by Chris Frantz
We sent the Columbia demo to Bob Feiden, one of Clive Davis’s Arista Records guys who had signed Patti Smith and Lou Reed, but when I called him about it after a few weeks, he said he’d lost it.
Then one night in November 1975, when we were opening for the Ramones, Seymour Stein heard us play quite by accident. He had come to hear the Ramones and was standing outside CBGB talking to Lenny Kaye when we opened our set with “Love Building on Fire.” To hear Seymour tell it, he was mesmerized by the song and the sound of our little trio and was drawn to the front of the stage as if by some mysterious force “like a snake charmer.” I remember seeing him standing there as if he were a statue, eyes popping out. After the show, he asked Tina if he could help her take her equipment off the stage. He said, “I’m Seymour Stein of Sire Records. Can we talk?” Seymour always says it was David he was speaking to, but really it was me. I said, “We know who you are, Seymour, but now is not a good time. Could you call us tomorrow?” I gave him the number at our loft.
* * *
The next day Seymour called, excited. He wanted us to make a record for Sire. We invited him over to talk. We liked him and we appreciated his enthusiasm but we told him he would have to wait. We weren’t ready to make a record yet. We were certain of that. We realized that if we made a mediocre-sounding record the first time out, we might never get a second chance. Seymour was truly surprised that we said no, not yet. He was, in fact, shocked! So, he waited—not patiently—but he waited.
Meanwhile, we started talking to each other about adding a fourth member, ideally someone who could play keyboards and guitar. But who?
17
THE STARS OF CBGB
On some nights, CBGB on the Bowery was like a beacon. I felt it was a sign of great things to come. On other nights, it was an oasis. It was a place where I could be refreshed, and gaze upon all the new rock stars. Other nights, it was a shelter, a refuge from the harsh reality that was life in New York City.
* * *
One winter night during a freezing cold blizzard when the snow was up to my kneecaps and still coming down and blowing sideways across Chrystie Street, I decided to make the three-and-a-half-block trek to CBGB. I was wearing a knit ski cap, a wool tartan scarf from Brooks Brothers, and a white Swiss Army sheepskin overcoat with black engineer boots. It was bitterly cold and I trudged as fast as I could to the welcoming interior lights of CBGB. I pulled open the door. The place was nearly empty, but standing in front me by the bar was David Johansen of the New York Dolls. I knew David a little bit from hanging out at CBGB. He was wearing a light blue satin suit, almost a tuxedo, with no shirt underneath. I said, “Hi, David.” He took one look at me, had another sip of his cocktail, and said, “You know, Chris, rock stahs, we don’t dress fuh the weathuh.” Another thing he told me was, “Chris, you’re never going to make it in this business. You’re too nice!”
* * *
One night in late fall of 1975, Tina, David, and I arrived home after work at our building on Chrystie Street to find the street blocked off. Several fire engines and emergency vehicles were just arriving on the scene. Our building was on fire. You could see the flames and smoke billowing out the windows on the fifth floor. Our loft was on the ninth. It was a dreadful feeling to think that we could lose everything we had. And it was cold outside. The fire chief said there was nothing we could do, let his men do their job and come back in a couple of hours. We decided to go to CBGB. It was 7:00 P.M. and Hilly Kristal was the only person there. We told him what had happened. He expressed his concern and told us to come on in and have a seat at the bar. He served each of us a pint of draught beer and a big bowl of his homemade chili. Over the years there have been many jokes and stories told about the chili served at CBGB. People say that they wouldn’t dare eat it—imagine what was in it! Well, I can tell you that we three Talking Heads ate the chili that night with great gusto and appreciation. I’ll tell you something else, too: It was really delicious. After a while, we steeled ourselves and walked back to our building. We were in luck. The firemen had put out the fire, which had been in a sweatshop that made polyester clothing. Polyester burns really hot and the fumes were toxic. Our loft was unharmed, but because of the strong fumes of burning plastic, we would have to sleep elsewhere that night. David went to stay with Andrea. Thankfully, Yann and Julia welcomed us to their loft, a half hour away by the F train in Long Island City.
