Remain in Love

by Chris Frantz

  We learned to play all the new songs from Speaking in Tongues with Bernie Worrell, Steve Scales, Alex Weir, and two new background singers: Lynn Mabry from the Brides of Funkenstein, and Ednah Holt from the Ritchie Family. Dolette had been invited to work with the Police and later Sting, probably for a lot more money, so off she went and who could blame her. We also learned a couple of tunes from David’s solo album, The Catherine Wheel, and Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love.”

  David was increasingly demanding and imperious. There was a lot of tension. In fact, the first production manager, a very experienced pro, quit after a few weeks of rehearsals, saying the gig was giving him an ulcer.

  This tour in 1983 covered the USA. We were playing every outdoor amphitheater and proscenium stage that could accommodate the rolling risers. Tina and I toured by bus with baby Robin and nanny Louise; the rest of the band traveled by plane. One time when they were all sitting at the gate about to fly out of LaGuardia Airport, tour manager Matthew Murphy said, “Where’s Bernie? The plane is boarding.” Alex Weir said, “I know where he is. He’s in the bar.” So Alex ran to get Bernie. The lighting in the bar was dark. Alex grabbed him by the arm and said, “C’mon, Bernie! Let’s go!” and started to drag him to the departure gate. The guy resisted and said, “Hold up. Whoa! Hold up, baby!” By the time they got to the gate Steve couldn’t believe his eyes. He told Alex, “That’s not Bernie. Bernie’s already on the plane. That’s Ray Charles!”

  David insisted that we all wear muted colors, especially no white because that would “pop” too much under the lights. All the chrome mic stands and drum hardware were anodized black. Nothing was supposed to reflect light. Then, of course, David came out wearing the biggest white suit anyone had ever seen. If the lighting person missed a cue, David would stop singing and yell at her. If one of the singers was not standing on her mark, there was hell to pay. But this ungentlemanly behavior on David’s part was not only directed at women. At Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, he hurled his microphone at our monitor man, Rick Coberly. After the show, Tina and I had to go to the crew bus to beg Rick not to quit the tour. Rick was nursing a lump the size of an egg on his forehead with an ice pack. Thankfully, Rick decided not to quit, but I never saw David apologize to him. Rick was the finest monitor man in the business. After our tour he went to work with Michael Jackson and his brothers on the Jacksons’ Victory tour in 1984.

  While performing in Eugene, Oregon, at the Hult, venue director David Pelletier introduced us to the great American author and Merry Prankster Ken Kesey. Ken invited us to his farm for dinner. Parked in front of his home was Further, the Merry Pranksters’ bus on which they toured the USA and turned on anyone and everyone who wanted to do LSD in the late sixties. I noticed rusty razor blades on the floor of the bus and Ken said, “Yeah, my kids come out here to snort coke. They think I don’t know.” After a hearty dinner of spaghetti bolognese prepared by Mountain Girl—whose real name is Carolyn Elizabeth Garcia—Ken said he had a proposition for us. He said he would normally ask his friend Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead to work with him on this, but there was a bad heroin problem, so he was asking us. His idea was to stage an opera based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem “Songs of Hiawatha.” Being a fan of Kesey’s writing and a person who had repeatedly read “Songs of Hiawatha” as a young kid, I thought this was a splendid idea. Ken said we should think about it and let him know. I said that we would, but in the van on the way back to our hotel David said no, he wasn’t interested. I still wish we had said yes to Ken’s idea. What a missed opportunity. I guess David had other plans.

  It was a no-brainer that the Speaking in Tongues tour should be captured on film. As the tour progressed, the band and production got tighter and tighter. Nobody had a rock show this hot. One day we were approached by a young filmmaker named Jonathan Demme and his fellow filmmaker girlfriend, Sandy McLeod. They wanted to make a film of the show. David, Tina, and I had seen Jonathan’s movie Melvin and Howard, about Melvin Dummar, the good Samaritan who rescued billionaire recluse Howard Hughes from a motorcycle accident in the Nevada desert, and we liked it a lot. So, we decided to roll with the idea. Sandy McLeod, who never got enough credit for all she did, followed us on tour, making notes of everyone’s onstage moves and how the show progressed from one song to another. The show began with David alone on a barren stage with a boom box and a guitar. With each new song another band member appeared. Risers were rolled out by the crew. Stage monitors and amplifiers were hidden underneath the risers. Halfway through the show the band took a short break, and screens were rolled down with words and images projected on them as the band performed the second half of the show. It was a very cinematic production, even before the movie was shot.

