Jerry Harrison

Of the Modern Lovers. Of the Talking Heads. We cover it all!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
My guest today Jerry Harrison, needs no introduction. You were
just talking about having met before, and Jerry started talking
about his problem with record companies. Jerry tell us the story.
So I was producing a band called Pure that was

(00:32):
from Vancouver and their manager was one of the organizers
of Music West, which is where we met. And the
band was called Pierre, and they had a song called Pierre,
And so what did the record company put out as
the first single? Blast? And then, of course record companies

(00:55):
being record companies, Blast didn't do quite as well as
they had hoped, so they spent by the time they
got around to Pure. Pure came out in Canada, but
never in the United States. It's like, you have a
song and a band with the same name. Don't you
think that that's a great advertising technique. Let's, you know,
put the money behind that. Everybody will know the song

(01:16):
and they'll know the name of the band. But you know,
it's sort of like horses and water. So what has
been your experience in your lengthy career with record companies.
Sometimes they're very very astute and very good, and but
many times they outthink themselves and they they never want

(01:38):
to spend money in advance, and so therefore they missed
gigantic copper opportunities. And the one time that I overcame
that was when when Tony has recorded Little Creatures. Ah,
David had been making our videos, so he had he

(01:59):
had were with Tony Basil on once in a lifetime.
She had done cross on him painless. And then he
worked with Julia something I can't remember her last name
on bringing down the House. So I went to Gary
kirkerstar manager, and I said, we need we're a band,
we need all be involved in making videos. We want

(02:22):
to make four videos for Little Creatures. He goes, well,
Warner Brothers never go for that, and I said, well,
then tell him we're not turning in the album. And
so we went to Warner Brothers and he said what
I said, and he said, I got you three. So
we all did storyboards for the various songs that they

(02:42):
thought should be videos, and the first video, strangely really
to me, was the Lady Don't Mind, and it was
a mixture of something that Tina had come up with
and what I came up with. And Uh, I was
good friends with Jim jarme As who made Stranger Than
para Ice and brought him on as basically the director,

(03:03):
but who I kind of co directed it with Uh.
Chris and Tina did with Teddy baff for Lucas Stay
Up Late, and then David did with Steven Johnson Road
to Nowhere. Then Warner Brothers decided that and She Was
would be the first single, so they hired Jim Blashfield
to do a He was sort of did a kind

(03:26):
of cartoon version for for videos. So in the end
we walked in When the album was released with four videos,
we also got like small budgets like forty dollars apiece.
But because we were conversant with how do you make
videos friends with people in that industry, we could do it.
That album was our biggest selling record. And the reason

(03:48):
it was a bigger biggest selling record is that MTV
always had a video ready to go when the when
the one that was sort of running out of steam,
there was another one to go and it you know,
and I tried to tell this too when I was
producing the violent films. It's like you have this song

(04:10):
old Mother Reagan, it lasts for one minute. Go to
the U c L A U c L A film
class and say you're gonna give ten thousand dollars and
you want every student to make a version of old
Mother Reagan. Men picked the top four and play him
in a row. But they don't do it. You know,
I had uh. I was producing uh big hitan the Monsters,

(04:34):
and I got John Lee Hooker to be on Boom
Boom Boom. This is amazing version. I don't know if
you've heard it. It's a theme of a TV show
which I can't recall. Right. The second so I knew
John Lee Hooker's manager. He was from Milwaukee as I am,
and I said would he be in a video? And
he goes, yeah, I gotta pay him, but sure. So
I went to Giant Records, which was earning Ace Offs Wreck,

(04:57):
and he goes, well, we're putting our money into this
other single maybe in a few months. Well, John Lee
died a month later, so we would have been the first.
We would have been the last recording of John Lee Hooker.
MTV would have played at NonStop. But you know there,
you know, not thinking ahead. They they missed the vote

(05:19):
and missed and missed making a lot of money. If
you ask me. Okay, at this late date, because you
were in graduate school when you all to be joined
talking heads, you feel confident in all your decisions. Would
you like to replay any of this? You can't, but
if you could, I think I would have been a

(05:41):
great architect. But I'm very happy with the decisions I've made.
So let's go back to that. How did you meet
Jonathan Richmond? He came in my apartment with There was
a contingent of Andy Warhol superstars that lived in Cambridge.
I don't know if you ever read the book about

(06:01):
Edie Sedgwick. Yeah I read it. Yeah, so she was
there just a little bit before that. But there was
this guy, ed Hood may Rickard was around. I think
that actually Andy Paley was part of that. So I
came in with Jonathan and baha, stop for a second.
How did you know all these people? Uh? I was

(06:23):
just part of being in a scene in Cambridge. Okay,
well let's just start there. So you go to Harvard undergrad.
I mean some people sit in their dorm room and study.
Other people barely go to school. So you move from
Milwaukee to Harvard. Do you immediately say, and this is
a very you know tumultuous and also positive time. Do

(06:44):
you merely integrate yourself in the culture pretty much? And
I played in a band and one of the guys
who I played in a band with had been in
prep school at Putney with Andy Paley, and Andy, who
was hanging around in New York, had gotten to know
Danny Fields and various people in a sort of warhole

(07:05):
expanded group. So when he came up to Cambridge, I
think he probably introduced us first to some of these people.
But we can't we fit in so and so we
would see them. And then Jonathan came in and he
was raving about the Velvet Underground album Loaded, and I

(07:27):
was making a film about alienation, and I went, Jonathan
seems to take energy and excitement from the things that
I think are alienating other people, which is sort of oh,
you know, over corportization of society and stuff like that.
So the film had two thirds two people that were

(07:48):
sort of overwhelmed by what were the changes of society
and Jonathan, who was embracing it. So I filmed Jonathan
like driving along Route nine out in Native and stuff
like that, pointing out all the road signs. He loved
the new ones he hated and things like that. He's
generally the Jonathan Richmond philosophy. I recorded a concert of

(08:10):
him playing, and I was using that as the background
music for the movie. My roommate was Ernie Brooks, and
he kept coming and goes like, you know, this music
is sort of amazing. It just sort of can't get
it out of my head. Meanwhile, Jonathan saw kindred spirits
and he started hanging around all the time. And so

(08:31):
actually Ernie and I dropped out of Harvard second semester
senior year to join the Modern Lovers. Okay, slower at
one point, let's go back to the Alienation movie. One
of the big differences between popular music today and the
area you're talking about was alienation was a core element. Yes,

(08:51):
now you seem very rooted. Are you someone who feels alienated? No, No,
I feel I've I don't feel alienated, but I feel
that sometimes my pherosophy what I believe about life at
some of the new uh let's say, philosophical theories I'm

(09:15):
pretty much a disagreement with. But I that's I disagree.
I'm not alienated. Well, let's talk about the type you
because as we get older, we are more comfortable in
our shoes and fit in and you know, and you've
built a career. But back then we use someone who
was you know, well he anti this and he antie that, Yeah,

(09:39):
it was. I had been in a in a band
in high school and then I've been an abandoned college.
But I never thought I was going to be a
professional musician. For a long time, I thought I was
gonna be a scientist, and then I was. I was
actually a painter for a while, and a sculptor and
a filmmaker and then but I always thought that architecture
might be where I was going to end up. And

(10:00):
I used to build things all the time, and I
thought that I have a mathematical sense. I thought it
might be a good balance between what I had. However,
I felt in this in the sixties, in particular, that
music determined the culture, and that I felt that like
Bob Dylan and the Beatles were more important than John

(10:21):
Kennedy as far as determining what people thought. So the
idea of ending up being a musician to me was
almost the highest thing to aspire to. I just didn't
think that I had the training as a musician to
be that. But when I met Jonathan and started and

(10:41):
then I went, Jonathan is playing something unlike anybody else
in the world, and this deserves to be heard. And
I have a real place in this. I know how
I can make this better. So just because I don't have,
you know, the training from the academy, it doesn't matter
at all all. I just had the right sensibility and therefore,

(11:04):
and I'm and this is going to influence the world.
I have no idea how commercially successful it'll be, but
I know it's going to have the influence. And that's
what I wanted to do. And frankly, it's the same
thing with the Toggy Heads is that when I met
the Talking Heads, I went, nobody's doing this, and I
have a there's a place for me to make this
even better and condemn it. I'm gonna do it. Okay,

(11:26):
let's talk about Jonathan himself. I happen to be a
big fan. Only album that you're on, Pablo Picasso, etcetera.
And Roadrunner. I always thought I'm gonna make an analogy,
which is bad. Um. I have some history with Jene Simmons,
and what shocked me about Gene Simmons is he is
that guy. Most people there's two people, there's the front facing,

(11:50):
and then you know, everybody gets along. Not Gene Simmons.
I always thought Jonathan Richmond was the same way, but
now I think there's obvious he's something quirky, something different
about We had that big opportunity. Those people don't get
a second round with something about Mary. Whatever you know

(12:10):
is a guy. He doesn't appear or I hate to
use word normal, but standard. Well, I absolutely agree with
you that he's a unique person. In fact, he's showing
up tomorrow night to do another album with me. I've
done two albums. Have you heard the album saw I
did with him? And there's a and and there's a

(12:31):
follow up record. So I've had two more records with
him in the last few years. They're on Blue Arrow
Records out of Cleveland. They are not on any streaming service.
You have to kind of work to get him. But
they're amazing and they're unlike any music being recorded right now.
Right now, he's been down in Tucson doing recording reggae
tone music and then we're going to add parts starting tomorrow.

(12:55):
Didn't I read something he got into construction, uh mason masonry.
I love what he said about it. He goes, you know, Jerry, Ah,
there's a lot of people who are saying mason and
music is their hobby. I'm a musician and masonry is
my hobby. So someone like Jonathan Richmond, who never really

(13:17):
sold any records and his music wasn't really covered, does
he have any money? He seems to have enough to
live the way he wants to live. He does, He's not.
He certainly doesn't make decisions based upon trying to have
enough have to make as much money as possible. He
makes decisions. You know, he has a wife, he has

(13:41):
a daughter. It's a second life. And so I'm not
saying that economic concerns don't affect him. Uh. He just
bought some property up in Chico. Until he's got a
lot of I think he has a lot of construction
to do. He's also been helping this architect of the
masonry because he's very much into not using Portland's cement

(14:04):
or very little bit of it, which is the more
modern way to bind bricks together, which is stronger. He
likes the Roman lime lime mortar, where you like different
mortar depending on whether it's in the sun and the
shade but it lasts longer. So he has long discussions
with this architect about what percentage of Portland cement and

(14:25):
lime mortar to use and he loves it. Okay, why
did he not break bigger? Because everything you're saying is true.
I mean, I remember he had the song what rock
in shopping center? I'm talking about balls, even having flags,
I mean, just incredible insight government center. Right? What why? Um?

