Remain in Love

by Chris Frantz

  From Sheffield we traveled to Manchester University, which was sold out, and then another crazy gig at Eric’s in Liverpool, also sold out. Doncaster’s Outlook Club was not full, but we got three encores from the northern kids. Then we headed south to the very groovy Friars Club Aylesbury, which was a favorite venue from our previous tour with the Ramones. Our agent, Ed Bicknell, was there with Dire Straits’ producer, Muff Winwood. There was also a supercute young barefoot woman wearing a very pretty white dress who had sneaked her way into our dressing room. Her name was Paula Yates. She engaged Tina in a long conversation, for some reason divulging that her father, a well-known British television presenter, had sometimes kept her locked up in a box when she was a child. It sounded like crazy talk but turned out to be true and years later, when her father died, it was revealed that he wasn’t her real father after all. DNA tests proved that her real father was yet another British television producer. Tina turned to tell me to come listen to this amazing creature, but when we turned back around Paula had disappeared and so had Jerry. Hmmmmmm.

  The Roundhouse show in London was sensational. The bill consisted of Talking Heads, Dire Straits, and Slaughter and the Dogs. The venue was sold out in advance and the vibes were very good all around. Despite having a pretty bad case of bronchitis she had gotten from the combination of nasty weather, overheated hotel rooms, and lack of sleep, Tina looked great and played like the real trouper she was. All of us were getting pretty worn out, but when showtime came, the adrenaline kicked in and we rocked the house. After the Roundhouse set, we were called back for four encores. The press was there in abundance and the reviews in the following days and weeks were wonderful. Seymour Stein was in heaven and threw a big party organized by Ed Bicknell for us at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Bob Geldof came up to me and said, “You look terrible!” The man has no manners. David Bowie’s longtime collaborator Mick Ronson was much cooler and spoke to us about how much he enjoyed the show before Seymour took Mick and us into a back room for some English blow that was always cut with speed. Still, it enabled us to stay awake and enjoy the party, which was a good one. Tina’s brother, Yann, was there and so was Leigh Blake. I had a long talk with Mick Jones from the Clash. Ian Dury was there, too, with a few Blockheads.

  We played fifteen shows in seventeen days and on the only days off we traveled by train to Manchester to play on The Old Grey Whistle Test television show and then back to London again. We were warned that the host, “Whispering Bob” Harris, would ask us one question only and then, rather than lip synching, we would perform two songs completely live. The television studio had a backstage bar for the artists near the green room so we proceeded to get loosened up. When the time came we took our places and “Whispering Bob,” who was a charming fellow, asked us “How long did it take to make the album?” Someone said, “Three weeks” and we launched into “Psycho Killer” followed by “Don’t Worry About the Government.” The sound we heard in the studio was pathetic but the sound of the actual broadcast was much better. Thank God, because every music fan in England was watching. David was wearing a yellow Lacoste polo shirt I had given him because it wasn’t my color. I wore a green one. Both shirts had been a gift from my mother. Little did she know she would have a hand in deconstructing the rock and roll wardrobe.

  We took the train back to London and drove by van with Dire Straits to the Top Rank in Brighton. We had dinner with Yann and Leigh, which raised Tina’s spirits. She was concerned about David’s behavior. It seemed like the more successful Talking Heads became, the more cold and dyspeptic David became. He was never a great personal communicator, so if you asked him if everything was okay he would just clam up and pout. In any case, this tour was almost over.

  At the City Center in St. Albans the venue was packed with much younger people than we were accustomed to. Thanks to playing live on The Old Grey Whistle Test and the power of television, our audience was expanding. We were met backstage by Tina’s sister Danielle and her husband, Mark, who were in the UK with their firstborn baby, Sabrina. Yann Weymouth and Leigh Blake were also there to cheer us on. It was a great show, if I do say so myself. People were starting to sing along with our songs, especially the choruses of “Psycho Killer.” The sold-out house demanded three encores and tried for four.

