by Chris Frantz
We had talked to Adrian about becoming a permanent member of Tom Tom Club as a singer and guitarist. Somehow, this was misinterpreted by Adrian. We later found out by reading an interview he did that he thought we were asking him to replace David in Talking Heads, as if we could do that. In addition to sharing credits and writers royalties with Adrian on the seven songs he played on, we showed our appreciation by asking Chris Blackwell—who was somewhat reluctant—to give Adrian an album deal. Adrian didn’t share his plans with us, but returned in September to record that album, Lone Rhino. By that time, however, we had completed Tom Tom Club and departed Nassau. I guess prog rock was where he was really at.
After Adrian left, Laura and Lani returned to record the rest of the album vocals with Tina. I completely adored the vocal blend these sisters got together. Tina likened the sound to “naughty Catholic school girls,” and who was I to disagree? Stevie was very particular in recording their vocal blend and the end result was gorgeous and unlike any other vocals I had ever heard.
Tyrone Downie, the young keyboard player for Bob Marley and the Wailers, played grand piano on “L’Eléphant.” This was our antiwar song, although you might not realize it since the lyrics are all in French.
Monte Brown came to the studio again to play a lilting Bahamian-style rhythm guitar part on “Genius of Love.” This sat well in the groove along with Adrian’s snaking, slithery picking part.
We invited the incomparable Uziah “Sticky” Thompson, who was working with Grace Jones in the studio next door, to play his unique style of Jamaican percussion on “Lorelei” and “As Above So Below.” He hit it out of the park, adding parts that sounded as organic as the jungle itself.
Finally, before mixing began, we invited Sly and Robbie to join Tina and me in adding handclaps on the backbeats of “Genius of Love.” Stevie had the four of us stand in a circle around a Neumann U 87 microphone and clap along for the duration of the eight-minute track. Then he asked us to do it again and again and again until we had four tracks of handclaps, which he then mixed down to one. My hands were sore but what awesome clapping! Sly and especially Robbie were not prone to exaggeration but when they heard the playback with the line “Reggae’s expanding with Sly and Robbie” Robbie said, “Man, bus it straight to Paris! This is a hit!” Tina and I had that feeling, too. So did Chris Blackwell.
We still felt like art students when thinking about album covers and we loved the process, but this time we acted more as art directors. Tina and I decided to invite our friend Jimmy Rizzi to try his hand at it. Jimmy worked in a childlike style that Tina called “urban primitive.” He lived and worked in a tiny SoHo storefront on Sullivan Street, where we would sometimes drop by and smoke a joint. He always had a good supply and we enjoyed his company. We called Jimmy up and proposed that he bring his art supplies down to Compass Point and create an album cover for us. We did not have to twist his arm. Jimmy arrived, hung out with us in the studio and by the pool, and within a few days we had a super-wild album cover that featured Jimmy’s idea of what everyone who worked on the album looked like. Tina printed the lettering for the song titles and credits in her own hand. Later, Jimmy and Laura flew to London to create an amazing animation video for “Genius of Love” from thousands of Jimmy’s drawings with directors Rocky Morton and Anabelle Jankel of Cucumber Studios. Their studio was in the same building David Bowie posed in front of for the cover of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The video was delightful and was featured by comedian Steve Martin in his first TV special. At the moment, it has over 11 million views on YouTube.
We still didn’t have a deal for the USA, but by the time Chris Blackwell had sold 150,000 “Genius of Love” twelve-inch singles imported from the UK into the USA, Seymour woke up and saw the light. He asked Gary how much we wanted for the album. Gary said, “I’m sorry, Seymour, but I don’t think there’s enough money in the world for Chris and Tina to make a deal with you.” Seymour said, “Oh Gary, just tell me how much they want.” Gary, who knew how much we loved boating, said, “Enough to buy a yacht.”
