E-book Assessment

Burning Down the Home: Speaking Heads and the New York Scene That Reworked Rock

By Jonathan GouldMariner Books: 512 pages, $35If you purchase books linked on our web site, The Occasions could earn a fee from Bookshop.org, whose charges help unbiased bookstores.

When an writer decides to sort out the story of a preferred and essential band like Speaking Heads, the contours of that are acquainted to a lot of its followers, the remit ought to be to light up the unexplored corners, the hidden particulars and anecdotes that present a extra full-bodied narrative and finally carry the band into sharper aid than ever earlier than. Sadly, Jonathan Gould has nearly fully ignored this directive in “Burning Down the House,” his new Speaking Heads biography. This lumpy e book, filled with redundant tales and pointless detours that present little illumination however loads of unnecessary bulk, lacks participation by the group’s members and isn’t the biography that this nice and essential band deserves.

As followers of the Heads already know, three of the 4 members met as college students on the Rhode Island Faculty of Design within the mid-’70s, kids of privilege with artsy aspirations and never a lot course. David Byrne got here from Baltimore by means of Scotland, a socially awkward dabbler in conceptualist experiments with pictures and a veteran of varied mediocre cowl bands. It was drummer Chris Frantz who enlisted Byrne to hitch one such band; bassist Tina Weymouth, Frantz’s girlfriend and the daughter of a embellished Navy vice admiral, performed bass. They have been an anti-jam band and pro-avant; the primary first rate track they got here up with was a shambolic model of what turned “Psycho Killer,” with Weymouth contributing the French recitatif within the track’s bridge.

For the emergent Heads, timing was every thing. When Frantz signed the lease on a spacious loft on Chrystie Avenue in East Village in October 1974, he had unwittingly discovered the apply house the place the three musicians would hone their craft. The loft was additionally a brief stroll to CBGB, quickly to develop into the proving floor of New York’s punk revolution and the Heads’ major dwell efficiency venue firstly of their profession.

In March 1975, Byrne, Weymouth and Frantz attended a gig by Boston’s Jonathan Richman and the Fashionable Lovers on the Kitchen, an arts collective house in Soho, and it confirmed them a brand new technique to strategy their music. Richman, “who dressed like a kid that everyone laughed at in high school,” influenced the band’s preppy visible template and Byrne’s clenched singing voice. Inside a 12 months of shifting to town, Speaking Heads had discovered its look, sound and favored membership. When Frantz ran into Fashionable Lovers bassist Ernie Brooks in a West Village Cafe, Frantz inquired about keyboardist Jerry Harrison; Brooks gave him Harrison’s quantity, Harrison joined the band and the traditional Speaking Heads lineup was full.

What adopted was a contract with Seymour Stein’s label Sire and the band’s collaboration with producer Brian Eno, starting with its second album, “More Songs About Buildings and Food.” By the point the band launched 1980’s groundbreaking “Remain in Light,” Eno’s function had expanded past his manufacturing duties. He was now writing songs with Byrne, which created friction throughout the band. When Byrne allegedly reneged on songwriting credit (the album listed “David Byrne, Brian Eno and Talking Heads,” reasonably than the person band members), it created a rift that by no means healed, even because the band was promoting hundreds of thousands of copies of its follow-up “Speaking in Tongues” and the soundtrack to the Jonathan Demme live performance movie “Stop Making Sense.” The ultimate act was recriminatory, as Byrne commanded an ever higher share of the highlight whereas the opposite members quietly seethed. The band’s closing album, “Naked,” was its weakest, and Speaking Heads dissolved in 1991, after Byrne eliminated himself from the lineup to discover outdoors tasks.

Writer Jonathan Gould

(Richard Edelman)

Gould does a serviceable job of telling the Heads’ story in a e book that arrives 50 years after the band’s first gig at CBGB. Curiously, for somebody who has tasked himself with explaining Manhattan’s late ‘70s downtown renaissance, Gould regards many of the key players in that scene with derision bordering on contempt. Gould refers to Richard Hell, a prime architect of New York punk, as a mediocrity whose “singing, songwriting and bass playing remained as pedestrian as his poetry.” Patti Smith’s music “verged on a parody of beat poetry,” whereas the vastly influential Velvet Underground, a band that made New York punk potential, is hobbled by its “pretensions to hipness, irony and amorality.” Even Chris Frantz’s drumming is “exceptionally unimaginative.” Gould can be careless together with his descriptors. Jonathan Richman’s band shows a “willful lack” of economic intuition, the Heads assert a “willful conventionality” to their stage look, Johnny Ramone is a “willfully obnoxious” guitarist and so forth.

It’s exhausting to fathom how a biographer intent on cracking the code of one among rock’s seminal bands can accomplish that with a lot contempt for the tradition that spawned it. An inquiring fan may need to go to Will Hermes’ 2011 e book “Love Goes to Buildings on Fire” for a extra nuanced and educated portrait of the inventive ferment that made the Heads potential. As for a biography of Speaking Heads, we’re nonetheless left with a lacuna that Gould has sadly not crammed.

Weingarten is the writer of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”