Shows/1993-08-01
They Might Be Giants
— with Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet, Cadillac Tramps co-headlining —
High River Rodeo Center in High River, AB
August 1, 1993
Fan Recaps and Comments:
This show was on the final night of "In-Fest '93", an independent music and arts festival in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. A 3-day pass was $35 in advance and $45 on the day, while a 1-day pass was $25.
John Flansburgh stated in a 2018 interview with the YY Scene that this show was "easily in the Top 10 of worst shows we've ever done", while also publicly addressing the co-headling band, Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet, that "we're really not such a shitty band." The band's set reportedly ended around 1:30am[1], with Flansburgh confirming that he had walked out in the middle of the show in a 1994 interview with VOX Magazine:
Oh man, that was the worst show we've ever done. I cannot apologize enough. There were so many things about it which were completely fucked up. Nobody told me that my amp had been left in New York. Nobody had the guts to tell me that I was going out on stage, without a soundcheck, with an amp I had never played through before. Plus the horns were completely frozen so there was no way we could play in tune. That was one in a million. I've never left a stage in the middle of a show before. It was something that we should have sorted out before. It was so screwed up, it was so messed up, it was really, really weird. Somehow it was just not to be that day.
Flansburgh would further elaborate on the circumstances surrounding the show's collapse in the same 2018 interview with the YY Scene[2]:
The first thing that was strange is that we were afforded no ability to soundcheck and we were playing on all rented backline, so none of the gear was our gear... And we were playing in almost pitch darkness, there was no light onstage. I didn’t know where the volume knob was. It was like out of a dream, frankly. Or I should say a nightmare. We were touring with a horn section and the night fell right as were going onstage, and the temperature fell precipitously — it went from (20 degrees) to (8 degrees) — and all the horns went really, really sharp and all of the string instruments went really, really flat and we couldn’t feel our hands.