The Talking Heads “stop making sense“ is one of the greatest concert films if not the greatest concert film ever! Life during wartime… The lyrics are a bunch of war movie clichés lines and just done brilliantly! David Byrne is a genius in this band and beyond. I have been able to see him live in a variety of different venues around Portland Oregon and he never disappoints. Keep digging Harry, there’s a lot to mine here!
Filmed live at The Pantages Theater in Los Angeles, December 1983. Bernie Worrell, the great keyboardist in P-Funk, was invited to join the band after drummer Chris Frantz and bassist Tina Weymouth went to a P-Funk concert at Madison Square Garden and came back to the recording studio shouting "Burn Down The House!" which was a P-Funk chant during the concert. David Byrne loved the sentiment so much he arranged to meet with members of P-Funk about collaborating. Out of these discussions, Worrell joined the band as their keyboard player. He was important in turning them more toward the funky side of life (their cover of Al Green's "Take Me to the River" and Frantz/Weymouth as Tom-Tom Club's "Genius of Love" bear witness to Worrell's contributions). Thanks Frank and Harri!
Edna Holt and Lynn Mabry were also with P-Funk and their own band She-Funk. Guitarist Alex Weir was the production and arrangement genius behind the Brothers Johnson. This collaboration resulted in the tightest live sound of all time.
Interesting thing listening back to music from the '70's and '80's, my friends and I were into heavy metal but we really didn't disparage or poo-poo other genres and artists, everything was on the table and cool in it's own way, this song was a fave for the lyrics alone; "I've changed my hairstyle so many times now, I don't know what I look like" ...hilarious, David Byrne is a genius
Interesting fact: the blonde bassist (Tina Weymouth) and the drummer (Chris Frantz) were married and they formed their own offshoot band called Tom Tom Club. They wrote one of the best songs of the 80s, the hugely influential "Genius of Love." It has been sampled to death.
My husband and I were just discussing that the versions of their songs from Stop Making Sense are so great that it's kind of disappointing when the studio versions come on the radio. This entire film is well worth watching and re-watching often.
I miraculously heard this version on a backwater station driving through eastern Pennsylvania. And once I heard the end of this version of Swamp on a local college radio.
I have to agree with what many others have said. One of the most well paced, well conceived concert movies I've ever seen. No exaggeration. You really should check it out.
One of the more brilliant bands, and one of the best concerts ever. Love this song, along with so many they did. David Byrne is a brilliant musician and I remember many a college party listening to their music.
The Talking Heads are one of those wonderful groups that can’t and shouldn’t be copied or duplicated. David Byrne is one of the most underrated front man there is. As always Thank you Sir ✌️
Must be extremely personally charismatic too. Part of the show is the set and risers stagehands built this as part of the theater… Yeah you got your moneys worth concert goers
They had the brides of funkenstein, Bernie worrel and the Tom Tom Club was basically a really old hip hop group. They had street cred lol. David even did x song with celua Cruz, a musician in Africa, and old web site has a translation of a cuban song with complete with African loan words. The G.o.a.t.s.
Had the very good fortune to see Talking Heads about a month before they filmed the show in L.A. for the movie. I saw them on he other side of the country, in Lowell, Massachusetts, and the generator to run the lights and special effects burned up in the parking lot, so we had our show with the house lights on, and it was still one of the best concerts of the over 500 I have ever seen. They still brought the stage settings out on rollers, just as in the movie "Stop Making Sense", which I highly recommend you Harry, and everyone else, watching. BTW, Bassist Tina Weymouth is my all time favorite female Rock Star, she is all business all the time, and she is innovative, a great performer, and fun to watch on stage, without theatrics. The Heads are awesome.
Unfortunately they had already disbanded by the time I was old enough to go to shows, but there are a couple of touring cover bands that do a really good job with Talking Heads music - Start Making Sense (all Talking Heads, mostly play the US east coast) and Pink Talking Fish (Talking Heads interspersed with Pink Floyd and Phish, a very interesting mix; tour across the US).
@@jp-bl5vk My buddy Bill Melcher played Bass in the Stop Making Sense band for a couple of years, and they played a gig at Musikfest in Bethlehem, Pa. hometown of the lead singer, who's name I forget at the moment, and Bill's hometown as well, and mine.
