This year marks the 50th anniversary of Talking Heads, the avant-garde New York band that helped redefine Seventies rock & roll, especially that coming out of the city. A new book publishing Tuesday — Burning Down House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock — goes deep into the group’s history and impact, while paralleling the socioeconomical challenges facing New York at the time.
In this exclusive excerpt from the book, author Jonathan Gould recounts Talking Heads’ first ever live performance, in 1975 at the Bowery club CBGB. It was a show that would help usher in a rich era of art rock.
A CITY IN MY MIND
The residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.
—E.B. WHITE, HERE IS NEW YORK
While its seven and a half million residents went about their daily business of striving and surviving, New York City confronted the specter of fiscal catastrophe during the first week of June 1975. For several months, the newspapers in America’s media capital had been chronicling the increasingly dire efforts of the administration of Mayor Abraham Beame to manage a multibillion-dollar shortfall in the city’s balance sheet, which had escalated from an “austerity budget” to a “budget crisis” as a series of deadlines for payments on New York’s ballooning short-term debt drew near. “Boos Greet Abe at Budget Quiz,” read the front-page headline on the June 5 edition of the Daily News. The accompanying article described a rancorous public hearing at which representatives from the municipal unions and minority communities denounced the mayor’s proposals for mass layoffs in the city’s workforce and deep cuts in its public education and social service programs. In the week ahead, the Board of Education would declare an official “day of mourning” for New York’s public schools; the unions representing the police and firefighters would distribute leaflets emblazoned with a death’s-head welcoming visitors to “Fear City”; and the sanitation workers would go on strike, leaving tons of garbage to rot and burn on the streets in the sweltering June heat. In the midst of a national recession, with inflation and unemployment cresting above 10 percent, the bill for a decade of wishful economics and willful mismanagement on the part of New York’s political establishment was inexorably coming due. America’s greatest city was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Or as John Denver declared on the record that topped the Billboard charts that week, “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.”
On that same night of June 5, an unlikely-looking group of musicians played their first professional engagement at a studiously seedy nightclub on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The name of the club was CBGB, an acronym for three types of music—country, bluegrass, and blues—that would almost never be played there. The place had opened a year and half before on the ground floor of a notorious Bowery flophouse called, with perfect New York irony, the Palace Hotel. The club’s owner, Hilly Kristal, had previously managed jazz and folk venues in Greenwich Village; his latest venture began unpromisingly as Hilly’s on the Bowery, a wino and biker bar at the wrong end of Bleecker Street that Kristal had planned to turn into a folk club until an ethereal-looking guitarist called Tom Verlaine convinced him to start booking unsigned rock bands to fill the void on Sunday nights. Though Kristal thought they were the proverbial “worst band I ever heard in my life,” Verlaine’s group, Television, was the first of these local heroes to attract a following. But it was a pair of even less accomplished and more openly aggressive acts, the Patti Smith Group and the Ramones, that first put “CBGBs” (as it came to be known) on the musical map of the downtown demimonde.
The band that made its debut that drizzly June night, opening for the Ramones before a handful of patrons on the club’s stark, fluorescent-lit stage, was called Talking Heads. On the face of it, they were a standard rock trio of guitar, bass, and drums—an instrumental lineup that had characterized some of the most flamboyant, virtuosic, and bombastic bands in the recent history of rock, including Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Led Zeppelin, and the Who. Yet none of those flashy attributes applied to Talking Heads. Rock fashion had taken a baroque turn in the 1970s, as the dandified style set by the Beatles and their fellow pop aristocrats—the mod suits, flower-power vestments, and helmets of well-coiffed hair—along with its rustic late-sixties American counterpoint—the beards, buckskin, and denim of groups like the Band, the Allman Brothers, and the Grateful Dead—had given way to the androgynous theatricality of “glam rock” stars like David Bowie and Elton John, the preening hypersexuality of “cock rock” stars like Mick Jagger and Robert Plant, and the less outlandish but equally preposterous hippie-cowboy trappings of California rock.
The three members of Talking Heads, by contrast, wore unremarkable haircuts and nondescript casual clothes (“the sort of clothes,” one of them later said, “our moms sent us for Christmas”). Nor was there anything in the group’s performance that called attention to their musical virtuosity, for the simple reason that they had none. While their drummer and guitarist displayed a rudimentary competence, their bassist, an elfin young woman named Tina Weymouth who had been playing her instrument for barely six months, seemed to cling to her carefully memorized parts with an air of quiet desperation. As for any hint of bombast, by the standards of CBGBs, Talking Heads played at a volume that was nothing short of demure.
Apart from their ability to defy the prevailing stereotypes of their musical time and place, 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. 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. Here, too, the contrast with rock’s prevailing performance practice, derived from the self-assured physicality of its African American role models, could hardly have been more pronounced. 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.
