The original Talking Heads musician, Jerry Harrison, talks to Freff, our man in the US. Sterling service.

I pass by CBGB's every now and then, while prowling the depths of lower-middle East-side Manhattan (don't laugh; we find our way around like that here), and a scuzzier-looking dive would be difficult to imagine. Hard to believe the club ever had a heyday, let alone one only a few years gone. Harder still, maybe, to remember what the fuss was all about, and where the bands and bandmembers have all gone... because, frankly, only one of those bands has actually made a real impact. Only one of those bands still matters. I'm talking about the one that grew up: the Talking Heads.

They made it because they were the real stuff. Enough beat for the feet, enough swing for the hips, enough truly quirky bizarreness for the brainpan. And — true test of Rock purity — they were always inevitable in retrospect, no matter how surprising the work was at first. (Come on, 'fess up, those of you who were around then. You didn't expect a cover of "Take Me To The River" on their third album, or for them to show up in Toronto one day, with no warning, as a nine-piece intellectual funk machine, or for the quantum leap that was 'Remain In Light'!)

But while there's been a lot of attention paid to David Byrne (he of the Big White Suit) and the Chris Franz/Tina Weymouth rhythm axis (both in the Heads and their dance club solo work, Tom-Tom Club), the other member from the CBGB days, keyboardist/guitarist Jerry Harrison, has never found a lot of press.

Serves him right for being the first professional musician in a band full of design students. But don't hold that against him; he really wanted to be an architect, not a musician. Swear to God.

A typical sordid musician's past (the short form), culled from conversations with Harrison during the rehearsals for the Heads' new studio album, due out this spring:

"I'm from Milwaukee, originally. Then I spent ten years in Boston, going to school and working various jobs. That's where I got hooked up playing keyboards with Jonathan Richmond and the Modern Lovers. I went from them to being desperately broke, briefly taught an art course at Harvard, worked for a Boston computer firm while playing in little pickup bands, did an album and a tour with Elliot Murphy, started going to the architecture school at Harvard's Graduate School of Design... and then met the Talking Heads."

So much for architecture (except maybe in album titles).

Harrison's attitudes and sensibilities had an immediate impact on the Heads' style, as even a quick listen to 'The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads' two-record set reveals.

"When I joined, the songs very often had these very abrupt, almost jagged changes. I think I helped make some of those transitions between parts work better. Adding a fourth instrument gave the songs a greater completeness, made it easier for people to relate to them. You might say that what I brought to the Heads was a knowledge of past music, rounding things out."

After that, of course, things went a lot more quickly than he or anyone else actually expected. "I knew that other musicians would appreciate us," he admits with a chuckle, "but I never guessed that the general audience would come to like us so much."

It is, after all, a long way from playing for $5 a night, to being to the release of 'Stop Making Sense', arguably the purest and best concert film ever made; a long way from buying your first $200 electric piano (used) and playing for $5 a night, to being one of the five musicians picked to beta-test the first production batch of Emulator IIs...

"In the last year I've bought a lot of new equipment. The Emulator II. A Prophet T8. Two DX7s... I'm not really sure I need all of them, but I'm working on tying it all together. I bought the T8 because I was in Wisconsin, working on my own album, and was pissed off at my Prophet 5 having fallen apart. I loved the feel of the T8's keyboard, more than anything else about it; since it's MIDI-equipped I'll probably make it my master keyboard. The sound of it, well — it's not a great step forward in analogue synthesis, which maybe the Oberheim Xpander is, but I'm used to Prophet programming. As for the DX7s, those are just amazing for the money. Amazing period, actually, but especially for the money. And the thing about having two of them is that in a very direct way you can build up sounds without having to get into complicated programming. You want to sharpen a sound, you just mix a sharper one in on the second instrument. That works a lot quicker in the studio.

