Remain in Love: Chris Frantz's Wonder-Filled Tribute to Collectivity and Commitment

 

Recalling a moment when (the rest of the band itching for solo projects) he and wife Tina Weymouth started thinking up Tom Tom Club, Chris Frantz makes a distinction central to Remain in Love. Frantz and Weymouth didn’t want to work solo but with a collective. “We felt by definition every band was a collective, including Talking Heads.”

And Talking Heads certainly was that. Most of the songs on their records were the product of jam sessions. Half of the lyrics of their first song “Psycho Killer,” including the French lyrics, were written by Weymouth who then volunteered that bassline (she said elsewhere was inspired by Bernard Hermann’s score to the movie Psycho).

Fellow Rhode Island School of Design student, artist Michael Zieve suggested that his friends call their band “Talking Heads.” Weymouth made a couple of t-shirts, and the couple wore them around to road test the name. They figured out how to make the band work as one of the greatest live bands of the rock and soul era at CBGB’s, on a stage built by the band Television.

Throughout the band’s story, Weymouth’s contribution was key. Though she read music and had background on acoustic guitar and flute, she saw the bass’s role with a visual artist’s eye, as a structural element in the composition. Her distinctive take on the instrument anchored that original three piece and played a key role in developing the band’s singular sound. In a trio that was essentially all rhythm players, her parts (like that "Psycho Killer" riff or the one in "Take Me to the River") offered broad strokes of color. 

Also, her presence as a woman in that original trio (before Jerry Harrison joined) made the band stand out, at least symbolically if superficially. Johnny Thunders asked them if they were a feminist band, and Lou Reed and Andy Warhol both took an active interest in the band, Reed making the unsurprisingly self-centered observation, “It’s, like, cool you have a chick in the band. Wonder where you got that idea.” Of course the Velvet Underground’s woman player was drummer Maureen Tucker, but Weymouth's blond chic also no doubt drew comparisons to the band's famous collaboration with singer Nico. (Years later, Tom Tom Club would perform the Underground’s great “Femme Fatale” with Weymouth on lead and Reed singing backing vocals.) 

The mix of artistic impulses that make up Talking Heads also reveals the collective. Weymouth and Byrne took those Polaroids for the More Songs about Buildings and Food cover, and they arranged them on the roof of Weymouth and Frantz's loft where the album was recorded. Weymouth's brother’s architectural designs led Jerry Harrison to create that manhole-like pattern on Fear of Music. When Brian Eno, who all but wrecked Fear of Music in the mixing stage (salvaged by the remixing of Rod O’Brien), kicked the husband and wife rhythm section out of the studio so he could once again tinker with their mixes, they designed the famous red-masks and airplanes album cover for Remain in Light. 

Frantz spills anecdote after anecdote, inside and outside of the studio, to give a dizzying sense of the potlach of creativity at the heart of the Talking Heads’ story. Eno gets plenty of credit for his positive influence, including the idea of playing their set staple "Take Me to the River," " as slowly as we possibly could without losing the groove" for the single. The fact that Gary Kurfirst (who had managed reggae greats such as Bob Marley’s Wailers and Toots and the Maytals) took on Talking Heads helped the band’s remarkable trajectory from minimalist R&B to world music. After Byrne and Eno made My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and both thought they were done with the band, Frantz and Weymouth began to work with Kurfirst’s friend Chris Blackwell of Island Records, who produced their friends the B-52s’ first two great records and helped Frantz and Weymouth pull together Tom Tom Club.

The Tom Tom Club story is fascinating for many reasons starting with its reverse crossover hit “Genius of Love,” landing its highest chart position at #2 on Billboard’s R&B chart. Now chart position doesn't mean much by itself, but it does show the music connecting with a new audience. That kind of chart success wouldn’t be rivaled by a Talking Heads record until 1983’s “Burning Down the House,” which went to #2 on the Dance charts. As Frantz notes, that cut was inspired by Frantz and Weymouth’s then-recent experience at a Madison Square Garden P-Funk, Bootsy Collins and Brides of Funkenstein show. Before that, Tom Tom Club’s biggest single would be inspired by a Zapp record, “More Bounce to the Ounce,” produced by P-Funkers Bootsy Collins and Roger Troutman (who fronted Zapp). 

