Talking Heads will be here soon. The New York art-punks, whose blend of nervy postmodernism and undeniable groove made them one of the defining rock bands of the late 1970s and ’80s, have not appeared together in public in two decades—until recently. Together they are promoting a remastered version of Stop Making Sense, their landmark 1984 concert film, directed by Jonathan Demme. Now, I’m awaiting their slightly delayed arrival for an interview in a conference room and library at the midtown Manhattan office of A24 Films, the production company behind the film’s rerelease.
On the occasions when the members of Talking Heads have individually discussed their history together since their 1991 breakup, the recollections have often carried notes of bitterness, if not acrimony: about songwriting credits, about singer-guitarist David Byrne’s tight control of the band, about the fact that the other members learned of his departure in a newspaper article. If it weren’t for the good spirits they displayed in a Q&A with Spike Lee after the Toronto premiere of the new Stop Making Sense, I might wonder if they’re going to show up at all.
Drummer Chris Frantz enters first, sporting the same sort of polo shirt he wears in the movie, still exuding regular-guy charm and enthusiasm. We joke about how punctuality is the sign of a good drummer—half the job, after all, is showing up on time. Next come keyboardist-guitarist Jerry Harrison and bassist Tina Weymouth. Weymouth, who is the type of person who takes an interest in things like library ladders, soon ascends the one in the back of the room and begins telling us about its manufacturer. Later, when I ask the members of the band to introduce themselves into their microphones, she says, “I’m the bass player. I’m almost a Scorpio, and I was born on a Wednesday, so I’m full of woe.”
David Byrne arrives a few minutes after the rest, his blue mechanic’s jumpsuit faintly echoing his iconic oversized business attire from the film: he still has his feel for the absurdity of the nondescript. I can’t help but relay every detail of their entrance—it’s the Talking Heads, sitting together in one room in front of me—but I’m not inclined to draw any inference about their dynamic in 2023 from the fact that he showed up last. As we discuss a few minutes later about Stop Making Sense: some actions are heavy with intention, and others just happen in the lightness of the moment.
If I didn’t know in advance about the complicated history of Talking Heads, I wouldn’t have sussed it out from our conversation. At last, they seem happy to be revisiting the music they made together, and their relationships with one another. They have good reason to be: The new version of Stop Making Sense is astonishing. The updated audio mix, which Harrison executive-produced, sparkles with musical details that were muddled or lost in previous versions. There’s an entire shredding Byrne guitar solo on “Making Flippy Floppy” that I’d somehow never noticed before.
The much-larger-than-life proportions of IMAX are uniquely suited to a film whose power comes in part from its blend of improvisatory looseness and theatrical artifice. It feels a little like seeing the Talking Heads live in 1983, but that’s not the entire point: The intimate views of each performer’s smiles and sweat, the feeling of bouncing across the stage along with them, and the sense of spectacle beyond even the real-world concerts being documented are feats that only this particular medium could achieve. As for the suit: well, it’s really, really big.
Stop Making Sense, which Spike Lee lauded as the greatest concert film of all time in the Toronto Q&A, documents three concerts and one rehearsal that Talking Heads performed while supporting their fifth studio album, 1983’s Speaking in Tongues. The music, which delivered wholehearted pop uplift without sacrificing any of the band’s restless inventiveness, found its greatest manifestation onstage, thanks in part to an expanded Talking Heads lineup featuring all-stars of funk and R&B: keyboardist Bernie Worrell of Parliament-Funkadelic, guitarist Alex Weir of the Brothers Johnson, percussionist Steve Scales, and backup singer-dancers Ednah Holt and Lynn Mabry, the latter of P-Funk and Sly and the Family Stone. Below, find our conversation with the original quartet about their recollections of making the film, their early days in the NYC punk scene around CBGB, and whether this unexpected reunion will lead them anywhere else.
This conversation was recorded for the Pitchfork Review podcast. You can listen to a lightly edited version of the interview below. (You can also subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.)
David Byrne: I’d seen a screening of the movie, regular scale, about a month previous. It was just me and three other people in a screening room. I was examining, looking at how it looked and sounded, which was incredible, all the improvements that have been made. I’m looking at myself and thinking, “What a strange guy. Who is that guy? Do I know him?” But then in Toronto, the big thing was the packed house, which was just completely—all together with the audience, shouting and clapping and dancing and all that.
