Chris Frantz And Tina Weymouth Remember Years At Compass Point

Publié le par olivier

Chris Frantz And Tina Weymouth Remember Years At Compass Point

As Tom Tom Club, the husband-and-wife team of Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth have had a wild career, from being the center of the downtown New York scene in the early '80s - the crucible where punk, new wave, and hip-hop melted together - to playing in the Talking Heads and working with everyone from Lou Reed to Grandmaster Flash to Sly & Robbie. And over 30 years after its release, their Genius Of Love still has one of the most distinctive melodies in pop music. The song was originally recorded in the Bahamas, and its hook was later sampled by numerous artists, most notably by Mariah Carey on Fantasy.

In this extended, often touching lecture, held at the Red Bull Music Academy Tokyo in November 2014, Chris and Tina open up about their lives in music - and with one another.

Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth at the Red Bull Music Academy in Tokyo (2014)

Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth at the Red Bull Music Academy in Tokyo (2014)

EXCERPTS

So excited to have you here today. It seems like a sensible place to start our talk with the band and when you met and how you started collaborating right at the very beginning. Because am I right in thinking you all met at college?

Chris Frantz: Yeah, we met at a place called Rhode Island School of Design which is an art school in Rhode Island, Providence, Rhode Island. I met Tina there and I met David Byrne there. We became friends. Well, more than friends. [laughs]

After Tina and I graduated we moved to New York City along with David and we got a loft on the lower east side, which happened to be just three blocks from a little club called CBGB's. We were fascinated and very excited by what we saw at CBGB’s which would be people like Patti Smith and the Ramones and very early stages of Blondie. Well, actually it was early stages of everybody.

People in the audience would be like John Cale and Lou Reed for example, and a lot of artists. It was a very mixed bag of people. You had what later became known as punks, but you also had minimalist composers like Steve Reich and Rhys Chatham and Phillip Glass and supermodels like Lauren Hutton who lived across the street. She would often come in and use the pinball machine, pick up some guys. [laughs] It was a very exciting time. It was 1974.

Talking Heads in New York

Talking Heads in New York

Tell me about getting signed and it all kicking off for Talking Heads and when you started making your first record with Psycho Killer. When did you first get in touch with Brian Eno and that collaboration started?

Chris Frantz: We were fans of Brian Eno, and we met him the first time we ever played in London, which was a little club called Rock Garden. It was like a honey comb and the band would be playing in one room and the audience would be in all these little rooms all around, so they would have to crane their neck to see the band. There was no stage or anything.

Eno was in the audience. So was John Cale. And Robert Fripp. And they came back stage. We already knew John Cale from CBGB's. I remember him saying, “Come on Brian. They’re mine.” But as great as John Cale was and still is we were more enticed by the production values of Brian Eno. Seymour Stein, who owns Sire Records, his wife was managing the Ramones. Again, we were on tour with the Ramones. She invited Eno and us to go to this pub lunch, Sunday lunch, and we really hit it off well. We had a few little meetings with him at his apartment and we decided to work together.

What was the first album that you worked together on?

Chris Frantz: More Songs About Buildings And Food.

Talking Heads at Compass Point

Talking Heads at Compass Point

Tina Weymouth: We went down to Compass Point Studio. We kind of unofficially opened the studio. It was a studio in the Bahamas that was built by Chris Blackwell of Island Records. He’d already given his home and studio in Jamaica Tuff Gong Studios is what it became to Bob Marley. He moved up to Bahamas because the political climate in Jamaica at that time was really bad. I think I’ve been told by friends of mine that the CIA was giving guns to 14-year-old boys. At least that’s the story that I’m told. So it was quite dangerous. But he wanted a place where his artists could come and work.

Out of that he build an apartment building, and he wanted to create an artist community and compound. The first person there was Robert Palmer. You know him from Addicted To Love, among other wonderful songs. Then we said we would be interested as well after taking Talking Heads down there twice.

Actually, we ended up going there many times but in 1980 we built it. But we built an apartment in his apartment building, and it was right behind the studio. We could swim in the morning, clear our heads, and then in the afternoon and evening we could start working in the studio. It was an amazing situation.

Tina Weymouth on the beach in the Bahamas

Tina Weymouth on the beach in the Bahamas

Tina Weymouth: There were two studios: Studio A and Studio B. Talking Heads went there in ’78 we had studio A. But they didn’t have the wiring all finished yet. But it was great. Brian Eno was a lot of fun. The songs were already written. All the songs for the first two albums were already written. Brian would always come after the fact.

He did three albums with us, More Songs About Buildings And Food in ’78. We did Fear of Music in ’79, which was recorded live at Chris’s and my loft in Queens. Then we did Remain In Light in 1980. So those three albums made a triptych.

Promo advert for Tom Tom Club's debut album (1981)

Promo advert for Tom Tom Club's debut album (1981)

And the chemistry of you as a couple and you as a rhythm section would go on to be a new band in itself. Let’s talk about how that happened.

Tina Weymouth: That happened because at the Remain In Light tour David Byrne left us. That was to finish up the record that he had started with Brian Eno.

I don’t want to talk about that too much, because I wasn’t present at the sessions, but I know about the conception of the ideas.

