Although written in mostly colorless prose, this is a gold mine for fans of the 1970s and ’80s music scene.
A music memoir that is as much about love as music.
Frantz’s highly detailed, “true inside story” begins with a pleasant boyhood. Born to a military family, he moved around, went to good schools, enjoyed listening to music—especially the Beatles—played drums, and joined various bands. While attending Rhode Island School of Design, he met fellow art students Tina Weymouth, his future wife, and the aloof David Byrne, who, Frantz writes, “got into music to get out of himself.” Weymouth and Frantz helped Byrne write lyrics for “Psycho Killer,” and Frantz wrote “Warning Sign,” which Byrne later took sole credit for. Throughout, the author offers a devastating portrait of Byrne as a back-stabbing liar who aggrandized himself while disrespecting his band mates. Their first band, the Artistics, played some venues, and they moved to New York’s Bowery in 1974, where they got a regular gig playing as Talking Heads at the CBGB club, their all-time favorite venue. A keyboard player, Jerry Harrison, formerly of Modern Lovers, joined them. The star-struck Frantz began meeting people like Patti Smith, John Cale, Debbie Harry, Lou Reed, and Andy Warhol. Throughout the narrative, he proves to be an inveterate name-dropper. Frantz describes the band as “pioneers” in the “Punk/New Wave/Post-Punk music” scene. In 1976, they played 76 gigs. At this time, Byrne wanted to kick Weymouth out of the band, but as the author rightly notes, her inventiveness on bass “was one reason Talking Heads sounded so unique.” In 1977, they recorded their first album and toured Europe with the Ramones. Afterward, Frantz and Weymouth got married. Though not the most elegant stylist, the author offers entertaining stories about Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme’s documentary about the band; the origins of the Tom Tom Club; Byrne’s big white suit; and the day, in 1991, Byrne “sneaked out of Talking Heads.”
Although written in mostly colorless prose, this is a gold mine for fans of the 1970s and ’80s music scene.Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-20922-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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