It’s such a wonderful feeling to have created a hit record. It was not a feeling I ever expected to have. Back in New York City, I was walking west on Houston Street and as I turned up Sixth Avenue, where a number of basketball courts are located, I stopped in my tracks. Every player had his boom box tuned to WBLS and they were all blasting our “Genius of Love” megamix out into the atmosphere. The feeling I got inside brought tears of joy to my eyes. Then one day Tina and I were riding in a checker cab downtown with Gary and David. Gary said, “Guess what? The Tom Tom Club album went gold today.” I wish he had picked another time to tell us this good news, but I guess he had his reasons. It should have been a time for celebration, but David glumly looked out the window and said nothing at all.
Tina by the pool at Compass Point.
Talking Heads had no gold records yet, but frankly, we were never about quantity. We were about quality. So was Tom Tom Club. People magazine, of all places, gave us an interesting review: “Tom Tom Club … is led by the Heads’ husband-and-wife rhythm section of Frantz (drums) and Weymouth (bass). They feature the euphoric, witty side of the Heads most in evidence on the group’s first two albums. In the clever, funky Wordy Rappinghood, Tina presents ‘a rap race with a fast pace.’ As her sisters Lani and Laura chant, ‘What are words worth?’ Tina intones, ‘Eat your words, but don’t go hungry / Words have nearly always hung me.’ Tina’s too modest. Her rhymes put Debbie Harry’s ‘Man from Mars, eating cars’ in the tricycle class. And all eight cuts have irresistible bounce. People tend to think of the Heads as the tool of Byrne’s artistry. These discs suggest the talent and inspiration has always been deeper and more shared.”
47
BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE
Tina and I went to the big P-Funk, Bootsy Collins, and Brides of Funkenstein show at Madison Square Garden, and what a wild and mind-bending show it was. Before the band had even taken the stage, the audience was chanting in unison, “Burn down the house! Burn down the house!” There were not a lot of white people in the audience. This crowd was black, or as the record business had taken to calling this segment of the population, “Urban.” The chanting created a feeling of somewhat dangerous good times ahead. While Tina and I were not complete strangers to this scene, we were not exactly relaxed or in our own element, either. The show was unbelievably funky and very long. We were invited to the after-party upstairs, where we spoke briefly to a very distracted Bootsy Collins and to Bob Krasnow, who had signed Funkadelic to Warner. “Kraz” had also signed my brother’s band, the Urban Verbs, to the label after a Brian Eno–produced demo brought them to his attention.
With the success of the Tom Tom Club album and all the hip-hop versions of “Genius of Love” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Jekyll and Hyde, and many others including even the comedian Rich Little, people were asking us what we were going to do next. The Tom Tom Club grooves and vocal style were becoming a huge influence on R&B music. Well, we were going to make a new Talking Heads record. Tina and I saw Talking Heads as the mothership. We loved our first band like it was our first child and no way would we ever abandon or neglect it. To say that David and Jerry were shocked at the success of our Tom Tom Club record would be a fair assessment, but neither of them talked to us about it. Jerry once said that he wished he had thought of the catchy “dee-deet, deet deet, dee-deet” keyboard part that Tina and I had come up with for “Genius of Love.” David never mentioned our record at all until one night, following the Broadway opening of his collaboration with the great Twyla Tharp called The Catherine Wheel. We were all standing around at the Studio 54 after party with Twyla and Mikhail Baryshnikov. The DJ spun an extended version of “Genius of Love” and the dance floor went wild. David leaned in to ask, “How did you get that hand clap sound?” That was it. He never mentioned the song again except to say in the press that its success was “merely commercial.”
Speaking of Twyla, she and
David had a budding romance. Tina and I were very pleased, because Twyla had a good influence on David. He seemed more grounded and friendly when he was with her. But then one day after returning from a tour of Japan, we received a phone call from Twyla asking if we knew where David was. We told her that David had decided to stay in Japan for a while. What we didn’t say was David had found a new girlfriend in Japan, one that, much later, he would end up marrying.
Tina Weymouth and Grandmaster Flash, New York City, 1981 © Laura Levine.
