Chris Frantz isn’t holding his tongue.
In a new book, The Philosophy Of Modern Song, legendary songwriter and performer Bob Dylan didn’t either. The seemingly permanently brutally honest musician wrote about some bands and derided others in his new collection of essays and the Talking Heads’ Frantz took none too kindly to one passage in particular.
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Dylan in his second essay, on Elvis Costello’s song, “Pump It Up,” wrote, “Elvis Costello And The Attractions were a better band than any of their contemporaries. Light years better.”
Those two sentences rankled the drummer, Frantz, likely the bit about “any of their contemporaries.” Talking Heads were and are very much contemporaries with Costello.
Wrote Frantz on his Facebook page on Friday (November 11), “I love Bob Dylan’s new book The Philosophy Of Modern Song. But I have one little bone to pick with the author when he writes ‘Elvis Costello And The Attractions were a better band than any of their contemporaries. Light years better.’ With all due respect to the Attractions and to drummer Pete Thomas in particular, I’d like to say to Bob something he once said to a buddy of mine. ‘Suck a dick.’”
Yet, as Rolling Stone points out, Dylan was, at least at one time, a follower of the Talking Heads. Frantz told the outlet that Dylan was in attendance when David Byrne and company played a show in St. Paul, Minnesota in the 1980s. Afterward, the band was invited to Dylan’s house for a party.
“We said, ‘Great!’” Frantz told Rolling Stone. “They gave us directions to a house somewhere in the suburbs of Minneapolis. This is before GPS, so it took us a while to find it. We knocked and this woman came to the door and said, ‘Hello?’ We said, “Bob invited us to come. We’re Talking Heads.’ And she said, ‘Oh, Bob’s already gone to bed.’”
“I’m not trying to pit the Heads against any of the bands of that era,” Frantz added. “There were so many good bands then, and I spent many nights at CBGB and saw a lot of superior performances. But I would say to Bob, ‘How are you making such a sweeping generalization?’ I think it’s a very good book—despite that one chapter.”
Fans can purchase Dylan’s new book HERE.
Photo FRED TANNEAU/AFP/GettyImages