When Talking Heads released a restored and remixed version of their classic 1984 concert film “Stop Making Sense” for its 40th anniversary, guitarist-keyboardist Jerry Harrison says it confirmed something that the influential art rock band had been sensing for a while .
“We have a sort of resurgent younger audience right now,” says Harrison, who will present the film for a special screening at the Alex Theater in Glendale on Wednesday, Oct. 8. “I actually think it’s larger than it was 10 years ago, interestingly, or 15 years ago.”
Singer David Byrne saw the likely reason, says Harrison, who with Talking Heads‘ Byrne, drummer Chris Frantz and bassist Tina Weymouth, premiered the film at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2023.
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“David pointed this out, but I think it’s really salient,” he says. “With streaming, people are often introduced to music because they decide to get a stream that is curated, sometimes by a computer, but sometimes by a person. And Talking Heads have found themselves in contemporary streams, but we’re not date-stamped.
“It’s just a song by us,” Harrison continues. “People who know who we are will then go like, ‘Oh, that’s Talking Heads. That was a long time ago.’ But if you’re a younger person, it’s just like in a stream with LCD Soundsystem and Arcade Fire and even far more younger acts, and they just go, ‘That’s cool. I want to learn more about that,’ or something like that. So after being prompted a few times, then people start to explore that.”
Prior to streaming, Talking Heads’ music was was linked in some people’s minds to the years between 1975, when the band formed, to 1991 when it ended.
“If you go back from 15 years ago to 30 and 40 years ago, it was more likely a radio station or a Sirius channel,” Harrison says. “And it would be ‘Music from the ’90s,’ ‘Music from the ’80s.’
Then streaming music changed all that.
“What happens now, it’s just like a DJ in a club, like, what is a cool transition between this song and this song? And our songs seem to fit that.”
In an interview edited for length and clarity, Harrison talked about finding a lost negative in a film in a Kansas vault, the common questions he gets on the tour that brings him and the film to the Alex, his memories of director Jonathan Demme shooting four nights of Talking Heads at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood in December 1983, and more.
Q: How did you end up taking the film on the road this fall?
A: It basically stemmed from realizing, when the four of us were talking about it, that because I was the person who put together the team that remixed it and spent most a good part of the year on that, and then I was the one who coordinated with James Makowski, who was in charge of the visuals, a good half of the questions were ones that only I could answer.
And I thought, well, you know, I could do this on my own and provide, I think, an interesting evening for someone who wants to come and see the film, and learn a little bit more about the process of the restoration, as well as have the opportunity to ask questions about Jonathan Demme. And, of course, the band itself.
Q: Are there certain things people tend to ask you at most screenings?
A: Well, there’s sometimes confusion. They’ll ask a question, like, “Did you rehearse a lot for the film?” And it’s like, “No, we didn’t rehearse a lot at all, because this was the show we did every night.” Some people think that somehow the staging was created for the film, and not that the film was just capturing a live performance that we had designed and then carried out all over the world.
Then there are people talking about, “Well, how did that come about? How did this sort of narrative, or storyline, of starting as bare and as small as possible, and going to, I think, it’s nine people on stage?
So I tell the story of how the different tours with the big band were a little bit different, but they’d always started with the four of us. And I think that David just decided, well, we could do this a little bit more extremely. And there’s a transition from the band that had Adrian Belew in it, the first iteration for the Remain in Light tour.
Then there was another tour for “Speaking in Tongues,” where the Tom Tom Club [Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz’ side project] opened for us, and then the Stop Making Sense tour. And each one of them, certain things were being refined. They were becoming far more visually oriented. You know, Talking Heads was kind of well known for just coming on and turning the white lights on and just leaving sort of a very stark and barebones presentation.
Q: Tell me more about all the time you spent remastering the film this time.
A: Remastering does not really do it credit. We went back to the very beginning and remixed the whole thing. Remastering is when you put some EQ and compression on something.
Q: OK, so tell me about remixing it, but also spending that much time with a film from 40 years ago.
A: I was working with Eric Thorngren, and E.T. and I did the mix for the [first soundtrack] album for “Stop Making Sense.: That was the first time we worked with E.T. He went on to do “Little Creatures” and “True Stories” as well with us, and he’s worked on a lot of my production work.
Then, in 1999, when we did the first DVD release of the film, he was the one who was involved in that mix. And then we remixed all of the Talking Heads albums for Dolby Atmos. So the idea of going back and looking at Talking Heads material was kind of familiar to both of us, because we had spent some time in the last decade doing stuff like that.
But this is the one where we had the time to spend a lot of time on it. We got going the minute we decided that we were signing with A24, and there was sort of a “This is going to go to the Toronto Film Festival in eight months or six months.” It’s like, “Well, OK, we want to make this look and sound as good as possible.” So we realized that we had to go back to square one, get the original multi-tracks and start.
