IT took two years of gentle persuasion, but in late summer 1974, Tina Weymouth finally agreed to join her boyfriend Chris Frantz in the band that would soon become Talking Heads. “Very shortly after I met Tina,” says Frantz, “I had this feeling that we could work together from dancing with her and watching her dance. I thought, ‘This girl’s got a great sense of rhythm – I’ll bet she can play.’”
Weymouth had strummed a bit of folk guitar as a teenager, but she’d never picked up a bass and disliked the connotations: “I always loved music but I didn’t really see myself as a girl in a rock band. That seemed like a hard row to hoe because it was a very cocky enterprise. I told Chris that I would be as supportive as I could, I would drive him and his drums to gigs and whatnot, but I thought it was pretty much a guy thing.”
Seeing Muddy Waters live during one of his 1974 residencies changed her mind. “Hardly anybody was there, but he just played his heart out, sang his heart out. I thought, ‘Wow.’ It woke up a passion inside of me. Also we were also living three blocks from CBGBs, where any night of the week, you might see somebody like Patti Smith or Television or Blondie, there were so many good bands. That was inspiring, because we were watching people get to know their instruments. I thought, ‘This is wonderful, because they’re about as new to this as I am.’”
