Sensed
When the Talking Heads toured their "Speaking in Tongues" album, Jonathan Demme was there to make a concert film of it, Stop Making Sense. What's of note, here, to me, is that after all this time, I've finally seen the concert.
At the time, I was one of the Talking Heads' biggest fans. They'd found a groove that resonated with me; my appreciation for more complex pop music was finally finding some bands that could provide the content, and David Byrne & co. were seeing audiences that other New Wave acts could only aspire to. The Forest Hills concert I went to was the pinnacle of their career and an ecstatic high point for me as well.
But I didn't really see the show. Yes, Burning Spear burned up the stage as the opening act for an inordinate amount of time, but I wasn't even tired of them before they were finally ushered off. Yes, the opening was enthralling, and every song thereafter well known and deeply felt - but now we get into the concert-attendance problem. At some point, I abandoned my seat, heading up into the aisles to dance along and groove with the music, deeper and richer than records allow and also far more communal.
So I didn't see the floor lamp or the big suit or how the modules were progressively rolled out song to song until the whole band was there, didn't see the performances Byrne put out for the different songs, or the other band members grooving themselves, or at least not in such a way as actually registered.
Watching Demme's movie I finally got to see the show. And I still love the music.
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2 comments:
I finally got around to watching it a couple of months ago. Excellent concert movie-- maybe the best ever made. (I think I need to see "Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones" again before I make any pronouncements.)
That said, I'm not so sure the show we saw was the show Demme filmed. Specifically, it seems to me that the performance we attended was a bit earlier in the tour, before a lot of the things you describe were developed. I can almost guarantee that we didn't have the big suit, for example. It opened the same way-- with Psycho Killer and the blaster-- but they were still working out the set. They did Burning Down the House twice, for example.
I also remember that a six pack of greenies was $20 bucks.
You could make an argument that Talking Heads at that moment deserve consideration as one of the greatest American rock bands of all time.
The movie was clearly a compliation of more than one performance. Tina Weymouth's dressed differently in one or two songs than for the rest of the movie. But the big suit was definitely part of the Forest Hills show; I remember asking "what big suit?" when someone we'd been there with mentioned it. The lamp, too.
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