  At the Oasis in Swindon, home of XTC, the audience of nine hundred people almost rioted. Some film crew was shooting parts of the show and the kids, I guess playing to the cameras, went absolutely nuts. Swindon was not known for this type of behavior and XTC were out of town; maybe they could explain it to us. The evening was pretty intense.

  The final show of the tour was at the Greyhound in Croydon. For our part, end of tour euphoria had set in. We invited Dire Straits to join us onstage for the encore. We played “Psycho Killer” and “Gloria.” I don’t think we had ever played “Gloria” onstage before—and we haven’t played it since—but somehow we pulled it off with great panache.

  We then had three days of interviews, parties, and sightseeing around London. We were back at the Portobello Hotel that we loved so much. Mike Stewart had arranged for Tina and me to have the “Four Poster Room,” which was heavenly. David and Jerry each had cabin rooms that were small like a ship’s cabin, but stylish with comfy antiques and built-in cabinetry.

  During these three days, Seymour Stein began calling insistently from New York. He wanted us to open in Seattle, Washington, for Elvis Costello and the Attractions, whose career was blowing up on FM radio in the US. This was to be the launch of their West Coast tour, and Seymour knew all the big Warners honchos would ride up to see what Talking Heads had grown into if we opened the show. While it was a great idea in theory, Seymour was not taking into account that we had just traveled around Europe and the UK to play twenty-one shows in twenty-three days. Now he wanted us to take an overnight economy flight from London to Seattle to open a show straight from the airport without so much as a sound check. With all due respect to Elvis and his great band, in our exhausted state, there was no way we were going to cross an ocean and a continent to be an opening act for them. Seymour kept calling our rooms, one by one, in hopes of a yes. We all asked the hotel operator to hold our calls. We really needed a break.

  On the day we were to fly back to NYC, we were met at the front desk by Leigh Blake, who had a troubled look on her face. She said the staff at the hotel was very upset with us. I asked the lady behind the front desk if there was a problem, but she wouldn’t even speak to me. This was especially weird, because she had always been so chipper and friendly. Jerry and Tina were standing with me wondering where David was, because the van was waiting to take us to Heathrow. David finally shuffled up the sidewalk outside the Portobello as we were loading our bags into the van. He made some excuses by way of explanation, saying that he had had an “accident” with the telephone and a desk. According to him, while he was trying to get some sleep, the operator had disregarded his Do Not Disturb to repeatedly put Seymour (who claimed it was an “emergency”) through to his room. Finally, he had yanked the phone out of the wall and then hit his head on an open cabinet door. In a fit of anger, he had smashed some furniture, too. Well, I thought, how predictably rock and roll. Mike Stewart settled our bill, including the hefty damages. Our agent, Ed Bicknell, would tell us that the hotel was upset, but not nearly as mad as when they called him to take Richard Hell away. Many years later we would be told that David had left a turd on the bed with a message “FOR THE MAID.” Hotels like the Portobello, who give part-time employment to actors, musicians, and university students, draw the line at this type of behavior. Tina and I wanted to believe it was just a rumor. We had heard from Frank Gallagher that disgruntled roadies sometimes did things like this in fleabag hotels, but it disturbed us to think that one of our own might even be tempted to perform such a lowbrow, copycat stunt in our favorite London hotel. After all, we were known for being original! When we returned to London, we would now have to stay in bland hotels devoid of romantic charm.
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  BUILDINGS AND FOOD

  It’s quiet here now on West Bay Street in Nassau, the Bahamas, except for the little conch salad stand and bar by the road where local villagers and a few tourists hang out and drink beer and rum, listening to reggae and soca. You can’t imagine how important and happening this little spot once was. Music history was made here. No kidding. The building is still here, but it’s accounting offices now: the studio is gone. It’s a casualty of the digital age. Everybody has home recording gear now and record labels don’t have the budget to fly a group down here to record anymore. Forget about it, it’s too expensive.

