Remain in Love by Chris Frantz review – the Talking Heads drummer speaks out
A winter afternoon, Providence, Rhode Island, 1973. Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz are art students and madly in love. They’re working on their paintings when they’re interrupted by Chris’s new bandmate, an awkward dropout with homemade trousers and home-cut hair by the name of David Byrne. He wants help with a song, and so Tina offers to write a section in French, tossing in as an afterthought the shouted line: “I hate people when they’re not polite”. Chris chips in with lyrics too, and by the end of the afternoon they have come up with “Psycho Killer”, the first defining masterpiece of one of the greatest rock bands of all time – though at the time they are still labouring under the hapless name of the Artistics.
Within a year, all three were living in an unregenerated loft on Chrystie Street, in the wilds of the Lower East Side (1,700sq ft on the ninth floor, with views of the Empire State Building – yours for a cool $289 a month). Weymouth’s car battery was regularly stolen and there was no heat in the building after 5pm, but the neighbourhood was a Who’s Who of the avant garde. Ornette Coleman, Lauren Hutton, William Burroughs, John Giorno and Robert Mapplethorpe all lived on the Bowery, while the painter Robert Rauschenberg owned a former orphanage around the corner. Best of all, there were bands everywhere, from the Ramones to Angel and the Snake, fronted by a local beauty called Debbie Harry.
After much persuasion, Weymouth agreed to learn bass. Armed with a 1963 Fender Precision, she joined the band, now renamed Talking Heads. The next element in their explosive alchemy was not a person but a place: CBGB, an unprepossessing dive bar on Bowery that stank of dog shit and roach spray, mixed with wafts of Chanel No 5. The letters stood for Country Bluegrass Blues, the owner Hilly Kristal’s preferred music, but somehow the bar had become the sweaty centre of the emerging new wave and proto-punk scene.
Frantz spent much of that first Manhattan winter jammed in the back room, watching Television, the Ramones and Patti Smith strut their stuff, the hairs on his neck standing up when the latter first launched into “Gloria”. By spring he was ready. For their debut outing on CBGB’s tiny stage, the trio eschewed classic rock star costume, dressing instead in what would become their trademark so-ordinary-it’s-weird style. Byrne was in Levi’s and Hush Puppies, a look that squared with his tense, hyper-earnest delivery as frontman. Frantz, like the preppie he was, wore a Brooks Brothers shirt for his shift as drummer. “I felt clean cut, but hip.” “Yeah, they suck,” he overheard Johnny Ramone say. “They’ll make us look good.”
Oh Talking Heads! You want to freeze them there, or maybe two years later, by which time they had acquired Jerry Harrison on guitar, a refugee from the breakup of the Modern Lovers. They didn’t look like anyone else, and they didn’t sound like anyone else either, though they certainly shared genetic material with the Velvet Underground, infused with deep draughts of gospel, funk and soul. Brainy art rock you could dance to, bubbling and fraying at the edges, their huge, utopian sound at odds with the alienated, bitter lyrics.
The downtown demimonde was quick to get on board. Lou Reed tried to persuade them into a bad record contract; Andy Warhol invited them up to the Factory for cookies. When they toured Europe with the Ramones, Dee Dee Ramone turned up at the airport walking with a cane, because his girlfriend Connie had just stabbed him in the backside. Although the cane turned out to be packed with painkillers that had to be forcibly disposed of before they could board, he was a sweetheart, who loved visiting castles. Johnny Ramone, on the other hand, hated the scenery and loathed the food (“‘What the fuck is this?’ I said, ‘Johnny, that’s a salad. It’s lettuce and tomato.’”) It was the spring of 1977, and all across Europe there were signs of punk’s arrival. In Zurich, Frantz saw audiences pogoing for the first time. In Manchester the kids were wearing bin bags, and showed their appreciation by gobbing at the stage until the instruments were slick with spit (it was this unhygienic practice that gave Joe Strummer hepatitis).
Back in New York, they recorded Talking Heads: 77 and by 1980 had made three more albums, all produced by Brian Eno, with whom the tongue-tied Byrne had developed an intense friendship. For 1978’s More Songs About Buildings and Food, they moved to the “unhurried out island ambience” of a quiet village in the Bahamas, where the legendary Chris Blackwell of Island Records had just established his Compass Point studio. The island and its musicians played a significant role in the band’s evolving polyglot sound. They had never heard most of their songs played back before, and each evening they would take the rough mix home to their bungalow and “dance and dance and dance”.
On the day they had signed their first record contract, Weymouth and Frantz had got engaged, marrying a few months later. Both their fathers were in the armed forces, his a general and hers an admiral. Byrne came from a more regular, suburban background, though class was by no means the only faultline in the band. It would be nice if the casually communal process that created “Psycho Killer” had been Talking Heads’ ongoing MO, but it soon becomes clear that the “remain” and “love” of Frantz’s title are pointed ripostes to an increasingly unhappy story.
Byrne, he complains, wanted to be in charge from the off. He took credit for other band members’ work, perhaps accidentally, and insisted on sole writing responsibility. According to Frantz, he claimed this was because he couldn’t sing words with conviction if he hadn’t written them, though the decision, Frantz observes, came after their lawyer explained the financial breakdown between music and lyrics. He tried to make Weymouth re-audition to stay in the band. He trashed a room in their favourite hotel. He even tricked the others into wearing muted colours for a big show, before appearing in “the biggest white suit anyone had ever seen”, to hog the limelight.
At the end of 1979’s Fear of Music tour Byrne quit Talking Heads altogether, leaving a journalist in Russia to deliver the bad news to his bandmates. After he and Eno had made their own album, the beautiful, unsettling My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Frantz persuaded them both over to his loft for a low-key jam with Weymouth and Harrison, the results of which were so alluring that everyone packed up and went back to Compass Point to record Remain in Light, an album that drew even more deeply on African music and rhythms (for the song “Crosseyed and Painless”, Frantz introduced Byrne to “this new thing called rap”). “We were about to take the world to church,” he exults.
Instead it was the divorce court. While Byrne focused on solo albums, Frantz and Weymouth drifted back to the Bahamas, worked as producers and formed their own spin-off outfit, Tom Tom Club, whose playful first song “Wordy Rappinghood” became a unexpected hit in Europe. A blue note starts to slide between Frantz’s lines. Sure, he has two kids, adores his wife, buys a farm in Connecticut on the advice of his accountant, followed by a yacht to tool around the Bahamas. (“She was yar,” he says, a phrase last uttered by Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story.) But he was also flat-out bingeing on cocaine, “mourning for the Talking Heads dream I’d had”.
The band periodically reconvened in the 80s, making four more acclaimed albums, but in 1991 Frantz answered another call from a journalist, asking once again for confirmation of Byrne’s statement that the band had broken up. This time it was final. “David stopped taking our phone calls and all communication from him ceased.”
This is a very different book from Byrne’s swarming memoir of ideas, How Music Works. Even on the far side of recovery, the ache lingers, palpable in the longing energy Frantz invests in set lists and outfits from long-ago gigs. I love Talking Heads. I danced to them at my wedding, and I want them played at my funeral too, but I’m not sure the grains of bitterness and sorrow that make their music so entrancing are quite so appetising in the raw.
• Olivia Laing’s latest book, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, is published by Picador. Remain in Love: Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club and Tina is published by White Rabbit.
