This Must Be the Place

A freelance music and culture journalist (New York Times Magazine, SPIN), Bowman here chronicles minimalist funk-rock band Talking Heads with their cooperation. He starts with character sketches of the quartet: the quiet, complex, blue-blooded bassist, Tina Weymouth; her artistic drummer-husband, Chris Frantz; the eccentric, nerdy, performance-artist-turned-singer David Byrne; and the Harvard-educated, ex-Modern Lover Jerry Harrison. Throughout, he places the band which formed at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1974 in the context of New York history and contrasts them with their Gotham art-punk contemporaries (e.g., Patti Smith, Television, and the Ramones). His deft analysis of how his subjects intersected with the avant-garde scene of Andy Warhol, composer Philip Glass, dancer Twyla Tharp, artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and ambient Dadaist Brian Eno sets his work apart from Jerome Davis's Talking Heads (1986. o.p.) and David Gans's Talking Heads (1985. o.p.). Recommended for all popular music collections and indispensable for Talking Heads fanatics, as this is the only bona fide biography in print. Dave Szatmary, Univ. of Washington, Seattle.