Dept. of Hoopla; heads talking again.(The Talk of the Town)(reunion of the rock group Talking Heads)

Whatever alarming images the phrase "international voting body of about a thousand rock experts" might conjure, let's give that hoary community some credit. It accomplished, in a single ballot, what the four former members of Talking Heads couldn't -- or wouldn't -- in eighteen years: it got David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison, and Tina Weymouth to agree to reunite, however briefly, and perform onstage again as Talking Heads. They'll play at least two songs this week when they are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame during a ceremony at -- not the Mudd Club or CBGB -- the Waldorf-Astoria.

"It's kind of an uptown gig, and we were always a downtown band," Frantz, the drummer, said last week, phoning from his and Weymouth's home in Connecticut. "But, you know, when people offer you these honors I think it's a good idea to accept them." He laughed. "It gives us a Hollywood ending -- the rise, the fall, the struggle, the stress, and then the happy ending. It's perfect. Going out with a bang and a giggle."

"I think we all, coming from New York City, tend to be cynical about things like the Grammys and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame," Harrison, the band's keyboardist and guitarist, said from Marin County, where he now lives and works producing records. "But then you meet someone who's in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and you're like, 'Wow!' Like, I met Rod Carew on the streets of Milwaukee once. Rod Carew. So you think, Why shouldn't we have something like that? And, of course, your kids think it's great."

In the weeks before the event, Byrne, just back in New York from a tour of Australia and Japan, was busy working on various music and art projects and attending the Whitney Biennial in saddle shoes. As the front man, he was the first to outgrow the band and the most determined to keep his distance from it. Although all of the band's members worked on side projects while Talking Heads was still a going concern, Byrne got most of the attention, especially once he branched out into film, in 1986, with "True Stories." By that time, the band had stopped touring.

The breakup was slow but rancorous. "Chris and Tina tried to be cool about the wind-down of Talking Heads, but after a while it started to really gnaw at them, and a ...