Remain in Love

by Chris Frantz

  I was not part of the studio session that followed in any way, but from what I learned from Paul Wexler and Wally Badarou, James had a few tunes written that were not up to his usual standards of excellence. The cats on the session were Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, Wally Badarou, Mikey Chung, and Monte Brown; Monte had played rhythm guitar on “Wordy Rappinghood” and “Genius of Love.” Sly and Robbie had some great groove ideas and everyone decided to go with those. Sly sang a pilot vocal in his inimitable nursery-rhyme style and everyone was digging that. Then James took the mic and added some more lyrics. It was sounding good and feeling good. Then James sat down by Sly and told him to play it this way. Sly, being a sweet, good-natured guy, obliged. When James tried the same thing with Robbie, though, Robbie handed him the bass, said, “You play that bumbaclaat part,” and walked out. This was bad, but the session continued with Wally playing keyboard bass, while James insisted on calling Mikey Chung “Montaygo.”

  My parents had come down to visit that week, and as my father and I were walking past the studio one afternoon, James Brown was standing outside looking at the sea. I said, “Hi, Mr. Brown. I’d like to introduce you to my father, General Frantz.” I normally did not refer to my dad as General Frantz, but I knew that James was keen on formality. They shook hands and James said, “Very good to meet you, General Frantz. You have a fine son.” They got to talking and my dad, referring to the “James Brown” part in “Genius of Love,” said, “You know, Mr. Brown, my son made you famous.” I could have died, but James sensed that he was only being teased. He answered, “Well, you know, General Frantz, your son may be a genius, but I was already famous.” Then my father said that he’d heard that James was from Augusta, Georgia, and that he had a law school classmate who was a judge down there. James, referring to a recent divorce settlement, said, “General Frantz, that’s the judge that took away my car! Yes, sir! Can you talk to him and get it back?” My dad said that he couldn’t make any promises but would try.

  * * *

  Reverend Sharpton, who was acting as James’s manager, had plopped his big, round, velour tracksuit–covered body down by the studio phone in the reception area. His hair was perfectly processed and permed. He spoke to no one and maintained an angry pouting expression on his face at all times. When I said hello to him, he looked the other way.

  In the studio, James had reconciled somewhat with Sly and Robbie, although they had taken to calling Sharpton “the Reverend Sodomite,” in light of what they, as Rastas, considered his unmanly hair style. After a few days of recording, Sharpton announced that James would be getting 100 percent of the publishing rights. In earlier times, when he was cranking out the hits, James could get away with his, but these times were different. Sly and Robbie would not agree to the arrangement, and when Chris Blackwell got wind of it he pulled the plug on the session.

  We bumped into James Brown a few years later when he was making a record with Full Force at Sigma Sound in New York. He was in good spirits and when Tina asked him how it was going, he said, “Going great! You know, you are all my children.” Then his assistant, thinking she must work for the studio, gave Tina a piece of paper with a phone number on it and told her to call Mr. Brown’s limo for him. Tina did so with pleasure. After all, it’s not every day you get to do something in return for the Godfather of Soul.

  52

  NAKED IN PARIS

  Our younger son, Marshall Egan, was born on August 25, 1986, in Norwalk, Connecticut. He was healthy and strong and welcomed to this earth by all of us Frantzes and Weymouths. Not long before he was born, he came to Tina in a dream as a young man dressed in a medieval buckskin hunting outfit. He said to her very distinctly, “My name is Egan, but I’d like to be named Marshall to please my father.” We had been discussing what we should name the baby and this settled it. Marshall was a family name on my side of the family, and Egan means “fiery-spirited one.” That he is.

  One month after Egan was born, the True Stories album and movie were released. Plainly speaking, neither one did particularly well despite “Wild Wild Life” reaching number 25 on the pop chart and the video winning two MTV video awards. Tina and I saw the film for the first time at our local theater in Connecticut. The room was not very crowded when we sat down, but shortly after the film began people started walking out. By the end of the film Tina and I were alone in the theater.

