Over the course of eight studio records, two live albums and the greatest concert film ever made, Talking Heads established themselves as among the best and hippest groups of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Fronted by David Byrne, who was joined by drummer Chris Frantz, guitarist Jerry Harrison and bassist Tina Weymouth, the New York rock band was forged in the nascent punk club CBGBs—the same one that launched everyone from Patti Smith to Television to the Ramones—before achieving the sort of mainstream success few of their peers enjoyed. Decades after their creation, songs like “Psycho Killer” and “Once in a Lifetime” remain embedded in the culture, a living soundtrack of the existential questions that still haunt modern life. In 2023 when Talking Heads’ celebrated 1984 movie Stop Making Sense returned to theaters, it was hailed all over again—as was the innovative quartet at its center, even though they had broken up in the early 1990s, never reforming and only rarely speaking to one another.
Fifty years after the band’s first public performance, Jonathan Gould has given serious thought to the group’s legacy, as well as the city that served as their backdrop. Coming out June 17, Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rockis a hefty tome devoted to chronicling their career from its early days to its bittersweet aftermath. But Gould, a writer and musician who previously authored books on the Beatles (Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America) and Otis Redding (Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life), places that history in a broader context, tracing the political and economic realities of New York at the time when Byrne and his bandmates first started gigging. Along the way, he also dissects the rock ‘n’ roll myth of bands as de facto families and the tendency of white musicians to crib from the Black progenitors of the art form. Burning Down the House documents the famous infighting that affected Talking Heads nearly from the start, but it’s less tell-all than sober sum-up, diving deep into the music to determine why it has endured.
Gould, a native New Yorker, is close to the same age as the band members and was making music around the same time as they were. “As the albums came out, what I was very impressed with was their artistic evolution,” he recalled over Zoom this week. “[It was] certainly one of the major attractions, that there was a real arc to their career that they started in one place and they ended up in another.”
Encompassing punk, new wave, pop, hip-hop, country and, eventually, African rhythms, Talking Heads helped set the stage for the musical adventurousness of the 1980s that would soon be embraced by the likes of Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon. Gould didn’t speak to the band members—each, according to the author, politely declined his interview requests—but he did get in touch with many in their circle, and he goes the extra mile investigating how, for example, Byrne’s autism both positively and negatively impacted Talking Heads. Below, he and I discuss the band’s continued relevance, his decision not to include one of Byrne’s most controversial public moments, and why he doesn’t think Talking Heads will ever do a reunion tour.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
It has been 37 years since Talking Heads released a studio album. Why do we still care? Why are they still so cool?
Two things come to mind. One is that they broke up. Another group that hasn’t gone away is the Beatles: After 10 years, they called it a day, and that has a way of freezing people in their prime at the height of their powers. If people rediscover [Talking Heads’] music, it’s there in its ideal form.
The other thing that comes to mind is in relation to the film Stop Making Sense, which was rereleased. Seeing it again in a big theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, what I noticed is there’s almost nothing anachronistic about it—nothing about the way the film looks, the film was made, the music. Talking Heads were committed to the idea of modernity from the very beginning. They didn’t pretend to be Western outlaws or any of the common postures that rock stars have gravitated toward in terms of the way they dress or behave. That’s one of the reasons they’re still around.
When you [work on a Talking Heads book] for four or five years, you become something of a lightning rod for everybody you meet, their feelings about Talking Heads. I’m very well aware of the number of people who are avid fans who discovered them through their parents—their parents were really into this band. Now, sometimes that’s the kiss of death. (laughs) But in their case, once the next generation got over the fundamental principle that you shouldn’t like what your parents like, there was a lot to like. The music still feels contemporary.
Of all Talking Heads’ achievements, I wonder if Stop Making Sense is most responsible for preserving their mystique.
If the film didn’t exist, yes, I think it would be a very different story. And if the film wasn’t what it was … it’s an extraordinary performance, but it’s also an extraordinary film. And part of what’s so extraordinary about it is all the things that it’s not—all the things that it doesn’t try to do, particularly in the genre of performance films and, particularly, rock performance films.
