Jerry Harrison will be taking your questions on Thursday night in Skokie, and you should go, because Jerry Harrison might be one of the more fascinating unsung figures of late 20th century culture. In fact, I bet there are many things that you don’t know about Jerry Harrison.
For instance:
No. 1, Who is Jerry Harrison?
Good question, but extremely dumb question if your taste veers towards innovation: Jerry Harrison was the guitarist and keyboardist for the Talking Heads. Before joining David Byrne, he also founded the Modern Lovers with Jonathan Richman. If Talking Heads were a pillar of the ‘70s punk movement, Modern Lovers helped lay some of the foundation. On Thursday at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, Harrison hosts a screening of Talking Heads’ classic “Stop Making Sense.” The movie, often referred to as the greatest concert film ever, was rereleased in 2023 to dancing, sold-out crowds. Harrison said in a phone interview that Skokie is his first time presenting the film alone, without another Talking Head. “The irony is, I’m the one who knows the most about (its reissue). I oversaw the remixing and the color balancing. No one else was quite so involved in the rerelease.”
No. 2, Jerry Harrison is super hands-on.
Because the original sound mix of “Stop Making Sense” had been created using a fairly uncommon Dolby encoding process that the sound systems of most movie theaters could not handle in 1984, Jerry Harrison would occasionally walk into multiplexes and adjust the theater’s sound himself.
No. 3, Jerry Harrison is a rarity in pop music. It’s hard to find a legacy music act that will not inevitably reunite for a concert, however briefly. Harrison was a member of two bands in which every member is still alive and yet the chances of a concert reunion are virtually nonexistent.
“The one question I always get is whether (Talking Heads) will ever go back on tour,” he said. “The obvious answer is no. Which was colossally stupid, and now we’re aging out of the time in which, if we reunited, it would be as good as you’d want it to be.” The Modern Lovers have slightly better chances — just slightly: Harrison has produced and play on Richman’s last four solo records. He said there’s talk of a big archival rerelease of the band’s eponymous first and only album, infamously recorded in 1972 and not released until 1976, after the band broke up. But Harrison doesn’t expect a reunion: “Jonathan was influenced by the Stooges and Velvet Underground but switched to a far softer sound, which is still his sound. I think he sees those old songs as expressions of him as a teenager, and how could he sing them honestly decades later?”
No. 4, Jerry Harrison has serious art-world bonafides.
His mother taught painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Both she and his grandmother also studied visual art with the designer Charles Eames at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. Harrison himself studied art at Harvard University, then, after the collapse of the Modern Lovers, returned to get a master’s degree in architecture. He created the album cover for Talking Heads’ “Fear of Music” and designed his own home in California.
No. 5, Jerry Harrison, long associated with hipster New York, is a Milwaukee native.
No. 6, Jerry Harrison was early to music sampling.
In 1984, with the great funk bassist Bootsy Collins, he had a minor indie dance-floor hit, “Five Minutes (Bonzo Goes to Washington).” It’s centered on a sample of Ronald Reagan’s open-mic scandal in which the president joked he would begin bombing Russia “in five minutes.” No major record label would touch it. Worse, Harrison said it got him audited right after: “Reagan had the IRS give me the most severe audit — they’d deny that, but it was an awful coincidence.”
No. 7, Jerry Harrison became a successful producer after Talking Heads.
He produced albums for artists as varied as No Doubt, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Live, Rusted Root, Elliott Murphy and the Violent Femmes. He became known “as a producer who could take somewhat alternative acts and give them more of a commercial chance.” The problem is that there’s no money these days in most of the music that he produced: “Rock became a niche.”
Tina Weymouth, Ednah Holt, Lynn Mabry, David Byrne and Alex Weir in “Stop Making Sense.” (Jordan Cronenweth/A24 via AP)
No. 8, Jerry Harrison is no slouch in the tech world.
He cofounded an early version of the online music platform GarageBand in 1999, which was eventually acquired by Apple. Harrison was also a cofounder of RedCrow, a health care start-up: “It was a marketplace for innovative health care companies to market ideas and raise money.” He sold RedCrow in 2022 to Alira Health. Randomly, he also cofounded Ophirex in 2012, a California company that continues to manufacture an accessible, pocket-friendly antidote that treat most types of snake bites.
No. 9, Jerry Harrison sounds pretty over his bad luck with great bands.
“The break-up of the Modern Lovers was painful,” he said. “We didn’t move quickly enough, Jonathan’s style changed entirely, there was tension in the band about moving in new directions. David Robinson (the drummer) wanted perfection — and kind of got that when he became the architect of another band’s sound, The Cars.” Still, the long goodbye of the Talking Heads is one of pop’s most wistful ends: “We stopped touring, we still made records, but just … wound down. And by that point, having joined Talking Heads after the Modern Lovers, I was well aware nothing lasts forever.”
“Stop Making Sense” hosted by Jerry Harrison is 7:30 p.m. May 1 at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie; 847-673-6300 and www.northshorecenter.org
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
