Chris Franz and Tina Weymouth were the rhythm section of The Talking Heads and founded the Tom Tom Club. When they stopped by WYEP on Oct. 5, 2001 they were promoting an art show and Tom Tom Club concert to benefit citizens of Haiti. As a Pittsburgh native, Franz enjoyed reminiscing about his time here, and the couple talked about the missing masters of some of their biggest hits, and the influence their sons had on their musical knowledge.
Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Rosemary Welsch: We're speaking with Chris Franz and Tina Weymouth who are the heart and soul of Tom Tom Club. But there's this huge rotating group of musicians that always seem to pop up on these records.
Chris Franz: Well, the Tom Tom Club was always meant to be inclusive of a lot of people and a lot of things. That's why we called it a club. We have some musicians that have been with us for years, and then we have some fairly new ones too.
Welsch: So in eight years, the question is, if you're somebody who goes to work and does your blue collar or pink color or white-collar job, what do musicians do whenever we haven't heard from them in eight years? And the answer is you're working.
Tina Weymouth: We only get paid on our successes, so that's the way it works with us. We were doing production for other groups. We worked on Angel Fish, which is Shirley Manson, the singer of Garbage. That was her solo record that she made, which brought her to the attention of Butch Vig. He said, ‘Oh, we've got to have her. You know, she sings really low, you know?’ We worked with her, and we worked with another group from Argentina called, Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. Happy Mondays was another group from England and, you know, various projects. We did a project with our old comrade Jerry Harrison called The Heads. We did it with a whole bunch of artists, which included Andy Partridge and Ed Kowalczyk from Live.
Franz: Debbie Harry, Michael Hutchence.
Weymouth: Richard Hell, Gavin Friday, and it was a really interesting group of people. Then we went out on the road and with Johnette Napolitano, and that was a fun kind of mix. It made us think, we've got to get back to Tom Tom Club because it's about that kind of mixing it up.
Franz: And it's fun for us to play live. It gets us out of the house.
Welsch: It’s one thing when you go into a studio and you make a record, but it's quite another thing when it gets to stage because it's never exactly the same thing. You're going to have different musicians, possibly. You can't totally recreate what you did in the studio, or would you even want to write?
Franz: When you play live, every night is somewhat different than the previous night, and so it keeps it interesting.
Weymouth: And especially because lately we've been aligning ourselves because we are independent now, with our own label. We've been playing with the jam bands, and they don't want you to do it the same every night.
Welsch: You went to The Jammys, which is an award show for all these Jam Bands.
Franz: Yeah, it's like the Grammys, except they call it the Jammys.
Weymouth: Because they mix it all up again, which is something that comes natural to us. And so we've, you know, fit right into that scene.
Franz: Yeah. We did some songs at the jammies with Michael Franti from Spearhead, who's quite a gifted rapper and musician in his own right. And so, yeah, the jam people like it when you mix it up like one member from another band does something with a different band.
Welsch: You did it. You did a cover of a of a fish song on a tribute album.
Franz: It's a song called Sand. Not the world's most exciting title, but it is a pretty exciting song once you get into it.
Welsch: We're speaking with Tom Tom Club, that's Chris Franz and Tina Weymouth. Way back when, of course, Talking Heads, you were the rhythm section of that band, and I have the feeling that the Tom Tom Club was already gelling and sort of waiting to break out and do its own thing, even at that point in time.
Weymouth: Well, we could have I mean, that's true. But, you know, we always felt that we were ideally positioned to be able to work with both bands. There was no reason why we couldn't have continued doing that. Oh, well, you know, you can have any number of things, you know, in life. That's the beauty of it. You have a lot of choices.
Welsch: You have a son who's what, 18 years old?
Franz: We have two boys. One is 18 and one is 15.
Welsch: When you have a kid as an adult, you are open to a lot of different cultural influences that adults who don't have kids, kind of. It just goes over our heads. We don't know about it. These things happen. They come and go quickly. So how does having children impact you knowing what's going on with popular culture and what you're going to do with your music?
"It's cool that the young hip hop people still like the record, and they transform it into something else sometimes."
Franz: Our older son has gotten at it. I mean, we've always been interested in hip hop, but he got us involved with some of the more cutting-edge kind of hip hop people. For example, The Executioners, who are a turntable crew from New York City, four guys, each one plays the turntables, and they create songs out of other people's records. And they're doing on their new album, for example, they're doing yet another version of Genius of Love. Well, what they do is they take our tracks that we send them and press them into vinyl, and one guy plays the bass, and one guy plays the drums, and another guy does vocals, and it’s really pretty wild stuff. So, we're into that. Our younger son is really into the new punk thing. He's exposing us to the all the new punk stuff, which is different than the punk we had in our day. You know, it's much slicker and the musicians are much better, but there's still a lot of that testosterone going on.
Weymouth: We've always had friends of all ages. That was one of the things about the Dead Heads, it would span four generations that you would see at a show. Since our beginnings, we've always had friends of all ages, from age two to 90 something. Having kids might throw it in your face more. But I think if you're an artist and you're traveling and you're out there, you're going to be exposed to all these things anyway.
But it's interesting for us when kids latch on to something old, or fresh, because we would be maybe ignoring something because, oh, well, that we've already seen that, been there, done that, heard that before. The kids come in and they hear it, and they think it's new and or maybe it's a sample, maybe it's the grunge band's going back to, maybe 60s or 70s rock elements and just revisiting that. And it sounds to us like, oh, it's not modern. It's not Avant Garde, it's not cutting edge. But to the kids it is, because that's the way they hear it. They train us to reassess it and not just dismiss it as that's just old hat, revisitation neo post-modern whatever. And they make you look at it the way that they like it, and then their friends do the same thing because they all have their individual taste.
