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Talking Heads drummer relives the early days of CBGB, the Ramones and rise of punk rock

It was the summer of ’75, when a garbage strike left tons of stinking trash piled high on flat-broke Gotham’s sweltering streets. Five-dollar hookers and fur-coat-clad pimps strutted around the Lower East Side, and junkies turned abandoned slums into squalid shooting galleries.

But amid that dystopian nightmare sat a grungy dive on the Bowery called CBGB that was home to bikers, neighborhood drunks and the seeds of a musical revolution that changed the future of music — punk rock.

Chris Frantz, drummer of the seminal new-wave band Talking Heads, had a front-row seat along with his now-wife, bassist Tina Weymouth, guitarist/lead singer David Byrne, and the original Ramones: Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy, all four of whom died way too early.

Decades later, the UK is staging a yearlong 40th anniversary celebration — dubbed Punk London — but the scene across the Atlantic blossomed only after the Big Apple’s was in full bloom.

Frantz, who still plays and records with Weymouth in their band, Tom Tom Club, shared stories of those crazed early days with The Post, when a dozen or fewer fans would show up at Hilly Kristal’s famed club for a gig.

“We lived at 195 Chrystie St., 3¹/₂ blocks from CBGB. It was rough, man, it was rough. No hot water, no shower, the bathroom in the hall we had to share with all these sweaty guys,” said Frantz, who with his bandmates was fresh out of the Rhode Island School of Design.

Patti Smith performing with Lenny Kaye (right) and Ivan Kral (left) at CBGB’s.Redferns

“That first summer there, ’75, there was a heat wave, not unlike the one we were having recently, and also a garbage strike at the same time. So you could imagine what it was like,” he said.

“The kids would open the hydrants and you had streams of water going down the street with burning garbage floating on it.

“The kids would set the garbage on fire. I thought I was going to lose my mind. Tina took it better than I did.”

But the band practiced every day in its ninth-floor loft with the great view of the Empire State Building way uptown, and before long debuted at CBGB, opening up for the protopunks from Forest Hills themselves.

“Hilly asked Johnny if we could open for them, and Johnny said, ‘Sure, they’re gonna suck, so no problem,’ ” Frantz recalled.

Frantz said the Heads all loved the Ramones — and even got to like the dictatorial Johnny, but it took a while.

“That guy was mean as a snake. He was just a pure, unadulterated mean spirit. I’m sure he had good qualities also, but they were not evident,” he said.

“He came around toward the end, but for the longest time, he thought that we sucked. But they were crazy. They’d be on stage playing and then they’d just stop and start fighting.”

The Talking Heads perform at CBGBsRedferns

Their debut together was hardly a roaring success.

“There were very few people in the audience, maybe 10 altogether. Five came to see us and five came to see the Ramones. The Ramones’ fans were all girls, presumably their girlfriends,” Frantz remembered.

When they weren’t performing oddball pop like “(Love Goes to) Building on Fire” and “Psycho Killer” onstage, they would drink at the bar and get to know the other bands and hangers-on.

One was Legs McNeill, one of the founders of Punk magazine, which chronicled the scene when only the Village Voice and SoHo News were paying any attention.

“Legs somehow positioned himself as an expert on CBGB’s heyday, but most of the time, he was passed out. One time at about 4 a.m., Hilly said, ‘Can you just get that guy out of there?’ ” Frantz said.

“Tina had a car, an old Plymouth Valiant that was a family hand-down. We could fit the whole band in there. We tried to take him home but he was so intoxicated, he couldn’t remember what his address was. We’d drive around and ask him, ‘Does that look like your place, Legs?’ Finally, we found it.”

Some of the musicians, like the poet-turned-singer Patti Smith, Debbie Harry’s Blondie, Television with Tom Verlaine, and Willy DeVille’s Mink DeVille, went on to score record deals, tour and become punk and new-wave legends.

Hilly KristalAP

Other regulars — The Shirts, Tuff Darts (with lead singer Robert Gordon) and the Miamis — never broke out but won loyal followings with music that had more energy and was more fun to listen to than just about anything on the radio.

At the time, the country was still suffering from a post-Vietnam and post-Watergate hangover — and the airwaves were filled with the vapid aural Valium of chart toppers like Olivia Newton-John’s “Have You Never Been Mellow,” The Eagles’ “One of These Nights” and Wings’ “Venus and Mars.”

Much of the best music from those early days was released on a double album called “Live at CBGB’s.”

