Tom Tom Club

Tom Tom Club is the band that the rhythm section of Talking Heads formed after they got tired of Brian Eno’s vehement anti-commercialism stance. The recording of Talking Heads landmark Remain in Light album was a collaborative effort, each of the songs being built up by jamming and then shaped in the studio, and apparently any time somebody came up with a riff or an idea that was too catchy, Eno would reject it out of hand. After the exhausting process of recording the album, the band took a break from each other and worked on side projects. Tom Tom Club is the side project that drummer Chris Frantz and his wife, bassist Tina Weymouth, created to put in some of there more commercial ideas. Of course, being that they were in Talking Heads and were over-educated art school graduates, their commercial ideas weren’t that commercial and, while moderately successful, Tom Tom Club never really challenged even Talking Heads for popular success, with one interesting exception.

Formed to take a break from the intellectualism of Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club succeeds admirably in that account. As they say in Genius of Love, their biggest hit, “who needs to think when your feet just go?”. Bassist Tina Weymouth invited her two sisters along to sing with her, and the fetching combination of smooth and icy girls vocals over languid reggae and hip hop beats is irresistible. This is one of those albums, like Roxy Music’s Avalon, that was recorded in the Bahamas and sounds like it. Sunny, beachy (not a word, apparently, as my spellchecker insists that I must mean “be achy”), tropical, it is a little vacation – the perfect summer music. This particular track starts with a catchy phrase which has been sampled and recast in any number of other songs, making it, along with a couple of James Brown phrases, one of the fundamental funky samples. Even the egregious Mariah Carey (Pariah Scary to me and Matt) bit the sample to add a little juice to one of her lifeless songs. According to Tina Weymouth, they’ve made more money from that one sample (which has been used in something like 50 tracks) than they made for all of Talking Heads’ music. Whether that’s strictly true or not, I don’t know, but it does point out the influence and popularity of that catchy little six-note phrase. This song is also a name-dropping grocery list of funkiness, shouting out everybody from James Brown to Bohannon to Sly and Robbie.

But that’s Genius of Love. This is the much rarer On the Line Again, and it is something else altogether. This track comes from their second album, Close to the Bone, which, criminally, has never been released on CD. Perhaps it wasn’t as popular because it just continued in the vein which had been so novel the first time out, but there’s some great tracks on it. Most of it is light and frothy, including the irresistible Life is Great that closes the album, and their modest, sound-effect laden Man with the Four-Way Hips. But they take a turn towards the serious with the remarkable On the Line Again, a cautionary tale of club life and being consumed by drugs, which is wondrously creepy thanks to the ghostly voices of the three Weymouth sisters. It was especially relevant to me at the time, because I was pretty close to the bone myself. I was living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (one block south of Houston, one block east of Avenue B), and had been partying pretty hardily. It was fun for a while, being able to smoke pot whenever I wanted to, dabbling with heavier drugs on a fairly regular basis – we’d trip about once a month, and always on something different. But it was starting to get a little scary. I had a horrifically bad trip once, in which I came inches away from killing myself to escape my insane brain. More and more time and money was being devoted to getting and doing drugs, and I had a couple of eye-opening encounters with people that had completely let themselves get eaten by the id monster of inebriation. I walked the line for a while, and then decided I needed to get my shit together or lose it entirely. Needing a goal outside of myself to jumpstart my life, I impulsively applied to Hampshire College, got accepted the day before classes began, and jumped on a bus with a bag of clothes before I had a chance to get cold feet. Once there, I swore off drugs, and was given a test on my first night. Walking the campus, I wandered by a small group of students, sitting on the stairs, sharing a joint. They called me over and, though I knew it was jeopardizing my social life, I thanked them anyway and walked on into the sober black night, pleased at my resolve which (except for Hampshire’s legendary Halloween party) I was able to keep until almost the end of my second year.

Tom Tom Club may not be the greatest band, they may not have any real lasting value (except for that one sample), and they may always sit in the shadow of Talking Heads, but as they say, who needs to think when your feet just go?