by Chris Frantz
Tina had faith in us and encouraged us every day, but not everyone understood why I was forming a band with David. He was awkward and, with what we know now, on the high functioning end of the spectrum. At the first meeting, he did not inspire one’s confidence. When my father, rest his soul, came to visit us in New York, David was unable to look him in the eye and barely spoke. While we were all having a beer, David turned and left without even saying goodbye. My father thought David was “a very thin reed to lean on.” I said that I could see why he felt that way. I told him that one time Tina’s parents had invited David and me to dinner at their home. David was painfully gauche that night. While sitting at the dinner table, he seemed to not really understand table manners. At one point, he lined up a row of peas on his knife and let them roll into his mouth. Then he did it again. I know—I said David was different. But when I played music with him, I liked what was happening. His style meshed well with my own ideas of being different and less predictable. He was a superb rhythm guitarist. He was also very willing to make an unexpected move, both musically and physically. He got into music to get out of himself. When you played music with David you came to realize that his eccentricities were not an act. There was something deeply moving about his determination and heartfelt efforts to perform a song, even in the early days. In spite of his shyness, he craved being the center of attention. He was always doing some weird thing like not joining in on a conversation, but then quoting that conversation in one of his song lyrics. At a party he would sometimes stand alone and not speak to anyone while looking very uncomfortable. People would watch him like they might watch a train wreck. Some people felt uncomfortable being near David; others were strangely attracted to him. I knew he wanted to be a star but we still had no idea who would be the front person in our band. David was a very unlikely front person so everything was up in the air.
We went to CBGB on the weekends. Nothing happened there during the week, but weekends slowly began to pick up. One Friday night in late 1974, David and I heard a band called Angel and the Snake at CBGB. There were maybe twenty or thirty people in the place, if that. The lead singer was heartbreakingly beautiful and her voice was clear, sweet, and unaffected. She captivated me. It was impossible not to be smitten. After their set she was standing by the bar. With David standing uncomfortably behind me, I offered to buy her a drink and told her David and I were starting a new band and that we were wondering if she might be interested in singing with us. I said, “My name is Chris Frantz and this is David Byrne.” She looked at us, smiling, and said, “My name is Debbie Harry. I already have a band, but you can buy me a drink.” Imagine what might have been if she had said yes?
At the bar at CBGB.
Television were the big men on campus at CBGB. They had been among the first bands to play there and their music was seriously compelling. They built the first stage at CBGB. They only played original songs. At the time, they had dueling front men in Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell, who had been friends in the Sanford School, a private boarding school in Delaware, before they ran off to join the circus in New York. Tom played guitar and Richard played bass. I heard that Richard was from Kentucky like me, so I liked him more already. The drummer, Billy Ficca, hit hard but had a jazzy style of playing that sounded different from any other rock drummer I had heard. The real musical star of the band, to me, was guitarist Richard Lloyd. He was a fiery player who alternated rhythm and lead parts that were both supercool and smoking hot. According to Tina, he was also the cutest member of the band. Television had a kind of messianic, beat-poet sensibility. I heard shades of the Stones, the Byrds, Neil Young, and Jimi Hendrix in their performances. They were very impressive and highly original.
The first time I saw Patti Smith play at CBGB, I had no idea who she was. I soon found out. She was a downtown poet who read at St. Mark’s Church in the East Village. Her work was in the tradition of the Beats like Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. She was accompanied only by Lenny Kaye on electric guitar, and she performed many of the songs that were later recorded for her first album, Horses. She chewed gum a mile a minute like a schoolyard speed freak. Lenny wore a brilliantly colored tie-dyed T-shirt and his long hair was down to his waist. I thought, Where am I, Woodstock? But then they started to play, beginning with “Real Good Time Together” by the Velvet Underground into “Hunter Gets Captured by the Game” by the Marvelettes. I thought, How thrilling is this? Then they dropped the bomb on us with her unique cover version of Them’s “Gloria” that began with Patti’s now-famous line, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” By the end of the song, hairs were standing up on the back of my neck and the smallish crowd of fifty or so people applauded with tremendous approval. By the end of the set, I was a fan. Patti said that we could buy her 45 single at Bleecker Bob’s Records. The next day I headed over to Bleecker Bob’s and who was behind the counter but Lenny Kaye himself! Lenny was friendly and warm. I congratulated him on last night’s show and laid down my money for Patti Smith’s “Piss Factory” and also Television’s “Little Johnny Jewel.” I was really excited by all of these new underground bands at CBGB. They were clearly going places. I wanted to go, too.
By mid-November of ’74 Tina, David, and I were getting into the swing of New York City life. In those days you could have a lot of fun with no money. Occasionally we would go out dancing at various loft parties and private underground discos where you had to be careful with the punch. If someone passed you a joint, watch out, it might be laced with angel dust.
