TALKING HEADS
“TAKE ME TO THE RIVER”

AL GREEN COVER

SONG

“TAKE ME TO THE RIVER”
[B/W “THANK YOU FOR SENDING ME AN ANGEL”] (1978)

WRITTEN BY

AL GREEN, MABON “TEENIE” HODGES

FIRST RECORDED BY

AL GREEN (1974)

David Byrne, working the Fender.

David Byrne is sweating.

He’s only been in the suit for a single song, but rivulets are already pouring down his face. It is a big suit—the big suit, as it was in fact known. This suit was not just a couple of sizes too large; it was a specially made costume, twice the width of Byrne’s narrow shoulder blades. What stilts are to height, the suit was to width. It made his head appear to have been shrunk by a voodoo priestess. It was also a lot of fabric to wear under heavy stage lights.

The poster for Stop Making Sense made dramatic use of the Big Suit.

Byrne and the band kick into “Take Me to the River,” the second song in the big suit. Within a couple of minutes, Byrne loses the jacket. This ruins the effect—the whole reason he’s wearing this silly contraption—but this is not a song to be overdressed for. The way the Talking Heads performed “Take Me to the River” would make someone wearing shorts and a T-shirt sweat.

By the time of this iconic performance, captured in Jonathan Demme’s 1984 concert movie Stop Making Sense, Byrne and the Talking Heads had scored a number of hits—“Once in a Lifetime,” “Burning Down the House,” “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody).” But those had all been played earlier in the evening. The concert’s big climax, as it was every time the band performed, was the lesser-known “Take Me to the River.”

It wasn’t their biggest radio hit, by far. But “Take Me to the River” was still the Talking Heads’ showstopper, the roof-shaker, the number they could count on to push a crowd into a frenzy. And it wasn’t even their own song.

As students at the Rhode Island School of Design in the mid-’70s, Byrne and Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz were huge Al Green fans. Frantz says he even used to play Green records to woo his classmate Tina Weymouth. Byrne and Frantz formed a college band called the Artistics. In addition to a handful of early Byrne compositions, they began including an Al Green cover in their sets: “Love and Happiness.”

Unfortunately, no recording exists of this proto-Talking Heads group covering “Love and Happiness.” But both Byrne and Frantz say it presaged “Take Me to the River” by differing quite a bit from Green’s original. “There’s no way I was going to be able to sing it like Al Green,” Byrne says, “so it ended up as something else.”

When Frantz graduated from college in 1974, he and Byrne (who quit school) moved to New York City and formed a new band, adding Frantz’s then-girlfriend, soon-wife Weymouth on bass (the Al Green records had worked!). They continued covering Green, but to celebrate the formation of the band they dubbed Talking Heads, they learned a new song of his: “Take Me to the River.”

Green and his guitarist Mabon “Teenie” Hodges had written “Take Me to the River” only a couple years earlier, in 1973. Though Green’s version was never a single, it had been a hit for his labelmate Syl Johnson in 1975. Byrne says the song’s lyrics first drew him in. “There’s a mixture of the secular and the sacred, the sacred and the profane. It’s sex and gospel and God and Jesus, all mixed together. That to me was fascinating. On the face of it, it seems like an unexpected mixture.”

Like “Love and Happiness” before it, the Talking Heads’ cover of “Take Me to the River” dramatically diverged from Green’s original. Green’s was yearning and emotional, every note dripping with sex. The Talking Heads’ arrangement sounded less like seduction and more like an academic giving a talk about seduction. It sounded, in other words, like the Talking Heads: tender in the band’s own dispassionate way, but a step or two removed from any raw expression of sensuality.

Although Al Green’s Explores Your Mind was released in 1974, one year after his religious conversion, it was still plenty romantic.

This difference was not entirely intentional. These art-school kids played their best approximation of Southern soul . . . but their best approximation simply wasn’t very accurate. “As much as we hoped it would sound like Al Green, it never did,” says Frantz. “I’m sure at the time I felt like, ‘Oh, wow, this is really funky,’ but it still sounded like a bunch of white kids from the suburbs.”

