Rock's Renaissance Man

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"David would do anything to get attention," Weymouth says. "He'd do anything on a dare. He'd go to a party wearing a red taffeta dress." Byrne's taste in wardrobe tamed down as his musical inclinations became more focused. Frantz had fantasized about forming a rock band. He and Byrne provided music for a film a friend was making, Frantz recalls, "about his girlfriend being run over by a car." The way Weymouth remembers it, "By the end of the session, Chris said to David, because, you know, David didn't talk very much, 'Look, let's start a band.' It clicked." Says Frantz of that historic moment: "We started Talking Heads because we thought we'd never be happy in life until we gave rock a shot, a serious try." They moved the action south from Providence to New York City, a friend came up with a name for the band -- drawn from TV argot for head shots of people holding forth -- and things began to happen very fast for Talking Heads.

The band first appeared at CBGB in the summer of 1975. Their lack of technical finesse would hardly have been worth remarking in the free-for-all punk scene, but their material was already abundantly strange and appropriately heretical. By the end of 1976 they had signed with Sire Records and recorded, as a trio, the wonderfully titled single Love Goes to a Building on Fire. Then they added a fourth member, Jerry Harrison, and went on a tour of Europe with the Ramones.

Byrne recalls that the punk "attitude and dress and hairdo were kind of fresh and exciting, but the music wasn't as innovative as we hoped. Some of it was difficult to listen to." Nevertheless, it was in England and on the Continent that the Heads started reaching a wide audience. When their first album, Talking Heads 77, was released in late 1977, the record company promoted it as part of a punk package with an ad that declared, GET BEHIND IT BEFORE IT GETS PAST YOU!

The music had already put them in a groove all their own, but after three more albums, the band had become a little fractious inside its own world. There were quarrels over songwriting credits, with Byrne almost always assigning himself primary authorship. There was dissatisfaction about Byrne's working on his own without the band. Harrison concedes that that period "was a point of maximum tension" but says the cure was for the other Heads to work outside the band as well. "You take the major step of all doing solo projects," Harrison says, "and then you stop worrying about apportioning Heads credits."

Still, Byrne remains the focal personality of the Heads. His habits (working from about 9 in the morning to maybe 8 at night), his personal tastes ("strong flavors, spicy foods"), his private life (living, largely in lower Manhattan, with Actress and Designer Adelle ("Bonny") Lutz, who created some of True Stories' most inspired outfits, for "it might be four years now . That's pretty good"), even the few personal surprises he lets drop (choosing to remain a British citizen because "it was easier to travel. Still is. But I can't vote. And I can't hold a job in civil service") all somehow take on the shape of legend as oversized as that white suit.