by Chris Frantz
While David was in London, Tina and I took our family and Jerry, Carol, and baby Griffin for a little vacation at Tina’s family home in Brittany by the seaside. Jerry went windsurfing every day. We promenaded with the children by the sea and generally had a ball enjoying seafood and crepes, cider, and Muscadet.
When we returned to Paris, we learned by a handwritten note from Bonnie that she and David had been married in London. I guess they didn’t want to share that experience with anyone else.
Tina and I had to fly back to the US for my cousin Tommy Fryman’s wedding down in Washington, Kentucky. I was one of the ushers. Tommy had been a US attorney in Manhattan and would come to our CBGB shows after work in a suit and tie. I remember when Terry Ork asked him if he was a Fed and Tommy replied, “Yes, as a matter of fact, I am.” Tommy was a real music lover, and before we met Gary, was Tina’s first choice to be our manager. Robin and Egan came with us. Tommy was Robin’s godfather and he was marrying Lisa Fiedler, the daughter of one of my mother’s good friends. In fact, my mother, who had introduced Tommy and Lisa, was greatly relieved that Tommy had finally popped the question. In her opinion, he had taken way too long to do so.
The wedding on June 20 was lovely and the reception at Tommy’s farm, Federal Hill, was especially fabulous. During the wedding photos Robin crawled under the voluminous skirt of Lisa’s wedding gown. She was a really good sport about it. After dinner and much wine, I stepped outside with my old friend Sam Dryden to get a breath of air. It was hot. Sam and I were smoking a joint and reminiscing by the family graveyard out back when we saw the silhouette of a really gorgeous woman off in the distance. Sam and I both wondered who this fine-looking woman was. She was walking in our direction through the bluegrass. As she came closer I looked at Sam and said, “I know who she is! She’s my wife!” Of course, she was. It had been ten years since Tina and I were married in this same little village in Kentucky and it felt good to be back.
Back in Paris, Rupert Perry, the president of EMI Records UK, invited the band to dinner at a five-star restaurant called Le Toit De Passy, in the 16th Arrondissement. He wished to celebrate not only our new album but also a new deal on which he had been negotiating with Gary Kurfirst for years. The food was wonderful, with sorbet between courses and champagne to drink. Rupert was charming and everything was copacetic until Gary’s name was mentioned. To my horror, David hissed, “Gary Kurfirst is a liar!” Then Bonnie piped up, “It’s true! He is.” Rupert raised his eyebrows but said nothing. We were all frozen with shock that David would act like this. Tina asked, “What did Gary do that you would say this?” David said, “He told me my soundtrack album would be a hit!” I supposed he meant the soundtrack to True Stories, where the songs were sung not by him but by the actors, which was a separate album from the Talking Heads version. Very few people had bought that album. Anyway, that was an unbelievably awkward moment.
Very early one morning the phone rang in our apartment. Tina’s mother answered. It was Gary on the line asking her, “Lo, are you ok?” She said, “Yes, everything is marvelous!”
Then Gary said, “Oh, thank God. May I speak to Chris, please?” I picked up the extension in our bedroom and said sleepily, “Hi, Gary. What’s happening?” He replied, “Oh, man! I just got a call from Rolling Stone asking me to confirm reports that you had committed suicide in Paris.” I let this sink in for a moment and replied, “Wow, Gary. No! I haven’t even been depressed.” I still have no idea who those reports came from and I have no details about how or why I would want to kill myself, but to quote Mark Twain, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
One other important reason that we were happy to be in Paris was that Tina’s brother, Yann, was working very hard on the renovation of the Grand Louvre. Yann had worked for I. M. Pei on the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and now I. M. had asked him to be his chief designer for the Louvre project. Not only was Yann a great architect and designer, but he had roots in France, was very diplomatic, and spoke French fluently with a proper accent. This was important when dealing with President François Mitterand and the French government. He had a little apartment in the Latin Quarter and roared around Paris on a stylish BMW motorcycle. Yann always had time for us and visited us in the studio from time to time. He gave the band a personal tour of the excavation taking place underneath the Louvre, where archaeologists were unearthing new surprises every day. It was an enormous task that took eight years to complete. There was much protest and consternation from detractors in France, but in the end the project was a huge success. The Pyramid, controversial as it was, became a monument that is beloved by the French and attracts millions of tourists every year. It was Yann who designed it.