Jerry Harrison: We’d been playing this show for the most part of a year [before filming]. A lot of what you might call choreography happened spontaneously, and then, “That was fun last night. Let's see if we can work it in again.” But there are moments that are specifically of that particular night of filming as well.
Tina Weymouth: There was one moment where I liked to wrap my guitar cord around [backup singer and dancer] Lynn Mabry's legs. I would do figure eights around the girls as they were singing. And Lynn was always so clever at getting out from that tangle.
Byrne: Once it’s formalized, once you go, “OK, we’re going to do that at that part in the song”—the next night, maybe the next night after that, then it’s a certain amount of artifice. But it emerged out of something very organic, so it feels like it’s just happening.
Harrison: Well, I can tell you one very distinct thing. When we did Remain in Light, it was sort of modal. You’re not going to the chorus, and going to chord changes. And that presented a struggle when David was writing the lyrics: how do we make a lift that comes out of here? So when we did Speaking in Tongues, we made sure that we built in chord changes and sections where it really felt like it went someplace else in a way that a traditional song does. It was still this interplay of layered music, but from a point of view of the structure of the music, it was quite different.
Frantz: And also, we didn’t have Brian Eno. I can’t remember—it’s not like we fired him—but I guess he felt, and probably we felt, like we’d done three albums together, and now it was time to do something different.
Harrison: Well, he had tried to quit before Remain in Light, so—
Frantz: So we produced [Speaking in Tongues] ourselves. I remember going to Tony Visconti, and meeting with him at the Hilton Hotel where he was packing his bags to go to London. I said, “Tony, how'd you like to produce the new Talking Heads album? We're going to make one pretty soon.” And he said, “You don't need a producer. You just need a good engineer. Produce it yourself.” So that's what we did.
Byrne: That was very generous of him! We made a point to go for this recording engineer Alex Sadkin, who has passed away, who’d done a lot of records that we really liked, like Grace Jones. [Sadkin co-produced Jones’s Warm Leatherette, Nightclubbing, and Living My Life.] We loved the clarity and punch that he got on those records, and we thought we would like to continue the kind of—whatever innovative kind of writing and recording stuff that we did, but with his kinds of sounds.
Harrison: We started at Blank Tape, which was a disco studio. It was a very dry-sounding room. It was at the time period where people taped their wallet to the drums [to deaden the sound]. Supposedly, if you put hundreds in the wallet, it sounded better.
Byrne: Over time, from recording and live performance, we learned that you could place sounds—little punchy things like the sound you just described—in little openings. Don’t try to play all the time. Just put it right there, where there’s a little space for it.
Frantz: Eno used to call that a “musical event.”
Harrison: When we were doing Remain in Light, it was very much about muting, because the tracks were played continuously, all the way through. So we had also learned this idea of “turn it on for just that part,” and sometimes, it’s the only time that happens in the song. And then we started trying to think of it a little more ahead of time, so we don’t have to play it all the way through the song.
Harrison: Oh, yeah.
Frantz: They did raise the bar for everybody, I think. [Percussionist] Steve Scales used to get mad if we weren’t super tight.
Weymouth: He’d been a Marine.
Harrison: I just had this conversation with [guitarist] Alex [Weir] where he was like, “We were in the pocket! I mean, I'm talking about in the pocket, you know?” We also, I think, made sure that they had fun and interesting parts to play. I think that we could take some pride in the whole ensemble. We knew we couldn’t relegate them to the boring parts. We had to make sure that they had something that they could stand out on, too.
Frantz: We love P-Funk.
Byrne: This was kind of like, “Oh my god, one of our idols. We’re actually playing with this guy.”
Weymouth: He was a brilliant musical director, and one of the beauties of his intelligent approach was that he brought out the best in each person because he was so supportive of each person.
Frantz: I remember I went to a P-Funk afterparty—Were you with me, David? It was down by the corner of Houston and Broadway, some discotheque that existed there at the time. They had played Madison Square Garden. They had these big boxes of T-shirts with Dr. Funkenstein on it. Somebody said, take a T-shirt. I said OK, I took one, and then I thought, I'll take one for Tina, too. So I took a second one, and the next thing I know, some big guy grabbed me and said, “You tried to take two T-shirts. Get the hell out of here!” and threw me out onto Broadway. With no T-shirts.
