Tom Tom Club

Benji B

Please welcome very special guest Chris and Tina AKA Tom Tom Club.

[applause]

Tina Weymouth

Thank you Benji.

Benji B

So excited to have you here today. It seems like a sensible place to start our talk with the band and when you met and how you started collaborating right at the very beginning. Because am I right in thinking you all met at college?

Chris Frantz

Yeah, we met at a place called Rhode Island School of Design which is an art school in Rhode Island, Providence, Rhode Island. I met Tina there and I met David Byrne there. We became friends. Well, more than friends. [laughs] After Tina and I graduated we moved to New York City along with David and we got a loft on the lower east side, which happened to be just three blocks from a little club called CBGB’s.

We were fascinated and very excited by what we saw at CBGB’s which would be people like Patti Smith and the Ramones and very early stages of Blondie. Well, actually it was early stages of everybody, Television. People in the audience would be like John Cale and Lou Reed for example, and a lot of artists. It was a very mixed bag of people. You had what later became known as punks, but you also had minimalist composers like Steve Reich and Rhys Chatham and Phillip Glass and supermodels like Lauren Hutton who lived across the street. She would often come in and use the pinball machine, pick up some guys. [laughs] It was a very exciting time. It was 1974.

Benji B

The original Talking Heads was a trio, correct?

Tina Weymouth

That is right. We were three people. It was a dream that Chris had back in college. He wanted to put together a band. He asked me first, but I was very reluctant because I played folk guitar and I didn’t think that I was really right for rock & roll. I didn’t really see myself in that role. Then he asked David, which was an interesting story because a mutual friend of ours was making a film about his girlfriend getting run over by a car, and they needed some really cacophonous music and Chris’s drums were setup, and I lived over a garage. It was right next to the Brown University tennis courts and so nobody minded if we made some noise there. We invited David to come over and jam with Chris.

That was recorded. At the end David said, “Oh, you know, I can do other things besides that.” In fact, he could. He was a great rhythm guitar player. He’s left-handed but he plays right-handed guitar. I always wondered how that might have affected his rhythm playing, but he’s a wonderful rhythm guitar player.

Then it evolved. They were first The Artistics sometimes known as The Autistics by our friends, probably because the band would be in the middle of the room and then everybody else would be jammed in one corner trying to get away from how loud it was. It was prototypical punk. But then when we moved to New York City it was just Chris and David in the band. At that point we saw how everyone was dressed and we thought, “Well, we should be different. We should have short hair and not be glam rock and not be Ramones in their perfecto leather jackets and Converse sneakers.” We thought, “Well, let’s let the visual be dictated by the content rather than trying to be glamorous and rock-star-ish.”

That actually worked very well for us. Then I joined the group along the way because Chris kept going to see CBGB’s and saying, “Will you join my band? Will you be in my band? We need a bass player,” and nobody would do it. Everybody thought, “Oh, you don’t look right. You don’t have that rock star look. You look too innocent.” Didn’t Lenny Kaye? I think Lenny Kaye said you looked like you’re too nice looking.

Chris Frantz

Well that was David Johansen. He says, “You’re never going to get anywhere in this business. You’re too nice.” One of the first people we asked to be in the band actually David and I was Debbie Harry. We saw her sing with this group. At the time they were called The Stilettos. It was just pre-Blondie. I saw her and I heard her voice and I said, “Oh man.” So I screwed up all my courage and I asked her, “Would you be interested in singing with David and I?” She took one look at us and said, “Well, I’ve already got a band, but you could buy me a drink.” So I did. It was a Rusty Nail. That’s what she wanted. [laughs] And we’ve been friends ever since actually. But she didn’t join the band. Things would’ve been much different.

Benji B

Were you already playing bass at this time, or did you learn bass?

Tina Weymouth

Not at all. I had to learn bass later. I was only playing bass for five months when the band first played out. It was kind of crazy. I know I must’ve driven people nuts because I mean I really was a punk. I was a complete autodidact. I did not take a lesson. Nobody taught me how. I do remember going around and asking people, “What do you think I should... What kind of bass guitar should I get?” They would take one look at me. I was about 100 pounds and five-foot-three, and they would say, “Well, you know, you should try a Gibson B3 or maybe a Hofner, a little Beatle bass because it’s very lightweight. I ended up getting this great big giant Precision Fender bass, which I still have, which is fantastic. I painted it battleship gray because I didn’t like the sunburst at the time. I didn’t appreciate the craftsmanship of it. Then later I then migrated to other kinds of basses. But I still love that Precision and the Fender jazz, too. That should’ve been what I should’ve gotten but the Precision was just a fantastic thing.

We didn’t have any money, you see. We all had these day jobs, so getting equipment was major for us. We ended up keeping our day jobs for quite a long time after that. CBGB’s was the only place in town, can you imagine this, where we were actually required to play original music. Everywhere else they only wanted cover bands. That meant playing Steely Dan or Fleetwood Mac or something like Jim Croce. [laughs] So that was a beginning for us.

We used every ounce of our strength to make this band work because we lived in a loft with no heat after 4 PM in winter. It was under the rooftop so it sweltered in the summer, and we were above a blacksmith shop so it was very hot in summer and no toilet. The toilet was in the hallway. We shared it with all the other sweatshop workers and kept it supplied with toilet papers as a matter of fact because no one else would do it. We had no kitchen and no shower. We would shower at friend’s houses. I think the torture of that situation made us just completely fall into our work. We worked and rehearsed and wrote seven days a week.

Benji B

For anyone in the room that’s no familiar with what CBGB’s was at that time, could you try and paint a picture of that venue and then tell us about the first time that you got to play there?

Chris Frantz

As I said it was when we moved to New York we had a friend who lived – CBGB’s was on the Bowery, which was traditionally where now they call them homeless people, but at the time they called them bums, guys who drank too much and had pretty much given up on everything. It was inhabited by those kind of people that lived in flophouse hotels. But the rents were really cheap, so young artists and some of them not even so young, but artists were flocking to the area, moving in there.

It was at the intersection of Bowery and Bleecker. Everybody has heard of Bleecker Street. The Bowery marked the dividing point between the East Village and the West Village. That’s where CB’s was located. A friend of ours lived diagonally across the street and he said, the first day I was New York, the first day I moved to New York, he said, “Hey, Chris, there’s something going on at that bar over there and I know you’re into music. You should check it out.” So I went that very night and nothing was happening. It was like two guys playing pool. Then I went back the following night and it was Patti Smith.

At that time Patti Smith just had Lenny Kaye accompanying her. It was her and an electric guitarist. But it was totally the kind of thing that was so inspiring that the hair on the back of your neck stood up. At least mine did. It was transfixing. Then another night where I went in the Ramones were playing, which was a completely different thing but also very exciting and very original. So I thought. “Oh this is it man, this is like the Cavern Club was to the Beatles. That’s what it’s going to be for us.” We kept going there, and we lived three blocks away.

Eventually one day we screwed up our courage and asked the owner Hilly Kristal could we audition to play. Hilly said, “Well, I guess I could put you on with the Ramones.” So we opened for the Ramones. It’s funny, we’ve been connected to the Ramones sort of... Well, how would you say, metaphysically ever since, even though our bands are completely different. But we had that same kind of esprit, I guess you would say.

We were trying to do something that was... When we listened to the radio like the Ramones, we didn’t hear the kind of stuff that we wanted to hear, the kind of stuff that was exciting to us. We had plenty of exciting records in our collection like David Bowie, and Lou Reed, and Al Green, and James Brown, but we weren’t hearing that kind of thing on pop radio. So we said to ourselves, “We can do better than that,” and we started this band. We called it Talking Heads.

Benji B

Where did the name come from?

Chris Frantz

We had a list of names, potential names, and a friend of ours suggested Talking Heads, actually.

Benji B

Who’s the friend?

Chris Frantz

His name was Wayne Zieve and he was from Chicago. He had also been at RISD and he read it in a TV Guide magazine. There was a glossary of television terminology and talking heads meant the least exciting but most informative format of programming, so we thought, ‘Talking Heads.’ Tina and I put it on a t-shirt. We each had a t-shirt that said Talking Heads. We went for a walk one weekend around Washington Square Park just to test out and people came up to us and said, “Are you in a band?” So we thought, “Well, this name is good.” [laughs]

Tina Weymouth

I think one guy said, “That’s the worst name I ever heard.” We thought, “That’s good.” It also didn’t seem to connote any particular kind of music, and we were trying to create our own niche at that time because we thought, “Well, there are so many other bands doing rock & roll so much better than we know how, so maybe we should do something that other people aren’t doing.”

Benji B

Should we take a look at that era at CBGB’s?

Tina Weymouth

Yeah, that would be fun.

(video: Chronology documentary)

Tina Weymouth

[comments over video] This is where I mess up. Then David messes up a little bit right after.

[applause]

Benji B

How does it make you feel watching that?

Chris Frantz

Those were good times. In fairness to Tina, who said that she messed up, there were no monitors, so you couldn’t really hear the vocal. David couldn’t hear his vocal. I couldn’t hear his vocal. They could probably hear the drums, but a lot of times I couldn’t really hear the guitar. But it was punk.

Benji B

That song “Psycho Killer” was a pivotal moment for the group, right?

Tina Weymouth

Well that was the first song we ever wrote. We actually wrote it in Chris’s and my painting studio before we ever moved to New York. David came to us. He had this idea he wanted to do something in two languages and he knew that I spoke French. So we sat down, we wrote some different lyrics. He thought it was a very good idea to have a person who had two streams of mind and the switching languages was part of that.

Benji B

Tell me about getting signed and it all kicking off for Talking Heads and when you started making your first record with “Psycho Killer.” When did you first get in touch with Brian Eno and that collaboration started?

