Marin’s Jerry Harrison to help Talking Heads’ music remain in light at Mill Valley Music Festival

It had been a long day of music at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival this past October, but there was one last band I wanted to see before heading home: Marin’s own Jerry Harrison, a former member of the Talking Heads, and King Crimson guitarist Adrian Belew playing songs from the Talking Heads’ groundbreaking 1980 album “Remain in Light.”

There were a few other people who wanted to see them as well — an expectant crowd estimated at more than 50,000 filled every square inch of grass from the stage into the far reaches of Golden Gate Park.

On that crisp fall evening, there was a rare feeling of community in the air as Harrison, Belew and their kinetic band — a powerhouse 11 pieces in all — unspooled spirited renditions of Talking Heads songs, hits such as “Once in a Lifetime,” “Psycho Killer” and “Take Me to the River,” that fans of the seminal new wave band hadn’t heard played live for ages.

Harrison had felt this magical connection between the band and its audiences from the first dates they’d played in Florida and Los Angeles on the maiden Remain in Light tour in 2021 and ’22. By the time they’d gotten to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, they were burning down the house. And the crowd was right there with them, happily fanning the flames.

“On that tour, there was a joy that came over the audience that’s palpable,” says Harrison, sinking into a plush couch in the spacious living room of his home in Mill Valley. “When people get excited enough it has a nearly religious feeling. It doesn’t exactly feel like a concert. It feels like something else, like reconnecting you to your core, to your youth.”

That electric San Francisco performance inspired Harrison and Belew to take the show on the road again this year, booking 19 shows across the country. One of the first dates will be in Harrison’s hometown, a May 14 slot on the second day of the Mill Valley Music Festival. More information and tickets can be found at millvalleymusicfest.com.

The tour is built primarily around music from “Remain in Light,” an iconic Talking Heads album produced by Brian Eno that incorporated Afrobeat polyrhythms, funk and electronics and is considered by many critics to be the band’s magnum opus, one of the greatest of all time. In 2017, the Library of Congress certainly thought so, deeming it artistically, historically and culturally significant enough to be preserved in the National Recording Registry.

That record was too dense and complex for the Talking Heads — a quartet fronted by David Byrne with Harrison on keyboards and guitar, drummer Chris Frantz and bassist Tina Weymouth —  to play by themselves in concert. As the album was being finished, Harrison was tasked with hurriedly recruiting five extra musicians, including Belew on guitar, so the band could perform the songs on tour.

“I feel an ownership of that band that diminished as it changed, which is one of the reasons putting together this tour with Adrian felt so appealing,” he says. “That was something I created, this ensemble of people.”

For them, the highlight of that 1980 tour was a concert in Rome’s Palazzo dello Sport. The video of that show has become a cult classic for Talking Heads fans, an effervescent performance whose exuberant spirit Harrison aims to recapture with this new band more than four decades later.

“Adrian and I would talk over the years about how fabulous the concert in Rome was and how different the video of that show is from ‘Stop Making Sense,’” he says, referring to the acclaimed 1984 Talking Heads concert film directed by Jonathan Demme that features Byrne stealing the show in his now-famous “Big Suit.”

“There’s a joy that comes over the audience in the Rome show, the same joy that I think you experienced at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass.”

They had originally planned to tour on the album’s 40th anniversary in 2020, but the pandemic put an end to that idea. Harrison had already lined up a group of musicians he thought could fill the shoes of the original crew — bassist Julie Slick, percussionist Yahuba Garcia-Torres and seven former members of the Brooklyn funk band Turkuaz, a group Harrison produced. Now calling themselves Cool Cool Cool, they also serve as the tour’s opening act.

In 2019, while visiting Belew in Nashville, he took the guitarist to see the funk band play at a local club.

“After three songs, Adrian turned to me and said, ‘This is going to work,’” Harrison remembers.

The next day, the group went into a studio to rehearse the Talking Heads song “Crosseyed and Painless.” During the session, a group of people at a party in another room were lured down the hall by the music.

“We took a little break and there were all these people at the door listening in,” Harrison says. “They were all saying, ‘Wait a minute, what’s going on? Are you guys (meaning the Talking Heads) getting back together?’ Even back in 2019, we knew this was going to be a success.”

‘True punk ethos’

Born into an artistic family in Milwaukee, Harrison had never planned to be a professional musician. After high school, he went to Harvard, graduating summa cum laude with a degree in visual and environmental studies before doing graduate work in architecture at Harvard’s School of Design.

