Why Jerry Harrison Is Revisiting Talking Heads’ ‘Remain in Light’

Jerry Harrison has spent a lot of the previous three a long time behind the scenes on varied tasks.

After the 1991 breakup of Talking Heads, the keyboardist and guitarist shifted his consideration towards producing different bands, like Violent Femmes, Rusted Root and Kenny Wayne Shepherd, amongst others. He additionally co-founded RedCrow in 2015, an funding and advertising firm that specializes in healthcare innovation and works to fund healthcare-related startups. Harrison has additionally helped to co-found funding organizations that run the gamut from sustainable farming strategies (VenEarth) to venomous snakebite remedy (Ophirex).

But throughout the previous couple of years, Harrison has been making his manner again to dwell performances. In addition to the occasional profit present, he lately reunited with guitarist Adrian Belew, who was first introduced into Talking Heads’ sphere when the band was recording its basic 1980 album, Remain in Light. Belew contributed some guitar elements to the LP and accompanied the band on tour, together with a 1980 efficiency in Rome two months after the LP’s launch.

Now, 4 a long time after its launch, Harrison and Belew are revisiting Remain in Light, re-learning outdated elements and discovering new issues alongside the best way. Harrison and Belew will carry out songs from the album on Sept. 29 on the Wiltern in Los Angeles, together with bassist Julie Slick, percussionist Yahuba Garcia-Torres and members of Turkuaz, a funk band from Brooklyn that Harrison has produced and beforehand carried out Talking Heads music with.

Harrison and Belew had been excited about bringing again Remain in Light for a number of years. In 2014, Harrison was producing a movie about Memphis music, Take Me to the River; Belew lived in close by Nashville. Neither might neglect the funky greatness from the 1980 Rome present at Palazzo dello Sport, the place Talking Heads and touring musicians carried out 5 tracks from Remain in Light in addition to different songs. “Every time I’d be in town, I’d have dinner with Adrian and we would talk about how much this show still was stuck in our memory,” Harrison tells UCR. Both musicians questioned in the event that they might recreate a number of the magic of that four-decades-old present.

Watch Talking Heads Perform in Rome 1980

The first time Remain in Light returned to the stage was in July 2021 on the Peach Music Festival in Scranton, Penn., the place Harrison, Belew and Turkuaz carried out alternatives from the album earlier than a crowd of people that had, due to the pandemic, gone many of the earlier 12 months with out dwell music. The band went on after midnight and it had been raining, however the viewers was in one of the best of spirits. “Everyone was just transfixed,” Harrison remembers. This was the start of their Remain in Light Tour, which earned reward because it continued. At a prog competition in Florida, Harrison acquired a very memorable praise: “You did the impossible. You got a prog rock audience to dance … artificial hips be damned.”

Part of the ability of that 1980 Rome live performance stemmed from its purposefully stark presentation; few exterior visuals and easy lighting allowed the band to see each other. “It was about the joy of everybody onstage and the playing,” Harrison says. There had been additionally a number of sensible causes for this, together with that band members knew they’d be enjoying massive festivals, generally in the center of the afternoon with no time or room to arrange something too technically elaborate. As Harrison remembers, even when the band needed extra, it in all probability wasn’t possible. “We didn’t have any money,” he notes. Stripped of theatrics – which served Talking Heads even higher when the Stop Making Sense Tour rolled round a number of years later – the 1980 Rome present was the beginning of one thing new for the band.

Harrison and Belew have been making an attempt to re-capture the vitality and pleasure of that live performance, however they are not making an attempt to re-create it observe for observe. For one factor, it is not bodily doable. Listening to the unique album, Harrison found elements that are tough to copy onstage today. “Boy, I had some dexterity back then,” he says. Fast-paced repetition was an integral a part of Remain in Light. In the studio, Talking Heads developed elements they preferred and realized to play them repeatedly, basically manually making a loop monitor. Because he hadn’t carried out steadily in the previous few years, Harrison admits he is not in the identical musical form that he was in 1980. But he says he is discovered different methods of arranging the songs. “You learn to squeeze the guitar just hard enough, so to speak,” he says.

Watch Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew Perform ‘Psycho Killer’ in April 2022

When Harrison, Belew and the remainder of the band carry out, the songs’ foundations are just about the identical. “I’m not completely authoritarian about trying to enforce [the parts], but everyone largely is playing the parts as they originally are composed,” Harrison says. Some issues have been tweaked alongside the best way, and sure band members have inadvertently influenced the enjoying of different members. Bassist Julie Slick, who carried out in a Talking Heads cowl band, performs her elements precisely the best way they are on the file, which in flip impressed Turkuaz’s drummer, Michael Carubba, to simplify his enjoying. Now it is extra in line with what Harrison describes as Chris Frantz’s “extremely spare” type. “When you have 11 people playing at once, you have to leave room for the other people,” he notes.

Even although he makes use of the 1980 Rome present as his information, Harrison’s set lists embrace a number of non-Remain in Light numbers, too, like Talking Heads’ “Slippery People,” a music Belew wrote for King Crimson referred to as “Thela Hun Ginjeet” and generally Al Green’s “Take Me to the River,” which Talking Heads lined in 1978.

By now, most Talking Heads followers have made peace with the truth that a reunion of any type is unlikely, but it surely’s additionally left room for the band’s catalog to be reinterpreted by artists as various as Belew and Turkuaz. Harrison credit his present stage of focus with the years he spent working as a producer of others’ music. But he says performing dwell once more is a fulfilling problem.

“It’s been very good for me, and exciting for me, to be back onstage,” he says. “Actually doing these benefits and these other things made me realize how much I kind of missed it.”