Chris Frantz

We were fans of Brian Eno, and we met him the first we ever played in London, which was a little club called... What’s it called?

Tina Weymouth

Covent Garden.

Chris Frantz

It was in Covent Garden but it was called the...

Audience Member

[inaudible]

Chris Frantz

No. Darn. It’ll come to me. It was like a honey comb and the band would be playing in one room and the audience would be in all these little rooms all around, so they would have to crane their neck to see the band. There was no stage or anything. Rock Garden. That’s what it was called, Rock Garden. Eno was in the audience. So was John Cale. They both –

Tina Weymouth

And Robert Fripp.

Chris Frantz

And Robert Fripp and they came back stage. We already knew John Cale from CBGB’s. I remember him saying, “Come on Brian. They’re mine.” But as great as John Cale was and still is we were more enticed by the production values of Brian Eno. Seymour Stein, who owns Sire Records, his wife was managing the Ramones. Again, we were on tour with the Ramones. She invited Eno and us to go to this pub lunch, Sunday lunch, and we really hit it off well. We had a few little meetings with him at his apartment and we decided to work together.

Benji B

What was the first album that you worked together on?

Chris Frantz

More Songs About Buildings and Food.

Tina Weymouth

We went down to Compass Point Studio. We kind of unofficially opened the studio. It was a studio in the Bahamas that was built by Chris Blackwell of Island Records. He’d already given his home and studio in Jamaica Tuff Gong Studios is what it became to Bob Marley. He moved up to Bahamas because the political climate in Jamaica at that time was really bad. I think I’ve been told by friends of mine that the CIA was giving guns to 14-year-old boys. At least that’s the story that I’m told. So it was quite dangerous.

But he wanted a place where his artists could come and work. Out of that he build an apartment building, and he wanted to create an artist community and compound. The first person there was Robert Palmer. You know him from “Addicted to Love,” among other wonderful songs. Then we said we would be interested as well after taking Talking Heads down there twice. Actually, we ended up going there many times but in 1980 we built it.

But we built an apartment in his apartment building, and it was right behind the studio. We could swim in the morning, clear our heads, and then in the afternoon and evening we could start working in the studio. It was an amazing situation because we’d be in this little... There were two studios, Studio A and Studio B. Talking Heads went there in ’78 we had studio A. But they didn’t have the wiring all finished yet.

But it was great. Brian Eno was a lot of fun. The songs were already written. All the songs for the first two albums were already written. Brian would always come after the fact. He did three albums with us, More Songs About Buildings and Food in ’78. We did Fear of Music in ’79, which was recorded live at Chris’s and my loft in Queens. Then we did More Songs About Buildings and Food in 1980. So those three albums made a triptych that Brian –

Benji B

More Songs was in ’78 or ’80? More Songs.

Tina Weymouth

More Songs was ’78. Remain in Light was ’80.

Benji B

That’s right. So should we get in something from this ’78 period because this is one where –

Tina Weymouth

OK.

Benji B

Sure. From the second –

Tina Weymouth

Moving along.

Chris Frantz

This was at the Entermedia Theatre on Third Avenue in East Village.

(video: Talking Heads Live at Entermedia Theatre (1978))

Benji B

[comments over video] What’s new wave?

Tina Weymouth

That’s a term that Seymour Stein, our record label owner of Sire Records, he came up with that. He borrowed it from the French film nouvelle vague. He coined it for us because we didn’t fit in with the whole punk thing in terms of how we looked. He thought he could sneak us in to radio, national radio.

Chris Frantz

In America the radio programmers would say, “Oh, we don’t play that punk music.” Seymour would say, “But they’re not punk. They’re new wave.” They’re like, “Oh new wave. Well, we can play new wave.”

[laughter]

Tina Weymouth

And it was really –

Chris Frantz

So it worked really well.

Tina Weymouth

It worked very well and we were able to because we had a brilliant manager Gary Kurfirst, who had also been a promoter. He knew how to work with agents. We opened up a little theaters all over the country because at that time you could either play a bar as a bar band or you could play an arena. Many, many theaters – this was the recession of the ’70s and many theatres were closed, so we opened up a lot of them. We played everything from pizzerias to steakhouses.

But by opening up these different venues other bands were able to follow. Blondie, even though they were signed and a much bigger band than us, they were able to play the same venues. Gary Kurfirst would put us because I said, “Oh Garry, you know, maybe we’d do better with college kids. You know, we’re kind of a nerdy band. Maybe they would like us.” Colleges had money, so bands could play at colleges. He would find the college kid. He would then set them up in business and say, “OK, now you know how to do it. I’ve taught you everything. Now I want you to find a theatre in town, and so the next time we come back we’re not going to play at the college. We’re going to play at this theatre. Then the next time we come back we’re going to play this other place.” So he was growing the band by small increments so that we would have the sense that we were actually growing as opposed to always having to open for some big arena rock band. We had the sense that people had come to see us. Sometimes we wouldn’t have a band open for us. We’d have a fire eater or a belly dancer as our opening act, or a poor Richard Belzer.

Chris Frantz

We got comedians. We also were very fond of the knife throwers. They were really good.

Tina Weymouth

But we also tried things, we would try things like having reggae acts open for us. But it was always very, very difficult trying to get the crossover happening. Because at the same we were beginning, we were starting out. Prince was beginning. So was Chic doing things but there was this whole dichotomy of, well, and the polarization of, “Well, that’s not rock & roll,” because there was the whole color issue. It was very difficult because we didn’t have that barrier. As musicians, none of us had these barriers. But as radio, there were very severe barriers that we encountered.

All of this was a kind of pioneering. It was pushing the boundaries of what we could do. For Prince it was the same thing. He was trying to push it from his direction. Chic had to do disco, and yet they were really a rock band in so many ways like Living Colour. But we were a dance band, too. So it was a very strange time, and then the Reagan years came along soon after. That made things even more complicated in terms of radio. But new wave was so important and so functional in terms of allowing us to get out there. Then on this record in 1978 we recorded [the only cover song on one of our studio albums], and it was a version of Al Green and Teenie Hodges “Take Me to the River.” There were two or three other versions out at the same time. Bryan Ferry had one.

Chris Frantz

Bryan Ferry. Levon Helm from The Band had a version, and also a group called Foghat from Canada had a version. But we had the hit.

Tina Weymouth

But that really broke us in national radio, and it started with little national public radio type radio stations in which there were a handful of them that would play us. They were independent from the big commercially programmed radio shows. That was a huge help, and it helped everybody. It helped The Ramones, it helped Television, it helped everybody who came after us. Obviously, it helped all of the British punk bands that then came over and were playing a lot of the same venues.

Benji B

You’ve kindly pulled up some archive images for us. Can we get this on the screen? Maybe talk us through some of these pictures from that era.

[images appear on screen]

Tina Weymouth

This is at The Kitchen in 1976. We’re still a three piece here. You can see the vibraphone behind David. Chris would sometimes switch to vibraphone for some songs because we were trying to change up our textures. Because being a three piece was a little bit limiting in terms of our sound. We had a very different sound back then. We were kind of like a little wind up musical toy box.

This is another. This is the publicity shot made for Sire Records for our first album. This is something we did ourselves. This is a selfie.

[laughter]

Early, early selfie from... This is in our first loft. This is from 1975.

That’s another one. We were still figuring. Oh, this is our debut in 1977 and I and Jerry in the background got the picture and David was furious. Oh my God.

Chris Frantz

So was I.

Tina Weymouth

Oh yeah. No, Chris was so happy because he always said, “Look David, come on. You got to have a girl in the band. It’s going to really help get us noticed.” Then Lou Reed. David was very mad at me because Lou Reed called me up on the telephone. He said, “Why does he want to talk to you?” It turned out someone had picked up my coat, found my address book in the pocket, called up Lou and given him the coat, just as an excuse to be able to talk to Lou. Lou called me up and then we went over where he asked us to come over and pick up the coat. So we all went over and he said to Chris, “Good idea putting a chick in the band. Where did you get that idea I wonder?” He’s referring to of course...

Chris Frantz

Maureen Tucker who is the Velvet Underground drummer.

Tina Weymouth

Yeah, but it worked. It did help us.

Chris Frantz

These pictures are actually from the Rhode Island School of Design. Our senior year Tina and I were both studying painting because we thought – oh we love paining and we had a show and those were the posters.

Tina Weymouth

This is a fanzine done by our first fan club. It lasted about two issues. Somehow they got hold of our mothers. [laughs] Here are these pictures. You can see that I’m a cheerleader in one of them. But that would’ve never happened in real life. That was when I was living for two years – I was 14 years old, I was living in Iceland. There were about 50 kids in my whole school, so I got to be a cheerleader.

This is a picture of Chris with Hilly Kristal. This is the closing of CBGB, one year before. It killed Hilly, one year before he died. It’s now a men’s clothing store. This is one of the tragedies of New York. This that we don’t have any of our heritage clubs like the Cotton Club. We still have the Apollo, thank goodness. Any more?

Benji B

I think that’s what we’ve got. Moving into 1980 now, we should spend a little while talking about an album that’s influenced so many different genres of music and DJs.

Tina Weymouth

David Byrne had left the group in December of 1979, and we didn’t know it. A journalist told us. We were playing in Germany, and he’d come over across from the iron curtain. He’d had to sneak across and he said, “So what are you going to do now that David Byrne is leaving the group?” We were shocked and I said, “Well, he’s not leaving, no.” But it turned out David was because he and Brian Eno had discussed doing a solo record together which was to become My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. But they took a long, long time doing it. They got together in ’80. Brian Eno was living in New York, and he was very, very keen on no wave. No wave came after the punk and new wave phenomenon. It was a bunch of kids like Sonic Youth and Arto Lindsay...

