Jerry Harrison & Adrian Belew
Quarry Amphitheater, Santa Cruz
August 16, 2024
Photos by Geoffrey Smith
Few bands have had such a massive resurgence in recent memory like Talking Heads. Due to a recent remaster and re-release of the band’s seminal live film and companion album Stop Making Sense, the band, whose members famously hadn’t all been in the same room together since being inducted in the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in 2002, have now been making the rounds doing interviews and surprise appearances at screenings of the film in various cities around the United States over the last year. One of the members of the legendary band, guitarist/keyboardist Jerry Harrison, has been touring regularly over the last two years with guitarist extraordinaire Adrian Belew, who played on the band’s 1980 album Remain In Light and performed live with the band during the subsequent tour for the album. One of the final slated shows on the tour was at the Quarry Amphitheater in Santa Cruz, a venue that I was more than happy to visit for the first time to see this show.
It would be inaccurate to say that the show is made up entirely of Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew, since the two have a talented backing band made up of the band Cool Cool Cool. Comprised of Sammi Garett on vocals, Chris Brouwers on vocals and trumpet, Craig Brodhead on guitar and keyboards, Greg Sanderson on saxophone, and Michael Carubba on drums, the band also featured Julie Slick on bass, who is a long-time member of the Adrian Belew Power Trio. The band came onstage to a large round of applause before playing one of Talking Heads’ most recognizable songs, “Psycho Killer” from the band’s debut album. Adrian Belew understandably handled lead vocals on the song, a touching tribute given that it was the first song he had ever played live with the band.
With the tour being billed as a specific highlight of the album Remain In Light, the two following songs, “Crosseyed And Painless” and “Houses In Motion,” seemed like obvious inclusions given their appearance on the 1980 album. All of the members of the band quickly proved how much they both understood the original recordings of the songs but also where to either add instrumental embellishments or where there was room to break into an extended jam session, with Harrison and Belew in the middle of it all standing center stage, the former switching from keyboards to guitar throughout the evening. Both songs were extended past their originally recorded versions, which was something that they would do with most of the songs throughout the rest of the evening.
One of the highlights of the evening was at the beginning of the next song, “I Zimbra,” which saw the band all walking to the front of the stage during the song’s intro. The song fit in perfectly in the setlist; even though it was the first song on 1979’s Fear Of Music, its tribal rhythm pointed towards the sound that Talking Heads would explore on Remain In Light. After that there was “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On),” which saw Chris Bouwers handle lead vocal duties, followed by “Cities,” a song that I didn’t expect the band to pull out and which featured Belew on lead vocals once again.
Following that was a section of the set that found Adrian Belew leaving the stage as the band tore through Jerry Harrison’s song “Rev It Up” from his 1988 album Casual Gods, which featured his band of the same name. After that was the lone song from 1983’s Speaking In Tongues, “Slippery People.” I understand that since Belew never had played the song with Talking Heads it didn’t make sense for him to play it on this tour, but damn it would have been cool to have heard what he could have contributed on guitar to something like “Making Flippy Floppy” or “I Get Wild / Wild Gravity,” or even a song like “Blind” from the final Talking Heads album Naked. Belew did get time to shine afterwards though, as Jerry Harrison left the stage for Belew and Cool Cool Cool to tear through an explosive rendition of “Thela Hun Ginjeet” from the King Crimson’s 1981 album Discipline, Belew’s guitar creating incendiary explosive sounds over and over again as the song barrelled towards its explosive conclusion.
The rest of the set felt like what would have been the setlist of a Talking Heads show circa 1980, as the three standards of “Life During Wartime,” “Once In A Lifetime,” and their rendition of Al Green’s “Take Me To The River” all being played back-to-back. For as enjoyable as those songs all were, there was a part of me that wished that more material from the second side of Remain In Light had been performed, especially a song like the atmospheric and bleak “The Overload.”
When the band came back out for their encore, they gave the audience something just as good: “Drugs,” the closing song from Fear Of Music. The performance was just as tense and anxious as the original recording from 1979, and was another song that I just did not expect the band to pull out. The show was ended with a rousing rendition of “The Great Curve.” Both songs featured Belew back on lead vocals, and he knocked both songs out of the park. Truly one of the peaks of the entire evening was when he exclaimed. “The world moves on a woman’s hips! The world moves and it swivels and bops!” after an explosive guitar solo.
I’m too young to have seen Talking Heads live, with their last album being released two years before I was born. The band’s music has been a constant in my life ever since my dad gifted me a copy of Stop Making Sense on CD for Christmas one year. When it comes to the Stop Making Sense concert film, I’ve watched it countless times throughout the years, and if you asked me what my ten favorite films of all time are, that’s ending up on the list. So suffice to say that Jerry Harrison, Adrian Belew, and the members of Cool Cool Cool aren’t just playing these songs faithfully, but also with enough reverence for the material that they aren’t afraid to take the songs into musical territories in a live setting that the originally recorded versions weren’t able to. If you’re a fan of Talking Heads, you owe it to yourself to see this show. A show like this sometimes only happens once in a lifetime.
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