- The music scene in the 1970s and 1980s is now the stuff of legend.

From disco to the rise of hip hop, punk and new wave, innovation and artistry dominated pop music.

Today's guest was in the middle of it all as a founding member of Talking Heads.

He's Chris Frantz this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(pleasant music) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes, from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

Joining me as he does every week in the co-host chair is my great friend, G. Wayne Miller of the "Providence Journal."

Each week we talk about big issues with great guests; authors, journalists, artists and more to make sense of the big stories shaping public life in the United States today.

This week we're joined by one of the founding members of Talking Heads, Chris Frantz, who has authored a new memoir, "Remain In Love, "Talking Heads: Tom Tom Club: Tina."

Chris, thank you so much for being with us today.

- [Chris] Thank you, Jim.

It's a great pleasure.

- Well, the book, "Remain In Love" is just a wonderful read and it really is a love story to music and to the love of your life, Tina.

But let's start with the music.

When did you first realize that you had a passion for, for more than just art, but actually creating music?

- Well, I began to love music, some of my first memories are my parents gave me a little portable child's record player.

The first record I had was called "Teddy Bears on Parade."

And I loved it!

I would play it over and over and over.

And then I got, Christmas was coming so I got "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" by Gene Autry.

And I loved that very much.

But when I actually started to play music was I think in the third grade.

I was at a good public school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and they had a music-education program.

And what they started us off on, all the kids, was this little instrument, a recorder that was called the flutophone, a little plastic recorder with a bell on the end that was pink.

(chuckles) I started off on that.

And then I, when I got good at that, they said, "You show great aptitude, Chris.

"We think you should try the trumpet."

So I said, "Great."

So I started, I guess it was in the fourth grade I started playing the trumpet.

But it just wasn't happening for me.

It wasn't working out, no matter how hard I tried.

And I tried very hard.

I did my lessons, did my practicing every day, but I just didn't have what it takes in here.

I think they call that the, is it the embouchure?

Embouchure?

- [Jim] I think that's right.

Yeah.

- [G. Wayne] Yeah.

- It wasn't working out for me, so I went to this, my music teacher, I was now in the fifth grade.

I went to a man named Gene Wilmoth who was a mallet instrument guy and a great teacher.

And he said to me, "Yeah, I can see you're having problems, "Chris, but I think you have a very good sense of rhythm.

"What do you say we switch you over to the drums?"

Now, all I wanted to do was play music.

I didn't really care what instrument.

And so I said, "Great!"

And he gave me a beginner's book.

And he gave me the little drum pad, which is a piece of rubber stuck onto a piece of wood and a pair of sticks and I started practicing and practicing, you know, the single-stroke roll and the double-stroke roll.

Then the five-stroke roll and the seven-stroke role.

And then the paradiddles and the ratamacues.

And all these rudiments, drum rudiments I was taught by Mr. Wilmoth.

It worked out really well for me because now I'm in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, baby!

(laughing) - And that, that was a snare drum, your first drum, according to what you wrote in your memoir.

- [Chris] Yeah.

- Which again, it's just, it's so beautifully written.

And we'll get into it a little bit more a little later on.

You had a band, your first band was called The Lost Chords, is that correct?

And it was a cover band.

You did Beatles and Beach Boys.

Talk about that, your very first band.

- Yes, it was The Lost Chords.

Yes, my first band was called The Lost Chords.

And I still love that name very much.

Must resurrect it sometime.

But The Lost Chords consisted of a bunch guys that played in the school band along with me.

And we were well aware of The Beatles and how much the girls loved The Beatles, and also how great the music was.

So, we were inspired by that, you know, that great performance on "The Ed Sullivan Show."

And we formed a little garage band.

We played like, "A Taste of Honey" and things like that.

- Chris, do you remember the first time outside of the school orchestra when you first played in front of people, when you first played in front of an audience and what that moment felt like?

- I do very clearly.

It was one of the most, how shall I say, highly chaperoned shows I've ever done.

(laughing) And it was in the basement, the Youth Fellowship of the Fox Chapel Presbyterian Church.