Chris Frantz

John Lurie.

Tina Weymouth

Yeah, they were kids who had been in the audience at CBGB’s but now they wanted to form their own groups. They wanted it to be very, very different. Lydia Lunch who had been a 15-year-old girl who wrote love letters to David Byrne and then formed a band filled with venom. That wasn’t the name of the group. [laughs]

So we had a dramatic shift in 1980. Cocaine was coming in. AIDS was coming in. People were dying from this weird disease and not knowing what it was. Then people were going around saying, “Oh, you’ve got to try this cocaine. It’s really great. It’s not addictive.” They did the same thing with oxycontin. And Reagan, Margaret Thatcher. It was a very bad time in a way, and so I think everybody just wanted to escape.

So when David and Brian Eno went off to do their record we thought, “Oh, what are we going to go now?” We started jamming in our loft and we went to see Brian Eno. He said, “What are you up to?” We said, “Oh we’re having these great jams. Come on over. Why don’t you play with us?” He said, “Oh I don’t know how to play anything.” So we said, “Well, it doesn’t matter. We’re all going to switch instruments.” When David heard that Brian was going to jam with us, then he came running back.

So we were always doing that, creating new situations and circumstances to keep it interesting for everybody to be part of. Instead of sitting down and writing a song and saying, “OK, this is what we’re going to...” We usually jammed songs anyway, but this was really totally trying to reduce everything to two cords if possible. If we’re going to make another cord it was going to be by creating another layer. It became much more interesting, much more like jazz in that way.

After we jammed for a couple of weeks and recorded them on a little cassette deck we said, “Oh, these will be good. Let’s take them down to Compass Point Studio.” We went down there and we ended up having a really great time, again jamming some more. But the very beginning of that session was difficult because Brian Eno had asked his engineer Rhett Davies who worked a lot with him to come over and do this with us.

Rhett abandoned ship within three days, leaving us with a huge phone bill. We said, “Rhett, what are you doing? Why are you doing this to us?” He said, “Oh, I’m really sorry, but I just can’t stand what Eno’s doing.” We said, “What do you mean?” Eno was God. He said, “Every time you guys,” and he said,” You guys, come up with a good groove and a good idea, he just says, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, we can’t use that. That’s too commercial. That’s too interesting and pop. We have to make it more complex and different.’” He said, “What’s wrong with pop?”

We could have this argument with Wally Badarou. Wally Badarou would stand with us and with Rhett Davies and say, “What’s wrong with pop? What’s wrong with pop music?” You can make really good pop music and make it new. But Brian just was against all that in his mind. But in fact we were doing what we were going to do anyway. So when Rhett left then we recorded “Once in a Lifetime” and that laid the groundwork for even better kinds of layering ideas.

Benji B

You might know this one.

(music: Talking Heads – “Once in a Liftime” / applause)

Tina Weymouth

That really became our practice from then on, not writing three chord songs but writing these rhythm beds and then allowing things to evolve over top of that. Speaking in Tongues, which we did without Brian Eno, the next album the following year, it didn’t come out until ’82 and it became the Stop Making Sense tour, but that was done in the same style.

Benji B

Can you tell me a little bit about the influence of Fela Kuti on the album Remain in Light?

Tina Weymouth

Even before them Chris had a lot of the albums and he really liked this one called like “76 mambone,” and we didn’t know if that referred to how many wives he had or what. We thought it was fabulous music, but we never thought, “Oh, we can ever play like that.” But when we were making Fear of Music Chris said, “Oh, why don’t we do something in this vein.” That became “I Zimbra.” That was kind of the groundwork. “I Zimbra” was the groundwork for a lot of things that we were going to do afterwards.

Chris Frantz

I’ve noticed that Brian often says or takes credit for introducing us to African rhythms and sensibilities, but in fact in 1974, like three years before we met him – maybe even 1973 – we would go up from Providence up to Cambridge, Massachusetts where there was this very interesting Multikulti store where you could buy dashiki, or you could buy Indian spices for cooking Indian food, or you could buy some nice bongos, or you could get a Fela Kuti album or a Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey album, or a King Sunny Adé. My favorite of course was Manu Dibango.

So we had these records in our collection, even when we were in college. If you are an art student you want to get stimulated. The African music and the African sensibility was very stimulating to a WASP guy like me. We never felt like we could even approximate what Fela did with his band, but we could use it as a source of inspiration and a way to do something unpredictable for us.

We always felt like when we made a record we should do something that was a little bit surprising to our fans rather than just keep recycling our sound. With Remain in Light we really went for it. To be honest, it was and still is the worst selling Talking Heads record. But it’s also the most critically acclaimed and a lot of people say it’s the zenith of our recording career. I mean, go figure. But we really went for something that would be surprising and super stimulating, not just to the fans but also to us.

Benji B

So many of the songs on that record are classics for DJs. It surprises me to hear that. I didn’t realize that was the worst selling Talking Heads record because in a way it seems to be best known.

Chris Frantz

Yep. You know after MTV started playing the video for “Once in a Lifetime” it developed a new life, but at first it felt it didn’t really take flight. [laughs]

Tina Weymouth

Not enough rock guitars.

Benji B

Yeah. That dance floor thing though, was it big in the clubs of the early ’80s in New York? Were tracks like “Born Under Punches” being played on the dance floors then?

Tina Weymouth

Yeah at Danceteria where people danced.

Chris Frantz

There were a few DJs who were hip to it like Mark Kamins and Larry Levan.

Benji B

Can we play that? Can we play “Born Under Punches”?

Chris Frantz

Sure.

Tina Weymouth

Yeah, yeah.

Benji B

Because that’s a very special one.

(music: Talking Heads – “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)” / applause)

Tina Weymouth

Thank you. One of the things that was interesting about what we learned when we were making this record was how by layering we discovered new aspects of what we could do. But when we went out to do this live Jerry Harrison thought that maybe we weren’t going to be able to play it as a quartet. So we ended up duplicating ourselves like having more four people, Bernie Worrell on keyboards, the great Bernie Worrell from Parliament-Funkadelic. We had well we asked Adrian Belew. Adrian Belew you know him know from King Crimson or he was for a long time playing with Robert Fripp. But he also had been when we saw him, Chris and I saw him first playing with David Bowie. David Bowie saw him playing in a hotel lobby.

So we got these great players and then we added vocalists, and it really expanded the texture of sound, and it changed our demeanor on stage as well. We went from being very serious and nerdy [people] who didn’t move to being very active and moving around a lot. I think a lot of it was to do with the players with us. Steve Scales on percussion was an ex marine and great, great percussionist.

[video plays on screen]

Of course they all laughed a lot when people would say, “But where do you get this African thing?” They’d all laugh and say, “We’re Americans. We don’t play African music because we don’t come from Africa.” But we grew to being much more comfortable with that whole aspect.

There is Bernie Worrell. He was really great. These are Prophet 5s that we would cart around the world with us. Jerry Harrison would play guitar and Prophet 5.

Chris Frantz

Yeah, that’s Dolette McDonald and “Busta Cherry” Jones.

Benji B

And we’ve got two bass guitars on stage on right now.

Tina Weymouth

That turned out to be like two queens in one palace but I love Busta. It gave me an opportunity to be able to sing backgrounds and play keyboard parts, which made it super fun for me. It was so supportive because Bernie Worrell came up to me at the end of that tour and said, “Tina, you should be writing more stuff. I’d like to hear you doing more of your own thing because you’ve got really good ideas.” So supportive coming from... Chris was supportive of me. Bernie Worrell was supportive of me. It was a great thing coming from such a great guy. All these people are just –

Chris Frantz

By the way, Adrian Belew’s haircut was done by George Clinton.

Tina Weymouth

Yeah.

Benji B

Simultaneously in New York right now I mean one thing that many people are guilty of and myself included is sometimes romanticizing a mythological part of club culture. One of the most famous eras for that is of course the early ’80s in New York with clubs like Danceteria and Mudd Club. Could you demystify that that for us? Was it really as amazing and special?

Tina Weymouth

It was because I told you, the cocaine and the AIDS, people didn’t have long to live and there was just so much blow going around, and it was dangerous stuff. I know Chris got asked to play sessions, secret sessions, that actually helped us with Talking Heads because he would go to one session play drums with other people and on rap records, early hip-hop.

Then the record would get pressed up and David would – during trying to write lyrics for Remain in Light he got stumped at one point so we said, “Well, why don’t you rent a car and drive around. You always get ideas when you’re driving a car.” So he did that. But he was still stumped six months later, and that was unusual for him. Because I think it was probably part of it was the two chords basically and a lot of those overdubs that you hear on the finished record weren’t done until after the vocals, because people needed to know where the vocals were going to be.

Chris came in with this record and said, “Hey, listen to this. This might give you some ideas.” David said, “Oh yeah, I don’t even have to have a melody [inaudible].” That was the new rap thing that was happening, and it helped us to see new ways of looking at our own music and evolving and growing our music into new ways, and not being embarrassed about going in that direction. Because at one point I think we were all terrified of some sort of cultural exploitation, invasion of Black American musical culture. We didn’t want to be that. We didn’t want to do reggae for that reason. We didn’t want to do blues for that reason. We rejected the blues. Not because we hated it, but because it seemed like it was sacrosanct.

But this opened us up to being able to say, “Hey, what does it matter? We can just mix it all up.” We’re always going to give it our own personality anyway. Jerry Harrison and David Byrne were never going to understand reggae, and I was always going to have trouble understanding certain things about rock & roll music. So it was a really cool thing because we were able to use our different natures and our different personalities to create a new chemistry.

