by Chris Frantz
After well over an hour of sweating in the heat outside we were allowed to come in with barely enough time to set up our equipment before the show started. When we got to our tiny dressing room we were greeted by none other than supermodel Jerry Hall, Bryan’s girlfriend, who said, “Hi! How are youuuuuu?” in her Texas drawl. She was so beautiful and refined. Her skin, her long wavy hair, her almond-shaped eyes, and her figure: Everything about her was perfect. We recognized her from the cover of Roxy Music’s Siren album. Tina told her that Bryan must be a little insecure to make us wait outside on the street. Jerry Hall said, “Oh, I don’t know about that. I think he’s just plain ruuuuude!” Not long after that she was dating Mick Jagger.
We hurried up and got ready for the show. Let’s just say that that night at the Bottom Line was like a homecoming for Talking Heads: We stepped onstage to a loud, long, and rousing ovation. We played our opening set with everything we had in us and then some. It was hot and we were sweating until we were drenched, but our playing was flawlessly funky. I was having an out-of-body experience behind the drums. On my drum riser, I felt like I was floating above the audience and they were all smiling back at me. The whole band was great. We stole the show from Bryan Ferry. He was good, maybe even great, but we were the ones who rocked the party that night. In his review of the night, John Rockwell from The New York Times wrote, “The show opened with Talking Heads, who were even better than Mr. Ferry. This was the lower Manhattan group’s ‘big-time’ New York debut, after a hugely successful tour of Europe. It was also the first time that this observer, long an enthusiast of the original trio, had heard them fully rehearsed in their new quartet configuration. Jerry Harrison, the new guitarist and keyboard player, is now fully integrated into the band’s idiosyncratically abrupt, exactly colored sound. Talking Heads played mostly new material on Thursday, and much of it had an almost disco feeling. This is interesting because it offers one possible avenue to commercial success, and because it formalizes a similarity between minimalist disco (K.C. and the Sunshine Band) and minimalist underground rockers that had never previously been made overt.”
Mission accomplished, Tina and I flew back to Sea Island the next morning for Honeymoon Part 2. We really relaxed into a couple of more days of sea, sex, and sun.
It seemed so short, though. On Sunday, we started the drive home to New York, going up the Georgia coast through wonderful Charleston, South Carolina. We spent the night in a very cheap motel (Free TV!) on Emerald Isle, North Carolina, a place that I knew from my youth, and frolicked in the big waves of the Atlantic Ocean. We ate fried fish and shrimp and hushpuppies and washed it all down with icy bottles of beer. We went to a disco and danced to “Rock Steady” and “I Feel Love.” We slept like babies. The next morning we took a wake-up swim in the sea before driving all the way back to New York and the real nitty-gritty, but I wasn’t worried and neither was Tina. We were good together.
32
THE SUMMER OF SAM
Tina and I returned to our loft in Long Island City to find that David, who was not exactly a people person, had moved his houseguest from London into our place without even asking. Leigh Blake was a journalist and fashion person who had interviewed us over in the UK. We liked Leigh. She was smart and fun, but we had just been married and had not been expecting to have a new roommate. She had managed to get herself to New York but now she was broke and had nowhere to live, so we took her in. In appreciation, she gave Tina a beautiful Kenzo dress and a set of British National Health hospital pajamas. Tina looked smashing in both. Because she was good with the press, we asked Leigh to be our unofficial publicist. We already had a publicist, but Leigh could help, and she was happy to do so. We had a lot of fun together.
We had four nights, July 5–8, booked at a famous nightclub called the Village Gate on the corner of Thompson and Bleecker Streets. The Village Gate was a basement jazz club that had featured Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Tito Puente, Nina Simone, and Aretha Franklin, among many other big names. Jimi Hendrix and the Velvet Underground had played there, too. Now the Village Gate was booking Talking Heads, Blondie, and the Patti Smith Group during the month of July. We had a different support band each night. We especially liked the Erasers, who were an all-girl outfit and friends of ours.
