22-11-2025, 12:14
Happy Birthday to Tina Weymouth who was born on this day in Coronado, California in 1950. She became the bass player for Talking Heads semi-reluctantly, not knowing a single thing about playing that instrument, and apparently David Byrne was not overly excited about the idea when it was first proposed by Chris Frantz - drummer and her boyfriend at the time. They later married (and are still joined at the hip) and also went on to form the Tom Tom Club after Talking Heads split up.
She is untutored but clearly not without musicality and it seems to me, the success of the band might be in large part due to her interpretive basslines. Jeepers - must have been exhausting performing these numbers live - you have to keep spot on timing and she really held it together.
I was interested to read this Guitar World interview by Scott Rowley - https://www.guitarworld.com/features/tin...n-in-light - excerpt as follows ....
“In my own playing,” she told me, “I was trying to pay attention to both melody and rhythm as a means to tie together the drums and David’s extremely bright, no mid-range guitar and vocals. With the addition of Jerry Harrison [Harrison joined in 1976, after their first single] and, finally, the big band, I would go for the deeper tones of reggae. I would need to get out of the middle frequencies to leave room for more players, more layers.
“It came very naturally, organically. It was a sort of deconstructive minimalism: playing well-constructed, simple parts with perfect time and a whole lot of feeling, avoiding flabby bombast. Originality was crucial too. To create new sensations it was a matter of slamming divergent elements and song structures together to see if something good would happen.”
She is untutored but clearly not without musicality and it seems to me, the success of the band might be in large part due to her interpretive basslines. Jeepers - must have been exhausting performing these numbers live - you have to keep spot on timing and she really held it together.
I was interested to read this Guitar World interview by Scott Rowley - https://www.guitarworld.com/features/tin...n-in-light - excerpt as follows ....
“In my own playing,” she told me, “I was trying to pay attention to both melody and rhythm as a means to tie together the drums and David’s extremely bright, no mid-range guitar and vocals. With the addition of Jerry Harrison [Harrison joined in 1976, after their first single] and, finally, the big band, I would go for the deeper tones of reggae. I would need to get out of the middle frequencies to leave room for more players, more layers.
“It came very naturally, organically. It was a sort of deconstructive minimalism: playing well-constructed, simple parts with perfect time and a whole lot of feeling, avoiding flabby bombast. Originality was crucial too. To create new sensations it was a matter of slamming divergent elements and song structures together to see if something good would happen.”
"The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us." ~ Bill Watterson