I love the fact that while they were preparing to make [Stop Making Sense],Rob Reiner was preparing to release This Is Spinal Tap, which to my way of thinking put an end to that whole genre of rock performance documentaries. It’s very hard for me to watch a standard rock documentary in the aftermath of This Is Spinal Tap—it threw off all of the affectations. But the affectations that [Stop Making Sense] threw off were the affectations of authenticity. Talking Heads began with this commitment to throwing off all affectations—and then, at a certain point, as David Byrne got more deeply and deeply into performing, he came to understand that authenticity is a pose. It may be the greatest pose of them all. Stop Making Sense gives itself over totally to the idea “This is a performance, this is theater, this is a show. We’re not going to try to convince you who we are or what it’d be like to have a drink or a joint or a cup of coffee with us. This is just what we do.” There’s a kind of purity to the aesthetics of it, which has weathered extraordinarily well.
Your book’s subtitle is Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock. Did you know, to steal a rom-com cliché, that New York was going to be a character in Burning Down the House?
Part of my interest was to have an opportunity to write about the city that I grew up in. But in that period of the 1970s and 1980s, I wasn’t living in New York—I was living in Boston when the whole CBGBs thing happened. I was well aware of CBGBs, but I didn’t identify that strongly with that scene.
I would like to think that my familiarity with the city and that slight distance from it gave me an interesting perspective on how to write about that time. One of the most annoying things that any writer can do is project an exaggerated sense of familiarity with whatever he or she is writing about: “We all know this, don’t we?” For me, there was a lot of discovery involved in doing the research.
The New York where Talking Heads got their start no longer exists. It seems like the city’s too expensive now for starving artists of their ilk to even survive.
It’s an absolutely critical point. When I dropped out of college and was playing in rock bands in the mid-’70s, I thought of myself as a professional musician because I was supporting myself playing music. What did that mean? That meant I was making $300 a month—that was six gigs a month. Sometimes I made more, sometimes I made less. My rent for me personally was a hundred dollars. [Talking Heads] weren’t making a lot of money in their day jobs, but they were making enough to live in New York City.
Many of the most expensive regions of lower Manhattan now were all industrial neighborhoods [when the band members lived there]—they weren’t built for people to live in them. In that period, when New York was this enormous manufacturing center, this extraordinarily beautiful architecture grew up. The post-industrial era in America, everybody thinks about it beginning in Pittsburgh or something like that, but it began in New York in the 1960s when those manufacturing jobs started to drain out of the city, and the city was making no effort to retain them. Nobody who owned buildings in that area was doing anything with them or planning on renovating them or redeveloping them because there was an excellent chance that a large swath of them was going to get torn down. So, yes, cheap real estate was absolutely critical [to the band’s early success].
You tackle David Byrne’s autism as a factor in both his creativity and also his inability to communicate in a healthy way with his bandmates. You never use his condition as an excuse for bad behavior—although, as he has pointed out, he wasn’t aware of his autism until much later in life. How did you approach talking about something so sensitive?
With great care. We can say he “wasn’t aware of it”—it didn’t exist. The concept of high functioning autism wasn’t recognized, in a serious way, until the 1980s. The seminal article was published by Hans Asperger, who gave his name [to the condition]. David grew up with no signposts.
One of the great helps for me in writing the book is that this is an experience that many people had in the 1990s and early 2000s. One of the most eloquent and insightful of those people was Tim Page, who I’ve become friendly with as a result of writing this book. Tim is an eminent music critic for The Washington Post and writer—[he] discovered in the ‘90s that he grew up with Asperger’s syndrome, as it was called then. His son, in his 20s, called him and said that the son’s therapist wanted to know if he could come to a session. Tim goes to the session and the therapist says the son may have Asperger’s, and Tim says, “What’s that?” The therapist sends him a book of essays on it. Tim describes this experience of reading this book and 50 pages into it, thinking to himself—about himself, not his son—“This explains everything. Here it is.” And I think a lot of people had that kind of a revelation.
It’s very important not to be reductionist. [It’s important] when writing about somebody’s creative sensibility not to turn [autism] into the Rosetta Stone of who David Byrne is and why he is the way that he is. That said, though, one learns a great deal about both the peculiar sort of powers—and I use that word advisedly—that high-functioning autism sometimes imbues people with and also the struggles that it causes them.