Frantz: Like, 1980?
Frantz: No. It was a guy who wouldn’t have cared.
Byrne: Bernie had perfect pitch. So, he would hear a siren go by, or car brakes, or something on the street when we're on the bus. And he had a little tiny keyboard and he would start playing along with it, perfectly in the right key.
Byrne: I did drop it a lot. We had to extend it so that it was high enough to light our faces. Usually a floor lamp is a little bit lower than that, meant to go beside a chair. The whole thing would just kind of bend. You’d hear the sound of the smashing light bulbs when it hit the stage, which was not good.
Byrne: Yeah, we’d just go on. I’d hope that the crew can sweep it up really quick, and I would just have to improvise or come up with something else, because the lamp dance was not going to happen. There’s a young man here at A24 who has the lamp tattooed on his arm.
Weymouth: Oh, that’s devotion.
Weymouth: I’m aware of it now. It's like 45 minutes of just anything that’s got me.
Byrne: It’s a Tina cut? Oh, that’s really cool. What’s it look like?
Weymouth: I don’t know. I haven’t watched it. James Wolcott [a journalist who wrote about Talking Heads for a 1975 Village Voice cover story on the CBGB’s scene] found it and told me about it. I was a little surprised. It is a little weird. I think I should be getting a Barbie doll or something, because Debbie Harry got one, and Sharon Stone got one, so. I probably wouldn’t get a Barbie, I would probably get a Ginny Doll or something like that because I’m so much shorter.
But it’s this weird thing, because the only reason I got into this band was because I loved these guys, and I wanted to see them succeed, and I loved the music. I was never fond of being photographed, or having that kind of idolatry. That’s not my thing. It took me years and years of my mother coaching me to get over shyness. I hated to even talk to the operator on the telephone, because I was so shy. Just like David has this removed sense of who he was then to who he is now, I have this feeling of, oh, that’s weird that people pay attention that way to a person who’s just trying to be part of a group. Because I’m not a diva. I’m not a rock star.
Frantz: Actually, you are a rock star.
Weymouth: No, no, no, no.
Frantz: Just look at yourself in that movie. I mean, what a babe. And you’re rocking as well.
Weymouth: Well, I did have a good time. It was a beautiful moment in time, and we’re so proud of it, that this is going to be our legacy. That when we’re long gone, this is probably going to go on for a while. I hope so. I mean, the Library of Congress has put it in.
Harrison: We'll have to send them the new version.
Byrne: And then 20 years from now it’ll be like a brain implant.
Weymouth: Oh, yeah. We won’t even need to go to a theater.
Frantz: Well, I identify as a Talking Head.
Weymouth: Me too. I hate it when journalists say “formerly of Talking Heads.” What are you talking about? It is a little weird—it’s almost cultish to identify with a group and not as an individual. But that happens to bands.
Frantz: It was such a big part of our lives. [Theatrically] We can never escape it.
Byrne: But in a good way. When it became obvious that the film was going to come back out—new print, new sound, new distribution and all that—whatever differences we might have had, we put them aside and said, “No, we really believe in this, we're all united, and we all feel the same way about this.”
Harrison: I also want to give credit to A24. When there’s new energy—I’ve seen this when an artist signs to a new record company, and suddenly it’s not just the same old people that have been working on your record. They’re trying to prove that they can do something. And then it puts a burden back on us. It’s like, you gotta come with me, you gotta help me do this. And I think we went, OK! We’re up for that.
Byrne: There was a lot going on. We were younger, so we were going out a lot, whether it was to art gallery openings or around the corner from where we lived to CBGB’s or other clubs. So there was plenty for us to take in. But I don’t know if we felt like, “Oh, this is a very unique cultural moment.” For myself, I don’t think I had that perspective.
Frantz: We moved to New York, at least I did, in the fall of 1974. We all had a mutual friend, another RISD guy, named Jamie Daglish, who had a loft at 52 Bond Street, which is caddy-corner across the Bowery from CBGB. I went to Jamie’s place the first day I was in New York, and he said, “Chris, I know you’re interested in music, and there's something going on over there at CBGB. You should check it out.” And so I did. I went that night and there was nothing happening. Nothing.
