by Chris Frantz
The songs David presented for True Stories were a mix of Americana, rock, voodoo, and gospel. We thought, “Okay. It’s cool. We can do this.” We knew that David really wanted to do this record with the actors in the film, but the record company wanted another record by Talking Heads, so that’s where we were at. When ET finished mixing Little Creatures we immediately rolled the tape again and recorded True Stories. The tracks ended up being damn good, even if it was not what many of our fans had been expecting. What they didn’t know is that at this point, Tina and I were doing our best to keep the band together.
During the recording of the basic tracks, David gave me the only compliment he had ever given me since I met him. After he heard the playback of the basic track “Puzzlin’ Evidence,” he said, to no one in particular, “Nice drums.” Actually, they were better than just “nice.” But David was not one to go overboard with compliments.
We decided to finish overdubbing and mixing the True Stories record in Los Angeles so David could continue working on his film. This sounded as if it would be fun, so off we went. We brought our now three-year-old son Robin along with a new nanny. Tina was expecting our second child, Egan, but wasn’t really showing yet. When we arrived, David’s production company had booked us into a lousy hotel in Santa Monica. Tina and I were shocked to find our room had no windows, and when I turned on the light roaches ran for cover. We spent one night there and then moved to our old favorite, the Sunset Marquis. Eventually, the guitarist T Bone Burnett told us about a friend who had a nice apartment in Santa Monica to sublet and since we were going to be in town for a couple of months of mixing and making videos, we took it. It was in one of those old stucco Spanish apartment houses that was very dark and gloomy inside. The apartment itself was nice enough, although we were told not to tell anyone we were staying there because sublets were not allowed.
We started recording overdubs at O’Henry Studio, Leon Russell’s studio over in Toluca Lake. Someone told us that Bob Hope lived in the house next door. We hired one of LA’s most famous studio cats, the percussionist Paulinho Da Costa, to add some magic to “Papa Legba,” “People Like Us,” and “Radio Head.” That last song title inspired some young guys in England to name their band after it. David and Jerry did a few fixes to their own parts and the recording was done. We never did get to meet Bob Hope.
Now it was mixing time and we moved to the Village Recorder studio in Westwood. They had a brand-new room with a Solid State Logic automated console that was all the rage because when mixing it could remember the engineer’s moves. If you created a mix and the next day you wanted to change just a few things, the SSL would remember where you left off, so you didn’t have to start all over again from scratch. ET loved this.
The thing was, though, some of the mixes were not playing back to ET’s satisfaction, so after working on a mix for a couple of days he would have to begin again. It was maddening. Finally he checked the little compartment where the SSL’s brain was located and the circuit cards were covered in a thick layer of sawdust. It turned out the console was installed before the carpenters had finished the extensive woodwork in the room. We had the compartment and the Dolby SR racks—which were also caked with sawdust—carefully vacuumed and after that, everything worked fine.
Village Recorders was a famous studio. Originally built as a Masonic Temple, it was taken over by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the sixties and became his LA meditation center. Yes, the Beatles meditated there. Geordie Hormel, the heir to Hormel Hams, bought the place in 1968 and turned it into a recording studio. Everybody recorded there. Sly Stone had famously taken over one of the little rooms with an endless supply of cocaine, and would wave a pistol at anyone who disturbed him. Fleetwood Mac recorded their 1979 double album Tusk there. While we were there, Jimmy Buffett, who was working on his latest record, Floridays, would pull up in his Porsche each day with a different young beauty. The great songwriter and bluesman Willie Dixon, dressed in a seersucker suit and straw boater hat, dropped into our control room to hear what was happening. He really liked the song called “Love for Sale” that we were mixing. He said, “You know, this is not the first song to use that title. Cole Porter had a song called ‘Love for Sale’ a long time ago.” Willie wrote some very big hits: “I Ain’t Superstitious” covered by Jeff Beck; Cream covered “Spoonful”; Muddy Waters covered “I Just Want to Make Love to You” and “Hoochie Coochie Man”; the Doors did “Back Door Man”; the Rolling Stones did “Little Red Rooster”; and Led Zeppelin did “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” and that’s just to name a few. Willie was a bighearted guy and a real gentleman. Tina gave him a kiss on the cheek when he left to have dinner with Eric Clapton.
