32 The New York Review
everybody go?” I told him his people
had kicked everybody out and Bob
said, “Oh, shit. Even Emmylou?”
“Yes,” I said. “Even Emmylou.”There are many such stories: Frantz
runs into Mick Jagger, alone at the
bar of the Tin Palace on the Bow-
ery, “high as a kite... wearing a huge,
quilted pimp- style newsboy cap” and
“singing along at full volume” to Ro-
berta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly” on
the jukebox and changing the lyrics
to “Blowing me softly with his lips.”
Frantz decides he’ll “wait until another
time to introduce myself.”
For pages at a time, this memoir pro-
vides some of the pleasures of those
Twitter threads in which people tell
their best celebrity sighting. Celebri-
ties themselves don’t often participate
in those threads, but it would be fun
if they did, and Frantz, who keeps a
cheery presence on Twitter, might not
hesitate. His point of view seems un-
changed since he held a day job, in the
early years of Talking Heads, as a stock
boy at Design Research, a furniture
store on 57th Street, and spied through
the shop windows passersby like Liz
Taylor, Paul Newman, Diana Ross, and
Farah Fawcett. “Some of them were
guarded,” Frantz writes, “but others
would give you a smile and a wordless
wink of recognition.”
The famous names in this book often
yield space to the names of friends,
girlfriends, teachers, cousins, long-
lost bands, bars, restaurants, dances,
county fairs, and dives, in Kentucky,
Virginia, Pittsburgh, Providence, New
York, and elsewhere, all described
memorably as they pass. Frantz tends
to identify everyone by first and last
name: Lex Browning, Karen Achen-
bach, or Chris Lushington, “a Dead-
head from Greenwich, Connecticut,”
who had a “serious, puzzled Clint
Eastwood vibe.” This weirdly touching
habit makes whoever happens to turn
up next, say someone named David
Byrne, feel like just another part of
some grand human lottery.
It also makes these people and places
retrievable, with a few quick actions on
Google. The rock memoir seems espe-
cially suited to the way we read now,
with the Internet standing by. You can
find Talking Heads’s entire Rome con-
cert from 1980 online. This book helps
you see the lives adjacent to the famous
life, the role of chance in their stories.
In Berkeley in 1977, a band called Leila
and the Snakes opened for Talking
Heads. Their lead singer, Jane Dor-
nacker, according to Frantz,
moved to New York City, where
she had great success as a weather
and traffic reporter until the day
her chopper plunged into the Hud-
son River and she was tragically
killed while broadcasting live on
the air.The recording can be found on
YouTube.
The big arc of Frantz’s life and career
is here, though it becomes at times hard
to trace, what with all those fascinating
little arcs that intersect it. A memoir by
definition knows what happens next;
this is its narrative advantage over ac-
tual life—which presents, in the mo-
ment, an array of possible storylines
and outcomes. But it is in every other
way a profound disadvantage, since in
its purest form a memoir’s vision of life
removes the element of contingency
and surprise, the late- night revelations
and impulsive swerves, that gives ex-
perience its actual feel. Frantz often
sets out on the popcorn trail of his life,
only to stop and munch the popcorn.
This method or anti- method captures
the branching logic of unfolding time:
“Way leads on to way,” as Frost put it.
Here are two paragraphs about the
night Frantz met his RISD freshman
roommate:My roommate, Hugh Roberts, fi-
nally showed up with a great excuse
for his lateness. He had broken his
leg and wore a plaster cast from
his knee down to his toes. He said
his friends called him Huey. He
was well over six feet tall with a
shag haircut. I helped him with
his luggage and stuff. It turned
out that we had some similari-
ties in our background. We were
WA S Ps and we’d both attended
prep school for boys. Both of our
fathers were lawyers. We liked to
make art and get high, and we were
hoping to break the mold we felt
we had been expected to fill. We
loved James Brown yet we also dug
the Velvet Underground, Captain
Beefheart, Terry Riley, and Moon-
dog. I could tell we were going to
get along just fine.
Later that night, in our room
after a joint and a few glasses of
red Almaden wine, Huey told me
about a terrible thing that had re-
cently happened to him. His mother
had committed suicide. She’d been
missing for some time when inves-
tigators found bits of charred bone
and the steel shanks of her high
heels in the old basement incin-
erator. They said she had opened
the little door and crawled into the
flames fully clothed. Foul play was
not suspected. Had she left a note?
I didn’t ask. I remember feeling
how strange and heavy this must
be for any young guy and I felt bad
about this, but Huey seemed emo-
tionally strong and resilient.I found Roberts’s 2010 obituary
online; he settled in Brattleboro,
Vermont, and opened the Windham
Gallery, which I remember visiting in
the 1990s. This vignette is true to the
little interpersonal advances and set-
backs that happen in the moment: first
Hugh becomes Huey, then the wine
and the joint kick in, and then the rev-
elation about Huey’s mother draws the
two guys closer even as it sets up a bar-
rier that can’t and won’t be crossed: “I
didn’t ask.” Frantz isn’t an investigator.
In some ways the roommate story
heralds the arrival, a few pages later, of
David Byrne:One beautiful September day, my
friend Marc Kehoe, who knew I
played the drums, asked me if I
would help him create some music
for a student film he was making
about his girlfriend being run over
by a car. I told him I would love to
and asked him to meet me over at
Tina’s place. He said he was going
to bring another friend, a guy who
played guitar.There’s more I’d like to know about the
“girlfriend being run over by a car,”but, like the mother in the incinerator
and countless other “heavy” events in
Frantz’s memoir—his own substance
addiction and recovery, for example—
it passes without much elaboration.
