ALBUMS THAT SHOULD EXIST : Talking Head - The Kitchen New York USA 13/3/1976

The Talking Heads - The Kitchen, New York City, 13 - 3 -1976

Paul says : "Now that I've finished posting the complete 1982 US Festival, I have a backlog of other albums I want to post. This is the one I'm the most excited about. It's a must have for anyone interested in the early years of the Talking Heads. What really makes this stand out is the jaw-dropping sound quality, considering how early this comes in the band's career, a year and a half before their first album was released.

The reason I'm posting this is thanks to musical associate MZ. When I posted the Talking Heads set from the US Festival, he said he had a better sounding version, and sent it to me. Sure enough, it did sound better, so I used that one. But at the same time, he also sent me a bootleg of this concert, saying that I should listen to it if I hadn't already. I did, and I thought it was great, so I decided to post this too. 

The sound quality is heads and shoulders above any other recordings of the band from this time. The reason is because it was professionally filmed due to sheer luck. It seems they were the only band to play the Kitchen, a venue for (non-musical) artists, and many public events were being filmed there at the time. Keep in mind the band only had their first public concert nine months earlier. And they still were lacking their fourth member, Jerry Harrison, who didn't join until a full year after this.

The one snag with the recording MZ sent me was that it was only half an hour long. I was going to post it anyway, due to the rarity of having such sound quality from that far back in the band's history. But then I looked on YouTube and found further videos. The timing was extremely fortunate, because it seems they were only made available to the public two weeks prior to when I'm posting this, in December 2024. I don't know why they were hidden for nearly fifty years, but better late than never. These videos were of the band's entire performance that evening!

I converted everything to mp3. Then I made some audio edits. The main one was to drastically boost the volume of lead singer David Byrne talking between songs. On the videos, one could barely hear him at all most of the time, but now he comes in clearly. He was unusually chatty back then, speaking before every song, although usually just a sentence or two. A couple of years after this, he rarely spoke at all during concerts. I also boosted the volume of the applause after every song.

Since this is so early in the band's career, many of these songs were played rarely. For instance, setlist.fm has the song "I Want to Live" only ever being played three times. And decent recordings of them are rarer still. Those include the cover songs "Sugar on My Tongue," "Love Is All Around," "1 2 3 Red Light," and "96 Tears."

So please enjoy this. And if you're really interested, watch the full video of it on YouTube.

This album is an hour and 13 minutes long. 

01 talk 
02 Artists Only 
03 talk 
04 First Week-Last Week... Carefree 
05 talk
06 I'm Not in Love
07 talk 
08 Love Goes to a Building on Fire 
09 talk 
10 Who Is It
11 talk
12 Thank You for Sending Me an Angel 
13 talk 
14 Sugar on My Tongue 
15 talk
16 Warning Sign
17 talk 
18 talk 
19 The Girls Want to Be with the Girls
20 Psycho Killer 
21 talk 
22 I Feel It in My Heart 
23 talk 
24 I Wish You Wouldn't Say That
25 talk 
26 Stay Hungry
27 talk 
28 I Want to Live
29 talk
30 Tentative Decisions 
31 talk 
32 No Compassion
33 talk 
34 Love Is All Around 
35 talk
36 1 2 3 Red Light 
37 96 Tears