When: Sept. 17-18
Where: The Belcourt
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.
A must-see on the big screen, it plays two nights only in honor of its 30th anniversary (!) — and if you feel like dancing, we’ll allow it.