The next person to drop in was the actor Lee Majors, who starred in The Six Million Dollar Man and Big Valley on television. He had been married to Farah Fawcett Majors, but no longer. He told us he was a big fan. When you achieve a certain level of fame, celebrities come out of the woodwork. This was fine with me. Lee was a sweet guy and very curious about our band. It turns out we both had roots in Kentucky.
David hardly ever came to these mixing sessions, unless we were also having a photo session. One such photo session was with the classic Hollywood photographer George Hurrell. I recalled when the art director at Interview magazine told Duncan Hannah back in 1976 that his photographs of us should look like George Hurrell’s, which we all thought was crazy at the time. Now, here we were in Los Angeles with the real Hurrell. His photos of Marlene Deitrich, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Gary Cooper, and Clark Gable, and virtually every Hollywood movie star you’ve ever heard of, earned him the nickname “the Rembrandt of Hollywood.” He was a charming man who regaled us with stories of Vaudeville days and used expressions like, “We’re comin’ into Altoona,” which meant we were almost finished with the session. He was all about the lighting and when he got that the way he liked it, he only took a few shots with that vintage 8x10 camera of his. His photo of Talking Heads is unlike any other taken of us. We actually look glamorous and sophisticated. This was the photo used for the True Stories inner sleeve.
During our time in LA we didn’t see a lot of David. I remember feeling surprised that during two months in Los Angeles he never once invited us to his new home in the Hollywood Hills, not even for a drink. We invited him to join us for some great sushi dinners in Hollywood and Santa Monica, but he failed to show. We never did anything together socially because he was “too busy.”
People who were more hospitable to Tina and me were our RISD friend Mary Lambert—who had just bought a home in Los Feliz—Dennis Hopper, and Paul Wexler.
Mary was the hottest video director of the time, having directed all of Madonna’s videos. Prior to that, Mary had asked us if she could make a video of Tom Tom Club’s “As Above, So Below.” We said yes, of course. She submitted it to Warner as a demo and when they showed it to their newest star, Madonna said, “Oh! I want her!” We loved spending time with Mary and we still do. During this trip we visited with her often.
We’d met Dennis Hopper in Nassau and he said to call us next time we were in LA. We did call and he picked us up in his vintage Cadillac and took us to his early Frank Gehry–designed home. It was located in a rough section of Venice with groups of men huddled around fires they’d made in fifty-gallon oil drums. When we pulled up he opened the garage door remotely and drove right in, closing the door behind us. We followed him upstairs and looked around admiringly at his fantastic art collection while he made a few phone calls. Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, and Johns were hanging on the walls. My favorite pieces were his own photographs, especially one of Teri Garr in her bra and panties taken, I think, in the same bathroom in which it was hanging.
After his phone calls we got back in the car and drove to another Venice compound, this one surrounded by a high chain-link fence with security cameras. It belonged to the artist Charles “Chuck” Arnoldi, who buzzed us in. He had an enormous studio where he was working on paintings made on large sheets
of plywood glued together in multiple layers that he would then dig into with a chain saw, creating a brutally rough surface to paint on. Chuck’s was a very brightly colored palette and his work was loads of fun to see.
Next stop was the home studio of a guy whose work I’d admired since my RISD days, Billy Al Bengston. He was legendary in the Los Angeles art scene. I didn’t know it then but he and Dennis both came from Dodge City, Kansas. They had probably been friends since they were kids. Billy was a motorcycle racer and a surfer. The work I had admired when I was in art school was a series called Dentos, in which the artist dented various-sized sheets of aluminum with a ball-peen hammer and then sprayed them with lacquer paint in various designs, sometimes featuring a sargeant’s stripe. He also painted a Dracula series, various abstract paintings on canvas that as far as I could see had nothing to do with Dracula.
Bengston made us a delicious light lunch of soup, salad, and tea and showed us his new work, which had an Asian feeling, with pastel branches of palms and flowers. Today, he’s still painting at eighty-five, but sadly, Dennis Hopper is no longer among the living, which is a damn shame.