Once in a while we would splurge on something big like a dinner at Puglia’s in Little Italy or a Roxy Music Show at the Academy of Music, but mostly we enjoyed the hospitality of our friends. We did some entertaining in our loft as well. Artists really relied on other artists and our friends were always good to us. Like any other community, artists influence each other and collaborations can lead to marvelous surprises. Looking back at all the excitement of being a young artist in New York at that time, the most momentous day by far for me and for our band was the day that Tina walked into our loft carrying a 1963 Fender Precision Bass Guitar she had purchased at We Buy Guitars up on Forty-Eighth Street. She had been saving money from work and, when her parents sent her a check for $100 for her twenty-fourth birthday, she was able to buy it. She had done her research; this was a great bass guitar. It was almost as big as she was. I had been trying to convince Tina to join the band for a long time, but she had always declined for very understandable reasons. She thought rock and roll was a boys’ club and, at the time, she was right. Rock and roll had mostly been a guy thing unless you were a singer, and there was the whole overtly sexist thing that so many bands displayed. She was also concerned about neglecting her painting. She had played acoustic guitar in a folksy style and she had played the flute and she could read music a bit, but she had never rocked a Fender Bass. In spite of it all, she decided to make the leap, and I can’t tell you how happy and thrilled this made me. She still needed an amplifier, and she was saving for one, but now we were a trio.
Tina jumped right in on bass. She may have been a beginner, but she was serious. She was ready to play bass at any time and we rehearsed and wrote songs together almost every night after work. Most of our songs grew out of extended improvisations. One thing RISD had instilled in us was that it was okay to be influenced by those who have gone before you, but you must always add something that is unique unto yourself to the work. Otherwise, it’s imitation. So, that was our musical philosophy. You can say what you will about our technique, but from our very first show we sounded like nobody else.
Despite our bad neighborhood and raw surroundings, we had plenty of visitors. One fellow in particular, Michael “Wayne” Zieve, came to visit us and did two very important things. First, he wrote some lyrics for a song titled “Artists Only” and gave them to us to use. Second, he saw that we were searching for a band name. We had been experimenting with names and we would even put them on my bass drum head
with stick-on letters to see how we liked them. We tried the Vogue Dots, the Billionaires, the Tunnel Tones, the Videos, but none of them stuck. Wayne said, “I was reading TV Guide and they had a glossary of television cameraman terms. When you have a shot of just the announcer’s head and shoulders it’s called a Talking Head. It’s the most boring but also the most informative format in TV. I think you should call your band Talking Heads.” We all agreed that it was a brilliant name that did not connote any particular style of music. Tina and I each had T-shirts made up that said TALKING HEADS on the front in big silver letters and put them on and took a walk to Washington Square Park. My shirt was red and Tina’s was black. People would look at us and smile. One guy asked, “Are you guys in a band?” Another said, “Oh man, that’s a terrible name!” We were getting more positive reactions than negative, though, and the name stuck. We became Talking Heads, and today that T-shirt of Tina’s is on display in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
15
TALKING HEADS’ FIRST SHOW
Now that we had a name and enough songs written to play a short set, we decided to go for it. Yes, we were still very raw and jittery and we did have apprehensions, but we felt that the time was right. We could see that there really was something happening with the new bands playing at CBGB. It was not really big enough to be called a movement. It was a small scene with mostly just a few friends in attendance. It was good that the audience was small because if you screwed up not very many people would know. Artistically speaking, the bands playing CBGB were very strong. They were also diverse. Imagine a place where you could see the Patti Smith Group, Television, the Ramones, and Blondie on any given weekend. We wanted in. I went to speak to the owner, Hilly Kristal.
I walked over to CBGB one spring afternoon in May 1975. The Bowery was sunny and bright but you could smell piss and other nasty things wafting in the breeze. As I opened the door to CBGB, the smells did not go away but came in layers to include beer, roach spray, dog doo, and Chanel No. 5.
Hilly was sitting at the bar with his Saluki dog, Jonathan, who was allowed to poop wherever he wanted. Nobody cleaned it up. There were no other customers so I asked Hilly if I could talk to him about something. He nodded yes. I said, “My friends and I have a band and we’d like to audition to play here.”
Hilly chuckled and asked, “What kind of music do you play?” I said, “We play in a style of our own.” He chuckled even harder and said in his very deep and resonant voice, “Well, I could put you on before the Ramones on Thursday. If I like your live show, you can play before them this weekend. There is no money for the audition and you’ll have to work out something with the Ramones on the weekend.” I thanked Hilly, shook his hand, and hurried back to the loft to tell David and Tina.
With this good news we started making a set list and running sets of all the songs we’d learned as professionally as possible:
“The Girls Want to Be with the Girls”
“Psycho Killer”
“With Our Love”
“Artists Only”
“I Want to Live”
“Warning Sign”
“Tentative Decisions”
“Love Building on Fire”
“I Wish You Wouldn’t Say That”
“96 Tears”
“No Compassion”
We didn’t tell very many people about our audition. We only mentioned it to a few close friends. The Ramones did not attract very many people, either. They said no one wanted to come to this dump on the Bowery. They were from Forest Hills, Queens, and that was a long subway ride for their friends.
