Binnie Klein and Chris Frantz Talk Old New York, New Music, and More

Binnie Klein is a psychotherapist, a DJ at WPKN in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and a musician who performs as In These Trees; Chris Frantz is the drummer for Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club, and a fellow DJ at WPKN. In These Trees has a new collaborative project with the Australian singer/songwriter Tartie, and they just released their first record together, The Quiver. To celebrate, Klein and Frantz got on a Zoom call to catch up about it, and much more.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Binnie Klein: It’s so good to do this because there’s so many weird — to me, anyway — ironies going on. When I first came to what I’ll call “our” radio station, WPKN, it was around 1976. By 1977, I had done almost every shift on the air, and I was playing your music. By the time your first album, Talking Heads: 77, came out, I was playing it on my show, and then later when Tom Tom Club happened, I was playing that.

Chris Frantz: Oh, that’s great. I’m happy to hear it.

Binnie: So I’ve been a fan. When did you come to WPKN? Obviously I am married to the station, and yet I don’t know when you actually first came. So I’d love to hear the story of how you got involved.

Chris: You know, I’ve been wondering myself. What year was that?

Binnie: Was it before the pandemic?

Chris: Oh, way before. These two guys from WPKN — Tina [Weymouth], my wife, and I went to a fundraiser for the community arts program, and Peter Bochan and Bob Johnson came up to us and asked Tina, would she like to have a radio show on WPKN? And Tina said, “Oh, no. You want Chris.” [Laughs.] She does that a lot, passes it to me. I said, “OK.” So that’s when I started.

Binnie: Well, I think the reason you and I have not yet met in the halls of the radio station is that — when you first came on, were we at the old studio?

Chris: Oh, yeah.

Binnie: We were at this really ragtag, typical down-and-out, living on nickels [space], just raising money to have an AP machine. And now, of course, we’re at this groovy downtown Bridgeport location that I haven’t been to very much since the pandemic. I’ve kind of shifted my way of doing radio, so I pre-produce. And in addition, your show is on Fridays, and then my show is first and third Thursday mornings. So it’s plausible that we’d both be doing all this radio but not bumping into each other. So this is how I had to do it, Chris — I had to pull you in this way so I could meet you. [Laughs.] 

Chris: Well, thank you.

Binnie: So, we know that you’re doing radio now, and we know that you’ve had an extraordinary, jumbo life in music. What was so interesting to me about reading your book [Chris’s 2020 memoir Remain In Love] — there were so many things that you mention that were part of my life, but in a more distant way. For example, I was living in New Jersey and I was trying to be a poet. I was trying to get out of New Jersey and into Manhattan, which is a scary thing to do in your early 20s, especially when you’re a woman. I would start looking through the Village Voice and I would see ads for cool sounding poetry writing workshops, like at Westbeth, which was an artist collective. I would submit some poetry, and to my delight, I got in. I did some courses at the New School, so I would schlep in on the bus to Port Authority and somehow make my way down to places you mentioned, like The Kitchen.

Chris: Oh, yeah. It was so great.

Binnie: The Kitchen blew me away. It was an art center way, way, way downtown. And there you were, chatting with John Cage. When I was at The Kitchen, it was the earlier ‘70s, maybe ‘73, just wandering around really lonely, trying to meet other like-minded people and so blown away by the video installations and the music.

Chris: Well, it was it was 1973 when I had the experience of meeting John Cage there. We came down in a little caravan from the Rhode Island School of Design to spend a day in New York. We went to the Whitney, which was uptown at that time. Then we came downtown and we went to The Kitchen. This was prearranged that John Cage would [meet] us. We were a group called The Painting Club. Tina and I formed The Painting Club because we figured out that clubs were given money by the school in accordance with how many members they had — so if you had 100 members, you would get much more money than somebody who had a club who had 50 members. So we formed The Painting Club and we got everybody we could find to sign up for it, and we got this money which enabled us to spend a day in New York. That was 1973 that we went down. Then I graduated from RISD in the spring of ‘74, and we — Tina and I, and David Byrne and a bunch of our friends from RISD — moved to New York City in the autumn of 1974.

Binnie: You guys had this incredible work ethic — I mean, you totally knew you wanted to live off your art, and you were able to do it. A lot of people really can’t stick with it. But you go to the downtown area because you knew that was where you needed to be, and you’re exposed to the Bowery. Now, I gotta tell you, your description in the book about the Bowery — my traveling salesman father would sometimes take me into the city on a Saturday, and he wanted to show me different things about life in Manhattan. He wasn’t a fully educated guy, but a super smart guy. Loved the racetrack. So he’d take me down to the Bowery, and we’re driving around and I’m seeing these unfortunate men who, as you write in your book so vividly, are lying in their own mess and drinking. Then eventually when I moved into the city, it was to live with a little enclave of poets. It was my version of the artists club, and we put out a magazine. But this was on the Upper West Side.

Chris: Yeah, I used to go up to the Upper West Side, because some people would live up there. Lenny Kaye from the Patti Smith Group had what I considered to be this amazing apartment. He had a doorman.

Binnie: Incredible.

Chris: And an elevator. Of course, we had an elevator in our building, but it was always breaking down, sometimes with us in it. I spent hours inside that elevator before somebody fixed it. But New York was so great back then. Jeez.

Binnie: Jeez is right. I mean, I have to say, I’m a bit envious of the fun that you clearly had. And you’re so good at recounting it in this very extravagant but detailed, realistic way. It’s like a log of everything that happened and all the places you played. I don’t really understand how you could have the detail still in your memory. Were you keeping notes?