While still a student, he began playing keyboards with Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, a band that Harrison believes was the first with what he calls a “true punk ethos.”

“Jonathan could express teenage angst better than anyone,” he says and smiles.

After the first Modern Lovers album, Richman decided to take his music in a softer direction and broke up the band. Harrison was crushed, but, as fate would have it, his tenure with the Modern Lovers caught the attention of the fledgling Talking Heads and, in 1977, he was invited to join the band as a keyboardist, guitarist and backup singer.

Two years before, Byrne, Frantz and Weymouth, all students at the Rhode Island School of Design, had formed Talking Heads in New York City, playing their first gig as the opening act for the Ramones at CBGB, the storied punk rock club in Manhattan’s East Village.

With Byrne as the band’s quirky, awkward front man, Talking Heads would go on to become one of the most creative and popular bands of the 1980s, melding punk, new wave, art rock, funk and world music. After eight studio albums, two live albums, eight compilation records, 31 singles and 15 music videos, some of them classics of the MTV era, Byrne decided in 1991 it was time for him to move on with his solo career.

Drummer Chris Frantz was hurt, saying he’d learned about the breakup in the Los Angeles Times. In response to a question from Anderson Cooper on a recent broadcast of CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Byne admitted that “it is very possible I did not handle it as best I could.”

Sensing the end

Harrison, who describes his relationship with Byrne and his former bandmates as “cordial,” could sense that the end was coming. The band hadn’t toured or performed since 1985.

“It was a disappointment, but the reality was that we were doing less and less together,” he says. “So it wasn’t really a surprise.”

The last time they played as a group was at their induction ceremony into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. During his speech, Harrison, who married his wife, Carol, in the late ’80s and started a family, thanked his bandmates for coming together after 18 years apart so that his wife and their children could finally see the Talking Heads play live.

In the early ’90s, Harrison, Weymouth and Frantz toured for a time as the Shrunken Heads, releasing an album in 1996. But Byrne took legal action to stop them, accusing them of what he called “a pretty obvious attempt to cash in on the Talking Heads name.”

Over the years, there has been constant speculation about a possible Talking Heads reunion that is not likely to happen. Harrison thinks “the scab came off” during the speeches at the Hall of Fame show.

“It’s no secret that there’s friction between David and Chris (Frantz) and Tina (Weymouth),” he says. “My feeling about it is that we’ve been offered colossal amounts of money to go on tour. It would pay for the college educations of our grandchildren and great grandchildren. It would be sort of nice to have that security. And there are so many fans that would like to see that.”

With Remain in Light, Harrison is giving the band’s fans the music they’ve been hungry to hear.

“One of the things I felt was essential is that we didn’t want to be a cover band,” he says. “And it’s not like someone’s taking David Byrne’s place. Multiple people in the band sing songs. This is about the love of the music and the feeling of the band. We’re not trying to mimic the personality of David. It’s more like we’re saying, ‘OK, I feel a resonance, so I’m going to do my version of that song because I feel I can do a good job singing it.”

Landing in Marin

While he was in the Talking Heads, Harrison recorded three solo albums: “The Red and the Black” in 1981, “Casual Gods” in 1988 and “Walk on Water” in 1990. On the “Remain in Light” tour, the band plays one of Harrison’s songs, “Rev It Up.”

Since the breakup of the Talking Heads, he’s used his years of experience in the recording studio as a successful producer of albums by the bands Live, Crash Test Dummies, the Violent Femmes, the String Cheese Incident, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Big Head Todd and the Monsters, Rusted Root, Stroke 9 and a host of others.

He and his wife could have lived anywhere, but chose Marin for its natural beauty, which he says has been good for his health, and for its many recording studios, including the Plant in Sausalito, now closed, the Site in Stinson Beach and Skywalker Sound. For a time, he had his own studio, Sausalito Sound.

In 1994, the Harrisons bought a three-story, 5,000-square-foot redwood house with sweeping views of Mount Tamalpais, the Pacific and San Francisco Bay. A selling point was its flat lot, rare for a mountainside home, that has a big enough backyard for their three kids to play in while they were growing up.

The couple designed the completely renovated interior with a New York architect friend of Harrison’s from Harvard’s architecture school. The centerpiece is a stunning stainless-steel staircase inspired by their former home, a loft in Manhattan’s SoHo. A feature in the House Proud section of the New York Times described it as “SoHo goes Marin.”