(14:49):
Was there something about him that he couldn't be bigger
or it just wasn't in the carts. I think that
there was somewhat of an issue is that when we
we should have made a record immediately, but we got
so many offers from record companies and managers that it

(15:09):
took us a year or so to try and sort
it all out because we just were considered the next
hot thing, and Jonathan was uh evolving, and he evolved
away from the anger and the teenage angst that we

(15:30):
would say that the first modern Lovers album UH so
beautifully captures. In addition, David Robinson, the drummer, is a perfectionist,
so he was never satisfied with the recordings and he
always wanted to make them exceptionally meticulous, and these were

(15:51):
two very opposite tracks to be going down. David Robinson
basically took all the ideas he had for the Modern
Lovers and he uh brought them to the Cars and
that's the basis of the sound of the Cars. But
staying with Jonathan Richmond, you drop out of college, you
start playing with Jonathan Richmond, Walk me through what that

(16:16):
period of time? How long until you sign a deal
and you make this record? Well, So dropped out January
of nineteen seventy one, joined the Modern Lovers. I was
able to squeeze in the last semester of college while
in the Modern Lovers, so I got to graduate. And

(16:37):
in the spring of nineteen seventy two, Lillian Roxon, who
wrote for the Daily Encyclopedia of Rock the Australians right,
wrote an article about us that just caused every manager
and every record company to make a pilgrimage. We were
living in this small house in Cohasset, Massachusetts, because we

(16:59):
would we were renting a summer house because we could
play music there and be loud, and they had come
down there, and we were making very little money. I mean,
we were really broke. And I remember Alan Mason from
from UH from A and M who made many trips
came out and I find it that Alan don't take

(17:21):
us out to dinner. Can you just buy us some
groceries because we just try and eat as much as
possible when but it's like it doesn't last, which he
did and he was sleeping on the couch and stuff
like that. But we had some very funny experiences there. Um,
but you know, everyone from David Geffen to Steve Paul

(17:42):
and Danny Fields too, Schiffmann and Larson too, five Davis came.
I mean, you know, it was it was so obviously
it was very hard to make decisions because we were
all these really good offers and we were trying to
find the right thing between someone who had the power
to make things happen, but also the belief of the

(18:04):
band and the book and you might say the honesty
that we were looking for, and that was it was
a tricky thing for us to negotiate. So how did
you ultimately make a decision? What decision did you make? Well?
We went with Warner Brothers with John Kle and a
guy named David Burson who was always uh who would

(18:24):
have been more Austin's kids tutors and he had been
given a job as a special assistant to my lost
and the trouble was that Jonathan had been moving, had
been moving from a song like uh, modern World or
she cracked into a song like Hey, their little insect

(18:46):
by the time we got back to California. And that's
why the demos that we made with John Cale and
Alan Mason that we made in the spring of nineteen
really reflected as best as possible boat what the Bondom
Lovers were, the early Bondern lovers were really about. And
that's the record that berserk Lely Records eventually put out. Okay,

(19:09):
you signed with Warner, what do you do for a manager?
We eventually went with Eddie Tickner, who managed the Birds
and Graham Parsons, and we were hanging around with Graham
Parsons and actually Phil Kaufman, who has the distinction is
that he's the one who burned Graham Parson's body in

(19:31):
the desert, was our road manager. In fact, we were
playing basketball with Graham four days before he died, and
we played at we played at the party that because
Phil the had to pay for the coffin uh, the

(19:52):
family at first wanted to charge him with stealing the coffin,
but he talked about a pact that Graham he had
made that whoever died first, the other person would take
him them out and cremate them at Joshua Tree. Graham
was a little bit strange from his family. I don't
know if you know the history of Graham Parsons, but
his father committed suicide on Christmas Day, and then his

(20:16):
mother uh married a wealthy gentleman from New Orleans who
Graham never really got along with. Graham then went to
the Bulls School in Jacksonville, Florida, which one of my
roommates in college went to two years behind him. And
one of my advisers at Harvard had been good friends
with Graham because Graham had been under him. So we

(20:38):
had all these kind of connections. Um very sad, one
of the greatest talents and it's it's it's it's awful
that that happened and h But anyway, so we were
with Eddie Tickner and Phil as our road manager. But
Eddie didn't really do the greatest job as a manager,
but we just sort of we sort of believe that

(21:00):
he was honest. It was stupid. You were in Cohassett.
Were you just in l A to make the record
that everybody bood? We moved to l A because John
Cale wanted us to make the record there, so we
moved in this I think in the summer of nineteen
l A, which where we were totally fish out of water,

(21:21):
and because there was a thing in our contract that
we did not get all of our advance until we
had a manager, and then Eddie when he became our manager,
didn't collect it. So by the time we sort of
broke up, we had still never gotten our advance, and
it was we would do things like we'd be walking
along the street and walked down to the Old World

(21:43):
restaurant if you remember that. On of course, because we
were living on King's Road. First we lived over in
the valley, we moved into a house Emmy Lou Harris
moved out and we moved into this house on Woodman Boulevard,
which was maybe insane over there. So finally moved to
this house on King's Road that was supposed to be
across from Wolfman Jack. So we'd walk and the police

(22:05):
would come up next to us in going did your
car breakdown? We go, no, we're walking and they go like,
are you sure you're not robbing something? We go, now
we're walking. They got nobody in l A walks where
we go? We're not from l A. We're walking. Okay.

(22:26):
How does it disintegrate and how does the album not
come out? Well, we tried working with Kale again, and
I would say that there was a moment where John
Kale said to Jonathan Jonathan, I want you to be
play this solo like you feel really mad or me

(22:48):
and Jonathan went but John, I don't feel matter me
And I think that he realized at this point that
the band had changed so dramatically from the year before.
I actually learned to like guitar because Jonathan had changed
his guitar parts and I said, I'll play the original parts.
So actually Jonathan gave me my first guitar, a telecaster,

(23:09):
and I learned to play all the original parts so
that I could play them in the studio because he
didn't want to play them. So how did it literally disintegrate?
You're sacrificing everything for this band. I'm sure you don't
want it to break up. No, I didn't want to
break up, and but it just cut to the point
that it was like Jonathan. We were not going to
be flexible enough to go exactly where Jonathan wanted to go.

(23:31):
Especially David and we you know, there was his ideas
like we have this body of materially want to do
a great version of it, then we'll move on. But Jonathan,
being sort of living in the moment, will say I
can't do it the same anymore, and so David quit

(23:52):
and we I think that Jonathan went up and started
hanging around in Berkeley with Matthew Kaufman who was managed
this band Earthquake, and then Greg Keen and had this
what he called a gorilla h record company called berserk Ley,
and David, Bernie and I drove back to New York.

(24:16):
Eventually Jonathan came back East and Bernie and I tried
playing with him again. David had moved to l A
to play in a different band. Actually, this guy who
had played in my high school band, Pop Turner, came
and played drums. He had gone off and fought in Vietnam,
and I had had moved back and I had convinced

(24:36):
him that he ought to go to Bennington because he
was miserable going to school in Milwaukee, which is where
I'm from and where he was from, and he came
down to Cambridge and then he played in the Modern
Levers and we started playing songs that were tried to incorporate,
incorporated Jonathan's new sound, but trying to do some of
the old songs. But eventually Jonathan's desire for right to

(25:00):
be exceptionally quiet. It was sort of like there's just
no room for the rest of us, and so I
think Bob and I just said, like, let's say it
just doesn't work. It's like there's no place for me here. Okay,
were you aware because you're obviously disappointed the album comes
out on Berserkilely, like four years later? Did you know

(25:23):
that was going to happen? And what was that experience? Like?
I knew it was going to happen because I had
to sign a contract, which was the worst contract I
ever signed in my life, because it was Berserkly Records,
and because I didn't have the money to pay for
a lawyer to look at it. I didn't even have
the right to audit sold a billion records. I made
five thousand dollars. However, it was the best decision I

(25:46):
ever made because the talking heads would never have knew
known I existed if I had not made that stupid contract. Wow,
let's go back to the beginning. You're from Milwaukee. What
do your parents do for a living? My father was
an advertising He had commanded a ship at the Pacific
during World War Two. My mother was a painter, very

(26:09):
great painter, as my grandmother was an amazing painter as well.
My aunt was an artist although she died in nine
but a wonderful photographer. My mom and my aunt had
gone to Cranbrook at the highlight of Cranbrook when Charles
Eames and Barrow Serene and Harriet Petoya were there in
the forties, where it was the leading art school in

(26:30):
the country, sort of the closest that the United States
had to the Bow House. So I came from a
very artistic family. My grandmother played piano and painted and
did all these things. So I was kind of brought
up in that, taking art lessons when I was a
little kid, and uh, taking music lessons. My father had

(26:50):
played jazz, saxophone and clarinet, fluted a band. That's how
he supported himself going through college. And had your family
been in Sucky a while while Milwaukee and ultimately did
that help you will hurt you. My father's father lived

(27:10):
on a farm in South Dakota and never he never
graduated from great school. But he had a bad tooth
and he dug it out of his mouth with a nail,
and he did such a good job. He decided he
would be a dentist. So he took the train to
Chicago to go to Northwestern And when the train stopped

(27:32):
in Milwaukee, someone said, there's a very good dental school
here at Marquette. So probably to say something like cents,
he got off and went to Marquette and lived there
for the rest of his life. And did he become
a dentist. In fact, his models are still in the
Museum of Dentistry at Marquette. And how many kids in

(27:53):
your family? I'm an over child, Okay, So you start
going to school. Are you the leader of the gang?
Are you the outcast? What's your formative years? What do
those look like? That sort of depends on what time
periods you know in I would certainly not saying I
was the leader of the gang, but I was an

(28:15):
important member. Will say, but I I certainly understood the
potential for sort of teenage alienation in high school of clicks,
trying to get along, trying to be I don't know,
cool or something like that. The thing that was amazing

(28:36):
about when I grew up in Milwaukee is bands became
this really big thing, and the bands up until that time,
people generally other than athletes only hung out with people
in their own grade. But bands broke that. We broke

(29:00):
because we had musicians from different grades in our bands,
so we knew people in three different grades. I mean
I did some sports too. I was on the track team,
so I knew people from that. But the bands and
like there was like this. My friends had this group
called the Relaxers, and they said, we stand for everything

(29:21):
that are anti athlete. Everything that athletes stand for, we
stand for the opposite. So we're all members of the Relaxers.
And interestingly, my high school band, the guitar player went
on to become Leonard Khn's guitar player for years. I
know Bob because you went to you went to high school.
My friend Jeff Wiker, Jeff, I know Jeff Wiker right,

(29:44):
So he moved l A and introduced me to all
those people. So I sat and then John Paris played
with Johnny Winner for ten years. The bass player. The
drummer went off to be a marine and fight at
Caisson and all the battles in Vietnam, and the lead
singer of that band went on to become the of
the American Institute of Architects. Pretty amazing for us, and

(30:04):
the people around us are the Zucker brothers who made Airplane, Ghost,
Naked Gun and all of those movies. So a little
suburban high school in Milwaukee put out an awful lot
of great art. Okay, I went to school in the
suburbs in Connecticut, fifty miles from New York City, and
nobody broke through. So what was in the water? Why?