Yann Weymouth and Robin on a BMW in Quartier Latin, Paris.
We had so much fun in Paris. One night Tina and I took David to see the great Calypso singer Arrow, who had a big hit with “Hot, Hot, Hot.” The club was mostly filled with stylishly dressed, dancing West Indian people, and the band was loud and wild. I’m not sure that David enjoyed it as much as we did, but we were trying to keep our connection to him positive.
Another time we went to see U2 perform at a huge outdoor show. We were not only friends with the band, but also with many of the guys in their crew. It was wonderful to see how popular the band had become. I couldn’t help but notice how intense their Irish security team had become. When we toured with them as our support act they’d had no security whatsoever, but now they were seriously guarded. We ran into them again at David Bowie’s Glass Spider tour the following night, where they were just hanging out in the VIP area near the side of the stage like we were.
Then, because we had never seen Bruce Springsteen before, Tina and I were pleased to accept our friend Jenny Bier’s invitation to his show. Jenny was our first concert promoter in France ten years before, when we we’d opened for the Ramones. Now she was running publicity for CBS France. This was another enormous outdoor show on the outskirts of Paris in a big grassy park. We sat in the VIP section with Terry Gilliam of Monty Python and lots of cool French people. The show, great as it was, was seemingly endless. It went on for hours and hours as we all baked in the sun. Tina and Terry and I decided to walk over to the hospitality tent and boy, were we glad we did. They were serving Veuve Clicquot champagne, fresh fruits, and cheeses and langoustines. The French really do it right. I drank the first glass of champagne way too fast, but it was hot weather and I was really thirsty. I went for my second glass, got another for Tina, too, and when I turned around I was face-to-face with Jane Birkin, the muse and lover of Serge Gainsbourg. I had admired her since the days of the hit song “Je T’aime” and when Tina introduced me to Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson album, which had been released in 1971, I was hooked. She was much loved in France and appeared in many films and fashion magazines and on television. She even had a handbag named after her by Hermès, although she preferred a simple straw basket to carry her things. Anyway, I turned around and there she was, looking absolutely her own gorgeous self, and I tried to say hello and introduce myself, but the words wouldn’t come. For the first time in my life I was completely starstruck and tongue-tied. I could tell by her smile she was amused. She said, “Oh, hello,” got herself a glass of champagne, and walked slowly away. Tina thought this was hilarious, but thankfully didn’t tease me about it too much.
Later, after the show we met Patti Scialfa, who was very sweet and lovely, and also had a good long chat with drummer Max Weinberg. I commented on how exhausting these long shows must be. I think the show that day went on for four hours. Max told me his hands had been operated on seven times from damage done by drumming so hard for so long. He showed me the scars. There were little X’s of scar tissue on each of his knuckles, but he said the surgeries had helped.
The big Warner executives were in town and they took us to a great little restaurant in St. Germain. Mo Ostin, Lenny Waronker, and Eddie Rosenblatt must have been on the way home from
Midem, the big music business convention in Cannes. They were curious about our new album and we told them the recording was going great. In fact, we were finished with the basic tracks. We told them we’d soon be headed back to New York to cut the vocals and add some horns. David was bananas for horns and why argue? New York had plenty of great horn players to choose from.
Tina and I were very sorry to leave Paris. It was a happy, romantic place for us and always has been. I think Jerry and Carol felt the same way. Strangely, though, David told us it had been a terrible experience for him. He hated it. But then, he was a contrarian and always had been.
