This Must Be the Place: The Adventures of Talking Heads in the Twentieth Century

NUTSHELL: "Rock 'n' roll followed this drama. Act 1: Form a band. Act 2: Take over the world. Act 3: Break up," writes David Bowman. That's the inevitable trajectory of the rock band. The band in question is the Talking Heads, and here is its authorized story. David Byrne, Tina Weymouth and Chris Franz met in the early seventies as students at RISD. They formed a band. Tina (according to this book) fell in love with David. The rest of the story has a little something to do with the dueling egos of Byrne and Weymouth.

DETAILS: One wouldn't expect the first (and last?) Talking Heads biography to be, um, straight, now, would one? Bowman is the guy for this project. Clearly a Headshead, he writes in elliptical Gertrude Stein-ish baby talk ("David's fruitcake complains about blabbermouths. The original verse was better. There was something more world-weary about it. The killer seemed more poetic. Pseudo-European. Dangerous somehow."), a style both cute and deeply annoying. Some readers will think the author has a tendency to get in the way, to poke his head in a little too much, with statements such as, "he wrote a verse about 'making flippy floppy.' David had no idea what 'flippy floppy' was" and "everyone's name appeared on the cluttered inner sleeves, but the typography and layout were so confusing that all it really did was reflect the level of picayune anality the band had gotten into." While This Must Be the Place isn't exactly immaculately reported, and while the author does have a tendency to call his players names, the book is, like the great band itself, awfully likable, and does have a ton of personality, which isn't something you can say about most rock bios, or most bands.

Adrienne Miller is Esquire's literary editor.

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