Jerry Harrison Talks Talking Heads History & Making & Performing of ‘Remain In Light’ (INTERVIEW)

Photo by Michael Weintrob

As far as influential musicians of our most recent past, Talking Heads have certainly made their imprint on the scene, both musically and visually. You can’t not know who they are upon hearing one of their songs and you didn’t walk away from a show without feeling completely mesmerized by their presence on the lighted stage. They made eight studio albums in their lifespan, had a groundbreaking concert film via Stop Making Sense, and were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in 2002. And this week on Thursday, September 29th, keyboardist/guitar player Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew, an excellent guitar player from King Crimson who began playing on Talking Heads albums around 1980, will perform together at The Wiltern in Los Angeles, playing music from their critically acclaimed album, Remain In Light. It’s an event that both artists are excited about.

“Jerry and I had talked for several years about the rare joy of the very popular 1980 Live In Rome video on YouTube,” Belew said in a press announcement earlier this year. “We both felt it was something audiences would love to experience now. The show we’ve put together is everything we hoped for and more. An awesome group of players and singers faithfully and lovingly reliving the music of a historic time: The Talking Heads’ Remain In Light. You cannot leave this concert anything less than exhilarated and dancing happily out the door!”

Harrison and Belew have done this before with Turkuaz, shortly before having to postpone a tour celebrating the 40th anniversary of the iconic album they will be showcasing later this week. “I think the album is wonderful but we took it up a notch when we did live performances. It was sort of a different feel than the Stop Making Sense band, which is sort of captured in that Rome 1980 ,” reiterated Harrison. “I’m really excited to be doing that again. You could really feel the energy and excitement, and there are so many talented musicians on stage.”

Harrison is certainly no stranger to igniting up an audience with his talent. He was a member of The Modern Lovers before joining Talking Heads when they were a trio – David Byrne, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz – just signing to a record deal. He has also been a producer since the eighties, working on albums by Kenny Wayne Shepherd, No Doubt, The BoDeans, The Bogmen and the Violent Femmes, as well as for his three solo albums, and has had several songs on movie soundtracks.

But for the moment, all his attention is turned towards The Wiltern. I spoke with Harrison recently about the event, Remain In Light, producing Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Myles Kennedy, early influences, and what makes Adrian Belew so amazing.

You and Adrian are about to do this big event in LA and I’m sure you’re both really excited about it. What can we expect?

Well, the show is based upon the Talking Heads show in Rome 1980, which is on YouTube. We took that as a template and it was sort of a little while in the making. Adrian had moved to Nashville and I happened to go down there quite a few times and we’d have dinner and this show would always come back up and it was like, why don’t we try and do something to kind of recreate this. I’d always felt there was something very special about that first incarnation of the sort of big band of Talking Heads. There was less a sense of staging and it was less theatrical than what it became with Stop Making Sense, which was amazing in its own right. But there was something about it and of course, Adrian is just such a remarkable player so it was sort of like, if I’m going to do anything sort of Talking Heads related – you know we’re not doing a reunion – I want it to have some kind of authenticity. We both worked together on this record, we’re both together on this tour, so we did it like that.

So basically we do most of the songs that are in that show. We do another song that Adrian wrote and sang for King Crimson called “Thela Hun Ginjeet” and I do “Rev It Up” from Casual Gods. We do a song, “Slippery People,” that the band Turkuaz, which a lot of the people that are joining us had previously been in the band Turkuaz, and we did it with the entire band at first. So we do “Slippery People” but with two girls singing it. Mavis Staples does “Slippery People” and I played it with her at her 80th birthday concert, so I thought, why don’t we do it like that and I’ll give the two girls a moment to shine.

So anyway, it’s a show that’s upbeat and really fun. You can dance to it and it’s really largely about the music. I think that everyone that is a fan of that album and a fan of Adrian and a Talking Heads fan, it’ll be joyful and fun.

Was it easy to revisit this album in terms of the musicianship? Did you have to do hours of practicing or did you and Adrian click pretty quickly?

I would say that the biggest thing was that the members of Turkuaz had spent the time and they knew their parts. I have other interests right now so I’m not playing concerts all the time so if there was anyone that was a burden, it was me to get myself in shape (laughs). I’m beginning the preparations to be ready for the show, cause we have done this before. We’re having a rehearsal the day before, which I’m really glad, cause it will help re-cement everything in everybody’s mind. But everyone kind of knows what to do and all of them are very professional and they have good memories or they know how to write the music down if they need to.

Will there be any extra creative changes?

