Where did you grow up?
I'm from Milwaukee [Wisconsin]. The guitar player, Bob Metzger, who was in my high school band, went on to be Leonard Cohen's guitar player for 25 years. This other singer, Fred Bliffert, did an album with Al Kooper [Tape Op #73] producing. It was amazing. From my high school band, the bass player played bass for Johnny Winter for ten years, and the singer became the head of the American Institute of Architects.
Did you end up on the East Coast because of college?
I went to Harvard. I was making a film, and I met Jonathan Richman. He came in with these people – Ed Hood and Rene Ricard – who had been in Andy Warhol movies. There was a Cambridge, [Massachusetts], contingent. I didn't ever meet Edie Sedgwick; I was there just after the period she was in Cambridge. Jonathan came into my apartment with this group of people, raving about the Velvet Underground and The Stooges. I was making a movie for a documentary film class, and I decided I'd put him in the movie. It was about alienation and the ascension of corporate symbols. He was obsessed by old signs, like he loved the Esso sign but hated Exxon. He liked the flying horse of Mobil, and he loved the Howard Johnson sign, but he hated it when it got changed to HoJo. The first thing I did was I filmed him driving down Route 9 outside of Boston, pointing out the signs that he loved and hated. Then I recorded some music of his, and I was using it as the soundtrack of the movie. Ernie Brooks was in my room, and he kept saying, "These songs are really insinuating themselves into my head." Jonathan was coming over and hanging out. Suddenly, both Ernie and I ended up joining the band [on bass and keyboards].
That's fortuitous!
Exactly, yeah.
How long were you guys playing before going to L.A. to work with John Cale?
I joined in January of 1971. I dropped out of Harvard the second semester of my senior year to join The Modern Lovers. Actually, Ernie and I were able to sneak in a semester while we were in The Modern Lovers the following fall, because we weren't playing that many gigs at that point. I spent a year and a half on my thesis and got a summa cum laude, which I would never have done without all that extra time. In the spring of 1972, Lillian Roxon wrote an article in the New York Post that started bringing all these people to come and see us. That was when we started what became The Modern Lovers, recording with John Cale and also with Allan Mason. I don't know if anyone else ever did this, but I got both Warner Bros. and A&M [Records] to share flying us to the West Coast. We said, "We don't just want to meet an A&R person. We need to meet the people we'll be working with." We came up and played some shows in Berkeley, [California], because Allan Mason was close to Matthew Kaufman, who [later] formed Beserkley Records. Then we hemmed and hawed about it, because we had so many offers. Eventually we signed with Warner Bros. and went back out and worked with John Cale again. By that point, Jonathan had started to move to his "Hey There Little Insect" and "quieter" rock and roll phase.
Right. It was a whole shift in how he wanted to play shows.
It was frustrating, because we were still trying to record what would be the first record. Kim Fowley produced some tracks after John Cale got so frustrated – Jonathan's world philosophy had changed. He had a philosophy, coming out of high school, of being confrontational with the audience and loving these bands like Iggy [Pop, The Stooges] and Lou Reed who would famously confront people in the audience. He introduced me to that way of looking at music. I had played in much more average bands, influenced by the [Rolling] Stones, The Beatles, James Brown, and Rufus Thomas. I never thought I was going to be a professional musician, but when I started playing with Jonathan, then it was like, "Well, nobody in the world is making music that sounds anything like this. I may not be the most technically proficient, but I know that the sounds I'm getting nobody else is getting." We were using a fuzztone on electric piano.
Were those the first times you'd been in a recording studio?
I had been in a college band, Albatross, and we had rented some studio time once. The Modern Lovers did a couple of songs at Intermedia Sound, which became The Cars' studio [Syncro Sound]. It had just been built on Newbury Street. We did the midnight to 7 a.m. shift.
Does anyone do those shifts anymore?
I don't know! You'd have eight hours; you'd spend six hours getting the drum sound, and then you'd have two hours, and we'd do all the vocals in half an hour. It's backwards.
John Baccigaluppi (JB): And get kicked out by the jingle session in the morning!
