Talking Sense Interview with Talking Heads' Jerry Harrison

Rip It Up, Issue 99, 1 October 1985, Page 20

Talking Sense Interview with Talking Heads' Jerry Harrison

George Kay

It was Pete Townshend who once said that it was no use progressing unless you took the people with you. Poor Pete, as the Who got progressively worse the more fans they seemed to pick up. Maybe there’s a moral there and maybe it’s one that could be considered when

looking at the current popularity of Talking Heads. Ever since the trio of Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth and David Byrne formed the Artistics at the Rhode Island School of Design and later moved the band to become part of New York’s CBGB’s

scene, Talking Heads have always been presented as some sort of intellectual alternative to to the traditional American love of roots ’n’ raunch:

“We’ve always been outside of the American scene. Obviously we don’t fit in like Bruce Springsteen does. Some people think that we were innovative years ago but now they’re used to our songs so they’re not as aware of that. There’s a whole group of people who’ve just discovered us,” explained Jerry Harrison from a Milwaukee studio last month.

Harrison joined the band in 1977, prior to their first British tour. His previous experience included playing keyboards for Jonathan Richman’s Modern Lovers and he appeared on their legendary John Cale-produced debut. In Talking Heads his competence was needed: "In the beginning I was a more experienced musician than everyone except maybe Chris. And I had a great backlog of knowledge of old rock ’n’ roll and other types of songs. In some ways I rounded the edges but I made the parts become more clear. I freed David Byrne from being so pressed to being a singer and a guitar player at the same time. I started by reinforcing both what he and Tina did and then I grew into it until I involved myself in the writing of that music. "As we moved into the layered approach of Remain In Light and Speaking In Tongues, I became a contributor to the way the various parts of the band worked together. And because of the ex-

plosion in keyboard technology I've had to keep up with the possibilities of sounds that synthesisers afford you, and that’s certainly true on Little Creatures, where I played all of the keyboard parts. And I'm more interested in the technical aspects, be it mastering or mixing, than the others.”

It didn’t take me too long to realise why Harrison was doing this phone interview and not Byrne, the usual spokesman. Byrne has never been the easiest subject to talk to. He cooperates, but his answers are rarely expansive; his appearance on RWP’s report of Sweetwaters South in Christchurch last year showed that much. Harrison proved to be the opposite articulate and coherent to the point where editing almost became unnecessary.

Big Bands ... The first three Talking Heads albums defined the band’s ambitions and progression as a fourpiece in search of that point where the funk of the Frantz rhythm section best complemented Byrne’s emotional hang-ups. 77 was a buncha songs, "wow, we’ve just done an album”; More Songs was cute and funky Eno didn’t mess it up, but it was Fear of Music with its tensions and traumas which epitomised this phase of the band.

Next stop anti-climax, unless ... “There were so many parts played on Remain In Light that it was impossible for the four of us to do it so the big band grew out of this need. I hired the whole band in one afternoon and as an experiment we played at festivals in Toronto and New York. In Toronto we just killed them. Elvis Costello was so afraid to go on stage after us that he delayed for about 45 minutes. We were on as the sun came down and it was incredible. From then on we all felt that it was a calling, like this thing had been born that we couldn't stop. “It came about in an organic way. And one of the differences between us and say a lot of bands in England is that our girl singers and percussionists aren’t just added on to liven up the show, they played parts we had written for them and so in a way they were duplicating us. But we also gave them the sense that they could do whatever they wanted and they could change their parts as long as they served the original idea. And that’s how the songs became moulded.”

In 1980, Remain In Light anticipated and was instrumental in creating a funk revival that has dominated critical thinking until this year. The freneticism of the first side blended James Brown, Sunny Ade and David Byrne into three tracks that had more energy than purpose. Compulsive five years ago, but these days you lift the needle. The second side was a different story. Byrne as usual was being oblique but the songs were stronger on aura and melody. Making this whole album work as a live entity must’ve posed problems:

Touring after 'Stop Making Sense': "One of the reasons we're not touring straight away is to allow Little Creatures to sink in, to see how we're gonna change next time we go out."

"Yeah, for a while we used the Sunny Ade approach, where for the Remain In Light tour the band was in a long line in front of the stage and at times it was hard to hear what was going on and sometimes it sounded as though we were two bands playing at once. We had some remarkable shows and it was a great band when we were on form, but it was hard to be as organised as we liked to be so we started being more particular as to how we set things up. We tried to establish a sense of discipline that perhaps we’d had earlier”

On the evidence of Stop Making Sense and the Christchurch Sweetwaters show last year it looked as if the band didn't have enough freedom to depart from the strict arrangements? “Our show required some things that were hard to do in a festival arrangement and where there’s more people involved, I think there’s more need to have things pre-arranged. But I don’t think anyone felt constricted as everyone could change what they did from night to night in certain places as long as they filled the same function.”

