The Adventures of Talking Heads in the 20th Century

Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa / This Must be the Place

New York based novelist David Bowman spent two years working on a new -unauthorized- biography of Talking Heads. The original working title, "Fa fa fa fa fa" has been changed for the American market into "This Must be the Place" by the publisher. The British edition of the book still has the original title.

The US edition will be out on April the 3rd and can be pre-ordered here.

Below is a website exclusive preview of the book, chapter 5 "Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town"

5: Uh-Oh Love Comes To Town

Back in Providence, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in August. They had both applied to graduate school at Yale, but neither made the cut. They had talked to David Byrne on the phone. He seemed to be having a ball in Manhattan. They thought they'd check out the city as well.
During the fall of 1974, however, Manhattan was no longer Oz. The city discovered it was $4.5 billion dollars in debt. Mayor Abraham Beame figured the Feds would bail him out, but President Gerald Ford stretched out his arm and went thumbs down.
Money was on everyone's mind. Chris and Tina needed to pull together a stake to get to NYC. Chris went home to Pittsburgh and painted murals for the hotels. Tina stayed in Providence and shined shoes for two hours a day. She also painted some signs. At summer's end, the girl had only made 60 bucks, but then the cliché times are hard is true. Only the Sunbelt had money -- Ford and Congress were happy to shovel funds their way at the expense of everyone else. This was looking like the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.
Thank God Chris pulled through. He had amassed two thousand dollars in Pittsburgh. He and Tina drove her old 1964 Plymouth Valiant to New York where they camped out at her brother Yann's loft in Long Island City -- an artists' neighborhood that was growing across the East River in Queens. Yann lived there with his girlfriend Julie McFarland. He had met her at an anti-war march in D.C. back in '71. "Together they formed part of the new thing that was happening with young people who were enjoying New York without any money," Tina said. "They came up with low tech high tech."

David was pleased when Chris showed up at Bond Street [the downtown loft where he was living]. David was even more pleased when, after the two saw the Ramones play across the street at CBGBs, Chris brought up the idea of forming a band like the Artistics in New York. Chris considered art a lot while he was painting murals in Pittsburgh. He'd thought it out. Painting was dead. And besides, you can't be acknowledged as a painter until you're forty. On the other hand, rock 'n' roll was a young buck's game. "Let's at least try it," Chris said. "If we fail, we fail. But we'll kick ourselves forever if we don't at least try."
David allowed himself to be swept up. He didn't have a brilliant career ahead of him making art of plucked eyebrows [a conceptual art piece he had created]. But before they could form a band, other things had to happen. Like money. They needed jobs. Chris and Tina needed a place to live. Then they needed a bass player.

Byrne became an usher at The Murray Hill Cinema on 34th Street. He made minimum wage, but "I was so excited just to be living and working in New York City. And I got to see Young Frankenstein over and over." Chris scored a gig in the packing department of Design Research, a store that sold chic, high-end furniture, lamps, dishes, and decorative housewares from Italy and Scandinavia -- as well as then-fashionable Marimekko clothing from Finland. Jackie Kennedy shopped there. As did Robert Redford, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Art Garfunkel and other wealthy New Yorkers. Tina sold stationary at Henri Bendels, just as hoity-toity. After a few days, she switched to selling shoes because she'd get a commission. She had budgeted herself five bucks a day to buy cigarettes, newspapers, books, transportation and food.
All over America, people were budgeting themselves on five bucks a day. President Ford had just given his State of the Union speech. He mentioned the economy. He advised Americans to "wait a while" before "buying that new automobile." He then told how a one-legged Korean veteran was refusing to use credit cards. He told an anecdote of a California teenager who stopped listening to rock 'n' roll in order to save electricity.
Stop listening to rock 'n' roll?
Not in our lifetime!