This is the set list from our first night:
“Love Building on Fire”
“Uh-oh, Love Comes to Town”
“Don’t Worry About the Government”
“Take Me to the River” (Al Green)
“Happy Day”
“The Book I Read”
“New Feeling”
“Pulled Up”
“I’m Not in Love”
“Psycho Killer”
“No Compassion”
“Warning Sign”
“Love Is All Around” (The Troggs)
This was the time when the .44 Caliber Killer, later known as Son of Sam, was stalking the city, shooting young women and their lovers. As if New York did not feel dangerous enough already, now there was a killer on the loose. People were uneasy and wondering where he would kill next. There was also an interminable heat wave going on. Even the toughest New Yorkers were teetering on the edge of sanity.
On July 13, Tina and I decided to have a little barbeque on the roof of our loft. Thanks to a slight breeze coming from the East River, it was cooler up there than it was inside. We were going to start mixing our album the next day and everyone was in the mood for a celebration. We were drinking wine and beer and grilling hamburgers and chicken as we gazed at the sunset over Manhattan. From our rooftop you could see most of downtown, midtown, the Upper East Side, Harlem, and the Bronx. As the sky became darker and darker, the lights of the city came on. I was watching the cars zooming across the 59th Street Bridge when I noticed something strange. All the lights in the Bronx had gone off. There was only darkness. As I was pointing this out to Tina and our friends, the lights of Harlem went off. One by one, the Upper East Side, then midtown and, finally, downtown went dark. We all just watched in amazement at the abruptly dark outline of the New York City skyline. Thankfully, the lights were on in Long Island City and would remain on. We went downstairs to turn on the TV. The news was not good. In some parts of town looting was going on. In other parts of town fires were raging out of control. I’ve heard some people say that hip-hop was born that night when future DJs and rappers could find turntables, mixers, microphones, and PA systems by smashing the windows of their favorite electronics store and walking right in. Any way you look at it, New York was madness that night.
The next day was not any better. Even in daylight, there was still burning and looting in some areas. No one could get to work and the news was telling everyone to stay home. It was still hot as hell and, of course, there was no air-conditioning. Eventually we got a call from Ed Stasium that the mixing would begin at Media Sound on Fifty-seventh Street later in the week if possible. The power came back on in most areas after twenty-five hours, but there was widespread arson and looting. More than a thousand fires had been set and something like 1,600 stores were broken into.
When things settled down, we entered Media Sound on Fifty-Seventh Street, which had once been a church, with an air of confidence. We felt as if we had great tracks and we believed that Ed would take them to an even higher level in the mix. Mixing is when you take your master tape with sixteen or twenty-four or more tracks recorded on it and “mix” it down to two stereo tracks, left and right. You can add equalization and effects and delays as you do the mix to make the record sound as sonically exciting and interesting as possible.
We had booked the studio at Media Sound during the day. Aerosmith was working on Draw the Line in the same room at night. Tina and I were the first in our group to arrive and, when we walked into the control room, the first thing we saw was that the huge plate glass window looking out into the studio had been completely wallpapered with pages from sleazy, hard-core porno mags. It was a really bad vibe for Tina, and I was not v
ery happy about it, either. I pulled them all down and put them in a paper bag for Aerosmith to enjoy someplace else. I’m not one to act holier than thou, but ugh! I teased Jerry about it because he was always saying what a great band Aerosmith was.
Ed got to work. Tony came and went, talking about bullets, as in “My latest record is number 10 with a bullet in Billboard but it’s only number 19 with no bullet in Cashbox!” Having a bullet meant the record was expected to rise up the chart. This was all new to us, but we didn’t care about bullets. We were happy to have any record at all. Mixing is a very detailed process and not for the uneducated ear. You have to be able to listen attentively to the same song and various elements of the song coming in and out all day long without losing focus. Some of us are better at this than others. Ed was really good. He was using noise gates on every track to lower the noise floor, but otherwise not a lot of studio trickery. One day, while mixing the song “No Compassion,” we noticed that the snare drum sound was not as powerful as we felt it should be. I’m not sure how I thought of this, because I’d never mixed a record before, but I asked Ed if we could send the snare drum signal out through a speaker in the studio and re-mic it, using the studio as a large chamber. Ed looked at me and said, “Aha!” He tried it and it worked really well in an early gated-reverb style.
On July 27, Ed mixed “Psycho Killer” parts one and two. I think it was clear to everyone who heard it that “Psycho Killer” should be the first single from our album. Even though it was the first song we had ever written together, there was something undeniably urgent and compelling about “Psycho Killer” and we hoped it would cross over beyond the CBGB crowd to listeners around the world.