  But there was a time. Talking Heads was the first band to record and mix an album at Compass Point Studios. We worked on three Talking Heads albums here: More Songs About Buildings and Food, Remain in Light, and Speaking in Tongues. Tina and I made the first and second Tom Tom Club albums here, too. Later, when Tina and I began producing other bands, we produced records for Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers and Los Fabulosos Cadillacs here. It was serious business and we had a ball.

  When Tina and I arrived at Compass Point on March 15, 1978, directly from my beloved grandmother Mammy’s funeral, David and Jerry, along with Brian Eno, engineer Rhett Davies, and Tina’s sister Laura, had already been there for a couple of days. Brian was fresh from David Bowie’s Low sessions in Berlin. Jerry and Laura met us at the Nassau Airport in a little open-air vehicle with a striped canopy top made by Volkswagen in Brazil. We piled in and headed to the studio only a couple of miles away. When we drove through a huge cut in the limestone and the beautiful blue-and-green sea was revealed, Tina and I felt like we were dreaming. It was heavenly with poinciana, bougainvillea, and jacaranda, all in bloom. I had never been to a real tropical island before, and I was thrilled. I still feel the same way every time I come here even though the studio is long gone and so many good people are no longer here.

  At the studio we were warmly welcomed by a staff mostly comprised of women. The studio was created by Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records. Compass Point was in tiny Gambier village, one of the oldest settlements in the Bahamas at the opposite end of the island of New Providence from the capital city of Nassau. It had an unhurried out island ambience and was right across the road from the glistening blue-green southern Atlantic Ocean. Blackwell, who was Jamaican, decided to build the studio in the Bahamas after Bob Marley and so many other people had been shot during a period of great political unrest in Jamaica. Nassau, while still a haven for gamblers and pirates of all kinds, was a far more stable tax-free environment in which to work and conduct business.

  Chris had been to see us play at CBGB early on and, although he had passed on signing us because he was putting all his energy into breaking Bob Marley at the time, I think he liked our band. The British singer Robert Palmer brought him to see us, and I think Chris may have regretted that he had passed on us, but maybe not. He had a long history of doing business with our manager, Gary Kurfirst, who had managed Toots and the Maytals, Peter Tosh, and the Mighty Diamonds. In fact, when we first met him, Gary’s office was within Island Records’ offices and his secretary was none other than May Pang, who had been John Lennon’s companion during his “lost weekend” away from Yoko Ono. Chris told Gary that he had built a new studio in the Bahamas and that he would give us a really good rate to be the first band to make a record there. Talking Heads had quite a buzz at the time and it would be good publicity for the studio. Also, Brian Eno, our coproducer, was an Island artist and felt comfortable that he was familiar with the console and recording equipment, which was the same gear he had been using at Island’s Basing Street Studios in London. It was a win/win situation.

  Entermedia Theater, NYC, 1978.

  Everything was brand new and the staff was almost as excited as we were to be there. They were mostly Bahamian or Jamaican and we got to know them all by name. It was good to know that Chris Blackwell had doused the perimeter of the studio grounds with the blood of a freshly killed chicken in Voodoo/Obeah tradition: everything within was protected from evil.

  After we’d had a look around the studio, we drove back down twisting West Bay Street along the coast to the little bungalow at Cable Beach where Tina, Laura, Jerry, and I were staying. The house was just steps from the beach and was a very welcome change from our industrial loft in Long Island City. Life was good. David stayed at a different ocean-side apartment with Rhett Davies the engineer and I think he was pleased to do so. We would pick him up on our way to the studio in the mornings. We didn’t do that thing where we would stay up all night. We worked mostly in the daytime. Brian stayed at the guesthouse of Chris Blackwell’s Ocean View home, a little cottage called Sea Pussy, that was easy walking distance to the studio. We didn’t bring any crew with us. We each looked after our own instruments and our own money, as was our custom. All of our gear—amps and drums and keyboards—had been shipped down from New York. Today that would be insanely expensive, but in 1978 it was doable.

