All along, I had been leading a double life as recording engineer by day and punk/new wave musician by night. At Media, I made a point not to talk about my band, Comateens, for fear of being fired. I also learned to keep my recording engineer job a secret amongst struggling musicians and especially the press—who were always after me for information about the stars.

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The two lives never crossed except for one day while recording Talking Heads: 77 when David Byrne asked me if I had a pin that he could use to pop a blister. Without a thought, I took a pin from my lapel and handed it to him. “An ASCAP pin?” he inquired. Byrne knew that you could only join the American Society of Composers and Authors if you had a song on the market, which I did. For a moment, the situation became very awkward because I felt that Media was not the place for me to hawk my own band. I bashfully said, yes, and then just looked away and we both fell silent.

This Teenmaster Records release of my song ‘Danger Zone’ got me into ASCAP (American Society of Composers and Authors).

 

The arrival of Talking Heads at Mediasound marked a butting of heads between ‘professional’ producers Tony Bongiovi and Lance Quinn, and the ‘troubadour’ musicianship of the Talking Heads. Like many producers of that era, the Bongiovi/Quinn team had their own hit making formula that they followed like a tried and true cake recipe. “My job,” explained Bongiovi in a recent phone interview, “was to preserve the style of the band so that everyone could appreciate it and yet to fit it into a record. So I had to do things with Talking Heads without destroying who they were.”

 

One of those ‘things’ was to ‘modify tracks’ by having Lance Quinn double David Byrne’s guitar parts and by replacing Tina Weymouth’s bass line on at least one song without the knowledge of the band or record company. “Tina was playing the wrong notes and…I had to say to co-producer Lance Quinn, who was also a guitarist, what’s wrong with that? Is that the wrong note? Is it in tune? And Lance explained that you can’t play a Bb major against an A minor chord or something like that so I said, how do we fix that?” So I tried to get her to change the part and she wouldn’t do that so I hired…Bob Babbitt and I said to Bob, I want you to listen to her style but I want you to play the right notes,” explained Bongiovi.

 

Personally speaking, I remember Babbitt having a bit of a struggle in copying Tina’s unconventional style. “Babbitt matched the style but corrected the notes,” Bongiovi noted. “Weymouth’s line was on track one. Babbitt recorded his bass line on track sixteen, which I then bounced to track one.” Whenever a single track was bounced to another recorded track, the original track was erased forever. Chief engineer, Ed Stasium, however, swears that the Babbitt tracks were never used in the final mix. How that could be possible, I don’t know, but perhaps Stasium pulled a fast one.​

The Bongiovi/Quinn squad went ahead and added cello, steel drums, a full horn section and other instruments to Talking Heads: ’77. Perhaps it was the shock of hearing their songs so ‘produced’ or the fact that they felt Bongiovi was not enough of a collaborator that created such a palpable tension between Bongiovi and the band. (Quinn was stuck in the middle.) I clearly understood both Bongiovi’s and the Heads viewpoint but when one of the Heads came to me and asked how they could get through to Bongiovi, I had little to offer because I already knew that no novice musician was going to tell veteran record producer, Tony Bongiovi, what to do.

 

“The record company comes to the producer, they don’t come to the band,” related Bongiovi. “Talking Heads didn’t like what I did when I did it. But after a while, when they became more experienced, there was an article that came out and they said now we realize what Bongiovi was trying to do and what he did for us as a band.”  (In the article Ten Things You Never Knew About Talking Heads, writer Tom Phelen stated, “During [the] recording of [the] fourth album ‘Remain In Light’, engineer Stephen Stanley would take Tina Weymouth aside every morning and say how Byrne and producer Brian Eno had re-recorded her bass tracks.”)

 

In typical ‘troubadour’ style, Talking Heads played their songs one after the other with Byrne singing lead in an ‘isolation booth’. In a night or two basic tracks were completed. After various ‘modifications’ were made, final vocal tracks were cut and the album was mixed all in record breaking time mostly because Sire was a new label with hardly any money. 

 

I assisted both Bongiovi and Stasium on Talking Heads: ’77 and Stasium on the Brian Eno/Talking Heads produced album, More Songs about Buildings and Food. On the latter LP, Avant-guard Eno was a true collaborator and the Heads were finally able to have an entirely different experience in co-producing their record.

 

In considering what Talking Heads song JanTuran would re-imagine, we looked primarily for melody and landed upon ‘Don’t Worry About the Government’.