  David was still getting mountains of press. He had hired his own publicist separate from the band, so we would read things on Page Six in the New York Post about how David had attended Jerry Hall’s baby shower. I thought, Really? Time magazine put him on the cover and called him “Rock’s Renaissance Man.” There was some truth to it—but you know he did not get to this point alone.

  Tina and I found a charming barn-style home in Connecticut on a beautiful pond with geese and ducks and turtles and frogs. Tina, being a big nature lover, adored this. We’d had a few good years and our accountant, Bert Padell, told us we should buy a house. We followed his advice. Finally, we had heat in the winter after business hours! We kept the loft in Long Island City, though. We did not want to put ourselves completely out to pasture yet.

  This was a wonderful time for Tina, Robin, Egan, and me. We spent many happy days with our children and our extended family. We had a big room to play music in. The first thing we bought when we moved in—before we even had beds—was a Steinway piano. We really wanted to keep this music thing going.

  You can imagine our excitement—yes, we still get excited—when Talking Heads decided to make a new album. The band got together in our loft and talked about how we would do this. David was keen on returning to the Remain in Light approach and Tina and Jerry and I were happy to hear it. We would create the songs together by improvised layering in the studio. When the tracks were complete, David would write the words and vocal melodies. All was good. Then David wrote me a letter saying that I should not play drums in a rock and roll style on this record. He did not say what other style he was thinking of, only that it should not be rock. I thought about this for a minute or two and decided, no problem, I would play this album of songs with brushes. I enjoyed the sound of brushes on the drumheads. Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” or Serge Gainsbourg’s “The Ballad of Melody Nelson” came to mind. I had played brushes myself on an early Talking Heads song called “I Wish You Wouldn’t Say That.” I told David that’s what I would do and the problem was solved.

  We had the idea to go to Paris to make this album, which would ultimately be titled Naked. We all loved Paris and thinking of Paris made me think of the wonderful Wally Badarou. Though we knew him from Compass Point, Wally was Parisian and very knowledgeable about the music scene there. Tina and I were very fond of his solo work and his productions. He had produced Level 42, Marianne Faithfull, Carlinhos Brown, and Wasis Diop among many others. We suggested to David and Jerry that Wally could coproduce the new album with us. They thought about it but ultimately felt that we should work with a more well-known producer, while still inviting Wally to play on the sessions and assist us in finding the crème de la crème of African musicians, many of whom lived in Paris. Wally also recommended we work at Studio Davout and that’s what we did.

  I suggested then that we consider the British hit-making producer Steve Lillywhite. He had worked with my brother Roddy’s band, Urban Verbs, and they all liked him a lot. Also, Steve had a very upbeat personality and a great sense of humor. This element was something that I felt was very important for the upcoming sessions. Steve’s track record was very impressive, too. He’d produced the Members, Johnny Thunders, XTC, Peter Gabriel, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Rolling Stones, and several records with U2. In fact, that very evening I was speaking to U2’s manager, Paul McGuinness, at Tramps about how his band was doing. He complained that “Eno keeps making these demands. He wants more and more, always more. Just today I found out we can’t use his mixes. The band is not happy with them.” I asked him what they were going to do and Paul said, “We
’re going to do what we always do: Call Steve Lillywhite.”

  We all agreed that Steve was our man and he was available and excited to produce us. Wally was on board, too. Studio Davout was booked.

  Before we left we gathered at our loft and recorded two dozen or more musical jams on my boom box. These were not really songs but departure points from which we would jump off to create songs. This process was fun to do and we were all getting along great like we used to do.

  We flew to Paris in early May of 1987. We would be there for a couple of months. We had our two boys with us and Tina’s mother, Laure, who was excited to live out her French-grandmother fantasy in Paris. She would help us with the kids and take Robin by train to visit her friends and relations in Belgium and Provence. Our nanny and great friend, Louise Kelleher, would meet us in Paris to help take care of baby Egan. Jerry and his future wife, Carol, had their baby boy, Griffin, and David was solo until Bonnie arrived.

  Tina and I were still very much in love and feeling fortunate to be leading such a romantic life together.

