by Chris Frantz
I told David that I was starting a band and I really hoped he would join me. I’d heard that over the summer he had auditioned for Charlie Rocket’s new band, a spinoff of the Fabulous Motels, but they said no. He had faced a lot of rejection in his life but he had a strong presence and individuality. His point of view was different from most people’s and we shared a real love of art rock. I felt in my heart that it was an artistically sound idea to take a chance on partnering with him. Tina and I may have been the only people in the world who believed in David as a musician and bandmate. David had trouble looking me in the eye when I asked him to start a new band with me, but I heard him say, “I guess so.” It was not exactly the reaction I had hoped for, but it was a start.
Tina and David agreed to be my roommates and split the rent. A hundred dollars a month per person plus electricity seemed doable. I went out to buy paint to freshen up the place, white for the walls and two different grays for the concrete floor with which we created a checkerboard effect. Tina drove me in her old Plymouth Valiant. It was the first time I had been to Chrystie Street after dark. The street was lined with female prostitutes of all shapes and sizes. When Tina was with me they said nothing, they respected her. But when I was on my own, they’d ask, “Wanna go out?” or “You need a date?” There were so many ladies to choose from, if that was your pleasure. These were the cheap $5.00 hookers who serviced off-duty cabdrivers and other lustful guys who would pull up in their cars. Their pimp was a fiercely handsome long-haired Latino dude who never said a word to us. He wore the same outfit every day, a funky knee-length brown fur coat with a baseball bat concealed under it. I never saw him use it, but I have no doubt he would have if he’d ever felt the need.
Tina and I had to steel ourselves to live in this nightmare of a neighborhood. So did David. The three of us had grown up in charming suburban parts of the country. Our parents had given us every advantage they possibly could and had been supportive in every way, but we were determined to live an artistic life and to us that meant living in New York City, the cultural center of the universe. If our parents had any doubts about us moving to the Lower East Side, they never said so, although the first time my father visited us on Chrystie Street, he said, “You know, I could never bring your mother here. She would never stop worrying about you.” Ralph and Laure Weymouth were more philosophical about it. I think they thought Tina’s brother, Yann, would look out for us, and he did, as much as he could. David’s parents, Thomas and Emma, came to visit one time and acted like this hellhole was completely normal. They were Scots and his mother plopped down in a chair and said, “Oooh! Put the kettle on!”
But there was another side of the Bowery. I could walk down the street and bump into Debbie Harry in one of her kooky thrift shop outfits. Debbie and Tina were like roses in a rattlesnake nest. Our friend from RISD, the designer Stephen Sprouse, lived just a block away in the same building as Debbie and her boyfriend, Chris Stein. I could cross paths with Johnny Thunders and his girlfriends of the moment, wondering why he looked like such a mess and yet his girlfriends looked so fine. Robert Rauschenberg lived and worked one block over on Lafayette Street in an old orphanage he had bought and restored. It still had the painted mural of young orphans on the side of the building. Ornette Coleman had a loft and rehearsal space on Bowery. The gorgeous gap-toothed model Lauren Hutton had a place near the corner of Bowery and Bond. Willem Dafoe was living there, too, as did Robert Mapplethorpe, the conceptual artist Vito Acconci, the pianist Charlemagne Palestine, and the feminist writer Kate Millet. The poet John Giorno, who we met at RISD when he did a reading from his book of poems Cancer in My Left Ball, had lived on Bowery for years. In 1966, William S. Burroughs moved into his “Bunker” in the same building and Mark Rothko painted his Seagram murals there. There was a huge artistic community, not that it was ever visible from the outside.
Out on the street you would beeline to the place you were going as quickly as possible. There was no promenading. You looked straight ahead and avoided eye contact with anyone you didn’t know, and even some you did know. There were a few places to hang out and have a drink. There was Phebe’s, which back then was a hangout for the Off-Broadway crowd from the La MaMa Theatre nearby. Some nights you could find Divine holding court at the bar and she was always a hoot.
