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[music]

Kerry Nolan: This is All Of It. I'm Kerry Nolan, in for Alison Stewart.

[music - Talking Heads: Life During Wartime]

Well, I'm pretty sure we all know that song. It's Talking Heads' Life During Wartime, taken from the film, Stop Making Sense. The 1984 film, directed by the late Jonathan Demme, has been called the best concert film of all time, and legendary New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael called it 'close to perfection'. In 2021 Stop Making Sense was chosen for preservation by the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. The movie has been remastered, cleaned up, and is being re-released in theaters next month. It'll also be featured at the Toronto International Film Festival, and a very exciting development, for those of us who are huge fans, is that Talking Heads will appear together at the festival for a panel discussion with director Spike Lee.

We're delighted that the band's guitarist and keyboard player, Jerry Harrison, is joining us to talk about the movie, the band, and what he's been up to for the past 30-some-odd years. Jerry Harrison, welcome to All Of It.

Jerry Harrison: It's very nice to be here.

Kerry Nolan: Let's go back to the very start, with you as a musician. Were you still with Jonathan Richman and The Modern Lovers in Boston when you first came in contact with members who would become Talking Heads?

Jerry Harrison: No. The Modern Lovers dissolved around 1974. I had joined them in 1971. Actually, I dropped out of Harvard second semester, my senior year, to join The Modern Lovers, which I ran into. One of the people who had interviewed me, he goes, "Oh, your graduation is coming up," and I said, "Well, actually, I just dropped out." "Couldn't you just coast?" It ended up being the right decision and I was able to squeeze that semester in actually while in The Modern Lovers, and it gave me much more time to do my thesis, so it all really worked out. Actually similarly, when I met Talking Heads, I was in architecture school at Harvard. Oops. I have to say.

Kerry Nolan: Someone's calling you.

Jerry Harrison: That was the Gary Goetzman, who was the producer of Stop Making Sense.

Kerry Nolan: Ah, very good.

Jerry Harrison: It was a very apropos.

Kerry Nolan: There you go. How was it that the four of you came together to form this band that had such a unique sound?

Jerry Harrison: Well, they had formed as a trio and they were looking to expand their sound, and in particular, were looking for a keyboard player. The record I made with Jonathan Richman for The Modern Lovers was a demo tape that we recorded in 1972, so really many years earlier, which to a degree was a blueprint for what became punk music. I think that the thing that attracted me to Jonathan, I had been making a film about alienation and I met Jonathan with these Andy Warhol, what they call, superstars. If you've ever read the book Edie-

Kerry Nolan: Oh, yes.

Jerry Harrison: -about Edie Sedgwick, there was a whole coterie of Warhol contingent that lived in Cambridge. They came into my apartment and amongst them was Jonathan, so I put him in my film, and I was listening to the music and he was coming over and hanging out. I said, "There's just something really special about this. Nobody is doing this." It stood in such contrast to what I didn't like was happening to modern music, which was that it was becoming overly professionalized. You had bands like Yes, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Even though I loved the Soft Machine, some of the prog rock bands, it was all about, "I went to the academy," and a 20-minute guitar solo, or a keyboard solo, or something like this.

This idea of short, and sweet, and to-the-point songs, really it doesn't seem particularly radical at this moment, but at that time it really was. It also was, for me, a revelation that I knew that the way I played keyboards would fit with what Jonathan was doing. I had never thought that I was actually going to be a professional musician. I took it very seriously, I was in bands in high school and in college, but I had other opportunities, let's put it that way, and other thoughts. I thought that I did need more of that more music school training, but with Jonathan, that would've gotten in the way. That was the beginning of me thinking, "Yes, I'm going to be a professional musician."

Anyway, that record came out in 1976 on Beserkley Records. The demo tapes that we had done for Warner Brothers [unintelligible 00:05:49] members of the Talking Heads heard it. They got in touch with me. Actually, Chris Francis' mother knew Ernie Brooks, the bass player's aunt in Pittsburgh. That's how they got in touch with me. A funny story, and if I'm being too lengthy, tell me, but I was pretty broke after The Modern Lovers broke up. The only way I could get to New York was that Ernie and I would use the band van to move families. There was a family moving to New York and I said, "I'll hitch a ride and help move." Well, when we got the van full, there was no room for my organ, so I just took a guitar and I showed up and they said, "Well, we're looking for a keyboard player. What happened?" I said, "Well, it didn't fit in the van, so I brought a guitar, but let's just play some music," and so we did.