From my first visit, CBGB held a position of great importance in my life. First, it was our ambition to play there. Then, when we were performing there, it was both an incubator for our baby band and our launching pad out into the world. Finally, when we were “too big” to play there anymore, it became a place that we would return to see old friends and check out the latest new talent.
An early CBGB friend and fan was Lenny Kaye. He was full of encouragement and warmth. As guitarist in the Patti Smith Group, in my mind he was at the pinnacle of the CBGB hierarchy. When I was still at RISD, I had bought the great album he curated and compiled called Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965–1968, and we played several tracks from that album with our band, the Artistics. Lenny always came to our early shows when sometimes there were only ten or twenty people there, and we could hear him cheering at the end of each song. On one hot summer night in 1975, he introduced us to the great Patti Smith herself. She looked us over while snapping her chewing gum and said, “Oh, yeah. You’re that art school band. I wish my parents were rich enough to send me to art school.” She turned and started taking to someone else. That was it, end of conversation. It was not the conversation we had been hoping for. Lenny had also started seeing Tina’s sister, Laura, and I think Patti put an end to that. When I run into Lenny now, he never fails to mention that he still has a soft spot in his heart for the Weymouth girls. As a musician, author, and producer, Lenny is in a class by himself.
Richard Hell was the bass player for Television, and also a poet and the author of the song “Blank Generation.” Richard was definitely a kingpin at CBGB. With his choppy hair and torn clothing, he pretty much created the punk look, which was copied, stylized, and sold in the UK, and later in Los Angeles, by Malcolm McClaren. Richard was from Kentucky like me but when I first mentioned the connection to him, he pretended he didn’t hear me. Later, we talked a little bit about Lexington, Kentucky, but it was clear that he had no great love for bluegrass. Richard quit Television and formed the Heartbreakers with Johnny Thunders. From what I heard, in 1976 Johnny was in Florida on the ill-fated final tour of the New York Dolls when he saw posters for a band from Gainesville, Florida, called Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. He liked the name “the Heartbreakers” and thought these guys will never go anywhere and decided to use the name for his new band. So, Richard was a Heartbreaker for a while but soon formed Richard Hell & the Voidoids and signed a recording contract with Sire about the same time Talking Heads did.
Richard Lloyd of Television was one of the best guitarists at CBGB, maybe the very best. We heard stories that he had been taught to play guitar by Jimi Hendrix, which, while only partially true, explained how Richard’s guitar work combined rhythm and melody to great effect and drove Television’s sound to a higher level. While Richard was not exactly chatty back then, we had a good rapport. He has written that he did have a big crush on Tina. He was not alone. Richard Hell and Dee Dee Ramone also had a thing for Tina. I was not surprised or jealous that these guys admired Tina. It merely showed they had good taste in women as well as in music. Television had founded the music scene at CBGB. While some say that other artists such as Wayne County had played there first, it was Television who first approached Hilly about doing a residency there. When Hilly said that he preferred country and bluegrass music, Television said, “Oh, we can play that!” Of course they never did, but that’s how they got their feet in the door. They even built the first stage, which was barely big enough for the four of them. After we had more or less established ourselves at CBGB, we approached Television abou
t doing double bills together—with them getting top billing, of course. After thinking it over, Tom Verlaine, who saw himself as the leader of the band, agreed. Television and Talking Heads was a bill that not only packed the place but also attracted a diverse crowd of people, including music lovers from as far away as the UK, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Japan.
Roberta Bayley was the very smart and pretty, no-nonsense young woman who took the money at the door. She was originally chosen to do this by Television, but I guess Hilly never saw any need to hire anyone else. Roberta was also a very edgy photographer who shot the Ramones’ first album cover and many of the great early band photos at CBGB. Later, when things got kind of crazy, the very wonderful Deerfrance also helped out at the door before she went off on tour singing with John Cale and relocated to Paris. Between Hilly and the people working the door there was a policy to not charge band members for admission, even when they weren’t performing, so CBGB became a real gathering place for downtown musicians. If the bartenders, Richard and Merv, liked you and your band, beer was on the house, but they did have a full bar if you wanted something harder. Hilly’s drink of choice was brandy and Fresca. I never tried that combination, but I did have a few Stoli and grapefruit juice.