In December of 1979 we, the Talking Heads as a quartet, were behind the Iron Curtain playing in Berlin and Brian Eno was there working at Conny Plank's studio right next to the wall. Holger Czukay from Can said, “Hey, David, Tina, come here,” and he made us come into this little room where he had this reel to reel tapes on the wall. He said, “I want to play you something.” He said, “Please don’t tell anybody about this because I have yet to shop it for a record deal. But it’s this idea I have to make this record.” He played us music that he had recorded.

Then on top of that he had a whole a bunch of found music from found vocals from radio and from other media, people talking in lecture and then looping those to create samples. So he was really the pioneer of that idea. 

That’s when David then went off with Brian and made My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. I think Holger was a little bit upset about that because they beat him to the punch. I’m a little bit upset that I didn’t catch it, because that’s why I probably wasn’t invited to the sessions, because I wasn’t able to say, “Hey, don’t you think you should come up with your own vocals.” Because it was a good idea, but it was somebody else’s idea first, and he should’ve left Holger do it first because it was his idea at first, although maybe some other people had done it before, but it was the first time in the rock context.

Promo advert for Tom Tom Club's debut album (1981)

Promo advert for Tom Tom Club's debut album (1981)

Tina Weymouth: So, now it’s ’81 and we come to Japan and our manager says, “Oh, Chris and Tina, I have some bad news for you. David Byrne is going off to do another solo record, and I think he’s going to be gone at least a year.” So we said, “Oh, what are we going to do with this big band? We spent all our money. We only have $2000 in the bank.” He said, “That’s what I was thinking. I was thinking maybe that we could do something with Chris Blackwell,” because Chris Blackwell always regretted that he didn’t sign Talking Heads.

When we asked him, “Please sign us,” and so he said, “Chris Blackwell may be able to give you deal.” We said, “OK, yeah, that would be great.” That’s when we went down in March of 1981. First we had a meeting with the great Lee "Scratch" Perry at the Holiday Inn in New York City. That was a very interesting meeting. [laughs] He said, “OK, how’s March for you?” So we went down and we waited, and we waited, and we waited, and it was soon come, soon come, soon come.

It was driving us crazy because in Studio A was Grace Jones and the great Compass Point All-Stars. Every day they were cutting tracks and we were just going nuts because we couldn’t be part of something. In Studio B was our young friend Steven Stanley, also from Jamaica who was just so sad that he was writing music called Tropical Depression.

Frantz with the Compass Point All-Stars (left) and in the studio with Steven Stanley (right)

Frantz with the Compass Point All-Stars (left) and in the studio with Steven Stanley (right)

Tina Weymouth: So I got all my courage up to ask the great Chris Blackwell, “Chris, you know, Lee Perry hasn’t show up yet and we don’t know what’s up with that, but we really can’t just keep living here. We don’t have any income. We really should get to work. We’ve been here for three weeks and nothing’s happened. Would you mind terribly if you let us work with this engineer that you hired, Steve Stanley in Studio B, which is empty? Would you give us three days to try to do something, just the two of us with Steven Stanley?” He said, “Sure, why not.” 

We went in there and we cut the rhythm beds for Wordy RappinghoodGenius Of Love, and another track, album track which would become Lorelei. At the end of three days we invited Chris Blackwell in and he said, “Great. Make a whole album.” So that’s how the first Tom Tom Club record came to be.

The Compass Point Studios (in the middle) and Robert Palmer's home by the sea (above)

The Compass Point Studios (in the middle) and Robert Palmer's home by the sea (above)

Tina Weymouth: [commenting on the picture above] This is an aerial view. The studio is the white building down towards the sea in the middle there.

Robert Palmer’s apartment was right on the sea. There’s a tiny little space. He drove his whole family crazy. I’d go over there at midnight and I’d knock on the door, there’d be no answer but from inside I’d hear all these little pygmy voices. It would be Robert experimenting because he would play everything. He’d play the drums. Then he’d play the guitar and the bass and the keyboards, and then he’d do these vocal experiments. Then he would make tracks that sounded very commercial, but most of the time this is what he was doing. 

Then in the middle you have this white building that you see the rooftop. That was the larger portion is Studio A and then there’s a small studio called Studio B. Everything about it was smaller but the sound was great.

Chris Frantz: An interesting point, Chris Blackwell was very hands-on with his studio, so much so that right before the studio opened when the building was finished he did a voodoo thing and he made sure that everybody around the area knew his doing it to where he took a bucket of chicken blood and feathers dipped into the bucket of blood and sprinkled blood all around the perimeter of the studio so that it would in some way be protected from evil doers.

Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth on the terrace of their Tip Top apartment

Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth on the terrace of their Tip Top apartment

Tina Weymouth: He also build the steeple on the church, which is over to the right. It’s got a pink speckle and he build a little steeple which was a great boon on Sundays. You would just love to have your windows all open and be listening to the music coming out of there, great church music... Oh, here, yeah, in back is the Tip Top apartments. Sly & Robbie had an apartment and Wally Badarou had Studio W in there with the Synclavier.

Tip Top?

Tina Weymouth: This is Tip Top because it’s actually on a hill and Chris Blackwell said – everything there is given a name. If you follow your eye down all the way to the left and out of the picture there is a little property that he owned called “Press on Regardless,” which we used to call “Pass Out Regardless” because U2 stayed there. That was our major experience with U2, watching them pass out. They were a very young group back then, just starting to feel things... Those were golden years.

www.redbullmusicacademy.com

Chris and Tina with baby in the Bahamas: "Those were golden years"

Chris and Tina with baby in the Bahamas: "Those were golden years"

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