1985 Demo Tape

For the various promotional demo tapes released by TMBG in 1985, see 1985 Promotional Demo Tapes

	1985 Demo Tape Demo tape by They Might Be Giants
	First released	July 4, 1985 Release details / collectors: Show | Hide	Tracks	23	Last demo tape	1985 Promo Demo Tape
	Label	TMB Music	Length	39:07	Next demo tape	TMBG / Joshua Fried Split Single

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See Discography Abbreviations for definition of various terms.

Original photo used for the tape, photographed by Mark Stern, 1984

They Might Be Giants (known by fans as the 1985 Demo Tape) is the first album-length release by They Might Be Giants.

Description

Background

Ad for the tape, seen in Art In Context and various magazines

This self-titled, self-released cassette tape is the band's first album-length release, and second official release overall. It features 23 tracks, most of which are early versions of songs that ended up on the band's debut LP. The tape was originally distributed in 1985 and 1986, as a cassette-only album. The band sold it by mail order out of John Linnell's apartment, as well as at concerts and at the Manhattan record store Finyl Vinyl. The material was recorded onto standard store-bought audio cassettes, with black-and-white photocopied inserts on different colored paper (commonly yellow, but also on white and blue).

The band began selling the tape in the second half of 1985. At the time of the tape's release, the band considered it their debut album. Contemporary advertisements described the release as a "23 song LP cassette" and an "LP-length cassette." John Flansburgh described the tape in the documentary Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns: "We didn't call it a demo tape, and we were selling it, so it was something real. But it was only real because we said it was real. There was nobody behind it. It was a cassette, it was just the cheapest thing possible." The release was given the label of a 'demo tape' retrospectively, after the release of the band's debut LP.

Recording

The tape was produced by Bill Krauss and engineered by Alex Noyes. The majority of the material on the tape was recorded at Studio PASS. PASS (the Public Access Synthesizer Studio) was a non-profit recording studio in SoHo, which mostly appealed to experimental electronic musicians. Noyes, a college friend of Krauss, was an engineer at the studio, and he let the band work there after hours. Krauss recalled: "They were charging $15 an hour and we couldn't really afford that, so Alex would let us in. We would work from 10pm until we couldn't stay awake anymore."^[1] Recordings were also created at John Flansburgh's home studio, and possibly at Al Houghton's Dubway Studio in Manhattan.

John Flansburgh described the recording process in a 2017 Tumblr post:

We had jobs, and had been playing out pretty much every weekend from '84 on, so we took the money we earned from shows and dedicated it to acquiring the very cheapest studio time available (often evenings or late nights). But we were also home taping enthusiasts, so we had been recording demos of songs for years, and because we were creating backing rhythm tracks for the show we were kinda half way there if we put demos together in a studio. We went to a cassette duping place and just made them in batches, and again plowed the money back into the project.

Bill Krauss recalled in a 2019 interview: "We were always recording because we needed to record for the shows, because all of the tracks were on tape for the live shows. [...] So, things that started out as demos made their way onto what became the 23-song collection. We didn't set out to make a 23-song cassette. We just started accumulating stuff and we had a bunch, and it became a thing." John Linnell described the tape in Gigantic: "I think at one point we were thinking it was like a history of the band."

Release

People review, June 30, 1986

The band created two music videos off the back of the release. In July 1986, they created a music video for "Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head" with director Adam Bernstein. The song seems to have been a priority track for the band at the time — it was the first song on their tape, and was featured on a number of promotional sampler tapes. The band also created a music video for Rabid Child, which remains unreleased. The band issued a promotional cassette, titled the "They Might Be Giants Album Sampler," to support the release of the tape.

The tape garnered a few positive early reviews, including in Oh No! Noho! in September 1985, and the Valley Advocate Springfield in May 1986. In an unlikely turn of events, the tape was reviewed by Michael Small in the June 30, 1986 issue of People magazine. The review was highly favorable, and it gave the band some of its first national exposure. John Flansburgh explained in a 2024 interview:

People magazine was an incredibly mainstream thing. Like, everybody's parents had a subscription to People magazine. So, to get a review in the front of book part of People magazine... Hundreds of thousands of people saw it, and thousands of people literally sent us checks and ordered it. It was very weird that it was so persuasive and interesting to people. [...] It was a rave review, it really made a huge difference for us, cause we were just a local band.

The success of the tape lead to the band signing a record deal with Bar/None. Bar/None was a small Hoboken-based independent record label founded in 1986 by Tom Prendergast. Glenn Morrow joined Bar/None as a business partner in late 1986, with the specific intent to sign They Might Be Giants and give their tape a wider release. John Linnell recalled in 1988: "[Morrow] heard the cassette and liked it, so he made the suggestion to clean up the tracks, cut a few songs, and he said he'd press it as a record."^[2] Bar/None had only released one record at that point, and it was a very small operation. John Flansburgh: "They said, 'We'll manufacture that tape for you and you can sell in record stores.' It wasn't like, 'We're gonna make you stars.' It was more like, 'Hey, want us to print up your record? We'll do that.' It was very low-key."^[3]

The band re-recorded and remixed material from the tape at Dubway Studio in Manhattan. They released their debut album, They Might Be Giants, in November 1986, after which the tape went out of print. Almost every track from the tape was reworked for the album — some more drastically than others — and a number of new songs were recorded. A few of the tape's songs did not make the cut for the album, and were saved for later releases. "Hell Hotel" was the only song from the tape that was not reworked for a later release.