After one of our first sets at CBGB, Johnny Thunders came up to me and asked if we were a feminist band. One-third of the band was female and playing bass, which was highly unusual. Also, he had just heard us play a song called “The Girls Want to Be with the Girls” so it was a fair question. I told him, “Yes, we are.” And why not? We knew from the start that we could never beat the Rolling Stones or the Who at their own game, so we would have to take a different tack.
Dee Dee Ramone was one of my first friends at CBGB. Joey was friendly, too, but Dee Dee had a lot more to say. I remember once he was trying to quit drugs and he said to me, “When you’re not getting high, the days are so long! It’s a real shocker.”
The guys in the Patti Smith Group were all cool. Besides Lenny, Ivan Kral was the most friendly to me. Ivan was Czech and very handsome. He played the bass and the guitar. Early on at CBGB he shot a black-and-white film, now an underground classic, called Blank Generation. Talking Heads was lucky to be part of that documentary. He had the most adorable girlfriend named Lynette. Both of them were bright, beautiful, and as sweet as could be.
Patti’s keyboard player was Richard “DNV” Sohl. When he became a member of the band the sound took a quantum leap. He never overplayed but always added lovely textures and colors to the overall sound. He was beautiful, too, in a Death in Venice way.
For a long time Patti Smith had no drummer, but when she added Jay Dee Daugherty, that’s when the band really started to rock. Jay Dee had come to New York from Southern California as the drummer for the Mumps, but it was with Patti that he found fame and maybe a little fortune.
The Mumps were Lance Loud’s band. Lance was a very wild guy who had experienced fame young when his family starred in the early documentary series An American Family. We got along well together. Lance’s musical partner was Kristian Hoffman, who moved to New York with Lance from Southern California. The Mumps were a tight little band with Rob Duprey on guitar and Jay Dee Daugherty on drums, until Jay Dee joined the Patti Smith Group. Kristian later worked with Lydia Lunch, James White and the Blacks, Klaus Nomi, and the fabulous Ann Magnuson. Rob Duprey went on to work with Iggy Pop.
The Shirts were all from Brooklyn, which in those days seemed a million miles from Manhattan. They all lived together in a brownstone and kindly invited us to make some demos in their basement studio that their good friend J. R. Rost was putting together. The Shirts signed to Capitol Records, but lead singer Annie Golden left the band to be in Milos Forman’s movie version of Hair. Then she went on to Broadway and eventually to HBO’s Orange Is the New Black. Despite many highs and lows, including the untimely death of guitarist Ronnie Ardito, the band has persevered and continues to record. I particularly love one song they wrote called “Tina of the Talking Heads.” You can imagine why. The “While David Byrne was squawking / Tina was pure white chocolate” kills me every time I hear it.
Mink DeVille was Willy DeVille’s band. He was one of the most colorful denizens of CBGB. Rumor had it he was a Latino from San Francisco when in fact he was a suburban guy from Stamford, Connecticut. He sure did have some soul, though. His vocals were terrific and his band was cool. He had a great drummer named Manfred. Manfred—whose real name was Thomas Robert Allen Jr.—and I used to chat, but conversations at CBGB were often very fragmented because of the volume of the music. You had to shout to be heard and that soon became tiresome.
Robert Gordon fronted a hard-rock band called Tuff Darts. Those guys were super tight and had real tough musical chops, but Robert departed after a few years to pursue his true love, rockabilly music. He worked with Link Wray, Chris Spedding, and Danny Gatton while Tuff Darts recorded an album for Sire with another singer, Tommy Frenzy.
They say Wayne County—later Jayne County, after she transitioned—played CBGB first and that may be. Wayne grew up in Georgia and still had a strong Southern accent. Her band was first called Wayne County & the Backstreet Boys and later changed to Wayne County & the Electric Chairs. She had a wild sense of humor and had been part of the downtown underground scene for years. She wrote songs that were almost parodies of rock songs and were vulgar in the extreme. My favorite was “(If You Don’t Want to Fuck Me, Baby) Fuck Off.” She taunted the homophobes and everyone else at CBGB. One famous night when Tina and I were watching, Handsome Dick Manitoba of the Dictators was heckling her and she said that if Handsome Dick didn’t stop he would be sorry. Handsome Dick continued to yell obscenities at the stage and Wayne stepped forward and swung her microphone stand like a battle-ax onto Handsome Dick’s neck. That was the end of the heckling. An ambulance was called and Dick was carried off to the hospital. Dick survived and later, in CGBG style, a benefit concert was staged to help with Handsome Dick Manitoba’s medical bills. I’m pretty sure Wayne County was one of the performers.
