Chris Frantz - Remain in Love: Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Tina

Very special thanks to the good people who helped me throughout the writing of this book. Your kindness is greatly appreciated: Elizabeth Beier, Lee Brackstone, Tomas Cookman, Sloan Harris, Daniel Kirschen, Megan Wilson, Rob Filomena, Frank Gallagher, Ira Lippy, Paul Wexler, Wally Badarou, Dolette McDonald, Steve Scales, Ednah Holt, Frederic Serfati, J. R. Rost, Jeff Jones, Duncan Hannah, Marc Kehoe, David Hansen, Lloyd Stamy, Gareth Murphy, Ed Bicknell, Damita Pearson, Lynn Nora, Nicola Mcquaid, Hannah Phillips, Jennifer Sarkissian, and Mia Bohling.

I had the great fortune to not only be a founding member of one of the most unique and exciting rock bands of all time, but to do so alongside the love of my life, Tina Weymouth. Together with David Byrne, and later Jerry Harrison, we created a new paradigm we called Thinking Mans Dance Music. The name of the band was Talking Heads. We found inspiration in the bands we lovedthe Velvet Underground, David Bowie, James Brown, Al Green, Otis Redding, Booker T and the MGs, Kool & the Gang, the Stooges, and the psychedelic garage bands of the sixtiesbut we didnt sound like anyone else. We didnt copy anyones style. And no one could copy ours.

I met Tina in painting class at the Rhode Island School of Design and we became young lovers. Tina supported me in my dream to be in a different sort of rock band and, with my encouragement, she eventually became a crucial member of that band and an iconic pioneer for women in music.

We moved to New York City with a plan to make our mark on the history of music and art. We found that we were not alone in this dream. Television, Patti Smith, Blondie, and the Ramones were already there, and seeing them perform at a funky dive bar on the Bowery was all we needed to further inspire us to create new original songs in a style of our own.

You could say that Tina and I were the team who made David Byrne famous. We were very good at shining the spotlight on him. We created a band that was post-punk before there was Post-Punk, new wave before there was New Wave, and alternative before there was Alternative. We had some hits along the way, too. With Psycho Killer, Take Me to the River, Life During Wartime, Once in a Lifetime This Must Be the Place, Burning Down the House, and Road to Nowhere, we enjoyed artistic, critical, and commercial success, a rare combination. We toured with the Ramones, XTC, Dire Straits, B-52s, Pretenders, Eurthymics, Black Uhuru, Simple Minds, the Police, Psychedelic Furs, and Devo, to name a few.

We played on Dick Clarks American Bandstand, Saturday Night Live, Late Night with David Letterman, and The Old Grey Whistle Test. We were there for the advent of MTV with our video for Once in a Lifetime.

Then, during a break from Talking Heads, we did it again with our new band called Tom Tom Club, which sounded completely different from Talking Heads and gave Tina and me our first worldwide hit songs and gold records with Wordy Rappinghood and Genius of Love. Tom Tom Club performed live on Soul Train one morning in Hollywood before going over to the Pantages Theater to shoot Stop Making Sense with Jonathan Demme directing us as Talking Heads.

Anyone who has been playing music professionally for over forty years has lived a life with many twists and turns. In this book, I will tell you all about them, from our art-school days to our induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. A number of books have been written about us, but most of them are not very good and none of them have given the reader the true inside story. With Remain in Love, I will do just that.

On December 17, 1980, at the Palasportaka PalaEUR Arenain Rome, Italy, at 21:00, Talking Heads took the stage. The support band, a well-known Two-Tone ska band called the Selecter, had warmed up the audience to a maniacal point and when I ran up the huge metal ramp to the stage and took my seat on the drum riser behind my Mojave Red Rogers drum kit and looked out at the many thousands of fans, I knew I had the best seat in the house. In the cold gray light of the arena, the mass of mostly young Italian men was swaying, pulsating, and screaming like one huge wild beast. The air was warm and damp and thick with cigarette smoke. This crowd was so overwhelmingly loud that we in the band were taken aback. Wed been touring the world to packed houses everywhere, but no audience compared to this one for its sheer animal intensity. It was almost frightening, like a modern version of the mob in the ancient times of the Colosseum.

From my drummers thronethats what they call itI waited for Tina Weymouth, Jerry Harrison, and David Byrne to strap on their guitars and signal each other that we were ready to rock. Our friend, guitar hero Adrian Belew, was joining us as well. Tina, looking exceptionally fine in a dress she had made herself, a strapless white sheath with a slit on the side all the way up to the top of her thigh, gave her shiny blonde hair a toss and played boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom-boom-boom. Her familiar introduction to Psycho Killer set off a roar from the audience so loud that I had to ask the monitor man to turn up my monitor so I could hear the band. This was the next-to-last show of the Remain in Light European tour and it was going to be a doozy.

One by one we were joined onstage by the phenomenal Steve Scales on percussion, the wonderful keyboard wizard Bernie Worrell, the gorgeously soulful Dolette McDonald on vocals, and the body-rocking additional bass of Busta Cherry Jones. Our energy level was a good match for the audiences. This is the set that we played:

Psycho Killer

Warning Sign

Stay Hungry

Cities

I Zimbra

Drugs

Once in a Lifetime

Animals

Houses in Motion

Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)

Crosseyed and Painless

Life During Wartime

ENCORE 1

Take Me to the River

ENCORE 2

The Great Curve

I was the timekeeper, the groove master, the foundation on which this divinely sexy and artistically compelling music was built. When I think of all the drummers I have heard over the years, the ones I love most are not the ones who play the most technically complex, fast, or difficult parts. I love the drummers who make you want to dance and feel good about yourself. I think of playing the drums the way I think about making love: You should not be frantic. You should not be a show-off. You should not aim to impress. What you should do is be sensitive to the song, the tempo, and the melody. You should serve both the song and the band while occasionally surprising them in a good way. You should be powerful, yet supportive. You should spread the love.