JS: Alright. We are recording. It is the… 11th of December. And I'm sitting here with Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth. Did I pronounce your last name correctly?

CF: Well, um, it's fine. I pronounce it "France." Kinda like the country. But Franz is alright. That's fine. That's kinda like the euro way to say it.

JS: Okay. So I guess I'll start by asking… start at the beginning here. Your early experiences with music. What brought you into music, um, how did you start with… uh, with rock and roll, with other forms of music… how did this begin?

CF: Well, I started music with a school band in elementary school. And they star… I liked music, I've always liked music. And I liked the idea of playing music. And I uh… uh… I think my parents… my mother used to take me to the youth symphony and the, and the big symphony also. To see um… you know, classical music performed. And… I guess I should say hear classical music performed. But anyway, um, I started off playing the trumpet, but that didn't work out very well. I um… I just didn't have what it takes to play the trumpet in my, my mouth. In my lips. My embouchure or whatever they call it. So I um… I had a very perceptive band, uh teacher and he said, you know, I think you'd be better off playing the drums. So he moved me to the drums and I did pretty well at that. And mostly we played, you know, concerts in the winter and football games in the fall, and memorial day parade type things in the spring and I really enjoyed it a lot but then the Beatles came out and um… everybody, everybody loved the Beatles and… I wanted to be in a band that was like the Beatles. You know. And… that was the catalyst. And I started playing in little garage bands with my friends from school… sometimes even with people I hardly knew just because they had like instruments and could play, and um… you know one thing led to another. But at the same time I was… I was… um… really pretty keenly interested in painting and drawing and um… I ended up going to… uh… the Rhode Island School of Design and I gave up playing the drums… for a couple years and I… I really missed it. So I guess it was my junior year…

TW: You should also say… it was very hard to decide what to do because Chris was also a writer. And very keenly into literature and into writing…

CF: Yeah, yeah. I was… I was into all that creative stuff, I guess you could say. I didn't… wasn't really sure…

TW: But that's one of the things that never has been told before that would be new for Joel. I mean that you... were… that you were an editor of your newspaper and that you were head of your poetry club…

CF: I had a record review column called the "Listening Eye" in my high school newspaper. I recently re-read… I had to go through… my mother was moving so I had to get all my stuff out of the basement. It had been there since high school. You know. And um… someday you too will have to do this.

[Laughter]

JS: I fear the day.

CF: And… I re-read some of these reviews I wrote for like the Rolling Stones' "Beggars Banquet" album and Sly and the Family Stone, their first album… and um… Traffic, "John Barleycorn must Die" the first Traffic album. It was funny what I said. I was really harsh. But anyway, um… yeah I liked all that stuff but it's… it kinda seemed for a time anyway like rock musicians were a different breed of person, than what I thought I was. So um… I think I fancied myself more as a um… painter. Or I thought that that was more realistic for me. But like I said, I moved to Providence and I did two years at RISD and... I, um… I really started missing my drum set. So, I… next time I went home I brought it up and I started playing in a band again in Providence with my fellow RISD students. And um…

TW: And this is around the time that Chris and I got tight, which was right then when he brought his drums back to school, and um… a new television show called Soul Train began. And Chris had um… Chris was part of a funk band at that time. And we were really… Rock and roll seemed kind of… well, the Beatles had disbanded and the Rolling Stones seemed tired. Rehashes of Chuck Berry and Chuck Berry's predecessors. At that point in time we kind of… we shifted from Rock and Roll. I mean, we loved, we still liked the experimental rock and roll, like um… David Bowie… and um… Mark Boland of T- Rex. Anybody who was doing something a little bit… off…

CF: Lou Reed.

TW: Yeah.

CF: Also, I think Roxy Music came out around that time.

TW: The Stooges…

CF: The Stooges. We got into that kind of stuff. Which at the time I think when… was known as glam rock…

TW: This was around 1971. Yeah. Yeah, I think they called it glam. But we identified…

CF: Or glitter. Glitter rock.

TW: We liked it because they were so outrageous and they were so… you know… non-homophobic which… which you know really kind of meshed with… where we were at and um… but at the same time we were… we were so into um… all the soul stuff. The dance music. James Brown and um…

CF: Well, that was when… that period of time when we were in Providence was when… the Discothèque became kind of a new phenomenon in America. We used to go to the Discothèque and, uh, dance to the early disco records.

TW: And you had to wait to get into the early discothèques in Providence… you know… it was all… it was all gay. All the discothèque scene. So that… so the dance music was gay.

CF: It was called the Gallery. It was in downtown Providence. And… I can't remember what the address was. I don't think it's there anymore. Think it's long gone. It was fun. They let… they let Tina in.

[They both laugh]

TW: I mean, women can be gay too. So it was, um… It was an interesting time.

[A pause]

CF: What's your musical background, Tina?

TW: Well, I'm very similar to Chris. Our backgrounds are so similar it's not funny. But, um… I traveled a lot more than Chris. So I didn't get to learn any music in school. I had one… course in seventh grade or sixth grade. That was wonderful. That started me off on learning how to read music on my own and then I… when I was… 12… and 13… and I guess 14 for almost three years, was the longest I lived in one place. I was part of a group of English hand-bell ringers. And uh… which is… old… kind of mathematical some of it. Some of it was… you might call classical. And we toured the East coast from Virginia to New York. And we did a lot of different shows. And… I got to play in the same World's fair that Bob Marley was playing, that Bob Marley played in… [Laughs] We were both unknown. Everyone was unknown. Anyway, so… so that was the beginning of my… um… of enjoying the idea of… of relationship to others in a… playing in a group. I thought that was just fabulous. But I've always loved music and singing. I used to organize my brothers… my sisters, mostly… my brothers were much too old and much too young, but… into plays, puppet shows, circuses. In fact one of our circuses actually had a talking head in it. Part of our… part of our show.

JS: A talking head? Like a…

TW: It was a talking head.

JS: Was this a… a person? Or was this a…

TW: It was before television started to use the terminology of… of… and it… but it… if you look in one of your older dictionaries you'll see that at one time it referred to… you'd have these things at freak shows where they would prognosticate the future. You know, you'd ask the talking head a question and it was just a disembodied head, like, kind of like a genie or something. Although in our case, what we did in our circuses was we put the talking head was my sister Lonnie. With a stocking over her head. And uh… sticking up out of, you know, a washing machine box. And you'd ask her… you'd ask her any kind of question and she… she'd answer it, and often it would be funny, you know.

JS: And… what age were both of you at this point when you were doing these tours?

TW: Oh I'd guess we were about 12 or 13 and Lonnie must have been… she's 4 years younger so, 8… or 8 years old. Something like that.

JS: How did you all manage to tour around at such a young age?

TW: We didn't tour with… I toured with the hand-bell ringers. But I was the youngest in this group for a long time. But then I think the last year we brought in… at that point my neighbor who was… um… we brought him into the group because he was a big hefty, country Irish boy. Who could… who could swing the big bells. [Laughter] Because you know… the bells were… you had… I had I had… one range of bells. I had… I think it was… [thinks] you'd have, we had the oldest frailest ladies playing the littlest, tiniest bells. And then the big, strong men would be playing the big ones. And they would, they would be as big around as this, and each one would weigh quite a lot. And it took a good strong wrist action to… to set the clapper in action. They're called English hand bells.

CF: Didn't you actually perform in a madhouse once with that?

TW: Oh yes. We performed in St. Elizabeth's insane asylum. That's what it was called back then.

JS: We…

TW: In Washington, D.C. That one was a remarkable show because one of our… one of our favorite scary movies for us kids to watch was "The Snake Pit." And so, going to that show was really incredible because... We had, I mean, as soon as we arrived, we came and… and Mrs. Tuft was the leader and it was her set of hand-bells. And she… she lived in a great old kind of almost like a Vincent Price kind of old Victorian gothic home. It was just incredible. An old mansion with, with, uh, stained glass windows and Chinese dragons and all this dark wood and furniture… actually, I guess you would call it… it was probably built around 1890s. That kind of thing. One of these brick things that looks a lot like a… like a…

CF: Well that's Victorian.

TW: Victorian, yeah. It looked a lot like… but with… with a much darker quality. But similar to Mark Twain's home in Hartford, CT. And Mrs. Tufts… we were Mrs. Tufts English hand-bell ringers. And she got us all the gigs… it was all… all her doing. She taught us everything. And she… and we had… But there was a very interesting experience because, you know, because every single kind of thing happened to us. You know, from being in New York City in Times Square, um, when Times Square was really Times Square. 42nd Street was really interesting. And we stayed at the YMCA. And we, but… I mean we had every kind of interesting experience. We played at um… in Williamsburg. We would wear colonial outfits and be surrounded by re-enactors. So we felt like we were part… it was like time and again. We were… it's like being back… going back in time. Other times we would be wearing Elizabethan outfits, with the high stiff collars and... Those were our two main, main costumes for performance. It was just a great… foundation for me. Because it really taught me to listen, not just to what I was doing, but to what everyone else was doing. And it was right at a formative time… for me. So, it was a terrific… terrific experience. And then when I was 14, we moved to Iceland for two years. Right around the time Bjork was born.

[Joel, Patrick and Chris chuckle]

TW: And my best friends that I… that I had been friends with the three years previously were also Icelandic, so I… we had a real fondness for everything Icelandic, even before we got there. And it was an incredible experience. And, um, our dad was head of NATO there. And it was a fantastic time because he was always… you know he fought in World War II, he fought in the Korean War. Didn't even see me 'til I was five months old. And so he… was a dove within the military who worked to try to keep the peace. He'd already spent, uh, two years in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and the Mediterranean. And he knew a lot about everything there was… he knew a lot about the problems between a congress that doesn't understand how to implement the tools of war and a military that can be a little bit too gung-ho. And so… so it was a very interesting time because it was at the peak of the Cold War, the Beatles had come out, Kennedy had been assassinated. And so they, they were all like scientists where… at the base in Keflavik. And they had a very friendly kind of competition with the Russians. Where the Russians would send over a little note saying "ha ha, we saw you! We saw you with your Polaris submarine spying on us!" And… and then we would… we would send back, "Aha! Guess what? We found you out. What you were doing here. And we know all about your plan here." And it was a… it was really kind of… right at the same time as the race for space. And it was really a very fascinating time because what it was doing was in fact creating a peace… but… it was a peaceful time where there was actually no war… except for this… you know… lousy Vietnam war that was starting right at that time. But it was a time of technology, everything that you're using right now, this was all developed by NASA and by… and by kids like yourself working in MIT, you know working with military contracts to figure things out. All the… all the video games that kids use today, that they play. They were all developed originally by the military. So there's a way to use this technology really peacefully and in a friendly way.