They had a Norwegian jazz band before us that went late. That's where the recording of "Hospital" took place. Then we went out and worked with John in the [San Fernando] Valley at Whitney [Recording Studio] and at Clover [Studios] that Allan Mason had. I remember they had a little AM radio, and we could go out to the car to listen.
But this version of The Modern Lovers didn't last.
That's right; The Modern Lovers broke up [in February of 1974]. In 1975 I did an album with Elliott Murphy called Night Lights, and went on tour with him. He had been a big fan of The Modern Lovers. I was just entering architecture school as I met the Talking Heads. They let me wait until January [1977] to join. I'd already put it off a year because of playing with Elliott. I knew I couldn't keep doing that. I knew that once I'd been in school then I could come back if it didn't work out. To a degree, The Modern Lovers thing broke my heart, at that time. I was wary of putting all my hopes, once again, into rock 'n' roll.
That worked out, I guess!
It worked out great. I got there just in time to begin all the rehearsals for the first album [Talking Heads: 77].
They'd done a single before that.
They did "Love, Building on Fire."
You went from one quirky, interesting songwriter to another.
Well, as I like to say, the only way you get to be in two of the most important underground bands of all time is that you fail so miserably the first time that you're still in that same early stage of your career! [laughter]
Yeah, right? I made a mistake: We interviewed Tony Bongiovi [Tape Op #127] a few years back. We printed something that Tony had said about Tina Weymouth's bass playing being replaced and all that crap. The engineer on that, Ed Stasium [#98], dropped me a line and said, "Chris Frantz and Tina are really upset."
Yeah, that is bullshit. I just worked with Ed remixing all of the Talking Heads albums for Atmos.
You mixed everything in 5.1 before, right?
That was with Eric "ET" Thorngren. [See Eric's interview this issue.] He did the bulk of the catalog. Ed did [Talking Heads:] 77, and he did about half of More Songs About Buildings and Food, and then Eric did the other half. Because Eric and I still had the sessions from the 5.1, we had a head start on thinking about this. When we were doing the 5.1, we listened to all of these different [surround] records. There were certain people who wanted to make mixes feel like you were on stage, with the musicians around you.
Yeah, some strange placement of the listener, as if you'd joined the band.
We felt that was not a very successful way to look at it. The other thing is that we realized that people would have these stereo systems, and then who knew what the rest of the speakers would be. We used the faux center of stereo, as long as it was then reinforced with the center speaker. By the time that we've now reached with Atmos, people have more sophisticated systems. I think that surround audio could be wonderful, but the majority of people who are going to be listening to Atmos will probably be listening to it on headphones, to begin with.
Where they hear the binaural version?
Yeah. It is a challenge, because the wrappers that Amazon and Apple are using are different. Those wrappers do slightly change the sound of the mix.
Like perspectives, or amounts of instruments?
Perspective, a little bit.
Where did you do the mixes?
Henszey Sound, in Los Angeles. David Henszey used to have a studio [AD Productions] in Milwaukee, that I'd worked at when he had just built it. It was in a high-rise and had a Neve V3, the one that came out before the VR. My wife, Carol, was pregnant with our son, Dylan, so we were going to be back in Milwaukee. We did [the solo record] Walk on Water there, and in Lake Geneva, [Wisconsin], at Royal Recorders. Playboy Records had built a studio [Shade Tree Recording Studio] there at the Grand Geneva Resort & Spa. Playboy had fallen on hard times, sold the place, and the hotel was now really funky, and a diamond dealer had bought the studio. It had two Studer A800s and two Mitsubishi [digital] 32-track [tape decks]. Millions of dollars in equipment. It had more equipment than any studio in London, New York, or L.A. in one place. For a single studio, no one came close to this. I could get great rates there. I brought Dave Jerden [Tape Op #86] there. Roy Thomas Baker came out and produced something, and then Frank Filipetti.
I'd never heard of this place!
Anyway, back to David Henszey. It was really funny. ET said, "I finally found an Atmos room where it seems like the guy knows what he's talking about." I said, "Who is it? Oh, I know him!" He was one of the first independent studios, outside of, say, Dolby's own rooms, to become Atmos certified. It's a smaller place, but he was good, and he was excited about the project. Then Ed built a studio, and I worked with Ed Stasium down at his house, as well as The Village before his room was built. The binaural experience in the headphones is great, in its own way. It is not the same as having speakers all around; you don't have the front. When we do a mix for Atmos, we have the same philosophy as we did for 5.1 – more like you're watching it from close to the stage. It's still in front of you, but you're hearing reflections and certain things. We did move sounds around the room for effects. Like the song "Drugs" from Fear of Music has all these sounds.
