The Washington Post reviews a new bio – ‘How Talking Heads stumbled their way to success’:
… Talking Heads… made its debut on June 5, 1975, at CBGB on the city’s Lower East Side. There was nothing new about a band built around guitar, drums and bass — Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Led Zeppelin and the Who used that format to churn out some of the era’s most bombastic music — but this group seemed slightly bewildered at having found themselves onstage. They were as different from the titans of rock as a sneeze is from a hurricane. Bassist Tina Weymouth seemed especially unsure of herself, which is hardly surprising since she had been playing for less than six months. Drummer Chris Frantz’s skills were rudimentary at best, as were those of the singer-guitarist, David Byrne; when Byrne opened his mouth to sing, as one critic said, “his voice rises as though he’s about to yell at his mother.”
Jonathan Gould’s well-wrought, insightful “Burning Down the House” traces the band from its fumbling early days to the kind of heady success that creates its own problems. Its three members had met at the Rhode Island School of Design, parted company, moved about, formed and left bands, and finally jelled as Talking Heads (there’s no “the” in that name), a group that not only survived but even got booked at clubs such as CBGB despite a lack of everything one might need to succeed in the music biz. Byrne recalls that they were “less a band than an outline for a band” as they stumbled through quirky, quizzical songs and wore clothes that looked as though their moms had picked them out.
Oddly, their awkward demeanor was a big part of their appeal. Since Weymouth had only recently learned how to play the bass, she kept her place in the music by staring at Byrne with such intensity as to suggest to the audience that he was someone who was really worth looking at. Within a year, the group was joined by Jerry Harrison, who had actually taken piano lessons as a child and whose keyboard and guitar playing “thickened” the band’s sound, to use Gould’s word. Indeed, the arrival of Harrison shifted Talking Heads away from “the anxious intensity of a guitar trio” to the tempo and syncopation common to soul and funk. Gould should know something about that; he is the author of books on Otis Redding as well as another group that transformed itself by adapting the sounds of Black America, the Beatles…
Harrison may have added heft to the band’s minimalist sound, but it was the arrival of producer Brian Eno that transformed them from club favorites to international stars. For one thing, Gould posits, Eno “was much more interested in the sound of singing than in the meaning of what was being sung,” so he downplayed the prominence of vocals in a song’s final mix. Eno’s approach had a special appeal for the band’s front man, and the all-new Heads took on a vitality fueled by his new persona. Gould quotes a critic who put it crisply: “Byrne’s vocal style is that of a man terrified by experience, yet obsessed with the need to plunge in anyway.”…
Baud
Apt. We’re definitely burning down the house with a once in a lifetime horror of a president.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
“The President’s crazy… did you hear what he said?”
– Talking Heads, “Making Flippy-floppy” from album Speaking in Tongues (1983)
No One of Consequence
Thank you Anne. I need the distraction. One of my favorite Heads tracks.
-NOoC
Kristine
“I can’t seem to face up to the facts.
I’m tense and nervous and I can’t relax…”
Kinda describes a lot of us at present.
mappy!
“Talking Heads join Stephen for an epic conversation celebrating the 40th anniversary of their seminal concert film, “Stop Making Sense.” In the first part of the interview, watch as David Byrne, Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth share stories from the earliest days of the band…”
“We Were a Cover Band at First” – Talking Heads (Part 1)
NotMax
The state of the restrooms at CBGB approached legendary. And not in a good way.
NotMax
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man also comes to mind.
;)
Old Dan and Little Ann
I got in the car an hour ago and Burning Down the House was on. Nice. Also, I am slightly obsessed with Tina Weymouth in the “Stop Making Sense” concert.
Doug R
Has anyone posted that new 4K video of “Psycho Killer” starring Saoirse Rohan?
