[The 40th-anniversary restoration of Jonathan Demmes Talking Heads
"Stop Making Sense", a great concert film, is a funk spectacle. It has
also united the band, which split in 1991, to discuss a landmark
achievement. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘STOP MAKING SENSE’ IS BACK, AND TALKING HEADS HAVE MORE TO SAY
 
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Jon Pareles
September 9, 2023
The New York Times
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_ The 40th-anniversary restoration of Jonathan Demme's Talking Heads
"Stop Making Sense", a great concert film, is a funk spectacle. It has
also united the band, which split in 1991, to discuss a landmark
achievement. _

Original Vintage Movie Poster for Jonathan Demme's Concert Film of
the Talking Heads with David Byrne ,

 

Four decades after it was filmed, “Stop Making Sense,” the Talking
Heads concert documentary, is still ecstatic and strange. “It stays
kind of relevant, even though it doesn’t make literal sense,”
David Byrne, the band’s leader and singer, said in a recent
interview.

The film, which was directed by Jonathan Demme, has been restored from
its long-lost original negatives and this new version will premiere at
the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday, then play in
regular and IMAX theaters later this month. An expanded audio album,
out Sept. 15, now includes the entire concert set, with two tracks
omitted from the movie: “Cities”
[[link removed]] and a medley of “Big
Business” and “I Zimbra.” Refreshing its peak performance, the
band hopes to draw one more generation of fans to its irresistible
funk grooves and youthful ambitions.

 
“Stop Making Sense” is both a definitive 1980s period piece and a
prophecy. Its staging helped reshape pop concerts in its wake. The
music hot-wired rock, funk and African rhythms, while the fractured,
non sequitur lyrics glanced at, among many other things,
disinformation (“Crosseyed and Painless”), evangelicalism (“Once
in a Lifetime”), authoritarianism (“Making Flippy Floppy”) and
environmental disaster (“Burning Down the House”).

“Sometimes we write things and we don’t know what they’re about
until afterwards,” Byrne said. “There’s a sense of a
premonition. I’ve looked at things I’ve written and I go, ‘Oh.
That’s about something that happened in my life after I wrote the
song.’”

There had been choreographed soul revues and big-stage concert
spectacles long before Talking Heads mounted their 1983 tour
supporting the album “Speaking in Tongues.” But Byrne envisioned
something different: a performance influenced by the stylized gestures
of Asian theater and the anti-naturalistic, avant-garde stage tableaus
of Robert Wilson [[link removed]].
(Talking Heads hired Wilson’s lighting designer, Beverly Emmons.)

Byrne storyboarded each song. The first part of the show demystified
the production, with backstage equipment visible and a stage crew
wheeling in instruments and risers as the band expanded with each
song. Then, with everyone in place, the concert turned into a surreal
dance party, capped by Byrne’s appearance in an oversized,
squared-off, very floppy suit — an everyday American variation on
the geometric costumes of Japanese Noh theater.

Demme’s cameras were poised to catch every goofy move and
appreciative glance between musicians. Now that most big concerts are
video-ready extravaganzas, that might seem normal. In 1983, it was
startling.

Only a few years earlier, Talking Heads were unlikely candidates to
mount a tautly plotted rock spectacle. When the band made its
reputation playing the Bowery club CBGB, its members dressed like
preppies and looked self-conscious and nervous.

Formed in the art-school atmosphere of the Rhode Island School of
Design, Talking Heads always had conceptual intentions. In a video
interview from his studio, the keyboardist and guitarist Jerry
Harrison said, “When I joined the band, I knew that we were going to
be an important band, and that we would be artistically successful. I
had no idea what kind of commercial success we’d have. All of us
were pretty familiar with the art world, where there are painters who
never in their lifetime were financially secure. And that was our goal
at that point.”

Byrne was purposely stiff and twitchy onstage. “When the band
started, I was not going to try and use the movement vocabulary from
rock stars or R&B stars,” he said. “I thought, ‘I can’t do
that. They’re better at it. They’ve established it. I have to come
up with my own thing that expresses who I am: a slightly angsty white
guy.’”

But in the fast-forward downtown New York culture of the late 1970s
and early 1980s — punk! disco! minimalism! hip-hop! art! theater!
world music! — Talking Heads rapidly evolved from a thumping,
yelping, skeletal pop-rock band into something more rhythmic, funky
and far-reaching.

Byrne and the band equally appreciated the Southern roots and deep
eccentricity of the Memphis soul singer Al Green — who wrote the
band’s first radio hit, “Take Me to the River” — and the
calibrated repetitions of James Brown, Philip Glass and Fela Anikulapo
Kuti. The band enlisted the equally open-eared Brian Eno as a producer
and collaborator to extend its sonic palette and songwriting
strategies — which, in turn, led Talking Heads to add musicians
onstage.

If there’s a narrative to “Stop Making Sense,” it’s of a
freaked-out loner who eventually finds joy in community. The concert
starts with Byrne singing “Psycho Killer” alone, to a drum-machine
track, with a sociopathic stare. By the end of the show, he’s
surrounded by singing, dancing, smiling musicians and singers, carried
by one groove after another.

“In a culture that’s so much about the individual, and the self,
and my rights,” Byrne said, “to find a parallel thing that is
really about giving, losing yourself and surrendering to something
bigger than yourself is kind of extraordinary. And you realize, ‘Oh,
this is what a lot of the world is about — surrendering to something
spiritual, or community or music or dance, and letting go of yourself
as an individual. You get a real reward when that happens. It’s a
real ecstatic, transcendent feeling.”

The band filmed a rehearsal and three live concerts at the Pantages
Theater in Hollywood. Then they chose the best audio and video
takes.Credit...via Rhino

“Stop Making Sense” has been released on multiple iterations of
home video technology — VHS, DVD, Blu-ray — but their sound and
video were often lacking. For the new restoration, the production and
distribution company A24 employed a forensic film expert to track down
the film’s original negatives. They were stored, inexplicably, at an
Oklahoma warehouse owned by MGM, a company that never had business
dealings with Talking Heads. The images have gained clarity, contrast
and depth.

“I noticed you can see things that you couldn’t see even in the
original version,” said Chris Frantz, the band’s drummer, in a
video interview from his home studio. “Now you can see every little
detail of the back of the stage.”

When “Stop Making Sense” was first released, in 1984, audiences
treated it like a concert, applauding between songs and getting up to
dance. The band and Demme chose to dispense with the concert-film
convention of cutting to interviews or backstage interactions or,
especially, to happy, well-lighted audience members; they only show up
in the last few minutes. Demme avoided that, Byrne said, because
“it’s telling the film viewer what they’re supposed to be
feeling.”

The band and Demme filmed a rehearsal and three live concerts at the
Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Then they chose the best audio and
video takes. They weren’t always the same ones, but the timing each
night was almost exact. “Chris was very consistent, even though he
never played to a click track,” said Tina Weymouth, the band’s
bassist, in an interview from the home she shares with Frantz, her
husband.

“The sync is not perfect,” Harrison said. “We could go digitally
now and make this perfect. But would we want to disturb the historical
quality to update it with what technology can do now? And we, of
course, decided not to.”

The tour’s technology was primitive by modern standards. The
rear-screen visuals came from slide projectors; the lights were
unfiltered. The show didn’t have a choreographer; Byrne and the
backup singers, Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt, had worked out some moves
while dancing around his loft before the tour, while others emerged as
it progressed. The show didn’t have a costume designer, either; the
musicians were instructed to find clothes in neutral tones, mostly
grays. But according to Weymouth, Frantz’s laundry hadn’t come
back in time for the first show at the Pantages, and he ended up
wearing a blue shirt all three nights for continuity.

Yet the band had the foresight to record the music on digital
equipment, then in its early stages. Digital recording meant the sound
quality could stay intact through the multiple generations involved in
mixing for film, and it’s one reason the movie has aged so well.

But the main reason “Stop Making Sense” has maintained its
reputation as one of the greatest concert movies is the nutty
jubilation of the performances. The musicians in the expanded band —
Alex Weir on guitar, Steve Scales on percussion and Bernie Worrell on
keyboards — are anything but self-effacing sidemen; they’re
gleeful co-conspirators. And the sheer physicality of the concert, the
performers’ sweat and stamina, comes through onscreen; in “Life
During Wartime,”
[[link removed]] Byrne runs laps around
the 40-by-60-foot stage at full speed.

“Looking at my younger self is a really strange experience,” Byrne
said. “He’s doing things that are profoundly odd, but kind of
inventive. But also, he’s very serious and intent on what he’s
doing.” He pointed out that until the last third of the movie, he
doesn’t smile much. “The joy is not visibly apparent, but it’s
there,” he said. “I mean, I have enough memory to remember
that.”

For all its artistic importance, the tour was not profitable. “We
made zero,” Weymouth said. There was a large crew and three semi
trucks full of equipment; some tour proceeds cofinanced the movie. It
also turned out to be the final Talking Heads tour. “I also think
that we had the ability to become one of the biggest bands in the
world at that point, touring bands,” Harrison said. “I think there
was a lost opportunity that would have been fun for all of us.”

He added, “There also might be the element that once ‘Stop Making
Sense’ came out so great, it was like, ‘How do we top this? Is the
next thing going to seem like a disappointment?’ I don’t know if
that was what was going through anybody’s minds, but I know that we
ended up not touring ever again.”

Talking Heads made three more albums, the Americana-flavored “Little
Creatures” and “True Stories” and the Afro-Parisian-tinged
“Naked.” After Byrne dissolved the band
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1991 — “an ugly breakup,” he told People magazine
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the other three members made an album, “No Talking Just Head,”
billed as the Heads. Byrne sued over the name, though the suit was
eventually dropped.

The band did regroup to perform in 2002 when they were inducted
into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
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anniversary of “Stop Making Sense” has helped further mend fences;
the band members will appear together to discuss the movie in Toronto
on Monday.

“Divorces are never easy,” Byrne said. “We get along OK. It’s
all very cordial and whatever. It’s not like we’re all best
friends. But everybody’s very happy to see this film coming back
out. We’re all united in the fact that we really love what we did
here. So that kind of helps us talk to one another and get along.”

_Jon Pareles [[link removed]] has been The
Times’s chief pop music critic since 1988. A musician, he has played
in rock bands, jazz groups and classical ensembles. He majored in
music at Yale University. More about Jon Pareles
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_A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 11, 2023,
Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Part
Period Piece, Part Prophecy. _

* Film Review
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* documentary
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* Concert Film
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* Talking Heads
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* David Byrne
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* Jonathan Demme
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* Burning Down the House
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* New Wave Art Rock
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