Talking Heads followers, rejoice! Hard on the heels of the re-release of “Stop Making Sense,” the 1984 Jonathan Demme movie broadly thought-about the very best live performance film ever made, Jonathan Gould has printed a complete biography of the seminal band that injected an artwork faculty vibe into standard music and endlessly modified rock ‘n’ roll.
Gould, the writer of well-received books on Otis Redding and the Beatles, chronicles in meticulous element the rise and fall of the band that acquired its begin in New York City’s underground punk scene and ended up touring the world with a repertoire formed by blues, funk and jazz.
He begins “Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock” with a vivid description of the drizzly June night time in 1975 when the unique trio – singer/songwriter David Byrne, bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz – made its debut on the seedy membership CBGB in downtown Manhattan, opening for the Ramones earlier than a handful of patrons. With their “unremarkable haircuts” and “nondescript casual clothes,” they provided a pointy distinction to the “baroque turn” that rock style had taken within the Nineteen Seventies, Gould observes.
“The qualities that characterized this neophyte group in their first public performance centered on the awkward, disquieting intensity of their singer-guitarist, David Byrne, their sketchy, skeletal arrangements, and the quirky intelligence of their songs,” Gould writes. “Tall and thin, with a long neck and an anxious, wide-eyed stare, Byrne stood stiffly at the microphone, his upper body jerking and jiggling like a shadow puppet as he scratched out chords on his guitar.… Instead of doing his best to command the stage and the room, Byrne looked trapped by his surroundings, as if he were prepared, at any moment, to make a break for the door.”
Within a pair years of their zeitgeist-changing performances, they enlisted keyboardist/guitarist Jerry Harrison, including a much-needed dose of professionalism to the band. Gould, a former skilled musician, writes exceedingly properly about music however suffers from a form of completism, cramming in an nearly mind-numbing degree of element together with the identify of the elementary faculty in Pittsburgh the place a younger Frantz first took up drums to each navy posting of Weymouth’s naval aviator father.
Though a lot of the fabric is fascinating, together with his observations about how Byrne’s then-undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome could have influenced his music and relationships with the opposite band members, it’s prone to be a bit an excessive amount of for all however essentially the most diehard followers.
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