Stop Making Sense

 I’m gonna talk about how I saw Stop Making Sense in theaters last night and it changed my life. 

I'm not a film critic, but I wouldn’t say I’m unfamiliar with concert docs. One of the first DVDs I personally owned was AC/DC Live in Donington, which became a formative memory in my personal history of rock music. I’m not unfamiliar with documentaries about the personal lives of bands, either; I make a point to watch Some Kind of Monster once a year. Stop Making Sense blew everything out of the water, and it’s not even close.

We used to host gigs in the basement of our four bedroom rental with a broken PA and mixer like all good, god-fearing punks do at one point or another. Locals and touring acts would play sets without any hard and fast end time, mostly just going until they were too drunk or too tired to continue (we always put out free beer to make sure they didn’t go longer than 30 or 40 minutes). These artists are always playing to a room of like, 20 people max. I think the biggest show we had was a New Year’s Eve gig and we might’ve pushed 60 people into our basement and backyard. Cover was pay-what-you-want always, and we never offered a guarantee. We hosted these gigs because we believed live music needed a place to thrive outside of the capitalist hellscape of the music industry and we wanted artists to have access to an intimate space where they could perform directly to an audience that had no choice but to give them their rapt attention. Turns out, if you play the music loud enough in a room small enough, this’ll work. 

In our basement shows, I watched emo bands spill their guts and indie-pop artists dance their hearts out. Kids lost their minds trying to mosh in a ten-by-ten space while precariously avoiding the sharp edges on the fireplace mantle. Hardcore bands threw themselves against the walls so much I was afraid we’d lose our deposit (we did). Every time we did a show, people couldn’t tear their eyes away, except to cut loose. 

On the other hand, I’ve seen big bands on reunion tours go on stage and deliver the saddest “I’m-out-of-money-and-nobody-likes-my-solo-records” performances on earth. American Football’s first tour back, Duster’s reunion tour, Algernon Cadawallader’s sputtering start-and-stop show at Neumos; I’m generally stoked to see these bands but had a hard time focusing on the music, and I like to think the crowds at these shows agreed with me. None of them had the charisma to command an audience the way you could when the only thing between you and the crowd was a microphone and five feet of space. There’s just too much space between you - we can’t see your face or hear the hurt or recoil from your beer-stained breath. 

What Demme and Byrne accomplish in Stop Making Sense is the reconnection of the performer to the audience, and most importantly, they make it last far into the future. Byrne’s presence on stage is as a ritual casting shaman leading a congregation of pagan worshippers in cult sacrifice. It’s a knife cutting through the curtain of monotony of my life revealing a world so bright and saturated I can’t look away. Close cuts to Byrne during Psycho Killer create a direct route from his lips straight to my brain, and they’ll continue to take this road for the entire 88 minutes. It’s like every time he cuts to that gaunt man Byrne’s body is beamed directly into my cortex.

Byrne’s dance moves are the real encapsulation, though. Wide shots of him flopping across the stage set against the rest of the band who mostly keep to their blocking make him the centerpiece of the show. The rest of the band has moments where they match his moves, but these are always sloppy enough that it feels like a spontaneous explosion rather than a planned break in their stand still. 

Let’s talk about the lamp. When Byrne started dancing with the lamp, I wanted to cry. It was so beautiful. Here we see a man broken down and reconstituted by love and energy and pure dancing. He throws the lamp back and forth, teasing the audience with the possibility that it might land on stage and shatter. It never does. Byrne manages to toss the thing to himself four times before collapsing on it like he’s falling into a lover’s arms for the first time in a long time. And I felt it. 

40 years on from the Talking Heads iconic performance I still felt the energy and pure unadulterated joy bursting off of that stage in 1984. 40 years on from that performance and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a band put out that specific flavor of on-stage elation. Byrne’s like 30 feet from the closest audience member and I know for certain they can’t pull their eyes off him. And Demme was able to capture it exactly how it felt. 

From the close ups of Byrne and the other band members cast in shadow from under-lighting to the “gymnasium light” Byrne absolutely needed for the opening number, the performance of the band is caught tenderly in the camera’s lens. Demme pioneers live concert filmography by lighting the stage entirely from the left on one night, and then from the right on the second night so they can cut the pieces together. What emerges is a performance in pseudo-perfection: everyone is lit at just the right moment, everyone gets a spotlight, and the band had four tries to get their on-stage energy to match exactly.

Somewhere out there, there exist a handful of videos of my band playing various house basements in the Pacific Northwest. Most of these are unlistenable blown-out recordings taken on a straight-to-tape camcorder or a conglomeration of iPhone camera shots stitched together in an attempt to leave a record of our existence at that space, at that time, doing what we did. None of these videos have multiple camera angles, nor am I wearing a big suit or dancing nearly as much or as well as Byrne does. Our most interesting production involved projecting images from Skate 3 playthroughs and episodes of The Office behind us while we played. Still, there are some special moments there, when the band gets in sync, and I’m not worrying about forgetting lyrics, and I can look across to my homies playing the songs we wrote in front of some 20-odd 20-somethings in a basement who are completely and utterly enraptured by us, and I get it. I get why Byrne sprints laps around the stage during Life During Wartime; it’s because he physically has to. His body will erupt if he doesn’t. I’ve had those moments where you’re dancing during the instrumental break and you run over to your bandmates to try to make them laugh at your moves. It feels amazing, and Byrne feels it more than most other humans could ever hope to. Demme captures that energy, bottles it, and loads it into a plasma gun that he fires point-blank at my head, killing me instantly.