Remain in Love: Talking Heads * Tom Tom Club * Tina by Chris Frantz

Chris Frantz is the drummer and co-founding member of Talking Heads; one of my favorite bands of all-time. He's also the husband of my favorite member of the band, Tina Weymouth. From reading this book, I also have learned that he's either an amazing storyteller or someone who incredibly happened to have amazing timing being involved in the formation of so many important bands and creation of pieces of music during the late 1970s through the early 1990s.

Frantz gives a nearly day by day account of how he met and wooed Tina during the early days of Talking Heads. Every stop on the band's inaugural tour of Europe opening for the Ramones is covered in depth. Chris's Kentucky wedding to Tina practically covers the entire guest list. And the married couple's origination of the Caribbean/pop/dancehall project, Tom Tom Club, due more to financial necessity than the ultimate achievement of a lifelong dream, goes through more twists and turns than a week's of soap opera. But when it comes to the demise of the band, Chris Frantz barely spends more than a dozen pages on the topic.

In 1984, while performing in New Zealand, frontman David Byrne stormed off stage and had to be prompted back to finish off the set by Frantz. That event which basically signalled the end of Talking Heads in concert as well as the beginning of the end of the band, isn't even mentioned in this book. One might argue that Byrne is the villain of the book. But I feel that despite as contrarian David Byrne was, not to mention devious and backstabbing he allegedly was, Frantz does a heck of a job giving the self-diagnosed autistic musician a heaping benefit of the doubt. 

One reason the end of the band isn't covered as in-depth as their origins is because how Frantz tries so very hard to focus on the happy times. The name of the book is 'Remain in Love'. However, it could also have something to do with the author's raging cocaine habit that developed right along with the end of Talking Heads. Maybe it's that period of time is too hard for Chris Frantz to document. Maybe his binges were so destructive, Chris just doesn't have very much memory of those times. 

I've gained an enormous amount of respect for Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth thanks to this book; though my level was already high before. I've also grown to appreciate the forgotten Head, Jerry Harrison, a lot more. I'm also listening to more Tom Tom Club than just 'Genius of Love'. An account of the career of the Ramones is definitely on my to-read list thanks to this biography. Though I doubt it's anywhere as rosy a read as this book was. But above all, I want to read David Byrne's side of the story. I think he deserves that chance before I finalize my opinion of him.

Oh... And before I forget! David, Chris, Jerry and Tina: can we please get 1 final tour before I die, please!!!

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 8 out of 10 stars.

1977- A Madman Turns 40: 2017- Day 85

 

For today's post, I'm looking at a couple of firsts.

  40 years ago today, Elvis Costello released his first single Less Than Zero. The song was written in response to Costello's disgust with a BBC interview involving a fascist union leader. 

   Less Than Zero was released as a punk record. But really, Costello's music was more in line with the British New Wave movement that spawned from punk. I'm not really what you'd consider a fan of Costello. However, thanks to Song Pop, I'm getting more exposed to his work and find that I really do like it!

A replica 1977 Elvis Costello World Tour t-shirt.

    There's a little bit of controversy with this song but I'll deal more with that in another post later on down the road. 

Original logo for
Focus on the Family.

    Now let's look at that other first. Today marks the first day that Christian psychologist Dr. James Dobson's Focus On the Family opened for business.

     The faith-based organization isn't without it's controversies. But it's also done a lot of good offering counseling for parents, couples, and children. Another thing I've enjoyed about Focus On The Family over the years is the amazing job it's done with a long-running radio and later video series called Adventures In Odyssey about an eccentric inventor and the adventures he has with the residents of the town of Odyssey. They're very professionally done and for a Christian series as pretty entertaining.

    Well that's my look at 1977 for today. But before I go, why don't we take a listen to Costello's Less Than Zero. 

   Enjoy...

1977: A Madman Turns 40: 2017- Day 77

 

  Today’s look at my year of origin gets political and punk. Who knew that the two could go hand-in-hand? British Punk band the Clash released their first single, White Riot.

A year prior during the Notting Hill Carnival, the local police force (some 1,600 strong) went overboard and literally started a riot themselves. Band members Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon were first hand viewers of the carnage and decided to write a protest song about!

This photo was taken during the 76 riot. The guy wearing the hat in the foreground
is Clash mentor Don Letts of Jamaica and this image was used on the back of Clash's debut album.

   Many incorrectly believe that the song is racist calling for a race when it fact it’s calling out racism in England’s Notting Hill district and asking for white teens to join the cause!

