One Week After Announcing Eight-Track Label, Big Bucks Lands a Couple of Talking Heads

By Robert Wilonsky Fri., Nov. 19 2010 at 5:15 PM

Categories: Local Music

Mark Bowman

Big Bucks, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth in Austin in 1996

It was but one week ago today that James "Big Bucks" Burnett announced he was, at long last, opening his Eight Track Museum on Commerce Street in Deep Ellum on Christmas Day, but of course. At the same time he announced his new eight-track label: Cloud 8, which will release an extremely limited run of The O's forthcoming Between The Two on February 8.

Bucks just sent word that he has added another act to the roster: Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth's Tom Tom Club. Forthcoming within "the first three, four months of 2011" will be the band's in-concert album, Genius of Live, and the couple has signed off on releasing some 30 copies, which will sold to the highest bidders. The eight-track will be numbered and signed by the former Talking Heads.

"There's really not a lot of information yet," says Bucks, "because we haven't developed our plans specifically. But Chris and I have known each other since '82, and he flew me up to their house a few years ago to organize their archives, so we have a longstanding friendship." Bucks met the couple backstage at the Bronco Bowl after a Heads show. As Frantz recounted last year, Bucks "somehow finagled his way backstage during soundcheck, I believe."

Says Bucks, the, ahem, signing of Tom Tom Club to Cloud 8 is "yet another step in our fascinating relationship. And if I can get the right funding, what I am hoping is that this can slowly -- or, hell, quickly -- grow into me getting the rights to reissue older albums. T-Rex's The Slider was just reissued on vinyl for, like, the 10th time. Why can't I do that on eight-track?"

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