The Chris Chronicles

For a long time I've felt the luckiest man in the world is Chris Frantz.  He helped found a great band--Talking Heads (and its offshoot, Tom Tom Club)--and married his true love, beautiful and talented bandmate Tina Weymouth.

Now that I've read Frantz's memoir, Remain In Love, I'm glad to see he appreciates his life. Approaching 70, he narrates his story with a feeling of "can you believe all this great stuff happened to me?"

He spends a fair amount of time discussing his childhood as an army brat before getting to the Rhode Island School of Design, where he meets Tina and starts a band (not yet Talking Heads) with David Byrne. Then all three move to New York and live in squalor, because that's what artists do. They also start developing their sound (Tina finally joins the band, learning bass in the process) and play gigs at CBGB, along with Patti Smith, Television, the Ramones and Blondie.  They get some notoriety and go on a tour of Europe with the Ramones.  They get back and finally release their first album, Talking Heads: 77.

To many fans, this was the beginning of their relationship with the band, but the book is more than half over at this point. In a way this makes sense--the early years are what made Frantz and Talking Heads, even though there'd be much success and many albums to come.  Frantz doesn't exactly skip over the rest of the story, but the milestones come and go pretty quickly at this point. (And the second half of his life gets only a couple chapters, which once again makes sense, since the music we care about most came in his 20s and 30s).

I recommend the book for Talking Heads--and Tom Tom Club--fans.  A warning, though--Franz is less a storyteller than a fact-lister.  Discussing a tour, he'll tell you each city where the band played, the hotel where they stayed, the restaurants where they ate, and so on.  Not that this is without interest, but you wish he'd spend more time on the music and the people.

Frantz comes across as a nice guy, and I don't think he's faking it. In addition to being grateful for his life, he has nice words to say about almost everyone he meets, big and small.  I guess a few people don't come across well, such as Johnny Ramone and Ziggy Marley, but you get the impression Frantz likes even those guys.

But there is one person who regularly gets a negative assessment. In fact, he's almost the villain of the book. David Byrne.

Byrne is generally recognized as the main creative force behind Talking Heads, and that's part of the problem.  Frantz feels he and Weymouth (not to mention Jerry Harrison, who joined the band just as they were about to record) were central in creating the sound and songs of Talking Heads, as well as keeping the band together during tough times.

Byrne, Frantz feels, grabbed too much credit, and often treated his bandmates as side musicians.  He was also mercurial, demanding and slow with a compliment. Frantz regularly expresses this viewpoint--here's an example on page 63, not long after he and Tina meet Byrne at RISD.  The "incident" referred to is Byrne secretly rehanging a gallery showing to emphasize his work:

This incident set an early precedent for David's seemingly continual need to aggrandize himself at the expense of his collaborators, as if their contribution were not as important as his.  Had I known about this at the time, I would called him out on it, but I didn't.  For some reason, nobody told me.  Years later, he treated the rest of us in Talking Heads with similar disrespect, and continues to do so. I have to wonder how his new collaborators will feel.  Tina has said he seems incapable of returning friendship.  We learned this from experience.

Strong stuff.  It's good to see Frantz is not so nice that he won't tell the truth about his feelings.