Two new courses offered through the Digital + Media department encourage students to expand their creative practices by exploring sound design.
Talking Heads Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth Return to RISD to Hero’s Welcome
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The crowd got to its feet to honor Talking Heads Chris Frantz 74 PT and Tina Weymouth 74 PT with a standing ovation as they took the stage at Brown University’s Martinos Auditorium in early February. The lifetime partners in love and music were back in Providence for the first time since 2015, when RISD awarded them honorary degrees, for a 40th anniversary screening of seminal concert film Stop Making Sense followed by a panel discussion with RISD Professor of American Studies Daniel Cavicchi (see top photo).
Directed by Jonathan Demme and filmed over the course of three nights at Hollywood’s Pantages Theater, the film presents Weymouth, Frantz, onetime RISD student and Honorary Degree recipient David Byrne, Honorary Degree recipient Jerry Harrison and a phenomenal ensemble of supporting musicians at the height of their prowess. “We take great pride in the way that RISD and an art and design education have influenced Tina and Chris’ lives,” said President Crystal Williams as she welcomed the audience.
In the conversation that followed the screening, Weymouth described the concert tour as a “joyful, loving experience” and recalled working with Demme and his crew to create a sensitive film that wouldn’t distract viewers from the performance itself. “No split-screens and no fingers on fretboards,” she said. “We wanted viewers to experience the show and the band in the same way that live audiences did.”
Frantz recalled rehearsing for the performances on an abandoned pier in New York City, complete with rats—“big ones!”—and developing the setlist and choreography over the course of the tour. He went on to share the band’s origin story at RISD, where he met Byrne when they collaborated on the soundtrack for a mutual friend’s short film. Weymouth would later be enlisted to play bass and would find herself opening for punk legends the Ramones at CBGB in NYC’s East Village less than a year later.
The first band Frantz and Byrne put together at RISD was a short-lived outfit called the Artistics. Frantz recalled recording a demo using one mic in his apartment on Benefit Street with then RISD student David Anderson on bass. The three-song reel-to-reel included the first-ever recording of monster Talking Heads hit Psycho Killer and was recently rediscovered in the RISD Museum.
Frantz originally sent the recording to former RISD faculty member Alan Sondheim, who had a radio show in NYC in the ’70s. The tape came to the RISD Museum in 2005 along with a purchase for the Prints, Drawings and Photographs department and was transferred in 2023 to the RISD Archives in the Fleet Library. The library alerted Frantz about the rediscovery and then loaned him the tape to be copied and remastered. It will be released on vinyl this coming November on Record Store Day, along with several other early Talking Heads demos.
Frantz and Weymouth—both members of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and recipients of Grammy Lifetime Achievement Awards—visited the archives earlier in the day, where they pored over posters of early shows and old student publications. They also toured the Fleet Library at RISD and the Studio for Research in Sound and Technology, where sound artist and RISD Professor Shawn Greenlee 96 PR and his colleagues demoed the state-of-the-art, 25-speaker spatial audio array.
Back at the Martinos Auditorium, Cavicchi fielded audience questions for Weymouth and Frantz. One fan asked if the advent of MTV in 1981 turned rock music into a more visual medium and how that affected the band’s approach. “We treated each video we made like an important standalone project,” Frantz replied. “Making these little art pieces is what separated us from the rest of the pack.”
Has being American informed their work? Absolutely, Weymouth responded. “We grew up listening to American radio and recently did a Delta blues tour where we saw Robert Johnson’s grave, Muddy Waters’ log cabin and Alan Lomax’s green Ford with the recording equipment in the back. This Land Is Your Land by Woody Guthrie is my national anthem.”
Watch the panel discussion on RISD’s YouTube channel.
Simone Solondz / photos by Thad Russell MFA 06 PH and Kaylee Pugliese
February 19, 2025
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