Screenwriter Jim Gibson admits that back when he was 15 years old he was “a little bit of a music snob.” In December 1983, he was obsessed with the Talking Heads, but he missed out on getting tickets to the three Speaking in Tongues Tour shows in Los Angeles that the band was planning to record for a concert film. Then, while coming back from a class field trip, Gibson heard on the radio that the band was doing a last-minute fourth and final performance that night. He and his friend happened to be near the Tower Records in Westwood and were able to score two of the last remaining seats.
The tickets were ridiculously good, something like the center of the 10th row in the orchestra. But when they arrived at the Pantages Theatre, they saw that their seats were covered by a large platform with multiple cameras set up on top of it. The ushers told them the section was closed and didn’t offer any alternatives. Luckily, the camera operators were cool and said the two teens could sit on the platform, as long as they promised not to stand during the performance. They now had the best seats in the entire place. “My head was three feet underneath the lens that was filming the center of the stage,” Gibson says.
As the decades passed, the music of the Talking Heads was still important to him, but he rarely revisited their records. Of course he saw Stop Making Sense, the Jonathan Demme–directed film that those Pantages shows turned into, when it first came out in 1984, yet what Gibson came to remember from that concert over the years wasn’t the music itself, but the circumstances that got him there. Then, this past September, he went to an opening weekend screening of A24’s newly restored version of the concert movie in IMAX. “It was like the Proustian madeleine,” Gibson says. “I was like, ‘Wow, this was a really fucking good show.’”
Most of us weren’t lucky enough to have our teenage concert memories immortalized on film by one of the best directors of the late 20th century. Until recent history, shows were usually fleeting moments—the details of them blurring and fading until all that’s left are a few stray fragments and a feeling. Over the past decade-plus, smartphones capable of recording decent quality videos have enabled music fans to easily preserve, rewatch, and disseminate what they experienced at shows. Professionally-produced livestreams have become increasingly common from services like YouTube, Amazon, and Hulu. And artists and film distributors of all kinds are seeing the broader possibilities in concert films. Though the medium has existed for decades and produced some bona fide classics—Stop Making Sense (which Spike Lee and others have called the “greatest concert film ever”) among them—the majority have been made relatively cheaply and only targeted the featured act’s most dedicated fans, whether it’s Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience or Neil Young: Heart of Gold. Now, with movie theaters seemingly eager to bring in ticket-buyers looking for communal events, concert films, if done right, may be able to provide those moments.
Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour were two of the biggest cultural happenings of 2023, and by the end of this calendar year, both will have IMAX-ready versions in theaters—an incredible turnaround time. The two hours and 49 minutes–long Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour took in almost $93 million domestically during its first three days in theaters this month, breaking the record for the biggest opening weekend for a concert film and becoming the second-biggest October film opening ever. The Eras Tour hit theaters before Swift’s actual tour has even concluded—she’ll be performing in South America, Asia, Australia, and Europe before a final stretch of North American stops next fall. But most fans could already preview the entire show since the tour launched in March, as crowd-shot footage flooded TikTok and Instagram Live. In The Eras Tour, the biggest supporting character may be the thousands of illuminated cellphone screens seen shining throughout L.A.’s SoFi Stadium.
Older music fans (and many artists) often complain about younger concertgoers’ immediate impulse to pull out their phones during a show instead of, you know, living in the moment, man. Brittany Spanos, a senior writer at Rolling Stone who has also taught the college course “Topics in Recorded Music: Taylor Swift” at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute, understands the appeal of trying to film a concert yourself, or viewing the results of others who have done so. “We want to experience those moments as quickly as possible and relive them, and if we weren’t there, feel like we were part of them,” she says. Spanos admits to having spent hours checking out shaky, grainy footage of people crying at Swift’s concerts. “It’s kind of endearing to watch and witness that excitement.”
Spanos saw the Eras Tour live in May. Taking in the filmed version, away from the physically and emotionally overwhelming environment that the in-person show created, she was able to better appreciate certain elements, like the choreography or just being able to hear Swift’s voice above all the fans screaming along. Still, even at the relatively chill, 18-and-up showing she went to last weekend in Toronto, she was seated next to a woman who began full-on sobbing as soon as “Cruel Summer” started and didn’t stop until the movie was over. “I was really obsessed with her,” Spanos said. “I loved sitting next to her and she could not have sat next to a better person, because I was very supportive of her tears.”
