Most Surprising Album in Jerry Harrison's Production Discography

Little column A, little column B

he tried to release an album under the moniker "The Only Head on the West Coast" but David Byrne sued.

He's the Rick Rubin of acts that want to be forgotten as quickly as possible.

No Surfing, Just Shred

I kind of agree with mark e: all of them are surprising, until you've gotten halfway through the list and realize what he's about as a producer, and then none of them are surprising.

"college rock" in the sense of what jewel boxes littered the most floors of dorm rooms, as opposed to what was played on college radio stations

Yeah this is epically true, and so evocative.

Maybe what we need right now is a POLLege rock poll, that focused on stuff (mostly US, white, burby) college students actually listened to in 1993 or whatever. Yr Hootie and the Crows, Duncan Loeb, BNL, DMB, GooGoo Blossoms, Rusted Spin, Semisonic Ray, Third Eye Doctors, Counting Root, Live Traveler, Sheryl Sweet type shit.

I recall feeling a little too old for it, but some of it became a guilty pleasure and I confess there was some of it that hit me just right.

1992 Volo Volo Poi Dog Pondering

I'd completely forgotten about this band. They were like Rusted Root for grad students. And now I see that Jerry has produced both bands, which is a degree of masochism I was not aware was possible.

Poi Dog sort of bounced around, from Hawaii to Austin and ultimately to Chicago, where they remain kind of an outdoor music mainstay in the way the Bodeans are to WI (and Chicago, too). Every bar band in Chicago seemingly features members of Poi Dog.

Yes. I seem to recall that one of the Poi Dogs, the one who would call me to drive him to the ramen noodle shop when his car broke down, produced an album by a band featuring one of the Chicago ILX0rs.

I remember in the early '90s, XRT pretty much played them hourly.

They were a really good live band. I remember somebody- some of the band members, I think! - making the following joke:
PD1: Somebody said we should make a kids album!
PD2: I thought we already did!

My only memory of PDP was seeing Dag Juhlin (I think) as part of "John Wesley Harding's All-Male Threesome." Iota in Arlington maybe 2003 or '04?

Footnote: The third member of the threesome was REM side-bro Scott McCaughey.

Yeah, Dag frequently plays in my guitar teacher's cover band, along with a former PDP drummer. (Plus singer/multi-instrumentalist David Blamires, who used to play with Pat Metheny; I love it when all these talented folks just end up in certain places, playing with whomever).

i know some of the many who love this music will hate to see a companion spotify playlist, but here it is Take a Look at These Bands: Jerry Harrison Produced It

i tried to be fair to jerry, choosing the song that seemed best from each piece. or the song that seemed least bad. or a song with a word from a talking head song in it. or the first song on the ablum. i tried to be fair to jerry, and this is what came out.

oftentimes, i'd look up the album art and try to find the most popular song from that album in the artist's most played list. oftentimes, that particular album was absent.

No Casual Gods, No Credibility

wikipedia is the one truth

Sometimes, all I can say is Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm

Lol at playlist title, Sufjan

I think Throwing Copper is the answer here. That Big Head Todd record was pretty inescapable on my college campus at the time and I remember liking that one Von Bondies single okay.

I agree. It was everywhere, so you've heard it. But it sounds nothing like anything you'd to be associated with a Talking Head. There's a line from talking heads to some of the jam band sounding stuff. Throwing Copper is the most surprising and kind of sets up the later surprises like The Verve Pipe and Stroke 9.

*you'd expect to be associated with at Talking Head

I didn’t like that Poi Dog Pondering album but I loved the Thanksgiving EP and their cover of “Love Vigilantes”

My friend wrote "Thanksgiving." Sometimes I contact him around that holiday to check in on his royalty payments. Nowadays he mostly does big Bowie and Queen tributes and such in Austin.