Well, I think that would be something we’ll find out in the rehearsal (laughs). At this point, we’re not fitting into a time slot like at a festival so we can really do every song we have. So it will be a good hour and a half or a little bit more than that. This will be only the second time that we’ve played in a theater. Every other time has been in an outdoor festival. So that’s going to be great: different kinds of acoustics, different feelings onstage, lighting, things like that. And I have a fondness for the Wiltern. There was a sort of reissue coming around, which there’s going to be another one, but a couple of years ago before the pandemic, there was a screening of Stop Making Sense that I went to and introduced the film. I think 2000 people came and they were all dancing to the music. They’d set up like a band PA rather than playing it through theater speakers and it was really great and really fun. So I think this is going to be that but even much more because we’re going to be playing the music live.

The chemistry you have with Adrian, do you think that is sparked more by your similarities or your differences?

I’d say similarities. I think both of us have such a pure heart about the music. Adrian is a one-of-a-kind extraordinary musician so I’m not going to be putting myself in that same category (laughs). But I think that our take on life and on music and on the joy of playing this is the same; and how much we love that tour and how special we thought it was. He lived in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, because of this great studio that was there called Royal Recorders that I used to work at quite a lot, so we have been around each other on and off for much more than I think he has with anyone else in Talking Heads. He lives in Nashville now and I see him in Nashville. For a while, he had lived in central Illinois but he lived for a long time in Lake Geneva and then I think he moved to Nashville. So we make a point of looking each other up. We’ve had this continued friendship and I think he played on every one of my solo records. I haven’t played on any of his (laughs). So there you go, there’s a new idea (laughs).

Were you immediately comfortable with each other in the studio when he came aboard for Remain In Light?

Oh yeah. It went really smoothly. Very often it was his first take on each thing: “That’s just great, let’s go on to the next thing.” Yeah, I remember going down to see him at the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club and asking him if he wanted to come up. I think he had to stay an extra day in New York but it’s not like we had a lot of time. He describes it, he goes, “Well, there was this music but no singing so I didn’t know where the solo was supposed to be.” And I think Eno said, “Well Adrian, just go out there and listen and when you feel like a solo might come in just start playing.” (laughs) Then he goes, “Okay, I think I’m ready;” “No, we already got that one. We’re going to go on to the next one.” (laughs) I think we began with “The Great Curve,” which I think is one of his most amazing solos really of all time, you know.

I was going to ask where you thought his biggest fingerprint was among these eight songs. You’d say it was “The Great Curve”?

Yes, I think onstage, but I also think in the recording, those solos are just gigantic sounding. And also with the sort of three vocal parts, it’s such a gigantic mélange of instrumentation. It really is a special song.

Do you think this particular album is the best one Talking Heads ever did?

Well, you know, I get asked that a lot and for many years I would say that there is kind of two I always point to, which is Fear Of Music and Remain In Light. Remain In Light, we were expanding what we were going to do. We weren’t expanding the band. We really played all those parts ourselves and then to be able to have a band play them we needed to make a bigger band. But it was a very influential record and it sort of changed how people thought about music. So in that way, I think it had the most impact on sort of the history of music. 

Fear Of Music, I always thought, was the culmination of us as a four-piece, because we had become better and better players from touring. I don’t know, there’s something just extremely special about that. But you know, if I go listen to Speaking In Tongues, I can make a good argument for that one and I think there’s a lot of sleepers and I think Naked is a lot better than people know. I’ve been doing atmos mixes of all the Talking Heads records with different engineers and I’ve been the one sort of overseeing them so I’ve become a lot more acquainted with all of the records again.

Is that exciting?

It is very exciting and I’m excited for people to hear it but I think that Remain In Light, because of its influence and its uniqueness and it’s sort of drawing a line in music history, I think you could probably say it’s certainly our most influential record in many ways. So I guess in that way it’s our best record.

“Born Under Punches” has so many different layers. What was the creation process?

We went into the studio, and this is really true of all of them but it certainly is extremely true of this one, “Born Under Punches,” and we sort of deliberately had not written the songs ahead of time. And the idea was to put down tracks, often one at a time. Someone would say, “Oh I have an idea” and they’d go out and the composition of the record usually was using the mixing board to create groups of instruments that would become the different parts of the song. This made it kind of difficult for David to write lyrics to it and melodies but eventually, you know, he succeeded wonderfully. And “Born Under Punches” is particularly that way. I think there is a couple of bass parts on it; there’s obviously that driving sort of scratchy guitar that’s on it that really sort of drives the song the whole time and this sort of loping bass parts is the major part of the song with these sounds just kind of coming in and out. Then David does these wonderful lyrics that are a very unique singing style that he has on that.