It's a very trippy song.
And "The Great Curve" from Remain in Light – with the three contrapuntal vocal lines happening simultaneously – it was so great in surround to have them coming from different directions. It does not take away from loving stereo still, but it's fun. When we were doing our mixes, I would compare a mix I could download on my phone and play and then go to Tidal or something, play the same song in stereo, and go back and forth. That was a good way to go, "Oh, what happened?" One of the things was that, with [Brian] Eno [producing, Tape Op #85], the drums and the bass are quieter than I had remembered. When we were remixing them, there was so much room in an Atmos mix that we were able to make the drums and the bass a little more present, without taking away from the feeling of the stereo mixes.
Right. The band is obviously very rhythmic.
Obviously, as we got later, Little Creatures and True Stories have the loudest drums, because we'd reached the '80s.
You need the giant snare and the tappy kick drum.
That's right. Everyone, especially everybody in New York, was influenced by disco music. Claude Shannon, who was the inventor of information theory, said that the amount of information in a given message is the inverse to how expected it is. If it confirms your expectation, there's very little information. People started using quantized drums when they got to disco music. I think what happens with quantized drums is that the brain knows they're going to be there, and therefore your brain is tuning them out [in order] to listen to what else is there.
Oh, absolutely.
You can be at a dance or a rave, and you're feeling the percussiveness and the feeling in your chest of the kick drum, but your brain is still looking for all the parts that are around it.
We tune out what we know is a constant element.
That's right. But the second we try and take that off the grid, it's, "Oh my god, is this loud!" We'll also pay more attention to it, because I've got to know where to put my foot for the beat.
That's so true for mixing. Elements that are repetitive get tuned out, even if they're the loudest thing in the mix. It's an interesting paradox.
We couldn't drive a car without the way the brain works, which is to expect that we see the road, to expect that there's going to be a line that we can look at to say, "Is it going straight, or starting to curve?" If we had to analyze everything we saw, de novo, at every microsecond, we couldn't drive a car, catch a ball, or hit a baseball.
Right. We assimilate and take most input for granted.
It's very interesting. I had taken a course in visual perception as part of my major at Harvard, and there was a guy named Rudolf Arnheim who wrote a book, Art and Visual Perception: [A Psychology of the Creative Eye]. It was a lot about Gestalt psychology. Gestalt psychology is the opposite of behaviorism. Behaviorism is there are a bunch of individual acts that add up and then will be predictive of what your response will be next time, and how you get conditioned to expect things. If you train a dog, it's very important to be absolutely consistent so that the dog knows that every time you say, "Come," it's going to get rewarded. If you start to break that, then it becomes very hard to train the dog, because now the dog becomes confused. Well, it's the same with us. The study of Gestalt psychology is talking about that. It's talking about our completion of the whole. We know that rooms have a corner, but you know that if you look through a lens that it becomes softened, because the lens bends how you see the corner. But, because we know there's a corner there, we perceive a corner, even though it's going through the lens of our eye. If you knew what our eye was actually seeing, it would see like a camera.
How do you apply this to mixing and making music or producing?
In mixing, trends come. We talked about the loudness of the drums in the '80s. There was also this sense of a different approach that say L.A. bands, London bands, or New York bands had. New York bands were definitely influenced by disco. It was very prevalent in Philly and New York, and engineers were hearing it all the time. Talking Heads, being a rhythmic band, we liked aspects of that.
Talking Heads were never really a punk band, sonically. It became more rhythmic-oriented.