But I heard some noise at the pool table in the back, so I walked back there and there was this guy with a very short crew cut, a sharkskin suit, a purple tie, and the later-Elvis-type sunglasses. And I said, is there going to be any music tonight? He said to me, in a very Spanish accent, “No, man, but come back this weekend. The Ramones will be here.” And I thought, “Oh, cool, a Spanish group.” It was Arturo Vega.
Byrne: I was thinking, it must be Arturo.
Frantz: He ended up being the graphic designer for the Ramones, and their lighting designer. I came back on the weekend and I saw the Ramones. Maybe you were with me, David and Tina. I think you probably were. The Ramones at that stage were not clearly developed: Johnny was still wearing really tight Lurex pants, and they hadn't adopted the motorcycle jackets yet. But they were playing these really amazing songs, like “Beat on the Brat” and “Blitzkrieg Bop.” They hadn’t gotten super tight yet, and they would stop and argue with each other in the middle of a song. It was so great. I thought, this is like the perfect conceptual art piece.
And then later we saw Patti Smith, and then we saw Television, and eventually Blondie. I did feel like there was something happening. I had felt like, Oh, if only we could find a place like the Cavern Club, that the Beatles had, or the club they went to at the Reeperbahn.
Weymouth: The Star-Club.
Frantz: And eventually I realized CBGB was a place like that.
Harrison: The other thing is, there was this thing that had come out of the ‘50s: you know, the Cedar Bar over in the East Village where the abstract expressionists hung out, or the folk scene on Bleecker Street. This whole idea of downtown. At least to me, coming down with the Modern Lovers, it all felt like kind of a continuum. [Harrison played keyboard in Jonathan Richman’s classic early punk band before joining Talking Heads in 1977.]
One of the most important things is that things were cheap. New York had overbuilt, and there was a recession going on all over the country. You could rent things for cheap, and it wasn’t that expensive to go to eat. And so artists flocked, and it created this homogeneous unit of creative people that gathered in a place that was not where the richer people wanted to live, but a great place to live. And then bars and galleries and everything sprung up around it.
Weymouth: There was some trepidation, because David had this idea and he had made drawings, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is like a Bob Wilson project.” [Robert Wilson, a legendary avant-garde theater director and sometime David Byrne collaborator, is known in part for his ambitious staging.] And we started thinking about, “How are we going to pay for it?” It just seemed huge. We did end up having to have three 18-wheeler trucks, and every stage had to be a minimum of 60 feet wide, 40 feet deep, that sort of thing. It seemed huge, but there was just this will to do it.
We had a wonderful manager, Gary Kurfirst, who said, “Look, it’s a good idea. I’ll find the money. We’ll get this done.” Then, Jonathan Demme came and said, “I love this concert. I think it needs to be filmed.” And he was right.
Byrne: There might have been a little trepidation. The fact that it begins a little bit slowly, with just me, and then Tina and I. We might’ve thought, “The audience is going to go, ‘Where’s the band? We came here to dance!’” It starts with an empty stage, with no lighting.
Byrne: Yeah, if you didn’t know that, didn’t expect that, you might have gone, “Boy, they’re really cutting back, trying to save money here. Just the two of them? And no lights?”
Weymouth: We’re just savoring the moment. We’re so happy that it’s resulted in this wonderful thing that’s lasted 40 years. And we’re not really looking too far into the future. We might be standing on the corner and a bus will knock us down. We’re super glad we’re alive. We’re all four here to enjoy this moment.
Harrison: There’s no question, though, that it revives the joy we had together. I think for each one of us, watching the film, we feel the joy—not just the four of us, but everybody that was onstage, and the crew. It’s certainly tugging on the heartstrings of how much I loved everybody.
Weymouth: I love you, too, Jerry.
Byrne: I remember, not too many years ago, being on tour with St. Vincent, and Carrie Brownstein was traveling on the bus with us sometimes. And at one point she had a phone video, and she said, “This is a high school in Seattle, and this is their music project.” The music class and the theater class did Stop Making Sense from beginning to end. The whole thing. I didn’t watch the whole thing, but I was like, oh my god.
A24’s 4k remaster of Stop Making Sense will be released in IMAX theaters on September 22 and widely on September 29.