53
LOU REED WITH TOM TOM CLUB AT CBGB
By the time we were to record the third Tom Tom Club album, Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom, in 1988, Tina and I felt it was time for a change in direction. We were in the mood to rock, and who better to rock with than Lou Reed? We had always loved the Velvet Underground song “Femme Fatale,” originally sung by the great Nico. Lou had written this song for her at Andy Warhol’s request and it’s a beauty as, of course, was Nico. We recorded Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom at Sigma Sound in New York City. We had recorded some hard-driving rockers for it but in the interest of dynamics and coolness we decided to do a version of “Femme Fatale.” Tina and I recorded the basic track ourselves and Tina sang a guide vocal, which is not a final vocal but acts as, well, a guide for the musicians so they know where the changes are. Then I got on the phone to Lou. I had spoken to him not long before that, when he called me up to ask how we had been treated by Seymour Stein and Sire Records because he was thinking of doing a deal with them. I told him that Seymour had always done right by us and had always been in our corner, and I thought it would be fantastic if he was on Sire. So when I got Lou on the phone I said that we were recording a version of “Femme Fatale” and would he like to come over and play guitar on it? Lou was such a guitar lover and I knew better than to ask him to sing, because that’s what everyone expected of him. He answered very matter-of-factly, “Yeah, sure.”
Knowing that this was going to really be something, I called up Jerry and David and told them that Lou was coming over to play guitar—would they like to be a part of it? Not surprisingly, they both said yes.
Lou arrived at the studio on time with his guitar the next day and we played what we’d already done. When he heard Tina’s vocal I could see that he was very pleased. We had kept it in the key of A the way Lou sings it rather than Nico, which is not the easiest key for Tina to sing in, but it sounded great. Lou told us that Nico had questioned him about certain parts of the song, especially the “whoa, whoa, whoa’s” at the end of the song. “What means this ‘whoa, whoa, whoa’? Lou is making fun of Nico!”
Lou went out into the studio and tweaked his guitar sound for a while and was then ready to record. After a few different takes he was finished. There was no mistaking that it was Lou playing. He had a style of his own. Later, we made a composite of his different takes and it was beautiful. Meanwhile, David and Jerry had come up with their parts. David played some subtle seagull-sounding parts and Jerry used a new sampling synthesizer called the Emulator to create some breathy and beautiful keyboard washes. It was sounding really sweet. Then Tina suggested that we men sing the “She’s a femme fatale” choruses together and we did, letting Lou stand closer to the mic than the rest of us so that his voice would stand out. It did. Everyone was happy, especially Lou.
We had a visitor in the studio that day, Sam Dryden. Sam was an old friend of mine from Kentucky. We used to hang out and drive around as teenagers when Sam was driving a brand-new Chevy Super Sport. Sam was the kind of guy who can make friends wherever he goes and that day he began what would become a fast friendship with Lou that would last until the day Lou died. They went on vacations together along with Sam’s wife, Sandy McCleod—who’d had an important role in the production of Stop Making Sense—and Lou’s girlfriend, the artist Laurie Anderson. Together they would travel to Mexico, Mustique, and the Turks and Caicos Islands. In fact, when Lou and Laurie decided to get married, their wedding was at Sam and Sandy’s home in Boulder, Colorado.
After the release of Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom we decided to perform residencies, or multiple nights, on our tour of America. I went to speak to Hilly at CBGB about it. In 1988, CBGB had lost some of its caché as being the hippest gig in town. Many new clubs had sprung up downtown and all over town. There was some serious competition. Hilly dug the idea immediately and we agreed that we would play five nights a week for three weeks. No one had done this at his club before or since. We had different opening acts each night and charged $5.00 to get in. We had a special T-shirt made that said TOM TOM CLUB in a luridly colored monster-movie style font on the front and I LOVE THE UNDERGROUND LIFE on the back, with CBGB in small letters on the sleeve. This was the first Tom Tom Club T-shirt ever produced and it sold like hot cakes at five bucks apiece. We wanted to keep things inexpensive for our fans as the cost of live shows and merchandise kept going up and up. This worked in our favor for a while, but then it seemed that people actually wanted to spend more, and if a ticket was cheap the band must not be any good. Crazy!
