that might sound like something that they would make eight years into their future. The German art-house director Wim Wenders had been given his biggest-ever budget to make Until The End Of The World, a sort of sci-fi meditation on dreams and endings, and he set it in the near-future world of 1999. For the film's soundtrack, Wenders rounded up a list of some of the most beloved and respected musicians in the world, and he asked them to make the songs that they imagined themselves making in 1999.

That's a fun thought experiment, and when it's paired with an auteur with ultra-cool cachet, it's the type of stunt that few musicians can resist. The Talking Heads leader David Byrne wanted to participate, but he had a big roadblock in front of him: Talking Heads would not exist in 1999, and he knew it. Even in 1991, Talking Heads only theoretically existed. Before Talking Heads' soundtrack contribution "Sax And Violins" made it to #1 on the Modern Rock chart, Byrne announced the group's breakup. His bandmates found out about it when they read it in a newspaper.

That leaves "Sax And Violins" as the final Talking Heads recording before the band's ending. Talking Heads had made music that could be considered futuristic, but "Sax And Violins" wasn't it. Merely by existing, the song was a reflection of the past.

The story of Talking Heads is long and involved, and I already got into a bit when I wrote a reader-sponsored Number Ones bonus column on "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)" a couple of years ago. That's pretty telling in itself. "This Must Be The Place" wasn't a big chart hit -- it peaked at #62 -- but people love it so much that the very generous Stereogum reader Jimmie Manning paid to read my review.

All through their history, Talking Heads inspired that kind of devotion. Seymour Stein, the main who signed Talking Heads to Sire, spoke with great wonder about the first time he heard "Love → Building on Fire," the track that became the band's first single. That song is incredible, and I can still hear exactly what captivated Stein. That song came out in 1977, and the band spent the next decade or so captivating many people. They always stayed just outside of the pop zeitgeist, which made them one of the emblematic acts of '80s college radio. You could argue that Talking Heads, even more than R.E.M. or the Smiths, truly defined what it meant to be an alternative rock band in the years before "alternative" became any kind of buzzword.

Twitchy weirdo genius David Byrne moved around as a kid, living in Scotland, Ontario, and Baltimore before going off to study art at the Rhode Island School Of Design and then at the Maryland Institute College Of Art before dropping out. (As a Baltimore native, I am happy to claim Byrne as one of us.) When MICA didn't work out, Byrne went back to Providence and started a short-lived band called the Artistics with the RISD student Chris Frantz. That group broke up quickly, and Byrne and Frantz both moved to New York. There, they started the new band Talking Heads. They couldn't find a bassist, so Frantz's then-girlfriend Tina Weymouth learned bass. (Weymouth and Frantz married in 1977; they're still together.)

The first Talking Heads performance was a CBGB gig with the Ramones in 1975, which put the trio in the exact right spot to get caught up in the early punk whirlwind. (The Ramones' highest-charting Modern Rock single, 1989's "Pet Sematary," peaked at #4. It's a 9.) Punk hadn't been codified yet. It was still really just coming into existence. Still, Talking Heads were a strange fit -- three square-looking young folks playing their strange and skittery version of rock 'n' roll. Seymour Stein saw them and loved them. The band added another member, Jerry Harrison, formerly of proto-punk greats the Modern Lovers, and they released their debut album 77 in 1977.

The first-album single "Psycho Killer" made it to #92 on the Hot 100, while the album itself peaked at #97. The early Talking Heads did well enough to make the charts, but they weren't a hit. Still, rock critics fell in love right away. 77 came in at #7 in the Pazz & Jop poll -- behind the Ramones' Rocket To Russia, ahead of Randy Newman's Little Criminals. Over the next three years, Talking Heads went on one of the all-time great hot streaks, recording three total-masterpiece albums with producer Brian Eno, who became so locked-in with the band that he practically became a member. All three albums went gold and made the Pazz & Jop top five. The band's cover of Al Green's "Take Me To The River," from 1978's More Songs About Buildings And Food, had enough juice to reach #26 on the Hot 100.

