Why the Talking Heads are still making more sense than ever 50 years later

Fifty years ago this month, three clean-cut art-school students who called themselves Talking Heads played an audition night at the Bowery club CBGB.Different from the other newly minted punk bands putting the New York City hole-in-the-wall on the map, frontman David Byrne, bassist Tina Weymouth, and drummer Chris Frantz looked and sounded like no one else. The skittish, hollow-eyed singer accompanied his strange, keening vocals and obtuse lyrics with hyper-rhythmic guitarwork, while the petite blond bassist (a rare mid-’70s axe-wielding female) and robust mop-top drummer held down the propulsive groove.

Their catchy “Psycho Killer” — with its sing-along chorus — immediately caught the attention of club owner Hilly Kristal, who booked them for a series of dates, including opening for the Ramones.Later adding keyboardist/guitarist (and Harvard grad) Jerry Harrison, the band would become “the most original, musically ambitious, and rigorously creative rock group of their time,” writes Jonathan Gould in his riveting new biography, “Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock” (out June 16).The book deftly interrelates New York City’s cultural, social, and economic history (from its bankruptcy and the downtown art scene to Son of Sam and the ’80s boom) as the band evolves into an expanded group of both African-American and white musicians, ambitiously exploring ever-more innovative sounds.A former professional drummer and the author of well-received biographies of the Beatles and Otis Redding, Gould says that “having grown up in New York, a big part of my attraction to the subject involved the chance to write about the change in the city’s social life and geography over the past fifty years.”He focused on Talking Heads, he relates, because “having written books about the archetype of a rock group and the archetype of a soul singer that together comprised an extended exploration of the centrality of ...