So this was a very interesting time in our lives because I was coming of age… we had all the NASA, the Apollo astronauts come up and stay with us and they would even… as big as the Beatles were… and as much as I really enjoyed the Beatles… I also thought that the Apollo astronauts, that they were real heroes that I met and went camping with. And so, you know, I wasn't seduced by "Rolling Stone" [magazine] or any of the hype. And.. plus being a girl, I didn't go into rock and roll because I wanted to get chicks, you know, or… and I never ever imagined that you could make money from it. It didn't look like something that very many people could make money at. It seemed like something that.… and this is still the case… that maybe a couple… 0.2 percent might be treated like royalty but the rest are starving. So to me, being a musician or being a painter or being a writer, it was all the same. And it's not something that you choose, it chooses you. And so all of this experience was great, and I learned to play guitar out of books… Bob Dylan… was big. The Beach Boys was big. But I was learning first acoustic guitar. And just learning to play folk songs. Traditional American folk songs seemed to be… the… to me… the authentic thing at a time when a lot of white bands were seemingly stealing from black rock and roll. And so… for us, Woody Guthrie, these were big heroes. Yes of course there were other heroes like Jimmy Hendrix. But he hadn't really happened by 1965. You know? That would come later. And then, we would get… he really helped everybody. That and Civil Rights. It helped all of us come together. And then it seemed okay… for a white chick to start playing black funk, electric rock music. But until these elements came together, it seemed an impossibility… of sort of girls in rock and roll. By the time I graduated from high school in '68, there was a group called Fannie. Are you familiar with Fannie? They were a lesbian group?

JS: Can't say I have.

TW: And that was the problem! It's that they were… you know… they were kind of the first all girl rock and roll group. [Long pause] But that was the problem that you would get… you would have… you would be stigmatized, immediately stereotyped by your gender. And so a lot of barriers needed to come down that had not yet come down. Civil Rights helped, but it was a long long haul. You know? It started in '61 and it took a long long time, it took… by '71 you had James Brown singing, you know… you know…

JS: I'm black and I'm proud.

TW: I'm black and I'm proud! But it took a long time. And it took a long time for... for white kids to feel like we can do this and we can do it in an integrated way. But it happened. The hippies helped a lot. Because, you know, they were at the same time when Nixon came in, in the early 70s. He was demonizing both the hippies and black Americans, saying that all black Americans basically were junkies and all hippies were, you know, pot heads. And so that kind of put us all in… lumped us all together in one and it actually unified, unified everything, in a sense. And it put people who had been kind of neutral… suddenly, it polarized people. And that's why you had all of the anti-war demonstrations as well. Vietnam was so… hideous, and so wrong-headed. Even people within the military were so disillusioned by it. And you know, it was terrible for our veterans. It was… just… dreadful. And after two years in Iceland, playing my guitar in Iceland alone in my room we moved to California and hardly saw my father for two years. He did two tours of duty in Vietnam back to back. And it was… an incredible time because by now the war had escalated and it really changed everything about how music was going to be. It could no longer be this happy kind of pop thing, and the Beatles were starting to address it… with pretty… heavy songs and that kind of changed everything. And it was being televised. You know? To see people being killed on television. '63 came Kennedy and Oswald, murdered in front of our eyes on television… you know, it was unheard of. But then by '64 and '65 when you would see the film clips, the newsreels on television, to see the North Vietnamese executing people, you know, with a gunshot to the head… you know, it was just unheard of! This was all new and it just changed everybody's kind of… point of view about this. And it changed…

CF: Though that famous shot is a South Vietnamese army officer executing a Vietcong.

TW: Oh that famous one, yes. But we saw them over and over again.

CF: Yeah, the stuff on TV was horrifying.

TW: It was horrifying and it changed the way that everybody looked at everything. And then you know… Life Magazine pictures and…

CF: And then you know, there was Kent State where students got shot and killed by the National Guard for protesting against the Vietnam war. You know that was like 70 miles from my home when it happened.

TW: Kind of extraordinary. But you see, they were… you could see that they were already… there was already at that point in time… there was already a large corporate world group that was trying to take over the United States' government and the world…

CF: But in fairness, we…

TW: They've been trying to do it for all that time.

CF: …when we got into music and stuff, I don't think that we were particularly, uh, politically motivated…

TW: We wanted to stay away from politics.

CF: Yeah, I mean it's not like we didn't have our political opinions or anything but we… we weren't writing protest songs.

TW: No, we intentionally… the Talking Heads decided that what we were was kind of fractured modern man. It was a philosophy and a vision. And… um, we dressed like everyman because we wanted to have clothes that anybody could buy. We did not want to put ourselves on a pedestal. We did not want to be rock and roll stars. You know?

CF: There was not one pair of satin trousers among us.

TW: And…

[All laugh]

JS: Or leather trousers for that matter.

CF: We've got the leather trousers now.

TW: Yeah, thanks to mad cow disease! They finally came down in price.

[All laugh, especially Chris- he has a deep, infectious belly laugh]

CF: But, we uh, yeah. We should get back to Rhode Island, though.

TW: Yeah. We got to Rhode Island and it was… by then, you see… we did all of our protests in '71, the war was ended and the recession was on. Big time. And all the big cities were in deficit. New York particularly was broke. But the art was so exciting. But, you know… Andy Warhol and… Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein, Helen Frankenthaler. They all lived in the city. They hadn't escaped, you know, they hadn't run away… yet. They all lived in the city and they worked in the city. And… the bands had stopped kind of happening except for things like the New York Dolls. You know, the clubs then you could only play cover bands, cover songs. There were only cover bands. Top 40 cover bands. And the bar… it's quite similar to now, in a sense that… they did not want to hear original music. Original music was made by "real bands"… and they were somewhere in some… other worldly place in… in "radio land." You know? And… they were throwing coddles and driven around in limousines and they did wear satin. And so we were going to change all that because Chris and I, we shared a studio in Carr house. Now sadly there's no studio there. But it was the most marvelous place.

CF: Right on the corner of Benefit and… Waterman St? That comes up the hill there?

JS: Yeah.

CF: Right on that corner. Caddy-corner across from that big sculpture at the front of RISD right there? [Editor's note: I've cut out about a minute and a half of conversation in which we map out the streets of the neighborhoods because I mix up Benevolent and Benefit Sts.] Anyway we shared a painting studio together. In our Junior year.

TW: And we had this little radio…

CF: Or was it our senior year? Junior and Senior?

TW: Senior year.

CF: Senior year. It was our senior year, I guess.

TW: By now it's 1973.

CF: We would listen to the radio while we were painting and we would say to each other, "This really sounds like shit. We could do better than this." [Laughs]

TW: Well it was always the same old same old, you know? A lot of Jim Croce.

CF: [Laughs] "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown."

TW: A lot of songs like "Tidy Yellow Ribbon," "Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road." Um, you know? Then there'd be Paul Simon which wasn't anything like early Simon and Garfunkel. No more "Bridge Over Troubled Water," no more "Feelin' Groovy." It was things like "Code of Chrome." Just kind of…

CF: The Eagles and Elton John.

TW: Yeah. Which, not… nothing against any of those people, but… we… it was such a constant diet of the same which is what Clear Channel is giving us now. It was… petrifying to the mind. It was stultifying. Horrible. And there was no variety. And… we just thought… this is very unexciting, this is really dreadfully pedestrian and banal. And.. it's not going anywhere and everything that has been, that the Beatles had started with "Sgt. Peppers" and "Let it Be" had just sort of died, you know? And..

CF: Well not really. It had gotten sort of… the whole idea of an "Art Rock" album had become Yes, Yes. And Deep Purple and stuff like that that were… that was kinda… God, I don't know.

TW: It got very pretentious.

CF: It had a lot of emphasis on virtuosity. Kind of an empty virtuosity. That didn't appeal to me.

TW: It made something like Alice Cooper seem so much more appealing because as stupid as it was, it… there was something very appealing about someone who was just in your face… Horrible. [Laughs, long pause searching for thought] Which I guess is what Marilyn Manson represents to a lot of kids today. [Pause] So, that's our early. That's our early, formative years.

JS: Wow.

TW: And I wasn't playing an instrument. Chris started a band…

CF: Well maybe you have another question that you'd like to… direct the flow of conversation.

JS: Well, I have been throwing down these notes as we've been chatting, but certainly feel free to go off… and say all that's on… on your mind as you go through this. I think that the best things that can come out here are probably going to be, you know, two or three steps away from anything that I directly ask. Um… I did throw down a couple of notes here as you were all talking… a couple little follow up things I just wanted to ask… um… first thing that I have here was that you said that your teacher… um… I guess this must have been in your much… your very young years… said that, you know… saw that you aren't the greatest trumpet player and decided, "he should try drums." Do you know what made him make that decision?

CF: Well, he was a percussionist himself, his specialty was like marimbas and, you know, mallet instruments. And, um… maybe… who knows? Maybe he needed a drummer in the band or something. But he steered me in that direction, along with a few other kids. But I sort of… I got it better than they did. And… and then my parents bought me a little drum set for Christmas. Which was great. I can still remember that I was so excited. My father was hinting that I was gonna get one, but then at the same time he would say, "oh no, I'm not going to get you that." But he would drop these hints that he was… I had a strong feeling that I was going to get a drum set for Christmas. I can still remember that night, like not sleeping the whole night and… waiting to go downstairs and see my… see if I got the drum set. Which I did.

