“Make It Up As We Go Along”: David Byrne on Film, Through the Decades
The phrase “grew up in the spotlight” is typically reserved for child stars who came of age in the Hollywood system. And while David Byrne is no Miley Cyrus, he is an artist whose trajectory has been tracked for decades. After coming to prominence with the New York art-rock group Talking Heads, Byrne’s eclectic output has spanned music, film, and theater. Central to the mystique of David Byrne and Talking Heads is their 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense. Directed by Jonathan Demme, Stop Making Sense is revered 37 years later as one of the finest distillations of performance on film. With the release of this past year’s American Utopia, directed by Spike Lee for HBO, the opportunity arises to look at Byrne through the lens of filmed performance at two very different phases of his life. The bone-dry, mischievous auteur of 1984 has grown into an earnest, politically involved elder statesman. In no small part thanks to Demme and Lee’s bold and stylish filmmaking, these two David Byrnes can at last be put into conversation with each other.
David Byrne was born in 1952 in Dumbarton, Scotland, to parents who not long after emigrated to the United States. Byrne’s nuclear family upbringing in suburban Baltimore informs the removed criticism of pop culture and “all mod cons” fixations of postwar America, as evidenced by his lyrical fixations on appliances and buildings. Even as a young man, Byrne’s music-making was often on his own terms. Kicked out of his school choir for singing off-key, he played in bands throughout high school and during his stints at Rhode Island School of Design and the Maryland Institute of Art. After dropping out of art school, Byrne reunited with classmates Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth in New York, where they formed Talking Heads in 1975. The polo-shirt wearing Talking Heads stuck out like a sore thumb in the Lower East Side music scene, often performing at CBGB alongside leather-clad punk icons the Ramones and Blondie. Their off-beat music, which combined elements of soul and funk, gained them a following and they signed with Sire Records in 1976. Jerry Harrison, formerly of The Modern Lovers, joined the next year, and the band released their first LP, Talking Heads: 77.
The band’s following was mostly restricted to hip circles until 1983, when Speaking in Tongues was released. That album included “Burning Down the House”, their only top 10 hit, and the band, now featuring an expanded lineup, began touring larger venues. The endlessly experimental Byrne designed immersive stage shows that went beyond simple gigs. Byrne soon decided that the tour behind Speaking in Tongues was worthy of cinematic capture, recruiting director Jonathan Demme, hot off of the cult favorite Melvin and Howard, to capture the show over the final four nights of the tour at Los Angeles’ Pantages Theatre. The final product of these filmed shows was 1984’s Stop Making Sense. This film was David Byrne’s project through and through, exercising full creative control, a recurring issue that was the source of his bandmate’s ire.
The David Byrne-ness of Stop Making Sense is apparent from pretty much the very first moment. The first shot, over which titles such as “Conceived by David Byrne” are splashed over, is of a brightly lit hallway, from which Byrne emerges, carrying a boombox. He places it center stage and tells the audience, “Hi. I have a tape I want to play,” and launches into “Psycho Killer”, accompanied by a drum machine. During percussive breaks in the song, a cowlicked, grey-suited Byrne staggers about the stage, eventually recovering in time to continue singing. With little fanfare, Weymouth, Frantz, and Harrison are successively brought on stage over the next three songs, building the band’s initial lineup. Soon, backup singers Ednah Holt and Lynn Mabry, percussionist Steve Scales, guitarist Alex Weir, and keyboardist Bernie Worrell join as well, culminating in an explosive performance of “Burning Down the House”.
Byrne’s stage banter is limited, consisting of variations of “thank you” to an unseen and mostly unheard crowd. Alright, thinks the viewer, here’s an accomplished band fronted by an awkward white guy. The viewer is wrong. Starting with “Life During Wartime”, Byrne’s goofy, mannered performance style transforms. He accompanies the songs’ lyrics, comparing life on tour with that of a fugitive, with wild choreography, making excellent use of his lanky frame. Eventually, he and the band all jog in place until he breaks out into a sprint around the stage, followed by a spotlight. We are no longer watching David Byrne performing with Talking Heads. Byrne is now embodying characters to accompany his portraits of different versions of American life. He puts on a strange, deep voice for “Swamp”, darting up from a lying position as if waking from a bad dream and marching. In “Once in a Lifetime”, he is a spectacled, Brylcreemed televangelist, ecstatically vibrating and self-flagellating while he proclaims, “same as it ever was!”. “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)” presents a sweet romantic hero lovingly cradling and dancing with a floor lamp, in a tribute to Fred Astaire.
But like all great actors, costume is central to David Byrne’s performance. I don’t need to tell you about the big suit. Anyone with a passing familiarity with David Byrne knows about the big suit. After leaving the stage and letting Weymouth and Frantz’s side project Tom Tom Club perform their hit “Genius of Love” (famously sampled by Mariah Carey), Byrne reappears, in shadow, to the opening of “Girlfriend is Better”. The Noh-inspired big suit puts an emphasis on his body and away from his head. The character who sings “Girlfriend is Better” spouts aphorisms, brags about his girlfriend, and is exactly the kind of empty, career-minded bonehead to embrace the super-sized fashions of the 80s. He is also not self-aware enough to get embarrassed, as evidenced by how he flails around in his boxy suit.
