CBS SF talks to Talking Heads member Jerry Harrison about Remain in Light
CBS SF recently spoke to Talking Heads member Jerry Harrison about two upcoming Bay Area shows with his Remain in Light Ensemble featuring guitar giant Adrian Belew (Frank Zappa, David Bowie, King Crimson) in Santa Cruz and San Francisco.
While singer/lyricist David Byrne would become the visual focal point for the Talking Heads as the band rose to become one of the most popular acts to emerge from the New York City punk scene in the late '70s, Harrison already had substantial experience when he was invited to join in 1977. Teaming with Jonathan Richman in his Boston proto-punk band the Modern Lovers while he was a student at Harvard, Harrison played keyboards in the group as it achieved regional popularity and was courted by multiple record companies
The Modern Lovers recorded demos that would eventually be released as the band's influential eponymous album (the Sex Pistols would cover the song "Roadrunner"), but Richman's desire to scrap their original hard-driving, Velvet Underground-influenced sound for a more stripped-down lyrical approach led the band to dissolve in 1974. Shaken by the split, Harrison returned to Harvard to study for his master's in architecture, but within two years was being courted to join the Talking Heads. Formed by Byrne and fellow students he met at the Rhode Island School of Design Chris Frantz (drums) and Tina Weymouth (bass), the band only recorded and released an independent 7" single before Harrison accepted the band's invitation in time to contribute guitar and keyboards to the band's first album for Sire Records, Talking Heads '77.
The group would embark on a remarkable string of collaborations with noted producer Brian Eno (an original member of Roxy Music who went on to an eclectic solo career and produced albums by David Bowie, Devo and others) that introduced funk and African music elements to the band's artful punk sound that reached a zenith on the third and final album they made together, 1980's Remain in Light.
Incorporating additional musicians (including guitar virtuoso Belew), the album featured the propulsive live favorites "Crosseyed and Painless" and "The Great Curve" as well as the future MTV hit "Once in a Lifetime." The band would see even greater commercial success after the 1983 release of Speaking in Tongues, the Talking Heads' first album in several years not produced by Eno, which included the band's biggest chart hit "Burning Down the House." The tour for that record was documented in seminal concert film "Stop Making Sense." Still hailed as on of the greatest music documentaries ever made, this year a restored version of the movie played theaters and the complete soundtrack featuring songs cut from the original film was finally issued.
While the Talking Heads would release three more successful albums and appear in the musical comedy film True Stories through the rest of the decade, tensions within the band emerged as Byrne took control of its direction. The band never toured again after 1984 and would announce an acrimonious break up in 1991. Harrison had already recorded his solo debut The Red and the Black in 1981 during a Talking Heads hiatus, and would make more solo and group albums with his band Casual Gods (who had a 1988 hit, "Rev It Up") in addition to producing bands and the 1996 All Talking No Heads collaboration with Weymouth and Franz and a variety of singers filling in for a conspicuously absent Byrne.
Production work with the Brooklyn-based funk band Turkuaz led Harrison to reteam with guitarist Belew for their current project revisiting Remain In Light and other Talking Heads classics. Belew has performed and recorded with a who's who of rock giants over the past four decades including Frank Zappa, David Bowie and King Crimson in addition to his successful solo career.
Belew went from being a high-school guitar hero in his Kentucky hometown to relocating to the southern music capitol of Nashville during the '70s to pursue his dream of becoming a professional musician. He was playing with a regionally popular cover band when he was discovered by rock experimentalist Frank Zappa in 1977 and eventually got invited to Los Angeles to audition for Zappa's group.
Belew would end up playing with the guitar iconoclast for over a year, touring extensively and appearing on the 1979 studio album Sheik Yerbouti as well as the cult concert movie "Baby Snakes" that was filmed at the New York Palladium on Halloween in 1977. It was during his tenure with Zappa that producer Brian Eno recommended Belew to his regular collaborator David Bowie, who would poach the guitarist for his band.
