I moved to Greenwich Village from a blue-collar New Jersey suburb in 1974, when I was 19, landing in the midst of a cultural transformation I had no capacity to grasp. In separate cultural spheres of the city, divergent new forms of heterodox music arose that I would grow to love in time: hip-hop in the abandoned lots of the Bronx, disco in the underground gay clubs of the West Village, and punk rock in and around a seedy bar called CBGB on the Bowery.

I was a student at NYU and lived in a tenement on MacDougal Street with a shared toilet across the hall. CBGB had opened just a few months earlier. The first or second time I went there, at some point in 1975, I found an oddball trio playing: a zombie-eyed singer who squawked as he made sporadic jabs at the strings of an acoustic guitar, a petite blonde woman who glared at him as she played an enormous electric bass, and a drummer who looked 11 years old and played the same rhythm pattern to whatever the other two were playing.

I grew to love the erratically unorthodox music of these earnest neophytes, who called themselves Talking Heads, and they got better, much better. The story of this band, its world, and its impact—a tale of fruitfully conflicting personalities, social politics, art, and luck (good and bad)—has been taken up before, most notably in a memoir, Remain in Love, by the band’s drummer, Chris Frantz, and an early biography of the group, This Must Be the Place: The Adventures of Talking Heads in the 20th Century, by the late novelist and critic David Bowman, among other books. But it has never been told as fully and vividly as Jonathan Gould tells it in Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock. Gould, a former professional drummer and the author of books on Otis Redding and the Beatles, writes with clarity and musical acumen on a period in American musical history that rock writers tend to romanticize and inflate.

Notwithstanding the allusion to blazing destruction in the book’s title (borrowed from the band’s only top-10 single, a hit in 1983), Talking Heads did more methodical planning and building than destroying. The three original members—singer-guitarist-songwriter David Byrne, bassist Tina Weymouth, and Frantz—met when they were undergraduate art students at the Rhode Island School of Design, and they shared a refined sense of conceptualization and artistic purpose. (Weymouth and Frantz both graduated from RISD; Byrne left after his first year and later applied for readmission but was not accepted back.) They understood that Frantz’s rigorously simple drumming was a kind of minimalism. They knew that Byrne’s method of composing in disjointed fragments could be thought of as collage. When they came together in New York in 1974, they rerouted their well-developed sense of image-making to music.

To fill out their sound, Byrne, Weymouth, and Frantz recruited a skilled keyboard player and guitarist, Jerry Harrison, who had played with a band out of Boston, the Modern Lovers, before going back to school for a master’s degree in architectural design from Harvard. Talking Heads’ background in art (and architecture) gave journalists a good hook for distinguishing them from the Ramones, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and other bands absorbed with proud amateurism as counter-agents to the grandiosity of prog rock and the whiney introspection of the ’70s singer-songwriters.

In early coverage of the group, John Rockwell of The New York Times described “the abrupt layerings of their music” as recalling “planes of color in minimalist art,” as Gould quotes him. James Wolcott, in The Village Voice, deemed their songs equivalent to “musical minimalism” and compared Byrne’s guitar playing to “a charcoal pencil scratching a scene on a notepad.”

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The Wolcott piece, a cover story for the Voice, appeared two months after Talking Heads performed in public for the first time, at a showcase at CBGB; and that happened just eight months after Byrne had visited the cold-water loft in lower Manhattan where Weymouth and Frantz were living to see if they could try working as a band. Weymouth had never touched a bass before. Byrne showed her how to handle the instrument, wrote her bass lines, and taught them to her note for note. She was no less of an amateur than Dee Dee Ramone, the bass player for the Ramones, but amateurism was not the aesthetic of her particular band.

However unskilled they were at first, Talking Heads were not unschooled, and their reputation as well-educated aesthetes distinguished them in the snobbishly anti-intellectual punk world. (They would later be categorized more accurately and more vaguely as New Wave.) In a scene at CBGB that Gould recounts, Patti Smith was introduced to Chris Frantz. “Oh, you’re that art school band,” she said. “I wish my parents were rich enough to send me to art school.”

Among the complicated subjects Gould handles with nuance is the matter of David Byrne’s psychology and its bearing on the group and its work. A quality of detachment in Byrne’s stage manner, along with the jittery astringency of his voice and his embrace of song subjects such as “Psycho Killer,” led writers to cast Byrne in pathologizing terms—as Gould notes, “through the use of psychiatric metaphors and references to his passing resemblance to the film actor Anthony Perkins, who played the homicidal maniac Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.”