There were major issues with access to the Eras Tour, whether because of the high cost of tickets on the secondary market, a fundamentally broken ticket-buying system, or simply all the places the tour didn’t go. Swift’s fans have been encouraged to use the movie as a way to recreate the in-person concert experience by getting dressed up, sharing friendship bracelets, dancing and singing in the aisles, and recording and posting every moment. The crowd at the Sunday night screening I went to at Universal CityWalk in Hollywood was jubilant, applauding for everything from the seizure warning at the start of the film to when the CGI snakes appeared before the Reputation set. “It’s this simulation of getting to experience something that’s iconic and beloved,” Spanos says. “You don’t need to watch a concert film to feel amazing singing along to ‘All Too Well (10 Minute Version)’ with other people who know that song. But that visual element, that packed-theater element, it just creates something extra special.”
Watching The Eras Tour, it’s obvious what an impressive feat Swift pulled off, both as a performer and a cultural uniter. What it doesn’t do is delve into the phenomenon the tour created. There’s probably a compelling documentary sequel to be made from the thousands of hours of fan-shot footage—one that’s more focused on capturing the anticipation, release, and validation that these shows came to provide for so many of her fans.
Other artists have explored the possibilities of crowd-created material before. In 1988, director Wayne Isham handed out cameras to audience members to help shoot the clip for Bon Jovi’s “Bad Medicine” so viewers wouldn’t get, as comedian Sam Kinison puts it in the intro, “the same video slop that we always get from these glam-rock pretty boys.” In 2003, Led Zeppelin put out a self-titled double DVD set that supplemented rare performance footage that the band commissioned with bootleg recordings that had been surreptitiously captured by fans. The result was a welcome rebalance to the group’s over-the-top concert film The Song Remains the Same from 1976.
Beastie Boys went even farther for Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That!, released in 2006, which documents their To the 5 Boroughs Tour stop at Madison Square Garden. Group member Adam Yauch, directing the film under his Nathanial Hornblower pseudonym, bought and distributed 50 Sony Hi8 Handycams to ticketholders right before the show and instructed them to document whatever happened that night. Combined with shots filmed by a small professional crew, the movie includes dizzying footage of fans going to the bathroom, attempting to hype up the people in the nosebleeds, heading to the concession stand, and trying to sneak backstage. You’ll even spot a pre-fame Donald Glover rapping along to “Three MC’s and One DJ.”
Though this tactic may seem like an insightful prediction of where society was headed, in reality, Yauch’s decision was impulsive and utilitarian. Neal Usatin, who edited Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That! and many of Yauch’s other projects before the Beastie Boy’s death in 2012, says the director hatched and pulled off the concept in a matter of days. Yauch even returned almost all of the cameras to the store once the concert was over to get his money back. Of the concept, Usatin explains, “To a certain extent, [Yauch] was like, ‘Who wants to watch a whole film of just us?’”
Though pre-production was minuscule, the editing process stretched on for over a year as they tried to find the most resonant approach, one that reflected the group’s larger outlook of always trying out new shit and hoping their listeners would come along for the ride. “It was an interesting process of trying to put together these different versions of what was possible and getting Adam’s buy-in that there’s a story here,” Usatin says. “Let’s embrace the fans, let’s embrace the perspectives.”
Earlier this year, the film We are Fugazi From Washington, D.C. premiered at AFI Silver in Silver Spring, Maryland, and has subsequently been screened in a few other cities. The film traces the post-hardcore band’s history from 1986 to 2002, through fan footage of over a dozen performances that have been synced with the band’s own soundboard-recorded audio. The results are powerful. What makes the film even more special are the contemporary interviews with the people who shot the material, most of whom were teenagers back then borrowing their parents’ camcorders for the night. They’re given the focus as they explain why they filmed the shows in the first place and what impact the band had on them.
In keeping with the group’s highly-principled ethos, the members of Fugazi aren’t doing press in support of the film and neither are the three filmmakers who “curated” it. There are no plans to put it on a streaming service or organize a broader theatrical release, but anyone can book a screening of it in their town, as long as they’re willing to expend the energy and resources to put it together and donate the profits to charity. Fugazi will probably never perform together in public again, but for fans who missed the era when they were around, or who were there but simply miss the band, it’s a decent substitute. “You’ll never recapture those moments, but this is the closest you can come,” says Joe Nelson of the punk archival and reissue label Trust Records, who set up a September screening of the film at Brain Dead Studios, a repertory theater in Los Angeles.