JS: How old were you at that point, then?

CF: Twelve.

JS: Twelve-ish?

CF: Yeah.

JS: Interesting.

CF: Yeah.

JS: And um… I guess the, the big follow up question that I had wanted to ask you [to Ms. Weymouth] is that you had mentioned this kind of… these genderized roles… if that's a word. I suppose that it is. Um… that especially during the '60s defined, you know, rock and what a young girl could see herself being… or not being allowed to be. And I guess my question then is… um, you mentioned some of the things that you thought brought that down, brought down some of those walls, but it strikes me that a bunch still remain? Um, and that kind of…

TW: I guess the big thing that brought down those walls was the pill. Which actually my doctor, Dr. Sachs, he's 95 now. He was one of the three guys who worked on the development of that. And it came out in 1964. And… that changed the double standard. It took time for it to change, but it changed the double-standard. So that, you know… It changed the way young girls could be. We didn't have such things as "date rape." We didn't call it that back then. We called it "putting yourself in a bad situation." Which meant… it put all of the responsibility on the girl. In other words, the only way you could protect yourself, your reputation and your future was to not have any adventure, to not do anything, to not go anywhere. To just stay domesticated. Safely tamed. And it certainly meant that you weren't going to be able to go on tour with a rock band. And if you did, girls were… they were… groupies. But these were all considered, you know, when I was a young girl these would be considered fallen women. And so it was… it was really quite a switch because… you know what happens later, because when in 1968 when Linda LeClair burned her bra at Columbia University… and I entered, actually about '67… spring of '68 and I entered Barnard Columbia in the autumn… I went there for two years before I went to RISD. And that is… that is really kind of really changed… the viewpoint.

And we had African American women who were really asserting their… I think they were kind of the leaders in a lot of ways for women. Because they had been the matriarchs that had held together African American families. Because even when slaves were separated, you know, it was always the women who raised the kids. Even when their husbands were sold away from the family. Their boys were sold away from the family. But the African American women, they kept… they kept it going. They would take care of other women's children. They created still a hub. So I… my sophomore year… My first year at Barnard I was a freshman with my first Jewish girlfriend. And she was very into SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. And she was also, you know, she also played guitar and she eventually became a film-maker and a documentary film-maker and a writer. She was very very smart. So I learned… I was very much an observer of these young women. I was not an activist myself. I was really learning from other people around me. I had had such a different background. So, I was observing how other people did things. And then my sophomore year I roomed with… I had a short time where I was not at Barnard and I was… I worked at Head Start in Virginia and that taught me an awful lot about… what it's like on the other side of the fence. You know, I'd had a… a middle class upbringing basically. You know, I was comfortable in every situation. From sitting with a truck driver in a diner to knowing which fork to use and what to say to a duchess. I'd had such a sophisticated upbringing, but at the same time I think like so many Americans I was very very naïve about what it was like to be black, to be… in a ghetto. So these things I was trying to learn, and then when I went back to Barnard, I roomed with four African American girls. And so they were really the leaders, in a sense. Because they were pushing through things because… in a way that.. even beyond what most of the white girls I knew were doing.

Because there's still that double standard going on. And I thought that I learned so much from all of them. And from their compassion as well as from their toughness. They knew what to be tough about. And what to hold out on. And what to hold out for. And so when I went to Rhode Island School of Design, I was by that time quite… focused on drawing and painting and learning my craft. And wanting to sort of calm down all the exterior influences. The war was over. And that's why I said, we started to just not want to be too political. We wanted to just be artists. And we felt that if you started to… you know if you get on the soap-box for something, it could really kind of close people off to listening to what you had to say. So our whole thing was once we formed the Talking Heads in '74, '75 in New York it was to be allowing the listener to make their own interpretations. We really wanted it to be truly democratic. In other words, not telling people what to think or what to do, but encouraging them to think for themselves. And so that seemed to us the most important way to be political. [Pause]

JS: Very… interesting and illuminating stuff. I just wrote down here actually, I don't know if you're familiar… and this is kind of a bit off topic… with a book called Where the Girls Are. It brings up a bunch of the same points that you just made. I actually read it for a class in popular culture last year.

TW: Really? I have not read that.

JS: Particularly about young African American girls leading the… leading the way in this.

TW: Yeah, they helped us white girls see that hey… you know. They weren't just going bra-less, they were letting their hair go out to here. And you know, we'd been strapped into girdles and bras and panty-hose. And makeup and all of these things. And hair curlers! The whole idea that your basic value was as a home-maker and that… you needed to be marriageable and therefore beautiful meant that so many girls had Cinderella complexes. You know, they all wanted to be rescued from a kind of drudgery. And the black girls, boy they were fighters. They did lead the way. And they were… they stopped straightening their hair, they grew it out to here. They had these thick afros. They did whatever they wanted. They even had fist-fights with their boyfriends. So… it changed our whole sort of perspective about what is a "nice girl." It changed the double-standard too. And it changed our whole viewpoint. Changed our religion, even.

CF: But when you started playing bass guitar with Talking Heads, there was maybe… there was no women playing bass or any other instrument at CBGBs.

TW: Well, not in our milieu, but…

CF: There were none.

TW: There was Carol Kay…

CF: Out in California.

TW: A bass player, who'd been trained…

CF: Who nobody ever saw her. She was behind the scenes. There was one person, Suzie Quatro that performed. But she was in England but she soon quit and became a TV star on "Happy Days." [Laughs] So, Tina was really like the pioneer of that… of a young woman playing an instrument that wasn't like… that was not singing. You know? There was Debbie Harry who was singing. There was Annie Golden who was singing with the Shirts. There was Patty Smith who was singing. There was nobody just rocking on a guitar. Except for Tina.

TW: Right, right. But I don't think of myself as a.... [Simultaneously with Mr. Frantz's words below] I always thought that what I brought was a little more than just being female…

CF: There was no Kim Gordon. There was Kim Deal, you know? There was no Courtney Love, you know? There was none of that. And people really took notice of it.

TW: Yeah, they did. It became…

CF: Which of course drove David Byrne crazy.

TW: Well, he didn't like anybody noticing anybody but himself. You know, it's like… he always wanted to be the diva. And he was.

CF: And he still is. [Laughs]

TW: Yeah. He is the diva.

CF: I'm just going to take a quick break to make another pot of tea for you all.

TW: Oh, that's a great idea.

CF: I'll be right back. [Exits to kitchen]

JS: Alright.

Brief conversation about the recording device I am using. This dialogue has been cut.]

JS: Um… I'm going to continue with my questions in a second. But before I do, Patrick do you have anything that you want to throw out, add, ask? Anything like that?

PC: Just from the music end of it, you mentioned that you were listening to a lot of funk…

TW: You know, Sly and the Family Stone was just wonderful. And he had this whole kind of… cool way of being. And of course there were others. I mean, there was Cool and the Gang. Sly like Cool, he had this concept of, of a whole musical family. And everybody sang and everybody played. And there was something just really positive and unifying about that because it wasn't about a diva. I mean, you know… and I liked that. I like the idea that… of being in a group…of like-minded equals… you know where there wasn't one beautiful star and the rest were the drones, there wasn't one queen bee and the rest were the drones, the worker bees. It was that everybody was an incredible, equal artist. Really, really smart. I mean that's how we formed Talking Heads and that's how we got Jerry Harrison to come into the group. Same thing. Very very difficult to find members for our group. And once Chris had laid the foundation, him and David, then it seems he had to keep it going with the same kind of… excellence throughout. And it was very hard for him to find other people. And he had been trying to get me to be in the band for a couple of years and I kept saying… it's not appropriate for me to be in it. But I was really… I was really loving what they were doing. And I was keenly attracted by the rhythms and the melodies combined… that he and David were doing, were playing. And I didn't see anybody else doing that sort of thing and I began to see how I might fit in, because of my own aesthetic.

And Chris really did not let go. He was very very persistent. And… he… it meant so much to me because I loved him. It meant so much to me be able to give to him that which he really wanted. But I had to overcome all of my fears because they were tremendous. Because I was going against every kind of, every kind of standards in order to join this. In order to join them. And it was really tough. And… I found myself really, in a really tight spot a lot, because of it. I had women who were unsupportive and very jealous and cruel on the one hand. And I had men who were really jealous and really cruel on the other hand. On both sides. And there was really only one person in my corner, and that was Chris. And it only grew and my brother was very encouraging, but he kept saying… "you should... he was so much older… I just keep hearing you doing some 'oohs' behind David." And at first we had actually thought we would get a singer. We thought David's guitar work was great and both Chris and David wrote, but Chris started off writing kind of the early proto-types of what a Talking Heads song would be like.

And then David very quickly absorbed that and learned it and Chris was kind of giving to both of us books to read, like The Outsiders by… um… what's his name? Wilson… book written by a guy when he was only 24 years old, kind of an amazing book about the different aspects of the psyche, of a genius artist. Like, you know, ranging from… Lawrence of Arabia to Lacinski. Different kinds of artists in different fields. And… so that and… William Burroughs. I remember David reading that and really liking the sort of cut and paste aspect of it. And that was… and we had a lot of artists around us. People at RISD who were very very… I would say very influential. Like Rudy Cheeks. Rudy was very influential on David because David lived in the same house with him. And David, David has always been the type who just becomes like whatever he's around. So if he's around interesting people, he mirrors back all of those interesting things. And it was… Andrea Koufax, was an artist, a visual artist… photographer. She was very influential. She and David dated for, oh I don't know, about two years. And he got a lot of his style from her. And as well as from me and Chris. So it was a… it was a very expectant time. One of our… one of our goals was to jam, to write songs. And one of our goals was to try to… as a trio was try to… no one would duplicate what the other was already doing. Except to re-enforce and accent.