Talking Heads signed up for the album but eventually bailed — although their photo remained on the record jacket.

“We didn’t think we were good enough yet — that’s why we pulled out. We thought it would ruin our chances to get a real record deal. Hilly was not happy about it, but at least he understood,” Frantz said.

The Ramones released their eponymous first album in April 1976 — and things took off from there, with the iconic “Hey, ho, let’s go!” opening lines of the 2-minute and 12-second anthem “Blitzkrieg Bop,” detonating like a gun at the start of a race.

And it’s still played at sporting events and in TV commercials four decades later. Who knew?

The Ramones’ appearances in London as the opening act for the Flamin’ Groovies came on July 4, 1976 — and caused a sensation unlike anything they had seen back in the States.

While most of America was celebrating the bicentennial with fireworks, concerts and picnics, the Ramones were inspiring a generation of British punks — including The Clash and the Sex Pistols, whose debut single, “Anarchy in the UK,” was released a couple months later.

The next spring, Talking Heads opened up for the Ramones on the bands’ first full European Tour.

They still couldn’t afford a luxury coach with sleeping berths, so they traveled on a beat-up tourist bus with Johnny in full dictator mode.

“He wanted to decide where everybody sat. If you changed your seat, he’d say, ‘Whaddya sittin’ there for? You weren’t sittin’ there yesterday,’ ” Frantz said.

And then there was the very strange trip to Stonehenge.

BlondieRedferns

“We had a very cool tour manager, a very experienced guy, and we were on our way from London to Brighton, anyway down near Cornwall, and he said, ‘We’re going by Stonehenge today. How’d you like to stop and see Stonehenge?’ ” Frantz recalled.

“And everybody said, ‘Yeah! Yeah! We want to see Stonehenge!’ This was when you could walk up and touch it. Everybody but Johnny, who stayed on the bus. ‘Who wants to see a f–kin’ pile of old rocks?’ he said.”

Johnny ordered his bandmates to stay with him, “but Dee Dee said, ‘No, Johnny, we want to see Stonehenge too!’ So they went, though we had to convince Dee Dee it wasn’t a good idea to carve his initials into the rocks,” Frantz said.

One date on the tour — which was sold out like all the others — was in Zurich, and after a sound check, they had time for dinner at a restaurant called Volkshaus, which was attached to their hotel.

“This was my first time in Europe, and we were really excited. It was really a beautiful place and they served us a wonderful meal starting with a nice, fresh green-leaf salad,” Frantz said.

“Johnny looks at it and says, ‘What the f–k is this?’ We told him, ‘That’s lettuce, Johnny.’ He said, ‘That’s not f–kin’ lettuce!’

“Johnny wanted iceberg.”

Frantz, who with Weymouth and family now splits his time between Connecticut and France, remembered the now-shuttered CBGB as the incubator for it all.

“It was just a nascent scene at the time,” he said. “We had the feeling that this was going to be an important place. We had seen Patti Smith, who was bigger than the Ramones at the time. She was wild. She had that intensity that you just don’t run into these days — onstage, but also off the stage.

“She was not a relaxed person.”

Also on the scene was the band Television, whose debut “Marquee Moon” is considered one of the best guitar LPs of all time.

“With that combination of bands, you know something’s going on. It just took a while to grow,” Frantz said.

I first met the Ramones, Talking Heads, David Johansen of the New York Dolls and many others while covering music in the ’70s for the since defunct alt-weekly The New Haven Advocate.

David Byrne and Chris Frantz (drums) of the Talking Heads.Redferns

I earned Johnny’s wrath in a nanosecond while covering a show in New Haven at the long-gone Arcadia Ballroom.

I was in the dressing room and started asking Joey a few questions.

“Whaddya talkin’ to him for?” Johnny shouted. “I’ll do the talkin’!”

“Shut up, Johnny,” Joey spat back as Johnny turned to me, his face a mask of fury. “You got questions, you talk to me,” he demanded, prompting an argument between the two that ended the interview.

Dee Dee sat nearby looking into a mirror calmly popping zits, clearly used to the turmoil.

Talking Heads, who by then had added The Modern Lovers’ Jerry Harrison on keyboards, were a different story.

Byrne was drinking a Heineken before a show in Westport, Conn., so I bought him another to break the ice — but he blew me off. This was decades before it was revealed that he had Asperger’s Syndrome.

Frantz was another story. He recalls, “David Johansen once said to me, ‘Chris, you’ll never make it in this business because you’re too ­f–kin’ nice.’ ”