1984-12 The Bob
They Might Be Giants
By Denise Barricklow, The Bob, December 1984
This is thought to be the first article written about They Might Be Giants, only a year after the creation of Dial-A-Song and before the release of the 1985 Demo Tape.
The cover charge is a quarter. A prolific band, They Might Be Giants write a new song each week. But what makes them quite special is a primary concern for their audience. In an ingenious use of the phone machine, they challenge the economic restraints of record distribution by providing the interested fan with an easy and inexpensive access to their sounds. Dial 718-387-6962 and you can hear the band's freshest ditty and a list of They Might Be Giants' appearance dates.
A great idea by a great band; They Might Be Giants have been playing on the smaller New York club scene for over a year now and words of praise continue to spread. They Might Be Giants are John Flansburgh on guitar and John Linnell on accordion. But despite their very sparse stage personnel, They Might Be Giants have had particular success on the small club venue. They play regularly at East Village spots. like 8BC, Limbo Lounge, Pyramid and Darinka as well as more mainstream places like Danceteria and Maxwells.
With songs like "Hell Hotel", "Youth Culture Killed My Dog", "Alienation's For The Rich", and "Here's Hoping You Don't Become a Robot", it's no wonder that their status as a novelty item often precedes the image of TMBG as pop artists. Yet they assert that They Might Be Giants isn't "nuts for nuts' sake."--that is, they aren't writing songs just to get a laugh. They claim to write in response to their world. Admittedly, this vision is unique. "Youth Culture Killed My Dog", for example, was written by John, who, while riding through Brooklyn on his bike, sang the tune into his Sony cassette recorder. It was conceived to be their "monster hit" closer for the show, and still, John concedes, the title came out quirky.
A minimal approach to music is apparent not only in TMBG's composing of songs. One can see from their show that the band is not fetishistic about instruments. Flansburgh plays an "imitation Fender guitar" and Linnell plays accordion. Their intention is not to impress anyone with the technology of their show. They work with whatever resources are at hand. Two years ago they had at frustrating time looking for a drummer, they recorded a drum track instead. Since then their rhythm section has consisted of a pre-recorded tape. Recently, they've started mixing things down at PASS studios in New York. With the additional help of a friend's DMX drum machine, They Might Be Giants have cleaned up their sound immensely.
By learning to do without many things, They Might Be Giants challenge their creativity. To interesting ends, too. It was after the band was forced to stop performing last winter when some of their equipment was stolen and Linnell broke his wrist that the phone machine idea first came to fruition. And this invention, too, is not without its limiting aspects. They Might Be Giants have discovered that certain pitches cause the tape to reset itself, thus cutting off the song. Yet this factor has not daunted the band's infatuation with the project. Each week they record a new song for the machine and only last summer did they play reruns of some of their more than 80 song repertoire.
It's a great deal, the phone machine. For a nominal sum, you might hear "Hell Hotel", a song which matches in meter the lyrics to "Gonna Take a Miracle" by Laura Nyro. It begins "Salutations pain his karma..." Anyway, you decide.