  Ira Lippy from Gary Kurfirst’s office had arranged apartments for each of us. Tina and I and our family would be staying in the apartment of Jean-Francois Bizot, the founder, editor, and publisher of the daring French magazine Actuel. Jean-Francois, a big fan and friend of Talking Heads, was in the middle of a divorce and neither he nor his wife would be living in the apartment until the divorce was settled, so he was pleased to rent it to us.

  When we arrived from the airport, a real estate agent let us in and gave us a couple of keys. The apartment was located on Boulevard Raspail just near the corner of Boulevard du Montparnasse, where Rodin’s statue of Balzac stands. There was a fine patisserie next door and a candy store on the corner that Robin remembers his grandmother never let him go in, saying, “Oh, no. It’s bad for you.” The apartment was on the ground floor with a terrace in back overlooking a beautifully lush garden. There were at least three bedrooms and lots of comfy Moroccan pillows to sit on. We were just around the corner from La Coupole and Le Dome and we dined there often.

  Recording sessions began at 10:00 every morning. After a few missteps, Tina and I figured out how to get to the Porte de Montreuil by Metro. This was the predominantly African neighborhood where Studio Davout was located. There was a lively street scene with plenty of people dressed in their native clothing. The studio itself had originally been a large movie theater built near the end of World War II, but was made into a recording studio in 1966. One of the first hits recorded there was a song written by Serge Gainsbourg for the teenage singer France Gall called “Les Sucettes.” It was considered to be scandalous, because it’s a song about a young girl who loves to suck on lollipops. France Gall denied any knowledge of the double entendre at her age, and I believe her. The main room where we worked was massive, big enough for a full orchestra. They’d removed the seats from the theater but the floor still slanted downward. Where the movie screen had been was now the control room. The ceilings were very high and the room was very dark with only a few lights so that we could barely see what we were doing. Michel Legrand had worked in that room, as had Herbie Hancock, Nina Simone, Dexter Gordon, Serge Gainsbourg, and Duran Duran. One great thing was the Café Davout on the corner. The blond waitress dressed in stiletto heels and a maid’s outfit would deliver our espressos, café crèmes, and beers on a tray right to us in the studio. There were no paper cups. We got real porcelain cups and saucers and glasses. French luxury!

  Steve Lillywhite had brought a well-experienced recording engineer named Richard Manwaring with him. Richard had a long résumé that included Human League, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and Fine Young Cannibals. He was serious about his gig, but also had a playful sense of fun. Assistant engineer Jean-Loup Morette was immensely helpful with setting up the band to record and translating from French to English when necessary. I felt we had an excellent team in the control room.

  Out in the studio Wally Badarou was already creating new sounds on his Prophet-5 and Yamaha DX-7. Wally never used the preset sounds on his synthesizers—he created his own unique sounds sometimes resembling organ or clavinet and then tweak them even further as the songs took shape. Wally set up with the band and would play on “Blind” and “The Facts of Life” before he had to leave to work on one of his own projects.

  Wally introduced us to Yves N’Djock from Cameroon, a great guitarist who played on a number of our basic tracks. Wally also introduced us to percussionists Abdou M’Boup from Senegal and Brice Wassy, one of the Bamileke People from the grasslands of western Cameroon. These guys were phenomenal percussionists and real sweethearts, too. On one song, Brice put on pants made of rattling bean pods that were played by dancing. Imagine the sound of one hundred maracas shaking at once and that would come close to the sound those bean pod trousers made. Abdou primarily played three tuned Bougarabou that resembled conga drums but had a deeper resonance. Abdou was a true Griot, trained from childhood to tell stories, sing praises, and keep the oral history of his people.

  Last, but certainly not least, Wally introduced us to Mory Kanté, a great singer and master of the kora, a twenty-one-string instrument with a long neck and a resonator of goat- or calfskin stretched over a large calabash gourd. The player usually sits with the resonator end in his lap while plucking the strings with his fingers like a harp. Mory Kanté was from Guinea and had a huge hit in Europe that spring and summer called “Ye Ke Ye Ke,” which had been remixed again and again for dance clubs so we were hearing his music all over Paris. For Talking Heads, Mory played on “Mr. Jones” and “Facts of Life.”

