Cool Cool Cool (from left, Craig Brodhead, Sammi Garett, Digo Zambrano, Michael Carubba, Greg Sanderson, Chris Brouwers and Shira Elias) will open for and back Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew at The Union County Performing Arts Center, Aug. 3.
If you are planning to attend the Remain in Light Tour show taking place at The Union County Performing Arts Center in Rahway, Aug. 3, don’t get there late. The Brooklyn-based funk-rock band Cool Cool Cool, which puts on a fun, high-energy show in their own right, will play an opening set, before backing Talking Heads member Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew (who played guitar on Talking Heads’ landmark 1980 album Remain in Light and also toured with the group) for a set of Remain in Light songs and other material.
WES ORSHOSKI
Jerry Harrison performs at The Starland Ballroom in Sayreville in March 2023, with Chris Brouwers at left.
Members of Cool Cool Cool first met Harrison in 2016, when they were still in their former group, Turkuaz. Harrison made a guest appearance at a Turkuaz concert at The Fillmore in San Franciso that year, and then produced Turkuaz’s single “On the Run” in 2017.
Remain in Light Tour shows have typically included most of that album as well as other Talking Heads songs and material such as Harrison’s solo single “Rev It Up” and “Thela Hun Ginjeet,” from Belew’s ’80s stint in King Crimson.
I talked to Cool Cool Cool members Chris Brouwers (trumpet, keyboards) and Sammi Garett (vocals, percussion) last week.
Q: I assume you’re not old enough to have experienced Remain in Light when it first came out. When did you kind of discover this album?
Brouwers: We just missed it by a couple of years when it came out. But the album and the music of Talking Heads have really been formative in our own musical careers and something that our bands have really found inspiration from.
Q: How about you, Sammi?
Garett: Like Chris said, we missed it by a couple of years. But growing up and even now, it’s an album that we’ve listened to and know super well. So it’s really exciting to get to play these songs live.
Q: How did you come to get the offer to play on the tour?
Brouwers: We started working with Jerry Harrison with our previous band, Turkuaz. He came in and produced a track of ours in the studio. At the time, he hadn’t really been playing out a lot — playing shows and live music — and I think it kind of re-energized him, in a way, and got his wheels spinning a bit. He was like, “You know what? I think I wanna do this. Would you guys be interested?”
He brought our whole band (Turkuaz) out, to start doing these shows and playing the music of Talking Heads. And so that continued on. We left Turkuaz and we started our band Cool Cool Cool, and Jerry wanted that to continue with Cool Cool Cool, and asked us to continue doing these shows and tours. And so here we are.
WES ORSHOSKI
Adrian Belew at The Starland Ballroom in Sayreville in March 2023.
Q: The name Cool Cool Cool … where did that come from?
Garett: It’s something that we always said as, like, a little joke, if something was going wrong or we had a lot of things to do: It’s a little motivational phrase that we would all say, like, “Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna get through.” And it just kind of stuck.
Brouwers: It’s like a “the show must go on” kind of thing. If we would show up to a venue and the bus broke down on the way and then when we got there, the show was double-booked and the sound engineer wasn’t gonna show up till late and they were giving us one pizza for the whole band, we’d be like, “Cool, cool, cool, here we go, we’re puttin’ on a show.”
Q: When you started doing the Remain in Light shows, were you trying to reproduce the music exactly? What kind of latitude did you have to put your own spin on it?
Brouwers: We really tried to play the music as faithfully as we can. We listened to a lot of live recordings, specifically from Talking Heads’ (1980) “Live in Rome” show, which was something that Jerry brought to our attention. He said, “I really want to do a show, kind of like this.” So we listened to it and took a lot of notes.
But also when we got together and started rehearsing together, Jerry was really open about, like, “Oh, we should do this our way.” For example, we’ve got a horn section and Jerry was like, “Hey, we should have the horns cover this part that the guitars do on the album,” and we were like, “Wow, that’s a really fun idea.”
So it’s a mix of both. We’ve made some slight changes here and there, but we try to be as faithful to the music as we can.
The cover of the Talking Heads album, “Remain in Light.”
Q: How has the show evolved in the time you’ve been doing it? Is it something that’s constantly changing or did it stay the same, from the start?
Garett: It’s stayed the same, pretty much. But they’re great songs and we love playing them, and each crowd is a little different. We get different energy from each crowd. So it’s sort of like a new show every time.
Q: Does that go for, also, the movements that you do? Is that strictly choreographed or does that change a bit, from show to show?
Garett: For the most part, all of the dance moves that me and (singer) Shira (Elias) and the rest of the band do … they’re choreographed moves that we have for a specific moment in a song. For the most part, they don’t change.
It’s fun getting the whole band in on some dance moves.
Brouwers: We didn’t come to the table like, “All right, we’re going to do all these moves in these places.” But as the show became more natural to us, we started being like, “That (move) was fun. We should all do that.” Or, “We should try this.” So those are kind of the small changes that we’ve made, that make the show more fun for us.
Q: Has the experience of immersing yourself in this music had an effect on the original music you make?
Brouwers: Definitely. As we performed this music with the legends who created it and made it so legendary, we were like, “Man, there’s a lot of stuff here that we can take, that works.” It was a lot about finding like, “This is kind of fun,” and seeing people’s reactions to different things. We’ve learned a lot about how to make that part of our own set and create our own music that hits similar tones, whether it be emotional, or even specific musical kind of things.
Cool Cool Cool (from left, Chris Brouwers, Digo Zambrano, Shira Elias, Greg Sanderson, Craig Brodhead, Sammi Garett and Michael Carubba).
Q: Has there been any discussion of what you guys might do together after the currently scheduled shows are over? Might there be other tours like this, or other projects you might do together?
Garett: The hope is to continue to play these shows, which are super awesome. There are a lot of markets that we haven’t been to yet, that we’d love to go to.
Brouwers: We’ve talked with Jerry about it. Apparently Talking Heads never really made it to South America, to do a tour there. So he’s been saying for a while, “I really want to take this international and go play South America and go to Japan and go to Europe.” So there’s hopefully the potential to do all of those things. But everyone is busy with Cool Cool Cool. We are on tour regularly and we’ll continue to travel. We’ve got tours lined up that we’ll be announcing soon, throughout the rest of the fall. But we’ll be ready to get that call again from Jerry, when he wants us.
Q: Has that exposure of opening these shows helped you get your own music out there? Have you seen an effect on album sales and things like that?
Brouwers: Absolutely. Even in just talking to people who come to these shows … there’s a handful of people at each one who come up to us afterwards and they’re like, “Man, we never heard of you guys. Who are you guys? How can I find you? How can I listen to your music?” So it’s been a really amazing experience for us and we’re super thankful that Jerry and Adrian have been really supportive of us, in asking us to come out and do this.
The Union County Performing Arts Center in Rahway will present “Jerry Harrison & Adrian Belew: Remain in Light,” with Cool Cool Cool opening, Aug. 3 at 8 p.m. Visit ucpac.org.
For more on Cool Cool Cool, visit wearecoolcoolcool.com.
Click HERE for a February 2023 interview with Harrison. Click HERE for my review of the March 2023 Remain in Light Tour show at The Starland Ballroom in Sayreville.
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