Why Jerry Harrison Is Revisiting Speaking Heads’ ‘Stay in Gentle’

Jerry Harrison has spent a lot of the previous three many years behind the scenes on varied initiatives.

After the 1991 breakup of Speaking Heads, the keyboardist and guitarist shifted his consideration towards producing different bands, like Violent Femmes, Rusted Root and Kenny Wayne Shepherd, amongst others. He additionally co-founded RedCrow in 2015, an funding and advertising and marketing firm that makes a speciality of healthcare innovation and works to fund healthcare-related startups. Harrison has additionally helped to co-found funding organizations that run the gamut from sustainable farming strategies (VenEarth) to venomous snakebite therapy (Ophirex).

However throughout the previous couple of years, Harrison has been making his approach again to dwell performances. Along with the occasional profit present, he lately reunited with guitarist Adrian Belew, who was first introduced into Speaking Heads’ sphere when the band was recording its traditional 1980 album, Stay in Gentle. Belew contributed some guitar elements to the LP and accompanied the band on tour, together with a 1980 efficiency in Rome two months after the LP’s launch.

Now, 4 many years after its launch, Harrison and Belew are revisiting Stay in Gentle, re-learning previous elements and discovering new issues alongside the way in which. Harrison and Belew will carry out songs from the album on Sept. 29 on the Wiltern in Los Angeles, together with bassist Julie Slick, percussionist Yahuba Garcia-Torres and members of Turkuaz, a funk band from Brooklyn that Harrison has produced and beforehand carried out Speaking Heads music with.

Harrison and Belew had been desirous about bringing again Stay in Gentle for a number of years. In 2014, Harrison was producing a movie about Memphis music, Take Me to the River; Belew lived in close by Nashville. Neither may neglect the funky greatness from the 1980 Rome present at Palazzo dello Sport, the place Speaking Heads and touring musicians carried out 5 tracks from Stay in Gentle along with different songs. “Each time I might be on the town, I might have dinner with Adrian and we might discuss how a lot this present nonetheless was caught in our reminiscence,” Harrison tells UCR. Each musicians puzzled in the event that they may recreate a number of the magic of that four-decades-old present.

Watch Speaking Heads Carry out in Rome 1980

The primary time Stay in Gentle returned to the stage was in July 2021 on the Peach Music Pageant in Scranton, Penn., the place Harrison, Belew and Turkuaz carried out alternatives from the album earlier than a crowd of people that had, due to the pandemic, gone a lot of the earlier yr with out dwell music. The band went on after midnight and it had been raining, however the viewers was in the perfect of spirits. “Everybody was simply transfixed,” Harrison recollects. This was the start of their Stay in Gentle Tour, which earned reward because it continued. At a prog competition in Florida, Harrison acquired a very memorable praise: “You probably did the not possible. You bought a prog rock viewers to bounce … synthetic hips be damned.”

A part of the ability of that 1980 Rome live performance stemmed from its purposefully stark presentation; few exterior visuals and easy lighting allowed the band to see each other. “It was concerning the pleasure of all people onstage and the enjoying,” Harrison says. There have been additionally just a few sensible causes for this, together with that band members knew they’d be enjoying massive festivals, typically in the course of the afternoon with no time or room to arrange something too technically elaborate. As Harrison recollects, even when the band wished extra, it most likely wasn’t possible. “We did not have any cash,” he notes. Stripped of theatrics – which served Speaking Heads even higher when the Cease Making Sense Tour rolled round just a few years later – the 1980 Rome present was the beginning of one thing new for the band.

Harrison and Belew have been making an attempt to re-capture the power and pleasure of that live performance, however they are not making an attempt to re-create it notice for notice. For one factor, it is not bodily attainable. Listening to the unique album, Harrison found elements that are tough to duplicate onstage nowadays. “Boy, I had some dexterity again then,” he says. Quick-paced repetition was an integral a part of Stay in Gentle. Within the studio, Speaking Heads developed elements they appreciated and discovered to play them time and again, primarily manually making a loop observe. As a result of he hadn’t carried out steadily previously few years, Harrison admits he isn’t in the identical musical form that he was in 1980. However he says he is discovered different methods of arranging the songs. “You study to squeeze the guitar simply arduous sufficient, so to talk,” he says.

Watch Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew Carry out ‘Psycho Killer’ in April 2022

When Harrison, Belew and the remainder of the band carry out, the songs’ foundations are just about the identical. “I am not utterly authoritarian about making an attempt to implement [the parts], however everybody largely is enjoying the elements as they initially are composed,” Harrison says. Some issues have been tweaked alongside the way in which, and sure band members have inadvertently influenced the enjoying of different members. Bassist Julie Slick, who carried out in a Speaking Heads cowl band, performs her elements precisely the way in which they are on the file, which in flip impressed Turkuaz’s drummer, Michael Carubba, to simplify his enjoying. Now it is extra in step with what Harrison describes as Chris Frantz’s “extraordinarily spare” fashion. “When you’ve gotten 11 individuals enjoying without delay, it’s important to depart room for the opposite individuals,” he notes.

Regardless that he makes use of the 1980 Rome present as his information, Harrison’s set lists embody just a few non-Stay in Gentle numbers, too, like Speaking Heads’ “Slippery Folks,” a tune Belew wrote for King Crimson known as “Thela Hun Ginjeet” and typically Al Inexperienced’s “Take Me to the River,” which Speaking Heads lined in 1978.

By now, most Speaking Heads followers have made peace with the truth that a reunion of any form is unlikely, but it surely’s additionally left room for the band’s catalog to be reinterpreted by artists as various as Belew and Turkuaz. Harrison credit his present degree of focus with the years he spent working as a producer of others’ music. However he says performing dwell once more is a fulfilling problem.

“It has been excellent for me, and thrilling for me, to be again onstage,” he says. “Truly doing these advantages and these different issues made me understand how a lot I type of missed it.”