And The Lost Chords played, and it was our first show.

And it was so exciting to me.

I mean, the kids really got excited.

Even though, I mean, who knows, I wish I had a recording.

Who knows what we really sounded like.

But the kids got excited and we in the band were terribly excited.

And it was just a wonderful experience, which, you know, it made me think, "Wow, I could really do this!"

- So, you were a young teenager at the time of Lost Chords.

And with that performance and other playing at that time, did you have any sense that you were starting down a path that would lead you toward becoming a professional musician and you know, obviously a music legend?

I mean, again, bear in mind you're 14, 15, whatever it was.

- Yes, well, it was a dream that I had.

And I shared that dream with many, many other people across the country and in fact the world that one day I would be in a band and the band would be famous.

And that I would come back to my hometown and people would like, be all excited.

And, you know, it was a dream that one day came true for me.

And I'm very grateful for that.

- So, in high school you discovered another passion which was art.

And you thought then of becoming an artist and that interest and passion in art in high school ultimately led you to apply to and be accepted at the Rhode Island School of Design, RISD as it's commonly known.

Talk about that, talk about the path that brought you to RISD, which is where, you know, the next stage of your career began to unfold.

- Well, yes.

I began to study, I had always been interested in painting.

Not so much sculpture, but drawing and painting.

And I had a very good art teacher.

By this time I was in high school.

And he suggested to me that, that maybe I should go to art school.

Now, my parents were very conservative people.

And of course their reaction was, "Oh, well how will he ever support himself?"

And my art teacher, whose name was David Miller said, "But I'm going to recommend that Chris go "to the Rhode Island School of Design, "because you know, the Rhode Island School of Design "is the Harvard of art schools."

And my parents, my father had gone to Harvard Law School.

So my parents were like, "Oh, it's the Harvard of art schools?"

(laughing) - Oh, that's great.

- Yeah, so they allowed me to go there.

In fact, my father drove me up for the interview.

And we walked all around the College Hill area of Providence, which is very beautiful, historic, and it has a great, great vibe to it to this day.

And I ended up being accepted and attending RISD.

And, oh, it was so, it was so great.

I mean, I'm still, I mean, I met Tina there, I met David Byrne there.

I met many people that I'm still friends with who have been very successful in the arts.

And we're all supporting ourselves just fine.

- And how!

Talk to us a little bit about both of those, those two really important relationships.

With Tina obviously, but also with David Byrne.

How did you meet, and how did you know that those relationships were gonna be so creatively productive?

- Well, with Tina, it was like love at first sight.

Have you ever experienced that?

- [Jim] I have.

- Yeah.

You know what I'm talking about.

It's like, "Whoa!"

With David, it was more of an artistic relationship, a collaborative artistic relationship.

You know, Tina eventually became my girlfriend.

I had to be patient because she had another boyfriend at the time; I had to wait for that guy to disappear.

(laughing) - Metaphorically, we know you mean.

'Cause this was Providence after all.

- (chuckles) Yes.

Well, yes, Providence was just wonderful.

I mean, it was.

Of course after four years, I had explored Benefit Street from one end to the other and I really needed to get to New York City.

And that's what Tina wanted to do, and that's what David wanted to do.

So, we were all in agreement about that.

And we had hoped that, we hoped that maybe we would start a band in New York City.

That was, again, that was my dream.

David said, "Okay."

Tina was not yet convinced that it was a good idea for her to be in the band.

She thought, "Oh no, that's for boys.

"Rock and roll is a boys club."

And she was kind of right about that.

But in spite of everything, one day she walked into our loft, just off the Bowery on Christie Street with a Fender Precision bass guitar.

And it was like, hallelujah!

Because I knew that Tina, she had never played bass guitar before, but she had played folk guitar and she had played flute, and she had played English hand bells (chuckles) if you can imagine.

She actually played those at the World's Fair in New York City and among other places.

And David and I knew that Tina had a, a shared aesthetic with us, an artistic aesthetic that we knew that it would work.

At least I knew that it would work.