(30:28):
You know? Part of it is there were gigs. Is
every after every basketball game and every football game, there
was a gig at the high school that hosted. So
there was a need for lots of bands. And so
if you got to be in that good enough to
be part of that group of bands, you could play
and you could make a little bit of money. And

(30:50):
we would go all over town to hear all of
the different bands, and like going into really dangerous, dangerous
for coming from a different part of town and slightly
dangerous to go into those neighborhoods. I mean, I was
at a dance where the Italian Gang and the Puerto
Rican Gang we just I started, I walked out in
one minute later the whole thing exploded. You know what

(31:13):
is it? You know when fools go where a brave
man fears to tread, or something like that. It was
sort of like that. Okay, let's go back. You're old
enough to have music consciousness prior to the Beatles. Was
your desire to be in a band as a result
of the Beatles in the British invasion? When did that

(31:34):
become a thing for you? Now? I was in a
band before the Beatles were in America, and we did
R and B music. So your musical training, you took
piano lessons. I took piano lessons, and then I stopped
playing piano and I played saxophone in the high school band,
trying to be like my father a little bit. And

(31:54):
then I was in a Dixieland band playing saxophone and
freshman year of high school and then soft my year,
this drummer the Vie the Marine. So I want to
form a band. I think you should play keyboards, and
so I started playing keyboards in that band what we're
called the Walkers. Okay, and so to what degrease since
you started before the Beatles, to what degree to the

(32:16):
Beatles in the British Invasion changed things for you? We
got um, I would say that less than the Beatles.
It was more the Yardbirds, the Who and somewhat the Stones,
the more Blues influenced parts of the British Invasion. That, uh,
the sort of the Walkers Part two, the one that

(32:37):
what Bob Metsker switched from playing bass to guitar, was
very influenced by the English Invasion. So you're going to
high school to get into Harvard, you have to be
a pretty good student. So were you very dedicated to academics? Yeah?
I kind of felt like I had a deal of

(32:58):
my parents, like if I get good grades and leave
me alone, And so I did that. To what degree
were you a bad kid? Testing limits? Uh? Enough? I
mean obviously the people that did a lot worse, But

(33:19):
I don't know. Lots of getting drunk, lots of dangerous driving,
lots of I mean, the other thing that was great
is that when you're in a band and you have
to do you want to get something to eat after
your parents get really use to you getting home at
two or three in the morning. Up until that time.
There was one time when I think freshman year, where

(33:39):
I had a girlfriend and I walked home and they
had called the police because they were worried about me.
By the time I was in a band, they kind
of expected that I would be getting home late. And
when you go to college, do you bring a keyboard,
do you bring instruments? Or you first think you're gonna
leave that behind. I sold everything. I thought, I'm gonna

(34:00):
wear a suit in the tie as a whole new
part of my life. And then I got to college
and Ernie Brooks, who lived in my same dormitory, form
to band, so I'd go watch him play, and I went, well,
I'm as good as these guys, I can join this band.
So I joined that band, and then I went home
and uh one of my couple of summer jobs. One

(34:24):
one year before I went to Harvard, I went I
worked in a lockwasher factory, which was quite an experience.
And then the next year I worked at Evan Route
in the industrial relations department. And when I came back
from that, the Fender dealership for the entire United States
was for the for the entire Midwest was in Milwaukee.

(34:46):
Miss Pedal gets hard player named of Ralph Hansel. So
I went out to West Alice Music and I went
shopping buying news stuff and I drove it trailer back
and it was like Christmas for the band I bought brought.
I don't know. I spent like two thousand dollars and
got like six amplifiers and mics and all this stuff.

(35:09):
And so we started rehearsing and then the band Albatross
it was called. Then we were playing at Harvard like
outside when we shut down the university in nine and
we were playing out on the lawn and we were
a part. You know. There were sort of three or
three or four bands there that were There was a
band called the Far Cry that I think signed to Columbia.

(35:32):
There was an amazing musician, Peter Ibers, who had a
band called the Class Bead Game named ultimately with Peter Ivers.
Would got killed downtown l A. Yes, I think beaten
to death with a hammer. That's hard. Yeah, it is
a girlfriend. Lucy Fisher and I are still close. Okay,
so you got the equipment, you're playing, you're you're there

(35:53):
on the heavy days and but this is always a hobby. Yeah,
I mean I'm thinking I'm going to be At first
I thought I wanted to be a scientist, and then
I decided I wanted to be an architect, but then
I didn't like the There was a new major at
Harvard called Visual and Environmental Studies. I was starting my

(36:13):
sophomore year, so I was the first class. But when
I started going to the classes, I went, they don't
have this together, and I don't. So fortunately I was stubborn,
and uh I was. I took a design carse sophomore year.
Now I hadn't done any art in years, but I

(36:34):
had done it with my mother when I was growing up,
and so I took this design carse. And then my
junior year I really was did not like the guy
who taught the next year of design. I used to
have run ins with him in the shop. He was
an anal compulsive, which was the opposite of me. So
I just kind of didn't go to the class. And

(36:56):
there was the most advanced class. So I went up
heirs to the most advanced class and I said, can
I take this class? And it was like this guy,
this wonderful sculpture named Mirco Basadala, who recently. I was
at the Rockefeller estate that's in Westchester, and I was
looking at this sculpture and I'm going, this looks familiar,

(37:19):
and it was Mirco and there was a he had
a new assistant named Paul Rotterdam, and I go, can
I take this class? I go, well, there's only five
people taking you. What do you think? Sure you can
take it. And so I had the waging experiences that
I had six hours a week with two brilliant, if

(37:40):
not genius professors, and there was one other girl and
me were the only two people in the class that
really worked hard. So we had like a personal apprenticeship
with these people. Mirco passed away halfway through the year,
and then Paul took over, and then Paul became my mentor.
He I took independent on studies with him, and then

(38:02):
he became my thesis advisor. Eventually I moved to New
York and built his loft with him. I hung his
shows at Susan called well Um. I had a one
man show at the Carpenter Center Um of my sculptures
and paintings. But the modern levers played at SO really
changed my whole life. But it was like that decision

(38:23):
of like, oh, I'm not going to go to that class.
I can't standard. I did a number of things in
college that I when I look back on, it was
like I can't believe that I sort of had the
balls to do that. But I just went up and
this is what I want and people went Nobody else
asks Okay, So anyway other than the academics, uh, what

(38:46):
was the social situation? Into what degree did that change?
You would Harvard lives. Well, there was the unique time
at Harvard where unlike if you watch the social network,
all of the sort of fine old clubs that you
know in the social network that people are trying to
get into, people were identifying with sort of the war

(39:09):
in Vietnam soldiers and the working class. And there were
a lot you know, there are a lot of self
identified communists. There was the Progressive Labor Party. I was hiding,
you knew the situation? Is there one more? Do I believe?
The situationists? French revolutionary French revolutionary Malcolm McClaren was incredibly

(39:30):
influenced by them. So they came over and they were
disrupting classes. And I will tell us a little about
who they are what they're about. So they believed that
the revolution was not about the workers student alliance, but
it was about defining the the places in the culture
where the uh interests of the general society we're being

(39:56):
manipulated by we'll say, the ruling class. And so they
would create uh sort of events that would elucidate this.
There's one of the main writers is a guy named
gud Board. Actually, many of the people that sort of
ended up taking over France began as situationists, and as

(40:21):
I said, and Malcolm was very influenced by so when
he did sex and all of that, that really grew
out of the situation is thinking. So they came over.
Some of them were down at Columbia, some of them
came from France, and they were in our in our
living in my room, and I was disrupting classes with
them and things like that. Um, and they kind of

(40:44):
they also introduced me to the to the psychiatrists, Wilhelm Reich,
you know him, Yeah, yeah, so I was and I
found him really fascinating and I wrote a lot of
papers about him. But let me do this day. Of course,
you know, roll thing comes out of him. Arthur Jane
comes off of him, all of this other stuff we

(41:06):
started by Reich, and of course Rich is amazing. The
they took his books out of the library at Congress
and burned them. They put him in jail. I mean,
he's an amazing figure. So he they and they also
kind of believed in free love. But it was basically
the guys in the group wanted to hook up with
our girlfriends, and the girls in the group weren't that

(41:29):
We're willing to hook up with us, but they weren't
all that attractive. And I remembered there was this time,
you know, I had gotten into this thing about Okay,
I'm suspicious of this. So am I suspicious of this
because of the way I was raised in my training,

(41:52):
or do I have an intuition that this is bullshit?
And how do I distinguish between those two uh trains
of thought? And I remember this girl coming up and
sitting next to me, and she goes, so, what do
you think about what we're saying? And I said, I'm
gonna trust my intuition, and I said, I think you're
completely full of ship. But it was an amazing time.

(42:17):
It was Harvard was unlike it was at any other time.
It was not all about just being rich. The rich
people kind of hid that they were rich, and and
to a degree, the working class was ascended totally unique.
You know, I was invited to enjoying a final club
and oh, I don't want to do that, so I know.

(42:38):
So it's like, you know what, it's funny. I remember
being counted go to a football game. You can't go
to the football game. Same thing. So you said, you
mentioned right and jan Off and all these people. What's
your experience with therapy if any. I've never done it.
I've always thought that I'd like to do it because
I think it's sort of would be fascinating. I've read
enough about psychiatry and stuff like that. It um. I

(43:03):
think the cognitive uh c G I is very effective
for changing your behavior, but it doesn't really get at
maybe why you have certain phobias or things like that.
You know. I thought that Ardi Lang was really fascinating
because he thought the schizophrenia was part of a healing

(43:25):
process and stuff like that. I've had all these amazing
things where I meet psychologists or new psychiatrists and I
bring up these authors and they've never heard of any
of them. I really, what are they teaching you in college,
It's like, how could you not know who Adler is
or who Right is or you know, I know, you

(43:45):
know Freud is. And the same thing is like they
don't know who Irban Goffman, sort of the inventor of
group psychology. It's like, what what are they teaching? Are
you that well adjusted that you don't need any therapy?
I think the therapy would be an exploration and it
would probably make me well more well adjusted. But I

(44:06):
think that I'm happy and I've found my ways to
I don't know, confront whatever issues I think I need
to confront, But I think they'd have probably been helpful,
but to a degree. Really doing therapy takes time, like
a lot of time, and I knew, you know, and
I also see that people kind of get addicted to it.

(44:28):
There was a philosophy professor who was the leading expert
on Wittgenstein, who was head of the philosophy department at Harvard.
It also happened to be gay, and he and I
became really good friends, and you know, he would go like, well,
Fritz Pearls was my psychiatrist for a long time. The
guy started sling, But then I thought I needed something more,

(44:49):
so I switched to a Freudian and I'm like, this
is an addiction. It's like a lifelong addiction of trying
to examine your problems all the time. So I'm uh,
I think it has a real place. You read the
case studies where they do fantastic things. I think that
it can be very very useful, and I think that

(45:09):
probably everybody could learn a lot from it. But I
think you could. I think you can learn awful lot
by self examination when you read the books and thinking
about what they're talking about. Mark's very interesting because he
believes that he was the first one to make a
connection between what you're thinking and how you hold your

(45:32):
body and your musculature. He told one, um uh, you
know one is what he called character armor, and then
he called it body armor. And so have you ever
had the thing where you have anxiety and your and
you kind of feel in your chest. It's almost like
there's a band around your chest when you're feeling well,

(45:54):
if you make yourself gag, it'll go away. And so
he had all these methodologies to using uh uh, what
are the um reflexes as a way is what he
called dissolving the energy that was in the body armor,
and then it would help dissolve the psychological characterological construct

(46:19):
that was connected to that body armor. We of course
believed that the orgasm was the most important, so he
would watch people having sex and it's like he really
went off. And I think he also believed in that
oregon and energy within the atmosphere. It's a little bit
like Telly Shardon and the idea of there being some

(46:42):
kind of life force, which of course has gone out
of favor and science. But you know, maybe we just
haven't developed the tool to be able to sense it.
I mean, they've never really explained acupuncture adequately, you know,
and yet there's you know, there's empirical evidence that it works.
So he was, you know, he in any ways was