Working with Brian Eno, Talking Heads expanded their sound in fascinating ways, taking influence from funk and Afrobeat without losing their sense of bugged-out wonder. But even in those early years, the band wasn't exactly a cohesive unit. David Byrne ran the show, often alienating and pissing off his bandmates, especially when he and Brian Eno became best friends. In 1981, Byrne and Eno went off to make their experimental, sample-based album My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. At the same time, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz started their club-centric side project Tom Tom Club and released 1981's "Genius Of Love," a leftfield smash that still gets sampled on hit records today.

When Talking Heads reconvened without Brian Eno for 1983's Speaking In Tongues, they discovered that the landscape had shifted. The band's art-kid sensibility played beautifully on MTV. At the same time, college radio had become an increasingly important cultural force, and Talking Heads were among the most-played bands on college stations in the '80s. The Speaking In Tongues single "Burning Down The House" fully crossed over, reaching #9 on the Hot 100 -- the band's biggest-ever hit. Speaking In Tongues went platinum. The band celebrated their success by making 1984 Stop Making Sense, the best live-concert film ever made, with director Jonathan Demme.

Stop Making Sense captures an absolutely supernatural live band at work. Talking Heads had amassed a ton of collaborators, and all those musicians meshed together onstage into a joyous, beautiful spectacle. As soon as the movie came out, Talking Heads made a truly perverse move: They stopped playing live altogether. There has been exactly one Talking Heads live performance since February 1984. Talking Heads were still at their commercial peak, and 1985's Little Creatures went platinum and topped the Pazz & Jop poll. But the band wasn't going to be a functional unit for much longer.

In 1985, David Byrne co-wrote and directed True Stories, a satirical musical that's nothing but episodic vignettes about small-town life. (I've never seen it. Maybe I should.) That same year, Talking Heads released an album called True Stories -- not a soundtrack LP, exactly, but a record of studio versions of the songs that Byrne wrote for the movie. The album got a muted critical reception, even though the single "Wild Wild Life" became the band's last proper pop hit, peaking at #25 on the Hot 100. A year later, Byrne worked with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Cong Su on the score for Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, and he won an Oscar. Talking Heads released their final album, the frisky and horn-centric Naked, in 1988. It went gold, but it didn't generate much in the way of hit songs or critical buzz, even though "(Nothing But) Flowers" is a banger.

After Naked, Talking Heads were effectively but unofficially finished. Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth kept making Tom Tom Club records. (Their highest-charting Modern Rock hit, 1989's "Suboceana," peaked at #10. It's a 7.) Jerry Harrison had been making occasional solo records even when Talking Heads were at their peak, and he kept doing that, while also producing for other alternative rock acts. (Harrison's only Modern Rock hit as lead artist, 1990's "Flying Under Radar," peaked at #13. His production work will eventually appear in this column.) David Byrne got really into Latin music, and he recorded his first proper solo album, 1989's Rei Momo, with Naked producer Steve Lillywhite. It got a polite critical reception, and the single "Dirty Old Town" made it to #8 on the Modern Rock chart. (It's a 6.)

That probably would've been it for Talking Heads, but then Wim Wenders came calling. Wenders got his start in Germany in the late '60s, and he became a big name on the global cinematic stage in the '70s, when films like Kings Of The Road and The American Friend started winning international festival prizes. In 1984, Wenders made Paris, Texas, a movie that's become an alt-culture fixture, and he followed it with the 1987 international hit Wings Of Desire. I've never actually made it through a full Wim Wenders movie. They're all languorous and rhapsodic, and I just get antsy too easily. I need someone to kick someone else in the head every few minutes. But my tastes don't really line up with those of the global film intelligentsia, and Wenders became a huge deal for cineaste types.

The success of Wings Of Desire enabled Wim Wenders to get a real budget for Until The End Of The World, a globetrotting existentialist sci-fi vision that Wenders had been trying to get made for more than a decade. Wenders also had the pull to get whoever he wanted for the film's soundtrack, and its tracklist is truly amazing: R.E.M.! Depeche Mode! Can! Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds! Neneh Cherry! Patti Smith and Fred "Sonic" Smith! Elvis Costello covering the Kinks! Julee Cruise covering Elvis, with David Lynch and Angelo Badalementi as producers! Motherfucking U2! A different version of U2's song "Until The End Of The World" appeared on Achtung Baby before the film's soundtrack came out, but they wrote it specifically for the film. (On the Modern Rock chart, "Until The End Of The World" peaked at #4. It's a 10.) All of the soundtrack album's other songs were brand new.