Farther down the street was the Tin Palace, a jazz club that served decent wine and food; the new tenor sax star David Murray, even younger than we were, was a frequently featured artist. Sometimes he would chat with Tina and me before his set. He was curious about what was happening in the downtown art and music scenes beyond the world of jazz.
One time I walked into the Tin Palace for a drink and saw Mick Jagger sitting alone at the bar, wearing a huge, quilted pimp-style newsboy cap. I did admire the Stones. He was high as a kite. The jukebox was playing Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly” and Mick was singing along at full volume but changing the lyrics to, “Blowing me softly with his lips. Blowing me softly … with his lips.” I decided I would wait until another time to introduce myself.
As we painted the loft on Chrystie Street and tried to make it nice, I had no doubt that one day we would live in a more desirable area, but for now we needed to concentrate on writing music and work hard on it. We felt like we had something new to offer to the world and we set about to do just that.
14
EARLY DAYS IN NEW YORK
Second Avenue becomes Chrystie Street below Houston Street, which for some reason in New York is pronounced “Howstun.” Light manufacturing and clothing sweatshops lined the western side of the street and the long, narrow Sarah Roosevelt Park makes up the eastern side. I will try to give you an accurate impression of Chrystie Street when we moved to the Lower East Side in the late fall of 1974. It was not the East Village and it was not SoHo (South of Houston). Our neighbors were mainly poor Dominicans and Puerto Ricans who had no great love for one another. Shootings and stabbings among the rival gangs were very common.
On the ninth floor, with windows all along the long, northern side of the loft, we had an unobscured view of the city and the Empire State Building, and along the western end of the loft, a view of the park, with its many junkies and conga players. Young conga drummers with wildly varying degrees of skill would practice for hours until they got tired or the coke ran out. Salsa music blasted from every passing car. Garbage was all around. That first summer, there was a famously long heat wave and a sanitation workers’ strike. The neighborhood kids opened the fire hydrants to cool off. I saw flaming piles of garbage float down Chrystie Street. I thought I was losing my mind.
The battery from Tina’s old Plymouth Valiant was stolen too many times to count. After we chained the hood of the car shut, the thieves would crawl under the car to steal it from underneath.
Our building superintendent was a pockmarked, paunchy, inhospitable Puerto Rican named Jimmy, and he couldn’t believe we were moving into the building to live. He never did anything except call the elevator company a few times a week when it broke down. He kept a pack of dogs on the roof. The building was strictly industrial and the loft was all concrete with none of the charming wooden beams and tin ceilings you might see in other lofts. There was no heat in winter after 5:00 P.M. We shared the toilet in the hall with a shop full of seamstresses and the furniture maker next door. It was so unbearably filthy that cleaning it was out of the question. I boldly spray-painted the entire thing silver—toilet seat, walls, and all—à la Andy Warhol’s Factory. There was no shower or bath.
The ceiling was twelve feet high and when we first tried to roll any paint on it, it began to crumble and fall in our faces. Not a good sign. I decided to use loads of paint on it in hopes that it would somehow act like glue and hold the crumbling concrete in place. That sort of worked, but later on when we were rehearsing, the sound vibrations caused bits of the ceiling to crumble and fall around us.
I never saw any rats in our loft, but there were plenty of roaches and mice. The roaches lov
ed to hide in the cracks of our little kitchen table. Sometimes while I slept, one would scurry across my face. In the morning, if I found a mouse feasting inside a box of Raisin Bran, I would simply hold the box top shut and open the ninth-floor window. Then I would hold the box at arm’s length out the window and watch the little mouse, or sometimes a pair of little mice, launch themselves out into space. I had the feeling that they usually survived the fall only to scamper right back up the stairs to our place.
I bought a water heater to install a shower for the loft, but soon realized I had no idea how to even begin such a job and had no money for a plumber, so for the duration of our stay on Chrystie Street, we took showers at Jamie and Susan Dalglish’s apartment at 52 Bond Street, or at Yann’s place in Long Island City. We would show up with our own towels and after some polite conversation ask our hosts, “Do you mind if I take a shower?” No one ever said no.