  We shot the movie, Stop Making Sense, over three nights at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood; the title is derived from lyrics in the Speaking in Tongues track “Girlfriend Is Better”: “As we get older and stop making sense / You won’t find her waiting long / Stop making sense, stop making sense.…” We paid for the movie ourselves—that is, the four core members of Talking Heads. Gary had to go to Warner Bros. for some money when we decided to shoot a third night. We were excited to learn that cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, who had shot Blade Runner, would be our director of photography. The first night was more or less a wash because of missed camera cues and various other problems, like the band rushing the tempos out of nervousness and too much cocaine. (The men in the band, anyway. The ladies—Lynn Mabry, Ednah Holt, and Tina—were not guilty of this.)

  The whole Speaking in Tongues tour posse with Gary Kurfirst.

  After the second night of shooting went very well, Tom Tom Club had to get up early to appear on Soul Train. We didn’t mind because this was a dream come true for Tina and me. We showed up on time at the TV studio and then had to wait for several hours, as one does, for host Don Cornelius to arrive. In the room where we were asked to wait, there was a big table with one single pink frosted donut on a plate. I didn’t touch it and neither did anyone else in the band, but while we were getting made up for TV, our soundman Jeff Hooper decided to eat it. Not long after that we heard a commotion and shouts of “Who ate Don’s donut?” from a production assistant. You would have thought someone had been shot. We thought this was hilarious and told them to go buy another donut, for crying out loud. When Don finally arrived we taped our segment, but Don proceeded to introduce me as Chris Paris two times before he finally got it right. This made me really nervous, but Tina, Laura, Lani, Bernie, Steve, and Alex were cool as ice. The taping went fine. From watching Soul Train on my little black-and-white TV in Providence to actually performing “Genius of Love” on the show was a leap not lost on Tina and me. After ten years, we had finally made it!

  The final night of shooting was really great. The band performed like we had no limits, in no small part due to our spirited audience. David’s performance was truly fantastic, but so was everyone else’s in the band. From my seat behind the drums, I felt blessed to work with such mighty players. The film crew was impeccable as well—when you see the movie, you’ll know what I’m talking about—especially Jonathan, who was juggling two films at the same time: As he was working on Stop Making Sense, he was also involved in reshooting another movie he’d directed starring Goldie Hawn called Swing Shift. Goldie had agreed to a gritty warts-and-all style, but when she saw the result she apparently hated it and made Jonathan reshoot all of her scenes. So Jonathan was not always present for our shoot. That’s Hollywood! Still, as a director, he understood the kind of movie we wanted and made sure we got that, but his real genius was in selecting the crew with Sandy. Everyone involved in the production of Stop Making Sense was at the top of his game.

  * * *

  After the last show we allowed some VIPs to come backstage. A dear friend from RISD, the filmmaker Mary Lambert—who is perhaps best known for the original, 1989 film version of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary and her nine videos for Madonna—was the first to
hug and kiss Tina and me in a night of much hugging and kissing. Robbie Robertson of the Band came backstage with Peter Gabriel, who actually appeared to be taking notes. Many members of the Warner team were present, including its chairman, Mo Ostin. There was a big crowd surrounding and congratulating us. Then the crowd parted to allow one man to pass. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys walked right past David, Jerry, me, and everyone else to make a beeline to Tina. He told her he loved her long blonde hair. He didn’t say much, but he said a lot with his eyes. He was clearly smitten with Tina. And who could blame him?

