Book Review:
Burning Down the House
Jonathan Gould
Mariner, 2025
Talking Heads was one of my bands as a young person. I was a bit too young to be with them from their beginnings as a sort of quasi-punk band in the mid-seventies–I was probably still listening to Kiss–but by the 1980 or so, they along with the Clash were the bands that really spoke to me.
The Clash started life as one of the prototypical London punk bands but quickly evolved into being something quite different. Talking Heads was always a sort of square peg on the punk scene in New York City. Both scenarios were completely all right with me. Though it matched my own mood, it always seemed to me that making a huge deal out of nihilism was a bit childish and contradictory.
If nothing matters, it also doesn’t matter that nothing matters, so . . .
For the Clash, all posing to the side, there were things that mattered: solidarity between the white and black working classes, for instance. For early Talking Heads, nihilism was really more of a personal matter. An interior matter. A matter which they’d turn into a big public success, but not one they insisted you pay attention to.
That really matched my mood in the 1980s. I aspired to the sort of activism the Clash involved itself with, but actually trying to deal with people generally threw me into the very sort of angsty despair that lies behind some of Talking Heads most memorable moments.
Jonathan Gould’s recent band bio of Talking Heads, Burning Down the House, does a great job of documenting the band from its humble beginnings through its unlikely success and beyond. It also contextualizes the band’s history within the events and culture of the times that the band rose up in and flourished. And, even without the cooperation of a single band member, covers the personal and artistic challenges they faced fairly well.
What with all that general historical context, the rock scene, personal histories and the history of the band to present, Gould had a complex task in front of him. One that he handles pretty well–keeping things basically chronological and more-or-less compartmentalized, with in-depth consideration of the albums in chapters of their own, and historical context usually sectioned off on its own.
One does wish for a bit more integration of these elements, though. Gould switches from one to the other often enough that connections can be woven in pretty effectively. Managing something more might have required that an already long book be even longer.
And there is plenty of band history to tell. Talking Heads grew and changed considerably as it grew older; in membership, in popularity, in artistic ambition. The band we see in Stop Making Sense, their grand-scale, Jonathan Demme-directed concert film–is not at all the band that made Talking Heads ‘77. Yes, the band has more than doubled in size, but even that aside, they’d moved from quasi-punk to eclectic funk; they’d gone from weirdly static and awkward to outright visual spectacle; they’d gone from minimalist to multilayered; they’d gone from laughable outcasts to surfing the zeitgeist.
And this isn’t just a difference that we recognize in retrospective: Gould cites multiple critics and collaborators who noted the same thing over the later history of Talking Heads: the band and, especially Byrne, were developing quickly. Sometimes in very surprising directions.
For some fans of Talking Heads early work, myself included, the spectacle and crowd-pleasingness of Stop Making Sense were a betrayal. Critics and audiences fell over themselves to praise the film and the performance it documented. They ought to have been befuddled and put off, by my lights at the time.
I didn’t actually watch the film until years after it came out. And then only because one of my college roommates would play it on continuous loop in our living room for days on end. For months. After having watched it in snippets, probably several times over, more or less by accident, I was converted. It was solicitous of our attention and involvement, yes. But it was also weird and offputting and cryptic and thought-provoking and really, really musically intense.
The band that I’d come to identify with could never have done anything remotely like this. But here it was. And I was glad it was. Was it a betrayal? Maybe. But it was a triumph.
You don't have to read between the lines too much to answer the question of how such an extraordinary transformation could have happened. Gould's answer is David Byrne, an Asperger's sufferer of unique talent, who was fortunate enough to be born into, find or fall into situations that nurtured and directed that talent in ways that ultimately got its uniqueness recognized. The extraordinary element in the Talking Heads story is undoubtedly David Byrne. Everyone else was along for the ride.
But Gould also recognizes that Byrne would probably not have gotten far without the help of a series of family, friends, lovers and collaborators who gave him ordinary things like friendship and support often without much reciprocity from him.