Belew joined Bowie's band for their 1978 tour, appearing on the live double album Stages and contributing what was becoming his signature unhinged lead guitar to songs on Lodger. While Belew would move on from Bowie's group a year later, he would reunite with the songwriter a decade later, serving as guitarist and musical director on his retrospective Sound + Vision Tour in 1990.
As the '70s turned into the '80s, Belew's activity would ramp up to a constant whirlwind. After being asked to add guitar to songs on the Remain in Light album, he was eventually invited to joined the Heads' live ensemble. Belew toured with the group into 1981 in addition to recording with related side projects including solo efforts by Byrne and Harrison and the Tom Tom Club, a band led by Weymouth and Frantz.
Belew had also developed a friendship with King Crimson founding guitarist Robert Fripp, who would ask Belew to join a new version of the band featuring monster drummer Bill Bruford and bassist Tony Levin. The group would record a trilogy of critically acclaimed albums and tour to rave reviews, writing a new forward-thinking chapter in the story of the revered progressive rock outfit. For the remainder of the '80s, Belew largely focused on his solo career before returning to work with King Crimson for an extended stretch in the 1990s that would continue until 2008.
Reuniting with Harrison for the Remain In Light project in 2021 that initially included the full line-up of Turkuaz -- longtime Belew bassist Julie Slick would also join -- the group has performed at a number of Bay Area festivals, delivering incendiary sets at BottleRock in Napa as well as Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in 2022 and the Mill Valley Music Festival last year. While Remain In Light songs make up a bulk of the set, the band usually includes other Talking Head favorites as well as Harrison's solo hit "Rev It Up" and the '80s-era King Crimson favorite "Thela Hun Ginjeet."
The profile of the Talking Heads has only risen in the past two year thanks to the newly restored version of "Stop Making Sense" that returned to theaters in pristine 4K to mark the seminal film's 40th anniversary as well as the re-release of the soundtrack album for the first time including every song from the movie (Harrison helped on the new Dolby Atmos mix for the release). The four members of the band also appeared together for the first time since being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002 to promote the re-release of the movie, taking the stage at the Toronto International Film Festival and on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert."
Remain in Light last visited the Bay Area for a pair of shows to close out 2023 at the Warfield in San Francisco and the Jam Cellar Ballroom in Napa on New Year's Eve, sharing the stage with LA roots-punk legends X. Harrison recently spoke with CBS News Bay Area about the project ahead of the band's return to Northern California to play a pair of shows promoted by Noise Pop. On Friday, the group headlines the Quarry Amphitheater on the UC Santa Cruz campus before coming to San Francisco to play a free outdoor afternoon show Saturday at China Basin Park next to McCovey Cove presented by Noise Pop, the SF Parks Alliance and the Great American Music Hall as part of the SF Live free concert series. Hysterical one-man groove tornado and former Bay Area resident Chaki the Funk Wizard brings his mix of deranged funk and punk covers and unhinged original songs to open both shows.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
CBS SF: I never saw the Talking Heads, but I've seen Remain in Light a couple of times. I saw you at Hardly Strictly a couple of years ago and thought it was one of top five all-time performances I've ever seen in over 20 years of attending that festival. That show was astounding. I also saw you at the Mill Valley Music Festival. I missed your performance at BottleRock in Napa in 2021. I guess that was the first time you played in the Bay Area.
Jerry Harrison: We've had some amazing shows in San Francisco. The one on December 30 at the Warfield was spectacular. It was delightful to have X open for us. Billy Zoom is an amazing guitar player, and Exene was in top form. I'm a great friend of John Doe and DJ [Bonebreak, X's drummer] was great. They're just wonderful. It was great that we had an indoor show after playing those festivals. At Hardly Strictly, there was an amazing...I'm not sure if that's just what Hardly Strictly is like, but there was a sense of joy that seemed to go over the audience that was almost like a religious feeling.
It was really special. And there's such an atmosphere. People don't try to crush forward. People seemed to respect each others' spaces. It meant that it was kind of spread out, but I think there was more than 55,000 people there. It was amazing. So we've had some great shows there and we're really looking forward to this one as well.
CBS SF: When you came up with the idea of celebrating Remain in Light and the Talking Heads' legacy with a new band, was Turkuaz the first group of musicians that came to mind as far as a group of collaborators in addition to Adrian?
