Features

The Core: Tom Tom Club

Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz on Phish, punk and Tom Tom Club’s Genius of Live

Live Years Later
Chris Frantz: We recorded Genius of Live in front of an audience of friends and neighbors just after September 11. 2001, which was a desperate time in America. We were hoping to counteract the bad feeling by having some good, funky rock and roll music, but the record never got a proper release. So about a year ago our friend Tomas Cookman [who runs Nacional Records] said, “I’ve been playing this live record and people keep saying, ‘Who’s that? That sounds really badass.’” So we agreed to have him re-release it with a bunch of remixes, including some by these Latin Alternative artists. The first two Tom Tom Club albums were big in Latin America, which I had forgotten about.

Tina Weymouth: One of the reasons we made the album was to record this band that’s been together for quite some time. [Percussionist] Steve Scales has been with us since way back in the days of the Talking Heads—we just felt we had a history together and it was high time that we recorded that history.

Fuzzy Memories
Frantz: Fuzz from Deep Banana Blackout is playing guitar with us [now]. They were a local band in Connecticut where we lived and we were blown away by how funky they were. When the guitarist who played on Genius of Live couldn’t work with us because he had a young child, we asked Fuzz if he was available. His band Caravan of Thieves will be opening for us on this [upcoming fall] tour. We sat in with them on a version of “Psycho Killer” last Halloween, as well as Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

Take Me to the River Too
Weymouth: [Talking Heads] released our simpler, minimalistic version of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” in ‘77. Three bands released versions of the song around the same time, but we tended to slow it down and give it a lot more space which was real different from Al Green’s upbeat R&B version.

Frantz: One reason we were so unusual, at least back in the early days of Talking Heads, is everybody in this punk/CBGB scene was doing stuff that was based on Lou Reed, Velvet Underground, David Bowie or The Stooges. So we said, “We’ll surprise them with an Al Green song.” It gets God and sex and cigarettes and everything all mixed up, and it’s just a fantastically liberating song to play. It was the first hit we ever had with Talking Heads—I don’t think a lot of people realized that it was an Al Green song.

Family Tour
Frantz: We were consumed with family matters recently and sometimes touring and family matters don’t exactly go hand in hand. We have been at the age where we are taking care of both our children and parents. But things seem well and we’ve decided to tour again. [Genius of Live is the group’s first national tour in a decade.]

Returning the Favor
Frantz: We first recorded Phish’s “Sand” at the request of the Mockingbird Foundation for an album being organized to benefit music education [the song appears on Genius of Live, too]. They’re amazing guys, and Phish is an amazing band.

Weymouth: It was a return of the compliment that they gave us when they did an entire Halloween costume of Talking Heads’ Remain in Light one October. They were off my radar until I heard about that and then someone who was really into them gave us a cassette and it went from there.

Tradition of Breaking Tradition
Frantz: Next year, we’ll be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the first Tom Tom Club album, but our feeling is the same: We don’t think of ourselves as virtuosos. We’re really into the spirit of making music for our friends and trying to transport people away from their everyday lives. I think that’s why we started and that’s also why we continue.

Weymouth: We’re not Berklee students of music. I’m really a punk. We went to art school—our take on things is to be creative. Of course it’s a wonderful thing when people preserve a tradition, but we were kind of trained to break with tradition