In 1978 Talking Heads toured New Zealand between More Songs and Fear of Music. It was a stark, brilliant show stripped to the essentials of rock ’n’ roll on the edge. The band stated that they didn’t want to insult the audience with the superfluous addition of fancy lightshows and props. Six years later there were changes: “We realised when we started playing larger places that the even lighting approach, which I still find very attractive, became impossible as half the audience got further away and so their view of things had to be more directed. Plus the possibility of using lights, props, slides and things just became exciting and we adopted those things into the framework of what we considered to be consistent with our general approach.” Would the band return to the smaller venues

with the return to the smaller lineup of Little Creatures ? "I don't know what we’re going to do and I don’t want to speculate.”

... Big Business Between Remain In Light and Speaking In Tongues, the band agreed to take a sabbatical to allow time to complete their various solo projects. In that period Harrison released The Red and the Black, the Frantzs, the Tom Tom Club, Byrne, The Catherine Wheel, and there was a live double band album, The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads.

The break was meant to revitalise the band, so how was the chemistry after they reformed? “It was a little different but we found it was good. Whenever you spend time apart you wonder what it's gonna be like but I think it’s worked out quite well.” Of the solo albums, the Tom Tom Club’s proved the most successful. Tina Weymouth’s child-like vocals and the summery funk of the band led to two hit singles from the album, ‘Wordy Rappinghood’ and 'Genius of Love: What would have happened to Talking Heads if the other solo efforts had met with the same success? "There’s always the pressure to tour by yourself. The Tom Tom Club when we played in Japan and England opened for us and they might have pushed that a little harder had Tina not been pregnant at the time. But she went on working on Speaking In Tongues right up to the eighth or ninth month. In fact, we were working on the album when Robin, their son, was born. It wasn't a damper on their career, but it stopped them from keeping on charging with the first Tom Tom Club and it delayed the second one a little bit. “But we all believe in Talking Heads and we saw our solo stuff as something added, not as something divisive." How do the Frantzs manage to combine their parental responsibilities with the touring demands of being in Talking Heads? “Quite well. On many of our tours they bring him and they have a nanny. When we were in New Zealand last year it was Robin playing with Chrissie Hynde’s daughter and the nannies chatting away.” That domestic interlude aside, it’s time to look at the unexpected commercial impact of Speaking In Tongues, an album that didn’t really cover any new ground as it was largely content with consolidating the busy celebratory funk-time of Remain In Light, but added more precision and unity. But why has it sold so well. "For one reason or another 'Burning Down the House’ was the biggest single we’ve had and that alone can propel an album. Also anyone who discovered it through that single would then find lots of material on the album that was exciting." Speaking In Tongues was released two years ago when we were all dancing ourselves stupid.

David Byrne's Lyrics: "I don't feel comfortable analysing someone else's lyrics. The band act only as editors to his lyrics by saying this verse doesn't work or this verse is great."

In a way Talking Heads were reaping rewards from a trend they helped create with Remain In Light three years previously: “I suppose that’s true. I think now you see that most everyone in one way or another is influenced by that kind of music. I think that’s why with Little Creatures we decided to show that we had other influences as well.”

On its release, Speaking In Tongues was welcomed in the States but received a lukewarm reception from factions of the English press who felt that Byrne’s presence was too pervasive and over-the-top:

“I’m always suspicious of anything the press says as they kind of jump to conclusions. I’m happy that we’ve tried various things and they sound different and that’s the most important thing.” Pushing a point, Byrne’s mannerisms and phrasings did become too predictable: "Yeah, well maybe that’s why we felt it was necessary to go off on a completely different direction with Little Creatures. I was happy with Speaking In Tongues but we certainly didn’t want to do another album like that.”

Any regrets about producing the album yourselves?

"No, the sound quality was amongst the best weve done. Ever since we’ve been producing ourselves the sound is much more crisp and brilliant and that’s what I prefer. We work well with an engineer so we felt we didn’t need a producer. With an engineer and the four of us we felt it was crowded enough in the studio and that we were perfectly capable of handling it. There was a time when we felt that a producer’s major function was to settle disagreements between the band, but by the time we finished Remain In Light we realised that we could do that as well ourselves."

