Music

“I think that there are a number of reasons why it has stood the test of time,” says Harrison, who will host the screening.

By Blake Maddux

September 15, 2025 | 2:10 PM

6 minutes to read

Milwaukee native Jerry Harrison’s Boston connections run deep.

While a student at Harvard, he and his roommate Ernie Brooks became enamored with the Cambridge Common performance by Natick-born Jonathan Richman.

Together, the three of them would form The Modern Lovers along with Woburn’s own David Robinson on drums. The sales of the one record that this lineup recorded would be negligible, but its influence since its belated 1976 release on punk, indie, and alternative has been fathomless.

Harrison returned to Harvard following his departure from The Modern Lovers in 1974. In the process of his ultimately successful pursuit of a master’s in architecture, he received an invitation to join Talking Heads, a New York City-based band comprising three members who met at the Rhode Island School of Design.

The band was an instant critical favorite, with their first three albums garnering massive widespread acclaim and remaining ranked among the greatest rock albums of all time. Major commercial success arrived with the No. 9 1983 single “Burning Down the House,” which was accompanied by a characteristically innovative MTV video.

Talking Heads’ higher profile was further elevated by the 1984 Jonathan Demme-directed concert film “Stop Making Sense.” The movie won praise among major film reviewers who may not have known the band’s music. Even the ever-exacting Pauline Kael deemed it to be “close to perfection.”

In recognition of its recent 40th anniversary, Harrison is hosting screenings across the US of a restoration of “Stop Making Sense” for which he was largely responsible. The 2026 trek includes a stop at The Cabot in Beverly on Sept. 21.

“I’m looking forward to having this screening up in Beverly,” Harrison said. “It’ll be really great. I rebuilt a house in Ipswich and Cohasset and my mother’s family is from Cohasset.”

Boston.com: Would it have befuddled you to have been told in 1984 that you would be appearing live at “Stop Making Sense” screenings in 2025?

Jerry Harrison: I would have been very surprised to hear it, yes. That said, I thought that it would have great staying power. I think that perhaps the most important decision we made was to have no interviews [in the film]. So it functions as a concert that you’re watching, but that you can put on as a dance party at home and you can turn the screen off and still enjoy it.

One of the things we set out to be was to be a little bit like the “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” a film that can play every other weekend and people would come. Yes, you would see new things every time you watched it because your eye would not go to what you already knew, but whatever seemed new to you. Also, you could have your back to it and dance and have a perfectly wonderful time.

Did its ongoing growth in stature surprise you, or did it just seem right?

Put it this way, we had high hopes for it. We were conscious of slipping into the time slot of the “Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Or at least I was. That was something I was hoping we could do.

I think that there are a number of reasons why it has stood the test of time. One of them is that the lighting design, much of it could have been done in maybe the ’30s or ’40s. None of the inventions that you had in the ’80s are used. We’re not using spotlights, we’re using canisters, some handheld, some tracked. And we’re using projection of slides, which had been around for a pretty long time. So I think that the old-fashioned-ness of the lights means that it’s all about the creativity. There’s nothing there that feels like it had a moment in the ’80s and then disappeared. I think that gives it a classic sense.

Plenty from the ’80s seems dated. I don’t think that can be said of “Stop Making Sense.”

Well, maybe the clothes we’re wearing!

True! And big suits didn’t really catch on, did they?

Well, we had a wonderful screening at the Rome Film Festival where the restoration was shown. And they had a screening in Milan, and they had a rack of big suits for people to try on and have their photos with them. And then they had these professional dancers come on the stage and try to teach [lead singer] David [Byrne]’s unusual dance steps to the audience. It was a really fun show.

What will longtime fans of the movie appreciate about the restored product?

I think the color balancing is better. I think it’s never looked better. The fact that we were able to find the negative and clean it, and then do a very high-definition digital scan. And the Atmos mix is just spectacular. You can close your eyes and have this sort of spatial placement that you certainly didn’t have with the same accuracy that you had with the mix that was done in 1984.

Do you notice several generations of attendees at the screenings?

Yes, I think it’s a mixture of ages. It’s similar to the show that I’ve been doing with Adrian Belew, celebrating the tour for [Talking Heads’ fourth album] “Remain in Light.” It’s always better when there’s a mixture of ages, because the young people are more likely to jump up and start dancing [and] they inspire their parents to join them. All-seated venues make dancing hard. With the film, if you have a theater that has really unbelievable Atmos sound and a really beautiful projection system, you’re a little bit more likely maybe to sit down to take in the stimulation of those things. And some of the ones that are designed for people to dance, they sort of revert back to renting a PA and making it sound like a concert. Both of these experiences are totally valid. It’s almost like you want to do both.

Talking Heads’ commercial and public profiles grew significantly between 1983 and 1985. How did MTV contribute to that?

I think that the rise of Talking Heads’ popularity … You can look at various singles that broke through in various radio formats. Even though “Psycho Killer” has become one of our most streamed and very much identified with the movement that came out of CBGB, it was a limited audience for [debut album] “Talking Heads: 77.” The first single that did anything was “Take Me to the River” and it was on AM radio, not FM.

Then, “Life During Wartime” from “Fear of Music” was definitely our big FM success. They even played it when they were breaking disco records in Comiskey Park, which was not really our intention because we actually quite liked disco music.

And then MTV came along, with “Once in a Lifetime” in particular and the video for “Burning Down the House,” and then of course “Wild Wild Life” which won, I guess, Best [Group] Video at the MTV Video Music Awards. Being that we were a visual band, we were able to adjust to the world of videos better than most bands. In so many videos the bands look like they’re uncomfortable actors in somebody else’s film.

Before we finish, can you recount for me some specific detail or episodes of the Boston music scene that you experience in the 1970s?

We did a show or two with Aerosmith and [J. Geils frontman] Peter Wolf. There was the Bosstown Sound, the Beacon Street Union and Ultimate Spinach, when I first got to Boston. I had no connection with them except Joe Casey, who had managed the Beacon Street Union and wanted to be involved with The Modern Lovers and acted as a road manager briefly.

I remember having a long conversation with Peter Wolf. He lived in a building next to the MTA yard in Cambridge, and Van Morrison lived there, and there was a guy named Ed Hood who lived in the building. He was in “Bike Boy” and some of the other Andy Warhol movies. So there was a kind of contingent of what he called his “superstars.” So I got to know some of those people.

Peter was really great because he came over and gave The Modern Lovers, let’s say, a reality talk about what the music business was like and what to watch out for. And how signing a contract was just the beginning of your career. You hadn’t made it, you had just sort of come up for your first game in the big leagues — and everybody else was there to try to make it the only game you played in the big leagues.

Jerry Harrison will deliver introductory remarks, post-screening comments, and an audience Q&A when he hosts “Stop Making Sense” at The Cabot, 286 Cabot St. in Beverly, at 7 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 21. For more information and tickets, visit thecabot.org.

Source