  50

  LITTLE CREATURES AND TRUE STORIES

  This chapter begins down at Compass Point in the Bahamas, not long after the Speaking in Tongues tour ended in 1983. One early morning I looked out of my third-floor window at Tip Top to see a man in a bathing suit lying facedown on the grass next to the swimming pool. Every once in a while he would move around a little bit, so I knew he wasn’t dead, but I didn’t recognize him. After a couple of hours I decided to check on him to make sure he was okay. I didn’t want to startle him so I kept my distance and said, “Hey, man! Are you okay? The sun is gonna burn you up!” He twitched a little bit and slowly raised his head. “Yeah, thanks. I better get out of the sun.” I said, “My name is Chris, I live upstairs.” He replied, “I’m Eric, Eric Thorngren, but people call me ET. I was up all night remixing Bob Marley’s ‘Buffalo Soldier’ for Rita Marley and Chris Blackwell. I’m still working on it, but I took a break and fell asleep right here on the grass.” It turned out that Eric had been the house engineer at Sugarhill Records. He’d recorded and mixed “It’s Nasty (Genius of Love),” “The Message,” and “White Lines,” all by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. These were some of my favorite records of the period and still are. They are the real essence of early hip-hop and have stood the test of time. While I wasn’t sure about the idea of remixing a Bob Marley and the Wailers track, I figured that, based on his résumé, if anyone could do it, ET was the guy. He invited me down to the studio to hear what he was doing later that night.

  I visited ET with Robert Palmer that night. We found him working away in Studio B all alone on what turned out to be an amazing remix of “Buffalo Soldier.” Robert and I were taken aback, in the best possible way, by the audacious sounds ET was getting. As Chris Blackwell gave Eric more and more work, he became a regular at Compass Point. He had a great energy and was funny as hell. Robert and I both thought that we wanted him to work on our next records. We all hung out together and partied ’til the break of dawn.

  Back in New York City, it was time to mix the Stop Making Sense soundtrack album, which would be a separate project from the actual film mix. We felt we needed some new ears on the project and I proposed that we try ET. David, who was normally very attentive, was strangely hands-off during these mixing sessions, and Tina was visiting her family in France, but Jerry and I went faithfully to Soundworks studio every night. ET was very meticulous and excited by the tracks, which were the first ever to be recorded fully digitally by the Record Plant Mobile. Some of the tracks were treated and edited, and we arrived at a very powerful-sounding album that helped to promote the film and vice versa. After its release in September 1984, in the USA it sold two million copies, while also doing very well in the UK, Europe, and Australia.

  Our next album marked another musical departure for us. For the first time, David brought us demos of songs he had written, at least for the most part. These demos, recorded on a cassette, were not the wild and funky polyrhythmic songs of Remain in Light or Speaking in Tongues. In fact, they were a return to singer-songwriter-type songs with a heavy dose of Americana thrown in. I was pleased to see that David had used some lyrics that I had written years ago for a song called “Perfect World.” We decided we would produce the album ourselves and, at my suggestion, we asked Eric Thorngren to record and mix it for us. After learning and rehearsing most of the songs at tiny Charles Lane rehearsal studios in the West Village, we moved into Sigma Sound Studios on West Fifty-third Street at the top of the Ed Sullivan Theater building. We recorded the basic tracks in one of the smaller rooms. The control room was tiny but the sound was great. For me, these songs felt comfortable and much easier to play than anything we had ever done before. We were all in good shape playing-wise, so the arrangements the band created came naturally. What David’s demos hinted at very sparsely, we made fully formed. This record would be known as Little Creatures. As usual, the basic tracks were recorded by the four Talking Heads, but we did have a few additional musicians come in and overdub parts.

  Steve Scales added his beautifully punctuating percussion to a number of tracks. Steve always brightened our day when he came to the studio. He had lost none of his sense of humor or energy level. Since Talking Heads stopped touring, he had been touring the world with Tina Turner and Bryan Ferry and later he would jump on board with Tom Tom Club.

  The great Brazilian jazz percussionist Nana Vasconcelos had been introduced to us by Don Cherry. Nana added an instrument called a water drum to “Perfect World.” The water drum was a handmade round ceramic pot with a hole on top that Nana would fill with a certain amount of water to create a uniquely wobbly, resonant sound.