I was quite certain that it would.

And it did, I mean, she turned out to be one of the great bass players of all time.

- So there you are living in the loft, the three of you and forming what became Talking Heads.

Were you rehearsing and writing and everything in that little loft down in New York City?

- [Chris] Yes.

- This is the mid-seventies, with just to tell us what is.

- Yeah, we moved there in 1974.

And at first it was just David and I practicing alone.

And, you know, trying to create a sound, a new kind of sound.

Well, a different kind of sound than what people had come to expect from rock and roll.

And also different lyrical content than what people had come to expect.

I mean, early songs like, like Psycho Killer and Artists Only and Warning Sign, I mean, those are all, you know, kind of different from what you were hearing on radio in those days.

And I'm still very proud of all those songs.

- Yeah, with good reason.

Can you talk us a little bit through sort of like, how did you actually write songs?

It's sort of like, there's the, I think the popular image of the artist toiling away in solitude and coming up with something, but you describe a more collaborative process.

- It was always very collaborative until towards the end.

Towards the end David would come to us with songs that he had, you know, sketches of songs that he had already written.

But in the early days, all through, up until the mid-eighties, our songs were composed by jamming, by playing together until we, until we found a bit that we said, "Oh, that sounds really hip.

"Let's repeat that a few times until we memorize it."

'Cause we, in those days we didn't even have a tape recorder.

You know, we would learn stuff and have to, have to, you know, ingrain it into our memory.

- I mean, it sounds like the script of a movie.

Maybe it will be a movie.

In 1975 Talking Heads open for The Ramones.

That was really the quote/unquote birth of the band.

And from there, it took off.

I mean, for all the reasons that we love and know: the quality of the music, the lyrics.

I remember so vividly listening to Talking Heads for the first time and going, "Wow, what a band!"

Talk about how it, all of a sudden, the dream you talked about earlier exploded and began to be realized.

- Well, we were very fortunate to have this little venue, this little rock and roll dive bar called CBGBs.

(coughs) Excuse me.

I'll start over.

We were very fortunate to have this little rock and roll dive bar called CBGBs just three blocks away.

And we would go there regularly.

And the first time I went there, I saw The Ramones.

The second time I saw Patty Smith.

And the third time I saw Television.

And so I thought, "Whoa, this place is happening!"

And so we became regulars there.

And when we had enough, regular audience members is what I mean, and when we had enough songs composed, we, actually, I went to the owner, Hilly Kristal, and I said, "Hilly, we got a band.

"And we'd like to audition to play here."

And he said, "Well, what kind of music do you play?"

And I say, I said, "Well, we play in a style of our own."

And he chuckled, and I think he maybe heard that one before.

And he said, "Well, I could put you on "in front of The Ramones on Thursday night.

"And if it goes well, "you can play the whole weekend with them."

And I said, "Great, we'll do it!"

We didn't even have a band name yet.

So, we had hurry up and think of a band name, which a friend of ours, his name was Wayne.

Wayne Z from Chicago, and Wayne had been with us at RISD and he was visiting and he knew we were searching for band names and he said, "I was recently reading "TV Guide," I mean, who reads TV Guide?

(laughing) Wayne did.

And he said they had a glossary of cameraman lingo for television.

And one of the words, terms in the glossary was talking heads, which is the most boring, yet also the most informative type of programming.

And so we said, "Talking Heads, Talking Heads."

And we all liked it; Tina liked it, David liked it, I liked it.

And we decided to go with that.

And because, you know, it didn't connote any particular type of music, really.

It might've been a comedy team or an improv group or something like that.

But it didn't sound like a heavy metal band or a punk band or anything like that.

So, we chose Talking Heads.

We opened for The Ramones, Johnny Ramone said, "Yeah, they suck, so, they'll make us look good."

(laughing) "They could open for us."

Now, when it took off was shortly thereafter.

Hilly Kristal at CBGBs decided to have something he called: A Festival of Underground Rock.

And these were all unrecorded bands.

And we played at that festival.

And we, I think every band played a few times.