The lyrics sound funny when just taken as separate lines, and the choreography as amazing dance. However, if you listen more closely and watch the choreography, he's really singing about what would happen if you were suddenly plunged into war, but you live in a city (let's say, NYC, which is where Byrne has lived for many years, and where the late, lamented CBGB's and the Mud Club, which are mentioned in the lyrics, were located). Where would you go? What would you do? How prepared would you be? "Changed my hairstyle so many times now" is what you do when you're trying to live under cover; same about "they're tapping phone lines": can't trust anyone or anything. "No time for dancing or lovey-dovey" because you're in survival mode. The group's movements are about running away, swimming away, feeling trapped, feeling hunted.... The Wikipedia entry for the song quotes a book about the Talking Heads: "David's lyrics describe a Walker Percy-ish post-apocalyptic landscape where a revolutionary hides out in a deserted cemetery, surviving on peanut butter. 'I wrote this in my loft on Seventh and Avenue A [NYC],' David later said, 'I was thinking about Baader-Meinhof. Patty Hearst. Tompkins Square. This a song about living in Alphabet City.'" Record World called it "a brilliant futuristic treatise on urban guerilla warfare." I was in Alphabet City (a neighborhood on the Lower East Side of NYC, also called the East Village) from 1987 through 1993. In the mid-80s, when I started to go there, it was full of burned-out buildings, many of which were being used by squatters, and gentrifiction hadn't really hit the neighborhood yet, although it was starting. Lots of homeless folks camping out in Tompkins Square Park (also the scene of a "riot" brought on by police ejecting people from the park); lots of crack dealing, at the height of the crack era; lots of starving artists and poets, a lot of punks and the forerunners of Goths; lots of Black and Hispanic folks along with some poor whites, with a high-rise low-income housing project on its eastern border. Which is why Byrne wrote that he'd lived in a brownstone (old NYC 3- and 4-storey buildings from the 19th and early 20th century) and lived in a ghetto. For part of my time there, I lived on Sixth between Ave. A and First Ave., which is a short block from where Byrne lived at Seventh and A. I knew it well. Amazing place and time that produced a lot of incredible music and art.
You can pick any track from that concert film. All fire. But really you should watch it from start to finish to appreciate the flow of how they choreographed the show.
This is one of my top five favorite bands and my all time favorite song. I got to see them at a club in Lubbock, Texas in the late 70s, and it was my second favorite concert ever. It was second only because I was blessed to see Queen before this show. David Byrne is such a talent is so many areas. He was just on 60 minutes back on March 5th. He was also nominated in the Best Original Song category at this year's Oscar Awards for the song "This is Life" from the movie "Everything Everywhere All at Once".
Another singer who's good at making random weird motions match the beat of the music so it both does and doesn't look like dancing is Peter Garret of Midnight Oil. But he's even more "random" looking than David Byrne. Peter looks like he's having some kind of muscle convulsions until you notice they're in time with the beats.
Awesome reaction!! Love it! After you mentioned I noticed after seeing millions of times, he runs to the beat when he speeds up he just doubles it. 😀👍🏽
Talking heads was my first concert I was 13 maybe 14 years old saw them at Clark university Worcester MA in the late 70’s and been lovin there shit ever since!
The recording quality of this album is outstanding, one of the better live recordings I've ever heard (and I've heard a lot). Sounds great played through a high end stereo system.
this band all met at Rhode Island school of design in early 70's by 1974 they moved to new yorkto concentrate on making music...the next year they won a spot opening for the Ramones at the cbgb club in NYC.
The Talking Heads honed their craft at the great NYC club the same as The Ramones and Blondie were honing their along with I'm sure numerious bands. Blondie holds the honour of being the 1st Rap video played on MTV with their song 'Rapture" which debuted January 31st. Pretty good for a band with a blonde female lead singer.
Saw the Talking Heads when I was a teenager, and it was by far one of the best concerts I ever went to! The whole place was dancing all night! Incredible!
Just so you know - Talking Heads had this same energy when I was 16, in the mid 70's (s) and I snuck into a bar and watched them play on a stage that only held the drum kit.
Actually, I'm a child of the music from the 70's and the blues from the 60's, but David Byrne (and a few other bands) from the 80's blows me away. D.B. is a brilliant composer and songwriter. My favorites are "Mr. Jones" and "Men vs. Women" (a solo LP) and of course some more of these albums. Thanks for sharing this vid from Talking Heads and best wishes @all from hamburg (germany)
I was a twenty year old living in Poughkeepsie, NY when this came out. Poughkeepsie is a college town with Vassar, Marist, Dutchess Community College, the nearby Culinary Institute of America and SUNY New Paltz just across the river. Like most college towns, it had a great, cutting edge, radio station and being a huge music lover, I was always tuned in. My preference was for the harder stuff but being the furthest thing from a music snob, I absolutely loved this song when it first hit the airwaves. Music has that ability to transport you to certain times in your life and this song really transports me to a great time in my life.
Frank - You are consistently submitting great tunes and this is certainly one of them. As has already been suggested I highly recommend The Talking Heads "Stop Making Sense" concert film. A gold nugget for sure. Thank you Frank and Harri!
Fine line between genius and insanity that the Talking Heads walk (or dance) so well! One thing for sure. IT SURE IS FUN! Love David's line at the end "any questions?"
This Live Performance "Stop Making Sense" was shot by Jonathan Denme. David Byrne, the leader and vocalist, is a very sensitive and creative artist, a genius. A few years ago he started a show, then a tour, with his own songs, collaborations and TH stuff wich I have the chance to attend: it's not easy to surprise me but it was one of the best shows I've ever seen (after the three times I attended to Prince). You can find the show, this time shot by Spike Lee, entitled "American Utopia". A must!
Was lucky to see them perform here in Detroit at our Masonic Temple. Stood at the foot of the stage with Tina playing her bass down at me ... what a time the 80's were.
