This Must Be the Place: The Adventures of the Talking Heads in the 20th Century
by David Bowman
Rating: 3.5/5.0
Publisher: Harper Collins
I can't help myself when I walk into a bookstore. If I stumble across something that's on a subject that I'm even remotely interested in or has a cover that I can't stop looking at, I'm basically sold. I'm telling you this for two reasons: I've listened to Talking Heads for almost my entire life and I can't think of a single widely accepted history of the group, which means any book on them is all that more interesting for its singularity, but more importantly, David Bowman's text on the group, This Must Be the Place, marks the second time the author has snared me in his trap.
The first time occurred when I accidentally spotted something called Bunny Modern by someone named David Bowman. The title alone was enough to make me pick it up, but it was also fluorescent pink and its cover art looked more like something you'd see on a Factory Records release. I bought it and finished it in a matter of hours and then I read it again. And I kept reading it until I unfortunately loaned it to someone and never saw it again. Bunny Modern is one of the unsung classics of our literary generation, a work so unique and vibrant and weird that it has no peer or comparison, its closest relatives being the first few works by Jonathan Lethem or a more controlled Jonathan Safran Foer. I couldn't find out much about Bowman and I was never able to track down anything else by him; I assumed he had been lost in a freak accident or had secluded himself in the mountains a la J.D. Salinger.
That is, until I similarly stumbled upon something called This Must Be the Place, also by David Bowman. I have to admit that the years I've spent obsessing over Bunny Modern and the fortuitous circumstances in which I found This Must Be the Place stacked the odds against Bowman. Similarly, the idea of Bowman writing about Talking Heads may have excited me so much that I couldn't help but be disappointed by reality. But the truth is, This Must Be the Place is both the best book in existence on Talking Heads and not quite the experience it should be, either in terms of a David Bowman work or as a document of such an essential band.
Tracing the history of the Talking Heads from their arty origins at the Rhode Island School of Design to the eventual dissolution of the band (via the media, of all things), Bowman, who is a journalist for New York Times and Salon, does a passable job of creating some sort of time-line for this normally impenetrable group. He also has the apparent benefit of complete access to all members of the band, each of whom allowed Bowman to interview them. But details are missing. Anecdotes and trade secrets are shed. Gossip and dirt are vaguely alluded to but never fleshed out. This would be refreshing if Bowman didn't hint at so much. At the beginning, it's the veiled accusation that Seymour Stein of Sire Records, Talking Heads' label, may have molested David Byrne during a trip to the Bahamas. Later, the drug use of the band's members, particularly Byrne, is hinted at and sometimes mentioned, but never to any full effect.
For most of the book, it's the animosity bassist Tina Weymouth directs at Byrne in every quote that seems like it could have filled an entire book on its own. Weymouth's apparent obsession with Byrne appears to both the reader and many of the people involved with the band to be a love affair of sorts. Her admission that she "always lived in a world of imagination" and thought the singer was like her but now claims "that was a mistake" makes Weymouth the sort of villain of the story. Bowman offers plenty of evidence to back this assumption up, but he never goes all the way, creating a frustrating tension that is never resolved, the author attempting to keep everyone happy but in the end satisfying no one, particularly Weymouth, who tells Bowman he has "everything wrong" and that she has "to rewrite [his] book for [him]" because he "know[s] nothing about [them]."
Further complicating matters is Bowman's tendency to write half the book precisely as David Byrne speaks and the other half in his own minimalist style, which at times veers into a fictional narrative and at other times goes off on tangents about the world outside the band. Bowman's attempt to revolutionize the rock narrative is admirable, but it fails to accomplish much, especially in light of Ray Davies' incendiary original "unauthorized" autobiography X-Ray, which utilized similar tactics to much more devastating effect.
But the story of Talking Heads is so interesting, and is such a perfect parallel for the last quarter of the 20th century, that the book still somehow manages to succeed. Hearing about the impact the group had not just on the world of pop music but also on contemporary art adds a depth to a group already rightly seen as one of the most important rock bands of all time. Byrne, in particular, seems to have been involved with nearly every major facet of popular culture in the late 20th century, from partnerships with Robert Wilson, Brian Eno and Twyla Tharp to his inspiring the likes of Basquiat, Werner Herzog and Robert Rauschenberg. Which of course is not to diminish the revolutionary accomplishments of Weymouth and Chris Frantz, who did much of the design work for the band's albums, in particular the photomosaic that graces the cover of More Songs About Buildings and Food. Or Jerry Harrison's production work, his time with The Modern Lovers and his founding of Garageband.com. And on and on. You get the picture.
The point is that Talking Heads are a band that, for all their influence on seemingly every indie band that followed, appear to still be only partially explored, their accomplishments and individual works disappointingly trivialized or outright forgotten. David Bowman's This Must Be the Place is a suitable exploration of the band's development, success and lasting value, structured in a fitting form-follows-function fashion. However, it's likely just a stop gap until someone comes around to write the defining Talking Heads history that captures the ideas and essence of what may just have been, in terms of impact on all portions of musical culture, the most influential band of all time.
by Morgan Davis
