Remain in Love: Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Tina

Talking Heads drummer Frantz delivers a bright memoir that reads more of an entertaining greatest-hits compilation than complete life chronicle. He discusses his early musical influences (R&B, Fela Kuti, and Kraftwerk) and how the band first came together in 1973 at the Rhode Island School of Design as a herky-jerky art-rock trio called the Artistics, with singer-songwriter David Byrne and bassist Tina Weymouth (whom Frantz later married). The band moved to Manhattan the next year and its burgeoning punk music scene, where, Frantz notes, the Talking Heads “were not afraid to appear straight.” His account of their 1977 Europe tour with the Ramones, studded with set lists and bright detail, is particularly thrilling (“we were post-punk before there even was punk”). In 1991, the band broke up when Byrne left. (Frantz writes of Byrne’s self-aggrandizement and suggests he is on the spectrum.) Later sections on Frantz and Tina’s epochal dance-band, Tom Tom Club, and their time recording and producing in the Bahamas, are replete with fun cameos (the Clash, Robert Palmer, Grace Jones). Fun, cheerful, and eventful, this memoir has just the right amount edge. (July)