Benji B

And the chemistry of you as a couple and you as a rhythm section would go on to be a new band in itself. Let’s talk about how that happened.

Tina Weymouth

Yes, that happened because at the end of this tour, this Remain in Light tour, David Byrne left us again. That was to finish up the record that he had started with Brian Eno. I don’t want to talk about that too much, because I wasn’t present at the sessions, but I know about the conception of the ideas.

In December of 1979 we, the Talking Heads as a quartet, were behind the Iron Curtain playing in Berlin and Brian Eno was there working at Conny Plank’s studio right next to the wall. Holger Czukay, I don’t know how to say it properly, from Can said, “Hey, David, Tina, come here,” and he made us come into this little room where he had this reel to reel tapes on the wall. He said, “I want to play you something.” He said, “Please don’t tell anybody about this because I have yet to shop it for a record deal. But it’s this idea I have to make this record.” He played us music that he had recorded. Then on top of that he had a whole a bunch of found music from found vocals from radio and from other media, people talking in lecture and then looping those to create samples. So he was really the pioneer of that idea.

That’s when David then went off with Brian and made My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. I think Holger was a little bit upset about that because they beat him to the punch. I’m a little bit upset that I didn’t catch it, because that’s why I probably wasn’t invited to the sessions, because I wasn’t able to say, “Hey, don’t you think you should come up with your own vocals.” Because it was a good idea, but it was somebody else’s idea first, and he should’ve left Holger do it first because it was his idea at first, although maybe some other people had done it before, but it was the first time in the rock context. So here we are end of 1980. This is ’81 in Rome. [gestures to picture on the host's computer] Is that what that is?

Benji B

Mm-hmm.

Tina Weymouth

OK, so now it’s ’81 and we come to Japan and our manager says, “Oh, Chris and Tina, I have some bad news for you. David Byrne is going off to do another solo record, and I think he’s going to be gone at least a year.” So we said, “Oh, what are we going to do with this big band? We spent all our money. We don’t have any... We only have $2000 in the bank.” He said, “That’s what I was thinking. I was thinking maybe that we could do something with Chris Blackwell,” because Chris Blackwell always regretted that he didn’t sign Talking Heads. When we asked him, “Please sign us,” and so he said, “Chris Blackwell may be able to give you deal.” We said, “OK, yeah, that would be great.”

That’s when we went down in March of 1981. First we had a meeting with the great Lee “Scratch” Perry at the Holiday Inn in New York City. That was a very interesting meeting. [laughs] He said, “OK, how’s March for you?” So we went down and we waited, and we waited, and we waited, and it was soon come, soon come, soon come. It was driving us crazy because in Studio A was Grace Jones and the great Compass Point All-Stars. Every day they were cutting tracks and we were just going nuts because we couldn’t be part of something. In Studio B was our young friend Steven Stanley, also from Jamaica who was just so sad that he was writing music called tropical depression.

So I got all my courage up to ask the great Chris Blackwell, “Chris, you know, Lee Perry hasn’t show up yet and we don’t know what’s up with that, but we really can’t just keep living here. We don’t have any income. We really should get to work. We’ve been here for three weeks and nothing’s happened. Would you mind terribly if you let us work with this engineer that you hired, Steve Stanley in Studio B, which is empty? Would you give us three days to try to do something, just the two of us with Steven Stanley?” He said, “Sure, why not.”

We went in there and we cut the rhythm beds for “Wordy Rappinghood,” “Genius of Love,” and another track, album track which would become “Lorelei.” At the end of three days we invited Chris Blackwell in and he said, “Great. Make a whole album.” So that’s how the first Tom Tom Club record came to be.

Benji B

And now we’ve got some. Let me put this on.

[picture appears on screen]

Tina Weymouth

Yeah, this is an aerial view. The studio is the white building down towards the sea in the middle there. Robert Palmer’s apartment was right on the sea. There’s a tiny little space. He drove his whole family crazy. I’d go over there at midnight and I’d knock on the door, there’d be no answer but from inside I’d hear all these little pygmy voices. It would be Robert experimenting because he would play everything. He’d play the drums. Then he’d play the guitar and the bass and the keyboards, and then he’d do these vocal experiments. Then he would make tracks that sounded very commercial, but most of the time this is what he was doing.

Then in the middle you have this white building that you see the rooftop. That was the larger portion is Studio A and then there’s a small studio called Studio B. Everything about it was smaller but the sound was great.

Chris Frantz

An interesting point, Chris Blackwell was very hands-on with his studio, so much so that right before the studio opened when the building was finished he did a voodoo thing and he made sure that everybody around the area knew his doing it to where he took a bucket of chicken blood and feathers dipped into the bucket of blood and sprinkled blood all around the perimeter of the studio so that it would in some way be protected from evil doers.

Tina Weymouth

He also build the steeple on the church, which is over to the right. It’s got a pink speckle and he build a little steeple which was a great boon on Sundays. You would just love to have your windows all open and be listening to the music coming out of there, great church music. Then back… Oh, here, yeah, in back is the Tip Top apartments. Sly & Robbie had an apartment and Wally Badarou had Studio W in there with the Synclavier.

Benji B

Tip Top.

Tina Weymouth

This is Tip Top because it’s actually on a hill and Chris Blackwell said – everything there is given a name. If you follow your eye down all the way to the left and out of the picture there is a little property that he owned called “Press on Regardless,” which we used to call “Pass Out Regardless” because U2 stayed there. That was our major experience with U2, was watching them pass out. They were a very young group back then, just starting to feel things.

[picture appears on screen]

Here is in Studio B. On the right is pictured Steven Stanley. He was 23 when this picture was taken. Then in the middle is my sister Laura, who must’ve been about the same age. Then on the far left is our wonderful, the best assistant engineer in the whole world, Benjamin Armbrister. He never rose beyond assistant engineer because he was the best at it.

[picture appears on screen]

This is the three girls. There’s me in the middle, my sister Laura on the left, and my sister Lani on the right. This is how we tracked our vocals. We each had our own vocal mike but we stood in a circle. We actually broke up the tight circle for the picture which was taken by Alison Jarvis. But we actually would have the mikes very close together and we would be looking at each other and we would track everything, every harmony three times so there would be 18 in the end. That would give us our sound.

[picture appears on screen]

Steven Stanley and Benjamin Armbrister again. He got’s patched cords which he’s taped to his head. It’s a nutty tension break happening there.

[picture appears on screen]

This is Benji getting tea for the ladies.

[picture appears on screen]

That’s Missses Detail, Madame Detail. That’s myself with Benji in the back. Oh no, Steven in the background. I had to keep notes for everything, of course, because there was a lot going on. We only had 24 tracks and we would have to bounce and bounce and bounce and bounce.

Chris Frantz

Do you have that picture of Chris Blackwell?

Benji B

I think it’s in here. Let me find it.

Chris Frantz

I think it’s...

Tina Weymouth

I don’t think it’s in here.

Benji B

Oh I didn’t. Just give me a second.

Tina Weymouth

OK, those were golden years from 1978 until I think... We actually went back there one last time. We kept trying to give it some business when Terry and Sherrie Manning were running it. And they run it the best of all. It became the favorite studio of Julio Iglesias, lots of reverb on his vocal and Shakira. Shakira bought a house down, there because she loved it so much. Bjrok went down there. Bjork was really creative. She would have them take her to the caves so she could get natural eco vocals. Madness came down there. Madness were very, very much fun. The first day they arrived they looked at the water. The second day they went into the water up to their ankles. Every day they’d get a little deeper. They’d finally get up to their waist and say, “Oh, the water is warm.” But they weren’t used to swimming.

I know one time I swam out. Do you remember this Chris, when I swam to the reef? I had snorkel and fins so it was nothing with a snorkel and fins. I swam out to the reef and back. Brian Eno kept saying, “Chris, Chris, Tina’s out there. Don’t you think you should do something?” But it was great having nature all around and nothing to distract us from our work.

Benji B

What were you listening to before you made “Genius of Love”?

Tina Weymouth

Oh yeah. Chris you handle this one.

Chris Frantz

Well we were listening to all kinds of things but there was one song in particular that I loved and it was by this group called Zapp from Dayton, Ohio and maybe Cincinnati, the Troutman brothers. The song was called “More Bounce to the Ounce” and it was super funky and I loved it.

Benji B

We have to find that.

Chris Frantz

I was looking for something that would turn me on. We were creating the tracks from the bottom up so I would go out in the studio just all by myself and play the drums and I had to think of something that would get me excited. So I thought about this song “More Bounce to the Ounce,” and it was like the springboard for “Genius of Love.”

Benji B

Do you want me to play it?

Chris Frantz

Yeah, you can play it, sure.

(music: Zapp – “More Bounce to the Ounce”)

Chris Frantz

[over the music] Still sounds good.

Benji B

“Genius of Love,” I mean, I don’t even know where to begin talking about “Genius of Love” in terms of its influence. It’s one of those records that transcended genre, influenced everyone in hip-hop, house, all sort of genres, all sorts of age ranges. Pretty much everyone in music has a reference to “Genius of Love.” Did you have any idea when you listened back to it in the control room what you created with that?

Tina Weymouth

We had a little idea. First that was the BPM. Everyone was doing everything around 120, 114, and then we brought it down. What did you say it was, 104? We thought it was 103 at the time. But you say 103. See, everybody has a different machine.

Anyway, we didn’t have these machines back then. We didn’t have samplers. Everything had to be done with tape. We had a little bit of an idea because it felt so good to us. The challenge was trying to create vocals. Adrian Belew came down and did some great rhythm guitar, but then he put this really screaming David Bowie kind of rock guitar on. It was great, but it didn’t match the mood of the rest of the song, not so well as his [imitates a melody] and that part was so great. So I said, “Stevie, whatever you do don’t erase it.” He erased it. Adrian Belew never forgave us. It was not my fault.