In middle age, Byrne diagnosed himself as having a “very mild” case of Asperger’s syndrome. Until then, fans of Talking Heads were no better equipped than Byrne himself to understand him. “David’s default setting was furtive and withdrawn,” Gould writes. “In the absence of any public awareness of Asperger’s…people tended to project whatever motivations they wanted onto David’s detached behavior, ranging from arrogance to insecurity, affectation to inhibition, or the catch-all of ‘eccentricity,’ whatever that might mean.”

While his bandmates “were familiar with his idiosyncrasies by now,” Gould adds, “they were well aware that the musical manifestation of those idiosyncrasies was central to their band’s appeal.” Weymouth and Frantz, while sometimes frustrated with Byrne’s detachment as a bandmate, recognized its benefits as theater.

I followed the band as a fan for the near-entirety of its life cycle, from the period of their CBGB debut in 1975 to the release of their final album, Naked, in 1988. I marveled at how quickly Talking Heads reached maturity as a group through the weirdly constructed chamber-rock settings of Byrne’s off-kilter, deceptively banal lyrics on the album More Songs About Buildings and Food (1978). With Brian Eno producing them and cocreating the music on the albums Fear of Music (1979) and Remain in Light (1980), they seemed on a trajectory of ever-expanding musical development to match the Beatles in the 1960s, changing almost unrecognizably from album to album.

I was in the audience at Wollman Rink in Central Park in August 1980, before Remain in Light was released, when a second bass player, the funk master Busta Jones, joined them. And then an additional keyboard player, Bernie Worrell, came out. And then another electric guitarist, Adrian Belew, followed by a percussionist, Steve Scales, and two back-up singers, Nona Hendryx and Dollette McDonald. “We look a little different than we did the last time we were here,” Byrne announced.

The difference in the way the group sounded and moved was shocking and exhilarating. This was the expanded band that would soon go on the tour captured in Stop Making Sense (1984), the concert film by Jonathan Demme: a dance band of virtuoso African American funk musicians playing alongside—and overtaking—the four members of Talking Heads. The music in that concert, drawn mostly from Fear of Music and the upcoming Remain in Light, was sexy and brainy at the same time: mesmerizing polyrhythms swirling under and around Byrne’s elusive language, barked out—“You may find yourself…” I remember being so overtaken by this music that I felt high, and not only because I probably was actually high.

The coming together of white and Black sensibilities in Talking Heads’ music in this period was celebrated as an act of bravery by the white critics writing about the band at the time. John Rockwell lauded Remain in Light as a “significant artistic and even social statement that demonstrates how black and white music can blend together creatively.”

Rockwell, well informed on music history, must have momentarily forgotten that the blending of Black and white has always been the very essence of American popular music. The twist in the case of Talking Heads—and it was merely a twist, rather than a major innovation—was the transformation of music steeped in a particularly white milieu (aloofness, inscrutability, and aggressive intellectualism) through elements of Black musical expression (improvisation, rhythmic complexity, groove, and flow). Reviewing Stop Making Sense, the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael called Byrne “so white, he’s almost mock-white.” With the “Expanded Heads,” as the new band came to be called, David Byrne took up and advanced the long white tradition of trading on the virtues of Black art and absorbing as much of it as a creative and ambitious white man could.

Gould implies his own approval in quoting the praise this music received in the mainstream press at the time. As he quotes Rockwell, Byrne “proves he is willing to evolve along with black music—unlike so many white lovers of 1960s rhythm & blues who have never been able to accept the 1970s in black music.” I liked it, too, but it’s hard not to see the arrogance in rewarding a white man for trying to catch up to his Black contemporaries.

Talking Heads carried on through another decade, zigging and zagging through musical territories—Brazilian rhythms here, old-school crooning there—until Byrne seemed to lose interest, and became more engaged with time-consuming projects like composing for films and modern dance. In one version of the band’s collapse, as proffered by Weymouth and Frantz (a married couple since 1977), Byrne abandoned the group without notice, consistent with long-standing communication problems between the musicians. “You could say that Tina and I saw the handwriting on the wall a long time ago,” Frantz said. “But we were shocked to find about it in the Los Angeles Times. As far as we’re concerned, the band never really broke up. David just decided to leave.” That was in 1991.

Three decades later, the group reunited—on camera for conversations only, no music-making—to promote the theatrical rerelease of a remixed and remastered edition of Stop Making Sense. Smiling cordially together on CBS Sunday Morning, they were asked how they felt about having broken up. “That was kind of the way we were, the way I was, and so it’s not like, oh, I wish I could have changed that,” Byrne said. “I think that’s just the way we were then and it kind of had to happen that way.”

Weymouth shot him a glare, her eyes tightly locked on him, just as they were the first time I ever saw them together. Same as it ever was… Same as it ever was…