It worked right from the get go. We went out for some inexpensive Chinese food. They lived in their loft on Christie Street, which was a slightly frightening place, actually. You had to go out into the hallway to go to the bathroom, which was pitch black, and, "Well, who am I going to run into out here?" It sounded like that with The Modern Lovers, I wasn't pretty familiar with New York, but I hadn't exactly lived there, and I hadn't lived Downtown like that.

Kerry Nolan: You-- Oh, I'm sorry.

Jerry Harrison: Anyway, we had a great rehearsal, and then I came down and did another rehearsal, and did a show with them at the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club. The photograph, the name of this band is Talking Heads that represents the four-piece band was actually taken. We played a party out in New Jersey, and that's the four of us playing this private party.

Kerry Nolan: Tell us a little about when when you got together, you moved to New York, you're playing gigs around town, you played some of the most famous and notorious clubs in New York during that punk/post-punk era, was it a serious professional scene or were you just all in it for the joy of making the music?

Jerry Harrison: Everyone took it very seriously. I think that we all thought that we were a artistic-- I don't know, what's the word, but in the same way that, say, Black Mountain was for the poets or Cranbrook in the '40s, or for visual artists. This little enclave, perhaps that's the best word, of what was going to be the forefront of music. One of the great things, I think, actually that happened is that a lot of the bands were ignored by the record companies for a number of years, which meant that we supported each other. We'd all go and see each other play. I also really credit Hilly Kristal, the owner of CBGB's, because he was, I think, very generous in, A, allowing lots of diverse bands to play, but he also gave you the door.

As we became more successful, and the same thing happened to Television, the Ramones, and Blondie in particular, we could make a fair amount of money on a weekend and that got us to the point that we could not have day jobs. I think that everyone felt that there was a shared ethos of rejecting the very things that I had been talking about that The Modern Lovers rejected, and trying to create a new to-the-point and very, very direct art form, reviving in some ways the songs of the '50s like Buddy Holly or Rockabilly songs that lasted a little over three minutes. Ramone songs, of course, they cut it down to about two minutes. They could do sometimes, some of them were even shorter than a minute. They'd do a 20-minute set.

Kerry Nolan: Right, with 15 songs.

Jerry Harrison: 15 songs, so anyway, we all shared that. There was a mutual respect, and nobody was really treading on each other's toes. The sounds weren't exactly the same. I would say unlike, say, the scene that developed in Seattle, where there is a similarity from the, what they called Grunge at that time, but it's that there was a there-- whereas the variety was more, but the ethos was the same.

This, of course, then spread to London. I can tell stories about how I think that that scene developed as well. Those clubs were great. One of the things about CBGB's was it was a long, narrow room, which actually sounded quite good. When you were in the band, if there were 30 people in front of you, you felt like you really had an audience. 20, 30 people was enough.

What happened is that as you went back, sometimes there were people that were there to see the next band play, and then eventually the people were out on the sidewalk having a conversation or a cigarette. It was a funky part of town, so people were more relaxed about if you took your beer outside, you weren't reminded about it that it was illegal. People float in and out and Hilly also, if you were a musician that played there, you got in free. You had to buy your own drinks, but you got in free.

Kerry Nolan: That seems fair.

Jerry Harrison: Yes. It was a place that we all hung out. There also was a mutuality of the visual arts and avant-garde jazz music. People like Philip Glass, Ornette Coleman, even people like Robert Rauschenberg, who of course, by this time was quite successful and still had a loft down in the same region that we did. Maybe bigger ones and nicer ones.

There was this really lovely interplay between the arts and between, like that this is a new way of thinking. I just came back from Vienna because my painting teacher had been from Vienna was like, they talk about leading the Austrian succession or where they would go across the street and reject the academy. I think that that's how we all felt there in New York.

Kerry Nolan: We're talking with Jerry Harrison, who has spent some time as the keyboard player, guitarist, songwriter for Talking Heads, and we have to talk about the re-release of the movie, but I wanted to play something first. One of the great songs that Talking Heads did, it's called Girlfriend is Better. Let's hear a little of that.