Speaking in Films Speaking In Tongues may have been the asset that established the band as a real bankable proposition but it’s been the movie Stop Making Sense and, more pertinently, its soundtrack which has led to talking Heads’ popularity locally:

“For one reason or another we seem to have clicked in New Zealand? Somehow people there seem to be more advanced than in other parts of the world and you understand us better. I love coming down there. “I think our time has been coming as a lot of bands have been imitating us and they’ve had quite a bit of success. So sooner or later we were

going to get more songs on the radio and we were getting easier to understand. Our singing was getting better and eventually we had to do well something was gonna happen and it did.” As the movie-of-the-concert, Stop Making Sense was nigh on perfect, but why was I always looking at my watch? Reason: the whole big band phase of Talking Heads had become a dead-end fun-time and songs like the opening and crowdpleasing ‘Psycho Killer’ and visions of Byrne in big suits and exagerrated mannerisms appeared like pop compromises to those familiar with the early and genuine live edge of the band. So was the movie meant to be the curtain on that big

band era of the band’s career? “We realised that it was the culmination of three tours and that we'd been learning on how best to use the big band and we felt that on tour it had all come together and that it was a very striking show and one very appropos for filming. Once we decided to record it, it had to be an endcap, as we certainly didn’t want to go out on tour with a live Stop Making Sense. One of the reasons we’re not touring straight away is to allow Little Creatures to sink in to see how we’re gonna change the next time we go out." Was the band happy with the movie? “I was initially involved in the making of it, so I’m quite happy with it. I was involved in the mixing of the sound and to me it was a wonderful project as it never lost the magic of a group of people working together quite closely. It was filmed in December and it was first shown in April and that was remarkably fast because there was 280,000 feet of film. It was one great experience.” Was it always the band’s intention to release a soundtrack from the film?

“Once we went to the trouble of recording all that music for the film then we felt we should make an album of it. There was some trepidation as we’d already released a live album, but we thought that since Stop Making Sense was a single album with different performances and perhaps it could more function as a Greatest Hits album made it individual enough that we could live with that.”

Little Creatures Big Changes “Each of our albums uses the quality of the band members differently. In Speaking In Tongues, because the songs were developed from jams all of the band members were involved intrinsically in the writing of the music. In Little Creatures we reverted back to our traditional method of working, where David wrote the songs and we wrote our parts and made comments on the songs.

“There’s been a mistaken idea that on albums like Remain In Light and Speaking In Tongues that most of the parts were played by outside musicians and that just wasn’t the case. Little Creatures does feel more like four people playing and not a whole orchestra.”

I had suggested that Little Creatures was the result of more of a band effort than its two predecessors. Whatever its means of creation, it has been a vital return to simplicity and the belief in songs. These qualities meant that its closest relation was More Songs About Buildings and Food:

"Little Creatures is a very happy sounding album and that’s a hard thing to do. It’s hard, without being silly, to make music that makes

people happy and that’s quite an accomplishment, I feel good about that.” Thus far the album has yielded the heavily airplayed The Lady Don’t Mind’ as it first commercial offering and there’s plenty more where that came from. In the process of making Little Creatures was there any idea of keeping going the commercial momentum that had peaked with Stop Making Sense ? “We weren’t thinking about that in the slightest. We were bringing melody to the forefront and I think it has some of David Byrne’s most inspired and tuneful singing and I think the background parts are the most developed we ever did. And we wanted to make it sound as if it could’ve been played by four people and the chord changes were a return to the more traditional format. The influences are more directly American rather than the Third World influences on Remain In Light and Speaking In Tongues" What was the idea of the paisley outfits on the reverse sleeve?

“Just to look ridiculous and have fun, but I suppose it was to match the festive nature that the cover had. We thought that it was such a wonderful painting on the front that to have a normal photo would be out of place so we went down and rented these outfits for a day. I think we look like a Hungarian circus.” The cover obviously reflects the optimism of the songs: “Yeah, the album is optimistic, but I can’t answer for David’s lyrics. But I think there’s still some of that edge of his there, it’s just a little less overt and I think because the melodies are prettier you don’t notice that edge quite as quickly.” Was it a happy band that recorded the album? “It was quite harmonious.” In the past there’s tended to be a few clashes in the studio?

“I think that whenever you put four very creative people together you’re bound to have conflict.”