Anyway, living downtown in Manhattan was cheap. Whether the recession was the cause or the effect, the fact that a recession was happening almost didn't matter. Downtown apartments were only $80 a month. CBGB's downtown rent was $700. Admission was a dollar at the door on weekdays -- three on weekends. On a Saturday night, CBGBs could gross one to two thousand bucks. Kristal says that CBGBs benefited from the recession because there were no juke joints on the Lower East Side. "St. Marks still had remnants of the 1960s, but it had become very dingy. The Fillmore had closed down in '72 or '73. In '74, you had Max's. You had me. "
Just a few blocks down from CBGBs and one block east on Rivington was 195 Chrystie Street. There Chris discovered a loft was available for $250 a month. During the Christmas season, Chris and Tina and David moved their meager possessions into the space and commenced to follow the tribal ritual of many rock groups -- living together and making music. Perhaps the most prototypical lower East Side coupling was when John Cale and Lou Reed lived together further east circa 1965 in an apartment at 56 Ludlow Street (rent $25) where the two shot heroin and wrote songs like "All Tomorrow's Parties."
Who could have guessed what events would transpire at 195 Chrystie Street? It was just a block east of the Bowery, bordered by Sarah D. Roosevelt Park, a narrow row of basketball courts and trees that started at Houston Street and ended further downtown than a human being would ever want to go. The park itself was a place to shoot hoops, score drugs, and get or give cheap blowjobs.
The loft itself was located on the top floor of a nine-story building. The northeast corner faced uptown and Chrystie Street. The building was filled mostly with sweatshops. All Chris and Tina and David's loft had was space. Raw space.
It was huge. A row of windows made of some kind of industrial safety glass, and you couldn't see though them. If you opened them, however, you had a superb view of the Empire State Building. Although the place had a view, what it didn't have was twenty-four hour heat. Like most working buildings, the heat went on at 6 AM and off at 7 PM. The space also lacked a bathroom or kitchen or even a refrigerator. So Tina got them a hot plate. They'd get a mini fridge come spring, but for now it was cold enough to just stack food on the window ledge.
At least they had a sink. The communal bathroom was down the hall -- four stalls and a couple of sinks. Everyone could bathe over at [Bond Street]. As for heat, a floor below the loft was a foundry. The place was completely illegal, but what a godsend. The constant heat kept Chris and Tina and David's cement floor warm. Once Chris and David found a bass player, this would be the perfect space for the new band to practice. As for Tina, she could paint here -- she had as much space as any SoHo artist.

Later that fall, Tina went up to the Museum of Modern Art to see a show by an artist named Brice Marden. Painter Francesco Clemente had said there was "magic" in Marden's paintings. Tina looked at Marden's work -- simple paintings of abstract squiggles and blocks of Aegean greens and browns, and just gave up inside. "He's beaten me to the punch," she realized.
Tina went back downtown and almost threw out her paints and brushes. She thought about video for about an hour, but rejected it. Dalglish [he owned the loft on Bond Street] had come over to Chrystie Street with Susan [his wife] to make a video with David. Susan slipped into a leotard and they went out into the hall where Dalglish had leaned a row of eight foot long poles against the wall. He filmed David Byrne spraying deodorant on the sticks while his girlfriend danced between them.
This was ridiculous. Tina had no interest in video.

Meanwhile, David and Chris were having no luck finding a bass player. They didn't want to be a boogie band or a dance band or go glam. They knew they wanted a crisp modern sound. David hated bands that sounded mumbly. "Got mumbled" he'd say. They never wanted to do the musical equivalent of a dramatic trick. They'd avoid sensuous rhythms. David would never play a guitar solo. No drum solos either.
They never ran into a lone bass player who thought this sounded interesting. At least Chris never did. "Chris is the one who organized the band," David said later. "I might have been too shy to put a band together to play my songs." Chris would claim that he asked Debbie Harry of the Stilettos (which would later morph into Blondie) if she would be his group's singer. She rolled her eyes. You guys. Tina began putting down five dollars a week on a bass at We Buy Guitars on 48th Street. Mid-winter, she brought it back to the loft. "I'll be the bass player," she said to David. "Teach me."

