Once in A Lifetime: "Stop Making Sense" and Talking Heads Live in Santa Monica
The 4K Restoration of the Greatest Concert Film of All Time, the Band, and Memories of 1983
Before “Stop Making Sense”, concert films followed a predictable, usually chronological structure: first, establishing shots of the venue and incoming throngs, then shots of the crew, then backstage encounters with the band, and finally the stage performance. Usually these were intercut, and the concert truncated into a bunch of incomplete songs. The implication was clear: what happened behind the scenes was as important as the concert itself, sometimes more so.
Jonathan Demme showed other directors of music documentaries what audiences have always known: music is all and the rest is filler.* “Stop Making Sense” is notable not only for the concert but what it doesn’t show: roadies setting up the stage, the audience filing in, the dressing room preparations and chitchat. Instead it begins thus: the camera follows David Byrne’s sneaker-clad feet as he strides onto the Pantages stage, acoustic guitar strapped to his slender torso. He carries a tape deck that he puts down when he reaches the microphone. “I’ve got a tape I want to play,” he says, then rips into a solo rendition of “Psycho Killer”. Next Tina Weymouth joins him on bass and vocals for “Heaven”; then Chris Frantz and Jerry Harrison join in on “Thank You For Sending Me An Angel”. Soon the expanded band takes the stage: Steve Scales on percussion and vocals, Alex Weir on guitar, Bernie Worrell on keyboards, and Ednah Holt and Lynn Mabry on vocals. Song after song, David Byrne is commanding and in perfect voice. The songs—“Cities”, “Life During Wartime”, “Once In A Lifetime”—are musically and lyrically fascinating, like no other bands’. Throughout Byrne is in motion, running, dancing, marching. The rest of the musicians—particularly Weymouth, Holt and Mabry—are kinetic too.
“Stop Making Sense” is pure performance, and eighty-eight minutes later it ends with a bang, with “Crosseyed and Painless”. The haunting, repeated last line—“I’m still waiting”—could also apply to every concert film I’ve seen in the past four decades. None approached the excitement of “Stop Making Sense”, let alone equaled it. Given the reversion to backstage and crowd scenes, I doubt future concert films will do any better.
With all this in mind, I attended the American Cinematheque’s sold-out screening of the newly restored “Stop Making Sense”, followed by a Q&A with the long estranged but still vigorous Talking Heads. Demme is sadly deceased, as is Jordan Cronenweth, the DP, but the film’s producer Gary Goetzman was in the audience. And Paul Thomas Anderson came to lead the Q&A.
The Aero was packed with people who were mostly too young to have seen a Talking Heads concert. Some hadn’t even seen the film, though it’s been available on on DVD in earlier form for decades. One who had seen both was me: my first (and last) Talking Heads concert was the Berkeley Greek Theater performance of “Stop Making Sense” on September 2, 1983. Though I’ve seen countless other great concerts—the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, The Police and Elton John, to name a few—none can hold a candle to the Talking Heads’ performance. Over the years, the concert has taken on a dreamlike quality in my memory. I remember a very pregnant Tina Weymouth playing bass, but I’ve never seen a reference to it. And because my companion that night—my husband—died many years ago, I had no one to ask about it. (In “Stop Making Sense”, filmed more than three months later, she is impressively slim.) I was pregnant too that night in Berkeley. My son, who attended in utero and is a lifelong Heads fan, accompanied me to the screening at Aero.
Afterwards I approached Lynn Mabry, who had talked about the Berkeley show during the Q&A. An East Bay native, she had invited her family to the Greek and heard her young daughter cheering her from the audience. “I was there!”, I said. Then, thinking of Mabry’s amazing singing and nonstop dancing, I added, “How did you do that?” “I don’t know!” she answered, and we both laughed.
*Among the many concert films I’ve watched, only two offstage scenes have stayed with me, both purely musical. In “Rolling Thunder Review” Joni Mitchell performs “Coyote” at Gordon Lightfoot’s house, accompanied by Roger McGuinn and Bob Dylan. And in “Charlie Is My Darling: The Stones in Ireland, 1965”, Mick and Keith work backstage on a new song.