The suit subtly transforms as the blazer opens, transforming Byrne into a smooth soul singer covering Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” in cool blue light. Slowly, the pretense melts away, as he removes the blazer and introduces the band by name. On the last song, “Crosseyed and Painless”, there is a completely different David Byrne onstage. His shirt is untucked, he’s locked in with his bandmates, and the nature of his delivery of lyrics to the audience has changed. He is no longer singing at them but to them. As if a spell has been broken, we witness a previously unseen crowd of all races dancing to the music, as well as some of the cameramen whose lenses we have been seeing through. He waves the stagehands on for a bow and exits where he came from.
Jonathan Demme’s keen focus on interpersonal dynamics, at work in films like Something Wild and Philadelphia subtly represents how much of the performance of Stop Making Sense is also the performance of David Byrne. Most of the shots are focused on Byrne, especially in the more expressionistic sequences, and the lighting often reduces the stage picture to solely Byrne. He rarely interacts with his bandmates, who, at this point, he rarely communicated with offstage, except for occasional turns to Mabry and Holt for call-and-response vocals. He and the band pay no attention to the esoteric projections (designed by Byrne) behind them, an “aw-shucks” look from the protagonist of “This Must Be the Place” being an exception. The David Byrne of Stop Making Sense, serious about his silliness and apparently apolitical, is hermetically sealed from his peers and the world at large. Less a concert than a series of musical sketches about different kinds of guys, Stop Making Sense depicts a band and its de facto leader thoroughly committing to performance in the most academic sense of the word.
In the wake of Stop Making Sense’s release and reception as an art-house hit, the group began to splinter. Despite releasing several more albums, including the commercially successful Little Creatures, and a narrative film, True Stories (a highly underrated piece of late-80s weirdness), Byrne’s already-tenuous relationship with his bandmates dissolved completely. The band officially split in 1991, after Byrne had already released several albums and film scores. Frantz claims that he, Weymouth, and Harrison learned about the band’s split from an article in the Los Angeles Times. Into the 21st century, Byrne made further forays into film, dance, and theater, including the OBIE Award-winning disco musical, Here Lies Love, adapted from a concept album about Imelda Marcos Byrne made in collaboration with Fatboy Slim. At odds with Byrne’s lack of communication with his Talking Heads bandmates is the sheer amount of collaboration that Byrne has done in his solo career, working with Celia Cruz and St. Vincent and reuniting with Brian Eno (who produced several Talking Heads records). In March of 2018, Byrne announced his first solo record in 14 years, American Utopia, accompanied by a highly choreographed tour, featuring Byrne and a backing band performing entirely with wireless and portable equipment.
The American Utopia tour coalesced into a “sit-down” Broadway production of the piece at the Hudson Theatre in New York, which premiered in October 2019. It soon became a standout hit in the New York theatre season, with critics praising the ingenious use of wireless technology and Annie-B Parson’s expressive choreography. In the interest of full disclosure, I saw American Utopia on Broadway three times while working as a volunteer with HeadCount, a voter-registration project, so I have elements of the production ingrained in my memory. When HBO announced in early 2020 that Spike Lee would be preserving the show on film, the Stop Making Sense comparisons soon came pouring forth.
In many ways, Demme and Lee are similar directors, interested in telling highly stylized renditions of extremely personal stories. Both also virtuosically integrate music into their storytelling. Lee’s films, however, tend to focus on ensembles, like the Brooklyn epic Do the Right Thing. Lee’s embrace of the collective has brilliantly translated into his distillations of live performance. A staggering example of this is his film of Stew’s musical Passing Strange, a rock bildungsroman featuring one of the most electrifying ensembles in Broadway history (seriously, it’s amazing). So, it would stand to reason that Lee would end up capturing something more than just Byrne in all his wacky glory.
There is artistic alchemy here, as American Utopia does not just feature David Byrne performing his songs about the strange elements of our world. It is a concert-slash-TedTalk about the pure interconnectedness of the human race, and a huge shift in how Byrne incorporates the world beyond him into his performance. The film begins with an image of the show’s curtain, a mural of sorts designed by New York illustrator Maira Kalman. Music swells, and we see Byrne, from above, at a table with a rubber brain. He sings “Here”, in which he patiently explains to the audience the different regions of the brain. He is soon joined by backup singers Chris Giarmo (matching his hair with fire-engine red lipstick) and Tendayi Kuumba. From the get-go, Giarmo and Kuumba support Byrne both vocally and physically. Within the first song, there is already a marked difference in Byrne’s performance from that of Stop Making Sense. He’s visibly more of a team player in how he is choreographed, and his relationship with his audience, as a performer, is that of actual engagement rather than performing a series of movements for a crowd. In a shocking contrast with his earlier stage persona, Byrne takes time after “Here” to deliver the first of many monologues, introducing the recurring theme of human connection. As in Stop Making Sense, the band is slowly built onstage, culminating with a small marching band’s worth of percussionists for “I Zimbra”.
