Tina Weymouth

Like Chris Frantz, Martina Michéle Weymouth came from a military family: her father was in the Navy, and her mother was French. She was born November 22, 1950, in Coronado, California. The family moved around a lot - Hawaii, Iceland, France, Belgium, Switzerland, the East and the West coasts.

"It makes a big difference in what you know you can do in life if experience has taught you you can live anywhere", she said in a 1984 interview in Guitar Player.
When she was twelve, Tina was a member of Mrs. Tufts' English Handbell Ringing Group, which was based in Washington, D.C., but toured around the Northeast. "We played in churces and schools in places like Pennsylvania, New ENgland, and the World's Fair in New York," Tina recalls. "Our repertoire was old English folk songs and medieval melodies, and we all wore Elizabethan costumes".

"I taught myself to play guitar when I was fourteen, but I didn't stick with it. No discipline. It was one of those things you'd do alone in your room to get away from your family when you're an adolescent and feel different from everybody else. I became captain of the cherleaders, but it didn't make me any happier. I still always felt really left out and different. Everybody hated highschool".

"I'm a self-taught musician. I was listening to the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Peter Paul & Mary - a lot of folk, in fact. I learned a folk finger-picking style from one of those Pete Seeger books with little diagrams with numbers for the fingers". So although she had played musical instruments for several years and shared the Artistics' (pre-Talking Heads, see the early days) excitement over rock and roll music, Tina didn't think about playing in a band at that point. She was an Artistics fan from the downbeat, though. "I was at every performance and every rehearsal. It was very, very loud. You couldn't stand closer than fifty feet because it was so loud and abusive". Maybe the decibels had something to do with the frequent distortion of the band's name into The Autistics.

Following the breakup of the Artistics in the spring of 1974 -probably due to approaching finals and the inevitability of graduation scattering its members across the map- David Byrne moved to New York and started writing songs. Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth graduated from RISD in June, and in September they, too, moved to New York, still figuring on entering the art world and not expecting music to be anything more than an amusement. Tina learned how to play bass and together with Chris and David she formed Talking Heads in january 1975. It would be nearly six months before they'd take their music out in public.

Besides Talking Heads, Tina also played bass in The Heads and Tom Tom Club, where she's also the lead singer.

• "really odd article about a couple who can only have sex to Talking Heads"

Collaborations:

• Producer (with Chris Frantz) for Ziggy Marley's album "Conscious Party"
• Producer (with Chris Frantz) for Ziggy Marley's album "One Bright Day"
• Producer (with Chris Frantz) for Happy Monday's album "...Yes, Please !"
• Producer (with Chris Frantz) for Los Fabulosos Cadillacs's album "Rey Azucar"
• Producer (with Chris Frantz) for Angelfish' album "Angelfish"
• Producer (with Chris Frantz) of several unreleased Ofra Haza songs
• Background vocals on Nona Hendrix' "Design For Living"
• Background vocals on Ian Dury's "Spasticus (Autisticus)" (album "Lord Upminster")
• Background vocals on The Rosenberg's album "Mission: You"
• Remixer (with Chris Frantz) of Zita Swoon's "Bananaqueen"