by Chris Frantz
I don’t know who gave David the car keys, but he backed Tina’s Valiant right into a three-hundred-year-old stone wall.
Traveling a short distance to Joyous Lake, we took a few deep breaths, pogoed a few times, and walked out onto the stage. To our surprise, at the table right in front of the stage was the wizard of all rock stars, Todd Rundgren, with a very tall, statuesque, super-sexy redhead. The Joyous Lake was not a big place and it was nowhere near full for us, but there was Todd and his girlfriend, Karen Darvin, who began making out and feeling each other up during our first song and continued to do so for the entire show. I don’t know if they were listening or not, but they were having a really good time. After the show, Todd said he would like to see us again and next time he would bring us something. He did. At UC Berkeley Todd and Karen came backstage with a big pot of delicious homemade organic chicken soup. I believe Todd would have liked to produce our next record, but we had our hearts set on Brian Eno.
Back in the dressing room, the great Charlie Mingus was getting ready to play. He was getting old and not feeling very well. I introduced myself and reminded him of a gig of his five or six years earlier at the Encore Club on Walnut Street in Pittsburgh, where I was working a summer job as bartender. It was a jazz brunch and my job was to keep the Bloody Marys flowing. Charlie and his band were playing and some ladies in the back were talking very loudly. Charlie cut the band and asked, “Will you all please keep it down over there? We would appreciate that.” The ladies quieted down and the band started playing again. This was some serious jazz, you know, not background music. Then the ladies started talking over the music again. It sounded like a hen house. In between songs, Charlie looked over at me and said, “Pass me one of those Bloody Marys.” Charlie took one sip, leaned back, and threw it across the room, where it landed with a big red splash right in the middle of the noisy ladies’ table. The room went very silent then, and the band resumed its set.
Charlie looked up at me with a smile, slowly shook his tired head, and drawled, “Oh, yeah.”
It’s dark on those Woodstock country roads at night and not easy to navigate but, after a few wrong turns, we finally found our friend’s farmhouse where we were going to spend the night. We smoked a joint out on the porch, took a deep breath of mountain air, and went to bed. Tina closed the door to the bedroom where we were sleeping. As she was climbing into bed with me, the door slowly opened again but no one was there. I got up and shut the door, but before I could get back in bed, it swung open again. We thought, “That’s weird.” We weren’t scared, though. We decided to leave the door open, but guess what? It suddenly closed by itself. I tried not to think about it and went to sleep. No sooner had I nodded off than I began to hear unintelligible whispering in my ear. If I sat up it would stop, but if I lay down it would begin again.
We didn’t get much sleep that night but no harm came to any of us, and we all had strange stories to tell in the morning. When I called our hosts to describe our experience, they said, “Yes, we think the house is haunted. What do you think?”
35
LET’S WORK!
Talking Heads: 77 was released to good, and even great, reviews in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and every UK music paper. We in the band were ready to work. Nineteen seventy-seven was a great time to be in a touring band, but Gary, at the same time, realized that there really wasn’t a touring circuit for new bands with our style of music. The big promoters weren’t interested. So by talking to college student promoters, club owners, and local independent promoters, Gary managed to put together a really great little tour for us. We played college campuses, like Oberlin, U.C. Berkeley, Penn State, Rutgers, and UCLA, across the country, usually in the student union or gym. We played the clubs, we played abandoned supermarkets, and we played small theaters where the vibes were great.
The day our album was released, September 16, 1977, we started the tour at the New Yorker Theater on Yonge Street in Toronto. There was a giant figure of King Kong climbing the Empire State Building on the marquee. We did two shows. The first one began at midnight! Our Toronto audience turned out for both shows and I think every new wave kid in the entire Province of Ontario was in the house. I have no doubt that a certain degree of rapture was achieved by everyone in attendance.
We drove over to Boston and played two nights at The Rat, where Jerry introduced us to David Robinson, the drummer from the Modern Lovers. He was starting a band with his friend Ric. They were going to call it the Cars. Like us, they had some big plans. Good times at the Rat on those nights. The place was packed and sweaty, and they were selling plenty of beer. The Rat truly was the CBGB of Boston. Before the second show we taped a radio interview over in Cambridge with a guy who called himself Oedipus. He broadcast from the basement of a building at MIT on the student radio station. He called his late-night show Nocturnal Emissions. Oedipus got Talking Heads right from the start. Eventually, he became the top cat in Boston radio at WBCN and kept Talking Heads in heavy rotation.
Headlining at the Bottom Line, NYC.
We made the short drive down to Providence to play a new joint called Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel. Some of our good friends, Dan Gosch, Rudy Cheeks of the Young Adults, and Josh Miller came out to see us. At the original Lupo’s, the drummer, me, sat in the storefront window and the band played to two rooms divided by a plaster wall that ran from the middle of the stage to the back of the club.
