Tom Tom Club: Smart Beat Dub Faction
originally published September 26, 2001
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Enter drummer Chris Frantz and significant other bassist Tina Weymouth - 50 percent of one of the most forward-thinking bands the rock and roll establishment has ever seen. In between Talking Heads records that saw them blossom (again) artistically (Remain In Light) and saw them successful commercially (Speaking In Tongues, which carried their first Top Ten track...), the pair took a stab at representing the cross-pollination that was starting to occur around the City musically.
The Tom Tom Club, was a creatively natural progression that avoided seeming opportunistic or crassly commercial. Urban legends like DJ Frankie Crocker (he was my idol... R.I.P.) snapped off the Tom Tom's hit single "Genius of Love," and connected a direct patch between what on paper were two disparate gang mentalities. What were downtown new wavers doing with the Funk? Who let the Funk slip the boundaries of the Bronx and upper Manhattan and gave it a subway token to Soho? But there it was.
When the Talking Heads officially split in '91, the Tom Tom Club became a full-time concern for Frantz and Weymouth.
"There was this thing called Grunge that came along," says Frantz, speaking to Flagpole via telephone. "And there was this great band called Nirvana. And everybody in the record business thought you should sound like Nirvana. There was no way we were going to get that sound with the Tom Tom Club, so we just decided rather than do recordings and have them rejected because they didn't sound like Nirvana, we would just do something else."
Frantz and Weymouth briefly teamed back up with Talking Heads guitarist Jerry Harrison in '95 for The Heads (the band minus David Byrne) and released two soundtrack-sounding albums, Virtuosity (1995) and No Talking Just Head (1996).
"After we did the Heads project with Jerry Harrison, we started getting a lot of requests to sample the Tom Tom Club," says Frantz. "So we thought we should give people new stuff to sample as opposed to just the music we did 20 years ago.
Now, on the third or fourth leg of gigs in support of last year's The Good The Bad The Funky, Weymouth and Frantz play their first-ever Athens gig. Accompanied by a righteous band of musicians including percussionist Steve Scales (who also did a stint as a touring member of Talking Heads), the album is their first in eight years. Moving in directions that cover Dub, Electronica, and groovy R&B, the disc reasserts a schematic now in use the world over in virtually every pop subgenre. Artists from across all corners of the music world have sampled or reworked various Tom Tom Club beats and tunes.
"We like it," says Frantz of the various reworkings. "Not only is it a good source of income for us, it gives the songs a second or third or fourth life. A lot of people say, 'Didn't you hate what Mariah Carey did to 'Genius Of Love?' and our reaction is 'No!' As a matter of fact, if she hadn't, we might not be able to send our kids to the Savannah College Of Art and Design!"
Bring enough dancing partners and perhaps Frantz and Weymouth can be goaded into giving their cover of "Love To Love You Baby" a whirl.
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