  As I set up my red Rogers drum kit in the studio, I gave myself a little pat on the back for how far we had come as a band. Three years before we had been listening to Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy album with fascination in our raw concrete loft on New York’s Lower East Side. Now we had completed two tours of Europe, the UK, and North America and we were in a beautiful new studio in the Bahamas with Brian Eno himself working alongside the four of us. I felt particularly good for Tina and how she had not only lived up to our expectations, but had far exceeded them. Her bass parts were sublimely funky without any unnecessary frills and they were uniquely unpredictable. She was not a show-off and she knew how to get down.

  The songs we were about to record had all been written long before, mostly even before Jerry joined the band. We had been performing them live on tour. Our playing was very tight and well rehearsed. On the first day of recording Brian said he’d like to try out some ambient room microphone techniques to give the recording a different sound than our first album. This involved placing mics in different parts of the room in different configurations to create a more exciting sound recording. He also brought his EMS Synthi A, a small briefcase-style synthesizer that he would use to “treat” our instruments on separate tracks as the recording was going down. Tina took Polaroids of the studio set up with her SX-70.

  The assistant engineer was a good-looking young Bahamian guy from Cat Island named Benji Armbrister. Benji told us, “Relax, man. This is the Bahamas. You can’t rush life.” I don’t know how Benji got the job, because Rhett had to show him how to do everything. But he was a great guy and came to be the best tape operator and assistant engineer I have ever known.

  The mood was very upbeat throughout the sessions. We were all on cloud nine—including Brian—and the energy level was high. We sailed through the recording of the basic tracks in the first ten days. We did multiple takes, but usually chose the second or third as the final. Brian only requested two changes in our song arrangements. One was to delete what he called “the Woodsman Section” of “Stay Hungry,” where he said David sounded like a lumberjack yelling “TIIIIMBER!” in a forest, and he was right about that. It did sound better without that part. The other suggestion was to try playing our cover of Al Green and Teenie Hodges’s “Take Me to the River” as slowly as we possibly could without losing the groove. He was right about that, too. The slowed-down version was far sexier and had an almost underwater quality that we all loved. When I mentioned I would like to record a small percussion overdub, Brian said, of course, but try to limit the part to only one note for every two bars. I hit a wood Gato Box with a mallet very sparingly and with enough reverb it sounded like a sonar bleep. Perfect! It’s interesting to note that “Take Me to the River,” originally an Al Green B side, was also recorded during the same time period by Bryan Ferry, Levon Helm, and, of all people, Foghat, but it was Talking Heads who made a hit of it. It became our first Top 40 single.

  After a day of recording, Rhett would
make us a rough mix on a cassette and we would take this back to our bungalow and listen back on our boombox and dance and dance and dance. To a recording artist there is no better feeling than to listen to your day’s work and think, Damn. This is good! Even though we had played most of these songs hundreds of times, we had never recorded them and heard them like this. David would re-sing the vocals and we would add a few overdubs, but the artistic quality of the basic tracks was undeniably wonderful.

  We had a song called “The Good Thing” that Brian, who loved amateur musicianship, suggested we invite the women who worked in the studio offices to sing on the choruses. Tina led them and sang with them. The idea was that they would somehow sound like Chinese youth in the days of Chairman Mao and, amazingly, they did! They were credited on the album as Tina and the Typing Pool.

  Brian would be the first to tell you that he was not a real musician. He was an idea man who communicated his thoughts in the most eloquent English we had heard in a long time. On this album, after the recording of the basic tracks, his production style really came to shine during the mixing. We loved the effects that he had created with his treatments of our sounds. They worked really well and gave the songs an added edge. We also loved the mixes that Rhett, his favorite engineer, achieved with only a little direction from Brian. We developed a great rapport with them and I felt that there was genuine mutual respect among us. We laughed a lot together, because we were truly enjoying ourselves.