[Chris lays down new pot of tea and pours]

So, for instance, since we couldn't find a singer who would join us, and David was singing all the parts, it seemed really important to me that the parts that I write, and 'cause we were trying to not just be rock and roll but be this kind of modern, modern entity. And changing music and being really different. We were trying to avoid any kind of blues… blues-ism. So I tried very hard always to write melodic lines that would… that would pull together what Chris was… the rhythms Chris was playing on the drums and the vocals that David was making. The guitar was almost a rhythm guitar, so in a sense… and then when he wasn't singing he could break into these little melodic lines, so my role seemed to be to not be peddling along, but to… since he was … whenever they were holding down the foundation of the rhythm, my role would then be to be then… then insinuating a kind of a melodic line, a counterpart to that and a harmony to David's vocal with the bass guitar.

When Jerry Harrison joined later, after most of the first two albums were written… he joined before we recorded the first album but most of the songs I would say were written. His first… the quickest way for him to become part of the group was to create kind of paths and so he would often be duplicating chord progressions or inverting chord progressions. If it was on guitar, he would just be doing inversions of what David was doing. But it was fleshing it out and making it lusher and fatter, but not… it wasn't always the interplay that we weren't able to do. Then afterwards when we sat down for the third album and the fourth album, "Fear of Music" and "Remain in Light" which to our minds… those are our masterpieces because those were the ones where we sat down as a quartet now, as a real quartet where we were not duplicating each other. Where there was a real interplay and where we were leaving spaces where the silences were as important as the noise. And we're really working out together and writing these songs together so that… everybody has a different role. A different part, but that each part of the arrangement is an orchestrated part. "Speaking in Tongues" is kind of a continuation of that, as is "Naked." Both of those were similar and they had some great songs on them also, but I think… that…

It's important that people understand how, how critical it was, the elements of those people that you would've never had the sound that was Talking Heads without those four people. You can hear early work with the trio and it's already in place, but the full thing does not happen until you have Jerry, and even when you have eight people in the band, it's still the same… it's still all written by the four. And I still think it's a wonderful… even today it all holds up. It's a wonderful piece of work. A really good tapestry. [She picks up her tea.] Thank you, Chris.

CF: Cheers.

JS: Cheers.

PC: How did Jerry Harrison come to be in the band? In all of the readings… <\p>

CF: We were looking for a keyboard player, fourth member. And one night Tina and I were at this restaurant in the West Village that Mickey Ruskin who was the owner of Max's Kansas City owned called the local. And he didn't know Max anymore but he had this place "The Local." And I recognized one of the guys there as being the bass player for the Modern Lovers, Ernie Brooks. He was at another table and I went up and introduced myself… we had a connection in that his uncle was my father's partner in a law firm. So I introduced myself and I said, "you know, by the way, we're looking for a keyboard player. Do you know anybody?" 'Cause we didn't really know that many musicians. And he said, "Well Jerry's not doing anything right now." [Laughs] In fact that's not really true. Jerry was at Harvard getting a master's degree in Architecture. But he wasn't in a band at the time so I guess that's what he meant. So we went up to visit. We made a phone call to Jerry and… we had a gig in Cambridge… I forget the name of the venue it was some club that doesn't exist anymore. It might have been called "The Club" or something like that. In Cambridge. And… Jerry came to the show and then the next day we went by his house and had a little chat with him at his apartment. Had a little chat with him. Then we got him to… come down to New York and sort of rehearse with us. It was funny, he didn't bring keyboards, he brought a guitar, [Laughs] 'cause I guess he wanted us to know he could also play guitar. And also I think it was too hard to carry a… we didn't have synthesizers then, but he had like a Farfisa organ and a Fenderose and he came down on a train and it was too heavy to carry one of those on a train. So he brought the guitar and… it sounded real good when he got added to the mix and we could tell that he had a… we shared a similar sensibility, you know? And we really liked what the Modern Lovers had done on that first record of theirs. So it took us a while, we had to kind of twist his arm to join the band because he'd been burned with Jonathan Richmond. You know, they put a lot of time and energy into that band and then at the last minute after they'd signed a record deal and everything Jonathan flipped out and wanted the band to play very quietly… and he basically wanted to go acoustic. And the rest of the band was not into…

TW: And Jerry was right. Jerry was right because he'd had an experience with one person who was so out of control and was therefore a control freak. And he recognized it again. Did you tell about the…

CF: No, I didn't get to that yet. I'm just talking about how we got him in.

TW: But thank God that we did get him in because if we hadn't… we would never have made the project. I mean, come on, let's face it a lot of great art was made with real assholes. Like Picasso. Think of Picasso and Brach. That painting. It… Brach was definitely the innovator of that Cubism. But think of Picasso egging him on. Matisse was definitely the innovator of that new modern art, but think of Picasso egging him on. You know? So it's a real… it's an important thing that there's always a balance in this world. You can't… If you have George Bush in office you're going to have an Osama Bin Laden. That's how it works. And there's always going to be a balance. And you need certain kinds of elements that help other elements to happen. Otherwise… in Utopia nothing would ever happen. It would just be… it would be like living among the Shakers. That's the closest thing to Utopia that's ever existed. But they didn't even have children. They didn't even have sex. They could only adopt. You know? [Laughs] Nothing epical could ever really take place. [Pause]

JS: [To Patrick] Did you want to continue?

PC: No.

JS: Alright, um… It tempts me here to go back and do a little bit more in Providence… but I think we're already kind of…

CF: Yeah, why not? Go ahead.

TW: Yeah.

JS: Alright. We'll, I guess, certainly continue on with Jerry Harrison and… did you mention by the way… what… you mentioned for you to mention this incident that solidified Jerry Harrison or something like that? I wasn't sure if that was…

TW: He almost didn't join the band.

CF: Well, he came down to play this gig. I got this… my brother had a friend in New Jersey who was willing to pay us to come and play at his house for a party. And now, we didn't usually do that type of thing but because it was my brother we said we would do it. And we needed the money. Because we could play at CBGBs and we could play at Max's, but…

TW: But only once a month.

CF: You couldn't play to often or you… risked over-exposing yourself.

TW: Well, not only that but that's how the contracts were.

CF: Well, anyway. So, yeah they didn't want to… Hilly Crystal who owned CBGBs would, if he liked you, you could play once a month or one weekend a month or something. But that wasn't enough to support ourselves, really. So we got this job in New Jersey and Jerry came down to play it. And we went over there… the guy brought a pickup truck over and we loaded our gear into this pickup truck and rode over to New Jersey. And played and David was immediately very unhappy there. I think it was because it was a very amateurish, playing in somebody's living room.

TW: It was a house party. He couldn't really be a diva in a house party.

CF: Yeah. So…

TW: And he didn't have a spotlight on him.

CF: And I think maybe he didn't think the kids there were cool enough for us or something like that. This was a long time ago. But it's pictured… the show is pictured on the album cover of "The Name of this Band is Talking Heads" which was never released on CD but it's on vinyl. And you see us playing in this suburban living room. With like…

TW: Got these fish, little plaques on the wall…

CF: Little plaques of fish on the wall behind us and stuff.

JS: [To Patrick] Isn't that what you found randomly at a… some store last year or something like that?

PC: No…

JS: [Chuckles awkwardly]

CF: It's going to come out on CD later this… in 2004. But anyway…

TW: Got a great photo session out of it.

CF: …David got mad. And he started… he all of a sudden… he wanted us to play… you know, we were all really earnest, we'd been practicing and practicing. And all of a sudden, he started to play this song which we had never rehearsed before and which Tina had never even heard of before. Called "Slippin' and a Slidin'."

TW: Well, actually I had heard of it once before. It's the one lesson David ever gave me, but I hadn't played it in two years…

CF: Anyway, David was…

TW: … I couldn't remember it. We didn't have tape-recorders then.

CF: David was having this sort of temper tantrum in the middle of our little set. And he… he suddenly called out, "let's play Slippin' and a Slidin'." Which we had never practiced and nobody knew like what key it was in or anything like that…

TW: He had… what it was a confidence crisis.

CF: Jerry, who had come down from Boston to do this show with us was like… "wait a minute, what's going on in this guy's mind that all of a sudden he wants to play Slippin' and a Slidin'?" This was not in the days of jam bands when you just, like, got up on stage and jammed out. You had to have everything rehearsed and try to appear professional. So that made Jerry have second thoughts and we… serious second thoughts about whether this band was ever going to… like, be worth his time or not.

TW: Well, he could see that there was an instability there.

CF: Yeah. [Laughs] It was hard to hide the fact that there was an instability.

TW: But we persuaded Jerry. We said, "look, there is instability but the gamble is worth the risk. Because when it works, it works so very very well. And if we can keep his confidence up, you know, because it is a problem of ego. Too small ego. And if we can keep his confidence up, then we'll… it'll all work out." But Jerry was right. I mean, he [David Byrne] did do this repeatedly, freak out repeatedly, but you know… we always… he became one of the team. Jerry became one of the team, to know how to keep it interesting and going. And Chris and I, when David would leave the group, we would call up Brian Eno and say come on over and jam and David would come running over. And when David left the group again, Jerry called up a bunch of people and we formed the first big band. You know, just keep it… keeping it…

CF: Keeping it interesting.

TW: …interesting and keeping it changing and giving him a sense of reinforcement ,of having like an army behind him. And he felt really powerful.

JS: So a lot of your… I guess you're alluding to hear that a lot of these changes here… the expansion of the band, you know, some of these kind of experiments that you did were in part to bring David Byrne back into the…

TW: They weren't calculated as "oh, what'll we do now to wow the fans?" They were calculated to basically… to bringing… to getting the band working again. Because, you know, how do you get David working with the band? He would just kind of wander off into some other zone. And sometimes it backfired, like the last time. I mean, it did backfire, finally, because Chris and I took David out to a really wonderful Latin restaurant with a live Latin band and said, you know, "isn't this wonderful music?" Because we'd just been to Brazil, and we wanted to introduce him to something fresh and new again. And… in a sense David just thought "I don't need anybody except myself." You know? And hired a bunch of Latin session players. So that's what he did.