But in any case we then hired... Adrian had gone on. We got him a record deal for his band with Island Records, Rhinoceros was his band. We got him a record deal with Chris Blackwell, and then we went on to finish the project. Because he went off to work with Robert Fripp on King Crimson, and we waited, and we waited, and we waited, and we waited. We waited like four months for him to come back, but he didn’t. So eventually we found this great rhythm guitarist. His name was Monte Browne. Monte had been playing at the famous Florida TK Studios. This would be –

Chris Frantz

He was with a band called T-Connection, a bohemian funk group that recorded for the TK Label, KC and the Sunshine Band, and who else? Gwen McCrae, Rock...

Tina Weymouth

“Rock Your Baby.”

Chris Frantz

George McCrae those kind of artists. Anyway, he was playing a hotel band in Nassau. Steven Stanley said, “Oh, this guy, Monte Browne, he could kill the rhythm guitar.” We had Monte come and play a very simple rhythm part. Monte said, “You’re sure that’s all you want me to do?” We’re like, “Yeah, man, that’s it.”

Tina Weymouth

Yeah. You know how amazing this kind of guitar part is when you marry it to really good drums and keyboards and synth and a lot of space in air. You hear it. Last year’s huge hit Daft Punk with Nile Rodgers playing that amazingly catchy riff, but it’s with great synth parts and great drums. So it’s what makes the whole track really kind of rise to a –

Chris Frantz

Why don’t we just play some of it?

Tina Weymouth

Yeah, let’s just play it. Play the track.

Benji B

Let me put in the video. Tell us a little bit about this animation.

Tina Weymouth

James Rizzi was the artist. It was done at Cucumber Studios in London and Annabel and Chaz Jankel and Rocky Morton’s Studio. Jimmy probably made like 4,000, 10,000 drawings and then all the other kids in the studio working made all the thousands in between

Chris Frantz

We actually flew Jimmy down. He was a friend of ours from New York, lived in Soho. We flew him down to Compass Point so that he could soak up the vibes. He did a really good job. He did the album cover first, and then when this song was taking off and video was the new thing, music video was the new thing at the time, we invested in sending him to England and doing this video with Cucumber Studios. Tina’s sister Laura was the supervisor.

Tina Weymouth

Yeah, she did a lot of the coloring. Everything is hand drawn. We didn’t want ourselves in the video because we knew it was getting played by Black Radio in America. And if they found out we were like a “mixed band” it might have been a different situation for us. We didn’t want to blow our cover.

We also loved James Rizzi’s drawings because they’re like, we called them urban primitive. We loved them because this would make like a really... We loved those really ugly vinyl album covers that would be made... Well, there were a whole bunch of them in the ’70s, but they would just be these hideous cartoon drawings made by some of our very favorite soul people. Parliament-Funkadelic, they were really good at making really ugly album covers. So we said, “That’s what we need. We need something that catches the eye that way.”

(music/video: Tom Tom Club – “Genius of Love” / applause)

Chris Frantz

Thank you.

Benji B

It’s amazing that not only is it of course one of the most of sampled tunes of all time but it’s also one of the most referenced lyrically with those some of those hooks. I mean the lyrics that you came up with, they’ve been referenced for years and years and years and years.

Tina Weymouth

Well, it’s an homage. It’s like that sweet soul music. It’s an homage a lot of the music that we were listening to. It’s also a story, a narrative. It’s a love story. Obviously the cocaine was dangerous, but we wanted to get people’s attention about it. Later GrandMaster Flash and the Furious Five would reprise this song and then they would “White Lines,” which was another very famous track of theirs. But this was, this is sort of like our [inaudible]. Mariah Carey did it again in 1995 as “Fantasy.” The story behind that is that she went to present her album to, it was Columbia at the time. Was it Columbia still?

Chris Frantz

Yeah, well Sony.

Tina Weymouth

Sony and CBS. Yeah. The guys all sitting around the meeting said, “But Mariah, that’s somebody else song.” She’s, “No, it’s not. It’s not. It’s not.” But this is what happened in the new world where you have producers who are also technicians who create a track for an artist to come in and do a vocal on top of. It happens time and again.

But actually we thought it was great that it happened because it was right at a time when we needed, we needed that little... When we got the call from her manager, I mean they were in deep trouble because it the track. She only eight songs on this album and it was going to float the whole record company this album, Mariah’s album. Her manager called up and said, “You know, we want to use this track.” So I said, “Well, send it to us. We’ll tell you if it’s cool or not.” He says, “Oh no, I’m just going to play to you over the telephone.” I said, “Oh well, alright, go ahead.” He played it and he said, “That’s not her singing you know.” All of this was leading into get us for the smallest amount of money because it was our track and she had sung over the top of it and she even sings a whole verse. Not only that but she reprises the whole song again on one of the other eight songs.

So it was a boon and a blessing for us because it helped us get through some very, very lean years, even though as our attorney told us, he said, “You’ve got let her use it. You’ve got to let her use it and don’t be tough on it because even if they give you only a tiny little piece, you’re going to get a tiny little piece of a huge sale. We said, “OK.” They said, “You’re playing with the big boys now.” And it was, it was the big boys. We were delighted that Mariah did it, and we’re delighted that we just got another request, too. Someone else is doing a track.

Chris Frantz

Yeah, somebody is. I forget their name. They’ve sampled Mariah’s version for a new song called “Just Like Mariah.” [laughs]

Benji B

As one of the most sampled tracks I definitely wanted to talk to you about publishing and how you’ve navigated those waters, because yesterday I was just trying to think off the top of my head of the songs that I could think of that reference “Genius” and then put them into a folder. Then I looked it up online and there’s something like 180, some of which I knew, some of which I didn’t. But just as a little refresher I tried to put together a little chronological taster of some tracks.

Chris Frantz

Oh I’d love to hear that.

Benji B

Yeah, just as a little... I mean it’s not sleek but this is a reminder of... It starts in 1981 and ends up with Mariah.

(music: mix of tracks that sample or reference “Genius of Love”)

Benji B

[comments over music] That’s Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. This is the replay, right, by Grandmaster Flesh?

[applause]

Chris Frantz

Well done, Benji.

Tina Weymouth

Yeah.

Benji B

So tell us about sampling, tell us about publishing, tell us about how you’ve navigated that from 1981 to 2014, and any advice that you’d have.

Chris Frantz

Well, we have a very good team of people that work with us, attorneys and accountants and stuff. They take care of it for us, really. They field the requests and then they send them to us and we say, “Yes, this is fine,” and then they negotiate what it should be. A lot of times it’s just a standard rate.

Tina Weymouth

Yeah, it’s just a taste. We just want a little taste.

[laughter]

Chris Frantz

But a lot of times we don’t get directly involved with it. We let the businessmen take care of it for us because that’s their forte. Business is not really our forte. But we’re always pleased when this happens when we get a new request, because it’s like this song that we wrote so many years ago it’s got another life again, yet again. It’s rewarding not just financially but also emotionally and artistically because it means people still like it. It’s still fresh.

Tina Weymouth

I might add that one of the things that we’ve learned is be very, very careful because sometimes of the mash-ups and they’ll take some of your song and somebody else’s song, so what we ask for is only a percentage, a small percentage of the profits. We don’t ask for a part of the writing because you can get really sued by whoever is the other songwriter that they’ve incorporated into the new project. So rather than get involved in that we just want a percentage of their profits so we don’t have any kind of lawsuits hanging over us.

We’ve only once denied a sample use. That was when our kids were small. We just thought, “This is going to scare our little... Any little African American kid is going to be really scared to his hear this really thug kind of gangster lyric.” It was lyrics that were very, very violent. The art, it wasn’t good art. They hadn’t contributed anything, just this horrible rap which was... Then I remember one line was “Throw the...” And then they’d use the N-word, “Throw the in the trunk,” meaning the trunk of the car, and it just sounded really, really bad. So we said, “No, thank you, we don’t want any part of that.”

Benji B

What are your favorite ones then? What are the ones that make you the happiest?

Tina Weymouth

Those were great. I loved the Jeckyll and Hyde one. I love Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Mariah. I think that’s great. What are your favorites? I loved GrandMaster Flash.

Chris Frantz

Yeah, GrandMaster Flash was great.

Tina Weymouth

Redman.

Benji B

I mean that’s important actually that one because it’s literally straight after you’ve made the record.

Tina Weymouth

Yeah, and that wasn’t a sample. That was a cover. They replayed it.

Chris Frantz

Yeah, the Sugar Hill band, house band played it. But I remember GrandMaster Flash, Tina did a photo session with GrandMaster Flash at that time for a magazine called New York Rocker. It was on the cover. Great picture.

After the photo session Tina brought Flash to the studio where Talking Heads were working and we just said, we asked him, “So you think this record is going to be big?” He said, “Yeah, man, this record is going to be big.” He said, “Everybody is going to be covering this record.” And he was right, and he was among the first.

Benji B

So what did it feel like to fly back from the Bahamas to New York and have like the hottest block party record and the hottest night club record and –

Tina Weymouth

It was so crazy you know because I’d be riding on the train and I’d see the original Roxanne [Shanté] who was like the first girl rapper. She’s actually singing our song to her friends right in front of me. I didn’t say, “Oh by the way. That’s me.” No, but it was just a thrill to hear people. Then they would do our a little keyboard part, which was something that Chris and I came up with to create a chord change a two chord change which is the [imitates melody]. That was like I played one part and then Chris played the finishing part.