Wim Wenders got songs back from pretty much every artist he asked, and there's some indication that Until The End Of The World is as long as it is because he wanted to make sure all those songs were in there. That doesn't explain why Wenders' initial cut of the film was reportedly 20 hours long, though. I meant to watch Until The End Of The World before working on this column, but I don't know, man. It's long. The shortest of the film's many cuts is still well over two and a half hours, and nobody likes the damn thing. I'm sure I'll watch a whole Wim Wenders movie eventually, but I don't think Until The End Of The World should be my first. I got bored just reading the Wikipedia plot summary.

Until The End Of The World takes place in 1999, when an Indian nuclear satellite starts acting all wonky and threatens to crash into the earth. That sounds like a pretty cool subject for a movie, but it's not about that. It's about a French lady, played by Wenders' partner and frequent star Solveig Dommartin, who doesn't care that the world might be ending. She and William Hurt go on some weird global journey involving a device that can record dreams, and they end up in the Australian outback. The movie was a critically reviled flop that didn't even earn a million dollars at the American box office, but the soundtrack was considerably more successful.

In the liner notes for the Talking Heads collection Once In A Lifetime, David Byrne writes entertainingly about Wim Wenders' assignment to write a song that could plausibly come out in 1999:

I spent a lot of time trying to image music of the near future: post-rock sludge with lyrics sponsored by Coke and Pepsi? Music created by machines with human shouts of agony and betrayal thrown in? Faux Appalachian ballads, the anti-tech wave? The same sounds and licks from the 60s and 70s regurgitated yet again by a new generation of samplers? The Milli Vanilli revival? Rappin' politicos… sell your soul to the beat, y'all?

There are plenty of circa-1999 songs that kinda-sorta fit David Byrne's different descriptions, but "Sax And Violins" sadly does not document any David Byrne precognition about *NYSNC or Limp Bizkit. Instead, Byrne pretty much punted: "I figured, hell with it, I’d imagine Talking Heads doing a reunion LP in the year 2000, and them sounding just like they used to." It's telling that Byrne uses they instead of we to describe Talking Heads. Already, he didn't feel like he was a part of it.

For "Sax And Violins" -- the title pun is too dumb to be acknowledged -- Byrne basically used an instrumental outtake from the Naked sessions. Talking Heads came up with the "Sax And Violins" music while they were getting ready to record Naked, and I don't know whether they reconvened to record the song or whether Byrne just used an already-existing recording. Either way, I think the song doesn't really fulfill the prompt for near-future music, except to the extent that all Talking Heads songs sounded like vaguely plausible near-future music. I think Byrne just used what he had, and he wrote some lyrics that went along with the premise about the crashing nuclear satellite: "Falling, falling/ Gonna drop like a stone/ I'm falling through the atmosphere on a warm afternoon."

"Sax And Violins" is ghostly and funky at the same time, which should be impossible. Talking Heads co-produced the track with Steve Lillywhite, recording in Paris with a bunch of different session musicians playing percussion alongside Chris Frantz's drums. (Johnny Marr, Kirsty MacColl, and Arthur Russell all played on Naked, but none of them are on "Sax And Violins.") The track rides a bubbly groove for a while, and it's full of playful pings and whirrs. David Byrne's lyrics are evocative but mostly disconnected. The best line: "Mom and dad, they will fuck you up!" That's real.

As a piece of music, "Sax And Violins" is perfectly pleasant. It's got an itchy grace that's particular to Talking Heads, and it probably goes on too long, but it never fully wears out its welcome. The synth sounds are cool, as are the little high-pitched squeals deep in the mix. It sounds like an outtake, which is what it is. You can tell why it didn't make the cut for Naked but wound up on the soundtrack of an art film a few years later instead. The track certainly doesn't work in conversation with any of the other music of 1991. David Byrne had to think of a cynical reason -- the circa-2000 reunion -- for the song to exist at all. As the final statement from one of the greatest American rock bands in history, "Sax And Violins" feels disappointingly minor, but that's the only way that Talking Heads were ever going to end anyway. The moment was over.