It was a weird setup. Everyone was seriously checking us out because we were already legendary in Providence thanks to our RISD/Artistics history. Add to that the fact that we had actually made a real record deal and released a real record. Another RISD grad, a bit older than we were, named Martin Mull had released a record or two, like Martin Mull and His Fabulous Furniture, but he created more impact on the TV show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Some of the Lupo’s crowd were skeptical at first, but after a couple of drinks and a great effort on our part to really deliver the goods, we won the whole room over. We were not rock and roll poseurs. When we rocked, our performance came from the heart.
We returned to New York for an invitation-only live recording session at CBGB. Ed Stasium engineered the recording. It was a beautiful October night in New York. We invited all of our friends and radio people and the music press. This recording would be used for radio promotion and to promote our tour on the King Biscuit Flower Hour, a nationally syndicated radio show. The audience, knowing we were being recorded, were even more intense than usual, which was great. We didn’t know it at the time, but this was the last time Talking Heads would play CBGB. After the show, Ed took us uptown to the Power Station to mix the concert. There were still table saws and carpentry tools all around, but in one control room the electronics were finished enough to mix. The sound and quality of the performance on this live recording got us a lot of gigs.
A couple of days later we were booked in the Student Union Social Hall at Buffalo State College, where we performed following a lecture by Clive Davis for a rock and roll writers’ conference. Clive talked about “a Janis Joplin” and “a Barry Manilow” and “a Patti Smith,” as if they were manufactured products. At first I thought this was a bad thing but then I remembered Lou Reed saying, “I wish RCA would treat me like a product and sell as many copies of my record as they did their televisions and refrigerators.” A group from Creem magazine, including Billy Altman and Lester Bangs, were there and we hung out with them after the show. They were fun guys. We drank a few beers and smoked pot with them, except for David, who still said pot made him paranoid. Lester was pontificating about the importance of remaining uncool in the face of coolness. He was referring to us. Ha!
We played a couple of really wild shows at the Jabberwocky at Syracuse U. and a place called Nite Court in Ithaca, New York, with an opening act called the Sweaty Tools.
We made our Chicago debut at a folk club called the Quiet Knight. The weather was cold and wet but the room was respectably full. People in Chicago were not sure
what to make of us, but we won them over with our energy and attitude. The word got out and our second night was sold out.
Then we traveled to Milwaukee, home of Jerry Harrison, and played the Electric Ballroom. We met Jerry’s parents, who were lovely people. You could see Jerry in both of them. Jerry’s mother was a painter and a good one. Jerry’s father was in advertising. We visited their house, where Jerry had grown up playing in bands and sailing on Lake Michigan. It was good to see where our newest Talking Head came from.
The next show, in Schaumberg, Illinois, was at a club called B’Ginnings. It was owned by Danny Seraphine, the drummer from the band Chicago. We noted that clubs owned by real working musicians always had the most comfortable dressing rooms. This one had several overstuffed leather couches and we all took a much-needed siesta before the show. The food was good, too!
We weren’t just playing shows in the towns we visited. We also did interviews with the local papers and visited FM radio stations that might or might not be promoting our shows or playing our record. We learned that if you visited a station with a Warner/Sire promotion man, that might be the only time that particular station played your record, but at least they played it once. After we left, the format returned to Elton John, Foreigner, Debby Boone, and the Eagles.
We also made appearances at record stores. When we rolled into Minneapolis we visited the legendary Oar Folkjokeopus record shop. Even though the clerks could be condescending, it was the hippest record store for miles around and the only shop carrying Punk and New Wave in Minneapolis. Let’s just say the clerks did not condescend to us. We met Andy Schwartz, who would soon be running New York Rocker magazine. We performed at Jay’s Longhorn, another steakhouse that pushed back the tables after dinner for the bands to play. They had a scene germinating with bands like Suicide Commandos, the Replacements, and the Suburbs. The Longhorn was the CBGB of Minneapolis, and every show we played there was packed.
Returning to New York City to headline the Bottom Line was a trip. All of our friends were there. The opening act was a magician named Jeff Sheridan. They say New Yorkers are a tough crowd, but we never found that to be the case. The audience was lively from the moment we walked out onto the stage and it was a killer set, if I do say so myself. We played two sets that night:
“Artists Only”
“Love Building on Fire”
“Uh-oh, Love Comes to Town”
“Don’t Worry About the Government”
“Take Me to the River”
“The Book I Read”
“New Feeling”
“A Clean Break (Let’s Work)”
“Stay Hungry”
“Thank You for Sending Me an Angel”
“Who Is It?”
“I’m Not in Love”
ENCORE
“Pulled Up”
“No Compassion”
“1-2-3 Red Light”
There was not much time to rest. The next night we played at Haverford College, and then we traveled on down to Richmond, where we played a Halloween party at Virginia Commonwealth University in the Franklin Street Gym. The last band to play there had been Parliament Funkadelic, and they had set off a pyrotechnic bomb at the end of their set. It was not their intention to do anything except create a dramatic stage effect, but the force of the blast knocked down the kids in the front of the audience and shattered all the big plate-glass windows in the lobby of the building. Naturally, the security people at the school were a little wary of us, a punk band from New York City.