Paul Wexler, who we knew well from Compass Point, kindly invited Tina and me to a dinner party at the house of his father, Jerry Wexler. Somehow I got lost on the freeway system in pouring rain. They say it never rains in Southern California, but that’s not true. During our stay it rained a lot. We arrived over an hour late, which is not cool at a dinner party, but Paul and Jerry were very understanding. Herbie Hancock was there and we recalled the time we first met at a little late-night Robata restaurant in Tokyo. Herbie was enjoying a big hit with “Rockit,” which was mixed by Dave Jerden, who had worked with us on Remain in Light.
In case you didn’t know, Jerry Wexler was the record executive and producer at Atlantic records who brought soul music and rhythm and blues to a crossover market by making a deal with Stax Records in Memphis and bringing Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett down to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to work with a mostly white but soulful rhythm section known as the “Swampers.” Jerry even coined the term “Rhythm and Blues” as a very young man while working at Billboard magazine. He also coined the expression “oversouling,” which is when a singer tries too hard to sound soulful by using unnecessary melisma and vibrato. Some of the other musicians he worked with were LaVern Baker, Ray Charles, Ruth Brown, Solomon Burke, the Drifters, Dr. John, Dire Straits, Dusty Springfield, Delaney and Bonnie, and Bob Dylan.
After dinner Jerry told us a story about working with Aretha Franklin. Before she came to Atlantic she had been on Columbia Records, where they never let her play the piano on her records. They always had some session cat play the piano and Aretha was only allowed to sing. She didn’t have a single hit on Columbia. When she came to Atlantic and was recording “I Never Loved a Man (The Way That I Love You)” down at Muscle Shoals, the Swampers were struggling a bit to get the feel of the song right. Jerry asked Aretha to sit down at the piano to play and sing the song. When she did, the band suddenly heard where the song should go and the studio pianist, the great Spooner Oldham, moved over to the Wurlitzer electric piano and followed Aretha’s lead. From then on Aretha played the piano at all her recording sessions. By the way, “I Never Loved a Man (The Way That I Love You),” Aretha’s first single on Atlantic, went to number one on the R&B chart and reached number nine on the Hot 100 chart.
While the mixing of True Stories continued, we shot two videos that would be included in the True Stories film and also marketed to MTV to promote the film and album. Gary Kurfirst felt that MTV was eventually going to ruin the music business with its preference for pretty boys and girls over real artists. He was not wrong.
The first video to be shot was for “Wild Wild Life.” We were to appear in various disguises in a lip-synch contest. We made the most of it and had a fun day doing it. Tina and Jerry and I picked out our own characters and costumes. Hollywood is a great place to find such things. I chose to be a heavy metal singer in the style of Ozzy Osbourne, a Hank Willams–style country-and-western star, and a satin-jacketed sports fan with WILD WILD LIFE emblazoned on my baseball cap. Tina played a society lady, and a crazy person who rips off her wig to reveal a shaved head. She also played a smoking hot Apollonia to Jerry’s Prince. Jerry also did great impressions of Billy Idol, a shady Latino in a zoot suit, and Bruce Lee. David dressed up as a smooth Salsa guy with a mustache and various nerds. ET’s in it, too, as himself. It was great to be in a video with actor John Goodman.
After we had done our bit, various members of the crew approached Tina and me to thank us for being so much fun and easy on the set. They said they had been told to watch out, that we would be very difficult to work with, but in fact it was just the opposite. I asked them who had told them that and they just shrugged sheepishly and rolled their eyes.