Wim Wenders directed the "Sax And Violins" video, a strange but hypnotic art short that zones out on David Byrne's head slowly circling, with different lights flashing on it. Wenders also pulled the unconventional move of including that video in the movie itself. In Until The End Of The World, "Sax And Violins" plays during the opening. Sam Neill narrates as Solveig Dommartin wakes up at a party where the video plays on multiple screens. It makes perfect sense as a video that would air in the background of a near-future party. The movie's idea of 1999 fashion is pretty fun, and I really like the toy monsters in the kid's room, but this is not the beginning of a movie that I want to watch.

Until The End Of The World arrived in American theaters on Christmas 1991, and the movie's vision of the near-future was already obsolete, since some of it takes place in the USSR. The soundtrack was obsolete, too. In December 1991, David Byrne announced that the Talking Heads were through. Maybe he didn't want anyone to get the wrong idea from the existence of "Sax And Violins." One more Talking Heads song made the Modern Rock chart: "Lifetime Piling Up," another Naked outtake that peaked at #11 when it came out on the 1992 collection Sand In The Vaseline.

Byrne and the other Talking Heads remained pissed off at each other for years. Just last year, Byrne finally told People that he had regrets about the breakup and that he'd been a "little tyrant" to his bandmates. Modern rock radio, facing a lack of future Talking Heads songs, threw "Sax And Violins" into rotation. Programmers also kept going with the Until The End Of The World soundtrack; another song from the film will be in this column very soon.

"Sax And Violins" wasn't a hit anywhere other than the Modern Rock charts, and it disappeared quickly. I was listening to alt-rock radio in the moment, and I don't remember ever hearing the song. Later in 1992, David Byrne released his solo album Uh-Oh, and the single "She's Mad" peaked at #3. (It's a 6.)

David Byrne kept going with his solo career, and it's taken him all sorts of fascinating places, but he hasn't been on the Modern Rock chart since 1994, when "Angels" peaked at #24. These days, he's a beloved art-rock elder who's always riding his bike around New York. When I lived there, David Byrne sightings were common. Whenever a new hyped-up indie rock band would come to NYC for the first time, you'd know it was a big deal if David Byrne and/or David Bowie were in the crowd. Byrne's American Utopia Broadway show became a Spike Lee joint in 2020, and that makes Byrne the subject of two great concert films.

The other Talking Heads kept playing without David Byrne for a while -- first as the Shrunken Heads and then as just plain the Heads. In 1996, they recorded an album with different alt-rock stars guesting on every track. But then David Byrne sued over the name, and the Heads were finished. This did not endear Byrne to his ex-bandmates. Still, Talking Heads got back together for a quick performance in 2002, when they were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. Byrne's vision of a circa-2000 Talking Heads reunion wasn't far off, but the reunion ended after that one performance.

The former Talking Heads continued to say rude things about each other in public for decades, and it was a genuine shock last year when they all got back together to promote a theatrical re-release of Stop Making Sense. They did the rounds at film festivals and talk shows, and people thought this might lead to a Coachella reunion set -- one of the few things that might convince me to fly across the country for a music festival. Earlier this year, however, Billboard reported that Talking Heads turned down an $80 million reunion-tour offer. So "Sax And Violins" really was the ending. A great band's story should end with a great song, but life doesn't always turn out so poetically. In this case, a pretty good song will have to do.

GRADE: 6/10

BONUS BEATS: As far as I can tell, nobody has ever covered or sampled "Sax And Violins." Talking Heads never got a chance to play it live, and Byrne hasn't played it at any solo shows since 2002. Here's a live recording of Byrne doing a mostly-acoustic version of the song at a special 1993 show that he played with Lou Reed, Rosanne Cash, and Luka Bloom at New York's Bottom Line: