Talking Heads Interview Part 2: Jerry Harrison

Rip It Up, Issue 24, 1 July 1979, Page 9

Talking Heads Interview Part 2: Jerry Harrison

George Kay

Jerry Harrison could be described as an interviewer's dream; just point the microphone in his general direction, ask him a question then come back in half-an-hour's time. Prior to joining Talking Heads on guitar and keyboards in 1977, he endured three years (1971-4) of teething problems with the foreverinnocent Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, and had the distinction of appearing on their first .and legendary Modern Lovers' album.

More about that later, but after he left the Lovers and his savings dissolved in the band, he played with a number of local Boston outfits and completed an album and tour with .Elliot Murphy. Starvation, set in, so Harrison was forced to work for a computer company and teach at Harvard for a brief period before joining Talking Heads just before completion of their first album. But to get back to his time with the Modern Lovers, what . are his impressions now of that off-beat bunch of Lou Reeds in miniature? "When I was in the Modern Lovers we thought we were the only band in the world who was doing what was important. We thought it was a crusade and everything else was this horrible music that was being foisted on people. We used to have to play colleges because there were no clubs that would have us so we felt isolated at that time." The first Modern Lovers album has been rightly regarded as a seventies’ rock landmark; it helped open avenues, musically, for modern American rock’n'roll, i.e. Talking Heads and the whole New York scene. The Modern LovSfS were unusual, and their suryjvsl. j'nanks largely to Beserkelv. 55; an example and encouragement for the more "underground" (Harrison's term) talents around. So, what about that first album? ' ' “When we recorded that we were very disappointed because we didn’t think it matched our live show. We did it in two days as a demo tape for Warner Bros., and we thought it was a dry sound that didn’t really. capture a lot of excitement. At that time the only song I really liked on the album was "Pablo Picasso", but in retrospect “I really like some of it a lot, like "Old World" and. "Hospital". ■What were the Modern Lovers like as a live band? ‘

"The concerts were somehow more intense than our first album conveyed. You never knew what was gonna happen in that band. You played the same songs and even though the parts were very easy there was always something hard about playing them and keeping on the beat. There was this quality in the songs which purposefully didn’t bounce and so it was very hard to play exactly right some times. We were always trying to keep it open so there’d be moments of inspiration, not exactly improvisation as in guitar solos, but a sort of open ended thing, and everytime you played you’d want to play it differently. One time in the Modern Lovers my amplifier picked up this Eastern European radio station so the whole song was based upon me turning up this radio station and playing along with that. But I think we were more consistent than we perhaps imagined, and the more I listen to the first album the more I like it, the same was true about our •.performances."

JONATHAN RICHMAN & POUNDING NEWSPAPERS

Richman has been labelled as the world's greatest Lou Reed fan, this was at the time of the first Lovers’ album: "He started off with a personal obsession with Lou Reed and then he became very excited'with Van Morrison and even later, Chuck Berry, and suddenly he wanted to play songs like "Johnny B. Goode”. He really liked Buddy Holly a lot and he played a really good guitar of that style, he was also very influenced by the Stooges’ first album. At the time I was in the band I would say the two biggest influences were the Velvet Underground and the Stooges... fact one of the big confiSWnich broke up the band was wfJSn Jonathan wanted to be tn.6rs.iike Van Morrison and Buddy Holly, and the rest of the band didn’t want to give up the electricity of the sound that went before. We got into tremendous fights about all these things, I mean he wanted us to start pounding the floor with newspapers instead of playing instruments.” I hold Richman’s last two childlike in high regard. There's a high Buddy Holly quotient on both and Richman’s aim was to record music that kids could listen and relate to. He certainly succeeded. Harrison wasn’t impressed with Rock'n'Roll With the Modern Lovers, although he never said so directly, I could tell from his guarded answer: "I.liked the instrumentals and the song "Fly Into The Mystery", which we used to do, but he changed the lyrics because they were so

localized to Boston, but I preferred them that way: It’s time to fly Into the mystery It's time to drive on out to Beverly It’s 8 o'clock In Boston It’s 8 o'clock at the airport And the girlfriend's just lost her boyfriend. Harrison recites the original lyrics with a deep sense of nostalgia: "I thought they were really great lyrics. I loved the idea that there was-such a sense of the locale that we lived in, a sort of innocence, poetry." How does he rate, if at all, the present Richman song output? "I think he’s written songs that are very clever songs that go back to the ideas of, say. Irving Berlin, but I don't think he's written songs that are nearly as powerful as those he wrote when he was about seventeen and are on the first album. I don't think anything he's done recently compares emotionally to "Hospital". He's been investing less of his personal conflicts, he's not extending his ego as he used to, and that was what was exciting about the Modern Lovers, you never knew what was gonna happen, it had an out-of-control-quality, but it wasn't sheer chaos." TIMES WERE HARD

Harrison was disappointed, and even resentful naturally enough, that the Modern Lovers never became successful, but along the way he learned a few useful lessons. At one time the band became involved with Emmylou Harris's manager. Eddie Tichner, "a really dishonest guy", who took the band for a ride with his phoney down-to-earth-attitude: "He would tell one person one thing and someone else another, and yet he gave me the impression of being a real honest guy, but he wasn 7.”

Harrison can also recall times when the band was so broke that they had to move the one available lightbulb from room to room because they couldn’t afford to buy another, and after he left the Modern Lovers his financial situation hardly improved. As a musician he was very reluctant to adapt to a more commercially acceptable style so he used to busk round colleges with a friend: "This friend and I used to do these colleges and we used to convince people that we were something that we weren’t We nad a few cover songs and we used to fool people with a Rolling Stone’s number into believing we were a normal band. The American music scene was stagnating during the Modern Lovers and I had developed this technique that was on the fringe and didn’t apply to anyone else's music, so you had to appear flexible to earn a living. And once you gave up regular day work you've got to play these gigs where you're earning $lO for maybe twelve hours work. It's unbelievable what you'd do."

What differences, other than the obvious, did he find between the Modern Lovers and the Talking Heads? "I think Talking Heads is a step further along the way but I came into the band when they already had quite .a following whereas in - the Modern Lovers I was in at the time we were trying to build up a following. The Talking Heads and the New York underground devstoped'ou't of the aftermath g\ commercial debacle of The Mew York Dolls and the Modern Lovers. The Modern Lovers were underground but they were underground by themselves, so they had no-one to communicate with, unlike Talking Heads. "Besides that in Talking Heads we try and perfect ideas and if an idea comes up that you enjoy then you can add to it and very often you will play the same thing, whereas in the Modern Lovers you could play the whole song completely differently each night." It wouldn’t be far off the. mark to describe Harrison as some kind of locquacious, goodhumoured Modern Musician, in the true meaning of that term. Musically he believes in the seventies, he isn’t yearning for the supposed grand-old days of the sixties, and the fact that he has been, and is, an instrumental cornerstone of two of America's most intelligent bands, speaks for itself. Surely.