Whatever David and Jerry thought about Tom Tom Club, by 1981, according to our contract, it was time for a new Talking Heads record. We had bought some time by releasing a really good live album called The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads, but we needed new music. Tina and I asked David and Jerry to join us at our loft in Long Island City to begin songwriting. I recorded everything on our boom box. The first day we began with an up-tempo jam, over which I hollered,”Burn down the house! Burn down the house!” just like I had heard at the P-Funk show. This was how that song began. It evolved to become one of our greatest house rockers and our first and only top-ten hit.
We would sometimes switch instruments during these jam sessions. This is how “Naive Melody (This Must Be the Place)” came about. Tina played rhythm guitar, Jerry played keyboard bass, and David played some freaky little sounds on the Prophet-5 using the modulation wheel. I played the drums because no one else knew how. On “Swamp,” I began with a bluesy, rolling keyboard bass part. Tina played the bass foundation on which “Slippery People” was built. David was eager to play, too, but Jerry, not so much.
All in all this should have been a happy time, but Jerry was not himself. He is an only child and his mother had been diagnosed with cancer. Naturally, Jerry was stressed about it. He began showing up to these writing sessions hopelessly hungover or still drunk from the night before. Some days he didn’t show up at all. On those days we got our upstairs neighbor Eagle-Eye Cherry, the fourteen-year-old son of Don and Moki, to sit in on keyboards, which was fun, but Tina and I were worried about Jerry. David, never much of a people person, said, “We should kick him out of the band.” I had a better idea. I called up my father and had a heart-to-heart talk about how they would handle a situation like this at his law firm. My father said, “We’ve had problems like this from time to time. What we do is recommend the person take a leave of absence with pay to get detoxed and straightened out. We don’t tell them how they should do it, but we tell them in no uncertain terms that it must be done one way or another if they want to come back to work.” I had a talk with Jerry. He acknowledged he had a problem. He said that he would rather not take a leave of absence, but he would get straightened out. He did. He began arriving at rehearsals on time and clearheaded and we all went back to work.
Don’t smile. People will think you’re making money.
On Valentine’s Day of 1982, Tina decided to go off the pill. She had been taking birth control pills since before we met, but now she was thirty-one years old, our financial prospects were better than they had been, and we were considering having a child. I was pleased with her decision and after a night on the town I said to her, “Let’s practice!” I didn’t know she would get pregnant right away, but that’s what happened. This was a very happy turn of events for us, but we didn’t tell anybody yet.
We all agreed that, unfortunately, working with Brian Eno was no longer an option. He had simply become too demanding. For example, he would only fly on the Concorde and expected us to pay for it. Brian had done a lot for Talking Heads, but Talking Heads had done even more for Brian Eno and his reputation as a producer. Tina and I visited the great T. Rex and David Bowie producer Tony Visconti in his room at the Hilton Hotel in New York to ask him if he would be interested in working with us. As he packed his bags before flying to London, Tony said, “You don’t need a producer. All you need is a great engineer.”
* * *
When the band had written enough material for an album, we recorded the basic tracks at Blank Tapes in New York with engineer Butch Jones at the controls. Butch had mixed our 1982 double live album, The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads. He was a charming person and an excellent engineer to work with. We decided to produce the album ourselves as a band.
The basic tracks were recorded quickly and almost effortlessly. Since Adrian Belew had run off with Robert Fripp and King Crimson, David thought we should scout out a new guitarist for an upcoming tour of Japan, the US, and Europe. Gary put the word out and right away our splendid Warner’s promotion person, Benita Brazier, called us from LA. She recommended we check out Alex Weir, who had worked with his cousins the Brothers Johnson and also with Quincy Jones. Instead of a traditional audition, we asked Alex to come to New York and overdub some guitar parts on the album we were working on. It worked out beautifully. Alex was a magnificent rhythm player with chops for days. His lead parts were not bad, either, as we soon found out when we invited him to tour with us.