David [Byrne, Tape Op #79]'s an amazing rhythm guitar player, and Chris is an amazingly simple and straightforward drummer. I always say, "Do you believe the drummer?" If you believe the drummer, then you let the drummer take time and you play with that person. If you don't believe it, you try to help the drummer stay in time. Sometimes, like in high school bands, the drummer might start dragging and then you're pulling him along but then you start rushing. Then you have to learn to get to the point where you trust the drums. Often, it sounds better to play a little behind the drums. I got a lot better as a musician in the Talking Heads because of the quality of the other musicians. They had a great work ethic, too. They were very on-time. We made all of our rehearsals. We'd rehearse for a specific amount of time. When we made our albums, we didn't waste money making them. We even went into the studio deliberately without having written any songs for Remain in Light. There was something about when we first played a song, there was an innocence to it, and we wanted to capture that.
The discovery.
Yeah. That was part of it. We tried to create a philosophy for each record. Working with Tony [Bongiovi], the idea there was, "Let's find someone who does commercials and disco music. It'll force us to do something different." Then, after that, we met Brian [Eno] and said, "We really see eye-to-eye with Brian," so we ended up doing three records with him. The first one was understanding how Brian used the studio as an extension of an instrument. Then we started to know about certain effects and thinking about that as we worked with him on the next two records. We were able to make suggestions. We recorded Fear of Music in our rehearsal studio, because we went, "Previously we've always felt slightly a little uncomfortable getting into the studio." It doesn't feel as comfortable than if you've been rehearsing in the same room for a long time. We had the Record Plant [Studios Remote] truck come out on alternate Sundays.
I didn't realize that until recently.
Of course, that created some limitations, but it also created a vibe for the record. For Remain in Light, a lot of that was because we were so excited about "I Zimbra" on Fear of Music that we said, "This is the direction we want to go for the next album."
Was there a worry about, "We're turning into this other thing. How do we play it live?"
With Remain in Light we played so many parts that we couldn't do this as a four-piece. The way the big band happened is we were playing a festival up in Canada called Heatwave, and then we were playing in [NYC's] Central Park. We were getting paid more than we normally got, so we said, "Let's do an experiment." I sat down with David and said, "We're going to need another keyboard player. We need another guitar player, and another bass player. We need percussion and background singers." I had been hanging around in New York with Busta Jones.
The bass player.
I met Bernie Worrell [keyboards]. I went off and, in that afternoon, I hired Busta, Dolette [McDonald, vocals], Adrian [Belew, guitar], and Bernie. I came back and said, "We have the most amazing band!" Bernie knew Steve Scales [percussion], and that completed the picture. We were in such a hurry that we hadn't finished mixing. Dave Jerden and David went out to L.A. and mixed two or three songs for Remain in Light. I stayed in New York, mixing with Brian and with [engineer] John Potoker. Then I started rehearsing with all these musicians in Long Island City at Britannia Row, which was owned by Pink Floyd. It was their American outpost where they had a rehearsal room. I think we had four days of rehearsal before our first show. I started rehearsing, and then David walked in and went, "Oh, we've been rehearsing without the lead singer. Wow!" We had this incredible show in Canada. Then we played Central Park and were like, "This is what we have to do."
JB: That was after the record was mostly recorded?
Yes, totally. We were mixing at the time.
JB: Where did the My Life in the Bush of Ghosts record that David and Brian did fit in?
They did that between Fear of Music and Remain in Light. It also caused a dynamic in the studio that was challenging, because they had just freshly worked together. We took a longer time off between Fear of Music and Remain in Light than we had between More Songs About Buildings and Food and Fear of Music. We finished More Songs..., went on tour, came back and wrote songs for Fear of Music, and then he came back and recorded it. We finished and went back on tour. Now we'd taken a little break. Because there was an easy communication between them, Chris, Tina, and I felt a little less connected. I had a lot of patience, so I hung around and went to the studio every day. For almost every drummer, they finish in one week, and then we work three months on an album. A lot of times Chris would come in, and he would say things like, "This sounded better yesterday."
He might be right!
Almost every single time he was right. "Oh my god, all the stuff we've been working on, we're going to have to throw it out!"
I interviewed David Byrne years ago, and he said, "We'd make a rough mix of an instrumental, and I would maybe write some melodies over that. I would go away for a month and come back with words, which didn't always work."
