Though they were the most high­ly tout­ed of the new wave bands to emerge from the CBGB's scene in New York of the mid-​'70s, it was not clear at first whether Talk­ing Heads' Low­er East Side art-​rock ap­proach could make the sub­way ride to the mid­town pop main­stream suc­cess­ful­ly.

The ear­ly in­di­ca­tion pro­vid­ed by the non-​LP sin­gle "Love Goes to Build­ing on Fire" sug­gest­ed that the group might be too will­ing to com­pro­mise for mass ac­cep­tance, while the record's com­mer­cial fail­ure sug­gest­ed that might not work any­way. The lead-​off track of the de­but al­bum, Talk­ing Heads: 77, "Uh-​Oh, Love Comes to Town," was more of the same, a pop song that em­pha­sized the group's un­like­ly roots in the late-​'60s bub­blegum sound of Bud­dah Records groups like the 1910 Fruit­gum Co., Mo­town, and Caribbean mu­sic.

But the "Uh-​Oh" gave away the group's game ear­ly, with its ner­vous, dis­con­nect­ed lyrics and David Byrne's strained voice. All pre­tens­es of nor­mal­i­ty were aban­doned by the sec­ond track, "New Feel­ing," as Talk­ing Heads fi­nal­ly start­ed to sound on record they way they did down­town: the stag­gered rhythms and sud­den tem­po changes, the odd gui­tar tun­ings and rhyth­mic, sin­gle-​note pat­terns, the non-​rhyming, non-​lin­ear, non-​nar­ra­tive lyrics full of apho­ris­tic sound­bites that came across like odd re­marks over­heard from a psy­chi­a­trist's couch, and that voice, singing above its nor­mal range, leap­ing in­to falset­to and from there in­to stran­gled cries like a mad­man try­ing des­per­ate­ly to sound nor­mal.

Amaz­ing­ly, "Psy­cho Killer" made the sin­gles chart for a few weeks, ev­i­dence of the group's quirky ap­peal, but the al­bum was not a big hit, and it re­mained un­clear whether Talk­ing Heads spoke on­ly the se­cret lan­guage of the ur­ban arts-​types or whether that could be trans­lat­ed in­to the more com­mon tongue of hip pop cul­ture. In any case, they had suc­ceed­ed as artists in that old ef­fort -​-​ us­ing ex­ist­ing el­e­ments in an un­usu­al com­bi­na­tion to cre­ate some­thing new in the world that still man­aged to be odd­ly fa­mil­iar. And that made Talk­ing Heads: 77 a land­mark al­bum.