Book Review
Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock
By Jonathan Gould
Mariner Books: 512 pages, $35
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When an writer decides to tackle the communicative of a fashionable and important set similar Talking Heads, the contours of which are acquainted to galore of its fans, the remit should beryllium to illuminate the unexplored corners, the hidden details and anecdotes that supply a much full-bodied communicative and yet bring the set into sharper alleviation than ever before. Unfortunately, Jonathan Gould has astir wholly ignored this directive successful “Burning Down the House,” his caller Talking Heads biography. This lumpy book, afloat of redundant stories and unnecessary detours that supply small illumination but plentifulness of needless bulk, lacks information by the group’s members and is not the biography that this large and important set deserves.
As fans of the Heads already know, 3 of the 4 members met arsenic students astatine the Rhode Island School of Design successful the mid-’70s, children of privilege with artsy aspirations and not overmuch direction. David Byrne came from Baltimore by mode of Scotland, a socially awkward dabbler successful conceptualist experiments with photography and a seasoned of assorted mediocre screen bands. It was drummer Chris Frantz who enlisted Byrne to articulation 1 specified band; bassist Tina Weymouth, Frantz’s woman and the girl of a decorated Navy vice admiral, played bass. They were an anti-jam set and pro-avant; the archetypal decent opus they came up with was a shambolic mentation of what became “Psycho Killer,” with Weymouth contributing the French recitatif successful the song’s bridge.

(Mariner Books)
For the emergent Heads, timing was everything. When Frantz signed the lease connected a spacious loft connected Chrystie Street successful East Village successful October 1974, helium had unwittingly recovered the signifier abstraction wherever the 3 musicians would hone their craft. The loft was besides a abbreviated locomotion to CBGB, soon to go the proving crushed of New York’s punk gyration and the Heads’ superior unrecorded show venue astatine the commencement of their career.
In March 1975, Byrne, Weymouth and Frantz attended a gig by Boston’s Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers astatine the Kitchen, an arts corporate abstraction successful Soho, and it showed them a caller mode to attack their music. Richman, “who dressed similar a kid that everyone laughed astatine successful precocious school,” influenced the band’s preppy ocular template and Byrne’s clenched singing voice. Within a twelvemonth of moving to the city, Talking Heads had recovered its look, dependable and favored club. When Frantz bumped into Modern Lovers bassist Ernie Brooks successful a West Village Cafe, Frantz inquired astir keyboardist Jerry Harrison; Brooks gave him Harrison’s number, Harrison joined the set and the classical Talking Heads lineup was complete.
What followed was a declaration with Seymour Stein’s statement Sire and the band’s collaboration with shaper Brian Eno, opening with its 2nd album, “More Songs About Buildings and Food.” By the clip the set released 1980’s groundbreaking “Remain successful Light,” Eno’s relation had expanded beyond his accumulation duties. He was present penning songs with Byrne, which created friction wrong the band. When Byrne allegedly reneged connected songwriting credits (the medium listed “David Byrne, Brian Eno and Talking Heads,” alternatively than the idiosyncratic set members), it created a rift that ne'er healed, adjacent arsenic the set was selling millions of copies of its follow-up “Speaking successful Tongues” and the soundtrack to the Jonathan Demme performance movie “Stop Making Sense.” The last enactment was recriminatory, arsenic Byrne commanded an ever greater stock of the spotlight portion the different members softly seethed. The band’s last album, “Naked,” was its weakest, and Talking Heads dissolved successful 1991, aft Byrne removed himself from the lineup to research extracurricular projects.

Author Jonathan Gould
(Richard Edelman)
Gould does a serviceable occupation of telling the Heads’ communicative successful a publication that arrives 50 years aft the band’s archetypal gig astatine CBGB. Curiously, for idiosyncratic who has tasked himself with explaining Manhattan’s precocious ‘70s downtown renaissance, Gould regards galore of the cardinal players successful that country with derision bordering connected contempt. Gould refers to Richard Hell, a premier designer of New York punk, arsenic a mediocrity whose “singing, songwriting and bass playing remained arsenic pedestrian arsenic his poetry.” Patti Smith’s euphony “verged connected a parody of bushed poetry,” portion the vastly influential Velvet Underground, a set that made New York punk possible, is hobbled by its “pretensions to hipness, irony and amorality.” Even Chris Frantz’s drumming is “exceptionally unimaginative.” Gould is besides careless with his descriptors. Jonathan Richman’s set displays a “willful lack” of commercialized instinct, the Heads asseverate a “willful conventionality” to their signifier appearance, Johnny Ramone is simply a “willfully obnoxious” guitarist and truthful on.
It’s hard to fathom however a biographer intent connected cracking the codification of 1 of rock’s seminal bands tin bash truthful with truthful overmuch contempt for the civilization that spawned it. An inquiring instrumentality mightiness privation to spell to Will Hermes’ 2011 publication “Love Goes to Buildings connected Fire” for a much nuanced and knowledgeable representation of the originative ferment that made the Heads possible. As for a biography of Talking Heads, we are inactive near with a lacuna that Gould has unluckily not filled.
Weingarten is the writer of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”