New York City is a huge character in this story. Not the New York City you know today, not the New York City of baby strollers and endless coffee shops, but the New York City of danger, recent de-industrilaization, near-bankruptcy, garbage strikes and declining population. This was the New York City where people with no ready means of income could move and find their way. Because more people wanted out of New York City than in.
Talking Heads was, initially, three of the many young people on the make coming to New York City during this time. (The fourth member, keyboardist/guitarist Jerry Harrison would join in 1977, more than a year after the band formed.) All three had attended the Rhode Island School of Design. Two of them, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, had graduated. David Byrne, who would quickly become the band’s main composer and singer, dropped out and was refused readmission.
As college kids, the Heads were distinct from most of their peers on the downtown scene in New York City. The other musicians tended to be from working class backgrounds. If they went to college, art would be about the last things they’d think about pursuing there. (“I wish my parents were rich enough to send me to art school” was Patti Smith’s response to meeting Tina Weymouth for the first time.) Spending a lot of money to pursue a career that you probably weren’t going to make much money at was, definitively, a rich person’s move.
According to Gould, most of the retrospective heroes of the CBGBs era were themselves hero-worshippers. They wanted nothing more than to become the new, updated versions of Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan. The punks called the Rolling Stones The Strolling Bones not so much because they thought the actual music was bad or outdated, but because they were continuing to occupy the cultural space that a younger generation–they themselves–would like to occupy.
Not so Talking Heads. Byrne’s fraught relationship with rock hero-dom was apparent to anyone who saw him in the early days of the band. Not that he wouldn’t take the pay and benefits when offered, but Talking Heads as a band was far more skeptical of rock stardom than their peers. Even after their success, Byrne’s ability to act in the role of rock frontman was distinctly limited to a sort of brainy parody. Early in their career, the band as a whole considered bringing on a “more traditional” singer and front person (Deborah Harry was actually asked about it!) and they collectively decided to stick with Byrne more or less because he was so awkward in that role.
Byrne, specifically, and Talking Heads more generally have often been disparaged because they seemed completely disinterested in, or even hostile to things like “reviving the spirit of rock n roll.” Byrne (like me, I have to admit) has always seemed rather puzzled by what that even is, or why it ought to have been revived. At their formation, Talking Heads defined themselves negatively by articulating a list of “don’ts”. No show-offy solos, no rock moves or poses, no pomp or drama, no rock hair, no rock lights, no rehearsed stage patter, no singing like a black man.
Talking Heads was built on a foundation that was similar to many of their peers: little formal musical education, little skill on their instruments but a passion to express themselves artistically through music. But the band was established with the ideology of an anti-rock-star band rather than as a wanna-be-rock-star band.
Though Talking Heads and, especially, Byrne would end up violating all of these strictures eventually, these violations were, characteristically, done self-consciously and surprisingly late in this history of the band. The basic idea that rock stardom wasn’t an end in itself and that they didn’t want to become new versions of the old rock stars still defined the band as much as anything, even late in life. Byrne would never become “the posturing clown yammering away about his baby” that the early band so despised. That negative identity was really the glue that held this band together for as long as it did hold.
But it barely held. The tensions and “frictions” within the band were significant from the start. Byrne and Chris Frantz had been in a RISD band called the Artistics, but Byrne was not really friends with Frantz and Weymouth. Something akin to a family atmosphere developed in the early days of the band when they lived together in a loft honing their skills and trying to work through potential songs.
For Tina Weymouth, in particular, this stage of the band’s development–with Byrne living as part of her domestic arrangements (she and Frantz were lovers and would ultimately marry)--would seemingly become the norm against which all later, much less intimate, situations would be measured. But the domestic arrangement was already over by 1976, when Weymouth and Frantz moved to a flat in Queens. Before the band had ever recorded.
Talking Heads began with three people from art school united in their desire to try to make it as an anti-rock band. And, famously, Talking Heads ended with four band members deeply at odds with one another. Weymouth, even before the breakup of Talking Heads, often bitterly complained about Byrne’s self-centeredness, social disfunction and “pretentiousness.” During and since the breakup of the band the bitterness of her complaints has intensified to the point where many speculate that she sounds like a scorned lover. (For me, the tone is a bit more spurned-older-sibling-ish.)