Waiting for the subway back to our loft, Tina and I admired the new “Radiant Baby” drawings in the Fifty-third Street station across from the Museum of Modern Art. These white chalk line drawings on empty black advertising panels had everyone wondering who had made them. They were popping up in subway stations all over town. Eventually, we found out they were made by a young guy from Kutztown, Pennsylvania, named Keith Haring. As drawings, they were unforgettable.
The police finally caught Son of Sam on August 10. The twenty-four-year-old mail carrier David Berkowitz told investigators that he had been getting directions to kill from his neighbor’s dog. He had killed six people and wounded seven others with his .44 caliber pistol. People started asking us if “Psycho Killer” was written about him. We said, “No, the song had been written years ago when we were art students.”
33
GARY
Gary Kurfirst came to see us on August 25, 1977, when we were beginning a four-night run at CBGB. We had asked Ken Kushnick to be our manager and he wanted to do it, but he also very logically said, “If I were your manager, there wouldn’t be anybody at Sire Records to fight for you.” So, knowing that we had a new album coming out in the fall, Ken brought Gary down to find out if he had any interest. Ken had known Gary since 1971, when they co-managed a band called Stepson. Gary had street smarts and vast old-school music business experience combined with forward thinking. He was the one person Ken believed should manage Talking Heads. We had gotten this far on our own, but record companies don’t really like to talk business with an artist. They prefer to talk to a manager and to think of the bands as stars. Record companies, more than anyone else, want you to be a star.
We had seen and heard enough about bad managers that we were circumspect when we met Gary. After our second set of the night, we were introduced by Ken. Gary was wearing one of those silver Porsche racing jackets. He had long hair and a scruffy beard. Gary was only four years older than me but he seemed much older and wiser. He loved our show and invited us to meet him for dinner at a Japanese restaurant next to Carnegie Hall, where his office was. We all agreed.
None of us had ever eaten sushi before. Raw fish? What a wild idea. Gary ordered for us while we tried out the hot sake. David mostly kept quiet, as usual, but, boy, he loved the Japanese food. He had always had an adventurous appetite and this new style of cuisine was heavenly to him.
He ate everything that was put in front of him. Tina and Jerry and I loved the food, but we were more interested in conversation with Gary. We were feeling him out.
What we found out was that, like the Ramones, Gary had grown up in Forest Hills, Queens. While still in high school, he began promoting concerts. The first concert he promoted was the Ronettes at the El Patio Country Club in 1966. Next came the Shangri-Las. In ’67, he put on shows by the Young Rascals, Donovan, and Janis Ian.
In the summer of ’67, Gary made a bold move. He leased the Village Theater in Manhattan’s East Village, where he promoted shows with Cream, Vanilla Fudge, Moby Grape, Canned Heat, the Yardbirds with Jimmy Page, the Jeff Beck Group, Otis Redding and Carla Thomas, Wilson Pickett, the Doors, and the Who.
Then one day when Gary wasn’t looking, San Francisco promoter Bill Graham bought the lease for the Village Theater out from under him and renamed it the Fillmore East. Gary was not happy about that but he had an idea. In the summer of ’68, at the Singer Bowl in Flushing Meadow Park, he staged the New York Rock Festival. The bands he booked were Jimi Hendrix, Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Doors, the Who, and Janis Ian. Eighteen thousand people showed up. The enormous success of this festival, both culturally and financially, inspired the 1969 Woodstock Festival of Art and Music in which he also had a hand the following summer.
All the while, Gary had been managing a popular Long Island Band called the Vagrants with Leslie West on guitar. They acted as support band at many of the shows Gary promoted until one day Leslie quit the band to form Mountain with Cream producer Felix Pappalardi on bass and vocals. Gary managed Mountain, who had an enormous hit with “Mississippi Queen.” He told us that one of his greatest regrets as a manager was refusing to allow Mountain’s performance at Woodstock to be used in the subsequent Warner Brothers film because they were not offering the band any money. He thought that was a rip-off. He did not foresee how much free publicity the band would gather and, as a result of his refusal, no one even knows about Mountain’s triumphal performance at Woodstock.