Listen, anyone can learn to play bass guitar. Anyone with two arms and two hands. Especially if she already knows guitar. Tina learned guitar back in high school. The only difference between guitar and bass is that a bass player does not strum chords, but plucks individual notes.
A bass is a bass is a bass.
Gertrude Stein was one of David's favorite writers. Gertrude Stein would have had a ball writing instructions for playing bass. It's likely Gertrude Stein could have even learned to play bass herself providing Ernest Hemingway or Pablo Picasso or even David Byrne had been there to teach her.
Gertrude Stein could have bottomed the band. To bottom the band, both Tina and Gertrude would play the basic note of each chord the guitarist -- say David or Pablo -- plays. If bass playing can be compared to reading, Tina and Gertrude would never need to advance beyond the linguistic complexity of Dick and Jane.
The rhythms of Dick and Jane were only slightly simpler than those of Gertrude Stein.
Give each note it's full value, girls!
Hold each note until you play the next.
Do not leave gaps in the music.
Do not leave gaps unless David wants gaps. Unless David wants nervous spaces. It doesn't matter whether the music is nervous and lean, you are playing pop music. Pop music uses simple rhythms. The drummer and bass play these simple rhythms for two or four bars. Then, either the drummer or bass player varies the pattern. Varies it for just a moment. These variations are called fills.
David taught Tina how to play bass and how to play fills. David taught Tina other tricks. Like a thumb slap. These are used in funk. Thumb slaps sound more sadistic than they really are. Tina's thumb didn't need to do any slapping. She just had to strike the string in such a way that it slapped against the upper frets of the neck. To do this, Tina kept her thumb straight, but loose, and brought it down on the string while twisting her forearm.

Within a few months, Chris and Tina and David felt confident enough to invite friends and co-workers up to see them perform up at the loft -- nicknamed "End of the World" by Patty Martin, who worked with Chris at Design Research.
"I'm thinking about my friends," David sang. "Come up and see me, my friends are important."
All these friends piling in the room. Brian Breger was from Design Research. So was Patty Martin. Tina's fellow shoe girls from Bendels. Jamie Dalglish.
Then the band would start to play. Raw. Stark. Jittery. The prominent sound was the sound of Tina's bass. Tina's bass was the stake. The root. The six-level basement. All this while Byrne sang jittery nonsense about boys and girls and tentative decisions. Girls want to be with other girls because these other girls understand abstract analysis. These other girls make intuitive leaps. They make "plans that have far reaching effects." These peculiar songs weren't exactly catchy, but were still weirdly melodic. David sang his peculiar lyrics as if he were a deaf boy, unaware of the pathos and inappropriateness of his own voice singing, "Come up and see me, my friends are important."
The friends of Chris and Tina and David thought the music they were hearing was really special. It was really out there. But then it wasn't like the three ever planned to be on American Bandstand or anything. Or did they?

As spring came to Chrystie Street, pedestrians stopped bundling up. Chris and Tina and David decided to focus on the band's look. So many of the groups at CBGBs were into black. Tough cuts. Torn shirts. Slutwear. Chris and Tina and David decided they would try to look as neat as the Brady Bunch. They would have nice hair cuts. The straight look was in the air. A few months later in summer, a group called The Modern Lovers would release their first album. Their leader, Jonathan Richman, looked like he still built model airplanes and said, "Neat!" a lot. In England, a singer-songwriter named Declan McManus had begun cultivating a Buddy Holly crossed with Charlie Starkweather look; he'd later change his name to Elvis Costello. As for the rest of American men, they were all into the blow-dry look of Warren Beatty, who starred in Hal Ashby's Shampoo the winter before.