His squirrelly, strained voice was well attuned to the furtive ambivalence of his stage presence. Darting around on the musical scale, Byrne’s singing in these early days would inspire a rich lexicon of description, with one local rock critic memorably comparing it to the sound of “a seagull talking to its shrink.” In addition to capturing the plaintive undertones in his delivery and the shrill, Tourette’s-like quality of his vocal interjections, this image also conveyed the psychological discomfort of his song lyrics, which dealt largely in analytical negations of conventional emotions—beginning, of course, with love.
“Well there’s just no love when there’s boys and girls,” Byrne sang in “The Girls Want to Be with the Girls.” “Please respect my opinions / They will be respected someday / Because we don’t need love,” he sang in “I’m Not in Love.” And in the song that would become a signature of the band in its formative years, Byrne inhabited the calmly deranged persona of a “Psycho Killer,” bemoaning the slights to his fragile ego (“I hate people when they’re not polite”) and flaunting the scope of his cultural erudition by channeling the late soul star Otis Redding one moment (“fafafafah fafafafa-fah”) and singing in French the next. Faced with the odd spectacle of these earnest misfits onstage at CBGBs that night, the more literate members of the audience could be excused for thinking that if J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey Glass had decided to form a rock group, it might have looked something like this.
As luck would have it, however, within a few weeks of their professional debut, the three members of Talking Heads would be pictured on the cover of the Village Voice, the alternative paper of record for the New York arts scene, beneath a headline heralding “The Conservative Impulse of the New Rock Underground.” “They present a clean, flat image, devoid of fine shading and color. They are consciously anti-mythic in stance,” the accompanying article noted. A few weeks after that, the group would be praised by John Rockwell, the newly appointed “chief rock critic” of the New York Times, who became the first of many writers to draw a parallel between the band’s austere arrangements and the “minimalist” aesthetic that had permeated the visual arts and contemporary classical music since the 1960s. “The abrupt layerings of their music recall planes of color,” Rockwell wrote, “which isn’t too surprising, since all three members of the band share a background at the Rhode Island School of Design. . . . The relationship between the classical-music avant-garde and visual and conceptual art over the last decade has been a fascinating one, and Talking Heads is a stimulating instance of how the art world has had an effect on local rock as well.”
Over the next two years, CBGBs would establish itself as the epicenter of a style of music that became known as “punk,” a catchall term for the ruder varieties of rock that had been floating around in the music press for some time until the advent in 1976 of the fan magazine Punk helped to localize it, fleetingly, in Lower Manhattan. Whether despite or because of its lack of commercial appeal, this downtown punk-rock scene would be extolled as a major musical phenomenon by a cadre of ambitious New York–based rock critics whose influence was drastically amplified by the echo chamber of the city’s media world.
In their hands, the primitivism of punk was celebrated as a return to the original renegade spirit of rock ’n’ roll, and promoted as an antidote to the artistic grandiosity, heightened professionalism, and rampant corporatization that had transformed the record business since the advent of the Beatles in 1964 from a poor relation of Broadway and Hollywood into America’s most popular and lucrative form of mass entertainment. Many of these first-generation rock writers had grown up in thrall to the sounds that had emerged from provincial music scenes in places like Memphis, New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, Woodstock, and, above all, Liverpool. Now, imagining themselves to be present at the creation, they set out to generate a similar mystique around the music they heard in a couple of seamy venues on the Lower East Side. The analogy was not lost on the musicians themselves. The Ramones had adopted their “leather boy” look from the early Beatles and their name from the stage name, “Paul Ramon,” that Paul McCartney had affected during the band’s gestation in Hamburg. “This could be like our Cavern Club,” Talking Heads’ drummer Chris Frantz said of CBGBs.
He wasn’t wrong about that. Much like the Beatles in Liverpool, Talking Heads would emerge as the albino in the herd of this New York punk-rock scene: the one band whose combination of talent, originality, discipline, self-awareness, and steely artistic ambition would form the basis of a major musical career. Their debut at CBGBs marked the start of a two-year apprenticeship during which they performed at the club on a monthly basis, rehearsing and refining their original crop of songs, gradually building a following that reached well beyond the self-identified constituency of punk into the broader and deeper strata of the downtown arts scene. During that period, they would resist an offer to sign with Sire Records, a New York–based independent label, on the grounds that they weren’t yet ready to record. They finally relented in 1977, having fleshed out their sound by adding a fourth member, a Harvard graduate named Jerry Harrison, on keyboards and guitar.
