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John Flansburgh

From This Might Be A Wiki
They Might Be Giants
Band Members:John Flansburgh | John Linnell
Backing Band:Marty Beller | Dan Miller | Danny Weinkauf
Flansburgh - Now
Flansburgh - Then
Flansburgh - The Earlier Years

Contents

[edit] Biography

John Conant Flansburgh (born May 6th, 1960) is one half of rock duo They Might Be Giants. He co-founded the band with John Linnell in the early eighties, and is a primary songwriter and singer for the duo. Flansburgh sings and plays guitar for the band during live concerts, and can often be seen directing the band and providing much of the between-song banter.

[edit] Early Years

Flans claims "Roadrunner" by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers inspired him to become a musician. He taught himself to play guitar while working as a parking lot attendant (and only 2 cars were stolen the whole time he was working!). He learned to play on just the top three strings of the guitar, because that's all the Ramones used.

Before joining TMBG, Flansburgh attended George Washington University, Antioch College and the Pratt Institute, where he got a BFA in Printmaking in 1984. He then got a job counting commuters at Grand Central Station. At some point, he was also in a band called The Blackouts and another by the name of Frieda. John also worked for Condé Nast, up until the recording of Flood, at which point both Johns quit their day jobs.[5]

[edit] Skills

Flansburgh is a left-handed guitarist. He contributes an amount of songs to TMBG equal to that of Linnell, and has had many side-projects over the years. He's the more social of the two Johns, and is often found after concerts mingling with fans and signing autographs. Flansburgh is the bigger "showman" of the duo and reportedly plans all the large presentations, including devising setlists for shows. He's also a visual artist, and takes a big part in planning the design of TMBG's CD liner notes, and covers. The back and front covers of Miscellaneous T are photos of letters he constructed with papier-mâché.

In addition to all these other things, Flans is an excellent music video director. He has directed music videos for Harvey Danger, Soul Coughing and Ben Folds Five, two for Frank Black, and another two of TMBG's own videos, The Guitar and Doctor Worm. He also produced Muckafurgason's self-titled album, and engineered Drink Me's self-titled album. He was involved with the production of several EPs that were released on the Hello club.

[edit] Side Projects

After joining TMBG, he started the Hello Recording Club with Marjorie Galen, and then formed Hello The Band with Joshua Fried, which had a one-off on the Hello club and no further releases.

Soon afterwards, Flans started the band Mono Puff, which released a series of EP's on Hello and then a full LP on Rykodisc entitled Unsupervised. The album's single video The Devil Went Down To Newport was played on MTV's 120 Minutes, and wasn't a complete failure. Two years later, Mono Puff released the Bar/None LP It's Fun To Steal (which Flans produced himself, along with Pat Dillett). The album had no EPs or videos associated with it, but the band did tour to promote it. Since then, they've not officially broken up, but the members have relocated to far-away places and a new release is not forthcoming.

[edit] Instruments

Flansburgh has played the following instruments in recordings or live:

  • Acoustic guitar (6 and 12-string)
  • Electric guitar (ditto)
  • Drums
  • Bass Guitar
  • Keyboard
  • Melodica (Snowball In Hell)
  • Piano
  • Tremolo harmonica
  • Harmonica
  • Trumpet (he can even play two at the same time, admittedly not very well)
  • Organ
  • Egg shaker
  • Kazoo
  • The Stick
  • Tiple

[edit] See also

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