Several days later we made the video for “Love for Sale.” The point of the video was to show how rock and roll bands are treated as products and marketed the same way pancake mix, makeup, and cigarettes are. A well-known television commercial director named Melvin Sokolsky was hired to shoot the band doing various funny things, sometimes with special effects that recalled popular TV commrcials for hairspray, roll-on deodorant, and candy bars. These shots were cut in with actual found TV commercials, and at the end each band member was dipped in chocolate and wrapped in shiny, colored aluminum foil. It wasn’t real chocolate, of course. It was a special kind of clay, delivered in a tanker truck, that simulates and photographs like chocolate. It was cold and it tasted like Pepto Bismol. I had it poured on my head in lovely slow motion. Tina had it poured all over her as she lay on a moving conveyor belt. Then the whole band jumped into a vat of the stuff and came out “chocolate” covered. Melvin Sokolsky lost his temper and rightfully so when David yelled “Cut!” in the middle of a shot he was making. Sokolsky said, in no uncertain terms, “No one yells ‘cut’ on my set except me!” It was a tense moment in Hollywood. In the end, all was well and everyone was happy with the results. The assistant director, a very capable young guy, came up to Tina and me and said, “It was great to work with you guys, a real pleasure. You know, we were told that you were real divas and difficult to deal with, but it was just the opposite.” I said, “Thanks. I wonder who told you that?” He replied, “The guy who yelled ‘cut.’”
Gary Kurfirst used to say that in the end, all you have is your reputation. I’m pleased that Tina and I still have a good one. If anyone ever tells you we were difficult to work with, ask for the source of that information. Then look up the psychological term “projection.” This is one definition, according to the Urban dictionary: “An unconscious self-defense mechanism characterized by a person unconsciously attributing their own issues onto someone or something else as a form of delusion or denial.”
Our business in LA was finished, but the fun wasn’t: There was a party in our honor at the Pacific Palisades home of Mo Ostin, the chairman of Warner. Everyone was given True Stories T-shirts with little stick figures on them that David had designed for his True Stories One Sheet. It was good to meet Quincy Jones, who was riding extra high from his work with Michael Jackson and “We Are the World.” I reminded him of the time we met him and his family at Traveller’s Rest in Nassau, and he said, “Oh, man, the smudder grouper and the curry chicken are the best! Let’s go right now!” I told him I would be going there soon enough and he was welcome to join us.
51
JAMES BROWN COMES TO TOWN
In 1982, when the news that James Brown was coming to Compass Point to cut a record with the Compass Point All Stars reached my ears, I almost couldn’t believe it. It sounded like something I might have imagined in a dream, but Paul Wexler had put it together and made it real. Paul was working A&R for Island after having huge hits at Warner Bros. with Van Morrison and the Grateful Dead. He had also worked with the Go-Gos and Tin Huey, Mavis Staples, and many other bands. Most recently he had produced a good part of the B-52s’ Party Mix! with Steven Stanley.
Paul was a cool guy with music in his blood and we hung out together a lot down at Compass Point. Paul even invited me to play on a Joe Cocker session with Wally Badarou, Earl “Pops” Popwell, and Cornell Dupree. It was a tremendous thrill for me to be part of it even though those particular tracks were never actually released.
James Brown coming to the Bahamas was front-page news in both of Nassau’s newspapers. When the Godfather of Soul arrived, he stayed at a little guest house on the beach called Press On Regardless, where U2 and Molly Hatchet and other members of Tom Tom Club had stayed. It wasn’t fancy but it had its own dock and a little beach and was easy walking distance to the studio. Of course James brought an entourage, which consisted of Bobby Byrd, Fred Wesley, the young Reverend Al Sharpton, plus some foxy women. James arrived wearing a white straw cowboy hat and lizard skin, stacked-heel cowboy boots, with the tightest jeans you’ve ever seen and a red vest with no shirt underneath. He was adorned in turquoise Native American jewelry, looking like a true badass.
* * *
That evening, in honor of Mr. Brown’s arrival—everyone had been instructed to call him Mr. Brown—Chris Blackwell had arranged a big party at his home and invited important Ministers of Parliament and other Bahamian dignitaries. I was invited, too, along with the whole studio staff and community. It was a beautiful night and a great party, but James insisted on having his hair conked by his longtime friend and bandmate Bobby Byrd before he could make an appearance. The great photographer Lynn Goldsmith had been sent to take his picture, but James was still in pink hair rollers and Reverend Sharpton insisted she be frisked and her camera cases inspected before she could even speak to James. This took a very long time and when Mr. Brown finally arrived at the party alone and two hours late, all the crème de la crème of Bahamian government and culture had left. Although he was too cool to mention it at the time, this did not sit well with Chris Blackwell, who had to do studio business with the government ministers James Brown had just snubbed.