Electricity and sweat define a concert experience.
With the right ensemble and determination, a band’s presence carries, no matter the audience. A night of irreplicable understanding between performer and audience, unique to each stop of any album tour. Capturing this feeling proves fruitless if done without consideration.
Electricity and sweat. When I sat down for the remastered Stop Making Sense IMAX showing at the Bullock Museum on October 2nd, I could almost taste the salt sitting on David Byrne’s forehead, and the crowd buzzed with static energy 40 years in the making.
My friend and I were of the few youngins in the Gen X crowd revisiting the film, and it made watching a masterpiece like this for the first time in the Live Music Capital of the World feel particularly special. The Heads loved this town, and Byrne later released a live album of his 2001 ACL Live performance that took place in our very own Studio 6A in the CMB.
Opening on Byrne’s blindingly-clean white Converse, he sets his boombox down and says, “I’ve got a tape I want to play you.” In comes the acoustic guitar line of a scaled-back “Psycho Killer.” Scaffolding and spidery wiring line gray concrete the same shade as the simple, ill-fitting suit he’s wearing. The raw set design and stripped interpretation of the band’s biggest hit make those well-versed in the band’s discography, especially at the time of recently released Speaking In Tongues, immediately suspicious. Songs like “Making Flippy Floppy,” “Girlfriend Is Better” and “Burning Down The House,” all expected on a setlist for the album’s tour, feature a vast array of intricate guitar, quintessential 80s synths and a myriad of percussion.
By starting with bare bones, diehards sit upright waiting for the rest of the groove to kick in.
The skeleton of the Talking Heads introduced the show: Byrne’s voice and guitar, then Tina Weymouth’s singular bass line in “Heaven,” onto Chris Frantz and his drum set on wheels, and finally guitarist Jerry Harrison joining for “Found a Job.” At this point, all of the Heads have arrived, but taking inspiration from genres like African funk, art pop, new wave and avant-garde rock, Speaking In Tongues featured instrumentals only accomplished through a masterful troop of rockstars – not just a four-piece group. To achieve the busy sound synonymous with the album, they beef this skeleton up two-fold, as the number of musicians onstage goes from the core four to nine total. By the time they play “Burning Down The House,” their most commercially successful song at the time of this 1984 performance, the stage has welcomed vocalists Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt, guitarist Alex Weir, keyboardist Bernie Worrell, and multifaceted percussionist and personal hypeman Steve Scales. They all hit the ground running, literally, as the following song “Life During Wartime” features Byrne and his frontline of musicians jogging in place for the majority of the runtime. Though if you were to listen to the live album release without watching the film, you wouldn’t hear this movement anywhere in Byrne or his supporting vocalists’ delivery.
The stage continues to build on the momentum of the music, blossoming with movement as each new section rolls in with the help of an extremely adept stage crew.
Each addition to the set, up until its final form for “Slippery People,” brings with it a new burst of energy from Byrne and his bandmates. He acts out the lines, “They’re moving forward and backwards / Moving backwards and front / And they’re enjoying themselves / Moving in every direction.” By the end of the full-band version of Byrne’s solo release “What A Day That Was,” he looks visibly exhausted and ready for the cool, calm and funky wave of “This Must Be The Place.” The tone switches here, which Byrne acknowledges with a quick costume change as Weymouth and Frantz perform their side-project classic “Genius of Love.” The song ends and Byrne reemerges with his iconic small head, big suit combo for “Girlfriend Is Better.” Byrne leads the ensemble through its most dramatic performance thus far, both the band’s grandiosity and Byrne himself having tripled in size.
The performance threatens to tip over and spill onto the audience as Byrne points his microphone towards the camera, demanding we sing the show’s namesake ourselves: “As we get older, and stop making sense / You won’t find her waitin’ long / Stop making sense, stop making sense / Stop making sense, making sense.”
The final two songs act as a single 15-minute closer. A rockified, gospel-like cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” that doubles its original runtime seamlessly transitions into “Crosseyed And Painless.” Throughout the film, the camera gives ample screen time to everyone helping bring the performance to life. Byrne follows suit by thanking both the full ensemble and the stage crew, bringing out the latter to bow during their last few minutes on stage. The camera then passes the spotlight onto the crowd for the first and final time, showcasing the electricity in the audience that had powered the show, energy that bled through the screen even as we watched 40 years later. I can’t recommend Stop Making Sense enough. It’s never too late to turn back time, as the film has found a (temporary) home on streaming, but watching the Talking Heads’ unwavering energy on the biggest IMAX screen I had ever experienced is something I’m glad to call my very own.