(47:05):
mimicking what a lot of Eastern things do, but saying
it within a Western frame of mind. And of course
he was hunted down by Hitler because he was associated
with the Socialists and setting up camps and stuff like
that about hygiene and health. And he went to Norway
first and then came the United States and and he

(47:25):
was up at Rangely Lakes up in uh in Maine.
He thought he could change the weather with Yeah. He
nicknamed this stuff called orgon energy and that you could
collect it or or disperse it. And William Burrows wrote
this big and rolling stone about going to visit Paul

(47:46):
Bowles and sitting in an orgon box. So I met Paul.
I met William Burrows one night with Patti Smith was
there talking and of course they're talking about poetry. But
of course when I go out to and go like,
can you tell me about the Oregon box with Paul Ball,
that's what I really want to know about it, and
he goes, there was something there. There was definitely something there,
So that's what I know about it. Staying on this

(48:15):
same tip to a degree, you know, being a musician
is very different. I'll just use architecture because you went
down that path to a degree, and there's a lot
of unique things. You know, a lot of musicians take
drugs to come down from the gig. Uh, you get
the incredible adrenaline hit that other people are unaware of

(48:37):
band's break up. How did you cope with all this tumultuousness?
Probably the sort of disintegration on the modern levelage was
pretty hard. First of all, I had put my own
money into helping the band survive. So I was really
broke when it happened, and I knew the potential of

(48:58):
what we could have done, and it was sad. It
was just really sad. And it uh. I went back
to Cambridge and I actually taught at Harvard. Paul Rotterdam
called me up and said, my teaching assistant quit, can
you do it? Is it sure? Which was really interesting

(49:18):
because the student body had changed. They were all about
getting good grades now instead of about what they were learning.
When I was in college, people go, I don't care
what great I got. I want to know what I
want to learn stuff and the and the and the
professors found that inspiring. Suddenly the professors were far more
radical than the students. I would have all these like students,
especially like you know, people from the law school were

(49:40):
taking this course and they were trying to get me
to do their project for them. It's like, what is
that why you're taking the classes for me to do it?
It's for you to do it. And then I worked
for h software development company called Cambridge Computer. But now
this is the computers before Apple and Microsoft or any
these companies existed. We were working on IBM main frames.

(50:03):
And the deck PDP eight and PDP eleven. This company
could have been Microsoft. It wrote the operating systems, they
wrote the manuals. They did this. I didn't do too
much programming. I was trying to be a salesman during
a that they had a system for school systems that
I was remarkably unsuccessful at selling. But there was a

(50:25):
recession in the early seventies, and so getting you know,
school boards to spend money it was. It was difficult.
But and there was a chess master that was there.
They could play twenty of us blindfolded and beat us
all but everybody was obsessed by chess. So I got
that's the best I ever was at chess, and that

(50:48):
that chess bachelor went on to become the world backgammon champion.
The other thing that was really interesting is that a
lot of the people in this head far more wild
and act of sex lives than most of the musicians
I knew. So that was it was really fascinating. But
I also learned that when they went home, they read,

(51:09):
they read manuals, and when I home, I listened to music.
So I went, I don't think this is my new career.
I think music is really what I want to do.
I applied to architecture school and then I put it
off for a year because I, um, there's an artist
named Elliott Murphy who came up around the time, all right,
So I made night Lights with him and went on

(51:30):
tour with him. I also produced Let's Start from the beginning.
Elliott was a New York guy. How did you know?
Elliott Murphy? He knew of the modern Lovers, and so
when he came up to Cambridge, I think he got
in touch with us, and then Ernie and I played
with him, and then eventually I produced that record Milwaukee
for him, and I just saw him in Paris when

(51:54):
I was there in November. We're still friends and so
that's what I did around the computer company, and eventually
I said, like, I've got to start architecture school before
as long as I can. And then I started. I
know that Chris talked about this. It was right as
I met the Talking Hits. I was starting that. So

(52:15):
I they were very nice to me that they let
me finish one semester. I said, my parents will kill
me if I don't at least finish the semester so
that I can go back. If I have to just
to go back to chapter. It's history with the Modern Lovers. Now,
you went from high school to college, you sold all
your stuff. When you had that line of demarcation, did

(52:37):
you say, no, there's a future, you say, I'm not
playing music. I'm out. I just thought that I'm an amateur.
There's professionals doing this. I'm a good student. I'm gonna
do something else. And then I saw that other people.
But I was just as good as the other people
that were around me. And when I met Jonathan, I said,
we're as legitimate as any band in the world. And frankly,

(52:59):
I hate them music that's coming out now, like I
don't know Emerson, Lincoln Palmer and yes, and it was
just you know, as I call it. And I think
it was sort of like the mannerism is the classical painting,
that it was more about grandios technique rather than great

(53:19):
songs and things like that. And so John, you know,
I actually think that the Modern Lovers are sort of
the beginning of punk music. I mean, we were, of
course exceptionally influenced by Developt Underground and the Stooges, but
those they don't seem exactly punk to me. But to me,
the definition of punk music is I have something to say,

(53:44):
and no matter how good or bad a musician I am,
I will find a means to express what I have
to say. And and because I believe it so much,
and I will say it was such passion, I'll get
across to an audience. And I think the Modern Lovers
were the beginning of that ethos, short and sweet ideas,

(54:04):
and of course Jonathan very much. You know, when everybody
was doing drugs, he writes a song called I'm Straight
and so we were being the opposite. Well that was
a big thing, you know, in the sixties and seventies.
But just to get the timeline right, how long after

(54:25):
the Modern Lovers break up do you actually start architecture school.
I started architecture school in September, and the broader Lovers
broke up, I believe in the spring of seventy. Okay,
So how do you ultimately uh connect with the talking gets.

(54:50):
It's as Chris said, he called me up because he
got the number through Ernie Books and the Showyer family,
who I did now up in Maine. He had a
j S house to Ernie's family's house. Also Steve Paul
because Steve Paul and Danny Fields were wanted to manage
the Modern Lovers. Steve Paul had said to the talking

(55:14):
you had to leasy told me that I would be
a good choice because they knew because he knew that
I paid it as well. So I think that we
I think there were this like this would be a
good time. It's a music story though, So the first
time I went down to play with them, like I said,
I had no money. I mean really I was that.
I ended up with Ernie moving a family to New

(55:36):
York and the band van and when we packed the
van there was no room for my oregan. So I
drove to New York with a guitar and I walked
into the the Christentina Davis Loft on Christie Street with
the guitar. They said, we thought you were a keyboard player.
I said, well I am, but I played guitar too,

(55:58):
and there wasn't any room for the keyboard. So I
brought a guitar. But let's display some music. And we
started to play some music and it sounded great from
the moment we started praying. So then I came back
with the keyboard and I did a show at the
Lower Manhattan Ocean Club. They also had a horn player
play with them, and then we went out to New Jersey.

(56:19):
We played that a private party that is sort of
immortalized in the pictures on the first album of the
name of this band is Talking Heads or I'm kind
of standing off at the side, because that was the
second time I played with them, And then they came
up to Cambridge and I I took a week off
from architecture school and played the Ratskeller in Boston, Lupo's

(56:41):
Heartbreak Saloon and found in uh in u Ah Providence
some places at a Clark University. And I think at
that point, AM going like, this is too good. I'm
going to do it. I had I had forgotten what
Chris said about the thing that I wanted to make
sure they got a record deal, and I think that

(57:02):
that's probably true. I think that I was like, I
don't want to spend two years chasing a record deal.
I want to like get to it and make a record,
because I had seen what happened with the modern lovers
waiting around for the right deal and stuff like that.
So but I was I was forever grateful that they rated.
I joined in January seven, we immediately started getting ready

(57:25):
to make the first album, and we did went on
that glorious tour that Chris has talked avented so well
in his book Opening for the Ramans, which frankly was
one of the most fun tours I've ever been on,
because the the audiences in Europe knew about the Ramans
and the Talking Hits as much from fanzines and articles

(57:49):
and magazines as from hearing any music. So they go, like,
we want to go see what's happening in New York
right now, So they were open minded to seeing the
Talking Hits with the Mounds, and we would like finish
our set and usually walk to the back and like
all of our fans would come up and said, like,
do you want to go out? And the great thing

(58:10):
about Talking Hits fans is usually there were people that
you were very perfectly happy to hang out with. They
were smart, they were intellectuals, and they had something to
teach you and talk to you about. So we'd go
out with them, go all over the towns with them,
come back, get on the bus the next day with
the Ramond to go on to the next place. Tina
actually has the same story as me, but we were

(58:33):
driving by Stonehenge and I went up to the bus
drivers that we have to stop. I want to go
see Stonehead and Johnny Ramone goes, what we're stopping to
go see a bunch of rocks? But oh god it
was and the weather was glorious. It was right when

(58:54):
when h the sex pistols did God save the Queen
into that thing when they were coming down the tem
We had this party that they all came to and Johnny,
Johnny Rotten was a big fan of Roadrunner, you know,
of course they they did a cover of road Runner.
It was a fantastic time. Now, was Gary ker First

(59:15):
already the manager when you came? Or how did you
get Gary Kurfers? Garry Kurfirst came about a year later,
and he having gone through not having a manager in
the modern Lovers, I was very adamant in saying we
really have to have a manager. Christine and David were

(59:35):
more business like and more let's say, unified and how
they thought about it than we had been in the
Modern Lovers, So they could have gone further, and they
had done a great job up until then. But there
comes a time where you're away and things are happening,
and Ken Kushnik, who worked at Sire Records, introduced us
to Gary. And Gary had gone through a quite an

(01:00:00):
adventure because he had gotten an underactive thyroid. He had
been the manager of Mountain and a promoter. I don't
know if you know much about it. Yeah, I know this,
and I knew Gary. Yeah, so anyway, you know all
of this. But so by the time he took us on,
it's not like he had a lot of other acts.
He had us and he loved coming on tour with
us and ran his business from the road with us.

(01:00:22):
And as Chris said, Gary would explore the towns as
we went out, and he sort of put together a
tour that was half top forty clubs and half this
and half that. I became the road manager. Tina had
been at and I remember we were playing actually in Milwaukee,
and he had made a deal like three guarantee, but

(01:00:45):
we get of the house after you make five and
the pro boer because I'm not gonna play you five
thousand dollars. I said, well, let me call Gary. Carry
gets out the phone. He goes, look, I'm a gambler,
but when I win, I collect. And if you ever
want to have any band ever play there again, you're
gonna pay, so the guy paid me. It was great,

(01:01:09):
It was It was an adventure. I mean because of Gary,
we built our name through touring to a degree that
another manager we had thought about her I had thought
about was Ed Bicknell, who had been our agent in
London and he went on to become Dire Straitsman manager,

(01:01:29):
and he would we would have been much more of
a European act and maybe South America. You know, he
took a different course, more publicity. So it's interesting to
think about those choices. But Gary was a master of
the road and we didn't mind working. Really, the Ramans
on Us were the only bands that really worked that
hard on the road that came out of Was it depressing,

(01:01:54):
I mean, you're on the way up, but you've got
to play a lot of places. At first you would
think we're audience as are not into you, or that
not many people show up or was that not your experience.
It was all an adventure, so it was fine. You know,
we were you know, we were driving around a station wagon.