That bitterness is on full display in Gould’s book. The speculation as to motive also gets a brief airing. Weymouth doesn’t come off well. Byrne, on the other hand, gets an Aspberger’s diagnosis along with some tut-tutting about his tendency to take more than due credit for himself.
While this isn’t necessarily the result of the pervasive misogyny of rock and rock writing, it is worth considering. Gould is conscious of this, and seems to believe that neither Byrne nor Weymouth is the monster their haters portray. But it hard to replace those well-known, hated figures entirely when he is so dependent on the very sources that helped create them.
The breakup, the behavior of band members, and who deserves credit for what were all matters of controversy at the time Talking Heads was a going concern, and some of them still are. Gould's judgement on them is that of a seasoned music biographer--he has acclaimed books about Otis Redding and The Beatles to his credit. While we might question whether he has suffieient data to exercise his judgment on (I, for one, suspect he had more co-operation from band members than he can openly acknowledge, but . . .), he does seem to try hard to be judicious.
As to that “pretentiousness” that Weymouth (along with a host of Byrne critics) complains of. It points an undeniable and unbridgeable rift in the band that was apparent even in the early days of their collaboration with Brian Eno: David Byrne was an ambitious musician and artist who was rapidly developing his musical palette and sensibilities to try to do new things with his art.
Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth were not. Their playing certainly developed and improved over the history of Talking Heads, but not nearly at the rate that Byrne’s vision was developing. What they really wanted to have a good time and make some money playing fun music. Chris and Tina wanted to be like the B-52s. Or the Bangles.
Byrne wanted to and did keep moving busily from influence to influence. Collaborator to collaborator. Medium to medium. Collecting new tools and elements as he went along. The results weren’t always great, but the forward motion was always there. Byrne was looking to gain the perspective, facility and scope to be an auteur. And he’d at least partially succeeded both with and without the rest of Talking Heads.
The tension between those two perspectives was certainly productive, as Stop Making Sense makes clear. The fun lovingness of Chris and Tina absolutely rubbed off on Byrne. But it is telling that Byrne’s aesthetic seriousness never seems to have rubbed off on Frantz and Weymouth. It was mostly just another annoying thing about David Byrne.
Early reviews and interviews with the band focussed very strongly on their art school background, and perhaps it was that highly assertive sense of aesthetics cultivated in art school that led the group to set themselves in such clear opposition to the world they were immersing themselves in. But what really set them apart was the fact that they all hated a lot of what rock ‘n’ roll had come to stand for, even among their new generation peers, even while ambitiously pursuing success as a rock band.
For some this was the ultimate indication that they were really nothing but parvenues and sell-outs. But what was it they were selling out? The hero worship of people who had no moral or artistic claim on it? A hedonistic lifestyle? As Tina Weymouth put it “Rock isn’t a noble cause.”
But what is? I’m not really sure the band came up with a great answer to that. But they played with better ones than “rock,” certainly. And that was the charm of the band: that they could rise above their milieu just enough to ask some interesting questions about it and us.
The fixations of Byrne’s songwriting were at the time of writing one of the most distinctive things about Talking Heads. In retrospect those fixations seem not only distinctive or eccentric, but prescient. The conflict between fact and meaning for the casual observer (Crosseyed and Painless, The Great Curve); The difficulty of resolving one’s identity in a free-flowing modern environment (Seen and Not Seen); The attractions of past certainties; The strong tendency toward violence for those who fail to negotiate meaning and identity in this untethered world (Psycho Killer, Life During Wartime, Listening Wind)
For Byrne, perhaps, the noble cause was human connection. Something that most people take for granted, but which, as someone on the spectrum, he had some critical distance on. Figuring out the self, its thirst for connection, how it connects and how it ought to connect. A project too big to work through in one lifetime let alone the lifetime of a band. But you have to admire the ambition.
A band biography, on the other hand, might not seem to be a terribly ambitious project. But Gould succeeds at placing the phenomenon of the band within a broader historical context that makes that narrow-focus history take on new interest and new meaning. Bravo.
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