It’s almost sensual in the rhythm

Yes. I would say “Houses In Motion” and “Crosseyed & Painless” are really sensual as well. I think that the sensuality is certainly throughout the record.

Were there any songs during this time that were in their infancy that didn’t make the cut for Remain In Light, or weren’t ready, but appeared further down the line?

No, I don’t think so. I mean, I think that when you go online you can see sort of an extended version of Remain In Light, and you’ll see either songs that became on the record but you hear what they sounded like when we were finished doing the basic tracks at Compass Point. And then there’s a few that never became and we never released. There may be one that did become a song we released on Sand In The Vaseline. I know that there was the song “Gangster Of Love,” but that was a later session. But I think when we went to our next album, which was after we did the Greatest Hits album, it was all new compositions.

When you started playing guitar, what was the hardest thing for you to get the hang of?

I started playing guitar much later than keyboards. I started when I was in The Modern Lovers. So I felt I had a lot of catching up to do, because I hadn’t been playing for years. And I think a lot of it was, I first of all was trying to learn how to play some parts that Jonathan [Richman] had played and he had like moved on to different parts. But I thought to represent the songs, they needed the original part as well. So I just got better as a guitar player. 

But you know, I think that one of the biggest things is, and this is sort of elemental, but learning to do barre chords and having the hand strength to do it. I immediately started playing guitar by playing electric guitar, not an acoustic guitar. And I’ve never become particularly good at playing acoustic guitar. For many people guitar is their first instrument; they get an acoustic guitar and then they get an electric guitar. But I started by me wanting to play the music that the band I was in was playing, which was this distorted electric guitar. I think even to this day trying to play really good acoustic guitar is a challenge for me (laughs).

Being that you were a little older when you joined the band, in your late twenties, do you think that added maturity made your contributions and compositions on a much deeper level than if you were younger coming in?

I think having gone through the experience of The Modern Lovers, I understood some things about what can go wrong (laughs). I had the experience of thinking everything was going to be great and then having the rug pulled out from under you. When I joined the band, we didn’t have a manager and I know that I pushed for us to actually have a manager. It was kind of the feeling for a while that we’ve been doing a pretty good job and we really don’t need one at this point. And I was kind of going, well, once we’re out on the road it’s going to be too complicated because there’s going to be too many things going on; and there’s also times where you want someone who fights for you, who is your representative, who perhaps can anger the record company, or someone else, and they can injure their relationship but our relationship with them is somehow still positive because it’s not us doing the arguing. So having that person who is in-between is really helpful.

Was The Violent Femmes your first foray into producing albums outside of the Talking Heads?

No. My first was I did a single with Nona Hendryx. Then I did the Fine Young Cannibals “Ever Fallen In Love” and that actually set the templet for what the rest of The Raw & The Cooked became. That was for the movie Something Wild and it’s on the soundtrack for Something Wild, although they ended up using a different version in the movie. Jonathan [Demme] had a version of them playing live which he had been editing to it and it sounded more like the English Beat and that was what he was looking for for the movie. So I had done those and I guess the Violent Femmes were next. I did Elliott Murphy’s Night Lights, and I had also been doing my record, Casual Gods

I had been spending a lot of time in the studio and I had found this studio in Milwaukee when I had gone back there to take care of my mother. My father died suddenly and it was like, what am I going to do, and I found this studio that I really liked; and the Violent Femmes are from Milwaukee. So I think that the people at Slash Records said, “Well, I think that Jerry is the perfect fit. He’s used to dealing with individual artists like David Byrne and Jonathan Richman and I think he will have a good rapport with the guys in the Violent Femmes.” I love that record. It’s unfortunate, there was a lot of tension in the band between Victor, Brian and Gordon and they ended up breaking up in the midst of the tour. I think that record would have done a lot better had they continued to tour and support it. They were just getting into like the second single at that point.

You produced one of Kenny Wayne Shepherd’s best albums, Trouble Is. What do you remember about working with that young guy back then?

The most amazing thing about it was that we were set to start at the Plant in Sausalito and I got a call from Ken Shepherd and he goes, “Jerry, we’re going to have to delay the recording. I just fired the lead singer.” So the singer, Corey [Sterling], who had been on the first record, got to the airport sort of still drunk from the night before and Ken kind of just thought, “This is not looking good.” So there was this crazy search for a singer. I mean, the idea that Noah Hunt, who is so spectacularly good, was found was just really so fortuitous and remarkable cause he is so much better than Corey in my mind. But he was really a neophyte and really scared and in fact, his vocal on “Blue On Black” is the vocal we did when we cut the song. He sang it actually in the control room as we cut the song. We tried to do it with better mics and do it over and over – we spent quite a bit of time thinking we could get it better. But there was an authenticity to that first take that it was just wonderful. And of course, that was Kenny’s biggest hit. It actually has some record for being one of the longest #1 records at Rock Radio ever. I think it’s like 22 weeks at #1, or something like that. It was just really great. 