The night Lou Reed joined Tom Tom Club onstage at CBGB.
Anyway, we called up some friends to be our special surprise guests on the encores. Debbie Harry said yes. Dee Dee Ramone said yes. Then I called Lou Reed, who said he would do it but only if we could provide transportation. So I called a limo company and had them send one of their best cars to pick him up.
We were working with a stripped-down four-piece band, so it was impossible to re-create what most of our studio recordings sounded like, but none of the club kids cared about that. They seemed to dig this punk version of Tom Tom Club and the shows at CBGB were packed every night with lines down the block. Tina and I had a room at the Gramercy Hotel for the duration of our three-week residency. The first night I had one of the worst cases of stage fright ever. My head was swimming and my stomach was churning until we climbed onto the stage to a wild CBGB welcome. The kids went nuts and I calmed down, knowing that everything would be cool. Debbie sang “Femme Fatale” with us at the end of the first week of shows. Is it possible she was even more gorgeous than Nico that night?
At the end of the second week of shows, Dee Dee Ramone joined us, playing guitar on a super-punk version of “Psycho Killer.” During the sound check he thought the song was “really tough” to remember, but on that night he rocked it.
Finally, for the encore on our last night of this CBGB run, we brought on Lou Reed. With Lou in the house we couldn’t just do one song with him, we did three: “Sweet Jane,” “Rock and Roll,” and “Femme Fatale.” There is a photo of Lou onstage with us that night looking back at Tina and he is beaming with pleasure and pride. Remembering this, I will never forget what he said to us that night in his apartment in 1976, after we’d met him for the first time backstage: “It’s, like, cool you have a chick in the band. Wonder where you got that idea?”
54
HAPPY MONDAYS
In early 1992, our office received a call from the management of the Happy Mondays. They asked if Tina and I were available to produce their new record. The truth is that all we knew about the Happy Mondays was that they were a band from Manchester, UK, and had a string of hits on Tony Wilson’s Factory Records. We had known Tony Wilson a bit and we liked him very much so we agreed to meet with the band’s manager, Nathan McGough, and the bass player, Paul Ryder. In fact, they took the train up from New York City to Connecticut to meet with us. Nathan and Paul stressed the fact that the band wanted to actually play the songs on their new record, and of course they got no argument from us about that. It seems their previous couple of albums had been very successfully produced by DJs who took snippets of the band’s recordings and then looped them into a dance groove that was programmed. You see, this was the time of Nirvana, the era of grunge, long, stringy hair, and flannel shirts. There was great emphasis put on keeping the music raw and unfiltered, kind of lik
e punk but without the discipline. In fact, grunge was the antithesis of the whole Manchester dance-music thing. So Tina and I said yeah, we can dig that. You want to play on your own records? You want to make the record in Barbados? Let’s do it.
No one gave us any idea what we were getting ourselves into.
The studio in Barbados was owned by the artist Eddie Grant of “Electric Avenue” fame and formerly known as a member the Equals. Sting had recorded The Dream of the Blue Turtles there in 1984, and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had recently held a writing session there. It sounded like a great place to get some good work done and soak up some Caribbean sun.
Tina and I flew down to Barbados with Robin and Egan and their nanny Shelly. When we arrived we were taken to the house where we would be staying, a fantastic old sea captain’s home made of limestone by Crane’s Beach. There were security bars on the windows, but no glass, so birds were constantly flying in and out. It was a great house and we loved it.
Bruce Martin, our percussionist and keyboard player with Tom Tom Club, came, too, along with our engineer, Mark “Suave” Roule. They were part of our team. It took several days of troubleshooting to get the studio up to the necessary standards—power surges and fluctuations were a big problem—but eventually everything was ready for the Happy Mondays to begin.