In David’s case, a lot of things start to come into focus, what some people have described as his agnostic attitude toward love. Most people who embark on careers as musicians are well aware that love is basically the denominator of popular music in the West—having it, not having it, dealing with it. But David seemed to come to it with the attitude of “Well, let’s look at whether this is really necessary”—he literally wrote songs that are about that. He also wrote songs that directly address the struggles that many people with high-functioning autism have with what neurotypical people refer to as “empathy”—the ability to pick up on emotional cues from other people to empathize with them.
In terms of his creative sensibility, I do think that [autism] added to his powers of observation, which tend to be acute if you’re studying how people do things all the time. And his powers of concentration—which, by all accounts by anybody who’s ever dealt with him, are off the charts. His ability to focus on an activity and just go with it well past the point when most of us are telling ourselves, “It’s time to have a drink,” are extraordinary.
In terms of interpersonal relationships, of course, it becomes much more complicated. And part of what’s complicated about it, we go back to the Beatles—this paradigm of a “rock group,” which didn’t exist before the Beatles. Buddy Holly and the Crickets were Buddy Holly and the Crickets—not an autonomous group. [After] the Beatles, there was this implication that [bands] were groups of friends—these were groups of mates, these were groups of people who had some kind of special relationship with one another. That became the model for what a rock group was supposed to be—and more importantly, became the model for the way that fans tended to relate to them.
In the case of Talking Heads, it was very complicated because, yes, David was struggling with all kinds of issues involving communication and interpersonal relations. But let’s put it this way: Chris [Frantz] and David were at RISD together for one year—only one year. These were not people who knew one another very well—this was not a collection of mates who’d come up together in some sort of a scene. That made the communications in the band—not just from David’s point of view, also from Chris and Tina [Weymouth]’s point of view—very complicated. I take a sympathetic view, but at the same time, all of them were hurtful to one another.
In the days leading up to June 5th of this year, Talking Heads teased a special surprise announcement, which made some fans hopeful that they were reuniting. It turned out it was just an official video for “Psycho Killer.” Reading your book, I can’t imagine you believed for a second they were getting back together.
It never occurred to me. It would be extremely difficult. It would be exactly the sort of thing that David Byrne has spent his whole life avoiding.
Why do it? Well, there’s one very good reason to do it, and that is there would be a vast monetary reward for doing it. But he doesn’t need that. I don’t think he’s looking to make a $35 million movie that would cause him to want to generate that kind of income. But more to the point, let me ask the obvious question: Who’s done it really well ever? For the artists themselves—even for their fans—who was not disappointed when it was done in that way? I never thought there was any chance they would get back together.
A comparable reunion tour that comes to mind is the Police. Fans went to those shows, partly, to see if the band was going to implode, since it was clear there was still a lot of bad blood between the members. So much of the history of Talking Heads concerns similar well-documented squabbles—in a weird way, is that part of the appeal of this band, too?
That could be. I haven’t thought of it in those terms, but you may well be right. We all love a little interpersonal drama—I mean, [reality] TV is a testament to that.
[The group’s] interpersonal story was something that I discovered as I was writing the book. I was a little amazed at the ways in which it did come out early on in interviews. The band were darlings of the rock press, and it was quite interesting how much they talked about the issues between them—particularly in the aftermath of the controversy over Remain in Light and the credits, which was a complete mess. I think that largely what happened with Remain in Light—the failure to credit the entire band in the way they had literally agreed to do it—was callous, but I don’t think it had anything to do with Asperger’s. [It’s] the sort of insensitivity that people show when they’re preoccupied by something that they’re very proud of and very involved in: “Oh, gee, yeah, we did agree to that—I’m so sorry, I forgot.”
You write eloquently about white rock ‘n’ roll’s tradition of drawing (and sometimes stealing) from Black artists who birthed this musical art form. Talking Heads brilliantly and respectfully integrated African musical styles into their repertoire, as well as adding formidable Black musicians to their lineup. But I was surprised you didn’t mention one of Byrne’s biggest missteps, an offensive promo he filmed around Stop Making Sense in which he appeared in both blackface and brownface as journalists interviewing the singer. In 2020, Byrne apologized for his insensitivity. But why leave that particular chapter out of the book?
