Remain in Love: Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Tina
by Chris Frantz
All I Ever Wanted: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir
by Kathy Valentine
Chris Frantz and Kathy Valentine are rock musicians of roughly the same age, and both played in very successful bands that fit loosely within the punk rock/new wave generation. Both have maintained long careers in music, long after the heydays of their respective bands. Both recently published memoirs which are full of music, travel, encounters with famous people and personal struggles within their bands. Other than that, the two books are quite different.
In his book, Frantz, the drummer of Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club, comes across as very upbeat. He loves his family, friends, women, art, music, travel, and most of all his wife, bass player Tina Weymouth. As he tells it, Chris and Tina grew up in close-knit families, met and fell in love when they were art students at the prestigious Rhode Island Institute of Design, and they've been together ever since. It's touching to read about how much he still loves her.
By contrast, Frantz's book reveals a lot of anger toward fellow Talking Head David Byrne, and bitterness about the way Byrne seems to take credit for the band's success. This goes beyond the usual grumbling between ex-bandmates.
In the final chapter, Frantz writes about the Talking Heads reuniting to play a few songs when they were inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, alongside their old touring buddies the Ramones. As he tells it, Byrne disappears from the afterparty, to the complete surprise of his wife. When Frantz finally gets Byrne on the phone a day or two later to ask what happened to him, Byrne reveals that when he left his wife at the party he was leaving his marriage. Frantz asks him why and he responds, "It's time to move on." A couple paragraphs later, Frantz ends the book by writing,
"When people say, 'It's time to move on,' I am not down with that. When speaking about my family, my friends, and my band, I am not a person who 'moves on.' I remain -- and I remain in love."
That's a really admirable sentiment, but it comes wrapped in a very personal jab at his ex-bandmate. "Remain in Love" has a lot of that. There are fond recollections of concerts and recording sessions sprinkled with resentments at Byrne's petty slights. I don't blame Frantz for his feelings, but this kind of thing can be uncomfortable reading for a Talking Heads fan like me.
Going to a Go-Go
Judging from her memoir, Kathy Valentine doesn't have a lot of unresolved feelings about her bandmates. Maybe it's the influence of her 12-step program, or maybe it's just something about her, but "All I Ever Wanted" is remarkable for the forgiveness it shows. The way she tells it, she has been through some stuff, and she has come out the other side a better person.
The first part of this well-written book concerns Valentine's childhood, and it was a wild one. After her parents divorced, Valentine's father had very little contact with her at all. She lived with her mother, who evidently felt she had been deprived of her own youth. Their home was a nonstop party house, where teenagers and young adults do drugs, have ill-advised sex and hide out after getting into all kinds of trouble. It's clear that Valentine feels that she needed more responsible parenting, but if she holds onto any anger against her mother, she doesn't show it.
Still, the bad habits Valentine picked up at that house appear to have followed her for many years afterward, as did a fear of abandonment. The closest she comes to sounding bitter is when she talks about a friend who ghosted her when they first moved to Los Angeles. She doesn't say so, but it seems to have touched a nerve that had been raw since her father left.
I don't want to make it sound like this is all a dark recovery memoir, although there's a lot of that. Much of the action of the book concerns Valentine trying to make it as a musician in Austin, and then in Los Angeles. One night, Charlotte Caffey asks her to play a few shows with the Go-Go's while their bass player is sick, and pretty quickly that changes the lives of everyone involved.
Girls Together Outrageously
Talking Heads' career was unusual in many ways, but, the Go-Go's story isn't all that different from that of a lot of other bands from their era, at least in broad strokes: They hone their craft in clubs for a couple years, get a record deal and release an album. It does surprisingly well ("Beauty and the Beat" sold 2 million copies!) and they tour the world to the point of exhaustion. They record a couple follow-up albums, but they can't match the success of the debut, and the band falls apart after drugs, money and personal issues get in the way of their musical chemistry and friendship.
The big difference, of course, is that the Go-Go's were all women. When their 1981 debut album landed at the No. 1 spot on the Billboard charts, it was the first time that position had been held by all-woman band who played their own instruments and wrote their own songs.
Valentine describes the early days of the band as a delightful time of fun and sisterhood. After reading about Valentine's childhood, you realize the togetherness of the Go-Go's filled a deep need she didn't know she had.
Of course, it doesn't last. When the band comes crashing down, she has to go back to being a struggling musician, and her abandonment issues come raging back. She eventually gets clean and later reunites with her old bandmates.
In an epilogue, Valentine notes that the Go-Go's have split and reunited several times. She very briefly addresses the time in 2012 that the rest of the band fired her. I've seen interviews with the band where they talk about their regret over that episode, but Valentine spends no more than a couple sentences on it. "Dysfunction is in our DNA, but it's a tendinous and strong imperfection that seems to also keep us together," she writes. She remains, and she remains in love with her band.
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