Beating Drums for Revitalized Tom Tom Club

In 1980, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, the husband-and-wife rhythm section of Talking Heads, ventured out on their own with an equally polyrhythmic but even more black-influenced side project called the Tom Tom Club.

Nine years later, with Talking Heads largely inactive, the Club is no longer open only at odd hours.

Not having played live with the Heads in five years, bassist Weymouth and drummer Frantz are making their Club a full-time organization with a new album, “Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom,” and a terrifying-to-mere-mortals tour schedule.

They’ve left their two kids back home and embarked on a two-month U.S. jaunt with only a few nights off. In many cities they’ll do multiple-night stints--including a whopping 12 -night stand at the Variety Arts Center beginning Tuesday, with only one evening off in the middle.

The ever-amorphous outfit hasn’t just changed its lineup since the days of the early hits “Genius of Love” and “Wordy Rappinghood.” A lot of topical black music influences have been shorn like a bulky winter coat, due in part to the team’s belief that sampling technology--using “samples” taken off other people’s records--has rendered live performances in the hip-hop genre almost superfluous.

“We couldn’t stay in the same place as eight years ago,” said Weymouth in a recent phone call from New York. “If we’re bored, then surely the listener is bound to be bored. In 1980, the hip-hop scene was fresh and new. See, when we did our first record, it was pre-sampling days. And we had an idea to just take these various elements and slam them together as if they weren’t part of the same song and make them part of the same song.

“Now, sampling does that. It’s gotten cheaper, but it hasn’t changed. We’re still paralleling it, but the reason we’re moving away from the hip-hop is because it’s not growing at this moment. There’s been a lot of copy-cat stuff going on. It can’t really be performed live. They just use tapes. And once you’ve seen one Run-D.M.C. show, you’ve seen it. You’re just waiting for their next record. For the hip-hop people to evolve, they have to find a new way to do it off-record.”

If anything, Weymouth expresses more of an admiration for today’s metal bands and their love of live playing.

“What’s happening is that in that kind of distortion music, you’re riding a wild bronco. The idea when you’re playing guitar like that is that it can get under you. When you’re working with feedback between your guitar and your amp, it can at any moment completely spin out of control, and that’s like an athletic adrenaline rush--as Tom Wolfe said in ‘The Right Stuff,’ pushing the envelope, what these jet test pilots do, seeing how far you can take it.

“I think what we try to do or what the jazz guys try to do is do it on a different level. The jazz guys try to do it on a very abstract level. I think we always try to do that as well, but also keep it with a strong backbeat that you can also dance to. They’re all valid ways of arriving at the same thing, which is trying to be in the moment.

“We don’t try to re-create our records. We don’t use sequencers or tapes; we really play. And we give ourselves enough room that, depending on how the audience is reacting and how we’re feeling, there’s chemistry there that allows us to improvise.”

For Weymouth and her husband, being “in the moment” means playing live and spontaneously, something that has obviously not been a priority for head Head David Byrne in recent years. She defends her once-and-future partner’s lack of interest in touring:

“We have such a different situation than David. We had a different vehicle with which to reinvent ourselves immediately in the Tom Tom Club. . . . With David, Talking Heads was his vehicle, and the David Byrne persona is one that’s well-known, and to reinvent that is a bigger challenge.

“All these things stimulate us and feed us and renew us. We’re not fighting about this, you know what I mean? We think of it as a positive thing.

“It gives time for a whole new generation to come up in the world. Generations in music change every four years . . . and five years of not touring with Talking Heads means there’ll be a whole different audience out there to win with a whole different idea of what Talking Heads is. So once we find that thing that excites us, we will be able to do it again, and hopefully we won’t have to do it in huge stadiums--which looked like what was going to be the next step.

“We didn’t want to be part of this huge business wheel, to touch a nerve and say, ‘OK, this is it, let’s milk it for all it’s worth.’ We wanted to retain control over what we were doing, and didn’t want to keep repeating ourselves.”

Weymouth chuckled, straining for an analogy. “Like Coke Classic or something; we didn’t want to be Talking Heads Classic.”