[music - Talking Heads: Girlfriend Is Better]

Kerry Nolan: From the soundtrack to the film Stop Making Sense, that is Talking Heads With Girlfriend is Better. I'm talking with Jerry Harrison. Jerry, how did you and the band decide to make this concert film, and what was the impetus?

Jerry Harrison: Well, we knew we had this really unique show. We had been experimenting with the enlarged bands since Remain In Light. When we did Remain in Light, we deliberately played parts all the way through the song, so that it was a question of picking which parts went together, but then when we imagined playing it live, we just needed more people to do it.

I actually went out and hired that band mostly in an afternoon, and it was an incredible band. Then the next album we did was Speaking in Tongues, which also use some of those techniques that had some other ones, but it still required a bigger band than a four-piece could to handle the songs as well as we might. It was about that time that we started to move from being like set-up like King Sunny Adé, a long line on the stage, which is what we did with Remain in Light and with all the lights largely on, which we had done in all of our previous tours, to being a little more staged. David started having the idea of a building.

When we first came out with the big band at the Heatwave Festival outside in Mosport, Canada, outside of Toronto, we started out as a four-piece, and then the rest of the band joined us, like, we're not the same as we used to be. Well, we took that idea and it became all the way to Stop Making Sense where David comes out, then Tina comes out, then Chris, and myself and Steve Scales and the singers with Slippery People. Then finally the whole band gets there and the stage is being built at the same time. There was a sense of like, okay, here's the transparency of, A, David going from maybe perhaps writing or working on a song by himself to adding other members to adding other instruments and stuff like that until it becoming this really larger production.

Kerry Nolan: When did Jonathan Demme come aboard?

Jerry Harrison: Well, he had heard about the performance. He came and saw it and said, "I think this would make a great film", because really the slides and the lighting and all of that, we did that every night.

Kerry Nolan: Oh, wow.

Jerry Harrison: That doesn't mean that when Jonathan and particularly, and Jordan Cronenweth, who's a brilliant cinematographer, looked at it that they couldn't go, "We're going to take advantage of this, or let's turn the lights up over there a little bit, or let's enhance that a little bit," but they didn't go like, "Oh, let's change what's li-- the way it is or anything."

Kerry Nolan: Well, that's interesting that you mentioned that, because what I remember of the film when it first came out when I saw it and then I remember reading later on, that he used unobtrusive camera work, so that it didn't really interfere with the band's performance and that the lighting was not movie lighting, it was just lighting for a concert. It seemed to give it a more natural feel.

Jerry Harrison: Well, I think that the lighting-- and I really have to get-- I know that David talked to other people, but David had been developing this concept and he was very, very much instrumental in that lighting. We'd spent a year of playing it live. It was with people running the lights and they got better and better at it.

By the time Jonathan saw, by the time we got to the Pantages Theatre, it was pretty set and looked pretty great just from the start. I think that Jonathan made a lot of decisions about being unobtrusive. Of course, there were people with cameras and you see some of them with handhelds here and there, but we very deliberately did not show, until the very end, lots of footage of the audience. We wanted to make you feel that you were at the concert, not just watching a documentary about the concert.

Kerry Nolan: Let me just tell you, Jerry, we have a minute left, maybe. I do have to say that you and your former bandmates are going to be on a panel discussion about the film at the Toronto International Film Festival with Spike Lee. That is very exciting news for a lot of Talking Heads fans. I am very much looking forward to seeing how that all plays out.

Jerry Harrison: Me too. I'm very excited that we're going be showing at IMAX theaters, which is going to be-- seeing yourself that big on a screen may be daunting. I think you know, I know that Spike Lee worked on American Utopia, so I think it'll be interesting to see his perspective having done that, of now and [unintelligible 00:20:48] thinking back on this film.

Kerry Nolan: Alas, this is where I have to leave it. The clock doesn't lie. Jerry Harrison, this has been such a pleasure. I could talk to you for another couple of hours. Thank you so much for being here.

Jerry Harrison: Okay, my pleasure.

Kerry Nolan: Coming up on tomorrow's show, conversations with creative icons. You'll hear Alison speak with legendary music producer Rick Rubin, Oscar-winning costume designer Ruth Carter, and writer Isabel Allende. This is All Of It on WNYC.

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