'Burning Down the House' review: The birth of Talking Heads

On June 5, 1975, three young musicians in a band called Talking Heads made their debut at CBGB on Manhattan's Lower East Side. There was nothing new about a trio consisting of guitar, drums and bass, 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).

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.”

Eno began his partnership with Talking Heads in 1978, when he produced its second album, “More Songs About Buildings and Food,” and went on to produce two more albums that included some of the group’s signature songs: “Life During Wartime,” which features the line “This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no foolin’ around,” which captures the era’s anxiety about urban decay and political unrest, and “Once in a Lifetime,” a track Eno shaped through repetition and layering, notably by adding grooves and polyrhythms by African artists such as Fela Kuti. Some of the best-known songs by Talking Heads failed to make the Billboard Top 100, even if they brought the band acclaim in the early MTV era and today are included on best-songs lists by magazines such as Rolling Stone. As Harrison said at the height of the band’s renown, “We’re more famous than we are successful.”

Success carries its own problems with it, and the Byrne-Eno bond pushed the other three musicians to the sidelines. Without Byrne, though, there would have been no Talking Heads. As Gould says, The Beatles embodied a rock group image that has prompted countless young musicians to form bands, the majority of which are mediocre. Yet Talking Heads succeeded because its leader gave flesh to the idea that “creativity comes from torment — the torment, in his case, of a lifelong struggle to comprehend a world whose outlines, contours, and customs were often a mystery to him.” If you’re a genius, anxiety can be productive, no matter where it comes from.