“We ran through these songs, and when we had the best version — what we thought was the best version — we kept it,” Frantz recently told the Globe via a Zoom call, describing that day the band gathered around one microphone in his Providence apartment at the time to cut the trio of songs, probably using a tape recorder from RISD’s film department.
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Now that early demo of what would become a hit song for the innovative band, recorded here in Rhode Island, is finally getting an official release.
The track is featured in a new Talking Heads collection from Rhino Records titled, “Tentative Decisions: Demos & Live,” coming out on Record Store Day on Nov. 28, or Black Friday. The vinyl release also includes The Artistics’ take on “Warning Sign,” which appeared on Talking Heads’ sophomore album, “More Songs About Buildings and Food.”
“Psycho Killer,” meanwhile, made it onto the band’s 1977 debut, “Talking Heads: 77,” with bassist Tina Weymouth and guitarist-keyboardist Jerry Harrison in the fold. These days, it’s a classic rock standard, wholly unique with its pulsing bass line, jolting energy, and signature French phrases.
“I think the real fans will recognize the songs in their demo form,” Frantz said. “Like I said, it was three amateurs in front of one microphone in a dusty apartment on Benefit Street, so technologically it’s not brilliant or anything like that. Quite the opposite.
“But it’s got an excitement to it and it’s got a real, I think, rock ‘n’ spirit,” he added. “I’m very happy with it.”
The Artistics demo tape at the Rhode Island School of Design.Kaylee Pugliese/RISD
Frantz has said he sent the initial Artistics demos, along with a handwritten letter, off to his teacher, artist Alan Sondheim, who, at the time, had a radio show on WBAI in New York City.
“I sent it to him, you know as young artists will do, in the hopes that he would play it,” Frantz said in February. “But I don’t think that ever happened.”
The tape was eventually purchased by the RISD Museum in 2005 as part of a collection of Sondheim’s materials, according to Margot Nishimura, RISD’s assistant provost for academic engagement.
RISD reached out to Frantz about it not long after the original Talking Heads members appeared on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” in October 2023, where Frantz mentioned he had heard early recordings of the band during its RISD days might exist.
Frantz then had the tape digitized and mastered, and, in February, returned it to RISD, where it now resides.
“ It’s amazing to have an artifact that, you know, really was there at the beginning of something that has had such an incredible impact on popular culture throughout the world,” Nishimura said in an interview.
It was Byrne who started writing “Psycho Killer.” He brought it to Frantz and Weymouth — a RISD student who was Frantz’s girlfriend at the time — in part, because he knew Weymouth spoke French, Frantz said.
“First he approached a Japanese student to write something in Japanese and she found out the title of the song … and she said, ‘Oh, no. I’m not going to do that,’” Frantz said. “But this didn’t bother Tina.”
The foreign language addition gave the song — the first the trio collectively wrote together — its signature bridge, with a few lines about the killer narrator ruminating on “what I did that night.”
“It was perfect,” said Frantz, now Weymouth’s husband. The trio penned the track — the first they wrote together — inside Carr House on Benefit Street.
“It had a good rhythm to it, and you know that fa-fa-fa-fa came from Otis Redding,” Frantz said. “But the whole vibe was kind of like Velvet Underground meets Otis Redding at Alice Cooper’s house.”
Talking Heads members Tina Weymouth, left, and Chris Frantz look at materials at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence earlier this year.Kaylee Pugliese/RISD
The new collection coming on Record Store Day also includes a demo of the song recorded in September 1975, as well as 10 other tracks recorded by Weymouth, Frantz, and Byrne in 1975 and 1976, and The Artistics’ demo of “Warning Sign.”
“In our early years in New York before we made any records, you can see the songs evolving over time, and they really did evolve as we got better and more refined in our listening and our thinking,” Frantz said. “I’m very happy that this is coming out because it’s, you know, to me, it’s an important cultural artifact.”
Asked if he would have ever thought “Psycho Killer” would have the staying power it now holds while he was recording it in that Providence apartment all those years ago, Frantz said, “There was never any doubt in my mind that we could have success with music.”
“I really had this vision in my mind that there was room in the musical landscape for a different kind of band that was artistic, but also spoke in everyday language, and spoke about things that were not generally referred to in popular music,” he said.
After a pause, Frantz added, “Such as psycho killers.”
Christopher Gavin can be reached at christopher.gavin@globe.com.