Welsch: It is great to see that your music doesn't go away. We were just talking about the fact that so many people have sampled your music. As a matter of fact, I checked it out, Mariah Carey, which I was totally unaware of. Tupac Shakur, Puff Daddy, Grandmaster Flash, some of the folks that have taken bits and pieces of your songs and brought them to a new generation, so they won't let you go.
Franz: Yeah, it's cool that the young hip hop people still like the record, and they transform it into something else sometimes, but they take elements of it that are totally recognizable. And it's always fun to hear it on the radio again.
Welsch: You were mentioning about the different folks that are in the band and have been through the band. Let's talk about this record, specifically The Good, The Bad and The Funky, because it's a pretty stellar lineup that you put together for this.
Franz: We sort of hibernate in there for a while, and once in a while we need somebody from the outside world to come in. We call them up, or maybe they even call us, and we invite them down to do a bit and, Toots Hibert from Toots and the Maytals, who's really one of the icons of reggae, he's on the record singing a song called She's Dangerous. We also had the late, great Charles Pettigrew, who had a band once called Charles and Eddie that had some big hits over in Europe, but he's from Philadelphia and a marvelous soul singer, you might remember. Charles sings three tracks, and then we have our good friend from Jamaica, Mystic Bowie, on a couple of tracks, toasting and singing, singing a lead Perry song called Soul Fire. And Tina sings a lot. We have one of our friends from Lowe's, Fabulous Cadillacs, played sax and Bernie Worrell, who was in the Talking Heads, and before that, Parliament-Funkadelic. Bernie plays keyboards on a track. So, you know, we have a lot of friends there.
Welsch: The original masters of Genius of Love and Woody Rappinghood. Missing in action. Do you know what happened to them?
Franz: Somebody took them off a reel back in the 80s and sent them to London from the Bahamas, where it was recorded, and that was the last we ever saw of it. We were trying to put together a greatest hits compilation and one of the ideas was you would get some cool new remixers like Fatboy Slim or whatever, to do some remixes of Genius of Love and Wordy Rappinghood, and that was when we discovered the masters were missing.
Weymouth: But of course, we don't own those. Those are owned by the record company. And some time ago Island Records was sold to Warner Brothers. It’s gone through a lot of different transformations, so it's impossible to know what might have happened. It might be discovered. You know, it's our film. Stop Making Sense was the original copies were either lost or destroyed also. And I think that a lot of them are in vaults. Warner Brothers has a lot of its vaults here and in the mines. Old mine shafts right here in the mountains, right outside of town here. Can't find them. I mean, this is this is how the record business works, you know?
Franz: Hey, Rosemary, did I tell you that I grew up in Pittsburgh? That this is like, my hometown? Did I mention that it is.
Welsch: It's been a while since you've been here, though.
Franz: My brother’s here. He’s a Pittsburgh guy.
Welsch: It's a homecoming for you. Back in 74, when we first went on the air, I wonder if you were aware of WYEP at that time. It was a very different station at that time.
Franz: I think at that time I was listening to a Soul Station.
Welsch: Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz are here. Phish does something every so often. I think it's every New Year's Eve, or they take an album and they for that concert, they redo somebody else's album. Yeah. They took on Remain in Light. I mean, did you ever even do all of the material from them?
Franz: No, we didn't. I think it's Halloween when they do it and they call it their musical costume and they did, you're right. They did remain in light at the Omni Amphitheater in Atlanta, Georgia, a few years back, and they really did it note for note. We were pretty amazed when we heard it. We got a cassette copy from friends of ours, kids that said, “Hey, Gene. Hey, man, do you know Phish covered your album? “and we, said, “No, we didn't know.” And then they gave us a tape and they really did a. fantastic job of it. We never played all those songs live.
Welsch: They would be really hard songs to do.
Weymouth: I don't know why we thought they would be so hard. I just think Phish did a really great job. I think we always freaked ourselves out artistically because we never wanted to duplicate our studio albums live. We always saw ourselves as taking it a step further by recreating something fresh and in the moment. Our reputation was that we were even better live than on record. But what's the point of replicating a record note for note?
Now with Phish doing it, it was eight songs. They had an expanded band to do it. I think it was such an homage that when we heard that they had done it and they were doing this tribute, the Mockingbird Foundation contacted us and said, “Have you heard that?” We said, “Oh, yeah. It's really kind of phenomenal because we never would have even considered to do such a thing.” And they said, “Well, they want you to be part of their tribute album, which is a reverse tribute. They asked people who they thought were influences on them to play on the album.” And then the money raised goes to what is one of our favorite causes, which is to keep music education in the schools.
Welsch: Absolutely. Well, we are going to let you go here and let you fly back out there to your hometown. And, you know, you get to show Tina all the places, the landmarks.
Franz: Tina did some of that stuff with me, you know.
Weymouth: Maybe longer. How many years have I been coming here?
Franz: Since the 70s. Yeah, it's been a few years.
Weymouth: I've seen a lot of changes. Yes, it's become really beautiful and hip. And I love it that the Andy Warhol Museum is here. You know, that's quite ironic and yet so terribly good.
Welsch: Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth thank you so much for taking the time out to come in today.
Franz: Thank you. Rosemary.