Pretty soon the trio of Byrne, Frantz, and Weymouth added Modern Lovers guitarist Jerry Harrison to complete the band lineup. They had to teach him “Take Me to the River” from scratch, since he’d never heard the original. As far as Harrison was concerned, it was just another Talking Heads song. “When I finally listened to Al Green’s version years later, I was like wow, this is different!” he says. “The Talking Heads version is a more strident, driving song, whereas the original versions—both Syl Johnson’s and Al Green’s—are more delicate.”

Al Green in concert, 1973.

Even in those early days, Talking Heads was performing several songs that would become among their most famous. But as they gigged around New York City, they quickly realized that nothing connected with crowds like “Take Me to the River.” This wasn’t because their crowds at punk-rock clubs like CBGB knew the song—just the opposite, in fact. “The normal influences for bands in that place and at that time would have been pre-punk bands like the Stooges, Velvet Underground, or David Bowie,” Byrne says. “We had those influences as much as any of the other bands did, but we wanted to also point out that we listened to a lot of R&B music and disco. That would have been anathema to some of that crowd.”

Frantz takes this a step further. “A lot of the people down at CBGB were, when it came to music, pretty racist,” he says. “If it was any black musician other than Jimi Hendrix, they weren’t really very cool about it. You didn’t hear anybody talking about how James Brown or Otis Redding are really great. All the talk was about David Bowie or Iggy Pop or Lou Reed. Performing a song written and recorded by a black artist is something none of the other bands were doing.”

Even if the CBGB crowds didn’t know any Al Green, they loved “Take Me to the River” when Talking Heads performed it. It had a groove and danceability absent from much of the music performed on those punk stages. It became the band’s surefire showstopper, even once they’d released their first album and had their own songs to draw from. “Psycho Killer” was a great song; but live, it proved no match for “Take Me to the River.”

Though their first album Talking Heads: 77 had not been a massive success (even the now-classic “Psycho Killer” reached no higher than #92 on the charts), their label Sire pulled out all the stops for album number two. They flew the band down to the Bahamas to record it and sent producer Brian Eno to record it with them. Though within a few years Eno would be the iconic producer of U2—and, as we’ll see shortly, Devo—at the time he was a relative novice whose only notable production was of the Velvet Underground’s John Cale around the same time Cale was producing Patti Smith’s Horses.

With “Take Me to the River,” the Talking Heads introduced the downtown art-rock crowd to real R&B.

David Byrne and Brian Eno in the recording studio.

Remote as they sound, the Bahamas at the time actually weren’t far from one of the era’s major music scenes. Chris Blackwell of Island Records had recently found a niche recording Jamaican reggae artists like Bob Marley and Toots and the Maytals and had decided to set up a studio closer to where the action was. He opened Compass Point Studios in 1977 in the small island city of Nassau. Jerry Harrison remembers how hard it was to even find the place:

“I fly down at 8:00 p.m. one night and I tell the cab driver that I want to go to Compass Point. The cab driver goes ‘What’s Compass Point?’ I tell him it’s a recording studio and he goes ‘Oh, yeah, I think I know where it is.’ Eventually we get to the right village, which was like chickens walking around a single streetlight. There’s just a bunch of dark buildings around us now. And he goes ‘This is it, get out.’ I’m thinking oh my god, what am I going to do? So I get out and a door opens and Robert Palmer walks out. He says ‘I believe you must be in need of a cocktail!’”

If the studio’s outside appearance was rugged, the inside was not much better. When the Talking Heads showed up a year after Compass Point opened, construction still wasn’t complete. “We felt like pioneers,” Harrison says. “There were times where a storm would knock out the power and the generator would come on. The salt air would cause corrosion in some of the equipment, so you started having breakdowns. Replacement equipment would have to get through customs through Miami, so then you’d get a couple of days off. You had to have a tolerant attitude.”