We wrote most of the songs from our first album, the ones that had not already been written in Providence, and many from the second album there, too. These were written during nightly rehearsal sessions. Songs and arrangements would evolve slowly over a period of time through repeated playing. The story that there was one songwriter in Talking Heads is a myth. The great majority of our songs, particularly the early ones, were always a collaborative effort. We did not record them. We didn’t even own a tape recorder. We had to remember the parts in our heads. Tina knew a little about reading and writing musical notation, but David and I did not, so with songs like “Tentative Decisions” and “I’m Not in Love,” we had to play them over and over until they were ingrained in our memory.
When you walked in the front door, first you had to unlock a large padlock from the huge, twenty-five-pound iron bar that, like some medieval invention, slid across the door. Once inside, you would immediately lock the door from the inside. On the left in our kitchen area was the table, where the roaches would hide between the cracks and where we had a single hot plate and Tina’s toaster oven. There was a sink for washing dishes but no hot water. If you wanted hot water, you had to heat it up on the hot plate, and that could take a while.
The loft was one big room. There were no partitions. As you walked past the kitchen area, there was a tiny red-plastic child’s table and chair where we kept our telephone; we wrote frequently called numbers on the wall, but there was a small notebook for all the other phone numbers we needed to remember.
Just beyond the phone area was where David slept and kept his things in a small dresser. He had a double-bed mattress on the floor. Across the floor from David’s area was where we kept our band equipment, which at the time consisted of my black-and-gold sparkle Slingerland drum kit and David’s two guitars, one electric Fender Musicmaster covered with leopard-skin contact paper and one beat-up acoustic guitar that someone had dripped paint on, and his Vox AC30 amplifier. Just beyond the band area was a little sink where we would brush our teeth, wash our hair, and take sponge baths before going off to our day jobs in the morning, and just beyond the sink was the “living room.” The living room consisted of my parents’ rattan porch furniture from when my father was stationed in Puerto Rico when they were just married. There were two armchairs, a couch, a coffee table, and a couple of end tables. On one of the end tables was a tiny black-and-white TV that my parents had given me one Christmas.
Tina and I slept in a double bed at the far end of the loft. We hung a bar from the ceiling to put our clothes on and it served as a sort of privacy screen, not that any of us had much privacy.
One night the three of us were watching TV when a startling blast of powdered glass sprayed all over us. We didn’t know what was happening, but when I walked over to the windows I found a bullet hole. We all got down on the floor. I turned out the lights and when it appeared that no other shots were coming, we went back to watching TV, feeling weird and scared.
We lived there for a couple of years. It was both heaven and hell. I’ll never forget how brave Tina was. You know, what was such a nice girl like her doing in a place like this? I know now that she did it for me, and if things had been different I would have done the same for her. Tina was smart, sexy, and cool and my love for her was immense. She was an artist with fine principles and I had no doubt that we would accomplish wonderful things together.
There were some big differences between uptown and downtown New York City back in those days. They were two completely different worlds, yet Tina, David, and I inhabited both. As much as we would have loved to just live the life of the artist, we had to support ourselves somehow and that meant day jobs if we wanted to have our evenings free. Our friends were a big help to us in finding work. Tina got a job as a salesgirl at the very chic ladies store Henri Bendel, thanks to Susan Dalglish, who was working there and had put in a good word for her. Jeff Turtletaub, our friend from RISD, was starting a new job at the Museum of Modern Art and gave his old job as a photostat man at an uptown ad agency to David. This meant David could quit his job as an usher at the Murray Hill Theatre; it was driving him crazy to watch the same movie over and over. Tina’s brother’s wonderful girlfriend, Julia MacFarlane, recommended me for a stock boy/shipping job at Design Research, which sold European-designed furniture, housewares, and fabrics. I called the manager, set up a meeting, told her Julia had sent me, and was hired on the spot. None of us were paid very much, but we made enough to pay our rent and buy some groceries and that’s all we needed. Interestingly, all three of our jobs were on Fifty-Seventh Street, the fanciest shopping street in the whole country.