That record was particularly hard. Also, we took a three week break because David had another commitment. We were on such a roll. We were in the Bahamas [Compass Point Studios]. AC/DC was over in the next studio doing Back in Black. I think that we recorded all the basic tracks, and they did one vocal and one guitar solo. I may be wrong about that; that's what I heard. We'd invite them to go snorkeling and they'd go, "No, sharks!" [laughter] We were on a roll. Had we continued in the Bahamas, the record would probably have come out quite differently. When we got back to New York, David was struggling. It doesn't have a lot of chord changes. It doesn't have the dynamic of going to another chord for the chorus. He needed to get back into the music. He ended up picking up instruments and playing additional parts a lot of times, which ended up replacing, or being in addition to, a part that we had done in the Bahamas. There's an extended release of Remain in Light that has some of those songs. One is called "Right Start," which is what "Once in a Lifetime" became, and one was called "Double Groove," which became something else.
Yeah, those are interesting.
I think it would have been a little closer to that had we continued, and if David had been able to slip into the "melody mode." We went back to Sigma Sound in New York. I negotiated the deal to go there, and it was a very hot summer. Of course, the Bahamas, particularly at that time, were chill. Then we got back to New York, with everybody living in their own homes and not together, and it was a change. We were feeling stuck. One of the great things is Adrian [Belew] played the Mudd Club, and we went down and asked him if he wanted to come up. He played for one day, including all those incredible solos, like "The Great Curve."
I saw him in 1981 with King Crimson when they did the Discipline tour. Holy shit!
I remember him talking to me about whether he should do that or not, and how much he liked playing with the Heads. I said, "I dunno, you're going to be the lead singer in this band. This is an opportunity you shouldn't turn down." It's sure been fun playing with him again and doing these shows. Did either of you come to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass? [Jerry and Adrian fronted the Remain in Light band.]
No. A friend of mine told me about your show.
It was unbelievable. There were more than 50,000 people there. And the amount of joy; it was as if everybody in the audience was singing along and dancing.
There are probably more Talking Heads fans now than there where when you guys were active.
It's aged well. I would say our audience is quite a bit bigger than it was in even 2010.
That's crazy for a band that didn't really reunite.
I was very involved in any of the times that we did a greatest hits package. I'd taken on working with Bob Ludwig [Tape Op #105]. When we did the surround mixes, at least it kept something slightly new coming out. Then David started including more Talking Heads songs on his tour, with the culmination of that being American Utopia [Broadway show and film]. When he did that Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno tour – where I was actually a co-writer of a lot of the songs he played – again, he deliberately stayed away from doing a lot of Talking Heads songs on the earlier tours. He did that, and then started playing bigger places and it was more successful. It ended up with him being able to reimagine something like American Utopia. All of this kept it somewhat alive. I also think that we relaxed about [having our music in] films or TV shows. There was a real feeling back in the '70s and '80s and even into the '90s [about that decision].
"Don't sell out!"
Don't sell out. I think that the turning point was when The Verve did "Bitter Sweet Symphony" and it was in that Super Bowl ad. Then Moby did that record, Play, and he had no airplay, but he had licenses, and it became a very successful record. We can't count on the record industry to make money, so these sync fees and the stuff that we used to think of as "selling out," it's often the only way that we're ever going to make any money. Things changed. We became far more open-minded about where we would have our songs. Stranger Things came on; I was watching the second episode, and they played "Psycho Killer" all the way through. I just saw this new Amazon thing called Upload, and the trailer is "Once in a Lifetime." One of the interesting things is how "This Must be the Place" has gone. We tried to have it be the second single on Speaking in Tongues. Warner Bros. spent a lot of money on "Burning Down the House." For the first time ever, they spent money on it.
To promote it?
I think what happened was Rod Stewart and Linda Ronstadt didn't sell well [at that time], and they went, "Uh oh. We have to start spending some money on building these audiences." They didn't spend a lot of money on "This Must Be the Place." It also didn't happen by itself. I can't tell you how many times people come up and say, "This is my favorite song," or, "We played it at our wedding." It's one of our most streamed songs now.
Some of David's best lyrics have something very "outsider" yet very personal at the same time.
As a general rule, he didn't really write songs about relationships. He wrote songs about ideas, so to speak. Other people have tried that. Some are successful. People want to resonate with it. There's a reason why most pop songs are talking about relationships.
It's easier to sell!