Chris: You know, I’m kicking myself that I didn’t keep a journal. I thought, You should be keeping a journal, but I never did because everything was happening kind of all at once for me. I think the reason I remember that first tour with the Ramones was it was the first tour we as a band ever did. It was also my first trip to Europe. The things that happened are very clear in my memory because it was the first time that ever happened to me.

Binnie: I was wondering if maybe you talked with Tina to stimulate each other’s memory about, “That night we did this, and that night we did that.”

Chris: Yes. And Tina did keep, not a journal, but a date book. Plus, I have the old tour itineraries — although you can’t trust those, because dates would get shifted around and canceled and added. But Tina kept these date books. The one for that year was from the Metropolitan Museum, and it had King Tut on the cover. Remember that big show?

Binnie: Oh, right, that exhibition.

Chris: So she kept notes on the name of the venue, whether we liked the concert promoter or not, whether we sold out or it was only half full or whatever. And actually, all those shows sold out, the ones we did with the Ramones. Because the European kids were just so thirsty for New York rock & roll that all the promoter had to do was make a poster that said “New York Rock from CBGBs,” and the club or the concert hall would sell out. So that was great. But Tina did keep these date books, and that helped me a lot because I could double check things, and sometimes she would say, “Never come back to this city again.”

Binnie: [Laughs.] That’s an important detail for sure. When I said I was envious — I mean, obviously of a lot of things, but given that I got into songwriting so late in life, and given that the nature of the project In These Trees and Tartie is done remotely — I don’t know if you know the backstory.

Chris: Go ahead, tell me the backstory.

Binnie: As DJs, we get lots of submissions. People want us — especially you, I would think, being famous — to play their stuff on our shows. And I don’t know about you, but I try to listen as much as I can because I know what it’s like to be struggling and sending out. But I’m picky, and there’s certain genres of music that probably don’t fit into my show. But one day, I get an email from a singer-songwriter in Australia named Tartie, and it was just a lovely email, struck the right note. “I was wondering if you’d check out my songs?” I wind up checking out her songs, particularly a video she did called “Winter’s Girl,” and I fell in love with her voice.

Chris: Yeah, she can sing.

Binnie: She can really sing. And I had this sort of instinct — a couple of things. She should be more famous, that’s number one. Number two, right around then, I had begun to write in a flurry about first love, first heartbreak, from back in the ‘60s. And that was through having been contacted by my first boyfriend when I was 16. Can you imagine? I got so stirred up. Anyway, that’s part of the inspiration for the songs. And somehow I said to her, “Would you take a look at a few of these poems? I think they might be songs.” And she did. She trotted off, in Australia 10,000 miles away, three decades younger than me at least, and she comes back with the first song on the album, “Orchard.” And it took my breath away. It was such a a fit, Chris. I had more, and she wanted to do more, and it just comes pouring out. Then I wind up connecting with this amazing producer, David Baron in Woodstock, New York, and the rest is history.

Chris: Well, congratulations. I think it’s really a good record. I’m interested to know, do you demo the songs on your little guitar and keyboard there and then send them? Is that how it works?

Binnie: Pretty much. I would say that it’s been a mixture. With “Orchard,” I had only the words. I sent them to her. She sent back a demo. I sent the demo to David. We then got a cello player, and David’s an incredible piano player, so he took over on the keyboards. Now, writing I will sometimes do on my little keyboard, and maybe make a little rough demo, but since I’m not a professional singer I really rely on Tartie to do some kind of a demo. And then David will do his magic in the studio in Woodstock and we’ll start adding. And he gave me — when you talk about collaboration — all this respect, that was just amazing in terms of what my vision was for the songs. 

Chris: That’s great. Respect is something we all love to have.

Binnie: For sure. And so contrasting with your experience, I think it’s likely that I might not get to have that [that same experience]. I mean, I need people a little more local. [Laughs.] Because I have more material, and more ideas about making In These Trees a little bit of a collective. But you were always with people. You were even living with Tina and David.

Chris: Yeah. 

Binnie: What is it like to be rehearsing and working and jamming and eating and laughing and drinking and drugging with the people that you’re creating art with?

Chris: Well, it was quite marvelous. [Laughs.] Not every single day was marvelous, but there were very high points that made it totally worthwhile. Especially in the early days when it was just Tina and David and myself, I never had any doubt that we would succeed. I just thought we’ve got something that’s very different from what other people are offering, and it’s good, it’s a little bit nutty, it’s a little eccentric, but it’s artistic and it will touch people’s hearts. Plus, we wanted to make people dance. That was another thing we wanted to do. But living together was really great. We shared responsibilities. We took turns making dinner. It was almost always pasta.

Binnie: Various sauces.

Chris: Yeah, one thing we discovered was — you know, we were living on a real budget — we discovered that you can make a sauce with cottage cheese, and it was cheaper than ground beef. 

Binnie: Is this the place you were living where you said that the bathroom — which was in the hall and shared with other seekers of fame and glory — was so filthy that one day you painted it black?

Chris: No, it was Tina who did it, and she spray painted it silver, like Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory. Even the toilet seat was painted silver, and it was a big improvement.

Binnie: Love it.

Chris: But we were not sharing with other people who wanted to get famous. We were sharing with a sweatshop of ladies who made polyester.

Binnie: I’m glad you had an opportunity to listen to The Quiver. I wasn’t sure you would like it, because the musical sensibility of it is so much more chamber pop, dream pop, indie pop. And I think of the stuff you play on your radio show and that you produce as being more funk-driven.

Chris: Right, there were not any funk songs on your album. [Laughs.] But that’s not the only thing I like. I listened to the album with Tina, and Tina was like, “This is great!” It helped me to get beyond my comfort zone. And Tina’s right, it is really good.

Binnie: You have made my day. Hopefully we will run into each other in person soon. This was delightful!

Chris: I wish you all good things. Bye, Binnie!