Jerry Harrison: Adrian was the key in my mind, I thought, if I was going to go out and play more than a smattering of Talking Heads songs. I had done the No Talking Just Heads tour with Chris and Tina and I. But Adrian and I, our friendship had continued since 1979. There was a studio in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, that he had moved up to be next to; a really fantastic studio. My wife and I are from Milwaukee, and we would go back when we were having our children there. I had inherited my parents house. Actually what started me going back there was my dad died suddenly and my mom was ill, so I spent about half my time there.
I discovered a studio in Milwaukee, but I also discovered the studio down in Lake Geneva that was really state of the art. So I started going down there, and suddenly Adrian's there. But he moved to Nashville a long time ago, and when I was doing the film "Take Me to the River," I ended up going to Nashville four or five times, and we'd always have dinner. We'd always somehow come back to this show that's on YouTube from 1980 of the Remain in Light tour. And we go, "God, it'd be great if we could use that as a blueprint, or do something like that."
There was talk of session musicians or various other ways. "How would we do this? Would Chris and Tina want to do it?" Which they didn't want to do. And then I produced Turkuaz. The inspiration for Turkuaz was really "Stop Making Sense." So they really were very, cognizant of the Talking Heads' work, but also played a lot of the songs. Whenever I sat in with them, we'd choose a Talking Heads song. So I talked to their manager, "Would they'd be interested in doing this?" And they thought it would be fun. So that's how it started.
I think that now, with Cool Cool Cool and the addition of Julie Slick on bass -- because when [Turkuaz guitarist/singer] Dave Brandwein left, [bassist] Taylor Shell left as well -- I think it's actually better. It was a little crowded on stage before. Now Adrian and I are right next to each other, so it's easier for us to have that direct communication. I think one of the other things that's very important about this is that by splitting up the vocal duties, it's like no one's trying to imitate David Byrne or trying to be David Byrne. Everyone's just saying, "These are great songs. And here's how I like to sing this song." But we were very faithful to the arrangements that were done on the 1980 tour. We're not really straying too far away.
CBS SF: Certainly you would be hard pressed to do better than Julie Slick. I've seen her several with Adrian in his band, and she's phenomenal.
Jerry Harrison: She is phenomenal. And she's a sweetheart. You just look at her and she's smiling, and you just go, "There's a happy and joyous person who's also very, very talented." She's great. So I produced a couple of songs [for Turkuaz], and that's how I got to know them. And that's why I started sitting in with them and things like that. But I also understood when I was producing them, that they were nice, they were very good musicians, and they had this great work ethic. And to a degree, what happened is that I called up Adrian and I said, "I think I found the solution to this. I found this band and we'll join this band. [laughs]"
And, it might sound kind of prosaic, but there's a lot of little details of being on tour. Like who will share a room with whom? What bunk do you want on the bus? Do you want to be on the top? Do you want to be in the middle? On the bottom? They each have their their advantages and disadvantages. The bottom doesn't shake around as much, but it's colder, and someone can step on you. The top one, no one's going to step on you, but you get a lot more movement of the bus. But all of those things are already worked out with this band, because they've done it. They also pitch in. They're not spoiled musicians. They're used to staying on the bus or in less expensive hotel rooms. So it allowed us to have a really big, powerful band that could handle the arrangements of "Stop Making Sense." The addition of the horn section has just been a delight. To be able to add this color the Talking Heads never had has made for a really fun show.
CBS SF: You mentioned the tour with Tina and Chris for No Talking Just Head, I guess that was 25 years before the Remain in Light tour launched. I was wondering, did you ever have an urge to get something together to get out and play live during that interim? What did that first show back in front of a big audience feel like it?
Jerry Harrison: It was kind of scary to tell you the truth. I used to say that what I did is I play memorials and benefits. Someone was in the hospital and we had to raise money for them, I would play. And then if they passed away I'd play again [laughs]. We did this at the Fillmore for John Perry Barlow, who wrote lyrics for Bob Weir and the Grateful Dead and started the Electronic Frontier Foundation and was a very public advocate for the freedom of information on the Internet and various other ideas. A completely brilliant and interesting person.