(01:02:15):
I'm just playing. Gary had found this guy named Gary
Schofield who had a van and who was a sound mixer.
The way he got the van is he had a
friend who got stopped by the Connecticut State Police who

(01:02:36):
thought he was a danger and shot him in the head.
And the van sat in the parents garage for about
five years and Gary finally went over and go like,
are you gonna do anything with that van? And they
went just take it away. So he had this free van.
So Gary ma had a deal with him and he

(01:02:57):
made much more money than us. So so I know,
we we'd go out and like, you know, each of
us is getting a grilled cheese and He'll goes, I'll
have the prime rib and so we kind of hated him.
But Garrett goes, he's too good a deal. You don't
get it. He mixes you, he helps move the equipment,

(01:03:18):
and he's got a van. It's an unbelievable deal. So okay,
the first album, you know, looking through from an outsider's
you point, it appears that you wanted to produce the
record itself and they want a little insurance and got
Tony Bon Jovie. You of course were in the power station.
What went on there? Well, Chris and Tina and David

(01:03:40):
had done a single with Tony Bon Jovi and they
wanted something away from the I don't know the punk producers,
and Tony was known for doing disco and horns and
things like that. Tony brought in a guy named Lance
Quinn who was sort of the musical part of the team.
Tony didn't really get us all. I mean we The

(01:04:04):
version he wanted to put a Psycho Killer on the
album was the one that has cellos. But when we
got back from the tour of London where we were
finishing our shows with Psycho Killer, I kind of put
my foot on and said like, no, we're going to
do the electric version like we do. Uh, we've been
doing live and that's what we did and that's what's

(01:04:25):
on the album. So but Tony really knew a lot
about sound. He was in the process of building the
power station, so we never worked at the power station.
We made it at a little studio called Sun Dragon,
a sixteen track studio at Stadium was the engineer. We
mixed it at Media Sound, where Tony was very involved.

(01:04:49):
I just worked with Ed doing atmost mixes of talking hits.
He still listens so loud it's like I have tonight
as it was like, oh my god, dude, it was crazy,
but it was fun. I just remixed all the Talking
Hits albums for atmost in eight weeks this summer, which
was Okay. Then let's just go sideways here for a second.

(01:05:13):
What's your viewpoint on ATMOS. Well, I was a big
fan of surround sound, and I did the five one mixes,
so Eric thorn Gren and I did that. So I
think that I think surround sound and ATMOS is a
version of surround sound is great. I think that you
are putting a computer in between your mix and the

(01:05:36):
eventual playback, because the the computer is sort of sampling
how many speakers do you have and what's the frequency
of response, and then making the adjustments. Sometimes that can
be a little bit weird. I also think that the headphones,
they're not exactly that really don't give you the entire experience,

(01:05:57):
but they're fun. They're fun to listen to, and I
think that a great surrounds on mix is just fantastic.
Um Our philosophy, you know, this is Eric thorn Gren
in mine is not to tear the music apart so
much that you feel like it's all in pieces, but
to keep the coherence that you have in the stereo mix,

(01:06:20):
but to enhance it. So I don't know if you've
had the chance, but go on Apple Music and try
listening to it or untitled see what you think. Okay,
and you live through the quad experiments and all this
other stuff. Do you think app moos is going to
be a small thing or it's going to become the default?

(01:06:40):
I think that ATMOS is the best chance because I
think that Dolby and Apple are behind it, and those
are two pretty powerful companies, particularly Apple. Apple is the
world's largest corporation, and so that's a that's a much
better starting place than where we were before. Sony has
you know, this competitive system, But I don't think I
don't think it's going to be the beta max phs.

(01:07:03):
I think ATMOS is going to be the default system.
I think that all the cars will have it within
five years. Already cars have it. I think that every
a v amp that comes out, we'll have it, will
be ATMOS ready. Now, are people gonna put in thirteen
speakers all over their rooms? No, but they have these

(01:07:25):
Atmos sound bars and stuff like that. There there's acceptable Okay,
they're not you know, like everything you know, you've got
audio file levels that's even better. Okay, so you just
did all these ATMOS mixes. Let's say you're a band
on the way up. How much time and money is
it going to take to put on an atmost mix

(01:07:46):
of that record? Well, I think that if every engineer
understands ATMOS, that they can mix using stems so that
they can sort of do them at the same time.
But if you're going back to the reginal material, you've
got to sort of start over. So I don't think
it's all that much more expensive if you're using an

(01:08:07):
engineer that's familiar with both, And I think the stereo
mix will always be your basis, the basic thing that
you're doing, and the utmost is sort of h a
fun and exciting extra. I've always thought that cars are
the ideal place for surround sound because you have you
sit in the same place all the time. So you know,

(01:08:30):
I think that we all take our cars. Now, don't
you adjust the stereo to a little bit to the
back and to the front. You sort of create a
Fox surround set up in your car already, so this
is just a little more defined. Um, I can play
some of my five one mixes in my cars. The
mix of burning down the house from the DVD audio,

(01:08:53):
it sounds amazing in my car, so I I think
that must will be great there just to be clear
in your car stock stereo or aftermarket stereo stock. But
I have. But I bought an RS seven, which is
one of the greatest stereos ever made in a car,
and that is one of the It's one of the

(01:09:13):
reasons I bought that car. Friend of mine designed. Friend
of mine design that makes a stereo for the RS
of it. Panging Old and the tweeters were designed by
a friend of mine who lives here and Merinn County,
and he licensed them to be you know, they pop
up out of the dashboard and then they go down
and it's it's great. But but when I play, I

(01:09:37):
think it's actually defaulting back to the Dolby version of
the five one. It's distinct in the different speakers in
my car, so I can hear panning going back and
forth and stuff like that. So I know what it's
going to be like to have a was it's great? Okay?

(01:09:59):
So he had seventy seven comes out. Were you happy
with the finished product? Yes, I thought that we were
a little heavier than the record. It was a it's
a little clear, you know, but I thought, you know,
it's very it's very clean and very immaculate, and it
captured the uniqueness of the band. Certainly. David's voice is

(01:10:21):
very you know, he has this, uh, completely unique way
of singing, you know, probably the most on seventy seven
and sort of slowly becoming a more let's say, conventional
is not the right word, but the ability to sing
in a fuller voice and more what we would think

(01:10:43):
of as a good voice. As he progresses, has more
of his kind of ah h what you know. Used
to say that his his thing is like it's sort
of like explosives of excitement, right, and has it has

(01:11:04):
more of that. But I think that the records records great.
I have favorites, so I love No Compassion, which has
always been one of my favorite songs. Um No, I
think it's I think who is its great and new feeling,
you know, it's terrific. I mean I'm excited where we
went after it because I wanted to go someplace else,

(01:11:27):
but I was the first sound was great. Did you
ever have doubts about the level of success of Talking Heads?
I always knew we would be an artistic success and
that we would really influence a lot of people. I
had no idea about our commercial success. I thought it
would be medium. We outstripped our commercial success from what

(01:11:48):
I predicted. But I didn't do it for the money.
I did it for the to be have that influence
on people. And so how did you know get involved
on the second record, Well, he came to see us
at the Roundhouse and then we went over to his
house and we went to this bookstore Compendium, and I
finally found this book about that Burrows once again had

(01:12:11):
written about called about this review of this book Inside
Scientology by Robert Kaufman, and every bookstore in the United
States did not have a copy of this book because
the scientologists bought every one of them so that they
so that there was no way to find out about
the sort of, uh say, we're devious things that they do.

(01:12:34):
And I found it at this book store, which was
very exciting, and we just were admired him and said
we'd love you to work with you, and he goes,
are you sure I love the sout of talking at
s And we said, yeah, we're sure. I mean we
think that Tony knew a lot about sound but he
didn't exactly understand us, and we'd like to work with

(01:12:56):
someone who understands us. And then he brought in Rhet Davy,
who was a terrific engineer. So and as Chris said,
it was a magical time down in the ad compass point,
just wonderful. And other than signing you to what degree
with Seymour stunt involved, I think with us most of

(01:13:20):
the time he just got out of the way. Like
we designed our own album covers, we made lots of
our own decisions. Um, he just tried to facilitate us.
And there were times that when Warner Brothers bought sire Rad,
if we couldn't get something out of Warner Brothers, Gary

(01:13:41):
Kirkers would try and go get it from Seymour. And
Seymour had a sauce spot for us. I mean, I
think he was amongst all the bands he signed, we
were among his very favorites. And so you know, how
did you end up cutting Take Me to the River? Well,
you know, I listened to your podcast with Chris and

(01:14:04):
they talk. It's true that Edo convinced us to slow
it down, which was the right choice, But I also
think that very crucial thing is I learned to Take
Me to the River by David teaching it to me.
I never went and listened to the original. And the
difference between sil Johnson or Al Green. It's all on

(01:14:29):
the upbeat, It's like and ours just dude, it's like
very didactic, like a march and and I think a
lot of that is my Oregon part because I had
learned it from David and I wasn't trying to mimic
the original. I've done this movie, I don't know if

(01:14:49):
you've seen this movie, Take Me at the River about
Memphis music that I was a producer of. Fantastic movie.
And so I've now worked with the Hodges brothers and
play Take Me the Ever with them Teeny Hodges as
the co writer. So I had to relearn it slightly
different chords, but also a totally different feeling. So I
became very, uh a sort of in tune with the

(01:15:12):
differences of what our approach was and what theirs was.
And ultimately the next album, Fear of Music. Tell me
about the album cover, well, I designed the deck plate.
It actually was influenced by because Tina's brother, who was

(01:15:33):
an architect, lived in the same loft building as Christentina
and me and he he used a rubber version of
dech plate. It's an anti skid surface that you'll find
on the backs of Ford pickup trucks on uh Sewert.
You know those doors that opened for elevators to come

(01:15:54):
out of the sidewalk in New York City. And I
thought this would be a great cover. So I am
what So I called up the company that was making
this vinyl flooring and I said, can you make it
thinner so we could use it for an album cover?