I’ve actually made five records with Kenny Wayne but that one certainly sticks out. It has so many great songs on it. Things like “Nothing To Do With Love” and “I Found Love.” You remember the ones like “King’s Highway” or “Somehow, Somewhere, Someway,” the kind of blues rockers. But when I’ve gone back and listened to it, some of the ballads and some of these other ones, or “Nothing To Do With Love,” I don’t know, it’s sort of a pop-funk, it’s got all these aspects to it. Wow, what a great record this was. 

Was there a particular song you wanted on the album?

There were two songs that I wanted, that we actually cut, which was a version of “Voodoo Child” and Bob Dylan’s “Ballad Of A Thin Man.” I wanted to put those on the CD as well but they decided not to. But Bob Ludwig, the mastering engineer, and I, we had sort of mastered them and we put a ten second pause at the end of the record and then came in with “Voodoo Child.” We had put a pause like we were sending out a CD for the band members’ approval and we were showing everything we had done and maybe those tracks would be used later as bonus tracks or for something. And we went, oh my God, this is the coolest thing! The idea that this record ends and then suddenly these two songs come on. But we couldn’t convince Ken and Kenny but I do think it would have been really spectacular if we had.

I didn’t realize you worked with Myles Kennedy when he was in The Mayfield Four. Tell us about that cause that’s early Myles.

It certainly is. First of all, he’s just an amazing singer and I’m disappointed that that record didn’t have more traction. We recorded it largely up in Seattle because his mother I think suddenly came down with something like a brain tumor or something and I wanted him to be closer to home. As it worked out, I didn’t realize that Spokane was as far from Seattle as it was so he wasn’t as close to home as I thought he would be. 

But the record was a little bit of a challenge to make because we recorded it in the studio where Dave Grohl had done the first Foo Fighters records, where he played all the parts himself, which was dug into a hillside. It’s called Bob Lang Recording, I think [Robert Lang Studios]. It had this gigantic door and it opened to this insane view of Puget Sound. It was beautiful. But the door was like a foot thick of steel and concrete. It was like a bunker and it was just in a hillside. But after a while, it was like, I kind of smell mildew or something in here. It had that sort of cave-like dampness to it and I was happy when we came down to Sausalito to finish the record. But I thought there were some great songs on that record and that somehow Epic or they together, somehow they just didn’t get it over the top. I’m so happy though for Myles, but sort of disappointed for the other guys in the band that were talented but didn’t have that opportunity to keep going.

Myles has become such an extraordinary songwriter. Could you see that in him then?

Yeah, because he was completely involved in the songs on that record. He was the real deal: he was an amazing singer, a terrific songwriter, and actually a good band member; he was not an egomaniac, he really supported the members of his band.

I’ve talked to other musicians about seeing a band in its infancy that totally blew them away and Talking Heads has popped up several times – John Doe of X comes to mind. What were you guys most trying to achieve in those early, early live performances?

I think we were really just trying to present the songs that had been written (laughs). There was like a shared sensibility. You know they had been a trio and I joined as the fourth member and one of the things, when I tried out for the band but also on the first record, was I wanted to enhance what they had already created, not try to overly change it. I wanted to sort of strengthen and to enhance that and I wanted it to seem unified. It didn’t matter to me if I played a solo on a record or stuck out. 

I think as we developed, we became more contrapuntal than we were on the first record because we were developing things together. I think in the earliest form, it was about this group of songs. A lot of songs that had actually been written at the same time as the first record, they just didn’t, we didn’t think they were sort of ready for prime time. There’s only a certain amount of space, particularly on vinyl, so as we played them live, they became more and more developed. Songs like “The Girls Want To Be With The Girls” or “Artists Only” got better and better and became the backbone of what became the second record. There were songs like “Found A Job” and a couple other songs, “The Big Country” and maybe “Stay Hungry” – I’m not sure that had been written then or later. But I also felt I wanted it to feel organic and I think that we pulled that off. 