And the next thing we knew our picture was on the cover of "The Village Voice" in this great article which said: Tired of glitter, check out the conservative impulse of the new rock underground.

And then things just started to roll.

And in fact, a couple of times we had to put the brakes on and say, "No, we're not ready to make a record.

"No, we're not ready to do a live TV broadcast.

"Come back in a year."

Which drove the record company people crazy.

But fortunately Seymour Stein of Sire Records was patient.

And he said it was the most difficult year of his life.

(laughing) But in November, 1st of November of 1976, we signed a recording contract with Sire Records for five albums.

And also Tina and I got engaged to be married on the same day.

- So now you're touring internationally which is just, you know, phenomenal.

Many of us have obviously been at a concert in the audience, but a few of us have actually been on stage.

Talk about what it is like to perform live in front of a large crowd.

You know, what you're feeling, what you're thinking, the role of a drummer; you write very eloquently about all of this in your book.

- Well, there's a big difference between performing in a club, you know, in an intimate situation to performing to a large audience in an arena or a festival or something like that.

In the small clubs, you can look people in the eye and you can gauge their reaction.

And it's intimate.

In a big venue, like, let's say the US Festival (chuckles) which we performed at out in California, there were 500,000 people in attendance.

And so, we were like, "Okay, heads down, do your thing.

"See at the end of the show."

(laughing) I mean, you, instead of responding to individuals, you're responding to this mass of people.

And thank goodness they liked us.

- Would you for a show like that, so you're an established act now, you're a tight band.

Do you still get nervous?

- Oh yeah, I get stage fright really badly sometimes.

And I found this, I found this homeopathic remedy called Gelsemium sempervirens.

It comes in those little warung tubes.

And you put a few of those under your tongue.

It's homeopathic, it's all natural.

And it just chills you out a little bit so you're not freaking.

(chuckling) - Well, so, in 1981 Talking Heads went into hiatus.

And in that downtime for the band you and Tina started Tom Tom Club.

Talk to us about that band.

- Well, Tom Tom Club was a true musical collaboration between well, of course, Tina and myself were sort of the leaders of the collaboration.

We brought on board two of her sisters, Laura and Lonnie to sing along with her.

We brought on board Adrian Belew, the guitarist who had been working with Talking Heads.

And you know, David did a solo, David announced he was doing a solo album which turned out to be "The Catherine Wheel."

And when he announced that, Jerry said, "Well, if David's gonna do a solo album, "I'm gonna do a solo album."

So, Jerry was doing his, Adrian played on all three: David's, Jerry's, and ours.

And he was kind of like the stunt guitarist.

And we also worked with a young Jamaican engineer/producer named Steven Stanley.

I think he was only 21 at the time, maybe 22.

But very gifted as an engineer.

And he was one of the in-house guys at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas where we made the first, second, and I think, well, at least the first two Tom Tom Club albums.

And that record, it was like a gift to us because, you know, we were, Tina and I were feeling a little bit like outsiders at the time a little bit.

You know, I wouldn't say dispirited, but we were challenged by our business situation with Talking Heads.

And that album, well, the first single Wordy Rappinghood went to top 10 in every country in Europe and number one in Argentina and in Mexico.

You know, you can sell a lot of records down in South America and Mexico.

So, we had a smash hit.

And all of a sudden like, we had new found respect from people in the business.

And that was really good.

- Chris, we've got about 30 seconds left.

What are you and Tina up to now?

- Well, Tina's writing a new book, her first.

I can't tell you anything about it, 'cause I haven't seen it.

- We'll look forward for sure, when it comes out.

I'm working on, I'm about to begin working on another book which has nothing to do with the music business really.

And we also have this little thing called Chris und Tina, which is an electronic music project inspired by Kraftwerk.

And we hope to get to that real soon.

- Well, we will look forward to all of that.

In the meantime, "Remain In Love" is just a great, great read.

Chris Frantz, thank you so much for being with us.

That's all the time we have this week, but if you want to know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on Facebook and Twitter, or visit www.PellCenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

(pleasant music) (upbeat guitar music)