Talking Heads "96 Tears" and "1-2-3 Red Light" (Live 1976)

Last week's Talking Heads CBS Demos post led to quite a bit of correspondence, but none as interesting as what led to the current post. I received a mysterious email from a nameless person who, sometime in 1976, managed to tape a Heads show at CBGBs. How do I know he taped the show? Well, he mailed me a copy. And it has a drawn-out, dare I say meditative, version of "96 Tears" (mp3) and a version of 1910 Fruitgum Co.'s "1-2-3 Red Light" (mp3) that is much briefer and just great. Here's the anonymous taper's personal account of the show:

"This was maybe the third or fourth time I'd seen Talking Heads. I'd missed their very first gig at CBGB, in May '75, but I'd been there for the second, at the Festival of Unsigned Bands that July, as well as for the Christmas Festival of Bands. On this night they are opening for Television, whom I'd seen a dozen times by then. It was so long ago that popular bands then would normally do two- or three-night stands at CBGB, two (different) sets a night, and it was so long ago that the entire audience sat at cafe tables, with room left over. I was sitting up near the stage, with my recorder--an object not quite as large as a toaster oven--tucked away in a bookbag, its cheap little microphone poking out the top. I'd never taped a show before. The Heads were still a three-piece unit, incongruously fresh-faced and wearing the kind of neat sports clothes my mother wished I would adopt, but that nobody else who frequented CBGB wore then. In a recent entry on his blog, David Byrne gives an acute assessment of himself at the time: "I was a peculiar young man--borderline Asperger's, I would guess." And that is exactly what he was like. The music was all the more powerful because of the clash between sound and image. It seemed a bit like demonic possession. It was the era of Son of Sam and "Taxi Driver," after all--shy loners stoking internal fires were definitely a cause for concern."