So we did that show with Bob Weir and Lukas Nelson and Sean Lennon and Steve Kimock and a lot of other people. My daughter played at it too, which was great. But this was a different thing. This was having to sing a lot, not a song or two songs, but a lot of songs. You know, sing more, play more, be on stage for an hour and a half. Our first show was at Peach Fest, which is not in Georgia. It was in Scranton, Pennsylvania. We want to went on at 12:30 at night after Oysterhead, but the whole audience stayed and they loved it. And it was just a thrill to be back. But I have to say that my playing and singing has certainly gotten better over the last couple of years of doing it regularly. I love it.
I was missing performing. You know, when I was in the throes of nonstop production projects for 15 or 20 years. Almost all of the '90s. I started the '80s, but in the '90s and into the 2000s, I had constant work. And then I did all the work on, first of all, the box set of the surround mixes of Talking Heads, and all the work eventually on the Atmos mixes of Talking Heads and the re-release of "Stop Making Sense." I oversaw the sound on that. So those things took up a lot of time, but they didn't quite satisfy the itch of being on stage.
I live in Mill Valley, so just going down and playing some stuff at Sweetwater was fun, but it wasn't exactly what I wanted to do. There was a notable show when the Bernie Worrell Orchestra passed through and I got them to add a date there, and then my daughter and I joined them, and that was really fun. So I got these smatterings of like, "Don't you want to do this? Don't you want to do this?" And it's like, "Yeah, I do want to do this, but how can I do it and have it be successful, and also just be a great show?"
CBS SF: During my research for the interview, I read that Eno was initially reluctant to work with the band after producing the first two albums he'd done with you, but hearing the demos convinced him to do Remain in Light. Is that accurate?
Jerry Harrison: No. What is accurate is that he was not going to do the record. In fact, Rhett Davies was going to be the producer. Rhett Davies was the engineer that Brian brought in on More Songs About Buildings and Food, and he had gone on to produce Dire Straits and various other acts. So he was a producer/engineer. We got to the Bahamas and we had this unique idea that we would not write any songs until we got to the studio. Because we had had these experiences listening to the first time we played a song -- that was usually on a boom box; we would record our songs on a boom box. There was something great about the compressors in the boom box. They sort of just congealed into a pretty good sounding version of something.
But there would always be this sort of innocence and...I wouldn't quite call it tentativeness, but it was something about the first time you play it. When you play it over and over again, you sink into a professionalism on it that is great and -- probably for most things -- is best. But there are times when you've lost something that you can't quite get back. So I said, "Let's see if we can catch that."
So we didn't write songs, and we wanted to catch the first time anybody played anything on the song. And we were quite aware of setting up groups at a mixing studio, so that one group of tracks would end up being sort of the verse and one group the chorus. What was also unusual about this is that, since we didn't have anything in mind, it was sort of modal. It was all played in one key, and it was by what parts you grabbed that you could sort of suggest other chords. But there were no sort of absolute chord changes.
This made it challenging for David to write lyrics to sing, because you couldn't lift to a chorus, or do something that you would do going up to the four chord or the five chord. But what happened is that we were recording there and -- I don't know how Brian found out about it. Probably with a conversation with David, because they had previously been doing some of their work on My life in the Bush of Ghost -- and suddenly Eno showed up. And when Eno showed up, Brett goes, "Well, if Eno's here, then I don't really want to do this, because I'm establishing myself as a producer, and I'm not going to be Brian's engineer again." So he quit.
And then Brian tried to be the engineer. But Brian, you know, he understood the signal flow of the studio, but it'd be a little bit like me being an engineer. I'd be a little slow on patching and micing and things like that. So everything kind of basically ground to a halt. We tried using one of the house assistant engineers at Compass Point, but he also was not experienced enough. And then Dave Jerdan came in, and we started to really move.
CBS SF: David had written the majority of the songs on the band's earlier records, but as I understand it this album had all the band members writing together as a unit. Which I guess if you were writing in the studio, that would be the way you'd do it...