John Cale was a frequent performer at CBGB. After his ups and downs with the Velvet Underground, he produced some classic records for Nico, like The Marble Index, Desertshore, and The End; for the Stooges’ self-titled debut album; and even the demos for the original Modern Lovers that were later released as their first album on the Berserkley label. He also recorded a number of great solo records that we loved. Recently he had returned to New York to produce Horses for the Patti Smith Group and he was performing again. He put together a great band and everybody at CBGB loved his version of the Modern Lovers’ “Pablo Picasso.” John was a Welshman with an appetite for booze, drugs, and music, like almost everyone else at CBGB. He had already taken a few laps around the track, but he was still going strong.
The Marbles were also early on the scene, an example of how diversified the musical styles were at CBGB. With Fab Four haircuts and a very clean, buttoned-down appearance, they were pure power pop before power pop was a thing.
The Dead Boys came to CBGB from Cleveland, Ohio. We had heard that Cleveland was one of America’s great rock and roll towns and the Dead Boys were as hard rocking as they come. Singer Stiv Bators claimed to have been the fan that gave Iggy Pop the jar of peanut butter that he famously smeared all over his shirtless torso. Guitarist Cheetah Chrome was a powerful player in the tradition—if you could call it that—of the Stooges and the MC5. Stiv, Cheetah, and Johnny Blitz had all been in one formation of the legendary Cleveland band Rocket from the Tombs, so they had something of a pedigree already.
Can you imagine walking into a dive bar on the Bowery, making your way to the stage, and seeing one of history’s great beauties for the first time? Imagine then that this woman can sing in a voice that speaks sweetly and directly to you as if there was no one else in the room. This was my experience with Debbie Harry. Her band—originally called Angel and the Snake, but now Blondie—was still finding their way and other bands kept poaching her players. Ivan
Kral left to join the Patti Smith Group. Fred Smith left to join Television. When I first met guitarist Chris Stein—who was Debbie’s boyfriend and songwriting partner—he looked a bit like a better-looking Alice Cooper. Drummer Clem Burke was a friendly guy who, while standing at the bar, asked me if I thought he resembled anyone. I was stumped. Then Clem said, “Some people tell me I look like Paul McCartney.” Keyboard player Jimmy Destri insisted on auditioning for Talking Heads when he heard we were considering adding a fourth member. Understandably, Debbie was annoyed at this. Musicians jumped ship from Blondie in the early days because they thought they could do better with a band that was getting more accolades in the music press like Patti Smith, or Television, or even Talking Heads. Bass player Gary Valentine even went solo after the first album didn’t do so well. Some people can recognize a diamond in the rough, and some people can’t.
There were some serious journalists down at CBGB, too. Our favorite, a nightly regular, was James Wolcott. Jim was writing for The Village Voice and wrote a great piece called “Tired of Glitter?: The Conservative Impulse of the New Rock Underground.” Of all the bands to choose from, the Voice put Talking Heads’ picture on the cover, probably because we had the shortest hair. Jim Wolcott seemed to get our music immediately, even in this early raw stage. He was both friend and fan. We liked him and his friend Trixie A. Balm, who was also writing for the Voice. They were smart and sympathetic to where we were coming from. John Rockwell from The New York Times was also very early in writing about CBGB and the bands that played there. He was more formal than Jim Wolcott but also very astute. Robert Christgau and Richard Goldstein were prowling around the scene, too. The great Lester Bangs arrived from out of nowhere one day and was hooked on the Ramones. He didn’t get Talking Heads and didn’t like us at first, but one day he told me he’d had an epiphany. He said, “Now I get it. You guys are so uncool, you’re cool.” That was one way to look at it.