As they set to recording their second album, “Take Me to the River” became a point of contention. Having seen how much crowds loved their cover, Eno was pushing them to include it. Byrne resisted. The band hadn’t had a real hit yet, and he didn’t want a cover song to be their first, not when he was writing so many originals that he was proud of.

“There’s always a little bit of resistance to recording a cover like that because it’s kind of a crowd pleaser,” Byrne says. “I’d seen it happen before, where radio DJs who pick what they’re going to play will often pick a cover song. Something that’s already familiar to their audience is less risky. So then a band gets known for covering somebody else’s song as opposed to writing their own material. They have to go through a struggle for years to get identified with their own songs.”

Eventually Eno and Byrne’s bandmates (who wanted a hit and were less invested in whether Byrne himself had written it) prevailed. “Take Me to the River” was one of the final songs the band recorded for the album, which was then operating under the working title Tina and the Typing Pool. And though Brian Eno would later earn a reputation as a hands-on, assertive producer, in those early days he sat back and let them play. He only had one major suggestion for the song: slow down.

“The Al Green version is actually a pretty up-tempo song, and we had been playing it at a fairly fast tempo,” Frantz says. “Brian suggested, ‘Why don’t you play it as slow as you can?’ We tried it, and it really worked. The version that ended up being on the record is way slower than how we were playing it live.”

Having honed the track over so many shows, the foursome recorded it live in the studio. Eno wanted everything simple and basic. “He gets bored very quickly,” Harrison says. Eno even tried recording the whole band—vocals, guitar, bass, drums, keyboard—using only two microphones planted in the middle of the studio (this sounded terrible and he reverted to a more traditional setup). “Brian saw that we were a good live band and felt like ‘My main job at this point is just to capture what’s already there,’” Byrne recalls.

Eno forbade the band members from tinkering too much with his live recordings. He even imposed a rule that overdubs had to be no more than one note every few bars. And the band obliged, to a fault. Frantz remembers overdubbing a percussion part on a little wooden box, hitting it only once every ten or fifteen seconds. When he finished, Eno said, “Maybe that was a little too sparse.”

Eno did not, however, follow his own rules. The band might have been forbidden from tinkering, but he wasn’t. Though the facilities at Compass Point were limited, Eno had brought his own gear. Frantz remembers Eno running the drums through a briefcase-size synthesizer, plugging pins into holes, just like at an old telephone switchboard, to get certain effects. Eno added what he called “epi-events”—little blips and bloops that gave the track a little weirdness. He then ran the whole recording through a limiter that distorted the audio as the track progressed, creating the effect of it gradually getting louder without actually changing the volume. He called this a “psychological trick,” telling the BBC it “makes your ears think they’re hearing something that is getting louder all the time.”

Harrison says that with all the delays and effects Eno was using, the sounds he and the band produced on their instruments were not always what they anticipated. “It was a very interesting experience making that album, because what you played would not necessarily be what ended up on the tape.”

The band eventually left the Bahamas, and Eno put the final touches on the song and the album, rechristened with a new name. Supposedly, while they were casting around for a title to replace the unpopular Tina and the Typing Pool, Weymouth asked, “What can we call an album that is just more songs about buildings and food?” Harrison responded “We can call it exactly that.”

More Songs About Buildings and Food came out in July 1978. “Take Me to the River” was the first single, and it soon became the band’s first real hit, reaching #26 on the charts. It offered an entry point into the Talking Heads world, something just familiar enough that people could latch on.

“I think that after our first album,” Harrison says, “everyone was like ‘What is this music? What is it even influenced by?’ And then we put out ‘Take Me to the River’ and people were like ‘Oh, it’s R&B!’ It sort of solved the puzzle for people.”

The Talking Heads, seen here in 1977, were one of many not-exactly-punk bands that played at New York punk-rock landmark CBGB.

It certainly solved the puzzle for radio DJs. Many DJs still avoided anything that sounded like punk music, but an Al Green song held no risk of backlash from listeners with more conservative tastes. Byrne’s predictions proved exactly right. “Radio programmers played it safe,” he says. “They thought ‘This is an Al Green song. We’re not going totally with an unknown here.’ It’s like people doing movie sequels or Broadway adaptations. Something’s already been a success.”