Probably the way to herald Byrne’s
arrival in this story would be to make
him, and not the car accident, the an-
nounced subject of our curiosity. But
there’s nothing about David Byrne that
repays direct treatment or straightfor-
ward engagement, as Dick Clark found
out.Reading this book I began to keep
track of all the tragic and frightening
things that happened to women. Be-
sides Huey’s mother’s almost certain
murder, the girl who was run over by
a car, and Jane Dornacker’s fatal heli-
copter crash, there are still other exam-
ples: a restaurant owner in Providence
who’d moved from New York because
his wife had been assaulted; a brush
with Phil Spector, women on both
arms, who later murdered the actress
Lana Clarkson. The dangers of being a
woman in the rock world, both in New
York and on tour, are suggested by how
avidly Tina Weymouth was watched
and pursued, even when the attention
was flattering. In Brazil, Frantz meets
the Scorpions, the German heavy
metal band, at a bar. “They were great
guys,” he w r ites, “but a l l they wa nted to
know was, ‘Where’s Tina?’” Given the
number of enormous nights out that
Frantz describes, and the presence of
the couple’s two young children, born
in 1982 and 1986, you have to wonder
how often Weymouth asked the inverse
question: “Where’s Chris?”
The first original song Byrne, Frantz,
and Weymouth worked on together was
“Psycho Killer,” before Weymouth had
ever picked up a bass. It was inspired
partly by Hitchcock’s Norman Bates;
Byrne said he thought of it as an Alice
Cooper number. Byrne showed up with
one verse. He wa nted the br idge to be i n
Japanese; Weymouth suggested French
and wrote a verse that won her great ad-
miration from various French speakers
who cropped up in her career. Frantz
wrote two verses, one of which was cut.
But Byrne instantiated the character
and sang with what felt like authentic
menace lyrics that many women could
imagine being directed at them:You start a conversation, you
can’t even finish it
You’re talking a lot, but you’re not
saying anything
When I have nothing to say, my
lips are sealed
Say something once, why say it
again?A few years later Weymouth, now a
member of Talking Heads, adapted the
score of Hitchcock’s shower scene—
those screechy violin stabs—for the
infectious bass line. Time and again
on these songs, it’s Weymouth’s play-
ing that answers—nearly duets with—
Byrne’s lyrics. Weymouth often drove
the tune, which forced the other players
to scramble their own musical calcula-
tions: as Frantz has observed, Byrne
used his lead guitar or vocals to create
the rhythm while the bass more or less
sang. In “Psycho K iller,” he does it with
staccato shouts, barks, and nonsense
syllables. As is common in Talking
Heads songs, the refrains seem to mark
phases of an escalating panic attack.The Psycho Killer’s crisis crests, but
the bass stays cool. The song itself has
cornered him. Weymouth’s suave play-
ing is his comeuppance.
The tensions that drive “Psycho
Killer” and are resolved by it were not
entirely staged: Byrne once tried to
have Weymouth fired on the premise
that her bass couldn’t keep up with him.
A later song, one of their loveliest, calls
a truce: “This Must Be the Place (Naive
Melody)” was named for the sweet,
credulous cooperation of Weymouth’s
bass and Byrne’s guitar on a simplis-
tic, reiterated musical phrase. “Home
is where I want to be / But I guess I’m
already there,” goes one of its lines.
The story of the band’s genesis and
evolution, as well as the intimation of
its demise, is told in the great Jonathan
Demme film that captured the band’s
1984 tour, Stop Making Sense. Byrne
appears first, all alone, “so white he’s
almost mock- white,” according to Pau-
line Kael, carrying his guitar and a
boombox which he places at his feet.
When he presses play, we hear a simple
percussion track, and Byrne launches
into a skeletal version of “Psycho
Killer” without the bass. For the next
tune, “Heaven,” only Weymouth joins
him on stage, her bass held high and
turned up loud. Then an early song,
“Thank You for Sending Me an Angel,”
with the band as the original trio; then
“Found a Job,” joined by Harrison.
What happens next is maybe the
greatest moment in their career, and
also a harbinger of their end. The stage
fills with musicians, nine in all: the core
members plus the “big band” required
for their expanded sound. Talking
Heads were now a multiracial group,
after years of absorbing the influence
of Black music, from gospel to Nigerian
pop to early rap. Bernie Worrell, one of
the founders of Parliament- Funkadelic,
played keyboard. Weymouth now
shared the stage with other women: the
extraordinary backing singers Edna
Holt and Lynn Mabry.
The film shows the group navigat-
ing an impossible paradox. They were
at once a party band and an art proj-
ect. Byrne, who designed the sets and
costumes—including the famous “big
suit” that is one of the most distinctive
costumes in rock history—had a path
forward from Stop Making Sense; so
did the band, which had become a col-
lective. Some of the best music Talking
Heads made after Stop Making Sense
was made apart, by Tom Tom Club and
in David Byrne’s solo projects. Byrne
broke up the band in 1991. Talking
Heads reunited for three songs in 2002,
when they were inducted into the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame. They looked
wary of one another but sounded tight,
and I have watched the clips approxi-
mately one billion times.
In his 2019 Broadway show, Ameri-
can Utopia, Byrne, who is now somehow
much less odd and looks like Senator
William Butler Yeats, sings with great
curiosity and passion. Around half of
the songs he performs, backed by an
intricately choreographed troupe that
gestures back to the Stop Making Sense
ensemble, are Talking Heads numbers.
In interviews, Byrne clings to the idea
that reuniting would be an empty act of
nostalgia, a form of creative suicide. But
that’s not, to borrow the title of his book,
“how music works.” On the evidence of
Frantz’s memoir, the old tensions re-
main, disembodied, waiting upon their
hosts, and so does the love. Q