David Byrne, the most talkative of the Talking Heads, wrote "Wild Wild Life" for the 1986 movie True Stories, which he starred in and directed. He recorded the songs for the film with the band, and that became their seventh album, True Stories. Many of these songs were used in the movie with the actors replacing Byrne's vocals, but the "Wild Wild Life" film version is identical to the one on the album.
The band shot a music video for the song that was incorporated into the film, getting Byrne's bandmates into the credits. The scene is a lip-sync contest where the citizens of the fictional town of Virgil, Texas each step up to the microphone and mine a line or two of the song as a band plays it on stage. (These lip-sync battles were a trend at the time, staged at bars at a time before Karaoke became popular). There was a great deal of tension between Byrne and the other Talking Heads at this time - the movie was his project and he brought them to Los Angeles to record the songs - but they had a great time making the video. Byrne let them choose their own costumes. Here are the characters they picked:
Drummer Chris Frantz:
Heavy metal singer in the tradition of Ozzy Osbourne
Country singer modelled after Hank Williams
Sports fan with baseball cap that says "wild wild life"
Bassist Tina Weymouth:
Highfalutin society woman
Deranged lady who takes off her wig to reveal shaved head
Prince protégé Apollonia
Keyboardist Jerry Harrison:
Prince (with Weymouth's Apollonia)
Billy Idol-like rocker
Bruce Lee type
Shady guy in zoot suit
David Byrne often inhabits strange characters in his songs. The guy in this one is certainly off-kilter (as are the inhabitants of the True Stories film), with his fur pajamas and hot potato. But he's also an observer, checking out the doctor, the stockbroker and the businessman, commenting on their wild, wild lives. He may be sleeping on the interstate, but they're the wild ones.
With lyrics like:
Check out Mr. Businessman, he bought some wild, wild life
On the way to the stock exchange, he got some wild, wild life
the Talking Heads remind us that they took satire and social commentary back from punk rock and repackaged it in new wave drag. In the book Avant Rock - Experimental Music From Beatles to Bjork by Bill Martin, Martin argues, "If punk was in part the music of the outcast ne'er-do-well, new wave of the Talking Heads variety was the revenge of the nerds."
Talking Heads' label boss Seymour Stein is the one who coined the term "new wave" to describe the band's music. It caught on as a way to dissociate the Heads and bands like Blondie from the punk tag.
The
True Stories film wasn't well received, but the album did better, selling 500,000 copies in America. The "Wild Wild Life" video was a huge hit on MTV, which helped expand the band's audience when they put the "
Once In A Lifetime" video in hot rotation the day they launched in 1981. At the MTV Video Music Awards, "Wild Wild Life" took the moonmen for Best Group Video and Best Video From A Film.
This was released as a single a month before the movie in a effort to promote the film. It ended up being Talking Heads' last Hot 100 hit, reaching #25. The band released one more album - Naked in 1988 - before David Byrne disbanded them.
Unlike most Talking Heads songs, this one repeats the title several times and has a solid pop song structure, giving it plenty of hit potential. It clocks in at a radio-friendly 3:39.
Talking Heads also shot a video for the
True Stories track "
Love For Sale," a commentary on the mind-numbing effects of television commercials. In a bit of fractal symmetry, that video appears in the
True Stories film in a sequence in which a woman is watching it on TV.
As opposed to straightforward concert films such as Stop Making Sense, the film True Stories makes some attempt at a story about a village preparing for a festival, with said village populated with various oddball characters. Most notable in the cast is John Goodman, in one of his earliest major film roles. This was a year before Goodman appeared in Raising Arizona, which introduced him to the Coen brothers and ultimately led to his most famous role as Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski: "I can get you a toe by 3 o'clock this afternoon - with nail polish!"
Talking Heads often beefed over songwriting credits. David Byrne typically wrote the lyrics, but his bandmates contributed their musical parts.
True Stories was Byrne's baby and he took sole songwriting credit on the tracks, but according to drummer Chris Frantz, the other three members made them Talking Heads songs. "He demoed all those songs before we recorded them," Frantz said in a
Songfacts interview. "When I say 'demo,' I mean just a beatbox drum machine and a guitar. We had to fill in the blanks. We had to take it from zero to 100 miles an hour."
The band never played this live because they stopped touring in 1984 after their Stop Making Sense concert film was released.