It's easy to imagine that Byrne was premeditatedly checking out the downtown scene in 1974-1975. Deciding the correct look his band should have. The kind of songs they'd write. Deliberating, debating and then staking out the Talking Heads niche. At century's end, Byrne said, "At that time in your life, it was never like this gnashing of teeth. 'This is it.' Or 'It's all or nothing.' 'This is the shot at the big time.' It just felt like, 'Let's rehearse some songs and let's see if we can get a gig.' We all loved the performances of Patti Smith and Television, but we had no desire to go in that romantic direction. We felt like it wasn't in our nature. I was thinking I loved it and it was in the rock 'n' roll tradition and I thought I'm going to find another way of expressing things in popular music that owes something to another kind of language. Not the language of French poetry or whatever. That was a conscious thought. Other bands were hanging out together all the time. So it was as much the idea came out of an organic life experience as a prearranged formal thing of 'Here's a song. We need a bass line for this.' I'd spent hours improvising little guitar riffs. I'd type down little stanzas. At some point I'd started putting them together. It was sort of a DNA thing. See how many of them would hold together. If they would stick." He'd give the new song to Chris and Tina. "We'd start working on it. Things could be missing. It would evolve from there."

Chris Franz really functioned as the band's de facto leader. When they decided the time was right to perform, he convinced CBGB's owner Hilly Kristal to let them audition.
"They played very precise," Kristal said later. "They knew what they were doing. They had obviously practiced much more than other bands. They had it down. They were an ensemble."
Kristal thought, "Tina played well." It was no surprise to him when he learned she'd only played bass for six months. "Somebody goes to college, they learn to do it correctly."
As for David Byrne, Kristal knew he wasn't a true rock 'n' roller. "Byrne was very shy. Very quiet. He just did his thing so to speak. He didn't communicate very much. He seemed almost embarrassed by it all." But Kristal loved Byrne's attitude. He loved the band's pure sparse sound. They were smart, but not Baudlairians like Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith. Their sound was basic like the Ramones, the difference being that the Ramones were hamhanded, while this band sounded like knitting needles dipped in honey.

Now all they needed was a name.

The group that eventually would call themselves Talking Heads might have been called The Vogue Dots. Or The Tunnel Tones. The World of Love. The Portable Crushers.
David would write these names on scrap paper and attach them to Chris's bass drum. Tina claimed that an old RISD buddy named Wayne Zieve got the term "talking heads" from TV Guide. Wayne Zieve also wrote the lyrics for one of the band's best songs, "Artists Only." It was such an art school song. "I'm painting again!" David would sing over and over. He announces that pretty soon he will be bitter. Then a line whose poignancy is best felt by art school students, "You can't see it 'til it's finished." Finally, David declares that he doesn't have to prove that he's creative.
Zieve's lines exist only to be sung in David's deranged howl. There was no television at 195 Chrystie Street, but "talking heads" was the technical term for a head-and-shoulder shot of an interviewer or interviewee.
This was either an unconscious or conscious challenge to the group named Television. As for that group, certain members of the band believed that Tom Verlaine chose that name after his initials.

Two weeks before their first show, Tina and Chris were walking down Bleecker Street wearing matching T-shirts that said, "Talking Heads." Some guy stopped them and said, "Is that the name of a band? That's a terrible name." A week before the show, Chris and a friend from work, Chuck Wachtel, were walking around the corner from CBGBs, when a wino leapt out of the window of his flophouse. Chris was sure this was a bad omen. Chuck tried to convince him, "It wasn't. It wasn't ."
Two nights before the show, Chris, Tina and David plastered promo fliers on every wall and lamp post. Then came June 5th.

Talking Heads were opening for The Ramones. Think of The Ramones as a band composed of four Fred Flintstones. The members, Johnny Ramone and Dee Dee Ramone and Joey Ramone and Tommy Ramone were not brothers. Or cousins. Johnny and Dee Dee and Joey and Tommy were Mr. Cummings and Mr. Colvin and Mr. Hyman and Mr. Erdelyi. What they had in common with Mr. Franz, Ms. Weymouth and Mr. Byrne was electric music that was spare, short and simple.
There were maybe twenty people there that night to see Talking Heads. But that was okay. CBGBs was a long narrow room. Twenty people would be all crowded together. Twenty people would feel like an audience. Byrne stood on stage before those twenty people, gaunt. Looking stricken. Tina had her little blond mop, clutching her bass guitar like it was a bazooka. Chris was happy and wired -- a professional.
"We're Talking Heads," David choked out. They began playing.

Text (C) David Bowman / Harper Entertainment 2001.

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