David Byrne, Rauschenberg, and a hot dog factory

The prettiest love song of the eighties shipped in a plastic case manufactured by the Oscar Mayer hot dog company. I am not being cute. That is a real thing that happened.

"This Must Be the Place" is the last track on Speaking in Tongues, and David Byrne basically did not write love songs. He said the subject was too big, and most of them come out corny, so he stayed away from it. Then he wrote this one, and it is the warmest thing in the entire Talking Heads catalog. He called it a love song made almost completely of non sequiturs. Phrases with real feeling in them that do not connect to each other or tell you any kind of story.

The parenthesis in the title says "Naive Melody," and that is not modesty, it is a description of how they recorded it. The band swapped instruments. Tina Weymouth put down her bass and picked up a guitar. Jerry Harrison went over to a synthesizer and played the bass part on that. Everybody playing something they were not good at, on purpose, because they wanted it to sound like somebody realizing they are in love and not quite believing it yet. It worked. The warmest thing they ever made, and it is four people slightly out of their depth.

Then there is the packaging, which I had to read about three separate times before I understood what Rauschenberg actually did. Byrne saw some of his collages at a gallery and asked if he would design a cover. Rauschenberg said yes, on one condition. He was not doing a cover, he was doing the whole package.

What he made was three clear plastic discs, each printed in a single color. Cyan on one. Magenta on another. Yellow on the third. Stacked over a clear vinyl record. To see any of it you had to spin the discs, and Byrne said Bob had perversely scrambled the separations so you could never see the whole picture at once. However you turned it.

It won a Grammy for album packaging. It also took about a year and a half to find anybody in America who could vacuum-form a clear vinyl record, which is how Jerry Harrison ended up on the phone with a hot dog packaging plant.

So that is the painting. The whole thing is misregistration. When a print job slips, the color plates do not line up and you get thin colored ghosts along every edge. That is what is happening to his hair, his shoulder, his hand. There are crosshairs in the corners, the marks a printer uses to line the plates up, which is a joke, because nothing in this picture lines up.

The song did nothing when it came out. It just sat at the end of a record for about twenty years while everybody slowly worked out it was the best thing on it.