After negotiating a Mountain contract, Gary became close friends with Chris Blackwell of Island Records. Chris suggested that Gary should manage some of his Island artists. Gary agreed and became the manager for Toots & the Maytals, the Mighty Diamonds, and Peter Tosh. Gary loved Toots and had traveled all over the USA with him. He told us about how he had negotiated a huge advance when he signed Peter Tosh to Columbia Records for Legalize It. Peter demanded to be paid in cash and that Gary deliver it to him in Jamaica. When Gary arrived in Kingston, he checked into his hotel and waited nervously for Peter to arrive. It was not wise to have that much cash on you in Kingston in 1975. Each day Peter sent a Rasta messenger to tell Gary that Peter would come the next day. This went on for days. Finally, Peter did arrive and Gary handed over the $250,000 in cash in a duffel bag. Peter was pleased and Gary was possibly even more pleased to no longer be responsible for all that cash.
* * *
At some point along the way, after not knowing why he felt so tired and bad, Gary was diagnosed with a thyroid problem and had to take a long rest. Now, with the help of modern medicine, he was coming back. He had no other clients at that time. We made a verbal agreement for Gary to manage us on a trial basis for one year. If either party wasn’t satisfied at the end of one year, they were free to go. We never felt the need for another manager. Gary was the best.
34
MINI TOURS
Gary didn’t waste any time. He set us up with an agent at William Morris named Stu Weintraub. Our first album, Talking Heads: 77, was released on September 16, 1977. Because we now had a manager, an agent, and a record to promote, more doors were open for us. But we were still unknown to most of the world, so our work was cut out for us, too. One of the first gigs under our new management was a Beefsteak Charlie’s in Scarsdale. I know it sounds like a lousy gig, but in fact it was fun and th
e pay was good. While the last customers were finishing their steak dinners, the waiters began pushing all the tables and chairs out of the way. There was no real stage, but there was a little elevated area where we set up our gear. We had help this time from a very tall, young, sophisticated black man named Jeff Jones. Jeff’s mother was an opera singer named Betty Jones, who had regularly graced the stage at the Metropolitan Opera House. His dad was a civil engineer. Jeff was a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and we all liked him right away. What he lacked in experience he made up for with his pure enthusiasm. Why he wanted the gig as our roadie, I don’t know, but he did. We agreed to pay Jeff twenty-five dollars a day.
We also needed a soundman with a van for our gear and Gary found us just the guy, from Wilton, Connecticut. His name was Gary Scovil. He told us he had just bought his cargo van really cheap because someone had committed suicide in it. It was like new. Gary had some experience mixing sound, too. We agreed to pay him fifty dollars a day, but only on the days we had shows. He was a curmudgeon sometimes, but he did a good job and never let us down. He and Jeff were about to put a lot of miles on that van.
Beefsteak Charlie’s turned out to be a lot of fun. The suburban kids were so excited to get a taste of downtown New York City underground rock. When we finished our set, they hollered for more.
The next show was at a club in Woodstock, New York, called Joyous Lake. We would be opening for Charlie Mingus’s Big Band. Some friends who were very hot interior designers, Ronnie and Victoria Borus, said we could stay at their country house just outside of Woodstock. We did our sound check and went to a nearby Middle Eastern restaurant for dinner and to pass some time. Tina’s sister Laura and Leigh Blake had come up from New York with us. At the end of dinner, Leigh had the idea to play the game “Killer,” where you draw lots to select a “killer.” The rules are that none of the other players knows who the killer is. He kills by making eye contact and winking when no one else is looking. If he winks at you, you wait a little while and then say, “I’m dead!” The first person to identify the killer wins. So, we enjoyed a few rounds until a last round went on for too long and someone said, “Hey, nobody’s died!” That’s when half of us guessed simultaneously that David must be the killer! He had been unable to make eye contact with any of us long enough to wink, which explained why he had never been killed either. We all laughed explosively, especially David, who suddenly began to choke and change color. It was scary. At Jerry’s urging, Laura, who was closest to him, managed to help him to his feet and very effectively administer the Heimlich Maneuver. She was so effective that not only did she unblock David’s windpipe, but she caused him to projectile-vomit his baba ghanoush like a firehose right across the room. The other diners in the room were paying attention now, but trying not to look. A very flustered waiter asked our table to please leave. I said, “But we haven’t paid.” He said, “That’s okay, just please go!”