The original stage at CBGB was not big but we were only a trio so space was not a problem. As we set up our gear, we realized there were no monitors, which meant we would not really be able to hear ourselves. But of course we didn’t have any monitors in our rehearsals, either, where David sang through a little guitar amp. It would be fine.
We decided to wear black and white. I wore black Levi’s with a white oxford cloth Brooks Brothers shirt and black wraparound shades. I felt clean cut, but hip. David was dressed all in black with gray suede Hush Puppy loafers. Tina looked chic, as usual, in a white shirt, black trousers, and red sneakers.
We played our set as best we knew how and we made a few mistakes, but nobody seemed to notice. The audience of about twenty people clapped dutifully after the first couple of songs, but as we warmed up, so did they. It was wild to play for real people in a real underground rock club, and we loved it. Finally we had arrived in New York. To me, it felt like my dream band had finally materialized. I was in love with our new band and this was the life for me. There was no doubt in my mind that we would succeed.
As we cleared the stage to make way for the Ramones, Hilly said we had passed the audition.
I heard Johnny Ramone, the guitarist, say to him, “Yeah, they suck, so they can open for us. They’ll make us look good.”
Our first show at CBGB.
On the weekend there were more people in the audience, but attendance was still pretty sparse. Maybe we had fifty people in the house, but that was fifty more than would have been there before Hilly started booking bands. We were all hoping this show would lead to many more. Yann Weymouth and Julia McFarlane brought the famous rock writer from Life magazine, Albert Goldman. Albert laughed and said we reminded him of an episode of The Twilight Zone. My favorite coworkers from Design Research came. A group of our RISD friends were there and between sets we all ran across the street to Jamie and Susan Dalglish’s loft at 52 Bond Street and partied.
Tina, David, and I were elated. With the exception of Johnny Ramone, nobody told us we sucked. Quite the opposite: People were intrigued by our quirky little band.
Guys were entranced by Tina, such a pretty thing with so much power. This didn’t bother me a bit. I was confident that Tina and I already had a very strong bond. David made a big impression, too. Even in these earliest shows he delivered the songs in a little high-pitched voice and an uneasy earnestness that was very uncommon in rock and roll. After the weekend, Hilly wondered how soon we could come back. We said, “As soon as you like.”
16
THE RECORD COMPANIES
There were a few daring record company guys who started showing up at our gigs. Most of the record company people did not want to come down to the Bowery to see a new band. It was way out of their comfort zone. They found new bands from their manager friends. Mark Spector, from Columbia Records, was one of the few who did come to CBGB. After seeing us play several shows, he took us into the famous Columbia Studios to record a live demo. The room was cavernous and could accommodate a full symphony orchestra. It was considered to be the best sounding studio in New York. Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Leonard Cohen, Laura Nyro, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Paul McCartney had all made records there. The music for West Side Story was recorded there. We drove uptown in Tina’s little car with our gear and carried it up to the studio. As we were setting up and the engineer was getting his sounds, Mark explained that he wanted us to run through all the original songs we knew as if it were a live show. We were recording live to two-track tape so there would be no fixing or overdubs. We ran through the set in less than an hour and then listened to the playback.
In some ways we sounded like a little toy band, but at the same time had an undeniably downtown edge. There was nothing smooth or easily digestible about our sound. Still, Mark was pleased with the result and, as an A&R—Artists and Repertoire—man, would play it for his bosses, letting them know that it was our first time ever in a recording studio.
Matthew King Kaufman, prowling downtown New York looking for talent, was another guy who expressed an early interest in Talking Heads. He had a small independent company called Berserkley Records in Berkeley, California. He had recently released the self-titled The Modern Lovers album, which we loved and played a lot in our loft. He offered to record a demo for us, too, and booked us into K&K Studio City in Great Neck, Long Island. K&K stood for Jerry Kasenetz
and Jeff Katz, who wrote, produced, and performed the 1910 Fruitgum Company, Ohio Express, The Music Explosion, and Crazy Elephant. They were the undisputed kings of bubblegum music. We had added one of their big hits, “1-2-3 Red Light,” to our live shows just for fun, so the irony of working in their studio was not lost on us. Matthew and his engineer, Glen Kolotkin, had us record just three songs: “Artists Only,” “Psycho Killer,” and “First Week, Last Week.” This time we were recording to sixteen-track tape and we spent more time getting the drum sounds right. Matthew seemed very pleased with the results and offered us a record deal. We told him we’d have to think about it and he said, “No problem, man, and you can play this demo for any record company you want.” We didn’t do that because, on close listening, it was clear to us that we needed more time to develop our skills. Live we were already very strong, but making a great recording was another skill set altogether. In a live setting, you are going for a compelling performance even if the playing is not always perfect. On a recording you are going for something that sounds good, hopefully even exciting after repeated listenings. We were learning how to do this as we moved forward.