So to hear that, this really simple little thing which was played on the very first Prophet 5, it was the one, one preset, like, OK. Because it wasn’t being used like that yet. Everybody was piano. So to use a keyboard – it took us a long time to be able to tour live as a matter of fact because to find keyboard players who would play the simple part and leave things wide open and we ended up, now we’ve worked like 25 years with a fantastic guy, Bruce Martin who’s a percussionist. That’s his par excellence. He also happens to play amazing keyboards.

So this kind of thing was new then. Now it’s like, oh, this is part of the fabric of our society, and all you guys, it’s like you’re all our children because you all grew up with this and you’ve assimilated it as part of yourselves. That makes us feel really good.

Benji B

The word fun appears a lot in that record. Do you think your music is fun and do you think that’s why it had such a healthy lifetime as well?

Chris Frantz

Well, fun is the best thing to have in my opinion.

Tina Weymouth

Yeah.

Benji B

You say fun a lot.

Tina Weymouth

Well, remember we were in a little bit of a depression, and we had to lift ourselves up. The last thing we were going to do was compete with our other band, which was a great band. We wanted to move completely 180 degrees away from all that irony and create something, just dance that didn’t compete with it.

I mean David Byrne, the only thing he asked us when it came out, he said, “Oh, how you did you make those handclaps?” We said, “Oh well, Sly & Robbie were in the other studio and we asked them to come in and we four stood around the microphone and we clapped the whole eight minutes like three times, and that was it.” It was the soul of that clapping.

But it was a very interesting experience for me because it changed my sound too because before we had the big band and we were just a trio. David Byrne played a very high tiny guitar that I often had trouble distinguishing what cords he was playing, partly because I was a novice, partly because the sound was so trebly. He played a cheap little student guitar, and so it didn’t have any warmth or body to it. So to try to make a whole between the drums and the vocal and that guitar, I played a much more trebly sounding bass guitar.

But then when as we grow into the big band and there were more parts we didn’t want to step on each other and so I lowered all my bass tones way down on the amp. I learned from Steven Stanley, who had learned from Sly & Robbie. He EQ-ed all the bass around 150 hertz to keep it way, way from the kick drum. So everything was done that way. Because one of the things that we were always running into with engineers who weren’t as... We always worked with excellent engineers, but a couple of times we had not so excellent engineers like when we would do live radio shows and such, and we’d run into this problem, which is quite common, that all the sound is squished into the mid-range. In fact it’s a big problem with British radio, BBC. They cut off the bottom and they cut off the top, and they just keep the mid instead of compressing it. I don’t know if that’s still true. That was true –

Benji B

Not so much.

Tina Weymouth

Yeah, that was true then. They would refuse to use compression. So this was a really interesting and very important thing for us learning. We’d already learned a lot working on our own with Talking Heads and in the studio with Brian Eno, and not to be afraid of the studio, to use it as a tool, just another machine. I mean people nowadays because we’re so used to computers, we don’t have the same fear, but back then it was a fear of, “Oh, don’t touch that knob.”

Now, we don’t have this. But back then it was really important because otherwise you’d have to carve out with all this mid all squished together, you’d have to carve out a space in the middle where the vocals could sit so you could hear them, otherwise they would... You’d just constantly have this problem of making make this louder, make that louder, make that louder until everything’s louder, and then you’re right back where you started. So it was all about the EQs and getting and making that space.

Benji B

You mentioned GrandMaster Flash going back to New York. What came first, “Rapture” or “Wordy Rappinghood”?

Tina Weymouth

Rapture came first but we didn’t even know that Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie were doing this but they were the other couple.

Chris Frantz

I think it was, “Rapture” was recorded maybe one month before we recorded “Genius of Love,” but it hadn’t been released yet so we hadn’t heard it. We were down in the Bahamas and we didn’t know what was going on in New York.

Benji B

So talk us through “Wordy Rappinghood.”

Tina Weymouth

“Wordy Rappinghood” came out first. It was actually released in England by Chris Blackwell in the spring of 1981 before the album was completed. I think it was in Top 10 or #1 in 17 different countries. I remember Brian Eno came up to us and said, “You know, I didn’t know who those people were who were doing that song, and I thought, ‘Who are these wonderful people? I have to get to know them.’” We said, “Well.” Then he said, “Oh, I knew them all along.” So it was a big surprise kind of thing.

But my rap, I mean I didn’t know what I was doing in terms of rapping. And I told Chris so, but he kept saying, “Oh no Tina, this is the new thing. You’ve got to do this.” I said, “Well, if I got to do it, you’ve got to do it too.” So he did the James Brown. But otherwise that’s when I brought in my sisters and I said, “Well, maybe we can do some singing as well.”

The challenge there was what kind of singing. “Well, let’s not do punk singing. Let’s do something that’s more like the Beach Boys would do.” Yeah, because we don’t want to sound like Chaka Khan either. But we did love Donna Summer. So I said, “Oh, you know, that was a good idea.” She was fantastic. Some of you might know this, but she was fantastic in the early days because she wrote, she co-wrote all those songs, she wrote her own material with Giorgio Moroder. So she was an amazing pioneer at a time when it was very hard for women to get in to songwriting, unless that was all they did. You weren’t supposed to be both the performer and the songwriter in certain people’s minds.

Chris Frantz

Tell about the chorus though, how you came up with that.

Tina Weymouth

With “Wordy Rappinghood,” we were now having to do vocals and we were outside walking on the street, me and my sisters, Laura and Lani, and we were saying, “Oh my God, lunch time it’s almost over. We have to go back in there and have something to present. We have to sing, but we haven’t written the song yet, so we’re going to have to sing before we’ve written the song.” So my sister Lani said, “Oh, don’t worry.” She’s a really great spirit. She said, “Don’t worry,” and she grabbed us, hooked her arms around both of our arms and started singing something that we had been singing in school when we were in France. Growing up, we spent a whole year in France when we were small children. In the schoolyard they used to sing this song which turns out we’ve discovered much, much later, it turns out to be some bastardization from an African song. But we were in the south of France on the Riviera and this African song had somehow reached the schoolyard. So we began singing. [sings]

So I said, “Oh Lani, that’s a great idea. Let’s just go in there and as a joke just to make the guys laugh because we haven’t come with a vocal let’s just sing that.” We get in there and they roll tape and we start singing this. We see through the control room window, we see the guys jumping up and down. Steven Stanley has jumped on top of his seat and he’s jumping into the air like this. [pumps arm up and down]

Chris Frantz

We were like, “Hallelujah,” because it was something that we had never heard before and it was perfect because it was coming of some place that you couldn’t predict. Nobody could’ve predicted that, nobody that I know.

Tina Weymouth

Then the rest is just kind of like, “Oh, it’s the first song, the first lyric, and it’s spoken.” So I thought, well, what, the challenge was coming up with some good words so it became all about words.

(music: Tom Tom Club – “Wordy Rappinghood” / applause)

Tina Weymouth

Happy accidents.

Benji B

How many overdubs?

Tina Weymouth

Monte Browne. Well, we started with the drums. Then I laid down the bass. Then we did the vocals and I –

Chris Frantz

Don’t forget the timpani.

Tina Weymouth

The timpani.

Chris Frantz

It’s a real timpani going [imitates sound]. I actually went out and bought the timpani.

Benji B

You were in Bahamas.

Chris Frantz

We were in Nassau. There was a music store and they had one timpani. Usually you have two so you can go [imitates sound]. They just had one. I said, “I’ll take it.” I think, gee, I don’t know where it ended up but we left at the studio because I couldn’t really fly it home.

Tina Weymouth

Then after the timpani then we –

Chris Frantz

After the timpani they you’d –

Tina Weymouth

We did vocals.

Chris Frantz

Yeah.

Tina Weymouth

Then after the vocals we brought in Monte Browne on guitar. Adrian Belew had not joined us yet at this point. This was done in the spring, that same period right after Chris Blackwell said, “Make an album.” Then it was released long before the album was finished so it had a life in the rest of the world, it had a life on Island Record before it ever got to the US. I think it sold... How many? I mean Sire Records wouldn’t sign us. They wouldn’t give us a deal.

Chris Frantz

Chris Blackwell imported into the United States 100,000 12” singles which sold out. That’s when Seymour Stein of Sire Records woke up and said, “What? Get me Chris and Tina on the phone.” [laughs]

Tina Weymouth

Yeah, and that’s when we made a deal to have the US release, which was then released in 1982. So it was like four months after the UK release and the rest in South America. Then there was a game of catch up. “Genius of Love” then became the hit single for the US as opposed to “Wordy Rappinghood.”

Wordy Rappinghood, the rap on it I always think it sounds like Doctor Seuss, really naïve. But I’ve never been against naïve things, because I’m kind of that way, and I think that even as you learn to do things and you start to master things you always like to have a naïve around. I loved that in the studio, someone who doesn’t really know what they’re doing but still approaches it with a joy of a kid who’s with a new toy and says, “Oh, what can that do and what can this do? Oh yeah.” I think that that’s a real plus. That’s great to have one person in collaboration who knows music theory who can say, “Oh, that’s a C cord. I think you’d better be playing a C there.”

But as far chemistry goes it’s great to have in any collaboration and the best things come from collaborations, the best ideas because you’re bouncing off of each other and getting excited and saying, “Oh, oh, oh, I have an idea. I know. I know. We can do this.” Then of course some things work and some things don’t, but you learn a lot more from the things that don’t work. You say, oh, leave well enough alone sometimes.

Benji B

Talking of collaboration talk to me about all the people that are around you and obviously the Compass Point All-Stars influence can be heard, but Grace Jones was recording in the studio next door, and obviously the amazing Wally Badarou and Sly & Robbie who you’ve already mentioned. Can you talk to us about the magic of Compass Point in that era? It felt like all the moons aligned. It was a very special, special time.