(01:16:15):
And they go, now, you know, we can't change our presses.
We can't do that. And I'm going, well, if we
sell a half a million records, I said, well, what
about it for an order of a million square feet?
So I got the president on the on on the line.
But eventually we came up with that the tolerances of

(01:16:35):
getting it the thin, that it wouldn't cost too much,
it just wasn't gonna work. Then the Queen's Litho, we
can't do this, but eventually they came around. We had
the same problem with the day Glow for talking at
seventy seven Queen's Litho, like, we can't put that kind
of ink in our in our presses. So David and

(01:16:55):
I started calling all of these record manufacturer verse from
out in the Midwest that did poker covers that used
Dayklow all the time, and then we said, okay, well
we're going to use this place in Ohio they do
day Clow all the time. Well, of course at that
point queens Litho said, of course we'll do it. And
then of course Very Music got nominated for a Grammy,

(01:17:18):
and uh, you know, queens Litha, we're petting themselves on
the back and David, uh, sort of just the type
is basically to look like an IBM S Electric And
then I found a friend of mine was working the
same marine who had been the drummer in the Modern Lovers,

(01:17:39):
was working for this cancer doctor. And you know, David
had thought of the idea of the lands At photo
for the back of of more songs about buildings and food.
So we were like really excited by things that were
imagery that was interesting and beautiful but had a meaning
beyond being sort of artistic. Okay, so the inside cover

(01:18:02):
is a heat sensitive photograph that was used in trying
to detect press camp cancer in the seventies. So we
all got our pictures taken, but David's just came out
looking at the sort of weirdest and coolest, So we
used that and life during the Wartime. Did that come

(01:18:22):
to you from David totally totally done? Or to what
degree was the band involved? David and I came up
with I think I came up with the chorus, and
he came up with the verse, and christ and Tina
said that they had come up with something independently that
that led to the song. So we ended up sharing

(01:18:44):
that between the four of us. Um, I don't I
didn't quite understand what Chris and Tina were what what
they exactly referring to, because it was something that they
said they had done, but you know, it was that
was so it was that's what we did. I mean,
Fair of Music is an interesting cover because it's the
only song time where I got to write with David,

(01:19:07):
just the two of us. So I co wrote Heaven,
I co wrote wrote Memories Can't Wait, and I co
wrote mind You know. Then one after remain in Light
and we had this whole thing that I know you
talked to Chris about about this whole group writing experience.
I never had the opportunity to be sort of one

(01:19:27):
on one with him, so remaining like, give me your
version of how that comes together. Well, I think it
begins with when we did the Fair of Music. We
had recorded the song that became the Zimbra, but we
never came up with lyrics. So we were sitting at
Atlantic Records listening to all the mixes. We're about to

(01:19:50):
jump on a plane to fly to New zealand, go
on to Australia through Perth, then fly to play Pink
Pop in Europe with a like a week vacation in Europe,
and so we're at that. We listened to it and
I go, can we just put on I don't know
what we called it at that point, track sixteen, and
we put it on and I think everyone went, that's

(01:20:12):
got to go on the record. So David and I
flew back from Perth thirty hours to New York to
finish uh Zimbra, and that's when Brian came up with
the idea of using the Hugo ball poem. And then
David and I went to the mastering lab with Eno
and then left there and went and flew all night,
went and played Pink Pop in Europe. But I think

(01:20:35):
we all realized that the that that zimbra and it's
influenced by African music was what we wanted to do next.
And so all of us were listening to Fella and
Manage to Coti that's the name of a restaurant, Manta
da Bango, and various other things, and and we then decided,

(01:21:00):
uh that we would not write ahead of being in
the studio, but just do it in the studio itself,
because we had realized that sometimes the first time you
play a song, there's an innocence and there's a way
that you play it that's different than you'll ever play
it again. And we went to capture that. And so
we got down to compass point we were working and

(01:21:22):
Rhet Davies was going to is that it was the
engineer who had done more songs about buildings and food.
Then you know, got wind of it and he suddenly
was showed up and you know, getting there, Rhett was
wanting to sort of get out from under you know's
you know wing will say, so he quit and then

(01:21:44):
you know, tried engineering but he's not he can't do it,
I mean, or he's so slow. It was, it was
ridiculous and the assistant a compass point, couldn't do it.
So then Dave turn flew in because he had been
working in My Life and the Bush of Ghosts with
David and you know, and he was the engineer, and

(01:22:05):
he then went on to be the engineer on my
first solo record, The Red and the Black. We got
to be good friends and we were often going out
and people doing one thing at a time, sometimes a
couple of things at a time. And and uh boards
back then had a way of locking mutes, so you

(01:22:27):
could have an A button that had the mutes of
one group and then be the other. So we would
sort of do parts and assign them to the A
group and the B part and go back and forth.
And that's really how we wrote the record, with these
groups of A groups of B. I don't I don't

(01:22:49):
think there's very many C parts in the record. I
think it's all A B, A B, sometimes different lyrics,
but A B, A B. Then we you know, had
a commitment had to leave, and we decided we went
back to New York, which I think was in some
ways we lost our momentum. And I went around and
negotiated with all the studios in New York to find

(01:23:11):
us the best deal, and we ended I had produced
Nona Hendricks down at Philadelphia Sigma Sound, and I loved
how professional they were. So I went to Sigma Sound
and I convinced them that they being an R and
B studio, that by having us, we could be a
lost leader for them to get rock bands to come
to them. So I got us this unbelievable deal there.

(01:23:35):
Um I asked Gary Kirfurst, if you negotiated with him,
and he goes like, no, nobody would do better the
way you already got. I just said, I want Jerry Steele.
So we went there. But David had kind of writer's cramp,
let'll say romain and I was a very hard record
to write melodies of lyrics too, because there it's modal,

(01:23:55):
it doesn't have chord changes to go to places. So
he's ruggled. And he then started picking up an instrument
and started playing along to things, and this started to
mutate what had come out of the Bahamas, which I
think was quite frustrating to Christentina because they loved what
had come out of the Bahamas. But it was sort

(01:24:17):
of a necessary evil for David to get back into
sort of being inside the music and then coming up
with lyrics and uh melodies. And I was there for
every minute of it, and I mean sometimes just watching,
sometimes putting in my two cents. By the time it

(01:24:39):
was ending, we had been offered to play up at
the Heatwave Festival and to play in Central Park that
Ron Telser had this series, and we go. I'm talking
to David. I was like, how are we gonna record?
How are we gonna play all this music? So he
and I sat down and going like, Oh, we're gonna
another keyboard player, were another guitar player, We're gonna need
background singers. I had brought in, by the way, Nona

(01:25:00):
Hendricks to sing on the record. Brian goes like, oh,
she'll take too long, that all singers they sing out
of tune, and I went, Brian, trust me, it's gonna
be great. And of course the minute she was there,
he was in heaven. So it was great. So we
got to the point that we were to be ready
for playing this show. David Flute to l A to

(01:25:22):
mix at El Dorado Studios with with Dave Jordan, and
I stayed with Eno and John Potoker at Sigma and
did other songs. Meanwhile, I went out. I went out
one afternoon and hired Bernie Adrian Blue to let McDonald
busted Jones. A day or so later, we found Steve Scales.
So I go back. I come back and go like,

(01:25:44):
we have the most incredible bad on earth. And so
we were rehearsing at Britanny Away, which was owned by
Pink Floyd out in Long Island City. So I called
up everybody and I made this deal with him. I said,
I'm gonna hire you for two weeks. We're doing two shows.
You're gonna make this money per per week. And uh,
Bernie's wife Judy goes, who I'm still friends with, She goes,

(01:26:09):
that was the clearest and the best negotiation I've ever
had in my life. Everything you said happened exactly as
you said it. The first day. So I was teaching
everybody the song, and everybody thought I was the leader
of the band, and then David shows up. They go like,
who's he? And then he started singing the song and
they like, oh, he's the lead singer and he does
all this other stuff. So and the record is, you know,

(01:26:35):
it's the most you know, it's the most influential and
amazing record we did. I mean, I think my two
favorites are fair of music and and and remain in light.
Although speaking in tongues is really been growing on me
a lot lately. But I love I love, I love
them all. And it's of course interesting because I haven't
done the atmos Max is like, they're much fresher in

(01:26:57):
my mind. Again, So you play your own music, you
play your own records, but not that often. Mainly I
hear him in stores or on the radio and stuff
like that. Okay, Now, Gary told me a story that
Eno was trying to weazle in to get an equal
royalty as a member of the band. Is said, I
earned it, and Gary said, no problem, the band's going

(01:27:20):
out on a tour. Just show up, and then that
solved the whole problem. It's exactly right. You know, he
was like someone who he had stage right. It's amazing
that he's such a confident guy. It's amazing stage right.
But yeah, no way he was going to do that,
and and and you know he was Edo lost an

(01:27:40):
opportunity though, you know, went on to doing music from
airports at that point, which was which was great, and
it was sort of the beginning of ambient music. But
we would have been happy to have been Ino's backup
band on another record like Remain in Light with him singing,
had he wanted to do it, so he he lost

(01:28:02):
an opportunity to because when he was singing with Nona,
to me, it's the only time I ever heard him
sing that didn't seem careful. It seemed like he got
so into the moment and with her that he started
to see sing with some excitement in his voice, not

(01:28:22):
that sort of careful, pure tone that he does almost
all the other times. Look, can you tell me about
Once in a Lifetime? The most the strangest thing about
Once in a Lifetime was that with the base being
on the upbeat and the drums on this downbeat, that

(01:28:42):
how you mixed it, you could decide that the one
was one place or a half beat later. There's a
there's an ambiguity there. The way we went out and
played it live, everyone has changed the bass part to
be with the drums. But on the record, if you're
going one, two, three, four, one done done, done on,

(01:29:10):
done on, But if you put the base up louder,
you think that's the one. So it has this sort of. Uh,
I don't know, you know, uneasyness will say that gives
it attention that I think is really special to it.

(01:29:31):
So Remaining in Light was not only different from the
previous Talking Heads album, was different from anything else in
the marketplace. Were you worried about audience acceptance into what degreed?
Did you think the audience would accept it? Well? I
think that after we did the tour, but before the
record came out, we played heat Wave and Central Park

(01:29:55):
and everybody went insane for it, so we were pretty confident.
It took years for the sales to catch up to
fair of music though, And how did you know Adrian
Blue and Bernie Warrell and stuff? So Adrian we he
first saw us at the accident, but we didn't see

(01:30:16):
him there. I think that, you know, Mona told us
about us, and then he came and saw us and
chammed with us. He was living in Champagne, Urbana, and
he's from Cincinnati I think originally um and he played
with us a few times. And how he ended up
on uh fir on Remaining Light is that I noticed

(01:30:38):
that he was playing at the Mud Club. My recollection
is that I went down and talked to him but
I guess maybe that he said remembers that Brian David
and I went down and he came up the next day.
He tells a wonderful story. He goes, we're no lyrics,
and he said, well, he went out in the room
and this is for the Great Curve, one of his

(01:31:00):
all time best solos and he ever played in his life.
And I think. He goes, We'll just listen and when
you think of solo, should come in play a solo.
And then when you stop, stop and then listen for
a while longer, and then come in when you think
something that would you would play a part for the

(01:31:21):
end of the song. So he's getting set up and
he's listening and he plays it and he goes, okay,
I think I'm ready, and we go We're finished. That
was fantastic. It was so great, and we went on
from there. I then got to He then moved up
to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin with his first wife, Um, and

(01:31:45):
I was gone back to Milwaukee to take care of
my mother because my father died suddenly. My mother had cancer,
so I was splitting my time between New York and Milwaukee,
and I found this little studio called DV recording that
was in a bomb shelter, and it was actually the
bomb shelter had been the bedroom of my best friend

(01:32:06):
in nursery school in grade school, and he had committed
suicide after after high school, but his younger brother had
taken over his parents house and I got to love
working there. And you know, this was at a period
where an eight hour block in New York cost a
thousand dollars and I was getting his studio for a
thousand dollars a week. But he could do any commercials

(01:32:30):
you want. And that's how I taught myself how to
be a good producer, because I could take the time.
I was basically working on the record that became Casual
Gods with him. But then I produced a single for
a band called It's in Material that was a top
ten hit in although I took my name off it
because I was piste off at what they did in
the mix. In England, I produced the Blind Leading the

(01:32:51):
Naked for the Piling Fems. There I produced um Oh
Elliott Murphy's album Milwaukee. There, I just did a lot
of stuff and I met my wife there. How do
you meet your wife? I had tried to pick up

(01:33:12):
in a bar with her boyfriend. There was a there
was these uh there was like some of my favorite
musicians from Milwaukee had a sort of supergroup will say,
and all the musicians in Milwaukee would go on like
Tuesday night to see them. And then a year later
when I walked in the studio, she was the bookkeeper.

