Harrison, Belew set to revisit Talking Heads album ‘Remain in the Light’ at Roxian Theatre
Photo by Michael Weintrob
Adrian Belew, left, and Jerry Harrison are revisiting the classic Talking Heads album “Remain in Light” at the Roxian Theatre next Friday.
Adrian Belew, left, and Jerry Harrison will be revisiting the Talking Heads' "Remain in Light" at the Roxian Theatre in McKees Rocks.
On Dec. 17, 1980, while much of the music world still was reeling from the murder of John Lennon just nine days before, Talking Heads played the Palazzo dello Sport in Rome.
The band was out on the road promoting its newest album, “Remain in Light,” which was garnering swooning reviews from critics and was making its way up the charts in the United States and Europe, fueled by the single “Once in a Lifetime.” The concert was professionally filmed, though it was not widely seen at the time and has never been released on any sort of physical media. Nevertheless, it’s been widely bootlegged over the years and can readily be found online.
When Jerry Harrison, Talking Heads’ guitarist, watched that long-ago concert on YouTube, he decided the spirit of that show, with its mix of edgy pop and afro-funk, was worth revisiting.
The band, and the musicians who accompanied them in 1980 “had its own individual quality,” Harrison noted in a phone interview from Oklahoma City last week. That’s particularly true when compared to “Stop Making Sense,” the acclaimed 1984 Talking Heads concert documentary that is now considered a classic of the genre. During the Rome show, he said the band sidestepped some of the more subdued songs on “Remain in Light” because “we wanted to keep the audience dancing.”
With Talking Heads having long-since broken up and a reunion extraordinarily unlikely, Harrison is taking “Remain in Light” back out on the road on his own, with an assist from Adrian Belew, a fellow guitarist who was on the 1980 tour and played on the “Remain in Light” album. Harrison and Belew will be playing at the Roxian Theatre in McKees Rocks on Friday, accompanied by an 11-piece band
Four decades after it first landed on turntables and in cassette decks, “Remain in Light” is routinely hailed as one of the greatest rock albums ever made. When Rolling Stone tallied its list of the 500 best rock albums in 2015, “Remain in Light” was at No. 129. It’s on the National Recording Registry assembled by the Library of Congress, alongside such indisputably great works as “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” and the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Belew, who has also worked with artists ranging from Paul Simon to Frank Zappa and David Bowie, told Guitar Player last year, “I’ve been fortunate to do a few albums in my career that have been called groundbreaking … and I would put ‘Remain in the Light’ high up there. I loved making it. I loved playing it live, and it’s still a record that stands up today, very, very well.”
Harrison and Belew had intended to take the “Remain in Light” tour out in 2020, but COVID-19 put the kibosh on those plans. Harrison and Belew then tried out the show at a couple of festivals, including the Peach Music Festival in Scranton, and decided to expand it into a full tour. It’s the first time Harrison has been out on the road since 1996, and the 74-year-old Harrison said, “It feels great.”
He added, “It’s a little more challenging being a little bit older. But it’s great.”
Despite the paucity of live work over the last couple of decades, Harrison has been busy. He’s been busy as a producer for other artists, including Kenny Wayne Shepherd, String Cheese Incident and Pittsburgh’s Rusted Root. A graduate of Harvard with degrees in visual and environmental studies and architecture, Harrison has also been involved in entrepreneurial ventures like the internet music site Garageband.com, the health care equity crowdfunding site Redcrow.com, and an antidote for snake bites that will soon be getting clinical trials.
While Talking Heads were still an ongoing enterprise, Harrison released three solo albums, the last of which arrived in 1990. He explained that he wouldn’t mind releasing some new music of his own at some point.
“I’d like to write songs that I’m excited about,” he said, adding that he is “not one of those people who can get into songwriting mode while I’m on tour or producing someone else’s work. They can just turn on the songwriting mode and do it in the midst of other creative projects.”
The concert starts at 7 p.m. Additional information is available at livenation.com.