THIS MUST BE THE PLACE: THE ADVENTURES OF THE TALKING HEADS IN THE 20TH CENTURY

The Heads' history is complicated and unusual, intersecting with the career paths of bohemian visionaries from the Ramones and Brian Eno to Robert Rauschenberg and Twyla Tharp. Strange, then, how seldom told their tale has been. Enter this comprehensive group biography, which follows the band from its origins as an art-school lark through its '80s commercial heyday and subsequent ugly breakup. Place is full of tantalizing anecdotes about the creation of now-classic projects like Remain in Light and Stop Making Sense, and it offers good dirt on tensions between the distant David Byrne and the difficult Tina Weymouth. Too bad Bowman's prose is often clunky and affected, with an overabundance of semi-relevant asides and several unfortunate errors that suggest -- rightly or wrongly -- a lack of musical expertise (the Shaggs shrink to ''The Shags,'' while the German experimentalists Can expand to ''Cann''). Suggested for fanns only. B