Stop Making Sense
Just ahead of its 40th anniversary, Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense is returning to theaters. Restored in 4K, the iconic 1984 Talking Heads concert film opens this week at the Belcourt as well as select AMC and Regal locations. To celebrate the occasion, we rounded up an esteemed assortment of critics, musicians, podcasters and media experts to give us their takes on Demme’s masterwork, viewed by many as the greatest concert film of all time.
We’ll lead off with late, great Scene editor and film critic Jim Ridley, who was a fervent fan of Stop Making Sense.
Jim Ridley, critic/icon/soul of the city
The first concert I ever saw was the Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues tour at Municipal Auditorium in 1983; it made me a concertgoer for life, but I’m not sure I got as much out of it live as I did reliving it through Jonathan Demme’s peerless performance film, Stop Making Sense. There’s no dialogue or framing device — the conceptual arc of the show removed any need for that nonsense — but in some ways it’s the perfect expression of Demme’s career-long fascination with the building of communities and with performing troupes as families (and vice versa).
The director’s love of people and performers radiates from the film, and he caught the band at its joyous peak, from frontman David Byrne’s mesmerizing solo entrance to “Psycho Killer” to his big-suit romp through “Swamp” to a chill-raising “Once in a Lifetime.” And the shared spotlight on Heads Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth (whose side project Tom Tom Club gets a sizable sidebar), as well as auxiliary members Bernie Worrell, Steven Scales, Alex Weir and Lynn Mabry, makes this a kind of anti-Last Waltz — a whole greater than the sum of its parts … and if you feel like dancing, we’ll allow it.
Dave White, author/podcaster/chef
You already know Stop Making Sense is perfect. Therefore, a memory: The only screenings in 1984 in Lubbock, Texas, were midnights at the town mall’s multiplex, precluding a pre-film treat of Orange Julius (mall hours: 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.). And though I’d already seen Big Boys at a punk club and Amy Grant at a bowling alley, it still felt like my first live show.
T. Minton, historian/sociologist/musician
Tina Weymouth’s style is the defining temporal outline. Her rhythms: compact, syncopated. Her melodies: structured, uncluttered, vivid. Her fashions: quintessential, enduring. Those gray coveralls alone are as trance-inducing as a targeted Wildfang ad. Where do I purchase? And if that spider-leg dance hasn’t inspired an ethnochoreological dissertation, it’s time.
Michael Jay, songwriter/producer/juror-of-all-trades
Stop Making Sense is Jonathan Demme’s best film next to The Silence of the Lambs. And that’s coming from someone who normally doesn’t love concert films. I find that it’s difficult to capture on film the excitement and energy of a live performance. Being there as an audience member, you occupy the same general space as the performers, and each is feeding off the other’s physical presence of being there. It’s hard to replicate that experience in a movie theater. But in the case of Stop Making Sense, Demme found a way to capture Byrne’s performance art in a way that’s very cinematic. No other music film looks, feels or sounds like it. The fact that it was released in the early part of the music-video era suggests that the visual style of the film had an enormous influence on the music videos of that time. It’s a groundbreaking, landmark achievement that I never tire of watching.
Craig D. Lindsey, critic/historian/curmudgeon
I remember walking in a few minutes late to a press screening of Stop Making Sense, which was getting a 15th anniversary re-release at the time. I entered the theater right when David Byrne was stumbling around an empty stage during his lone performance of “Psycho Killer.” I immediately assessed that this was gonna be an experience. It still is.
Craig MacNeil, podcaster/nightlife impresario/editor
When I was 5, my mom took me to see the Rolling Stones concert film Let’s Spend the Night Together per my request. Age 8, I failed to convince my brother to take me to see This Is Spinal Tap. Somehow I managed to find out about any and every music film. By then I was already a fan of Talking Heads, who I knew from “Burning Down the House,” and my brother worked at a fabulous old-school video store — they had everything. I asked for Stop Making Sense and was immediately obsessed. I can’t count how many times I played that tape, or how often my brother brought it home for me. I was already subscribed to Rolling Stone, and Talking Heads were now my favorite band. I couldn’t wait for Little Creatures (the album) and True Stories (the album and the film). Of course, I was crushed when the band split. But it wasn’t just about the band. Stop Making Sense’s entire look, feel and presentation were unlike any concert movie I’d ever seen. The Zeppelin film sucked, AC/DC’s was pretty good … but this was a FILM. So I became a Heads fan, a lifelong Demme fan and a first-week renter of Something Wild. Because of that revelation of a film, I might have been the only 12- to 14-year-old who was thrilled to read that Ray Liotta would star in Goodfellas. Maybe. Possibly all the kids were gassed up. We can’t really check their Twitter history though, and I couldn’t really share these delights with anyone at school. But Talking Heads and Jonathan Demme helped to make my private universe — and thus my childhood — full of things I could look forward to.
Jason Shawhan, media prophet/DJ/performance artist
I miss Jonathan Demme. His was an egalitarian heart and a perceptive, constructivist eye. The way this performance builds, both musically and structurally, stays with me. The beatbox-via-boom-box opening. The way Ednah Holt and Lynn Mabry’s vocals are the glue that, on “Slippery People,” snaps everything into place. The gut-punch majesty of “What a Day That Was.” Not even what Diane Keaton did for beige in Annie Hall compares to what Tina Weymouth, Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt do for slate in this movie.
Bob Roberts, Nashville Shakespeare Festival/Nashville Rhinestone/local theater historian
Just as concept albums in the ’60s changed the idea of what a record could do and be, Stop Making Sense showed that a concert doc didn’t have to follow the traditional formula. So many of its predecessors hewed to the idea that a concert on screen had to be broken up with interviews in order to be compelling, in order to tell a story. Demme and Talking Heads instead showed that the stage performance itself could drive a narrative, even if only in subtle ways. From the slow additions of each piece of the musical ensemble to the integration of props, costumes and projections as part of the performance rather than mere window dressing, Stop Making Sense helped make a cinematic leap between concert documentary and stage musical into a new concept that has rarely, if ever, been equaled since in energy, talent and style.
D. Patrick Rodgers, editor/drummer/critic
The first time I watched Stop Making Sense, I recall thinking to myself, “How is it possible that the guy who directed this also made Something Wild and The Silence of the Lambs?” Indeed he did, and all within the same seven-year span — along with Married to the Mob and Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia. Jonathan Demme contained multitudes, and was quite possibly the only director capable of adequately capturing an experience as outsized and monumental as a Talking Heads performance at the height of their power.
Tyler Glaser, Grimey’s/baseball historian/Muppet of a man
Every time I watch Stop Making Sense, the film forces me to rethink not just the performance of music in general, but the recording of performed music. The entire experience has aged perfectly, and each time I revisit the film I think I’m more and more engulfed in the performance. It is truly one of the greatest captured performances of live music.