Tina Weymouth

It was special. Grace was a lot of fun. She was a wild woman. [laughs]

Chris Frantz

I heard she’s still is.

Tina Weymouth

Yeah. We were able to... Chris Blackwell was producing and the great Alex Sadkin was engineering. Alex after Lee “Scratch” Perry gave Bob Marley and the Wailers their original sound, Alex Sadkin created all the albums that came after that have amazing really great production that helped break Bob Marley to the world.

So here were Alex Sadkin engineering. Chris Blackwell’s whole approach as a producer was really wonderful. It was like that’s how we learned to become producers too, was don’t get in the artist’s way. Just help, midwife whatever it is that the artist is going to do. Help that person. If they lack ideas, bring them. He would do things like say, “Chris and Tina, what do you think? Do you have any ideas of cover songs that Grace might do?” We thought for a minute and Chris said, “I know, ‘Warm Leatherette.’” He said, “Oh, you have a copy of that?” “Oh yeah, we’ll get a cassette to you.” Then I thought for a second, I thought, “Oh yeah, you know, I think Grace would sound good doing that song called ‘Walking in the Rain.’ It’s got that line, ‘Looking like a man, feeling like a woman.’” I said, “Oh that’s Grace.”

Everybody thinks Grace is like six feet tall. She’s actually five foot eight. Mariah Carey is taller than Grace. But she wears those four inch Christian Louboutin heels. What an amazing remarkable woman. But then the band, they were amazing remarkable band. Their chemistry was extraordinary and put together by Chris Blackwell. He found them from all over. Barry White Reynolds was the guitarist for Marianne Faithfull and Wally Badarou. They called him the professor. Also the prophet because he played the Prophet so well. And...

Chris Frantz

Sticky.

Tina Weymouth

“Sticky.” Uzziah Tompson. He called him Sticky because he’s an amazing percussionist. We asked Wally to play keyboards on a song after the Grace Jones project was finished when we were doing overdubs. We said, “Oh, you know, this would sound good.” Wally would be great for this. And then...

Chris Frantz

Tyrone Downie, the keyboard player from the Wailers was down there then. He played on the song we did call “L’Elephant.” Let’s see who else. The guitarist was a heavyset Jamaican guy, Jamaican Chinese guy and they called him Mao. His real name was Mikey Chung but he looked like Chairman Mao and so everybody called him Mao.

There was a vibe there that was just all about the art of making music. The technicians were very competent and advanced. The engineers that were working there, they were the crème de la crème. So if you had a good idea it could be captured and enhanced and maybe even turned out better than you thought it was thanks to these guys.

Tina Weymouth

Well, they could get you good sound immediately, so you weren’t wondering –

Chris Frantz

Yeah, it would sound like a record right away.

Tina Weymouth

Your rough mixes from the day would already sound like the great mixes, sometimes better than what people would end up with if they fussed with it too much.

Chris Frantz

The artists that would record there would continue to come back, for example The Rolling Stones would be in there one year and then the next year and then the year after that. Same with AC/DC. They made some of their biggest hits there, “Back in Black” and also “For Those About to Rock.” Then you had Gwen Guthrie who was backed by the Compass Point All-Stars, wonderful singer, soul singer. Who else? Ian Dury came through there and made one of his last albums I guess with Sly & Robbie.

Tina Weymouth

Ian Dury and Chaz Jankel, The Blockheads. They had a very funny experience there because they arrived and they just had just enough money cash because you’re not allowed to take cash over boarders and stuff, and they had just enough to pay for their time there. Of course everything cost so much in the Bahamas because even water has to be brought over in huge tanks. So yogurt, an egg – these things would cost a fortune, and fresh fruits and vegetables.

So they get there and they don’t know the typical practice. It’s like the Chuck Berry practice. You get there and whatever you’ve agreed to ahead of time now they have you over a barrel and they can ask for more. They said, “No, man, we want $4,000 right now.” That was all they had. So they give over everything and for three days they’re like trying to nibble on little candy bars and things.

We met them and we said, “Hey, you want to come over to our house. We’ll cook you a barbecue.” We couldn’t understand. We usually would make all this food but we would have enough left over that we’d have some leftovers to eat for the next three days. It was all gone. They were eating like this. All of them were like hovering over their plates like this, like nobody take mine. We couldn’t understand how they could so eat so much. Then they explained to us, “We were starving.”

But it was a wonderful experience. Then we went in because after that Ian Dury said, “Hey, you want to do some backgrounds, background vocals on our track?” And we said, “OK.” We went in there and he said, “I want you to sing I’m spasticus, artisticus,” and so that’s what we did. We just sang these big loud backgrounds on what... It was banned. I think the BBC banned it because it was supposed to be inappropriate for a cripple to be singing about cripples. It became a huge hit for them. What a brilliant combination those two were and the whole band.

Benji B

You mentioned that you learned a lot about producing at that time and also that you went on to produce records yourselves. What did you produce after that?

Tina Weymouth

Well, it came out of tragedy. Besides our own records, the Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club, the tragedy was that Alex Sadkin was killed. His fried had come to visit and they were going around a corner too fast in a Jeep, an open car, and it threw Alex and he hit his head and was killed instantly. He was slotted to do the first Ziggy Marley & The Melody Makers album for, was it... ?

Chris Frantz

Virgin.

Tina Weymouth

Virgin, yeah.

Chris Frantz

Virgin. Virgin America was a new company at that time. So when Alex had died and they came to us and Tina’s brother actually, her younger brother was working at Virgin at the time and he said to the A&R person who handled Ziggy who had signed Ziggy, a woman by the name of Nancy Jeffries. He said, “Well how about Chris and Tina?” Nancy said, “Well that’s not a bad idea, they should meet with Ziggy.” So we met with Ziggy and his mom, Rita, at a restaurant in New York. Afterwards, I remember Ziggy said, “Why did Chris bring his wife to the session?” [laughs] Anyway, we worked with Ziggy & The Melody Makers for two albums, the first two, and they were pretty good records, I gotta say.

Tina Weymouth

Tell them the story about the single that got him the Grammy for best record.

Chris Frantz

They had this great song called “Tumblin’ Down,” and this is after we had finished the project and everything, we were done with our part. They took it to a guy named Hank Shocklee, who is the producer of Public Enemy and other projects. Tina and I were in a cab, a taxi, in New York and over the radio came this song. We said, “Wow that sounds good, I think I’ve heard this before.” I think we have a copy of it don’t we?

Benji B

We can play a small section.

Chris Frantz

It’s a remix that Hank Shocklee did.

Benji B

Here you go.

Chris Frantz

Yeah, there it is, check it out.

Tina Weymouth

Yeah. It was actually his engineer. Hank went out for a break, and a lot of times it’s the engineer who actually does the remix. Hank went out for a break and his engineer, whose name, I’m sorry, I can’t recall right now. But he told us the story later. He said, “They’re not going to complain, it’s their song, it’s their production.”

Chris Frantz

There it is again.

(music: Ziggy Marley & The Melody Makers – “Tumblin’ Down (12” Remix)”)

Chris Frantz

[comments over music] So this got the Grammy for Best Reggae Album.

Tina Weymouth

[comments over music] It gave them a #2 Billboard single.

Benji B

You mentioned, “Why did he bring his wife to the session?” That’s a funny story. I just wanted to ask you how long have you been together as a couple, now?

Tina Weymouth

We’ve been friends since 1971, and then we became an item in the summer of ‘73?

Chris Frantz

I think so. I think that’s correct. [laughter]

Tina Weymouth

Yeah, so that’s like 41 years.

[applause]

Benji B

It’s such a beautiful story that you’re able to coexist and create together and produce together and record and tour. How is that possible?

Tina Weymouth

Thank you, Ben.

Chris Frantz

It’s like a miracle. It’s a divine thing. I can’t explain it. We’re very fortunate people.

Tina Weymouth

He’s a saint. Chris is a saint, and he treats me like a queen, but I am his servant. Do you understand this? This is how it works, it dovetails very nicely. I joined this band for him.

Chris Frantz

Yup.

Tina Weymouth

I was very reluctant. He kept asking me for two years.

Benji B

How did you do it Chris? How did you do it?

Chris Frantz

I just twisted her arm.

Tina Weymouth

No, he kept bringing home these Suzi Quatro albums saying, “She could do it, you can do it.”

Chris Frantz

I used my powers of persuasion.

Tina Weymouth

Well, he said, “Oh come on Tina, maybe you don’t know how to play bass, but you can learn because you share our musical sensibility, you understand our aesthetic.” I said, “Well, that’s true I share your aesthetic, but boy is it going to be hard.” And it was because I was playing live in front of an audience, very self-consciously, after five months. It was training on the job. I was doing the job and I was learning, but it was an approach that we had, all of us as Talking Heads. Chris kept saying – because he was the best musician in the band, and thank goodness because if the drummer is good everything is going to sound good, right? It sounds like music already.

David wasn’t a singer really but he became so by default. So we grew into our positions and our roles and every time we were putting together a song we were always trying to do something we didn’t know how to do. Sometimes a song like, “Thank You for Sending Me an Angel,” I kept trying to fit nine beats into eight because it just sounded like that should be the natural melody, but it created a really interesting part. Same with, “Found a Job,” but I never really knew what I was doing, but I grew into it and I was dreaming it because we were doing it day and night.

When we weren’t at our day jobs we were just playing together and so I started dreaming it. If you’ve ever been an athlete or a skier or if you’ve ever done anything, you start dreaming what it is that you keep doing. Even horrors of horrors, if you do a video game too much you start dreaming that you’re playing that video game, which is pretty horrific that your mind is there. For the music it became a thing where just one day I just woke up and just said, “Oh, wow, I get it.” It had been such a mystery. I always thought that these people who were trained musicians had some gift beyond my gift as a listener.

