31 Movies of May, Day 10: Stop Making Sense

May 10th viewing: Stop Making Sense, chosen by an ordinary guy, burning down the house

Year of Release: 1984

Directed by: Jonathan Demme

Written by: Jonathan Demme and the Talking Heads

Starring (in documentary footage): David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison, Lynn Mabry, Ednah Holt, Bernie Worrell, Alex Weir, Steven Scales

Accompanying Beverage of Choice: Northern Hawk Owl (Amber Ale, 5.8% ABV) - Right Brain Brewery, Traverse City, Michigan 
(Support Independent Breweries - buy small town when getting buzzed during quarantine)

One of the highlights of my concert-going career was Neutral Milk Hotel’s 2014 reunion (revival?) tour. Though Jeff Mangum had been doing solo shows in recent years, this was the first time the band had toured since In the Aeroplane Over the Sea came out at the end of the 90s. I saw them at the Orpheum Theater in Madison, Wisconsin, enthralled at getting a chance to see a cultural touchstone that I previously thought would be confined to the past. 

It wasn’t just checking a cultural box though - the performance was outstanding. The band was in fine form, and the whole set was staged and paced perfectly. Mangum started the show by entering the stage alone, strumming an acoustic guitar and singing “Two-Headed Boy.” Then the other band members gradually joined the stage, until the full cacophony of live sound filled the auditorium. I know Neutral Milk Hotel isn’t quite the first band to come to mind when one thinks of rollicking stage presence, but I can assure you that they absolutely killed the night I saw them.

One band that generally IS thought of right away in terms of rollicking stage presence is the Talking Heads, and a big reason for that is the Jonathan Demme concert documentary Stop Making Sense. I’ve never read anything on how Mangum and Co. decided to structure the shows on their 2014 tour, or for that matter how they had generally structured their shows back in the 90s, whether anyone in Neutral Milk Hotel used Stop Making Sense as a reference or whether they’d even seen the film. But kicking off the show with a maverick frontman playing a big hit on acoustic guitar, only to be slowly surrounded by accompaniment, sure as hell feels like a nod to Stop Making Sense, whether it was meant to be or not.

The opening of Stop Making Sense features one of the greatest opening shots is cinema, documentary or not. You see the casually-dressed feet of David Byrne wander across a black stage, then Byrne’s disembodied hand sets down a boombox and he informs the world that he intends to play a song. Byrne then breaks into a stunning rendition of “Psycho Killer,” the song’s ominous tone enhanced all the more by the fact that the only instrumentation in use is Byrne’s acoustic guitar and a rhythmic tempo pulsing from the boombox. 

Song by song, a new member of the band joins Byrne on stage, starting with bassist Tina Weymouth for “Heaven,” followed by Weymouth’s husband Chris Frantz for “Thank You For Sending Me an Angel,” and then guitarist Jerry Harrison for “Found a Job.” The lineup doubles for “Slippery People,” adding backup singers Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt, keyboardist Bernie Worrell, percussionist Steve Scales, and guitarist Alex Weir. By the time they break out into “Burning Down the House,” Scales has upgraded from bongos to an eight-foot diameter percussion kit, and the full power of the band is put on blast.

This is far more intensely choreographed than you would expect from most rock shows - the general image you expect is a bunch of musicians jamming the hell out with focus on the instruments, something like what you see in Martin Scorsese’s The Band documentary The Last Waltz. Stop Making Sense calls to mind some of the live shows of Byrne’s more recent collaborator St. Vincent, or even (particularly in the great aerobic flailings of Mabry and Holt) Andrew WK. 

Even the more intimate moments possess a sense of setting that show the love and care that went into their planning. “This Must Be the Place” is one of those songs* I always toss around as possibly my favorite song, before ultimately coming back to the conclusion that no, “Accident Prone” by Jawbreaker is my favorite song. But the Talking Heads tune always becomes a candidate again every time I see this movie, because it’s such a truly sweet performance. The song starts with all of the foreground members of the lineup repositioning themselves in darkness to huddle together around a Pier One Imports-style floor lamp, and ends with Byrne traipsing across the stage with the lamp as his dance partner in a way that is playful and, in a weird way, tender.

The clear dedication and effort shown in the performance reminds me of Beyoncé’s Homecoming, though that film specifically makes a point of emphasizing the effort much more so than Stop Making Sense. Both films put the work on display through craft and quantity, with Homecoming including a remarkable performance from a full HBCU marching band along in addition to multiple dance crews, guest stars, and Beyoncé herself. The most creative highlight in Homecoming, however, comes in the choice of costume for the scores of performers on stage - filmed over two nights, one night everybody is clothed in yellow, the other everybody in pink. The color-coding puts all of the cross-cutting between the two nights on display for the viewer, making it all the more clear how precise each moment of each show has to be in order to transition seamlessly between the two.

Stop Making Sense was filmed in a similar way, though Demme filmed it as such to make it appear as one show. That is its own respectable choice, as it allows the complete crescendo of energy to flow through the film, and in particular it creates a continuity to to the concert that feels very much like a narrative, even if there is no actual story to speak of.

Much of this stems from that gradual lineup reveal, and Demme’s commitment to isolating moments of individual art from each of the band members, be it just for one shot or one close-up, or in some cases for a full song, such as when Weymouth and Frantz step out to shine in “Genius of Love” from their own project, Tom Tom Club. Pretty much any live show includes an introduction for the individual band members, but the character work here makes it actually feel like it means something when Byrne does it during “Take Me to the River” near the film’s conclusion. It’s nice to put a name to the face of the these people you feel like you’ve gotten to know over the course of 80 minutes. Demme does such a great job of establishing all of the band members as characters in their own right.

I can’t really say if everybody in Neutral Milk Hotel felt like an individual character when I went to go see them in Madison on a typically cold February night. I was a couple years out of undergrad and returning to my college stomping grounds, so I had a handful of drinks over the course of that evening (at one point, me and a group of friends may or may not have consumed a giant 2 liter Old Fashioned served in a glass boot). But I can certainly remember seeing the whole crowd break out honest-to-God lighters for a musical salute for maybe the only time in my life. When you have a show that works on that level, it doesn’t just work on a musical level alone, you have to achieved some sort of storytelling feat on an emotional level. And whether or not Stop Making Sense provided a basis for Neutral Milk Hotel’s journey that night, they proved that the formula certainly isn’t broken.

*Other songs in this category: “Slapped Actress” by The Hold Steady, “Pancho & Lefty” by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, “Repetition” by Trampled By Turtles, “One Beat” by Sleater-Kinney, “Maps” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Little Mascara” by the Replacements