       See Notting Hill is a sort of upscale area and the residents at the time didn’t want the Carnival celebration to occur in the first place. Despite not getting a permit to celebrate, organizers of the celebration went ahead and did it anyway. Looking for an excuse to shut it down, when officers began getting reports of pick-pocketing, they quickly went into action. As a result over 60 people were arrested and countless more injured. By the way, the group targeted most by the Notting Hill police force was blacks, mostly of Caribbean descent.

 

A Carnival attender arrested during the '76 riot.

    As I said, White Riot was the Clash’s answer to the violence. It wouldn’t be for another 10 years before public opinion and public policy changed allowing the parade to be performed with legal permission. But the Nottinghill Carnival has continued to be marred with violence from both police and gangs over the last 30 years to the point of festivities being cancelled at least twice.

   As for the Clash, they became punk rock legends. Their 1978 single London Calling became a standard for 70s rock and they had continued success in the 80s. But the band itself kinda distances themselves from White Riot- not because they no longer feel strongly for the call of social justice but because they see their music style as amateurish compared to later works like London Calling.

    Before I leave, I thought it would be interesting to note that the B-side of White Riot is a song titled 1977. (Talk about irony or bizarre coincidence as today is the 77th day of the year 1977!) That song is a call out to entertainers such as the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Elvis being no longer culturally relevant! Wow- that takes cajones! Take a listen for yourself and decide.

    Enjoy...

   

1977: A Madman Turns 40: 2017- Day 38

     Punk is dead!

     In a London International Times article, the term is used for the first time ever 40 years ago today. With the troubles the Sex Pistols were having keeping signed to a label and the low sales of punk records, critics declared the genre's day in the sun was over.
  
    In typical ironic punk fashion, fans of punk embraced the saying. Groups such as Crass wrote songs devoted to the saying. Plus, future music critics and punk fans would debate if punk was dead for decades to come.

    If anything, saying punk is dead made it come alive. In the next few weeks and years, punk would explode- especially thanks to a little place in New York City called CBGB. But it's not time to talk about that yet. Patience, we will.

    Well, until tomorrow, enjoy a listen to one of my all-time favorite punk hits and long live punk!

1977: A Madman Turns 40: 2017- Day 6

   It's Epiphany and to my wife, our Christmas lights have to stay up at least till this night is through. But you don't want to hear about that. We just got over the hustle and bustle of the holidays. Plus many of us are still recovering from holiday hangover- you know, that time after a long break and the difficulties of getting back into the daily grind of work and life in general. 

   So I thought I would talk about music today. Over the next year, I'll be talking about music quite a bit. I'm not musically inclined but I love to listen to various things. But above all, I'm quite a fan of new wave and it's father genre: punk. 

    No, I don't have safety pins sticking out of my face or spiked purple hair. The only holes in my clothes are mostly due to tiny claw marks from my cats. But I've always been considered a rather odd fellow with my own style of dress, actions, and likes. So, I guess that why punk music speaks to me...

   Doing research on this project, I noticed that 40 years ago today punk band, the Sex Pistols were dropped by production company EMI. So, I thought I would investigate why. I clearly know of the impact of this action: it sent the punk music world on fire. It was US vs Them (the rich, the establishment, and the powerful.) EMI's decision to cancel a 2-year contract (and demand thousands of dollars back which was already spent) with the band that was only a couple of months old was seen like a big rich bully picking on the weird poor kid at school. The punk community saw this as a challenge and in response, turned the Sex Pistols into rock gods.

    But why was the Pistols dropped?

    Dateline: December 1976
    Newly signed Sex Pistols agree to appear on the BBC as a replacement for my favorite band of all-time Queen! They got drunk but instead of being wild, the Sex Pistols started 
out the interview kinda drool. Though they did apparently mutter some sweats, studio heads were expecting a crazy punk band. What they got was a group of uncommitted thugs. Seeking to get things rolling, producers begged host Bill Grundy to get everyone involved, including fellow punk artist, Siouxsie Sioux revved up. 
     Grundy supposedly was drunk too and at one point starts flirting with Siouxsie. at which point this exchange occurred. (Warning: NSFW)

Jones: You dirty sod. You dirty old man.

Grundy: Well keep going, chief, keep going. Go on. You've got another five seconds. Say something outrageous.

Jones: You dirty bastard.

Grundy: Go on, again.

Jones: You dirty fucker.

Grundy: What a clever boy.

Jones: What a fucking rotter.

The event caused a media $#it-storm. You think scandals are bad in the States, they're

 even worse in the UK. For the next 3-4, the episode was all the papers and tabloids

could talk about. 