I played folk guitar, and I had toured. As a 13-year-old I toured with a group of English hand bell ringers. That was kind of obvious. I was only responsible for six different bells, six different notes. I just had to play them when our conductor told me to. It was a whole challenge to become a bass player. People would come up to me and say, “You’ve been listening to a lot of James Jamerson haven’t you.” I’d say, “Who?” I didn’t know that because of radio growing up as kid I had been assimilating this music. James Jamerson for those of you who don’t know is the great genius bass player for practically all the Motown records.

Benji B

One thing I really wanted to make sure I asked you – because I keep getting this nod that we’re going to have to wrap up soon – is with the relationships that you’ve had over the years and your experience of them changing in different ways and your experiences in the record business. If you could do it all over again what would you change?

Tina Weymouth

Well, now at this point, we wouldn’t get a record deal. No one would sign Talking Heads, and Tom Tom Club is just as non-viable because it’s a six piece band and you can’t survive except for fun, playing locally at places you can drive to. To get around the world you have to be, as Robert Fripp would say, a small intelligent unit. Do you have any of that stuff, did you give it to Benji already?

Chris Frantz

Yeah, Benji has some.

Tina Weymouth

What we’re actually creating is a new project, which is going to be electronic. We started working on it actually a long time ago, but there was a constant demand for Tom Tom Club up to this point, so we put it on a back burner but played with it. Do you have “Incognito” there? We created this in about 2006 or 2007 for Chicks on Speed from Berlin. They were an art group who became a music group and they made this compilation that called Girl Monster.

(music: Tina Weymouth & Chris Frantz – “Incognito” / applause)

Tina Weymouth

That was a lot of bass on that one. We get asked to do a lot of things for other people, not sessions or anything like that, just benefits. So this is for a film, an educational film.

Benji B

Going to do “Downtown Rockers.”

Tina Weymouth

You’re going to do “Downtown Rockers” next? I was thinking The Bombing of Brittany. You don’t have that movie, that clip?

Chris Frantz

It’s a video.

Tina Weymouth

It’s a film clip.

Benji B

I think it’s in there. Just give me one second.

Tina Weymouth

Last year we were asked by a historian who is... Brittany is like the Ireland of France, and it’s a place that was really hugely demolished during World War II because the Nazi’s had taken it over and they had all their u-boat bases there, and they thought that the landing from the Allies would come over there. They were really harassing and harrying all the Allied shipping in the English Channel. So it was determined by the Canadian and RAF, Royal Air Force of England, that they would attack in conjunction with to prepare for the landing.

Nobody knew where it was going to be, but this was the preparation, and they had to bomb the headquarters the Command [unintelligible], which was a beautiful chateau, but they had to bomb all the places where they were building and storing armories and equipment. So this is Royal Air Force of Great Britain footage that we did.

(video: Royal Air Force of Great Britain footage scored by Tina and Chris / applause)

Tina Weymouth

It’s actually so much fun to not have to come up with vocals. Just work on music, melody, rhythm and with that visual which is very powerful. We didn’t want to glorify it. We wanted to make it truly sad. It’s kind of a pleasure to work on sad stuff, easier than making happy stuff. Happy stuff is very hard to do.

So we want to conclude with something we did on an EP three years ago, was an EP we did for Nacional Records.

Chris Frantz

It was in 2012 that it was released.

Tina Weymouth

OK, two years ago. So we did this, this was live with a band.

Chris Frantz

This was with the Tom Tom Club band.

Tina Weymouth

Yep. It’s coming full circle back to... We used film footage that was shot by the camera of Ivan Král, who was the guitarist with Patti Smith. He made this fantastic film. It’s actual film, not video. Back in very early CBGB days, like June 1975. So we used bits of it to have render homage a lot of the groups who had come out then.

(music/video: Tom Tom Club – “Downtown Rockers” / applause)

Tina Weymouth

So you saw it inter-cut with footage from 1975. We’ve got kids from present day Brooklyn. That’s where all the artists have moved to. Lower Manhattan is too rich, too costly. Then you see our band Tom Tom Club, we’re in our studio at our house, which is our garage.

Benji B

I’ve been told about three times that we’re going to have to wrap it up shortly, but I want to make sure that we have time for at least a few questions from participants only. Sorry to stress it, but we really only want questions from participants at this stage. Thanks for your understanding. Who’s first? Fred. Yeah, it’s coming.

Audience Member

I can’t remember the name of what you said he was, but the friend of yours you said was the best assistant engineer ever. I’m interested as to what made him so good.

Tina Weymouth

He was happy, and that’s a very important part of being in a work environment, the contribution of atmosphere. But he was always very willing to go out nine miles away to get some fried chicken late at night. He was happy, and that was incredibly important when people are under stress, is to be with someone who’s like that. In French we call it “serviable,” which means someone who is really willing to put themselves out. He knew exactly what he needed to do. Like when Stevie would say, “Now, Benji I want you to press the tape button exactly when I do this,” because that’s how we would get certain effects would be to start the tape at the beginning of getting a sound. For an introduction for a special little mix effect and Benji was just so willing to just do anything we needed him to do. OK?

Audience Member

Thanks.

Benji B

Any more questions?

Audience Member

Hey. I’d just love to hear what kind of stuff you’re listening to these days just because it’s really obvious you’ve pretty eclectic taste and especially your Tom Tom Club and maybe the influence that rap had on that. So I would just be interested to hear maybe what you’re into these days.

Chris Frantz

One of my favorite records I heard recently was by a guy Hajime Tachibana, who is here somewhere. It’s a really eclectic record. He was formerly with or still is with the band Plastics, and there is just some totally wild unexpected stuff on that record. What else have we been listening to?

Tina Weymouth

Wild Belle.

Chris Frantz

Yeah there’s a group from Chicago called Wild Belle that we like very much, in fact, they guested on our last Tom Tom Club EP.

Tina Weymouth

Xeno and Oaklander.

Chris Frantz

Yes, we love Xeno and Oaklander. In fact, we just saw them about ten days ago in Paris. They were fantastic.

Tina Weymouth

We hear a lot of Craft Jerks records because Mr. Craft Jerks lives in our house. So he’s constantly coming by and saying, “Will you please listen to this and tell me if you like it because I’m not going to release it if it’s not good.”

Chris Frantz

Oh, another thing, Nortec Collective, we love Nortec Collective. In fact we did a collaboration with them. We don’t have time to play it now but it’s pretty hip. Tina did the vocals, oh, and so did I.

Tina Weymouth

I played bass.

Chris Frantz

I played drums and the Nortec guys did the rest. It’s called “Motel Baja,” and that’s also the name of the album.

Tina Weymouth

Yeah, we have a situation in Mexico. The government is very, very corrupt. You may have seen in the news lately about the high school students, 43 of them were murdered and their bodies have just been discovered. Then we have situation where there are scared ignorant people in the United States who are terrified of immigrants who are trying to get away from really bad political situations. And they’ve erected all these walls.

So there are a lot of people from Mexico and South America in oppressed places. Not all of South America is oppressed, but the places that are, and they all have this dream of getting away and getting into the United States and they collect in and around Tijuana in what they call Baja. So it’s referred to as “Motel Baja” by the people because they never get out. They’re just there forever with this dream of getting away.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Benji B

Of course.

Audience Member

Something that I really love of what you do has to do with some freshness, some humor, maybe is that thing that you were learning how to do it while you were playing. I was wondering, how do you manage that naïve factor you were talking about when you were making music? I imagine that you got more technical with time and how do you manage to stay fresh because you definitely are fresh.

Tina Weymouth

Oh wow. Thank you very much. I don’t know if that’s a question or a compliment.

Audience Member

Both, maybe. I’m sorry, but by staying open to maybe let go what you know already and...

Tina Weymouth

That’s true, and I happen to live with the happiest man in the world, so my moodiness is constantly factored into what we do together, and he’s always making me laugh and that helps a lot. We also work with just great people. It seems like every time we teach a young engineer like Steven Stanley, we get a new young engineer who’s going to work with us we teach him everything we know and then he gets married and has twins. This has happened to us repeatedly and we keep telling them, “Don’t have kids, watch out watch out.”

This keeps happening, but every time we lose one great, amazing engineer, we find another one. They always help us find the next amazing engineer, and they are fresh in themselves and they have ideas, too. We’re always open to listening. A lot of it is just listening. That’s your biggest instrument is your ear. Then everything else, the technical stuff takes care of itself. We all do it. The most confusing thing for me in all of it is... I’ve given up on music theory. The most confusing thing for me is that every time – the technology moves so fast, I was constantly using manuals to learn how to use this new piece of equipment this new piece of equipment, but I keep our old pieces.

Chris and I keep a lot of old pieces, too. They’re sort of our standbys. The new pieces we have to figure out, oh my God, and we just have to be happy to have to wear that hat for awhile because now a days you have to do everything. You have to sing. You have to dance. You have to write. You have to be your own manager. You have to call everybody up on the phone. You have to be your own agent. Sometimes it’s just overwhelming, and so you just have to just step back and just have a nutty tension break and be kind of silly and do something else. One thing that we’ve learned is to work on three songs at a time and keep shifting. When we get stalemated on a song we abandon it and we come back to it after we’ve had some freshness.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Tina Weymouth

You’re welcome.

Benji B

Thank you. Any more questions?

I really want you to stand up and join me in saying thank you so much to Chris and Tina.

Tina Weymouth

Aww.

[applause]

Benji B

Make some noise for Tom Tom Club.

Chris Frantz

Thank you.

Tina Weymouth

Thank you. It’s our pleasure.