Chris Frantz: 'If you knew David Byrne, you would not be jealous of him'
David Byrne overwhelms the image of Talking Heads. With his herkyjerky mannerisms, loopy persona and arch lyrics – not to mention his command of the songwriting credits through much of their catalogue – he eclipsed the efforts of every other member of the band. Yet according to a new memoir by Talking Heads’ co-founder and drummer, Chris Frantz, titled Remain in Love, Byrne’s dominant image wasn’t merely a by-product of a legitimately outsized talent, but a clear power grab, driven by ego, greed and a skewed mindset.
“It’s like he can’t help himself,” Frantz said in a phone interview. “His brain is wired in such a way that he doesn’t know where he ends and other people begin. He can’t imagine that anyone else would be important.”
Towards that end, Frantz contends, Byrne often seized sole writing credit on songs the whole band had created, denigrated the other members’ musicianship – particularly that of bassist Tina Weymouth (who is married to Frantz) – and put enough space between him and the other members socially to suggest contempt for them as people. At the same time, Frantz appreciates the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity the alchemy of Talking Heads provided for him and the other members. As evidence, his book proudly details the artistic highlights of a band that rates as one of music’s most creative units – a group so visionary that, as he writes, “We were post-punk before punk even happened.”
In his book, Frantz also writes about his 42-year marriage to Weymouth with a warmth and awe that inspired its title. Beyond Talking Heads, he tells hilarious, if often unflattering, tales about
Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Johnny Ramone, Happy Mondays (who Frantz and Weymouth, at one point, unhappily produced), and frequent Talking Heads producer Brian Eno. Of course, he also covers the ground-breaking band he and Weymouth created, Tom Tom Club.
An early section of the book details Talking Heads’ first days at CBGB in 1975, when they were upstarts, trying to break into a world dominated by Patti Smith, the Ramones and Television. When they first met Smith, she dismissed them as rich kids, based on their pedigree as recent graduates of the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, where the core of the band had formed in 1973. “It was definitely reverse snobbism,” Frantz said. “She had great empathy for people like William Burroughs but, for kids who just got out of art school, zero.”
When Frantz first heard about the Ramones, he thought they were a Mexican band. Once he discovered their true origin and style, he loved their minimalism and humor, but the feeling wasn’t returned by Johnny Ramone. The famously smallminded guitarist considered Talking Heads either pretentious or baffling. “Johnny was a real son of a bitch,” said Frantz.
Soon after Talking Heads started to gain a foothold at CBGB, Lou Reed befriended, and courted, them – if in his own peculiar way. He invited them up to his place, where he proceeded to eat an entire gallon of ice cream in front of them, while offering his critique of the band. He wanted to sign them to a recording contract, but when Frantz and others looked it over, they realized it gave ownership of their catalogue entirely to Reed and his manager, which would have sent all the profits from album sales their way. “It was a ridiculous agreement,” Frantz said. “I never understood why he did that. Lou was a good friend and continued to be, despite that.”
Still, the meatiest part of Frantz’s book bores into the relationship between Byrne and the other three Heads, including guitarist Jerry Harrison. The drummer felt there was something odd about their frontman from the start. Byrne never looked anyone in the eye, and he maintained a disassociated demeanor which caused the author to surmise he might be “on the high end of the spectrum”. Frantz had already been playing with future wife Weymouth at that point, imaging a band based on their rhythms. When they invited Byrne to join them, friends told him they believed Byrne would be “a
thin reed to lean on” as a frontman.
The first signs of Byrne pushing his contributions ahead of anyone else showed in college. He was supposed to be part of a group visual art show but sneaked into the gallery before the opening to rehang his own pieces in a front room, pushing the others to the back. “He was trying to make it seem like it was his show,” said Frantz.
The pattern repeated with an early Talking Heads’ song, Warning Sign, which Byrne wrote with Frantz. Yet when the song first appeared, it bore just the singer’s credit. When Frantz questioned Byrne about it, he claimed it was a mistake and that it would be changed, which it later was. Frantz and Weymouth did receive co-writing credit for Talking Heads’ first single, Psycho Killer, which, the drummer revealed, was inspired by the wry morbidity of Alice Cooper. The early version of the band, captured on Talking Heads: 77, stressed what could be described as anti-sensual rhythms, emphasized by the nervous, and distracted, persona of Byrne. “We were very conscious that we should have a different demeanor than, say, the New York Dolls,” Frantz said.
But by Talking Heads’ second album, More Songs About Buildings and Food, for which Frantz provided the title, they drew more on the funk