The Daily Mirrors response to the events of December 76.

   Jump to January 4, 1977. The Sex Pistols take a commercial flight at Heathrow. They're

 set to perform in the Netherlands. While waiting for the flight, the band spat at passengers, 

got into fights, and while in the air, reportedly had several vomiting spells. Well, it was all 

enough for EMI and on January 6, they dropped the Sex Pistols. 

The Sex Pistols, signing with A&M,
after being dropped by EMI.
Note Sid Vicious (center) the band's newest member.

   After this happened, the rest they say is history. Another label signed the band and quickly

terminated their contract, but Virgin picked up the Pistols by the Summer. The band added a 

new band member by the name of Sid Vicious, and by year's end, they would sell over

150,000 records in less than 24-hours with a little record called 'God Save the Queen.' 

Pretty soon, the world of punk music would become a commercial darling to labels worldwide,

all because a group of young British musicians got drunk on BBC television.

In 2001, Q Magazine named this the
greatest album cover of all-time.

Punk had been around for a while; mostly underground and in garages. But it was on this day

40 years ago that lead to punk rock becoming a household name and giving birth to a genre

that would dominate the early 80s, British New Wave. 

Happy Birthday, Punk... and God Save the Queen!

    

   

Hip Hop Family Tree by Ed Piskor (potentially Volume 1)

By no definition am I a fan of rap or hip hop music. There are some songs I like and they’re mostly old school stuff like Sugar Hill Gang, RUN DMC (w/ Aerosmith, of course), Fat Boys, and Yes, I’ll admit- Vanilla Ice! I love Queen and David Bowie’s Under Pressure!!!

Anyways, I probably would’ve overlooked this book had I not received the 2014 Free Comic Book Day edition sampler of this book prior. I’ve not read that entire book but it did pique my interest enough that when I found this at the library, I snatched it up.

The book covers the early 70s will block parties and jams in local New York parks starting the earliest experiments with what will eventually be known as rap. It introduces Grand Master Flash, Fab Five Freddy, shows how the Sugar Hill Gang originated, the early days of a young Darryl McDaniel and his friends, a drugged out Russell Simmons, and the chaos and brat that is Rick Rubin. The book ends with Blondie’s Rapture becoming the first mainstream rap hit and the arrival of hip hop on popular TV shows such as Saturday Night Live and 20/20. (This is showing my age somewhat, but I remember that 20/20 special and knowing my dad, I probably was up watching that SNL episode waiting for my mom to get home from work.)

The artist and writer of this book, Ed Piskor, is clearly a fan of hip hop. He crafts the poetry, angst, and rhythms quite nicely. It’s almost as if you can feel the beat when reading this book. However, that doesn’t mean that this is an easy book to read.

Piskor’s dialogue is almost verbatim to how it was spoken 40 years ago. If somebody used slang in their music, that’s how Piskor fills in the word balloons. If somebody left out a syllable or vowel, that’s how Piskor writes this story. That’s not really the problem with this book. Except for maybe reading what Russell Simmons has to say? He was so strung out on dope or weed; it’s like trying to decipher pig Latin.

No, what I had trouble with this book is keeping the cast of characters straight. The inside covers of this book has a “Who’s Who” line-up of almost 100 characters who is some way shaped the evolution of hip hop. Some of the participants aren’t even singers, like Jean-Michael Basquiat, but their art played a major role with the culture and thus he’s in the book. Piskor tries to keep the line-up in order of appearance in the story, but it doesn’t quite work out that way. Plus when you’ve got 35 people who go by the moniker “DJ____”, it’s hard to keep it straight. I found myself going back to those pictorial references and previous episodes in the book often.

Ed Piskor might have had big ambitions. In his afterword, the author rights that he hopes to produce further volumes about the history of hip hop music. Maybe Piskor was afraid to not get a second volume published and thus stacked the deck with a super-sized first volume. If Hip Hop Family Tree gets the green light for a volume 2, hopefully Piskor will reel it in just a little and narrow his scope. Instead of 11 years of history, maybe he’ll focus on just 5.

This is a very good book with an interesting story that’s has piqued my interest in learning and listening more about early hip hop. The art is very good and the brown paper bag-type of paper is an interesting choice. The extras at the end of this book, like the comparison of hip-hop culture with comic book culture, were very smartly crafted. I wouldn’t recommend this book to those under 14 for the use of strong language and drug culture. But, I eagerly await future volumes.

Worth Consuming.

Rating: 8 out of 10 stars.