March 25, 2021 31
This Ain’t No Disco
Dan Chiasson
Remain in Love:
Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Tina
by Chris Frantz.
St. Martin’s, 384 pp., $29.99
The four members of the American
band Talking Heads came from intact,
midcentury American families, with
kind and presentable parents who turned
up at their gigs, or supplied a hand- me-
down station wagon for touring, or
fluffed the guestroom pillows when the
band came through town. Chris Frantz,
the drummer, was a prep school kid
from Kentucky and Pittsburgh whose
first memories included Christmas par-
ties at Harvard Law School, where his
father, a West Point graduate who later
became an army general, was a student;
later, Frantz played in the woods at Mon-
ticello, where his mother volunteered.
When Frantz got to know his wife, Tina
Weymouth, the band’s bassist, she was
living in her parents’ carriage house on a
leafy street in Providence, Rhode Island.
Weymouth’s father, Ralph Weymouth,
was an admiral who became a promi-
nent antinuclear activist; her mother
was from an old French family, and to-
gether they raised eight children. David
Byrne’s Scottish parents, an engineer
and special education teacher, had
settled outside of Baltimore in a house
they decorated with their son’s art proj-
ects. Jerry Harrison, the only child of
an ad executive and a painter, came on
board late, in 1977. Harrison, a veteran
of the Boston band Modern Lovers,
was working toward an architecture
degree when Frantz, Weymouth, and
Byrne turned up at his drafting desk at
the Harvard School of Design and per-
suaded him to join the band.
It was an unlikely foundation for a
band coming up in the punk scene of
downtown New York City, but it meant
that Talking Heads were destined to
grapple with the meanings of family
life. Here was a band led by a couple,
with a strange, alienated man- child at
the microphone. The Ramones, their
friends and touring partners, were a
family all right, but in comic- nightmare
form: a feral, sniping brood, a nest of
eels. Frantz, Byrne, and Weymouth, on
the other hand, spruced up the danger-
ous commercial loft where they lived
together, on Chrystie Street on the
Lower East Side, with rattan furniture
from Frantz’s parents’ porch.
The critic James Wolcott, who cov-
ered the band’s early shows at CBGB on
the Bowery, noted these inclinations in
a cover story for The Village Voice titled
“A Conservative Impulse in the New
Rock Underground.” Frantz played
drums as though “in the next room,”
like a teenager jamming in the attic;
Weymouth looked like “Suzi Quatro’s
sorority sister”; Byrne sang in a “little-
boy- lost- at- the- zoo” voice. The band
played the room at CBGB “like a tele-
vision located at the end of a long dark
hall.” The songs themselves seemed to
fantasize, at times, about getting to redo
high school with coolness added in:I wish I could meet everyone
Meet them all over again
Bring them up to my room
Meet them all over again
Everyone’s up in my room“Mommy, Daddy, come and look at me
now/I’m a big man in a great big town,”
goes the opening verse of “Pulled Up,”
an early tune. The band’s name was
taken from a TV Guide article. The
members of Talking Heads had expe-
rienced the revolutions of the 1960s as
young teenagers, on their parents’ liv-
ing room TVs.The constructed family called Talking
Heads had no stable arrangement orhierarchy. Byrne, who offered him-
self up as a very curious human spec-
imen onstage (“Take a look at these
hands,” goes a refrain in “Born Under
Punches”; a few beats later, movingly:
“I’m so thin... I’m too thin”), was a
shrewd and at times unscrupulous actor
behind the scenes, testing what could be
characterized as a fraying commitment
to patience on the part of his band-
mates. Frantz and Weymouth seem,
even to this day, alternately peeved and
charmed by how much they bit off with
this prodigal oddball who was, from the
beginning, one of the most gripping and
passionate talents in American music.
It must have been difficult, in their
early shows, to decide whether to keep
your eyes on Byrne, lurching and blurt-
ing in Lacoste shirts and button- downs
borrowed from Frantz, or Weymouth,
whose bass set up an insinuating com-
mentary on or alternate account, cool
and sexy, of the songs that were putting
Byrne through such paroxysms. Nei-
ther figure was exactly reachable. Wey-
mouth withheld while Byrne spazzed.
He not only sang the songs but acted
as their protagonist: the eager yet per-
petually thwarted student of modern
life, straining to master its arcane or-
ders and customs. You were rooting for
him, almost the way you would a ner-
vous child at a school recital. The music
worked to soothe his body, but his
mind seemed to dart and lunge from
one frightening thought to another.
Wolcott saw an “uneasy alliance
of composure and breakdown—be-
tween outward acceptance and inward
coming- apart.” Byrne, in his brilliant
2012 memoir- slash- treatise, How Music
Works, describes it this way:Throughout the three- piece and
four- piece periods, Talking Heads
songs, and even the shows, were
still mostly about self- examination,angst, and bafflement at the world
we found ourselves in. Psychologi-
cal stuff. Inward- looking clumps of
words combined with my slightly
removed “anthropologist from
Mars” view of human relationships.Though “the groove was always
there” as a “body- oriented antidote”
to his “nervous angsty flailing,” Byrne
writes, it “never took over.” Attempt-
ing to pry some light banter from Byrne
during their 1979 American Bandstand
appearance, poor Dick Clark turned
to Weymouth for a lifeline: “Does he
bubble over like this, I mean just set
the world on fire?” he asks, sarcasti-
cally. “I...guess...he’s organically
shy,” she responds. Byrne’s telegenic
strangeness was the band’s great op-
portunity, but also its biggest risk. He
seemed to understand this more than
anyone, which might be why he broke
up the band. Byrne developed a follow-
ing in the autism community, and has
since diagnosed himself with Asper-
ger’s syndrome.Chris Frantz’s Remain in Love:
Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Tina
is partly the story of how Frantz’s en-
viable temperament—friendly, game,
as sunny as a Kentucky afternoon—
worked in counterpoint to Byrne’s
intensity. Search online for any per-
formance by Talking Heads or Tom
Tom Club, the dance band he and
Weymouth spun off in a lull between
Talking Heads records, and you’ll
likely see Frantz, from a riser, beaming
down in satisfaction at the wild scene
he’s assembled onstage.
That’s roughly his narrative stance
here: though he sets the beat, he’s also
a bystander, starstruck even now as
he retells his great stories. Frantz and
his two little kids were fooling around
on the beach in the Bahamas when he
spied a “single, solitary figure dressed
all in black walking slowly our way”:As the figure came closer I
thought, No, it can’t be, but there
she was: Patti Smith, the High
Priestess of Punk. I said, “Hi,
Patti.” She looked at me with sur-
prise or paranoia or perhaps both.
I said, “It’s me, Chris Frantz from
Talking Heads. Good to see you.”
She still seemed extremely uncom-
fortable to be recognized in such
beautiful surroundings. She said,
“I’m only here for my boyfriend’s
sister’s wedding.” I said, “Oh,
that’s nice.” She looked at me like I
was crazy and said, “I’ve gotta go,”
and turned and walked away in the
direction she had come from.A 1990 meeting with Dylan went off
a little better. Bob’s security men en-
tered the green room before a benefit
performance to shoo everyone out, in-
cluding Bonnie Raitt, Iggy Pop, Patrick
Swayze, and Emmylou Harris. Frantz,
in a blue blazer, looked too square to
be one of the talent, so he stayed be-
hind and tried to blend in:When Bob strolled in, he asked
me casually, “Hey man! Where didJerry Harrison, David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads, Hollywood, December 1977Michael^Ochs^ Archive/GettyImages