Shows/1990-03-24b
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They Might Be Giants
F/X in San Jose, CA
March 24, 1990
Fan Recaps and Comments:
"THEY MIGHT NOT BE GIANTS" by Gina Arnold
The San Francisco Bay Guardian, Apr. 4, 1990:
At last Saturday's gig in San Jose's newest nightclub, F/X, They Might Be Giants only started to get warmed up about ten songs into their set. For any other rock band, that would have been an unmitigated disaster. But since the songs of They Might Be Giants are all well under three minutes long, the show wasn't even half over yet.
And that was despite the fact that the entire performance, including encores, lasted exactly one hour. This seems a bit odd for a band whose latest album, Flood, contains 19 tracks: In the mere three years since the band released its self-titled debut album on Bar/None records, it has recorded more than 60 songs and written countless more. Supposedly when the duo first began, it changed the song on its famous Dial-A-Song service daily, with no repeats: I bet they're kicking themselves now that they didn't do it on a 900 number.
Still, despite this embarrassment of riches, at the San Jose show the Giants whipped quickly through only about 20 songs. The resulting set seemed scattershot and short, jumping back and forth between serious, hit-bound songs like "Your Racist Friend" and "Birdhouse In Your Soul" and jokey novelty numbers like "Particle Man" and Cowtown." (Weirder still are the songs that can't make up their mind as to which side of the fence they're on, like the tuneful and witty "Someone Keeps Moving My Chair" and Purple Toupee.")
Sure, the band played the hits: "Don't Let's Start," "Ana Ng." But those songs were interspersed between long (by Giants standards) bouts of throwaway stuff. By focusing relentlessly on the jokier songs — "Cowtown," "32 Footsteps" and "The Famous Polka," for instance — the band's performance ended up lacking what little continuity its albums have.
And that lack of continuity is one of the main problems with They Might Be Giants. Although anyone with half an ear can tell that this is one of the most talented songwriting pairs of our time, live, the duo seems to want to emphasize its novelty aspects. In part, this concerted wackiness is the band members' deliberate response to the fact that, as a band, the Giants are just plain funny-looking: Pinheaded accordion player John Linnell and dorky looking guitarist John Flansburgh do not sex symbols make. It's quite smart of them to realize that if they hired a bassist and a drummer and went for the whole rock band trip (instead of relying on backing tapes for the rhythm tracks, as they do) they'd lose all their cachet, especially with the youngish Monty Python/Oingo Boingo-type fan they seem to be revered by.
The drawback to the whole "We're An Art Project, Not A Rock Band" persona, however, is the ultimate jokiness of it at times completely swamps the greatness of their better pop songs. This has been a problem on all three of the band's albums as well, though never more so than Flood, on which the clever songs are far less clever than ever and the great songs are far more great. "Your Racist Friend," for instance, which is about going to a party where the conversation makes you ill, is one of the most succinct short stories I've ever heard — a political song with a moral to it that doesn't even have to try hard to make its point. (When the protagonist of the song — the one who has been telling his girlfriend all night that he "can't stand here listening to you and your racist friend" — stomps out of the party, he shrugs off their apologies with, "you let the contents of the bottle do the thinking, but you can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding.")
Likewise, "Birdhouse In Your Soul" is the neatest little philosophical twist on love you've ever heard: "Not to put too fine a point on it/say I'm the only bee in your bonnet/make a little birdhouse in your soul." These two songs in particular are just far too good to be tossed in between polkas and chants like so much salad, and it's probably no coincidence that they're both written and sung by Linnell. (He's also the writer/singer of "Don't Let's Start," "Ana Ng" and "Purple Toupee;" of all the hits, in fact.) This is unfortunate, because, though Linnell has a plaintive nasal charm on record, Flansburgh is really the better singer. Live, it becomes apparent that Linnell and Flansburgh are not as evenly matched as songwriters as they seem at first glance: Flansburgh's work is far more silly and lightweight (the exceptions being "Twisting In The Wind" and "Lucky Ball and Chain").
The fact of the matter is that the better They Might Be Giants get, the more they have something of an editorial problem. Of course, any band with a huge body of work is bound to have to leave out some of its better songs when they play live. (In San Jose I thoroughly missed "I've Got A Match" and "Dead"). TMBG's choice of songs in San Jose was more than just incomplete: It emphatically emphasized their ultimate dittyness. The result was like seeing Devo play the collected works of Elvis Costello.
Saturday night's show may have seen extra disjointed because this was the first live show ever put on at F/X, a two-month-old club in downtown San Jose's new "Nightclub Triangle." F/X is in a converted porn theater, and it seems like a good place to see a show, but there's no such thing as an opening night that isn't plagued with difficulties for everybody involved. You know — the sound man doesn't quite know where to stand, etc.
The problem with They Might Be Giants now, however, is that their goofiness is beginning to grate. A little of it goes a long way. Between that and the oddness of their instrumentation and over-loud, nasal vocals, their truly great songs tend to slip out of the big picture. What they need to do is quit squandering their monumental talent on countless funny-once songs, and get down to business.
The band may also have been a bit low-energy: They seemed infinitely less high-spirited than the last time they came through here, though they did get in a few cracks at Peter Murphy. (This being San Jose, one of Murphy's biggest U.S. strongholds, that didn't go over too well.) Gone were all of the amusing props — fezzes, big sticks, etc. — and the duo didn't seem to be talking to each other much. Worse, Flansburgh kept back-chatting to the crowd crushed against the stage, which was pretty alienating for everyone else. It was late in the set before the Giants began to warm up a little and talk about things like breaking the cultural ban on disco balls and screaming as if one were in hell, and at that point things picked up musically as well.