Having a genuine hit was an unmitigated joy for the others, but Byrne had mixed feelings about being best known for a song he hadn’t written. He’d worried about becoming famous for a cover song, and that’s exactly what happened. The Talking Heads never released another cover, and Byrne confirms that the success of “Take Me to the River” was the major reason why. He says, “You want to make sure you don’t fall into that trap” of being known as a cover artist.

It should be noted that the cover art for More Songs About Buildings and Food features neither.

Even once the band had original hits, “Take Me to the River” remained their biggest concert crowd-pleaser. Byrne wrote many beloved songs but never one that electrified crowds like the Al Green cover. Frantz thinks he knows why. “Most of our other songs you wouldn’t call sexy,” he says. “Not that they weren’t interesting and really good, but they didn’t have that.” Harrison attributes that to the song’s structure: “It has a drama and it reaches an impassioned peak, so it’s a great song for the end of the evening.”

As the band’s live performances grew, the song grew with them. Within a couple of years, Byrne began writing bigger song arrangements that required more musicians. By the time they filmed Stop Making Sense, the foursome was augmented by backing singers, another keyboardist, and a second drummer (not to mention a big suit). “After [our album] Remain in Light, David said, ‘Oh, we can’t possibly play this music live,’” Frantz says. “The recording of Remain in Light was done with a lot of overdubs and different parts, more than he believed we could play. He didn’t think it would sound like the record and didn’t want to tour anymore. I believe it was Jerry who came up with the idea of what if we toured with extra music playing the other parts to fill out the sound? David liked that idea.”

“Take Me to the River” proved perfectly suited for this growing concert setup. It had begun life as a soul song, and adding backing singers nudged the Talking Heads’ version back in that direction. “It was still our groove as opposed to Al Green’s groove,” Byrne says, “but the bigger band brought a lot of the gospel stuff back into it.”

The Talking Heads themselves never met Al Green, but in later years the various members met musicians connected to the earlier “Take Me to the River” recordings. They all have stories.

Chris Frantz once met Syl Johnson, Green’s labelmate who’d recorded the first hit version, in a Japanese hotel. “The jet lag is something serious when you get to Japan, so I woke up in the middle of the night,” Frantz remembers. “I couldn’t wait to get some breakfast, so I got down to the restaurant before it even opened. I was waiting outside and there was this really nice-looking black guy waiting there, too. We started talking, and he introduced himself. It was Syl Johnson.” Johnson said he loved the Talking Heads’ version of the song he’d made a hit.

When working on a Memphis-music documentary titled Take Me to the River, Harrison had the opportunity to play the title song with iconic soul musicians like William Bell and co-writer Teenie Hodges’s brother Leroy Hodges, who played bass on both Green and Johnson’s recordings. Harrison of course tried to play it in the original arrangement, but the muscle memory of so many years playing the Talking Heads’ version proved hard to shake. “It worked best if I could sit next to Leroy and be watching his hands,” he says. “I could see that he was about to move and the chord change was going to come there.”

Byrne ran into Teenie Hodges himself a few times, even once inviting him onstage to join in on the song. But he made Hodges do the Talking Heads’ version. “He was incredibly happy that we covered his song and, I think, probably also happy that we realized that he had a part in it,” Byrne says. “He wasn’t just some faceless songwriter. That acknowledgment, I think, meant something.”

As for Al Green himself, on the few occasions when he’s been asked about it, he had nothing but good (if somewhat generic) things to say. “I think Talking Heads are a super little group,” he said. “I thought they were great. I guess the public thought so, too. . . . The record sold quite a bit. It’s just fantastic.”

If he doesn’t go into more detail, perhaps it’s because the song the Talking Heads recorded sounds little like the song Green wrote. “Our version, it does seem very much like it’s ours,” Byrne says. “That what makes a successful cover, I guess. You own it, as opposed to copying somebody else’s version. You make it yours.”