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From one Hall of Famer to another, thank you David Bowie

Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Chris Frantz was a founding member of the Talking Heads who now plays with the Tom Tom Club. He was a friend of David Bowie’s — and recalls for The Post here the music legend’s influence on him and others through the years.

In our younger days as art students, Tina Weymouth and I shared a painting studio at the Rhode Island School Of Design. We would listen to the radio, mostly WBRU FM from Brown University, while we painted, and sometimes we would would think out loud to each other.

Talking Heads founding member Chris Frantz in 2004.FilmMagic

When David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars traveled through the airwaves to our ears, we felt as if someone was speaking directly to us in our own artistic language.

The radio was the way we heard new music back then, and not much of what we were hearing gave us the buzz we were looking for. But David Bowie did.

In fact, it was his music and image, along other legends like Lou Reed and The Stooges and James Brown, that inspired me to form a band called The Artistics with David Byrne and some other cool RISD friends.

One autumnal afternoon around that time, I was sitting in front of Joe’s sandwich shop on Benefit Street when a friend called Charlie Rocket, who was in a great band called The Fabulous Motels, got out of his car and came over to say he had just seen David Bowie and The Spiders from Mars up in Boston and that the show had changed his world.

He told me nothing would ever be the same, and he was right. Shortly thereafter came Bowie’s production of Lou Reed’s Transformer with “Walk On The Wild Side” and then his production of “All The Young Dudes” by Mott The Hoople. It seemed like everything he touched was genius.

We moved to New York City in 1974, and I urged David Byrne and Tina to start a band with me. We wanted to have a band that spoke to people the way David Bowie and his band had spoken to us, with a soulful intelligence and an artist integrity.

This was the band we called Talking Heads. We were told that David Bowie came to see us play at CBGB’s, but he left before we had a chance to meet him.

Years later, in 1982, we had the good fortune to meet David when we played the Montreux Jazz Festival with Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club. He had a home nearby, and he decided to drop into our dressing room to say hello.

Dressed very unpretentiously in a brown anorak and a Shetland wool tweed cap, he was friendly and a little bit shy. By this time, we knew, through our mutual collaborator Brian Eno, that our music had been an influence on his, and I can tell you this was a great honor.

David looked at the spread of snacks the promoter had provided for us and asked, “Are you going to be eating that cheese?”

“No,” we said, and he wrapped it up in a napkin and put it in the pocket of his jacket.

Then he asked. “Are you going to be eating those nuts? “No,” we said, and he wrapped those up and put them in his pocket, too. He giggled as he did so.

Later that year, when we were onstage playing Radio City Music Hall, I looked over to my right and dancing in the wings all by himself was David Bowie.

He gave me two thumbs up and a pelvic thrust.

This made me so happy that I glided through the rest of the show as if on a cloud. We never had any deep conversations together but I am proud to say, as a great fan of his, that we made an artistic connection.

His new album, Blackstar, is very challenging music to me, but I mean this in the best possible way. It’s kind of scary, like the first time I heard “Heroin” by The Velvet Underground.

The videos are deeply frightening, too, but I will eventually feel more comfortable with them.

The cutting edge is not always very easy.

The work of a lifetime is full of twists and turns and David Bowie’s music will live forever.

I’m grateful for his time here among us and for never failing to create that buzz we have been searching for.

Thank you, David.

Respect.

Peace.