JS: When was this dinner and…

TW: 1985.

JS: '85.

CF: You know, we're getting pretty far from Rhode Island and the avant garde there. [Laughs]

TW: No, in Rhode Island… David had been to school… he went freshman year to RISD, and the same freshman… same year Chris went.

CF: 1970.

TW: Okay. And then, at the end of the year he left. He dropped out of school. He never returned to school. He followed a friend who was going back to Baltimore. He meant, there was a girl named Naomi Riechesbaird. Was a painter. She's a painter to this today. And she, she had been going to school at the College of Art in Baltimore. And had a boyfriend there, whose name was Mark Kehoe. Also known as Walter Kapusta. And both of the boys… and then David formed this bond with this couple… they became like mom and dad… and David formed this bond and he… everything… Mark Kehoe's a very inventive guy. He's a graphic designer in New York City now. And he was a very inventive guy. And he would do things like get a gig at the Playboy Club and then invite David to come along. Because he was kind of a… Mark was very much of an anarchist. And so he introduced David to the concept of anarchy. Before that I think David was kind of… had been… groomed by his parents to be a very good little… to be a very straight little scientific researcher. And… tried to be on student council and that kind of thing. But Mark Kehoe was a really different kind of character. And his girlfriend Naomi was wild. It was… they were like this crazy… like the Golchadito (sp?) or something. The two of them together were quite a pair. So David… followed them back up to Rhode Island School of Design because Naomi reapplied. Applied to RISD and got in. David reapplied to RISD but was not let in. And…

CF: Well, they didn't like that he was admitted and then had left.

TW: Well, who knows why? We don't know why.

CF: Okay. That's just an assumption on my part. [chuckles]

TW: He always used to tell us the story that they said, "well, you don't need us." You know. His portfolio this time was Xeroxes of etch-a-sketch of all 50 states. Now, I think just conceptually alone it was a pretty clever idea, because how do you get a Xerox of an etch-a-sketch without ruining the picture? Just flipping the etch-a-sketch over. But David somehow managed to do it. But they didn't like that because they knew what David's… altogether they decided not to let him back in. And we don't know really why. Wal… Mark Kehoe, also known as Walter Kapusta, was hanging around RISD and making films. And so he decided he wanted to make a film of… about Naomi getting run over by a car.

JS: [Chuckles]

TW: And they needed some… some music for his film. And so he asked Chris to organize it. And he also asked David, who was always there. And so they came over to where I was living, over the garage in my parents' house. It was right next to the tennis courts. We'd set up Chris' drums there because he could practice without bothering anybody because it was right next to the tennis courts, and nobody cared…

CF: The courts are still there on the corner of Hope and Benevolent Sts.

JS: They're still there but they're not looking very good.

TW: No, they look terrible.

CF: And right behind the courts on Benevolent St. is a yellow house, or at least it used to be yellow, with a carriage house and the carriage house there was where Tina lived and where I… she allowed me to keep my drum set which was very nice of her.

TW: Well, I loved it. I loved having him play drums there.

CF: I would go over and practice and make out with Tina. [Laughs]

TW: When he was playing drums, I tell you, just him all alone with nobody else playing, it was music. His tiny…

CF: So anyway, Mark had this idea that David and I would collaborate on this soundtrack. Just create some… improvise some music. Cacophonous music.

TW: Well, that's what David came up with. You were playing some really great, great groovy stuff. And David was playing this horrible a-tonal, metal clanging noise.

CF: And Mark recorded it on a little reel to reel tape recorder and that was the soundtrack for his film. But afterwards David said, you know, "I could play other stuff too." And I was looking for somebody to start a band with because we wanted to… I wanted to have a band that could perform at RISD like Rudy Cheeks' band the Motels had done. And didn't… and also the other Motels were like Dan Gosh and Charlie Rocket, also known as Charlie… his real name is Charlie Clavery. Who was kicked off of Saturday Night Live for saying the "F" word. He became an actor and was on Saturday Night Live and he said the F word and got kicked off the air. But anyway… and fired from the show. But I wanted a band like that that could perform at RISD parties and dances and stuff because there wasn't one after the Motels had kind of disbanded. And David seemed like an interesting cat, you know? He had like… [laughs] He had his hair bleached but he would bleach it with Clorox, wouldn't he?

TW: He didn't know about peroxide.

CF: Not like… oh, man. It was really wild looking. And he… he was real kind of… he and Mark Kehoe… Mark was always getting drunk all the time… I don't think he still does that.

TW: No.

CF: But he would get drunk all the time and… you know.. throw up in somebody's dormitory room, you know? He was kind of persona non-grata at a lot of places at a lot of places but we liked him, despite all that… Anyway, David and I formed this band and we called it the Artistics and we ended up playing at a few, not that many but a few, RISD events. In particular this… we kind of organized the whole thing ourselves along with Tina. A Valentine's Day ball.

TW: We formed a club called the Painting Club.

CF: We figured out that the rule at RISD was that the club with the most members got the most money. Like whoever formed a club you got the amount of money… the amount of money you got to support your club was… directly related to how many people were in the club. So we formed the Painting Club and we got like half the school to join the Painting Club.

JS, PC: [Laugh]

CF: And we got enough money to… we paid ourselves… I remember we paid ourselves $150.

TW: Total.

CF: And we spent all the rest of the money on liquor.

TW: Oh yeah, it was totally for the parties.

CF: Tequila, vodka and beer.

TW: But it was a good party, I mean because it brought a lot of diverse people together who never met. Who never normally would ever would see each other.

CF: It was fantastic. I remember Andre Leon Talley that we were talking about before [he was mentioned casually before the interview began] came down from Brown and wrote a big piece for the RISD paper about what a… you know, it was the party of the year and all that. And the Artistics played. And we played a number of cover songs that we did, plus two songs that we wrote together… "Psycho Killer" and "Warning Signs." I think there was a song called "Sick Boy" that we wrote too which was later dropped from our repertoire for some reason although it was pretty good song.

TW: I didn't like it.

CF: You didn't like it?

TW: I… well, I think "Sick Boy" was probably the first kind of…

CF: It was real punk.

TW: It was very dark. [Sings oddly] "Sick boy. I don't feel well." I remember the beginning.

CF: Yeah. [Laughs]

TW: It would… it was just… it made David really unattractive, the way he would do it.

CF: Maybe so. Anyway…

TW: It made too much of his autism.

CF: [Simultaneously as she speaks] Where were we going with this?

TW: We had two autistics in the band. So a lot of time people would call "The Artistics" the "The Autistics." But, you know, high functioning autistics, high functioning.

CF: With good reason.

TW: A lot people think that autism is just retardation and it's not true. At least 20 percent of autistic… people with autism have good intellectual function. And so… you know, there was… sometimes David's choices were not right on to knowing how to… he would drive people away. So it was really important to not… have songs about, about… I mean, it's one thing to do "Psycho Killer." It's another thing to do "Sick Boy." Because people always thought every song was about him.

CF: Yeah. And we used to do cover songs too, like... "I'm not your Steppin' Stone." We did, "My Baby Must be a Magician."

TW: Naomi would sing that one.

CF: Naomi would come up and sing that one.

TW: And they were all very proto-typical punk. Chris was dressed head to toe in black leather. David was in black leather. And not… black nylon shirts…

CF: I had a jumpsuit. A black jumpsuit that I bought at Sears Roebuck and it was really green but I dyed it black.

TW: And I think I still have that jumpsuit. And… and then… Michael Seeve. He would sing a song or two.

CF: He had his own band called "Providence." And then sometimes he would come up and sing with us.

TW: And…

CF: He was the guy that gave us the thought of the name Talking Heads. He added it to the list.

TW: He also contributed lyrics to "Artists Only."

CF: Yeah, he wrote the lyrics to "Artists Only."

TW: [Sings] "I'm cleaning by brain." Well, we changed… it was changed… he said… because painters always say when they're between projects, you know, they'd be on a roll and then they'd be lying fallow, trying to get an idea for the next painting, and they'd, you'd say… "how are you doing? What's going on?" And if they weren't painting at that moment so they'd say "well, I'm cleaning my brushes." And "I'm cleaning my brushes" became "I'm cleaning my brain." Same thing. Because it was… it's all about a clean sweep. Starting over again with a new, fresh concept. But the painters were kind of like in some ways some of the wackiest people. I mean, the people who were kind of like… together, seemed to be… the most together were the architects and the industrial designers and fashion designers. And then after that… then you had some pretty wacky people.

CF: Like the people that would blow glass. [Laughs]

TW: The glass blowers like Dale Chihuly's people. They were pretty out there. But then the print-makers were kind of… and the illustrators… they were kind of pretty steady, always good product. Very good stuff coming out. Very reliable. But then you'd have the truly wackos were the painters. I mean because they were just… film-makers could, you know, they had to… they were a combination of things. They were really… it was early on getting into videos. The film-makers were also like the painters and they also crossed over. And there was the… very important guy there named Jamie Dalglish, who'd come back. He'd been in… he was put in one of the Polaris submarines under the ice cap for two months and he never came back the same. It… he's a really brilliant, brilliant kind of genius guy. And it did something. The chemistry of being two months with that re-circulated air that they breath and all men. It had the effect of making him way overly sensitive. And… he came back after that on his… what do they call it that they give to veterans?

CF: The GI Bill?

TW: Yeah. And so he came to study at RISD graduate school and he was a brilliant painter and film-maker. And so David would always hang out. He would follow everybody around. He figured out that without even going to the school he could get a lot. He could sort of suck off of everybody, sponge off of everybody. And there were quite a few really interesting people Jamie Dalglish was one. Andrea Koufax was another. I mean, there were really a huge number that I couldn't even name them all for you, but…

CF: By the way I got an email from Mark Kehoe just yesterday. He's having this… he's on the board of this Vermont film festival. Independent film festival in Vermont, which I think is in January of all months to have it.