Interestingly, there were sync issues until we finally found a tape that was hidden in an MGM vault in Kansas. MGM had nothing to do with this film, and it was kind of found in the last month of working on this. So we scrambled and we eventually went back to really the same film mix facility where we mixed it in ’84.
We were not in the exact same room, but it was interesting to be all the way back to the same facility. It was important for us to hear it in a theater of a certain size, rather than in a room that was, you know, 15 by 15 or something like that.
Q: What was it like with Jonathan Demme and his crew filming the shows at the Pantages? Did much change for the filming?
A: I would say that the show was largely the same. We made some adjustments for [cinematographer] Jordan Cronenweth, who said that certain lighting was too bright and was overly saturating the film. So we tailored the lighting so that it would read the best on film.
And then Jonathan [Demme] noticed that in the way that there’s like an ensemble group acting, that there were moments of, you might say, conversation between different band members, either dancing or talking or something.
So Sandy McLeod, who was sort of an assistant director, went around and made notes for Jonathan, like, you know, “Something great happens on stage right in the middle of ‘Girlfriend is Better.’ Or, you know, “Make sure that you get the way Lynn [Mabry] and Ednah Holt] are interacting with David in this song.
“One of the reasons we shot it over multiple days is that we put sort of railroad tracks in the theater for a dolly, to hold these very large Panavision 35 millimeter cameras. We then had one come down the middle, one come down the left, one come down the right on the three successive days. And this had to do with making sure that we had enough people in the audience that it felt live, that it didn’t just feel like a film shoot.
Had we had three sets of railroad tracks, that it would have been a very sparse audience, and there wouldn’t have been the sort of back and forth that a band feels with the audience. So we felt that was essential to getting the right performance.
Q: What do you remember about the first time you saw the finished film with an audience?
A: The first time I saw it in front of people was at the Florence Film Festival, which was kind of cool. Bernardo Bertolucci and Susan Sarandon were there, various other notables of the film world, and, of course, a foreign audience. It was, it was really quite great.
Then we went around the film festivals. I would have to go up and, like, adjust the Dolby. At the time, it had this primitive matrix system so that you could get some sound coming out of the rear of the theater, but when it was adjusted wrong, it would do things like take the snare drum and throw it in the rear. And that was disconcerting. So I would go and adjust each theater for the sound while we were doing the film festivals.
Q: I assume the sound is much easier to manage with the new version?
A: Yeah, but it’s been interesting on this run. I would say the majority of the theaters that have taken it also have performing acts, and they usually do the stereo mix with a kind of beefier sound system. More make it a live concert than dwell on the sort of surround sound nature that the film has the possibility to have.
There’s sort of two ways to watch this film. I guess the ultimate is an IMAX where everything is really hyperreal. It’s very big. And you’re like, just sort of looking at it and going, like, “God, I never saw that because I never had that detail.” And then the other one is, you know, these kind of more classic theaters where very often people want to get up and dance in the aisles.
Q: What was it like when you saw people dancing in the aisles with this release?
A: We had a couple of screenings in places where everybody had to stand, so of course, they dance. Then recently, my wife and I went over to the Rome Film Festival a year ago or so. And they had another screening up in Milan, and they actually had – this was hysterical – they had a whole rack of big suits [like David Byrne wears in the film] for people to try on to have their picture taken.
They had these two professional dancers get on the stage before the show and try to teach David’s bizarre dance moves to the people in the audience. It was so cute.
Q: This year is also the 50th anniversary of Talking Heads, though you didn’t join until ’76, I think. What do you remember about them reaching out to ask you?
A: I saw them briefly backstage when they played in Cambridge [Massachusetts] at a place called The Club. But that wasn’t the real beginning of working with them. What really started it is that they had decided that they wanted to add a member a little later. It was actually Chris’s mother and father who knew Ernie Brooks with the Modern Lovers’ uncle and aunt in Pittsburgh. [Harrison had been in the Modern Lovers with Brooks previously.] And so they got Ernie Brooks’ phone number and then got my phone number and called me.
And then I went down to their loft on Chrystie Street, and we jammed a little bit. I came back down like a few weeks later and rehearsed. And then I played a show at the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club, and a show out in New Jersey. Actually, the pictures on “The Name of This Band is Talking Heads” that seem like they’re in a living room was that show. Second show I ever played with them.
Q: How do you see the legacy of this band, from the time you were together to today?
A: Well, it was hard to know; we certainly didn’t know at the beginning that it would have such a long-lasting effect. I think when I joined the band, I knew that it would be an artistic success. I had no idea what kind of commercial success it might have. I felt we were pretty left-field, but [with] a very unique way of creating music and looking at music.
We worked very hard at building our audience by touring relentlessly, and, you know, the audience got bigger and bigger. Then, when we sort of created the big band, basically in response to how many parts we had played ourselves on “Remain In Light,” we knew we had a show that was amazingly powerful.