During the two decades since they stopped performing live and releasing new music, certain perceptions of Fugazi have taken hold. There is the idea that they were stuck in an antagonistic relationship with the audience, constantly lecturing them to stop stage-diving or getting too wild. Yes, they gave those warnings to specific bad actors, and We Are Fugazi does include footage of Guy Picciotto delivering his infamous “ice cream–eating motherfucker” moment, but through the film it becomes clear that their intention was always to foster a community where people could exist freely without the threat of violence. One of the most compelling performances in the film is “Suggestion,” a song about street harassment and male complicity in sexual assault, with their friend Amy Pickering handling most of the vocals. Film viewers can see the Sacred Heart Church hall in Washington, D.C., packed with people—even the stage is full. Underneath a glittering red heart, directly behind the band, a group of young women cry, hug, and sing along. It’s proof that no matter the size of the venue or the level of spectacle, a concert film can convey the catharsis that’s possible through live music.
“I came away from that screening saying every band of note who can put this together should do it,” Nelson says.
Concert films also have the ability to calcify an understanding of what an artist’s live show was like. Beyoncé’s first-week performance at Coachella in 2018 was shown as part of the festival’s official livestream. Unauthorized recordings of it were chopped up and spread across social media for anyone to revisit. Then, almost exactly a year later, Homecoming rendered them irrelevant. Homecoming is cinematic, even if it’s only available for streaming on Netflix. Not only are her performances spellbinding, but Beyoncé provides the context of what went into making the show and offers a treatise on the importance of Black fellowship. From the trailer for Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé, it appears she’ll once again give more than high-quality concert footage.
In February 1984, after the Pantages concerts were filmed for Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads played a small string of shows in Australia and New Zealand. Then they actually did what the Band promised they were going to do after The Last Waltz (the other critical contender for greatest concert film ever)—they stopped touring and became solely a recording enterprise, making three more albums before officially splitting up in 1991. The last time the Talking Heads publicly performed music together was during their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.
Unlike Jim Gibson, I don’t have teenage memories of seeing the Talking Heads live. I am, however, old enough to remember being taken to see Stop Making Sense at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre in 1984 when I was 6 years old—an anecdote that says more about the coolness of my dad than the coolness of me. Seeing Return of the Jedi on opening night at that same theater a year earlier taught me that going to a movie could be an event. Seeing Stop Making Sense taught me that going to a movie could be a party. Before we went, I’d seen a segment on one of the local news stations about people dancing in the aisles as the movie played, scenes that are quite similar to what’s happening now in theaters during The Eras Tour. No one stood at our showing, but I do remember noticing how the bodies around me started moving more and more as the band on-screen grew bigger and bigger.
I saw the recent re-release of Stop Making Sense at the TCL Chinese Theatre, one mile west on Hollywood Boulevard from where the shows were filmed. This time, members of the crowd—some old and awkward, others young and buoyant—did get up and dance. A guy in my row (glasses, probably late 50s), started running laps around the aisles during “Take Me to the River” and was escorted out to the lobby, missing the “Crosseyed and Painless” encore. One of the key elements of Stop Making Sense is that there are no shots of people in the crowd until the very end. The effect is that whoever is watching the movie at that moment becomes the Talking Heads’ audience for the night. My favorite part of the showing was when I couldn’t tell if the applause when a song was over was coming from the people around me or from people 40 years in the past.
For most fans that got into the band post-1984, myself included, an imagined Talking Heads show looks like Stop Making Sense. It’s even hard to wrap my brain around the fact that many of that tour’s 64 concerts were performed outdoors, including two nights at L.A.’s Greek Theatre just four months earlier. If other Talking Heads shows are talked about, it’s usually from the band’s early days, when they were the self-knowing dweebs wearing white button-down shirts and khakis amid the leather jacket and filth at CBGB. But there was nearly a decade in between, filled with experimentation and other big ideas. I recently texted my wife’s hip uncle and asked if he went to the Speaking in Tongues Tour. Of course he had, crossing the Wisconsin border in August 1983 to catch the band at the Poplar Creek Music Theatre, a long-gone open-air venue outside of Chicago. He didn’t remember the show that much. He had much more vivid memories from 1979, when the band came through the clubs and auditoriums of the Midwest.
“Fear of Music Tour was intensely cool. Demented and challenging to a lot of people. I loved it,” he wrote. “That’s their pinnacle.”
Sounds amazing. I looked around online and all I could find from that time was an episode of The South Bank Show with some sick clips in it and a degraded version of an entire concert, shot charmlessly from the side of the stage in Amarillo, Texas. If you somehow have better footage of those actual shows, I’d love to see it.
And I might not have the hours to take in all of your Taylor Swift and Beyoncé videos on social media right now, but give me 20 years and I’ll probably want to see those, too.
Eric Ducker is a writer and editor in Los Angeles.
