Like any lifelong Talking Heads fan, I was thrilled to see ‘Stop Making Sense’ return to theaters last year along with generous but expectedly awkward promo appearances from the permanently fractured group. I never saw the real thing live, missing what turned out to be their final tour in ’83, when I was 14 and only beginning to see shows.
Roughly a decade later, my first/best newspaper editor regularly regaled me with enviable details about their Hollywood Palladium gig three years earlier behind ‘Remain in Light’ with the just-arrived English Beat opening. (He also saw the Clash play the tiny Roxy the night before ‘London Calling’ dropped. I love/hate him for even more reasons than these.) Wish there were bits to view from back then, but the relative dearth of quality footage is another of many reasons why ‘SMS’ stands so tall, setting aside the electrifying energy of both what’s on stage and what wound up in Jonathan Demme’s lens. His tightly focused, you-are-there approach to concert-as-filmmaking has gradually become a lost art form. Takes a master on the level of Spike Lee to know how to recapture that magic, which he does with flair in the sensational movie of David Byrne’s Broadway show ‘American Utopia’ (this is the original cast recording). Yet, as with Demme’s document, you can imagine a less-perfect picture but you can’t picture a less-perfect performance. That’s thanks to Byrne. He’s why I’ve never wasted a moment hoping against hope that they’d reunite, because 1) ain’t gonna happen and 2) he has been expanding his conceptual vision ever since they split. I’ve been fortunate to see him live in a variety of spaces over the years, every time with different players, always with inventive rearranging and impressive staging. Saw this production too, at the Shrine in LA before he retooled it for an extended NYC run. Bet some of us cherish it like we do ‘SMS’ in another 40 years.
#SoundtrackSunday 020
‘American Utopia’
Todomundo/Nonesuch, 2019
d: Alex Timbers (theater) / Spike Lee (film)