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. Soon after Talking Heads started to gain a foothold at CBGB, Lou Reed befriended, and courted, them – if in his own peculiar way. “Johnny was a real son of a bitch,” said Frantz. The famously small-minded guitarist considered Talking Heads either pretentious or baffling. Once he discovered their true origin and style, he loved their minimalism and humor, but the feeling wasn’t returned by Johnny Ramone. When Frantz first heard about the Ramones, he thought they were a Mexican band. “She had great empathy for people like William Burroughs but, for kids who just got out of art school, zero.” “It was definitely reverse snobbism,” Frantz said. 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. Of course, he also covers the ground-breaking band he and Weymouth created, Tom Tom Club.Īn 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. 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. In his book, Frantz also writes about his 42-year marriage to Weymouth with a warmth and awe that inspired its title. 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.” At the same time, Frantz appreciates the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity the alchemy of Talking Heads provided for him and the other members. 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.
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