JS: In Vermont.

CF: I guess it doesn't really matter since it's indoors what time of year it is, but… just thought I'd add that.

TW: We had some great painters. David Anderson, great painter. He was there. He was also a member of the Artistics. He played…

CF: He was the guitarist.

TW: He played lead guitar. [A pause] He can still play beautiful guitar.

CF: He was from the same town as me in Kentucky. But after college he went to Switzerland and… it's real weird. He came back with a Swiss accent, after having like a Southern accent…

TW: But German.

CF: …he came back with a German accent.

TW: Well, that's what… you know, Asperger's… that's very symptomatic. That eculalia. It's very symptomatic of that.

CF: But anyways, suddenly he sounded like, I don't know. Arnold Schwarzenegger or something like that.

JS: Governor Schwarzenegger.

CF: Yes. Thank you. My governor can kick you governor's ass.

TW: Breeding the bullet-proof Kennedy.

JS: I do think it's kind of impressive that the governor of the largest state in the nation is somebody whose.. behind I've seen… many times. Often in blue light.

CF: [Laughs]

JS: [To Patrick] Did you want to throw something in here?

PC: No.

JS: You've mentioned a whole bunch of folks here now, a whole lot of artists… which is great because I know that people will then be looking back through here and going, "oh, these are all these people that we have to…" Well, I guess first of all, I want to ask… do you all… you just mentioned one fellow in Vermont who you just got an email from. Do you keep in touch with a lot of these folks, and also…

CF: Oh, yeah.

TW: Yeah we do. It's sometimes more… we're able to keep in touch better than other times.

CF: Some of them have… we've lost contact with like Dan Gosch. G-o-s-c-h. Who lives in Rhode Island. As far as I know, he still lives there. Rudy Cheeks can put you in touch with him. He was in that band the Motels. And he's a… a very good painter. But he… he became a bit of a recluse, I think. He doesn't really go out that much anymore. 'Cause every time we're in Providence we ask Rudy Cheeks to come to the show, we always say, "try to get Dan Gosch to come." And he always tries and Dan always has some excuse about why he can't come out that night. But Rudy Cheeks always comes.

TW: He's great.

CF: And then we have breakfast with him the next day and catch up with him on all the gossip that's going on.

TW: There's some pretty heavy gossip. One sad thing that happened was… there's a restaurant in New York in the village called David's Pot Belly which was started by a man named David Levine and David Levine fell in love with Providence… and the Providence mafia. And he came up to Providence to start David's Pot Belly II. And it used to be way up, you know, on the hill.

CF: It was on Hope St. There's a French restaurant there now.

TW: And Chris worked there. And then he opened up a bigger one down the hill, at the bottom of the hill. Below Benevolent St.

CF: On South Main St.

TW: So everybody worked there. I mean, David worked there, I worked there. I think Rudy worked… everybody… I mean, all my… half my sisters worked there as waitresses. I mean, we all…

CF: He had a rule that you had to be cute to get a job as a waitress. So all the waitresses were like… really really cute. [Laughs]

TW: And Chris became a chef there because Chris was really… he was really on top of… you know, to be a chef you have to be… very organized and rapid and be quick on your feet. And so Chris became a chef, but David could never move up from being a dish washer. Because… but it was better than… he got that job thanks to Chris because he'd had a job… you know that little hot dog stand that they have next to the… is it the Biltmore?

CF: It's called the New York System.

TW: Yeah.

CF: Don't know if it's still there.

TW: It was there a couple years ago.

JS: I'm not sure if it's still there either, but actually on a random side-note, I spoke with a professor yesterday who I have a paper due for tomorrow and said basically, it's going to be very hard for me to get this all done. I'm going and doing this interview. He was actually in his teens during the "Stop Making Sense" tour and his reaction was, "that's far cooler than doing my paper so just get it in to me whenever you can." [Chris laughs] But he specifically mentioned this hot dog place…

TW: Yeah. And David got fired because his arms were so hairy.

JS: Okay…

[Chris laughs]

TW: Because one of the requisites of the job is in order to get the hot dogs done fast enough you would stack all the buns on your arms and then you'd go like this [mimes placing things up and down her arm] and put all the actual sausages into the buns. And David's arms were too hairy and the clientele complained about finding hair in their hot dogs. [Chris laughs] So, David got fired and got a job up at David's Pot Belly. Now to end the story, the sad story of Davd…

CF: Was that what your professor was going to say?

JS: Well he had just asked because he'd heard… you know, the Providence lore was that in the video and the film "Stop Making Sense," during "Once in a Lifetime…"

[Chris laughs]

JS: This gesture here going up and down the arm was based off that hot dog thing…

TW: Wouldn't it be great if that were true? But no, that's not. That's a copy. David copied that out of a film.

CF: It's from Balinese, the Balinese dance thing where they do this, in fact they're doing it in the "Once in a Lifetime" video. There's a blue screen behind him where they have like these Balinese dancers…

TW: And they have the people doing it.

CF: Yeah.

TW: David gets all of his dance moves from video tapes. Like the ones from "Stop Making Sense" like this one [gets up and does a dance move] and then the… the foot dragging one. And then the… then the this with the big suit. That's all from Fred Astaire. He just… he would… he was not a choreographer inventor, he just figured out how to put other people's stuff together in unusual ways. So, yeah. The end of this David Levine story that's kind of sad is that David Levine… he virtually had every student working for him at some point. Everybody went through the system so everybody knew David Levine. Well, his wife divorced him and took their small child away. And, he eventually became so depressed that he killed himself by disembowelment… with a sword. Which is one of the stories that Rudy told us… one of these breakfasts…

CF: We had no idea.

TW: We had no idea this had happened.

CF: Rudy Cheeks filled us in. Hari Kiri. [Pause]

JS: How long ago was this?

CF: I guess it was a few years ago…

TW: I guess it must have happened in the 80s or 90s.

CF: I think it was in the 90s.

TW: But it was a very sad ending to this man that everybody had felt challenged by because a lot of people just hated him. Because they were being… you know, either they were beholden to him or because…

CF: Well, he was very volatile. He used to yell at people all the time.

TW: He was a tough businessman. Restaurateur.

CF: Hot tempered restaurateur…

TW: What other kind of restaurateur can you have?

CF: He's either too happy or he's too angry. One or the other, you know.

TW: But I don't see how you can be a restaurateur unless you're, you know, telling everybody to stay on the case. You've gotta move.

CF: In a way, yeah. He taught me how to move quickly. I used to move… to do everything really slow. But then he just said, "no no, man. You've gotta do it fast. Faster. Faster, faster."

TW: It's the same thing but fast.

JS: Well, you've mentioned a couple places now that… I guess were kind of gathering grounds for people…

CF: Yeah, the other gathering ground was Joe's sandwich shop, which is now Geoff's…

JS: Superlative sandwiches.

CF: Mmm. Very.

JS: That's their slogan now.

CF: Geoff, Geoff…

TW: Chris lived upstairs from there.

CF: The original was on Benefit St. and I think there's still one there.

JS: There is.

CF: But now there's the one up on Thayer. But Geoff's… Joe's was run by this guy Dewey Dufresne and… he didn't want to call it Dewey's he just called it Joe's… and the thing everybody, all the RISD kids would get sandwiches there. But the thing was that they would insult you from behind the counter. Like when you went in, they would always have some wise-ass remark to make. And Geoff was one of the employees there and he later, like, took it over when Dewey moved back to New York. And his son now is, Wiley Dufresne is a super-hip successful restaurateur himself in New York. [Pause]

JS: Well, I guess now the next logical extension here, you know. We have these meeting places. It really seems from your descriptions and from the descriptions of a couple the other people that… the other students have been interviewing that there really was a sense of community here… at this time.

TW: Yeah.

CF: We didn't venture too much into the other parts of Providence. To a certain extent downtown, you know, we would go down there. And I had a loft for a little while that I shared on Pine Street downtown. I didn't live there, but I kept my drums there… for a short time. About a year. Maybe two years. We used to rehearse the band I had… the funk band I was in before the Artistics was called The Brotherhood. We used to rehearse there. And… mostly our activity was confined to the College Hill area. Somewhere between, like, Hope Street and South Main Street. The furthest we got North was to the Star Market. You know. [Chuckles] Very few people had cars. Tina had a car.

TW: Only the last year.

CF: The very last year.

JS: I'm sure that parking was not quite the nightmare then that it is now.

TW: Well, you know, I lived in a garage. So it was no problem, parking.

[Chris chuckles]

TW: No, Providence was not as bustling as it is now. RISD's student body was about 1000 and now its about, what? 2000 or 2400?

JS: It's larger, yeah. I don't know if you guys are aware of the massive RISD renovation/moving project that's going on.

TW: Well, we love it. My dad was a lifetime in the military but the Nixon regime was his last. He just couldn't stand it anymore. He tried… he did everything he could. His last job was… he was head of naval design and research which meant that he could controlled the military industrial contracts coming to the navy. And they, they wanted him out because he kept saying no to agent orange. He kept saying no… you know, he'd been in Vietnam. He said, "we have enough weapons to ruin the Earth over and over again. We don't need anymore." And that this was a diplomatic course of action, not a military conquest. We're not going to have a military conquest and we have to have… and this… and he was lied to by the Nixon cabinet. He and all the other chiefs of staff were lied to about the president's troops in Cambodia. So when these people, they wanted him out of the way because he was standing in the way of big corporations making contracts with the government and the military, you know, their friends. And so he, so he retired. He retired. He was 52 years old. 53 years old. Something like that. Very young. And at first, because my mother was French, he thought… they thought that they would go to France. And maybe that they would be able to work at the… with peace keeping missions in France. Because he was really concerned about what was going to happen in the Middle East next. So they moved to the South of France and after a year they hated it. They wanted to come back to America. [Chuckles] They… it was just too boring for him. And the whole French way of doing things was just too bourgeois and not far-sighted and inventive enough. And no vision. So, they came back to the States and they decided they didn't want to live in Washington anymore because of what was going on there. You know, the corruption. And so they wanted to… they decided Providence was a good place. And that's why they ended up in Providence. My last… two years? It was my last two years at… [Thinks] No, it was my last year. My last year at RISD, '73, '74. And that's when I moved to… I lived over the garage because that helped then because then I didn't have to pay for an apartment. And… and… and… where was I going with this?

