Chris Frantz recounts adventures as a Talking Head.
Chris Frantz, best known as the drummer and co-founder of Talking Heads, leads something of a charmed life. In his memoir “Remain in Love: Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Tina,” Frantz recounts growing up in a loving, secure family, their support of him pursuing life as an artist, forming a boundary-pushing, commercially successful band, enjoying a blissful marriage with his group’s bassist, and traveling the world meeting accomplished people while performing, recording and producing music. It makes for interesting stories, which Frantz shares breezily in 56 short, focused chapters.
Those who know Frantz lived in Pittsburgh as a youth may be a bit shocked by the opening line of one of his early chapters: “When people ask me where I’m from I say Kentucky.” Frantz’s father served in the army after graduating from West Point, so the family moved a few times during Frantz’s childhood. His grandparents’ Kentucky home offered a centering place to return to, including for his wedding to Tina Weymouth, and Frantz enjoys identifying as a Southerner.
But Pittsburgh plays an important role in Frantz’s formative teenage years as his family makes homes in McKnight Village in the North Hills and Kerrwood Farms in O’Hara. In these locales Frantz meets a supportive band teacher who guides him away from trumpet and toward percussion instruments, and another who lets him do some of his first composing. Frantz listens to radio stations KQV and WAMO, buys records at the downtown Kaufmann’s Department Store and forms his first rock band.
He completes grades 9 through 12 at a boarding school in Virginia, then heads to the Rhode Island School of Design to become a painter, then on to New York City to pursue his musical dreams. He makes a semi-triumphant return to Pittsburgh during Talking Heads’ first extended American tour in fall 1977, though. Frantz claims our city’s “dominant concert promoters,” DiCesare Engler Productions, “never wanted to have anything to do with Talking Heads,” so the group’s first ‘Burgh appearance is at Antonino’s Pizza on Craig Street in Oakland. Frantz may be a bit grandiose in declaring this was “the night the new wave arrived in Pittsburgh,” but the show certainly has achieved legendary status locally.
The bulk of Frantz’s book deals with the formation, rise, triumph and dissolution of the Talking Heads. For the most part, Frantz delivers just the right amount of information about rehearsing, writing songs, recording, touring and managing interpersonal relationships within the band and their management team. Musicians will enjoy hearing about the group’s myriad musical and production collaborations and often unusual writing and recording processes, but Frantz explains things clearly and succinctly enough to keep anyone engaged in his tales. He also namechecks an incredible array of people who come into his orbit, from artists like Andy Warhol, Howard Finster, Robert Rauschenberg and Peter Blake, to musicians including James Brown, Lou Reed, Debbie Harry and the extended Bob Marley family. And that’s on top of stories about shows played with the Ramones, Patti Smith Group, the B-52’s, XTC, Dire Straits and Television.
Beneath the surface of all the great gigs and unlikely encounters, however, Frantz does have an axe to grind. While fully acknowledging David Byrne’s vital role in forming and developing Talking Heads with him, Frantz has also clearly built up a great deal of resentment toward his band’s frontman. He snipes with asides like “for some reason we were not invited to play [Live Aid]. Oh, that’s right. By 1984 David had decided that Talking Heads, one of the world’s greatest touring bands, should stop performing live.” He also gets in digs about Byrne taking full credit for songs written collaboratively, projecting his difficult behavior onto others in the band, fracturing relationships with people helpful to the group with rude, anti-social acts and choosing to abandon his wife on the night of the band’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction.
While Frantz’s memoir is generally paced well, two exceptions make for distractions. When recounting the Talking Heads’ first tour of Europe as a support act for the Ramones, Frantz suddenly shares
far too much detail about every city visited and every show played, down to repeatedly sharing how many encores the band performed, what they ate and drank pre-andpost-gig and what hotels they stayed in. These chapters could have been edited down to the exceptional details also shared in them. Conversely, near book’s end, in the middle of a story about his family buying a sailboat to travel between the Bahamas and New England, Frantz casually mentions his outpatient treatment for cocaine and alcohol bingeing bad enough that his wife threatened to leave their marriage over it. He basically attributes his substance abuse to mourning over Talking Heads’ demise. This merits a single paragraph and is left unexplored elsewhere.
Thankfully, Frantz shares plenty of other stories more deftly. From Johnny Ramone’s surly touring pronouncements to the inspired creation of Tom Tom Club’s dance-floor filling songs to difficult production assignments with Ziggy Marley and Happy Mondays to being dumbstruck meeting a French celebrity backstage at a Bruce Springsteen show, Frantz reels off fascinating moments from his life with aplomb. Forthright, frothy and fun, “Remain in Love” is a winning mash note to 1970s New York City, the sadly defunct Talking Heads and Chris Frantz’s loyal, talented life partner, Tina Weymouth.