Burning down the house

At least the Heads' box set negates their 1992 contractual "greatest hits" obligation, "Popular Favorites: Sand in the Vaseline." All the former's new "extra" cuts are included in the new box, including the jagged-sounding early CBGB numbers recorded before Harrison joined the band. The box set's new "alternate versions" archaeology isn't as exciting as, say, Bob Dylan's "official" bootleg series. There is no Talking Heads equivalent of "Series of Dreams." Saying this, I must reveal that in 1999, I sold all my Talking Heads vinyl and CDs to Bleecker Bob's in Greenwich Village. I now gladly welcome Talking Heads back into my CD shelf with this definitive collection.

I tossed my Heads after having lunch with Tina Weymouth. At the time, I was writing a history of her old band, and her poisonous memories of the band's divorce finally made it impossible for me to listen to Talking Heads anymore. I mean, we all know about Paul McCartney and John Lennon's post-Beatles squabbles. John sang to Paul, "How do you sleep at night?" and 30 years later Paul reversed the Lennon-McCartney credits on songs that he wrote by himself. But neither one tried to reform the Beatles without the other, as Weymouth did in 1994 when she wanted to restart Talking Heads without Byrne. Neither John nor Paul ever accused the other of being autistic. In the late 1990s, Weymouth even reportedly called several old friends in the middle of the night to tell them that Byrne had a "baby penis."

While we were at lunch, Weymouth announced that she had heard David Byrne was a murderer. And she wasn't talking about his song that goes "Psycho killer, q'est-ce que c'est?" No. She heard at a party that Byrne had killed a boy in Brazil using voodoo. She wanted us to play Hardy Boys and solve the case. "David is a vampire, in a way," she told me. "Watch out for the autism. It might be something much more complex. Psychics have seen him and they say he just has a firewall around him."

Talking Heads fans generally don't take kindly to dumping on Weymouth, but she really is the Lady Macbeth of rock. I find her the kind of tragic anti-heroine who is rarely investigated in pop music histories. It's not that I see her as some kind of shrew. Rather, I like to picture her as a slim, naked, green angel. I never saw her this way, but more than a few former Rhode Island School of Design students remember Weymouth showing up at an art opening naked, her body covered with green paint. I think there is something sweetly innocent about that.

She recalled her first real meeting with David Byrne by telling me, "I went to visit him in his apartment in Providence, which was a pigsty. There were all these clothes strewn about. There was also a corset and white vinyl boots. 'Whose are those?'" she asked. "David said, 'Mine.' I said, 'It can't be. Prove it to me.' David went behind a wall and dressed in drag." She made no judgments about Byrne's propensity for cross-dressing. "Back then," she told me, "David was kind of fun."

Lee Blake, a friend of the band from its early days, told me, "People ask me over and over, 'What's the matter with the two of them?' I say, 'Tina's always been in love with David.' Maybe now she wants to destroy him rather than have him not be hers." Another witness, an old girlfriend of Byrne's named Mary Clark, believes, "Tina's obsession is just a control issue. She saw a loss of her own power, the more powerful David became."

When Seymour Stein -- who would sign Talking Heads to Sire Records -- first saw the band playing at CBGB, he said, "I was mesmerized. I saw this girl [Weymouth] -- and she looked like a Keane painting come to life because her eyes were so blown up -- transfixed on David. She was watching his every move. I thought mistakenly that they were together." He then added, "Not that I gave it much thought, because it was the music and David standing there -- great guitar player, that quirky voice and those lyrics one after another, and everything."

Again Byrne eclipsed Weymouth. She responded by telling anyone who would listen, "David takes the most obvious thing, and people all go, 'Genius! Genius!'" When you hear her say that in person, her voice rings with utter contempt.

Post-breakup, Byrne has rarely bad-mouthed Weymouth in the press, although I suspect this was for legal reasons. While I was interviewing Byrne, I said something unprintable about Weymouth, and Byrne just stared at the tape recorder and raised his right eyebrow. The only time I saw Byrne get visibly angry concerning her was when he described a letter Weymouth wrote him in 1996.

"I'd get these bizarre letters from Tina," he said, gritting his teeth. "They'd say what a fucking dumb jerk and asshole piece of shit I was. It would go into detail how badly I'd behaved. What a terrible person I was. How hard I was to work with. How unfair I was. It was this thing meant to make me feel real terrible and how much 'I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.' And then in the end she'd go, 'Why don't you want to work with us? Why in the world don't you want to work with us? What's the matter?'" Byrne paused and sighed. "You've answered the question. Look at the beginning of your letter, look at the end. You've answered it. There is some kind of weird denial going on."

In the end, Talking Heads' box set is a testament to music that transcends even the most sordid history. It also includes a DVD that contains all the band's videos, including the trademark image of a deadpan Byrne slapping his own forehead and intoning, "Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was ..." John Cale, once fired from the Velvet Underground by Lou Reed, told me this about Talking Heads: "The incredible nature of the band at the time [was that] everybody looked at them and wondered what exactly held them together. That's kind of a really cool cinematic thing about them; the best thing about cinema is when the audience is just incredulous about the plot and the story line of the film. And you think, 'This can't possibly be true.' And you follow it and you believe it and you buy it. The charm of Talking Heads was the same way. 'This can't possibly be true.'"

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