(01:33:33):
It was there were a lot of things that had
to fall. She was engaged to get married. It was
it was let's say, um with it. It was a
bunch of things to negotiate. But happily we did it.
And we're still a little bit slower. She's the bookkeeper.
You're seeing her all the time. She's engaged. How do
how do we make the transition? She said. I walked

(01:33:57):
in and there was like the electricity was there, and
she goes, oh, and we started, uh kind of seeing
each other on the slide because I had a girlfriend then,
and uh, we just realized that we were the two
of us were soul mates and we had But it
took me a while. You know, she was a little

(01:34:19):
more decisive than I. Wy I was. It took a
little while, but we did that and now we have
three kids and it's great, Okay, and what did the
guys say. I think that they were I'm happy that
I found someone that uh, well, I seemed to be
in love with no no, no guy she dubbed. Well.

(01:34:42):
It was hard for him because he was a big
Talking Hints fan. So at first he was really delighted
that I was around. Then he realized that maybe wasn't
so good. But all he had to get over it.
You know, it was too bad. It was it was messy.
I'm not you know, it was bessy. Okay. The The

(01:35:04):
cover of Heaven is by Iva Davies in Berlin. You
can uh it's built his ice house on Spotify, you
can check it out. But you're now going on the
road with Remaining Light with Adrian. How did that come together? Well,
I've been thinking about this for ten years that there
is this YouTube video from Talking Heads in Rome in

(01:35:27):
and for Adrian lives in Nashville right now. And as
I said, I did this movie Take Me the River,
and we were at the Nashville Film Festival, and we
did a screening for the Nashville chapter of the Grammys,
and I don't know, there was just a bunch of
reasons that I suddenly went to Nashville, and I'd always
have dinner with Adrian and we just talked about how
great that was ego. You know, my fans say, that's

(01:35:49):
the most joyful concert they've ever seen. And I said,
we got to find a way to recreate this. And
then I produced this band, turk Quase, who were big
fans of Talking Heads, And I said, Adrian had another
way of using session musicians, So I don't want session musicians. Hey,
they'll never they won't ever share a room, and you

(01:36:10):
know it's not gonna work. So I suggested Turquoise. So
Turquoise had a show at the Exident and we booked
a rehearsal room after it, and Adrian I went to
see them, and then we did a rehearsal one day
and Adrian goes, you were right, this band is perfect. Uh,

(01:36:31):
so we did. So we were was all supposed to
take place in the fourth anniversary, but of course COVID happened,
So it's happened over twenty two playing festivals. Eventually Turquise
broke up. So actually it's not the lead singer and
not the bass player, but all the other members of
Turquoise and then Adrian's uh bass player from his trio,

(01:36:55):
Julie is now playing bass. It's actually better now because
Adrian I sing more. And you know, we had an
amazing experience. We played it Hardly Strictly the Bluegrass Festival
in San Francisco, Fisco. We played the fifty thousand people
there in October and after Elvis Costello, and there was

(01:37:18):
a a wave of joy that just went over the audience.
It was It's one of the most remarkable evenings of
my life. And you can see it by going to
Hardly Strictly and they will say Jerry Harrison and Adrian Blue.
So now we're taking it on a more sort of

(01:37:40):
serious tour us. It's really a tour for twenty year olds.
Like five days on, one day off hoping I hold up,
I mean Minneapolis in February. Sounds kind of dicey to me,
but that's what I'm doing now. If you look on
if you look at the tracks you played, the songs

(01:38:01):
you played, it was from throughout talking hits career. Is
it going to be the album remain in Life of
beginning to end or is it gonna be like that? Now?
It's like the show in Rome. So it has songs
from Fear of Music and as Psycho Killer, we do
one King Crimson song, we do rev it up my

(01:38:21):
solo song, and the girls in the Turquoise had been
doing Slippery People, and so since maybe his Staples does
Slippery People, uh, we are doing a version of Slippery
People that the girls in the band sing. So we're

(01:38:42):
sort of we're sort of venturing three songs away from
what we did in Rome, and we've we've thrown out
a couple of the songs from Rome, but we're not
it's not we're not going any further into the Talking
Hits career, except for of course, Slippery People Beyonder Man
in Life. Oh okay, when was the last time you
were on a tour other than these one offs that

(01:39:05):
I've done with this, It would have been I think
the tour for uh hm, no talking just heads with
christ and Tina. And how many years ago was that?
Nineties six or some long time? Okay, tell me about

(01:39:28):
the genesis of the movie and how you felt about
the movie with the Big Suit, et cetera. Well, the
original band, which was what Adrian and I are trying
to capture, started. Adrian left to join King Crimson, which honestly,

(01:39:48):
I recommended that he do. I thought it was a
very good move for his career, even though I missed
him the idea that he'd be playing for us and
we and Alex we are joined a band. Uh don't
let McDonald got stolen by the police. Tina rightly realized

(01:40:11):
that having two bass players was confusing. I think that
David and I heard that there were places on remaining
like where there were two basses, and we were trying
to emulate that. But on stage there were times in
that band where it was like very abstract. It was
like one side of the band went this way and
one side of the band went this way. I wish
we had recordings of every night because it would have

(01:40:32):
been like Charles Eves or something that would have been fantastic.
So and so it got a little more locked down
when we did the tour for speaking in Tongues and
then and it was getting a little more visual. And
then David um, you know, he had done the Catherine
Wheel with Twilt Tharpe, which actually I worked on for

(01:40:56):
quite a while as well, and he I think it
was getting more into like staging. He had worked with
Robert Wilson on the Civil Wars, So I think he
wanted to do something that had that visual element, and
so he started talking to stage designers and other stuff
and coming up with ideas, and a couple of a

(01:41:19):
few ideas we threw in and uh, it got sort
of designed that way. The big suit comes from Kabuki
theater and he had two of them made. A friend
of mine who I knew, designed the one that he
used the most. And you know, this idea of building
the stage we had sort of, you know, in the beginning,

(01:41:41):
like even a heat wave. We came out as a
foresome and then grew into the band. So this idea
of getting of growing from little too big already been born,
but it became much more going all the way, one
person at a time by the time we got to
to stop making sense. And I think one of the
enduring qualities of stop making sense is that what David

(01:42:07):
and the lighting designers came up with used technology that
really was sort of could have been there in the thirties.
You know, a rear screen, projection lights, handheld lights. There's
there was nothing. There were no very lights. There are
no things that were like of that time period. So

(01:42:28):
therefore it becomes timeless, could be could be recreated out
of like supper stock someplace, or it could be done
you know, it doesn't rely on technology. How did Jonathan
Demi get involved? I think he saw the show and said, like,
this is fantastic. I want to film this. Okay. When

(01:42:48):
did you realize that David wasn't going to want to
do it anymore? Or was that always a factor in
the back of your mind or was it a shock?
Have you been through the breakup of the Modern Lovers.
I thought it was inevitable to happen at some point,

(01:43:09):
and my goal was to feel that I was prepared
for that change to happen. UM. But up through True Stories,
I thought that we we were just we're going to continue.
Although I was really disappointed that we'd stopped touring. I

(01:43:30):
think there was an element that the success of stopped
making sense that David I didn't want to uh compete
with himself, so to speak. Um. There was a moment
when we did little creatures where we talked about doing
going to uh doing residencies in different times, like do

(01:43:52):
six days at the Beacon and then there's six days
at the Theater in Chicago and six days of Philadelphia
and Los Angeles and San Francisco, because then we could
have had more constant lighting and things like that, but
his desire to move on to true story sort of
short circuited that. One of my great disappointments is we

(01:44:14):
were offered to play Live Aid and we would have
killed it. We were the best band of the world,
I thought at that point live and if you look
at the success of You two and Peter Gabriel, it
really grew out of Live Aid and that they also
we're cognizant of the social issues and could talk coherently

(01:44:36):
about those, and we could have done that as well.
And I tried to get the David to do it,
but he was too involved in scouting out locations or
something in Texas and didn't want to do it. Then
it was like, okay, well, we aren't touring, but we're
making studio albums. And when we got up to Naked
Um he had written some songs, but we said, we

(01:44:58):
like what we've done. Two albums of you of just
your songs, when why don't we go back to the
model of speaking in tongues and remain in light, which
I don't think he was. I think he was a
little bit annoyed by that. It's interesting when he came
out with I think it was Ray Momo, he said
they were the same songs, but they didn't sound the
same at all to me. I was in the middle

(01:45:19):
of producing the Boudin's at the same time. I just
had a baby with my wife, so I sure had
a lot on my mind. But we went off to
uh to Paris and just had a great time making
this record and Wally Battery who introduced us to a
lot of African musicians, and I knew a fellas manager,

(01:45:40):
so I was also finding musicians and uh, it was
great fun there. Um, but I could see that, you know,
David also had met Bonnie, and Bonnie I think was
reinforcing red david career. It will say more in the

(01:46:03):
art world rather than the rocket world. Rocket rolled world
was a better avenue for him to go to pursue
his many interests. And I think that when he got
on the cover of Time magazine as a you know, filmmaker, musician, artist,
I don't know what else, dance or whatever it said.

(01:46:23):
By this point he had his own office and I
was like, Wow, this is going to be very hard
because He's really used to having people now around him
that always say yes or are very careful where they
say no. One of the great things about a band
is you have the honesty of people like don't way
am I going to do that? And I think the bands,

(01:46:47):
uh I have only storious about bands. I think the
bands are the only successful communist art for UM, because
it really is can be a group decision. There was
a visual group that around Victor Vassarelli called the g
R a V that did optical art at the forties,
but eventually Vassarelli got discovered as the major uh UM

(01:47:13):
talent there. And it's sort of so it broke down.
But what do you have your own office and you're
having people who are always supportive? You know, it's sort
of like the brothers and sisters that are a pain
in the ass. It's like this, God, do I have
to deal with them again? So, you know, once he
was on the cover of Time, I knew that it

(01:47:33):
would be a very it would be hard to keep
it together. David, of course, is filled with ideas. He's
really really good at efficiently using and sometimes reusing as ideas.
You know, I learned an immense amount about how to
do certain things from both Jonathan and David. It's really
interesting how you'll have an epiphany about something you've been

(01:47:57):
struggling with and then you watch somebody else doing you're like, oh,
I could do it that way. I go all the
way back to I was in kindergarten and the the
brother of the the guy who had the recording studio
and the bomb shelter, who was one of my closest friends,
was this sort of precocious artistic genius. And the teacher

(01:48:23):
in kindergarten asked everybody in the class to draw a cat,
and everybody draw a cat with like, you know, your
arms straight out like like pegs. But Michael drew it
like with the cat running like the legs were bent,
and the teachers showed it to us, like what's different
about Michael's drawings than you yours? And then kind of

(01:48:47):
some people didn't even notice, and it was like and
it was like, wow, first of all, I'll never draw
a cat the same, but I've got to look more carefully.
It's like, is that I'm really look really look hard,
and so I think that, you know, there have been
many times in my life where I've met someone and

(01:49:09):
sometimes by helping them do things, it's allowed me to
go like, well, I can do this now I know
with the route for myself to do it when I've
been struggling to find the solution to how to do it.
So both David and Jonathan were inspiring to me in
that way. So how did you handle emotionally the end
of the Talking Goods. Well, I had already started making

(01:49:30):
solo records and I'd already started becoming a music producer,
so I just kept going with that. And financially, how
has it worked out having been a member of Talking
Heads record royalties which are historically poor songwriting. To what
degree on how has it been working for you? Well,
I my mother said, never talked about money, so I'm

(01:49:52):
going to be a little bit cautious about this. Um
it goes up and down. Talky has seen a resurgence lately,
so it's gone up. As you know. I've been involved
in a bunch of companies which have some have been
pretty successful. Those are the kind of things where you
work ten years on something and then you have a payday.