CF: Research and design.

TW: Exactly. Research and design. And so the next thing that happened was my father became friends with a bunch of people including Ralph Beckman. Now, Ralph Beckman is now designing incredible toys and stuff. He used to be a car racer. Long distance driver for… he would drive these little Datsuns until he was pissing blood, you know? [Joel chuckles] And his wife Judy just said, "That's enough of that, Ralph." You know. And they actually ended up having two daughters who'd both gone through RISD. Both were really brilliant girls…

CF: Well, they still live in Providence, Ralph and Judy…

TW: And Ralph… and Ralph and a bunch of his cohorts... Ralph, I think he was one of the designers of Tickle Me Elmo? The doll that was such a big success.

JS: Oh, I remember.

TW: So…

CF: They did the new etch-a-sketch too. With the sound.

TW: The musical etch-a-sketch. That didn't go… you know. But for a while, he… I knew him through a guy I was dating before I started dating Chris who was also in the architecture school and Ralph went through the architecture school. And I became really good friends with Ralph and Judy and through Ralph Beckman, my father was very interested… they asked my father, Ralph Weymouth to be part of REDE, R-E-D-E. And they bought an old… Florentine design factory mill, brick mill, up, way up at the Northern end of Benefit Street. And, you know, where it was all run down and… and they completely… they created out of this rock face with sandblasting and the beams and everything … they created sort of the first of the Providence renovations. And they were Research and Design. REDE. And all of these guys together, they were a bunch of architects and designers who decided, "Providence is our place. This is our niche. We're not going to leave when we graduate. We're going to make this city into something." And they started, they started as a private firm. They started and they hoped my father would make some inroads into the political... of course it was very difficult because… the political, the town as we all know is quite… there's a lot of strings you've got to pull and my dad… just… he's so straight arrow and… but his… my dad's job was to try to raise money for these things. But this is how they got started. And that got my father really interested in much more environmental work. And eventually they moved out of Providence because they couldn't stand the stultifying social life of Providence. The young people they loved. But the people who were their own age in the '50s and '60s were… they were bankers and lawyers and not intellectual and not… not people with far-seeing ideas. Most of them. But some of them were. But if you see, they opened up. More and more people started to do what REDE did. And REDE no longer exists but… it's been broken up into lots of different little… you know, different factions. And they opened up the city so that the rivers where Edgar Allen Poe used to go down to the waterfront. It's now a waterfront again! Because when we were going to RISD, it was a Carmax parking lot.

CF: Somehow they managed to pave over the river. It's kind of wild. We didn't even know there was a river there.

TW: When we arrived, no.

CF: [Chuckles] Nice, what they've done. Huge. Huge.

TW: It's wonderful. The whole town has just become such a much more interesting place architecturally. And I really think it's thanks to a probably a number of factors many of which I'm probably not aware of. Very likely not aware of. But I think that the universities have something to do with it. Rhode Island School of Design, definitely. Brown, definitely. And… you know, some… probably some very very good people in the community. But I am… I am quite sure that it was the impetus of these young people with this… far-sighted vision of what the town could be that made it what it is now. I mean, now you have a downtown… the whole renovation of the old train station. All that. 'Cause used to be there were very few restaurants, and there were… they were kind of stuffy old Italian, overpriced Italian restaurants. Now they're, they're… super-hip over-priced Italian restaurants. [Laughs] But… but… but they… but it's very different. It's a very different place from when we went there.

CF: It's a lot better.

TW: Oh, much. So improved.

CF: But I loved, I loved the whole colonial kind of architecture that was… you know, and still is there on the College Hill area. The ambiance was great. But after… I must admit after being there for four years, I felt like I'd sort of explored the College Hill area from one end to another and I was… I was ready to make the move to New York City. Although having lived in New York City for a long time, I wouldn't mind moving back to Providence at some point. It's nice.

JS: Well, I guess in the um… keeping track, I know that you all went from Providence after being in school there to New York and sometime in the interim kind of ended up just transplanting to, I would imagine, somewhat different artistic scenes. And, my impression is that there was a lot of art and culture going on in both places…

TW: Yeah, a lot of our teachers actually lived in New York and commuted. And there still are a lot of teachers at RISD who live in New York and commute. They go up two or three days a week to teach at RISD. Teach painting, but they actually live in New York. Richard Merkin was one… we had a lot of visiting from New York.

CF: [Referring to digital recording device] That thing still going? That's great.

JS: This thing can go for… I'm not brilliant at math… 500 divided by 60, I mean…

TW: Richard Merkin was a very big influence… trying to think who else… a fellow who's gone now. Several are gone. We… you know, there was Harry Callahan who… one of the most important photographers of the last century. He was actually one of the Americans responsible for raising it to a fine art. Your friend Paul… he's gone now…

CF: Paul Proft.

TW: Paul Proft. He used to drink his own chemicals, that was his…

CF: He was a photography teacher.

JS: He drank photo chemicals?

CF: Evidently he did. I… he died of cancer.

TW: There was Dale Chihuly who was the glass blower who has just changed the way that people look at glass today. He's also amazing. And he designed the most remarkable pieces. I don't know if you're familiar with Dale Chihuly, but…

CF: He's like the glass blower in America. Pretty much the whole world.

TW: Pretty much the world.

CF: He now… now he does these enormous things like for casinos…

TW: Chandeliers the size of this room.

CF: Casinos and hotels and… people who are enormously rich who can afford it.

TW: Yeah, it's amazing.

CF: He also does little things.

TW: Well, we had lots of visiting artists too… like… who would come up and talk to us and then one of the things that we did after we organized the painting club is that I would borrow my parents' van. And I would take people down for the price of gasoline… I would drive a group of ten or twelve people down in the van to… experience different things in New York City. And there was… one thing we did was we went down to see John Cage give a… you know, the composer John Cage to give a performance and we all had this little thimble of wine and mushrooms because he's also really into mushrooms. Another thing we did was we went to the Whitney, it was the biennale, I think it was. The Whitney museum…

[Tina gets up to look for a book]

CF: It was… in the America they call it the biennial. They have it every two years. That's what that means. [Laughs]

TW: Okay. But it was all… it was all Andy Warhol, at that time. Very exciting that the whole place was plastered with Andy Warhol's pals' wallpaper… I'm trying to look for this Dale Chihuly book but I'm not finding it.

JS: While you look for that, let me ask… I was also curious and we've got all these names of people doing all these amazing sorts of art, but I know that both of you were doing non-musical art as well…

CF: We did painting, yeah. That was what our "degree" was in, painting.

JS: Could you comment a little bit on the kind of stuff you were painting?

CF: I was… well, you know, when you study painting there at RISD they make you do figurative painting and a lot of drawing, and… but I ended up doing in my senior year I ended up doing I guess what you'd call color-field painting. Sort of large abstract things that have different layers of colors on them so that, you know, you put a yellow or a blue and you get an interesting shade of green and then next to it are reds so you get some vibrating movement between the two and… they were kind of meditative to look at… the type of things that you… you really look at and they didn't have… [gestures to art on wall] Not like this which has the King of Oysters and the King of Used cars. It was… they were more of… meditative and….

JS: Well, is this a painting of yours?

CF: No, these are a friend of ours' from Lafayette, Louisiana. Francis Pavey.

TW: All of our good work isn't even present. It's all been given away, you know… someone admires something, we give it away.

CF: We have to start painting again so that we can hang some paintings of ours up in our house.

TW: There's actually a painting of mine in Providence somewhere and somebody found it and they left a message on our machine, on our message machine, but the message got erased and so I never… eh, I didn't follow it up fast enough. When we're on tour, it's very hard to follow through on things until you're finished with the tour. [A pause] Yeah, we'll start painting again. I think sooner rather than later. But first we have to write our book.

JS: You're writing a book?

TW: Mm hmm.

CF: Well, we want to. I haven't really started. I think Tina's started.

TW: I've started making notes.

CF: But, um… we were going to write a book. I don't know. We were thinking we would do it together… where you, where you know…

TW: Don't tell.

CF: Okay. Okay, I won't tell. Somebody else might take the idea.

TW: That's enough.

JS: [Chuckles]

CF: It'll be, I guess, kind of memoirs.

TW: That's basically what people want.

CF: Just for starters. And then, and then maybe we could each do our own thing after that. Maybe novels, or maybe something…

TW: Oh, I think I'd rather paint than write novels.

CF: I've never written a novel, so I don't really know. [Chuckles] But I think I can handle my memoirs. You know, without a ghost-writer. 'Cause, I mean, you know, we're well educated.

TW: More or less. More or less.

CF: We don't need some, you know, rock journalist to help us. I think we can manage.

TW: Well, I always hate those books anyway. "As told to."

JS: Those are essentially what… I mean, this is very different because it's… a very different context…

TW: This is an interview. This is different.

JS: But this is, I mean, from my end, doing this kind of interviewing thing… may end up being… what I'm doing and may be "as told to…" me. And, I actually only started… I tried to read, I got about 100 pages into Aerosmith's book… [It's worth noting that these "as told to" books are just commercial versions of Oral History, and that's what I'm alluding to here]

TW: Oh, god. Poor thing.

JS: Which was available at the… it was 500 pages and it was at Sam's Club for I think about 6 dollars or something. And I said, "I'll give this a… I'll check this out." And… I don't know if you all are familiar with Stephen Davis. He also did Hammer of the Gods.

CF: Yeah, I've met Stephen Davis.

JS: Really?

CF: Yeah, he's interviewed us also.

JS: Okay. I don't know if he did the same narrative device with your story. He really tried to go for starting in media res or whatever… this kind of… Homeric… he was trying to make a Homeric telling of the story of Aerosmith… which is kind of… slightly absurd… I found funny…

TW: Very "Spinal Tap."