Jerry Harrison: I think it was more about the process, and that's what happened. And I would include, obviously, Brian as a composer as well. Also having done two albums with Brian, we were a lot more familiar with the studio and could make suggestions that you make when you're a producer or an engineer that were totally in Brian and the engineer's hands on the previous albums. So there was a totally collaborative feel when we were there, and we had a sense of trust of what Brian liked to do, which was to sometimes modify and change or add to your parts by adding a delay or an echo or flanging or various other effects to them. And we liked that sense of experimentation.
So the idea was sort of pure experimentation and sort of an arrogance that we'd be able to take our album budget and not get stuck and take too much time. The album would have been a very different record had we just went straight through in the Bahamas. We took a three-week break because Brian had a previous commitment, and then reconvened in New York. And not only did the break stop the momentum, but also the atmosphere of a New York studio and a hot summer in New York was quite different than being in the sort of laid back quality of the Bahamas.
I think if you listen to [the unfinished bonus tracks on] Remain in Light, there's songs from that called "Fela's Groove" or "Right Start," various things like that and you get a sense of what it sounded like when we left the Bahamas. And there was some friction or tension about this, because Chris and Tina being the rhythm section were largely finished by the time we got to New York. So it was really David, Brian and myself who went to the studio every day. And as a methodology for David to kind of get back in the groove, he also started playing new parts -- guitar parts, sometimes a bass part, and stuff like that -- because it was a little easier to get back in the groove, just playing an instrumental part than singing a part and coming up with the lyrics.
If we had continued in the Bahamas, the songs were sort of really forefront of your memory. You take three weeks off, they've moved a little further back, and so then that made it be edgier and a little a little different. The record is fantastic, so I think that whatever happened was for a reason, and it really worked out. I think it's probably our most unique album.
When we went on to "Speaking in Tongues," we did a similar process, but we wrote the songs and rehearsed them and then went in the studio. And we also built in chord changes, which made writing lyrics [easier.] Because then you're writing the melody and the lyrics to the music. It's not some simultaneous process, or starting with lyrics and then finding music for it.
One of the inspirations for Remain in Light was we were so excited about "I Zimbra" on Fear of Music that we go, "We want to do more of this." When we had finished "I Zimbra," we were listening to it, ready for it to go to the mastering lab, and we were leaving for a tour to New Zealand and Australia, where we were going to go from Perth to Europe. And I said, "Could you play that track eight that we never quite finished?" And everyone goes, "Oh my God, that's gotta be on the record."
So David and I flew back from Perth on a 30-hour flight to work with Brian. And Brian, David and Julie Last who was the engineer, put the vocals of the Hugo Ball poem on , and we mixed it, and we went to the mastering. And then David and I flew and met Chris and Tina at Pink Pop in Denmark. But I think we all thought that sort of African-influenced quality of that song would be a great next place to go. So we were all sort of ready for, "Okay, we're gonna have this new process. We're gonna have this sort of layered approach of all these instruments, the way that African bands do. We're going to be we're going to be polyrhythmic. Let's just go in the studio and just start playing parts." And then you put them on and go, "No, I like the way this works together. I like the way this one works with this." The methodology was very essential to what the end result was.
CBS SF: In addition to the African influence, it feels like the Talking Heads and Blondie were two of the first rock bands to be influenced by hip-hop. I think Blondie a little more explicitly with "Rapture," but in terms of the groove orientation of your music, and maybe in the construction and David's vocal delivery in some cases...
Jerry Harrison: Certainly "Facts are simple and facts are straight/Facts are lazy and facts are late" is a rap.
CBS SF: Was that just a function of being at the epicenter of the culture in New York City at the time?
Jerry Harrison: Yes. And we were also influenced by disco and the sound of disco. And one of the things is that there was sort of a New York sound and a West Coast sound. The New York sound where the bass drum had the point of the bass drum is far sharper. It's not like, "Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!" It has this point. In disco music, the kick drum is at least as loud as the snare drum for the whole song. So we worked with engineers that sort of embraced that New York sound. We lived in New York, and we were listening to Frankie Crocker's radio show, so we were aware of it.