(01:50:13):
But between the two things, we've managed to have a
very nice life and not overly extravagant but also comfortable,
So no complaints. And do you know about my snake
bite company? Do I know about what my company that
has a antidote for snake bites? No, So I founded

(01:50:37):
a company about ten years ago which is going to
revolutionize the world. Um, mosquitoes killed the most people. Humans
kill the next most people, and snakes are third. Snakes
kill a thousand people a year, a may more than
half a million people a year. Anti Venom is a
very incomplete and sometimes dangerous therapy, causing anapylactic shock and

(01:51:01):
other issues. And we have developed a antidote for a
particular toxin that is found in almost every snake, but
one that's very noxious and that also has an effect
on your general immune UH response to the snake bite.
Sometimes it's the immune response that kills you, not the
bite itself. This would be akin to you die from shock,

(01:51:25):
not the car accident. So we have an oral and
an ivy formulation. We are in clinical trials in India
and the United States just finishing them up and hopefully
it will be on the market. And know if you
will get FDA approval and we'll be on the market.
You involved with garage band. How do you get involved with,

(01:51:47):
you know, a venoms anti venom situation. Well, I had
met these neuroscientists and I had this lovely party in
June and there are all these smart people in my
my kitchen, and I said, does anyone have a great
idea that they haven't done anything with here? And this

(01:52:07):
person I never met, who was a friend of this
neuroscientist doctor, and he goes, I do it was a
totally different idea about snake bites. In fact, he even
tested on himself that there was a whole thing we
I had filmed at a hospital where he became paralyzed
and then there was a different treatment. It was only
for neurotoxic snink bites at that time, but now we
came up with something better. We just did a b

(01:52:29):
round where we raised a bunch of money. We've got
a lot of money from the US government because the
military is really interested in it. It's been a ten
year path, ten your path where the general scientists in
the in the snake bite community said it will never work.
You guys are crazy. Do they all embrace it now?
It's been remarkable. So how did you end up producing records? Well,

(01:52:55):
as I said, Nona. Hendricks asked me. First, we shared
a hairdresser addresser suggesting me and I had become friends
with with Busta Jones, which is how I met Bernie Warrell.
And he and I were like going out in New
York and abusing ourselves, will say, and trying to meet
meet Curls. And he had made a solo record, and

(01:53:19):
I helped him with that, and then he helped me
with the production of Nona. And then it was like
I had been watching, you know, and I had been
watching Tony bon Jovi, and I was like, I could
do this. So I still started doing it a little more.
And then when I got out to the studio, so
the next thing I was really doing was my own
solo record, which Alex Weir helped me on in the

(01:53:41):
beginning quite a lot. And you know, I was teaching
the engineer the things to do, and I was the producer,
and so I just spent so much time in the studio.
But I just became more and more comfortable, so that
when I started doing the violent themes right and it's
a material or the Bodine's, I had the compidence to
go like, no, we're not to do it that way,
we're doing it this way. And I also, you know,

(01:54:04):
I have a scientific mind, so I was like I
understo it, like how you patch it in the wiring.
And I knew things about microphones and the patterns and
the e q s and the compressors. I'm not an
engineer because I never spent the time developing those skills,
but I can talk through it and I understand it.
And I also learned have really good engineers, So I

(01:54:25):
always found really good people. And did your phone just
start ringing or do you have a manager or somebody
putting out the word or whatever you ran into somebody
say hey, I could do your record well. After I did,
uh crash the Stummies and Throwing Copper, which at the
end of now the two biggest records I ever. I mean,
Throwing Coppers sold more records than all the talking As

(01:54:47):
records combined, right the live record. After that I wrecked,
my phone wouldn't stop ringing. But I did have a manager,
but there was more. She was more of a gatekeeper
than it. Now what Actually, my my production career took
a hit by starting garage band dot com because you know,
I produced a few records for garage band that never

(01:55:08):
came out actually quite wonderful, and it stopped me from
You're all as good as your last hit. The good
thing about being a producer is that you do three
or four records a year, so you're rolling the dice
four times because there's so many ways that a band
or a record can fail. I mean, I've started this

(01:55:29):
conversation by let's say mistakes that the record company makes.
But it's mistake you know, I produced a band and sudding.
They don't get along with each other. That happened, the
violent fans, they broke up, they become they get into drugs,
billy goat and it stops working. And so there's a
lot of ways that things can fail. So rolling the

(01:55:50):
dice more than once is really helpful. I had also
done an analysis of who made money in the music business,
and boy playing in a band was way down on
the list. Top is songwriters and owning publishing, second is
managers and and producers because they don't have cross collateralization

(01:56:15):
with their records. You can do five dogs and do
one hit record, and you can pay it on the hit.
If you own a record label, you've got to admortize
all of them across each other. If you're a band,
you have to balance out your losses with your gains.
But as a producer, as a manager and a manager
gonna have multiple acts on the road at the same time,
and he gets paid on growth. That's a really good gick.

(01:56:38):
So I did this angle, like well, of those gigs,
I can be a producer. I'm a songwriter, but I'm
a slow songwriter and um and I wish I'd done
that more. But I got so successful as a producer
it just started to take up all my time. You know,
I worked constantly, but I got to do a lot

(01:56:58):
of great records. And then nineties was a fantastic time
to be making records. You know, the CD sales were
really good, so you could make good money at it.
And I got to make a lot of records that
I'm very proud of. I go back and listen to
you know, I might have a fifty records I made,
so it's pretty great. So you talked about looking for girls.

(01:57:23):
To what degree did you partake in the rock and
roll lifestyle, drugs, women, etcetera. Well, I was a lot more,
a lot more cautious about it. When we were a
four piece but when the big band got together, there
was there were so many of us to go out.
I got a little more, I got a little wilder.

(01:57:46):
And what is your relationship with the other three members
of Talking Heads? Now, I think I'm on good relationships
with everybody. I don't think that I'm I mean, David
and I are like on a relationship that like if
I when I'm passing through New York, I give him
a call. Um, It's much more likely that I give

(01:58:08):
him a call than he gives me a call. But well,
you know, we regularly have dinner, you know, wheel or
lunch or something like that. You know, I went and
saw American Utopia on Broadway, and I also saw it
when it was a road show, when it came through
San Francisco, much tighter when he was able to be
in the same theater. You know, it really improved a lot. Um.

(01:58:31):
You know, I have a very frank relationship with David.
I mean when he was decided that he was going
to go out on his own and basically the band
was going to end, and I said to my I said,
I think David, I think you're making a mistake. I
think you get all the credit for the success of
the Talking Heads, so you have no pressure on your
solo records as long as you get a good review.

(01:58:53):
Mo Austen goes, God, my genius, just does it again,
I do a solo record. They want me to do
all this press that maybe in Togy Heads we would
turn down and want me to be on a TV
show that maybe I found embarrassing. But I'm I'm judged
on the financial success of my record. You have the

(01:59:14):
glorious advantage that you don't have to have that. You know,
we could keep the band together for working six months
every two years. It seems like a perfect world. He guys, well,
maybe I gotta learn that. So that's what happened. Now
he has not had anywhere near the level of commercial
success with new music since the end of the talk.

(01:59:37):
He gets, No, there's a lot of artist success, but
I certainly know not commercial systems. Not not the commercial
success that either Chris a tied To did with the
Tom Time Club or certainly I did with my production career.
So in the time you have left anywhere from a
second to thirty years, what's that look, Well, I gotta

(02:00:01):
finish this tour that's coming up. That's the first thing
and I want to see, uh opheis that's the name
of the snake Bite company become a uh a household name.
Uh It has other possible treatments that actually could be
a treatment for acute respiratory distress syndrome, which is what

(02:00:22):
everybody ties from eights from or in the beginning did
We did a small clinical trial about that. I had
another company that I started called red Crow, that I
sold to a Lira Health earlier this year. But I've
at this point I'm sort of concentrating on going back
to music and not getting a little further away from
investing your tech. I was also on the board of

(02:00:45):
directors of a very cunning edge microprocessor company called micro Unity.
We were involved in a gigantic lawsuits with Intel and
Dell and then all the smartphone manufacturers. We realized nearly
since you wanted to talk about money, we realized nearly
three quarters of a billion dollars in patent infringement. That

(02:01:09):
was a ten year lawsuit. I learned an incredible amount
from this legal team that I got to be on.
I think my basic thing is I want to keep
myself interested. I'm not I'm interested in music. I'm interested
in producing. I'm interested in art. I'm also really interested
in science. I was involved with the venture group called
Van Earth that was about climate mitigation. We have these

(02:01:31):
theories that we think that soil and something called biochar,
which is based upon the terra prey to soils that
the Amerindians in Brazil did pre Columbian uh was a
sink for carbon and we think it's part of the
solution to global warming. So we started companies and tried

(02:01:54):
to develop I spent about four years on that. But
you know, I'm concerned about climate change and I was
trying to help save the world that way. You know
what's kind of nice. It's very frustrating because everything moves
so goddamn slow. I mean, what's really great about music
is like at least you can make a record in
a certain period of time and it comes out, and

(02:02:15):
you can see what happens when you make a movie
and it comes out. You know. I did these movies
Take Me to the River I did. Uh. There's another
one called Take Me to the River Nola that I
had a little bit to do with. I did a
movie with Kenny Wayne Shephard called Ten Days Out Blues
from the back roads, which was my idea for a
double trouble and Kenny Wayne. We traveled around playing with

(02:02:36):
unknown blues musicians and also like BB King in Indianola, Mississippi,
which is where he's from, at a juke joint out
in the middle of the woods. What I want to
do is just keep myself doing interesting things and things
that that that my mind is challenged to do, and
so doing the same thing forever it starts to get boring.

(02:02:59):
That was a thing that music. As much as I
love it, I think music has gone from being the
centerpiece of philosophical engagement for our world, which it was
in the late sixties and early seventies, to be the
backgrounds of everybody's life. And you know that people talk
about their playlists and sometimes a lot of their collection

(02:03:21):
of how many songs they have, two thirds of which
they've never listened to. It's it's it's become commodified. Obviously
with streaming at least it's getting better now, But quality
got worse it didn't, You know. We were always trying
to make things sound better. I would work with Warner
Brothers about their the formulations on their cassettes to make

(02:03:43):
the cassette sound better. And I go down to the
basement Warner Brothers and sit and listened to like eight
different formulas and to try and choose which one we
would put our cassettes out on you Again, this was
something might go down on the basement. The Warm brothers
and artists never come down here. What are you doing
down here? But it's like I enjoyed the technology. I
enjoyed the whole process of what it takes to go

(02:04:06):
all the way from singing the song to it being pressed,
to it being a duplication plant, and all the places
that could go wrong, and I wanted to know about
it and want to know how to fix it if
I had to. Well, you know, it's just really funny
talking to you, because generally speaking, music is a dumb business,

(02:04:28):
and you're anything but dumb. Not that there aren't smart
people in it, but a lot of these conversations I'm
sure you've had them, are very frustrating. So it's been
very stimulating talking to you. Oh, I've enjoyed it very much,
Thank you very much. It was great a lot to
do it again until next time. This is Bob left

(02:04:49):
set