O. Felix Culpa
@Doug R: Yes, Anne Laurie did day before yesterday: balloon-juice.com/2025/06/20/friday-evening-open-thread-musical-interlude/
trollhattan
Related, the CBGB film starring jackal favorite Alan Rickman is well worth viewing.
dm
I said this late in the other Talking Heads thread, but Angelique Kidjo did an album covering Remain in light that is absolutely wonderful.
youtu.be/ygjm2cX2klY
Wag
I’ve been a huge Talking Heads fan dating back to 79. Had the pleasure of seeing them in concert at red rocks on their Remain in Light iteration with Adrian Belew playing some of the most outrageous guitar solos in the world. I’ve continued to be a huge fan and I’m looking forward to seeing David Byrne on his upcoming tour in November. Through the years Talking Heads have provided a soundtrack for my life. I see a small amount of hope that there seems to be the start of a thaw in the relationship between David Byrne and the other three members I doubt that there will ever be a reunion tour (they’ve already turned down an $80 million offer to do so), but it is good to see a thaw over the past couple of years in the previously icy relationship between Byrne, Weymouth, Franz, and Harrison.
Wag
@dm:
I agree, 100%.Her reinterpretation of Remain in Light is brilliant. She did a concert tour a couple of summers ago that I saw and it was a thrilling musical evening
PJ
That review has a lot of misinformation in it. Chris Frantz had been playing in bands for years and was a tight drummer from the start of Talking Heads (you can check out pre-’77 videos of him playing), Eno did not transform them into international stars (they did that on their own, and that came post-Eno) or introduce them to African music, etc.
dm
@Wag: better link : youtube.com/watch?v=X0EOxxKrUFc
Omnes Omnibus
@PJ: Jerry Harrison had also been a member of the Modern Lovers.
Captain C
David Byrne’s percussionist Mauro Refosco has a really cool band called Forro In The Dark, which is also one of the old school Nublu bands. Byrne’s even played with them on occasion.
p.a.
Psycho Killer got early play on WBRU (Brown U’s quasi-semi-hemi-demi radio station) upon release in part I think because of THead’s Prov & RISD connections. I loved it, my GF at the time hated it. It was a sign of the relationship’s eventual arc…
AliceBlue
Saw them at the Electric Ballroom in Atlanta in ’77 (maybe ’78?). They did a phenomenal show.
eclare
I saw the movie Stop Making Sense in high school, fan ever since. I don’t think the friend that I took with me was too impressed.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@eclare: The movie is so good! Best concert film performances ever. I was converted by it in high school (on VHS in the 90s).
Big fan ever since, also turned on to Bernie Worrell by it, which led me to P-funk, George Clinton and Bootsy Collins!
Wag
@dm: Such an amazing album.
BigJimSlade
This is a really fun watch – an opera singer watches the live “Life During Wartime” and comments on it.
Ten Bears
Never tripped my trigger, was white noise in the soundtrack of my youth
frosty
Chris Frantz’s memoir Remain In Love was really good. I wasn’t as dedicated a Talking Heads fan as, say, Stephan Colbert, but after reading this I turned into a huge fan of their rhythm section.
David_C
Brian Eno is just on another planet, leading the way. I’ve heard that about his lyrics, which kind of blows apart all the hours we used to spend gleaning the meaning of “Blank Frank.”
Minstrel Michael
I lived in Providence in the late ’70s, pretending to study computers at Brown, and failing for a number of reasons, specifically including that most of my friends were students at RISD. So I got to see the original Talking Heads trio, Byrne playing an acoustic guitar with a pickup mounted in the soundhole. I liked their edginess. “Artists Only” in particular sounded really bleak and despairing, none of the goofiness of the album version. IM(ns)HO Jerry Harrison didn’t add anything, just made sure that you could always hear the guitar changes at the right time. They had already moved to New York by then, but RISD rightly gave them a hero’s welcome.
JustRuss
Saw TH at the Santa Barbara bowl about 1987. One of my top-5 concerts. Byrne’s energy was off the charts.