Reviews
This Must Be the Place: The Adventures of Talking Heads in the Twentieth Century by David Bowman
jeremyhornik's review
3.0
I used to love the Talking Heads so much. Then at some point I couldn't bear the pretensions. Then I would hear "Life During Wartime" and I would love them all over again. And I would also realize it was my own pretensions I hated. Me and the Talking Heads... it's complicated.
Anyways.
I realized recently that the Talking Heads were never ever getting back together, and I didn't know why. I imagined there must have been some reasons, and maybe some good, trashy stories. So I wanted to read a book, and this seemed like the best one.
It's not bad. It's kind of flatly written, and there's too much "That day the Challenger blew up" kind of stuff in it, and periodically it offers up some really stupid sentence that makes you wonder why you bothered, but generally it's all right. It tells the story, mostly a kind of musical tango between Byrne and Weymouth, who even as a teenager I knew were the coolest. All their best stuff came from the collaboration between the four of them. And when they couldn't collaborate anymore, the band was done.
There's a kind of magic in collaboration that makes art richer and stronger. But it has to be a real collaboration. If one person is leading with assistants, it loses something.
I guess what makes a great band is not the strengths of the members, but their flaws, and the willingness of the others to help shore them up in the service of the art. And as a group evolves, this gradually becomes unsustainable, as either success or failure will change the relative status of the different group members. Well, I'm glad they recorded it all. And I'm also glad I basically ignored all this history and just listened to the music for so long. There's a lot of cocaine and a lot of self-satisfaction but no major betrayals, no real trashiness. Just a collaboration that worked, until it didn't.
PS Someone's got to make Tina Weymouth into a movie character. She sounds like a... complicated and strong personality.
Anyways.
I realized recently that the Talking Heads were never ever getting back together, and I didn't know why. I imagined there must have been some reasons, and maybe some good, trashy stories. So I wanted to read a book, and this seemed like the best one.
It's not bad. It's kind of flatly written, and there's too much "That day the Challenger blew up" kind of stuff in it, and periodically it offers up some really stupid sentence that makes you wonder why you bothered, but generally it's all right. It tells the story, mostly a kind of musical tango between Byrne and Weymouth, who even as a teenager I knew were the coolest. All their best stuff came from the collaboration between the four of them. And when they couldn't collaborate anymore, the band was done.
There's a kind of magic in collaboration that makes art richer and stronger. But it has to be a real collaboration. If one person is leading with assistants, it loses something.
I guess what makes a great band is not the strengths of the members, but their flaws, and the willingness of the others to help shore them up in the service of the art. And as a group evolves, this gradually becomes unsustainable, as either success or failure will change the relative status of the different group members. Well, I'm glad they recorded it all. And I'm also glad I basically ignored all this history and just listened to the music for so long. There's a lot of cocaine and a lot of self-satisfaction but no major betrayals, no real trashiness. Just a collaboration that worked, until it didn't.
PS Someone's got to make Tina Weymouth into a movie character. She sounds like a... complicated and strong personality.
sarahjsnider's review
2.0
It's still too soon to write a history of Talking Heads. The injuries are too recent and the egos still too raw to get any real new information. This forced the author to pad the book with a bunch of filler. (Five sentences on the haircut Twyla Tharp had on the day she first met David Byrne? Really? It was a wedge. See, I did it in one sentence.) And not well-written filler, either. You know the booklet that came with the Popular Favorites 2-CD collection? Just read that, because you're not going to learn much more from this book.
bookishheather's review
2.0
Bleh. As a person who was single-digits-aged when Talking Heads was active but only discovered their work in recent months, I was really hoping for something that would give me background and a decent narrative about them. I didn't know a lot about the band beyond the studio albums I had listened to, after all. Instead, this book's author became sort of a fifth character as I read—an unwanted one. He often sounded like he was trying to prove himself as hip to readers, and I tired of it pretty early on.
He seemed to revel in Jerry Harrison being a "ladies' man," yet I noticed almost every woman mentioned in the book is described negatively—worst of all Tina Weymouth, who is seemingly the villain of the piece. In one short chapter where Toni Basil's career is described with her Talking Heads video work, I found myself disagreeing with how he was describing factual information. One of the videos in question I had just watched on YouTube the day before—did his description of this video suffer because YouTube hadn't been invented when this book was being written, or was it yet more authorial judgment? This called into question nearly everything else he describes in the book, to my mind.
Individuals from NYC's art scene appear throughout the book, for a variety of reasons. Philip Glass and Robert Wilson turn up frequently (yay!), because David Byrne later works with the latter. There are other artists and RISD peers who turn up throughout as well, but I'm not sure all that many of the details are important to the story—and at 400+ pages, a bit more fat could have been trimmed. The author regularly refers to Moments in Bob Dylan History, presuming his readers all know what those moments are about, but then feels it necessary to point out how important MTV was to music in the 1980s. Hrm. Is there anyone reading a book about Talking Heads who wouldn't already know this?
As the band is disintegrating in the final chapter I think the narrative starts winning out over his interpretation, illustrating something a little more nuanced than what he seems to want to say. Or perhaps the author character is just cooling a bit because there are a lot of fragmented bits to cover. Thus I was able to try and answer the larger questions for myself based on the events he describes. That said, I'd have expected him to dig deeper to try and answer the big question: what really lead to the breakup of the band?
Somewhere in this process I wondered if David Bowman was one of those people who pump out mass market books about cool bands that will sell well (see Randi Reisfeld's early works). When I looked into his career I discovered that he only wrote three books before he died, and this was the sole non-fiction book. It looks like his fiction works were generally more well-received. It's not my intent to trash a dead man's work, but there aren't a lot of books about Talking Heads out there and I felt fairly disappointed by this one.
He seemed to revel in Jerry Harrison being a "ladies' man," yet I noticed almost every woman mentioned in the book is described negatively—worst of all Tina Weymouth, who is seemingly the villain of the piece. In one short chapter where Toni Basil's career is described with her Talking Heads video work, I found myself disagreeing with how he was describing factual information. One of the videos in question I had just watched on YouTube the day before—did his description of this video suffer because YouTube hadn't been invented when this book was being written, or was it yet more authorial judgment? This called into question nearly everything else he describes in the book, to my mind.
Individuals from NYC's art scene appear throughout the book, for a variety of reasons. Philip Glass and Robert Wilson turn up frequently (yay!), because David Byrne later works with the latter. There are other artists and RISD peers who turn up throughout as well, but I'm not sure all that many of the details are important to the story—and at 400+ pages, a bit more fat could have been trimmed. The author regularly refers to Moments in Bob Dylan History, presuming his readers all know what those moments are about, but then feels it necessary to point out how important MTV was to music in the 1980s. Hrm. Is there anyone reading a book about Talking Heads who wouldn't already know this?
As the band is disintegrating in the final chapter I think the narrative starts winning out over his interpretation, illustrating something a little more nuanced than what he seems to want to say. Or perhaps the author character is just cooling a bit because there are a lot of fragmented bits to cover. Thus I was able to try and answer the larger questions for myself based on the events he describes. That said, I'd have expected him to dig deeper to try and answer the big question: what really lead to the breakup of the band?
Somewhere in this process I wondered if David Bowman was one of those people who pump out mass market books about cool bands that will sell well (see Randi Reisfeld's early works). When I looked into his career I discovered that he only wrote three books before he died, and this was the sole non-fiction book. It looks like his fiction works were generally more well-received. It's not my intent to trash a dead man's work, but there aren't a lot of books about Talking Heads out there and I felt fairly disappointed by this one.
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