That final question is the key one in Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock. As it turns out, the answer is pretty simple, especially if we're talking about bassist Tina Weymouth: she hated it. Even after reading my share of books on John vs. Paul, Mick vs. Keith, and Pete vs. Roger, I've never quite read a rock and roll rivalry like the one between Tina Weymouth and David Byrne, partially because their relationship took nearly no time to sour. From the very beginning of Talking Heads, Weymouth resented Byrne's controlling nature and tendency to take credit that should have been more democratically distributed, and was annoyed by the way he presented her little rock and roll combo as some kind of grand, graduate art thesis. She has a point, but she seemingly has a tendency to take it too far, reading every single move Byrne made as a slight against her, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison.
What's so peculiar about this particular rivalry is how one-sided it is. Byrne never really has a bad thing to say about Weymouth, no matter how stinging the sniping might get. He also rarely takes any of her legit gripes to heart, continuing to do whatever it is he wants to do no matter how it might affect his bandmates.
Author Jonathan Gould makes sense of this by presenting it through the lens of Byrne's Asperger's Syndrome, which accounts for both his refusal to acknowledge how dicey things are between him and Tina and his egocentrism. Perhaps if he had been diagnosed earlier, Weymouth would have been more understanding of his way. Hopefully she'd at least have been less mean about it, though there are clues in the book that she wouldn't have.
As for the other questions peripheral to Weymouth vs. Byrne, we get answers to all of them as well. Gould wrote a very complete biography of the band, so much so that we can pretty much forgive its meandering first couple of chapters which give weirdly extended accounts of The Beatles' career, Altamont, and other rock and roll milestones that are both overly familiar and pretty irrelevant to the main story. While I like how the author critically engages with both the band's music and behavior, he also has a slight tendency to tip over into being judgmental at times, as when he chides Frantz for being a "pollyanna" because the drummer's autobiography presents his southern upbringing happily without acknowledging the region's racism and because he does not discuss his grandfather's mental health. There's also the occasional head-scratcher comment, as when Gould suggests that the structure of the musical comedy A Hard Day's Night was somehow the blueprint for the straight concert film Stop Making Sense or how Joey Ramone moonlighted as a rent boy (by all accounts, only Dee Dee Ramone raised drug money in that particular fashion). The revelation that it was David Byrne who drove Edith Massey to the premier of Pink Flamingos is pretty delightful though, and there is enough joy in the pages of Burning Down the House to offset the bitterness at the heart of the Talking Heads story.
