Few films start so inauspiciously as Stop Making Sense. Talking Heads frontman David Byrne walks onto a bare stage at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles wearing a grey suit and white sneakers and carrying a boombox. “Hi,” he tells the crowd. “I got a tape I want to play.” He puts down the stereo, launches into “Psycho Killer,” and everything comes to life. Byrne breaks into wide-eyed staccato dance moves, the audience whistles in appreciation, and the show only gets better from there. It’s everything anyone who ever bought a concert ticket wishes would happen when a band takes the stage.
Stop Making Sense, released in 1984, is a frenetic 90 minutes. In that time the audience watches the stage fill with the rest of the band, backup singers, and props, not the least of which was Byrne’s famous “big suit.” (Years later, Byrne said the goal was to “show how a concert gets made” even as it was happening.) Compared to the elaborate pyrotechnics, floating stages, and stories-tall video screens of today’s concerts, it all seems so quaint. Yet not one of the countless concerts filmed in the years since ever captured a band’s energy quite like Jonathan Demme did in his seminal film.
A lot of credit for this, of course, goes to the Talking Heads, who at the time were riding high on the success of the album Speaking In Tongues and its hit single “Burning Down the House.” But the bulk of its brilliance comes from Demme, who worked with Bryne to create a concert movie unlike any before—or since. The director, who died Wednesday at the age of 73, gave the film an uncanny sense of being there. He favored shots from the crowd’s point-of-view, and made nearly all of them so visceral you half expect the guy next to you to pass a joint. (I’ve seen the film many times, most recently at an art house theater in San Francisco, a night that still feels like the closest I’ve ever come to seeing the band live.) Demme avoided crowd reaction shots, which creates the sense that, as Byrne once noted, you’re part of the band and not the audience. Many concert films, most recently the Rolling Stones doc Shine a Light and LCD Soundsystem’s Shut Up and Play the Hits, try to replicate this feeling. Few succeed.
One reason the film feels so seminal is its place in history. Stop Making Sense closes one chapter in concert filmmaking and opens another. Back in the 1970s, films like The Band’s The Last Waltz and Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same got a lot of mileage out of pointing a camera at a charismatic band and just letting them do their thing. By the early 1980s, live pop music—thanks in no small part to the Talking Heads—became something more like performance art. Stagecraft mattered, and audiences would soon come to expect elaborate costumes, sophisticated lighting, and amazing choreography. Few would ever do it quite like Byrne did in Stop Making Sense (lamp-dancing, anyone?), but it’s hard to imagine the jaw-dropping concerts produced by the likes of Madonna, Kanye West, and Lady Gaga without the sense of theatrics the Talking Heads and Demme pioneered in 1984.
The irony is the alchemy of Stop Making Sense was so perfect that even Demme couldn’t replicate it. He went on to make music docs for musicians like Neil Young and The Pretenders (not to mention Oscar-nominated films like Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia), but they all felt a bit like he was trying to recapture the magic made with the Talking Heads. Last year saw his final attempt. Demme followed Justin Timberlake on his 20/20 Experience World Tour for the Netflix film Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids. Timberlake said he worked with Demme after telling him “how much Stop Making Sense meant to me and changed the way I view a live experience.” Demme, as you expect, did a masterful job. But by 2016, everything had come full circle. Demme was capturing something distilled from a performance he’d documented 32 years earlier. The show was wonderful, but also the same as it ever was.
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