In fact, it was the audience in Richmond that was wild and crazy. We loved their enthusiasm. Many were in costume and they were mostly drunk or tripping or both. At the appointed closing time, while we were still playing the tail end of our show, the armed security men pulled the plug. The kids were not happy about it. I call them kids but we were not much older. We just laughed, hollered “Good night!” and got the hell out of there.
The next day we drove up to Pittsburgh, PA. The dominant concert promoters in Pittsburgh were Pat DiCesare and Rich Engler. They never wanted to have anything to do with Talking Heads. Every time we played Pittsburgh we had to promote the shows ourselves with the help of Gary Kurfirst. For our Pittsburgh debut, we played at Antonino’s Pizza Parlor on Craig Street right between Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. It was a tiny place and packed. My mom and dad were there with a couple of their friends, beaming with joy. Our opening act was a fire-eater who had enjoyed a few too many drinks before the show. He told dirty jokes as he put flaming torches down his throat and rolled his tongue around the torches. Everyone in the house was transfixed.
By the time we took the stage for the first of two shows, the audience was full of great pizza and Iron City beer. The Ramones had played this tiny joint the week before us. They must have been really loud, because even we, who always played at a modest volume, sounded super loud in the tiled interior of Antonino’s. We made the best of it and turned what could have been a lousy gig into a legendary night in the ’burgh. I had imagined we would play a nightclub or a small theater. While it was not exactly the type of gig I had imagined my triumphant return to Pittsburgh to be, it was the night the new wave arrived in Pittsburgh.
The next day we drove back east to Rutgers U. in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The kids went nuts, hundreds of them. The year before we could barely even get a gig in New Jersey.
All of us in Talking Heads had parents who had worked hard to make a good life for us. None of us were rich growing up, but we were not poor, either. David had always made it clear that he felt that Tina and I had advantages that he did not. So it came as a bit of a surprise to see how nice his family’s home was when we visited David’s folks outside of Baltimore in Columbia, Maryland. Columbia was a planned community developed by James W. Rouse, who emphasized human values over mere engineering and economics. The town was comprised of ten villages, with footpaths and bike trails connecting them. Every building we saw was built of red brick and neatly landscaped. Since this was his neck of the woods, David was behind the wheel of the Country Squire. When he realized he had just passed by his family’s home, David decided to turn around by driving over a carefully landscaped median strip. I said something like, “Wait a minute, man!” but it was too late. The Country Squire was now teetering on the median strip like a seesaw with neither the front nor the rear wheels touching the ground. David thought this was hilarious—and looking back, it was—but we were stuck. Tina got behind the wheel while Jerry, David, and I somehow managed to push the car over the pretty roses and boxwoods and off the median to the other side of the road, hoping that no one had seen us. At David’s childhood home, Tommy and Emma Bryne were waiting to greet us sweetly with cups of hot tea and trays of homemade shortbread. David had been born in Dumbarton, Scotland. After moving first to Ontario, Canada, when David was two, the Byrnes had settled in Maryland and had lived there for over twenty years. Tommy was an electrical engineer at Westinghouse and Emma was a teacher of special needs children. Their home was cheerfully decorated with plenty of color and light. Tina noticed a number of Spin Art paintings on paper plates prominently displayed on the living room walls and asked Emma if these had been made by her special needs kids. “Oh, no!” Emma proudly replied in her Scottish accent. “Our Davy made those!” “When he was a little boy?” Tina asked. “Noooooh! In art school!”
Two days later we had another big New York gig. This time we’d be playing the Eisner and Lubin Auditorium at NYU. Tina’s sister Laura and Leigh Blake met us backstage and we caught up on family news and downtown band gossip. We had a couple of days off to rest and do our laundry before we were back out on the road. Tina and I visited CBGB to say hi to Hilly and all of our friends there. I remembered the words of our good friend Lenny Kaye when I asked him what it was like to play all those great gigs in Europe and across the USA. He said, “There are some great venues around the world, and we are happy to be able to play them, but there really isn’t any place
better than CBGB.”
When we played upstate at the student bar at Binghamton University, our opening act was a hip new comedian named Richard Belzer. They called him “The Belz.” We thought he would be a good choice because he was funny and smart and a real New Yorker. Our mistake. As funny and hip as Belzer was, the kids just wanted to rock. They pelted him with ice cubes and booed him off the stage. Tina and I saw what was happening and brought him backstage to our dressing room. He was clearly shaken and very upset. I offered him a chair and a joint, which he accepted and we sat with him while he smoked it and calmed down. I wouldn’t blame him if he never opened for another rock band again, and I doubt that he ever did.