During those same two years that CBGBs was cementing its role in the downtown music scene, New York’s epic struggle to avert bankruptcy would force its elected leaders to relinquish virtually all of their power to the dictates of a state-appointed board of investment bankers and corporate executives, dubbed the Municipal Assistance Corporation, whose single-minded efforts to restore the city’s standing with its debt holders led to the evisceration of a system of local government that, for all of its tribal politics, had served the diverse needs of New Yorkers more comprehensively than that of any other major city in America. Between 1975 and 1978, eighty-five thousand public employees, a sixth of the municipal workforce, were laid off, including large numbers of police, firefighters, and schoolteachers. City-run hospitals, health clinics, day care and senior citizen centers, youth programs, libraries, parks, and recreational facilities either were closed down or began operating on sharply reduced hours, while the City University of New York was forced to end its hallowed policy of offering free tuition to all qualified applicants. In response to these “austerity” measures, the quality of life for millions of New Yorkers spiraled precipitously downward, as social and economic trends that had been gaining momentum for decades reached a tipping point. New York had already lost more than five hundred thousand jobs during the first half of the 1970s, most of them in the blue-collar manufacturing and transportation industries that had formed the city’s economic base since the nineteenth century. It would lose more than a million residents over the course of the decade, nearly all of them white, working-and middle-class wage earners and homeowners who left in response to the loss of jobs, the fear of crime, and racial anxieties that were exploited by banks, landlords, and “blockbusting” property speculators. Crime rates had been rising exponentially since the 1960s; now, with the NYPD diminished and demoralized, untold numbers of assaults, robberies, and property crimes went unreported, while open-air drug markets operated with relative impunity in many parts of the city.
In the short run, however, New York’s economic downfall was a boon to its unrivaled status as a seedbed of art and culture. References to “business,” “real estate,” and “manufacturing” were not to be found in E. B. White’s classic 1949 testimonial, Here Is New York. Instead, White focused his portrait of the city—by which he meant Manhattan—on three species of New Yorkers: the natives, who were born there and took its character for granted; the commuters, who worked there and returned each day to their homes in the suburbs and the outer boroughs; and the “settlers,” who were “born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.” “It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements,” White wrote. “Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. . . . The city is always full of young worshipful beginners—young actors, young aspiring poets, ballerinas, painters, reporters, singers—each depending on his own brand of tonic to stay alive.”
It was this third group, composed of young strivers who were willing to endure the rigors of urban decay for the chance to pursue whatever quest they were on, that thrived in the postindustrial ruins of New York in the 1970s. In a decade when hordes of residents were fleeing the city, the one demographic group that showed a significant increase consisted of young adults in their twenties and early thirties. The wholesale loss of jobs and population turned the industrially zoned tracts of Lower Manhattan (as well as Brooklyn and Queens) into some of the most affordable living space in any major American city—especially for people who were willing to do without the comforts of heat and hot water, safe streets and supermarkets, in order to live out their dreams. “We felt as though we were living in the aftermath of some cataclysm we hadn’t quite witnessed, some war that had taken place while we were asleep or away for the weekend,” the author Lucy Sante wrote of her own introduction to the Lower East Side. “We naively thought that the downward spiral would simply proceed, that the city would be drained of its wealthy and that we could move into their vacated penthouses when tumbling rents and our minimally increased wages eventually agreed to shake hands.”
Even as the twin towers of the newly built World Trade Center loomed over the abandoned piers and warehouses of the once-mighty port of New York, marking the shift in the city’s economy from the making and movement of goods to the making and movement of money, Lower Manhattan was filling up with a critical mass of young adults: some of them talented, some of them poseurs, some of them strivers, some of them slackers, some of them visionaries, some of them drunks or junkies masquerading as visionaries, all of them seeking to make their mark in the place where making a mark mattered most of all.
Having come from Baltimore, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and Southern California, the four members of Talking Heads exemplified this influx of aspiring young migrants who arrived in the city in the 1970s. And more than any other rock artists of their generation, they would draw their energy and inspiration from the cosmopolitan influences and connections that were available in the new bohemia that was coalescing in Lower Manhattan. While the other bands that got their start at CBGBs were acting out their retrograde fantasies of adolescent rebellion and rock ’n’ roll salvation, the members of Talking Heads, and David Byrne especially, would identify and associate themselves with a stratum of downtown culture that included painters, writers, composers, actors, dancers, graphic designers, filmmakers, and theater directors, who in turn accepted these brainy, iconoclastic, art-school-educated rock musicians as kindred souls.
In the realm of popular music, Talking Heads became figureheads of a major shift that was taking place in the cultural geography of New York—away from the museums and galleries of the Upper East Side, the theaters, concert halls, and literary haunts of midtown, and the taverns, clubs, and coffeehouses of the West Village, toward a broad swath of derelict loft buildings, storefronts, and tenements whose future had remained in limbo until the city’s long-standing plans to build an elevated expressway through the heart of Lower Manhattan were finally abandoned in 1971. What Harlem had been in the 1920s, and the Village in the 1950s, the Lower East Side and the newly christened neighborhoods of SoHo, NoHo, and TriBeCa would be in the late 1970s and early 1980s: the latest crucible of New York’s multicultural melting pot.
Excerpted from the book BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock by Jonathan Gould. Copyright © 2025 by Jonathan Gould. From Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