CF: [Chuckles]

JS: Well, it starts with, like, the big drug intervention in 1985. And then you have to go back and… how did we get to this point, and…

TW: Yeah, yeah. I know, they always do that. It's so…

CF: Those guys were bad.

TW: Brian Wilson? No, what else did they…

CF: We once were using the same studio. I don't know if you remember, we were mixing our first record, "Talking Heads '77" was being mixed in the same room that Aerosmith was recording in. We were mixing in the day time and Aerosmith was recording in the night-time. They had… they had the entire studio covered with pornographic pictures, you remember? That they clipped out of magazines and, like… taped to the windows of the studio and stuff like that.

TW: That was why I didn't like being there.

CF: They were… they were… there was some residue of cocaine just everywhere. Everywhere you'd look there was just flakes and powder and stuff. And we had heard that they… that there was gun-play going on at night there. Like, the guys were bringing in their guns… they were real bad. A friend of ours who ended up working for Patty Smith was in charge of driving them. Moe… Sloden. And Moe had to get them up in the morn… they were staying in the St. Regis hotel which even then was like four, five hundred dollars a night to stay in, and his job was to get them out of bed and get them to the studio. Not an enviable... task…

TW: See, that's everything I can't stand about rock stars. It's every reason to not want to be making rock music. It is so boring. "And then, he did another line." How adventuresome! And then, you know, he did another line. Then he ran into a friend of his and they did a line together. It's so horrible. Pathetic.

Robin (Chris and Tina's 21 year old son): It's sad, like, what's it called… what's that movie called…

[Mystic Bowie, Tom Tom Club, peeks head into room]

TW: Hey, Mystic.

CF: Hey, Mystic. How you doing?

JS: Hey, there.

CF: This is Mystic Bowie. He works with the Tom Tom Club. These guys are doing a little interview for the… they're students at Brown in Providence.

Mystic: Oh, nice.

Robin: "Decline of Western Civilization Part II." Has the Butt Rock guys. The Cock Rock of the 80s. And they're interviewed about their excess.

JS: [Chuckles] I will admit that is a… a guilty pleasure of mine. [Chris chuckles too] I just find that whole scene so… excessively amusing.

CF: It's amusing up to a point. And then it starts to get to be boring. We were around it a lot at one time. And so… that's why Tina feels the way she does.

JS: Well, it's understandable. It's one thing to be from a distant place where it's almost not real, where as to you all, I'm sure this is… very real.

CF: Yeah.

JS: Some of these problems that I can look at from a distant perspective are people that I'm sure you knew and cared about.

CF: I try to keep my sense of humor about it though.

[Somewhere in this last interchange, Tina has exited the room.]

JS: Um… well, I do want to jump forward at least, I don't want to be taking too much of your time here…

CF: Right.

JS: So, I…

CF: Is there anything… any closing kind of question or anything like that? Anything you wanted to know that we haven't touched on yet?

JS: Well, you have both been wonderful in going through all of this stuff. I just want to take a quick look at the notes I made as you were talking and the things that I came in with… to really… I guess close this off here. Um… this is one of those stream of consciousness notes things… [Notes crackle]

PC: While you're looking, can I…

JS: Yeah, go for it. Absolutely.

PC: I don't know how to phrase this as a question, but Howard Finster did the artwork for "Little Creatures." Did you work with him on that, or…

CF: No, he… I think David made the initial contact. David was living upstairs from the Phyllis Kind gallery. Who was his representative in New York. And… Phyllis kind of represented all kinds of outsider artists and… Howard Finster was having a show and David saw it and thought it was cool, and we agreed that it was really cool. And he had already at that time done a cover for REM, although completely different looking than the one he did for us. But what he didn't… all he needed… none of us really spoke to him. It was all done through Phyllis Kind. And we took polaroids of what we looked like. A poloroid of each member of the band, just our heads. And he took it from there. And he… we tried to visit him a couple of times when we were down in Georgia and unfortunately both times he wasn't feeling well, wasn't having visitors. He also had cancer, unfortunately. But… that's how that came about. I think David bought the painting. I think he probably has the… if I'm not mistaken he has the original of that cover. [Pause]

JS: Alright. I have just… looking through the notes of things that I wanted to aim for here. The… I guess I'm going to throw out, like, four sort of small talking points for you and you can respond to them in any way you feel fit. These are some of the broader questions that we were looking at as we started this project. We found some documents, research about certain cultural events that I was wondering if… you might remember. One of them was the "Private Parts" show. I don't know if you have any memory of this… it's kind of lived on in lore…

CF: I do remember that. I do remember it, but what was it?

JS: It was a RISD exhibit. I think it was a graduation, you know a graduate sort of thing. Senior project.

CF: People's genitals or something?

JS: Right. And the police came and took everything down and there was a huge stir. The students ended up suing, but a lot of the art was in terrible condition by the time they got it back… I mean, major first amendment issues here.

CF: Huh. I remember this, but I don't… I obviously didn't have anything in it or I would remember it much better than I am… [Chuckles, pauses to think] I wonder if that maybe happened right after we were there or something.

JS: It was '72. [Editors note: The exhibit was actually in 1978. I made a mistake. Therefore Chris's inability to remember the event is both not his fault and not surprising.]

CF: Oh, '72. Well, I was there… hmm… I wish I could remember more. I do… it rings a bell for sure, besides being the name of Howard Stern's autobiography. [Laughs]

JS: Right. A fine piece of literature for all Americans to read. So I was wondering if you had any recollection of that or any other, if you can recall, large, sort of framing events that may have happened at your time there…

CF: No, no.

JS: And the other ones of these questions…

CF: Did Rudy Cheeks know about that?

JS: Yeah, he was one of the ones who turned us on to it. And one of the people in my class actually interviewed one people who… one of the organizers of it. And a bunch of other folks had said it was… quite memorable.

CF: [Long pause] Sorry, I don't know why I can't remember that. I was there. I was there at the time. I must have been sleeping. [Laughs]

JS: Well, that's what students are supposed to do. At least… at odd times.

CF: Struck out there. [Chuckles]

JS: No problem. So I guess the um… the other things here. If this applies at all… wondering how Providence, Rhode Island might have shaped your music, or your outlook on music. The scene there, the culture. How it may have… impacted you and why you've chosen to remain in contact with so many folks from there.

CF: Well, I think… the people that you meet in college are often your friends for the rest of your life. The people you become friends with in college and… some of my friends there were… real lovers of music even though they might not have been musicians themselves. They all had big record collections and, you know we would get really excited when there was a new… like when "Sticky Fingers" came out. You know, the Andy Warhol cover of the Rolling Stones' album "Sticky Fingers" with the zipper on it and all that. Super cool. And the record that was inside was good too. But, we were just really tuned in to what was going on in popular music and rock and roll music. To a certain extent avant garde music, but mostly it was rock and roll that we were interested in, or soul. And, um… I think the people that you hang out with and are friends with are the people that help to shape your views just by exchanging ideas with them and sitting around at the snack bar, or whatever. Talking. And I'm quite sure that… it was a guy Charlie Rocket who told us for the first time about David Bowie and that David Bowie was this… you know… weird English… sort of… the way I first heard it, it was a transvestite, a guy who wore a dress and sang in a falsetto… rock and roll songs… you know. He turned out to be much more than that, but at the time he was wearing a dress and it was different. But… you know, he had a song about Andy Warhol and about producing Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side." So all this stuff's kinda, kinda always in sync with what we were interested in. And… [Pauses to think] of course I met Tina and David there. That had a lot to do with shaping my future.

JS: And I guess I'll make this my last question for you here… but… in whatever way that you see fit to define it, what would you say to you defines avant garde, and what that you have done musically or as a painter or as a writer would you qualify as avant garde?

CF: Well, I don't know that I'm… that I've ever been really truly avant garde except in the early, early days of Talking Heads. But, but I think we have been kind of pioneers… to me the avant garde is something that's… way way at the forefront of… of an art form. Whether it's music or painting or writing or whatever. So much so that it could almost never be popular. You know?

JS: Mm hmm.

CF: It might become popular 50 or 100 years later, but at that time it's just too out there to appeal to the… you know… mainstream. And I think Talking Heads in the early days was almost too out there to appeal to the mainstream. But there was something about it that… from our first performance caught people's attention and… the taste-makers, the people that… the people that influence… what happens in magazines and what goes on TV and in the movies, those kind of people really liked us. So we might have been on the verge of avant garde, but we were also… we had our foot in both… we sort of had our cake and ate it too. We had our artistic credibility, avant garde credibility, but we also had enough popular appeal that we could sell a few records.

Robin: Can I say something.

CF: Yeah.

Robin: Two words: pop art. That's what it is. It's popular, but it's a... a bit more heady than… just normal popular.

CF: Thank you, Robin. I think that describes it pretty well. [Chuckles] So I consider myself very lucky because if we had just had our… our one foot in the avant garde or our artistic world than… you know… I might not have ever been able to buy a really good drum set. [Pause]

JS: Well…

CF: But I appreciate the avant garde. I mean, I like it. I appreciate… the contemporary avant garde. And like Tina said, even back in school we were going to see people like John Cage and Merce Cunningham and… we were familiar with… Kathy Acker. You know? As a writer. Are you familiar with her?

JS: No.

CF: She also… back then she called herself the Black Tarantula. She was a visiting artist to… who stayed in my apartment. I would let these visiting artist stay in my apartment because the school was too cheap to buy them a hotel room. Veto Acconci who was one of the early conceptual artists. Dennis Oppenheim. These were people that visited RISD and… in the early '70s and now are quite… almost established… in the art scene, but at the time they were… you know… they were truly on the cutting edge. I think Veto Acconci's now an architect. I've heard.

JS: That seems to be what happened to quite a number of folks from this period here.

CF: Yeah. [Slight pause] Well, good.

JS: Thank you very much.