"I think the Emulator II is great. I got involved with that because I knew Bob Stiles, E-Mu's sales manager, from when he worked at Rod Argent's in England. He called me when they were putting together the first group of testing players. There was no manual yet, and we all went to this little seminar they held — Steve Porcaro, myself, a few guys who do effects for movies — and it was really wonderful. That's one of the reasons I did it. I knew I was getting into a relationship with a company that would give me help when I needed it, that would see to it that things got fixed and programs supported. But on top of that, I just think it's a very good instrument. It does the important parts of sampling without giving you too many pricy extras, and it does it for a fifth or a sixth or even a tenth of what you'd pay to get a Synclavier or a Fairlight.

"Actually, I think the really amazing combination is the sound of the Emulator mixed with the DX7s. But you do things differently in the studio than you do on stage, so I don't know how my stage system is going to alter. I've heard some very interesting reports about the Ensoniq Mirage. I like the fact that it's smaller, more stackable. It seems like it might make a great backup."

So what's all this new-tech doing for him that his battered old electric piano doesn't, anyway?

"Sometimes it slows you down. You spend so much time thinking about how to get your sound, and precisely what you want that sound to be, that you lose the thrill of just playing your instrument. The other thing it does," he admits ruefully, "is make me wish that I'd taken piano lessons a lot longer.

"When I first started playing electric organs you really couldn't use any real independent, left-hand technique. There wasn't room on the organ to do that sort of thing without completely cluttering up the band's sound. Even with electric piano it didn't work well. So I've always had this very austere approach to parts, always trying to make what I played fit in and do exactly what it was supposed to do and not go for any grandiose gestures. But with these new instruments, where you can start dividing them and you have touch sensitivity, you can play left-hand and right-hand parts simultaneously and give each totally different voicings and a lot of strength. In the studio, you could always do that sort of thing. Just lay in another track. But now you can start to do it on stage as well as in the studio... and that makes me want to get better."

Keeping up. that's the other rough part with all this technology. Sometimes it's good to just hang back and pick up the nearest available guitar.

"I love guitar. On stage there is something special about it, about the way it feels, about being able to walk around. Maybe I appreciate it so much because I didn't start on it until I was 22, when I was with the Modern Lovers, and got incredibly frustrated over the way Jonathan Richmond was changing his style and ruining all his songs. I told him 'Look, I can play your old parts — it'll only take me about three months!' In actual fact it took me a little longer, but I practiced real hard.

"Certain songs just seem like they were written for guitars and nothing else. Take something like 'You Really Got Me'. I'm sure you could arrange that for keyboards, but it just wouldn't compare to the guitar version. And how about 'Substitute,' by the Who? In the Heads' music it's partially a matter of room in a given song, but it's also a matter of structures. Some things just sound better with two instruments of the same sort of modality playing. And you don't voice things the same on guitar as you do on keyboards — guitars have this advantage that you can have things very low and very high at the same time."

Right now Heads' rehearsals are under way, with material shaping up (in Harrison's words) as "more-concise, more straightforward song structures than we did on the last couple of albums." Partially this is because the rehearsals come on the heels of David Byrne's song-writing for a film called 'True Stories.' Having to shape songs that tell the thoughts in the characters heads has changed the sense of what he currently wants to achieve. But more than that it seems that all the Heads, after the lengthy task of mixing both the film and album sound for 'Stop Making Sense', have become interested in their own past. After experimenting with weaving lots of complex patterns and parts together, it would appear that they are now trying to find a newer, more careful way to use what those experiments taught them. "We won't have so many parts," he says, "but each one will say more. They'll bear more weight."

There's the architect surfacing again. It it weren't for the occasional wonderful mad notion (like his recent record framed around Reagan's infamous the-bombing-begins-in-five-minutes "joke," or talk of forming a remote keyboard trio with Bernie Worral and Raymond Jones), you'd think Jerry Harrison was making entirely too much sense indeed.

"The thing is, I never thought of myself as the most natural musician. I think more with my eyes, my visual sense. I certainly have a much better visual memory than an aural one. And I... I think that in a period without tape recorders, in a period without some of the advantages that musicians now have, that I just wouldn't have ended up, being a professional musician at all. That gives me an approach to music that's different than most. But it also means I have something different to say."

He flashes a quick grin. "I still think that thing with Bernie and Raymond would be great. And I still might do it, if our lives would ever get together enough."