Nice, good song!

no way did he do Throwing Copper. that's amazing

https://www.punkglobe.com/robewilliamsinterview1013.php

Black 47 came through Bloomington a few times and would pack clubs. I saw them a couple of times and they were way better live than the cuts I heard off their CD.

Outside Looking In BoDeans - listened to this one a bunch on tape as a teenager, but it's pretty much ruined.

I also saw them play a free show in downtown B-ton and James McMurtry opened the show and he was killer. I'm pretty sure it was fall of '89.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

'Jerry Harrison produced "Lightning Crashes"' should be under a snapple cap

lol!

Jerry was the latest guest on the Talking Heads podcast Sufjan mentioned upthread. He has a lot of good stories and thoughts about the Talking Heads and he even mentions Throwing Copper and the Heads album (but otherwise doesn't mention his productions). seems like a very chill guy

Y’all know Jerry also is big medtech investor? Trying to recall the podcast where I heard him talk about, iirc, hearing assistance technology.

Y’all know Jerry also is big medtech investor? Trying to recall the podcast where I heard him talk about, iirc, hearing assistance technology.

He's also the co-founder of a medtech corp that's trying to develop a field antidote to snakebites:
https://www.ophirex.com/our-team

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Harrison was foisted on the Fatima Mansions by their record label, who wanted them to crack the US market. The album is a punchy hard rock effort with the usual vicious lyrics, but apart from three or four great tracks it's fairly forgettable by their standards. It also has a slightly monotonous uniformity of sound which isn't there on their other records, which are all really varied and jump from genre to genre (something which is very difficult to pull off but the Mansions managed it).

I found this quote by Cathal Coughlan about Harrison from the time (1994):

“He’s an amusing kind of a man, but it was always very evident that he comes from a slightly different background to the one that I did, and I never lost sight of that fact. He understood a lot, but there were some music references that were completely lost on him, and some of them were about American music as well.”

Why would anyone be surprised by No Talking, Just Head (of all these albums)?

Yay, Mansions!

I'll agree with Jon's point about uniformity of sound - that was the goal, after all. But I disagree that it's "fairly forgettable". All of their albums sort of blend in my head until I play them and their widescreen white hot anger burns bright.

You won't encounter a bigger Mansions fan than me, and Lost In The Former West would probably have sounded brilliant if it had been released by almost any other 1990s rock band. I just think that while it certainly has some real moments, it's not a patch on Viva Dead Ponies or especially Valhalla Avenue, that's all.

By all accounts they were on their last legs as a unit while recording it, which if true is an echo of what happened to Microdisney in the late 1980s. Coughlan put out the Bubonique album a year later and his own solo debut a year after that, which suggests that by 1994 he had already mentally checked out of the Mansions for various reasons.

Huh somehow missed that he produced God Shuffled His Feet. I've only heard a few albums on this list but that one is surprisingly good

Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm has always been earworm comfort food for me, but I have never brought myself to listen to the entire album or anything else by them.

I have never heard of Cathal and/or Microdisney/Fatima Mansions until exactly an hour ago and I'm suddenly extremely obsessed

Microdisney are phenomenal. Do you know Sean O'Hagan? He got his start there as well...

Oh yes, I know his stuff... never been a fan! always preferred Stereolab without him and never cottoned to the High Llamas. I love all the Cathal-related stuff I listened to this morning, though! Fatima Mansions isn't on Tidal but I just was Youtube playlisting it and was delighted, Cathal has a proto-Falkous vibe or something. Haven't figured out if I agree with his politics yet ha

Hands up, who are the three ilxors that voted for the same String Cheese Incident album? I wouldn't have been surprised to see them get a joke vote or two, but three for the same album?

it's true. kenny wayne arguably as surprising but suffered some vote splitting.

failed to keep the herd moving in one direction

or failed to herd the flock in one direction, sorry

Big interview with Jerry in the new TapeOp. Seems like a nice, thoughtful guy, too bad he seems to think sales are what make an album a success.