Working on a series of musical ideas that would become Remain in Light (at a point when Frantz and Weymouth held things together by building grooves in order to coax Byrne and Eno into the studio to play with them), they met bass player Busta Jones, who would help them put together the Big Band which would tour behind the album and create the live album The Name of this Band Is Talking Heads. That band would include Bernie Worrell from P-Funk and the great back-up singer Dolette McDonald who Jones had met cutting disco in New York. By the 1984 Jonathan Demme concert film Stop Making Sense, which captures a version of this band, Talking Heads would also include Bride of Funkenstein Lynn Mabrey.

If you saw that band on that The Name of This Band tour, as I did, you couldn’t escape a series of revelations regarding the grandeur of a band as a collective. Equal to the original four members of the Heads, P-Funk’s Worrell commanded that stage as a sort of elder statesman from the funk Mothership, and so did Dolette McDonald, percussionist Steve Scales and guitarist Alex Weir. Part of the wonder of that show was its explosive enthusiasm and warmth. That absentee quality in David Byrne’s persona worked well to decenter the show, allowing everyone else to shine all the brighter.

That concert was one-of-a-kind. An ecstatic celebration of punk and funk--two genres seemingly from different worlds but fitting together in tight, multi-colored grooves--sounds informed by everyone from James Brown to Bob Marley, the Velvet Underground to King Sunny Ade. A child-like wonder would break out on band members' faces, and there was something metaphorical in how that played off the serenity of a 6-months pregnant bass player, as always holding everything together with her husband, and a manic frontman who simply began to run laps around the stage through “Life During Wartime.” In that moment, there was a family onstage, exploding with excitement and possibility.

It was so much more than we could have expected, the carload of record store friends of mine (I believe my girlfriend and I were the only ones who didn’t work at Sound Warehouse) who drove down to Oklahoma City from Stillwater that day. We’d all seen great bands do exciting sets. But this was something that truly felt like it could have never happened before that moment, and we all felt a part of something bigger during that show.

Perhaps not surprisingly, reading Frantz’s book, I’m shown my own musical discoveries from a new perspective. Each page offers so many obscured and perhaps only half-appreciated (by anyone outside of the bands) connections taking place in that late 70s rock and roll insurgency. Touring with the Ramones, XTC, and Dire Straits, the Talking Heads story is a story of how various 70s rock and roll revival collectives carved out space in new radio and touring markets. Working separately and together, these collectives formed a multi-pronged cultural movement that gave kids like this writer a sense of his own role in the story. 

I certainly get a strong taste of that connection when Frantz tells how he played Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks” for Byrne while they were struggling for lyrical ideas for a bridge in “Cross-Eyed and Painless.” The first time I heard “The Breaks” and a brand new record by Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, “The Message,” was on that trip down to see Talking Heads in Oklahoma City. 

Before that day, rap had seemed smaller somehow—the novelty of “Rapper’s Delight” or the city beats and rhymes echoed back at us by bands like The Clash. From hearing that huge pair of records in the car, to seeing one of my all-time favorite bands transform into something no one had ever seen before by adding funk and soul players and tearing at the segregation between genres, I think I had a eureka moment that started my own role as a music writer. Three years later, my first published piece, on the “Sun City” protest single--featuring Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five alongside everyone from The Who to Bob Dylan to Darlene Love--focused on the way music strove to counter the racism in the music industry and on my college campus.

Little did I know that same day in that car, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s new album featured “It’s Nasty” built around the sounds of Frantz and Weymouth’s collective The Tom Tom Club. All of these musicians were having important conversations at that time, and we were all benefiting from the results. 

The cross-pollination of those musical conversations is central to what Chris Frantz’s Remain in Love celebrates, and it does so (so rock and roll) with a love song at its heart. As Chekov once said, all great stories have at their heart a polarity, an animus and anima. This is certainly a long, gorgeous love letter to Tina Weymouth. But to celebrate Weymouth is to celebrate an ethos that repeatedly chooses  the collective over the individual vision.

Though Western culture (and as Lou Reed notes here, the music industry) may like to pluck away the individualist icon in the band and call that character’s story the story that matters (as too many breathless interviews with David Byrne do), the real story of any music is the interplay among the musicians, those behind the scenes and those in the audience. (I love that the B-52s first show up here as some kids at an Atlanta gig.) Without all of these participants in play, that thing we love about music doesn’t happen—worse than that, it doesn’t much matter. 

By contrast, Remain in Love is a book focused on why we love music, and, by maintaining that focus, it locks in on all the things that matter most. In that sense, it’s a book that tells all our stories, how we go about building the things we build and how we hold each other together as much as possible as long as we can. It's a book about the long haul, and that in and of itself is reason for celebration.