You know, John Doe is a good friend of mine and they are a fantastic band. One of the things that is so great about the bands from that period, especially four-piece bands, every member is very defined. Take X. Billy Zoom is an incredible guitar player. He has a presence onstage, even today when he is sitting down, he has a quiet authority and he believes what he is playing 100%. DJ Bonebrake is a terrific drummer who can play jazz, who can play all this stuff, but he’s rocking really hard. And of course, John and Exene are trading singing parts. You know they had been a couple and they have this sort of magic between them. And I think the Talking Heads when we were this four-piece, there were almost fans of each one of us and because we kept the white lights on we were not putting all the attention on David or let’s go over to Tina. I think everybody could look at whoever they wanted to all the time. And people could see the sort of concentration and interplay between us. 

People very often will comment on Tina sort of looking at Chris or looking at David, sort of not facing the audience but looking at the two of them in those early performances. She wasn’t going out to perform for the audience, she was locking into the music and you could see her 100% concentration on that. And I think that is what we were all about. Like, how do we make each one of these songs express to the sort of ultimate of what that song is. The other thing about it is we always wanted to do it with simple and direct means. Not exactly punk but part of the punk/new wave ethos, which I think The Modern Lovers in many ways were one of the first proponents of this let’s get away from ornate complicated arrangements like all these bands of the movement that came out in the seventies. Certainly, The Modern Lovers, when we came out and made the record in 1972, stood as sort of an alternative to Emerson Lake & Palmer and Yes and what really became Prog Rock. Like all these musicians who had studied in the Academy and solos that went on for five minutes and the whole piece was fifteen or twenty minutes. I mean, even Cream when they released the live album [Wheels Of Fire], “Spoonful” is three-quarters the side of an album. And the other one is “Toad,” the drum solo, which takes up the whole side. 

The bands had very good musicianship and I think they were inspired by Jazz albums where you had sometimes extended versions of a song cause it would meander and manipulate and go this way and that way, and people would play these solos. And this was, let’s go back to the sort of songwriting of Buddy Holly and rockabilly and early rock & roll, like the three-minute song, short and sweet. And the Ramones of course is the ultimate version of this. Some of those songs are two minutes and fifteen seconds. Hilly [Kristal, owner] would do this thing at CBGBs that everyone would get like a half-hour set or something like that, and you’d have six bands play in one night sometimes in the early days. And the Ramones could do in thirty minutes, fifteen songs (laughs). Emerson Lake & Palmer, it would be two songs (laughs). 

So I think that’s what fans like John Doe saw in us and may have been influential in how they conceived of X. I think they were a little bit after us, I’m not absolutely sure of the timing, but again I love X. And when you think of The Police, a trio, you really understood what every person in that band did. Blondie was so dominated by Debbie’s persona but that doesn’t quite fit the mold as much although if you can think about the music it does. But Television, the interplay between Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine is absolutely essential. It was a very different band when Jimmy Rip joined and replaced Richard Lloyd. He was more of a session player, maybe even a little more accomplished, but I’m not sure I thought the interplay between the two guitarists was better. It was different and still good.

Is there someone that influenced you that would totally surprise people?

Well, certainly in Talking Heads we all were very influenced by R&B music. I had played in my first high school band, we played lots of R&B songs and I wasn’t particularly good. I was probably one of the least talented in the band (laughs). But on our setlist, we were playing James Brown songs and Rufus Thomas, and just as The Beatles and the Stones and The Who were getting to the United States, the second version of that was we were very influenced by those English bands. But the first version, we were playing a lot of songs that other bands around there played but it was very, I guess to a degree, it was music that influenced everybody coming from England had influenced me at a similar time. But I was also very influenced by certain kinds of American early rock pop hits that were not so much let’s say blues records or R&B. Songs like “Ooh Poo Pah Doo.” I had come out of that. 

One thing that is interesting is that from my high school band, the guitar player in my high school band went on and became Leonard Cohen’s guitar player for twenty-five years. And the bass player was Johnny Winters’ bass player for ten years. So they were professional musicians their whole lives. So three of us, three out of five, went on to be professional musicians, which is extraordinary for a suburban high school outside of Milwaukee.

Also out of that time, guys who were in other bands, who were sort of integrated with that, became filmmakers and made the movies Airplane and Naked Gun and Ghost and Kentucky Fried Movie – the Zucker brothers. So it was this very creative group of people in this high school. And the bands broke the idea of everyone only hanging out with people from their own class. Sports teams from the past had done that but in bands, it was like your partner was someone from a different class so you got to know other people in a way and it sort of really changed how high school was. Of course, I went to high school at the end of the sixties, so it was right when sort of marijuana and LSD were just changing the entire culture. I could go on about that for hours (laughs).

Portrait by Michael Weintrob

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