I wound up not putting it in mainly [because] I strongly suspect that David thought of this, in some ways, as the ultimate joke on himself. But we have to go back a little bit historically: [Blackface] was then [only] starting to seem like something that was an appalling lapse of taste. We need to remember that when people do things which we now look at and think, “My god, what was he thinking?”
David was very, I think, aware of his whiteness from the very beginning. I was stunned when I came across his own description that part of [the band’s] manifesto included the principle of “no singing like a Black man.” One of the things that was so interesting about him and about Talking Heads’ engagement with Black music was the way that he played off of his whiteness. Early on [in the book], I introduce the phenomenon of Jagger and the way that Jagger, in a very different way, played off of his whiteness. In Jagger’s case, [he had] the audacity, as a middle-class Englishman, to outwardly imitate an African-American Delta accent. Byrne did not have this slyly ironic relationship to his whiteness, but he was aware of the irony of it—he couldn’t help but be from the very beginning.
That, I think, is what prompted that lapse of taste. Yes, he apologized for it, but when people do things like that, and when we look back on them, the only thing that I do urge people to do is to put it in some historical context.
Byrne has had success as a solo artist, but he’s never enjoyed the same critical acclaim as he had with Talking Heads. As much as he eventually chafed at being part of the band, ultimately did he need them to reach his greatest heights?
[In the book] I bring up his experience with psychotherapy, which was post-Talking Heads—[he says] how therapy wears all the edges off and that creativity comes in part from torment. Therefore, who wants to have all of your problems solved? [Frantz, Harrison and Weymouth] were the three people who, for 10 years, basically spent their lives rubbing against David Byrne’s edges.
I do think that’s important—and it’s different from what most [artists] do nowadays, which is hire a group of wonderful musicians to play behind them. In the case of Paul McCartney, the guys who’ve been playing in his band have been playing with him for probably longer than he was playing with the Beatles. It’s not a band in the same sense—someone like David Byrne or Paul McCartney is so professionalized in terms of his approach to what he’s doing. The rough edges don’t come into play in the same way—everybody’s too good, everybody’s too used to adapting to one another professionally in the course of making the music.
My point about ending [the book] with [the] American Utopia [Broadway show] is that it is a self-curated retrospective of his career. Half the songs in it come from that 10-year period when he was with Talking Heads. To me, that’s sort of his judgment [on his career]—I wouldn’t expect him to come out and say it, but it seems like it’s self-evident.
He has, from time to time, written some wonderful songs since then. But he’s just released a new song as a prelude to this new album that’s coming out. And the song, “Everybody Laughs,” it is this type of formulaic writing.
When American Utopia came out, several reviewers made this comparison between Byrne and Mr. Rogers as this kind of wonderfully pleasant, welcoming personality. David is a much-better-adjusted person [than he was during the Talking Heads days]. Now, I don’t know what he’s like to live with, but in terms of the way he interacts with the world—in terms of the way you can see it—he’s come a very long way. People should be very happy for him for that reason, because the difficult parts about living with high-functioning autism are no fun at all. So we should be pleased for him. But the question of where the edge is is a real issue, and it’s a real issue as performers get older.
Burning Down the House is thoroughly researched, drawing from plenty of archival interviews and your own conversations with those who knew the band. But Byrne, Frantz, Harrison and Weymouth declined to speak to you. As much time and care as you spent on the book, is there an element of Talking Heads that still feels mysterious or unknowable?
I’ve always been very skeptical of people’s curated memories of events which took place 10, 20, 30 years ago. If you ask me anything about what I was doing in 1980, what you’re going to get from me is a story that I’ve been telling for a very long time. When we tell stories, whether we’re writers or not, we all do the same thing, which is we play with them and we make them better and we add to them and we subtract [from] them.
It’s very, very rare that you can sit down with somebody and talk about events that occurred 50 years ago. I’m not sure what I could really get from [the band members]—it would be wonderful if they were all together and somebody said something and they all said, “Yeah, that’s exactly the way it was!” But probably what would happen is what always happens, which is that if they were all together, someone would say, “That’s the way you remember that?!”
To write well about other people, one of the things you have to accept is what’s unknowable about them. You spend years and years trying to figure out every minute detail, collecting every scrap of information that you can. But in the end, the mystery of what it was actually like to be them always remains intact. To pretend otherwise is to violate one of the unspoken principles, which is not pretending to know things that you don’t know.