The promoter in Japan was the famous Mr. Udo. He was the biggest promoter in Japan. When he met us at the airport—a tiny fellow with slicked-back hair, huge sunglasses, and a floor-length mink coat—he was very warm and welcoming. Mr. Udo told Gary that Talking Heads were great and everything, but the band that would really sell tickets in Japan was Tom Tom Club. So, we said that Tom Tom Club, who had never toured before, would open for Talking Heads. We would do a mini-set.
We rehearsed both bands and found ourselves working with a new tour manager/soundman, who was the absolute worst. In Tokyo, he repeatedly knocked on Laura and Lani’s door in the middle of the night. He slipped mash notes under their door. When they didn’t respond to his unwanted advances, he gave Tom Tom Club shorter and shorter sound checks until we had none. Tina asked him why he hadn’t been giving us our per diems and he reached into his pocket and threw Yen in her face. A lesson was learned: When a person has a very long résumé, chances are he has been fired a few times. We were stuck with him for the Japanese tour, but as soon as it was over we fired him.
For the upcoming tour of Europe, we asked Jeff Hooper, a veteran of some other Talking Heads tours and a good friend of Frank Gallagher’s, to take over the soundboard. We never had any worries with Jeff. He was a lovely Welshman and the favorite soundman of Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey, two of Wales’s most enduringly popular artists. For tour manager on the upcoming European tour, we hired Matthew Murphy. Matthew had a warm, kind, easygoing way about him that was greatly appreciated by us and the other members of the band and crew, as well as the promoters.
* * *
We didn’t know then that this would be Talking Heads’ final tour of Europe.
We didn’t have Busta on second bass anymore and Bernie had taken a job producing Rita Coolidge’s next record, so we recruited Raymond Jones, the keyboard player from Chic. Also, we brought Tyrone Downie from the Wailers to play keyboards with Tom Tom Club. Tyrone and the rest of the Wailers’ extended family had been going through a difficult time since the untimely death of Bob Marley the year before.
Here are some highlights of the tour.
At the Montreux Jazz Festival, when we were getting ready to go onstage there was a knock on the dressing room door. I opened the door and standing before me in a khaki-colored anorak, blue jeans, and sneakers was David Bowie. I had heard from Adrian that he had a home near where we were, next door to Charlie Chaplin’s widow, Oona. “May I come in?” he asked. I remembered when we were performing at Radio City Music Hall and I saw him dancing in the wings all by himself. I replied excitedly, “Hell, yes! Of course you can. C’mon in!” He said hello to all the men in the group. The ladies had a separate dressing room. There was a lovely assortment of backstage munchies on the table and Bowie zeroed in on that. He asked politely, “Are you going to be eating those nuts?” I said, “Please, help yourself.” He filled up one big pocket of his jacket with nuts. Then he asked, “How about those cheeses? Are you going to be eating those nice cheeses?” Again, I said, “Pl
ease, help yourself.” Bowie neatly wrapped up most of the cheeses in a napkin and put them in his other pocket. Then he said, “Well, have a great show. Break a leg. Can’t wait to hear Tom Tom Club.” And with that he was off. Byrne looked burnt.
In London, we played two nights at Wembley Arena. Gary and Chris Blackwell tried to come backstage without the proper passes so the security told them to fuck off. Gary said, “But I’m the band’s manager!” Chris said, “I run their record company!” Security said, “Sure you do,” and escorted them both outside to the car park.
Backstage at the Rock Werchter festival in Belgium, I was killing time with Jake Riviera, the founder of Stiff Records who also managed Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe. Jake was teasing me that we would never be as big as Elvis Costello when all of a sudden a United Nations motorcade roared up behind us with two motorcycles and a stretch limo with US flags flying from the hood. It was wet so the uniformed driver put boards across the grass so that his passengers would not have to get their shoes muddy. Two very-well-dressed, good-looking ladies got out and waved to us. Jake Riviera exclaimed out loud, “Who’s that?” I replied, “Oh, that’s my mother and her roommate from college. The guy behind them is my uncle. He’s the chief of staff of NATO.”