  We were all surprised at how smoothly the music came together on these sessions. As planned, we would listen to our demo cassette from Long Island City and depart from there. Tina, Jerry, and David were all playing beautifully and those creative juices were flowing like a fine Bordeaux. I felt that we were not only having a really good time, we were making some very strong music as well.

  Funny episodes happened, too. One day when we were waiting for a particular guitarist recommended by Wally to arrive, right on time a tall, thin African man walked into the studio. Steve Lillywhite asked him if he was the guitarist and he answered in French that yes, he played guitar. Then Steve asked where his guitar was and he said he didn’t have it with him. Steve said, “No problem, you can use one of ours.” We played the track for him while setting him up to record. When he played it was clear that he was not accustomed to recording an overdub. He was missing the chord changes and his playing was all over the place. When Steve questioned him about it, he said in French that it was no problem—and that we should keep his part and the rest of the band should rerecord their parts to fit with his! At that moment another young African guitarist walked in carrying his guitar. This was the guy we had been waiting for. The fellow we had just recorded was a messenger who had come to pick up a package to be delivered to our business office. Then we asked the real guitarist to take over but he politely declined because he didn’t want to take another African brother’s gig. It was one of those c’est la vie moments.

  Another day a percussionist arrived to play and insisted that he needed to tune his drums. We said, “Okay, sure. Bien sûr.” What we didn’t know was that he would start a big fire in a trash can in the bathroom right under the control room to heat up his drum skins until they were at the right pitch. There was so much smoke that it set off the fire alarm and Jean-Loup had to urgently call the pompiers—the fire department—to tell them that everything was okay so they wouldn’t come and hose down the studio and all of our electronic gear.

  We did have one guitarist join us from England. Steve was friends with Johnny Marr of the Smiths and thought he would be a great addition to a couple of our songs. We had not met Johnny before but he immediately fit right in. We in Talking Heads had not brought any technical crew with us. We carried our own gear and set it up. We tuned our instruments ourselves. When Johnny turned up he had the most famous guitar tech in Engla
nd—or possibly the world—working for him: Alan Rogan, the guitar tech for Pete Townsend. I chatted with Alan while he was setting up Johnny’s gear and tuning his twelve-string for an overdub on “(Nothing But) Flowers.” When he mentioned Ronnie and Keith, you knew he was referring to the Stones. When he told you about working with Eric, you knew he meant Clapton. I figured by having Alan in the same room we had finally reached the big time.

  Johnny played beautifully and with ease. After he was finished Tina and I shared some herb and drank some wine with Johnny, Steve, and his lovely and feisty redheaded wife, Kirsty MacColl. Then Johnny was off back to Manchester. I’ve never been very much of a Morrisey fan, he always seemed so twee, but I will always be a fan of Johnny Marr. Great guy.

  Kirsty MacColl sang like an angel and she could effortlessly layer harmonies the way the Beach Boys did. Steve recommended that she sing backing vocals on a few of our songs and, when we returned to New York and David recorded his vocals, she sang on “(Nothing But) Flowers” and another song called “Bill.” We developed a good friendship with Kirsty and enticed her to sing with Tom Tom Club on our album Dark Sneak Love Action. She was strong, determined, and did not suffer foolishness. Sadly, in 2000 we read in The New York Times that she had perished when she was hit by a powerboat while snorkeling at a seaside resort in Mexico. We miss her still. Her own albums and her work with the Pogues, particularly “Fairytale of New York,” are outstanding.

  * * *

  Around this time David had to go to London for some reason. Steve wondered aloud, “Why is he going to London in the middle of recording this record?” Though David didn’t tell us, I knew from Chris Blackwell that he had been asked to compose the theme for Bernardo Bertolucci’s new film, The Last Emperor. Later, David told Tina and me that his main contribution to the score was to hire an arranger to orchestrate a traditional Chinese song, for which he had selected various instruments he wanted the arranger to use. In any event, he won the 1987 Academy Award for Best Original Score, which he shared with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Cong Su, who composed the main portion of the soundtrack.