Many of the best uptown art galleries were located on Fifty-Seventh, so during my lunch hour I could meet Tina at a gallery or we could walk over to Central Park and have a sandwich. It was not bad at all, at least for me. The stress of working at Bendel’s was a bit much, though, not just for Tina, but for all the girls who worked there. The pressure was on them to look great and to sell, sell, sell. When she graduated to selling shoes, Tina said the customers could be downright crazy, like insisting that their feet were smaller than they actually were, but she had some nice customers, too, like Cher, Bette Midler, and the young Tatum O’Neal.
I was happy with my day job at Design Research. I worked with a couple of poets and a couple of cool black guys and a whole store full of sophisticated, beautiful young women. The salesgirls were always completely sweet to the poets and me. Brian and Chuck and I would unload a big truck once a week and put the stuff in the stockroom or on the sales floor until it sold, and then we would wrap it up and ship it off to the customer or load it back onto a truck for delivery. We stocked designs by Marcel Breuer, Hans Wegner, Alvar Aalto, and Joe Colombo, among others. We also carried Marimekko apparel and fabrics. We had loads of famous customers, too. Jackie O would come in to shop with her sister, Lee Radziwill, and Truman Capote. Kurt Vonnegut, who always wore a trench coat with coffee stains on it, was a regular customer. John and Yoko came in once and bought an all-white leather sofa. Outside on the street, we spotted celebrities galore. Paul Newman and Robert Redford passed by the store chatting with each other on a fall afternoon. Peter Boyle would walk by chatting to himself. Liz Taylor, Diana Ross, Farah Fawcett, and, best of all, Catherine Deneuve were all frequent passersby. There was no threat of paparazzi then, except for Ron Galella, who mainly targeted Jackie O. I got a kick out of seeing these famous people. Some of them were guarded, but others would give you a smile and a wordless wink of recognition. We used to joke around about how we would be and what we would do if we were rich and famous.
After work I would usually take the F train from Fifty-third Street, near the Museum of Modern Art, down to the West Fourth Street Station. Then I would saunter east on Bleecker Street toward Bowery. If it was my turn to buy groceries, I would stop at the Grand Union at the corner of University Place, where I would usually pick up some pasta, red sauce, and salad to carry home and cook on our little hot plate. If I was feeling rich, I would buy a bottle of decent red wine at the liquor store at the corner of Bleecker, and
Lafayette. It was the closest liquor store to us that didn’t just cater to winos. Then I would continue down Bleecker schlepping my shopping bags to the Bowery with CBGB straight ahead. I’d walk down to Houston, speeding up so the bums wouldn’t bother me or ask me for money, and head east to Chrystie. It’s funny, but in a couple of years almost every lawyer or accountant we met would say, “Chrystie Street? I love Sammy’s! Have you ever been to Sammy’s?” Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse was a little oasis of kosher cuisine on the Lower East Side. It was old school and you would see limos parked outside during dinner hours. Music business execs loved that place. It’s still in business today, and I’ve still never been there.
We took turns cooking at the loft. David liked to cook and he was pretty good at it, but really, he would eat anything. One time he came home with some fish that he bought from a guy selling from the back of a truck that stunk to high heaven. I asked if we were really going to eat that and David said, “Well, I am!” as he fried it up on Tina’s little hot plate with fish grease splattering all over everything. He served nothing else with it, just a big plate of stinky fish. I had worked in a restaurant and tended to make things like chicken and pasta and omelettes. We substituted cottage cheese for ground beef in our spaghetti sauce to save money. We may have been poor, but we were not starving.
Almost every night after dinner, David and I would sit down at our instruments and fool around. You could call it jamming, but really it was the beginning of a musical search for a sound of our own. It was important to us that, while rocking, we did not have a predictable rock and roll sound. It had to be a sound that was all ours. I had no doubt that we could find it. I didn’t yet know about the “Law of Attraction,” but I was visualizing success every day and every night. I did have some doubts about finding other players who would share our aesthetic to join the band. Most of the bands we were seeing that had a unique thing going on were not about to quit their band to join ours, but that was okay with us. We were just getting started. We were finding our way.