  Eric Weissberg, who was famous for his picking on “Dueling Banjos” from the film Deliverance, drove down from his home in Woodstock, New York, to add a gorgeous pedal steel guitar to “Creatures of Love” and “Walk It Down.” He said that when he got the call from our office, he didn’t even know who Talking Heads were, but his daughter was a big fan and told him he absolutely had to work with us.

  Lenny Pickett, an original member of Tower of Power and leader of the Saturday Night Live band, played impeccable tenor, baritone, and bass saxes for us on four songs, including “Television Man” and “Road to Nowhere.”

  “Road to Nowhere” was perhaps the only song on the album that took some time to gel. We ended up recording it the way we’d done Remain in Light. In this case, I went out into the studio alone and laid down a simple marching cadence. No, I did not use a click track. Then Tina, David, and Jerry added their parts. The song was coming together but needed some extra flavor, so I called up my good friend Jimmy Macdonell, who Tina called “the Clint Eastwood of Accordion Players.” Jimmy Mac, originally from Lafayette, Louisiana, had a shockingly good Zydeco band in New York City called Loup Garou that played regularly at Tramps. Sometimes they shared the stage there with Buster Poindexter (David Johansen’s alter ego). Jimmy brought along his washboard player, Andrew “El Pantalones” Cader, who performed wearing a suit and hat made from one-dollar bills. Jimmy and Andrew were fabulous and lent the song a truly Acadian feel.

  At ET’s suggestion, we brought in the crème de la crème of studio background singers: Lani Groves, Diva Gray, Erin Dickens, Gordon Grody, Kurt Yahijian, and Ellen Bernfeld. Behind David’s and Tina’s voices, they gave the record a sweet sheen that one wouldn’t have expected from Talking Heads. These people could sing their asses off. They also added nuance to the melodies, which was a welcome touch.

  As for David, he was singing more comfortably than ever. For once he was writing vocal parts that were within his singing range. He had taken to a crooning style that was very different from the jittery, squawking and yelping sounds he had sung in our earlier days. This new singing style reminded me of many years before, when he took one vocal lesson but quit when the vocal coach required him to sing “Send in the Clowns.” Now he was singing every song like that. It’s funny to recall, but some people weren’t ready for the change. They missed the weirdness, but that was where we were at then. We were in what was for us new territory.

  We were beginning to enjoy the fruits of our labors and David moved into a big loft on Greene Street in SoHo. The interior was designed by Tina’s brother, Yann, and his team at Red Roof Design and was very stylish in a low-key way. On the ground floor of his building was the Phyllis Kind Gallery. Phyllis Kind specialized in outsider art. She was the first to champion and show this
type of work in New York, or maybe anywhere. Her stable of artists included Martin Ramirez, Henry Darger, Joseph Yoakum, and Howard Finster, among others. David really liked Henry Darger’s watercolors of what the artist called the “Vivian Girls.” He collected them. These were paintings of cute little transgender girls. Sometimes they were clothed in sweet little sundresses and sometimes they were nude. Why do I call them transgender? The little girls have tiny little penises. These would probably not work for a Talking Heads album cover, but Phyllis Kind had another artist who would; in fact, he had already made a cover painting for REM: Reverend Howard Finster.

  Reverend Finster lived in his own Paradise Garden down in rural Georgia, not far from the town of Athens. Howard was commissioned and within a few days had made us a magnificently quirky album cover that included the four members of the band and featured David as Atlas holding the world on his shoulders, dressed only in boots and his tighty whiteys. Next to his portrait of Tina, Finster wrote, “Tina, may your mansions be many.” On the back cover was a color photo of the four of us dressed up in luridly colored pink, lavender, and yellow silk and satin outfits from a SoHo boutique called New Republic. These were not rock star outfits. They were from another dimension.

  With the success of the film Stop Making Sense, David was able to make a film of his own that would be called True Stories, about some wacky characters living in a small town in Texas, of all places, and it would include a soundtrack by Talking Heads. Our plan was that, while ET was mixing Little Creatures in the control room at Sigma Sound, we would be out in the studio learning and arranging the songs that David had written for True Stories. David had written some parts for us in the film but his idea was to cast me as a pimp and Tina as a whore, so we declined to be actors in the project as graciously as possible.