KEEPING THE BEAT AS PUNK IS BORN
Talking Heads drummer relives CBGB and life with the Ramones
It was the summer of ’75, when a garbage strike left tons of stinking trash piled high on flat-broke Gotham’s sweltering streets. Fivedollar hookers and fur-coat-clad pimps strutted around the Lower East Side, and junkies turned abandoned slums into squalid shooting galleries.
But amid that dystopian nightmare sat a grungy dive on the Bowery called CBGB that was home to bikers, neighborhood drunks and the seeds of a musical revolution that changed the future of music — punk rock.
Chris Frantz, drummer of the seminal new-wave band Talking Heads, had a front-row seat along with his now-wife, bassist Tina Weymouth, guitarist/lead singer David Byrne, and the original Ramones: Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy, all four of whom died way too early.
Decades later, the UK is staging a yearlong 40th anniversary celebration — dubbed Punk London —but the scene across the Atlantic blossomed only after the Big Apple’s was in full bloom.
Frantz, who still plays and records with Weymouth in their band, Tom Tom Club, shared stories of those crazed early days with The Post, when a dozen or fewer fans would show up at Hilly Kristal’s famed club for a gig.
“We lived at 195 Chrystie St., 3¹/2 blocks from CBGB. It was rough, man, it was rough. No hot water, no shower, the bathroom in the hall we had to share with all these sweaty guys,” said Frantz, who with his bandmates was fresh out of the Rhode Island School of Design.
“That first summer there, ’75, there was a heat wave, not unlike the one we were having recently, and also a garbage strike at the same time. So you could imagine what it was like,” he said.
“The kids would open the hydrants and you had streams of water going down the street with burning garbage floating on it.
“The kids would set the garbage on fire. I thought I was going to lose my mind. Tina took it better than I did.”
But the band practiced every day in its ninth-floor loft with the great view of the Empire State Building way uptown, and before long debuted at CBGB, opening up for the protopunks from Forest Hills themselves.
“Hilly asked Johnny if we could open for them, and Johnny said, ‘Sure, they’re gonna suck, so no problem,’ ” Frantz recalled.
Frantz said the Heads all loved the Ramones — and even got to like the dictatorial Johnny, but it took a while.
“That guy was mean as a snake. He was just a pure, unadulterated mean spirit. I’m sure he had good qualities also, but they were not evident,” he said.
“He came around toward the end, but for the longest time, he thought that we sucked. But they were crazy. They’d be on stage playing and then they’d just stop and start fighting.”
Their debut together was hardly a roaring success.
“There were very few people in the audience, maybe 10 altogether. Five came to see us and five came to see the Ramones. The Ramones’ fans were all girls, presumably their girlfriends,” Frantz remembered.
When they weren’t performing oddball pop like “(Love Goes to) Building on Fire” and “Psycho Killer” onstage, they would drink at the bar and get to know the other bands and hangers-on.
One was Legs McNeill, one of the founders of Punk magazine, which chronicled the scene when only the Village Voice and SoHo News were paying any attention.
“Legs somehow positioned himself as an expert on CBGB’s heyday, but most of the time, he was passed out. One time at about 4 a.m., Hilly said, ‘ Can you just get that guy out of there?’ ” Frantz said.
“Tina had a car, an old Plymouth Valiant that was a family handdown. We could fit the whole band in there. We tried to take him home but he was so intoxicated, he couldn’t remember what his address was. We’d drive around and ask him, ‘ Does that look like your place, Legs?’ Finally, we found it.”
Some of the musicians, like the poet-turned-singer Patti Smith, Debbie Harry’s Blondie, Television with Tom Verlaine, and Willy DeVille’s Mink DeVille, went on to score record deals, tour and become punk and new-wave legends.
Other regulars — The Shirts, Tuff Darts (with lead singer Robert Gordon) and the Miamis — never broke out but won loyal followings with music that had more energy and was more fun to listen to than just about anything on the radio.
At the time, the country was still suffering from a post-Vietnam and post-Watergate hangover — and the airwaves were filled with the vapid aural Valium of chart toppers like Olivia Newton-John’s “Have You Never Been Mellow,” The Eagles’ “One of These Nights” and Wings’ “Venus and Mars.”
Much of the best music from those early days was released on a double album called “Live at CBGB’s.”
Talking Heads signed up for the