The songs seem to be studies or viewpoints on or from different people. The ‘Big Country’ under the microscope: “Yeah, the album zeroes in on personalities. David had been thinking of that when he started to prepare these ideas that are now going to lead onto our next album and a movie he’s working on called True Stories. So the songs on Little Creatures are written from an individual’s persona, each from a different person's viewpoint, like someone walking by or someone looking down. ‘And She Was’ is about someone floating above the background.” The lyrics to 'Road To Nowhere! the song that concludes the album, work on contradictions between verse and chorus:

“That's very typically a David Byrne idea of setting you up for a surprise. I can’t say more than that because I don't feel comfortable analysing someone else’s lyrics. The band act only as editors to his lyrics by saying this verse doesn’t work or this verse is great.” The album sleeve credits the band with the arrangements and Byrne with the songs. How do you draw that distinction? “He had the kernel of the songs written before we began the rehearsals. He wanted the credit as having written the songs but they went through this period of gestation and sometimes changed quite dramatically. We kept songs pretty short, so we used just about every song we had available."

Little Creatures is a good album, just because it doesn't have pain scrawled all over it doesn't lessen its stature as being a perceptive series of songs about life and the little futile lives that we lead. The title track’s country hokum bugs me but otherwise there's few complaints.

What songs work best and why? “I like 'Stay Up Late’ because it is so charming and I really love 'Walk It Down’ and Television Man! For me those two are closer to the Speaking In Tongues sound and style but they’re a little more driving. When I go through each one of the songs on Little Creatures I really like them all, even a song like ‘Give Me Back My Name’ that

doesn’t stick out sounds really powerful by itself. Sometimes a song doesn’t seem so strong because of the context of the other ones around it. And I think 'Perfect World’ is a wonderful song."

Modern Femmes and Violent Lovers When this phone interview was connected through to Milwaukee Harrison was in the middle of mixing the new Violent Femmes album. Violent Femmes’ last album, Hallowed Ground, was the sort of thing that bands like to forget about:

"It showed another aspect of the band that people didn't realise was there. The people who liked the first will like this one a lot. I loved 'Country Death Song' on Hallowed Ground, but the others left me a little cold. I've enjoyed producing the Violent Femmes and I think we’re making a really good record here.” Violent Femmes are part of the press-labelled resurgence in American rock ’n’ roll that covers anything from Husker Du to the more traditional outlook of Jason and the Scorchers and the Long Ryders. “This resurgence is a reaction to the over synthesised sound of the English and so there’s a return to the roots as a reaction and in this case they’re looking back to rock ’n’ roll with guitars to the forefront. I think it’s going to grow into something slightly different and that this is just a period of re-defining the bases from which you

work. But I like Los Lobos and Jason and the Scorchers quite a'lot.” As well as working with the Violent Femmes, Harrison has been helping Elliot Murphy, a longlost Long Island Dylanite whose Nightlights album Harrison appeared on in the 70s. And keeping with past connections there’s Jonathan Richman:

"I just saw him play here in Milwaukee. He’s up and down but when he’s good he’s really good. I’ve the same criticism of him as I’ve always had after he broke up the Modern Lovers in the first place, and that is he refuses to do the songs I thought were powerful and so he limits his audience to people who are only attracted to that refreshing and naive approach that he’s adopted. In the first album there was both a naive approach and one that could appeal to a stronger musical backing. But I still love some of the stuff he’s doing.”

He’s the eternal child? “That’s what he wants. He could retain the innocence and naivete but also explore a few more styles and power and not rely so much on his voice and personality. Songs like ‘Hospital’ and 'Pablo Picasso’ are classics." And Harrison’s half-way through an album of his own. Fear of Repetition With Little Creatures Talking Heads have com-

pleted the circle the old progression as a backwards movement:

“If we weren’t progressing musically we’d give up eventually. We’d give it a few more tries to see if we could find a way to keep it moving. You’re bound to find some points stagnant but we haven’t reached that yet. “The next album will explore the new focus on melody that we’ve put on Little Creatures without abandoning our committment to rhythm or experimentation or to taking or contrasting ideas from other places.” The change that fuels the band comes from a fear of repetition: “That’ll be our next album (laughs). We think that change is the most important thing and innate in music is the feeling that once you’ve explored something you want to move on. We set that out as being very important to us in the very start, even if it meant we ignored obvious commercial moves like doing another Al Green song after the success of ‘Take Me to the River! “We wanted to be labelled as the band that tried to test the waters for different things and tried to push our own creativity and feel free to go where we felt like.”