Byrne and the band nimbly perform the joyous chaos of Parson’s choreography, which tends to thematically link to the lyrics, as opposed to the loose, figurative movements of Stop Making Sense. The sense of interconnectedness that Byrne ruminates on in his monologues is made physical by the band and Lee’s choice of shots, rarely focusing one image solely on Byrne. Instead, we typically see the entirety of the band, running around, leaping, and playing at each other. Several times, in a tribute to Busby Berkeley, Lee cuts to an aerial camera, showing the band as a moving, breathing mass in lockstep.
An intriguing element of Byrne’s growth as an artist is how older Talking Heads songs are reframed and contextualized in service of Byrne’s thesis in American Utopia. Most of the songs on the album American Utopia are explicitly political and hopeful, and Byrne goes out of his way to build connective tissue between these and the songs he wrote as a younger man. While “This Must Be the Place” is accompanied by a charming lamp-dance in Stop Making Sense, he prefaces the song in American Utopia with a monologue about how looking at other people “is just the best”. The Afrobeat freakout “I Zimbra” from Fear of Music features gibberish lyrics written by Dada poet Hugo Ball. Instead of letting the weirdness speak for itself, Byrne gives the audience a quick dissertation on the political roots of Dada, a method of “using nonsense to make sense of a world that didn’t make sense”. Even “Blind”, a song lyrically improvised in the studio according to Tina Weymouth, has further political resonance as Byrne, sharing the spotlight with percussionist Jacquelene Acevedo, sings “no sense of harmony/no sense of time/don’t mention harmony/say what is it”.
There are moments of true political earnestness, such as the overlaid image of Colin Kaepernick kneeling during “I Should Watch TV”, accompanied by the lyric, “Am I not your brother” and Byrne’s cover of Janelle Monáe’s protest song “Hell You Talmbout”, accompanied by images of the Black Americans killed at the hands of police who are named in the song. These are definite Spikeian touches, but the fact that they feel not just appropriate, but necessary, in American Utopia speaks to a marked departure from Byrne’s seeming art-for-art’s-sake attitude of the 70s and 80s. The music no longer suffices as a presented object, so Byrne and Lee present it alongside political images of our moment.
The nature of Byrne’s connection with those around him, from his bandmates to the crowds witnessing the performance is indicative of Byrne’s growth between Stop Making Sense and American Utopia. While he is the center of attention at nearly every point of Stop Making Sense, he often cedes center stage to the American Utopia band, even standing hard stage right and cradling his guitar during the bridge of “Burning Down the House”. He individually introduces every single member of the band and where they were born, and gives them a chance to shine in the intro of “Born Under Punches”. While his stage banter is at a bare minimum in Stop Making Sense, at least a third of American Utopia is dedicated to the monologues which connect to a larger, explicitly stated theme. Any accusations of didacticism are countered by the sheer explosion of joy in Byrne and his band’s back-and-forth with the audience.
The piece ends triumphantly, with Byrne and the band marching through the theater singing the refrain of “Road to Nowhere”, depicting a joyous descent into the apocalypse. Over the credits, we see Byrne and the band biking through New York to a youth choir’s cover of “Everybody’s Coming to My House” from the American Utopia album. Byrne and his collaborators embrace the audience, and ultimately the world beyond them, in American Utopia. To use a visual art metaphor, Stop Making Sense is a gallery show without wall text, asking its audience to sort out the meaning on its own, while American Utopia is a gently informative studio visit filled with musings by the artist.
Stop Making Sense and American Utopia are such compelling encapsulations of performance because of Demme and Lee’s unique approaches to exploring the person behind the performance. Comparing these two performances provokes a conversation about Byrne’s growth not just as an artist, but as a person. To paraphrase “Once in a Lifetime”, well… how did we get here? The case may be that, with age, Byrne mellowed out and embraced the political responsibilities of being an artist. He talks at length in American Utopia about the effects that political choices have on generations to come, a topic no doubt inspired by becoming a father and later a grandfather. He also admits, in the preamble to “I Should Watch TV”, that he was socially isolated for most of his adult life and obsessively watched TV in the 70s to learn more about the world. A late-in-life diagnosis of Asperger syndrome has also contributed to the shift in Byrne’s worldview, claiming in “I Should Watch TV”, “there were many awkward moments/I had to do some self-atonement”. Byrne finally had an explanation for the distance he felt between himself and others, a major engine of his songwriting.
Put simply, his seriousness lessened as things happened to him. There was no actual malice in his coldness as a younger man (as much as Weymouth and Frantz may beg to differ). His removed, anthropological takes on humanity were more interesting than anything from the heart. Deep into the third act of American Utopia, Byrne states his point clearly: “who we are… extends beyond ourselves to the connections between all of us.” We don’t really know what the David Byrne of 1984 would say to that statement, but it’s the kind of thing you would expect to be heartening to the guy who would watch TV to understand everyone else. Byrne learned to accept the necessities of collaboration and human interaction. Juxtaposing and revisiting performances from different phases of his career is a testament to that growth.
Stop Making Sense is currently streaming on Amazon Prime and American Utopia is currently streaming on HBO Max.
Special thanks to Lou Barcott and Christiane Swenson.