In 1993, the tape was re-released as a promotion by the Hello Recording Club. It had a limited edition of 3,000 copies, and all proceeds went to the non-profit People with AIDS Coalition. If subscribers added $5 to their Hello subscription fee, they would receive a copy of the reissue, which had a glossy color insert. In a 2022 interview on KMSU, John Flansburgh hinted that the band was working on another reissue of the tape. He confirmed that the masters had been digitized and that preparations had begun: "The '85 demo tape was sort of an ever-evolving thing. There's one final version that got reviewed in People magazine, and that is the master that we, I think, are going to be going with. We've got the material. Part of it is just mastering it in a way that's going to sound like a finished recording. [...] It is my goal to get it out into the world, and I would like to see it happen."

Track listing

#	Title	Length	Lyrics	Guitar Tab
1	(Put Your Hand Inside The) Puppet Head	2:10		N/A
2	When It Rains It Snows	1:18		N/A
3	Number Three	1:41		N/A
4	Don't Let's Start	1:06
5	You'll Miss Me	1:53		N/A
6	Hope That I Get Old Before I Die	1:12		N/A
7	Biggest One	1:23		N/A
8	32 Footsteps	1:36
9	Boat Of Car	1:14		N/A
10	Cowtown	2:22		N/A
11	Chess Piece Face	1:21		N/A
12	Rabid Child	1:31
13	Youth Culture Killed My Dog	2:58		N/A
14	Alienation's For The Rich	2:25
15	The Day	1:24		N/A
16	(She Was A) Hotel Detective	2:19		N/A
17	Which Describes How You're Feeling	1:24		N/A
18	Toddler Hi-Way	0:25
19	Become A Robot	1:18
20	I'm Def	1:25		N/A
21	Hell Hotel	1:54		N/A
22	They Might Be Giants	2:59		N/A
23	Nothing's Going To Change My Clothes	1:49		N/A

Promotional & Print Material

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  1985 promotional ad for the tape

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  Poster advertising the tape, February 1986

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  Poster advertising the tape, May 1986

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  1993 Hello Recording Club bulletin announcing the tape's reissue

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  Advertisement for the reissue, from a 1993 TMBG Information Club newsletter

Variants

There have been at least five 'batches' of the 1985 Demo Tape, each with noteworthy differences in both layout and content. John Flansburgh explained in a 2024 interview: "It was always evolving because we were always popping back into a studio and recording a new song, or updating something. We didn't really think of it as a set release. That's why there's so many versions of it."

The versions of the tape are presented here in their estimated chronological order. Each iteration of the tape built upon the previous, and changes carried over with each version.

1985 Demo Tape Example 1

• Possibly the earliest, this tape features a simpler track-listing layout on the inside of the J-card compared to others, with the tracks and credits vertical in one column.
• The cassette is a black C46 cassette tape with either a hand-written or typewriter-typed label on side one, which reads: "P. & C. 1985 TMB Music / They Might Be Giants / Side One." One example of the tape includes a typed message on Side Two that reads "P.S. They Might Be Giants love you."

Images: Example 1a

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  Example 1a, side 1

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  Example 1a, side 2

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  Example 1a, cover

Images: Example 1b

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  Example 1b, side 1

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  Example 1b, side 2

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  Example 1b, cover

Images: Example 1c

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  Example 1c, side 1

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  Example 1c, side 2

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  Example 1c, cover

1985 Demo Tape Example 2

• Possibly superseding Example 1, this tape features a more elaborate layout for the track-listing on the J-card, orienting the layout 90 degrees to the previous example and splitting the track-listing into two columns of "Side One" and "Side Two."
• The cassette is a smoky clear or black plastic C46 cassette tape with a red stamped label on both sides, reading "Side One / They Might Be Giants / ℗ & © 1985 TMB Music" and "Side Two / They Might Be Giants / ℗ & © 1985 TMB Music."
• Features a few song differences:
  • "You'll Miss Me" is a different mix with extra tom drum and cowbell fills, panning on the handclaps, and noise stabs at 1:08.
  • The Micromoog synth line in "Cowtown" is doubled with delay and panned hard left/right, instead of the monaural synth in Example 1.

Images: Example 2

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  Example 2, side 1

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  Example 2, side 2

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  Example 2, cover

1985 Demo Tape Example 3

• Visually identical to Example 2.
• Features a few song differences:
  • "Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head" is replaced with a rough mix of the final 1986 album version. Lacks the "Things! Gotta do! Head! Puppet Head!" backing vocals and changes the "subway" lyric to "carwash."
  • "Hope That I Get Old Before I Die" is replaced with a rough mix of the final 1986 album version. The song features a different, louder bass drum part and a more monaural mix compared to the final song.
• Some copies contain a demo of "The Famous Polka" as the last track on side A, that isn't listed on the cassette's J-card. Gary Ray of Darinka owned one such copy, which is now stored in NYU's Darinka archives.

Images: Example 3

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  Example 3, side 1

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  Example 3, side 2

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  Example 3, cover

1985 Demo Tape Example 4

• Identical in layout and content to Example 3, but is dated 1986.
• Includes the unlisted "The Famous Polka" as the last track on side A.

Images: Example 4

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  Example 4, side 1

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  Example 4, side 2

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  Example 4, cover

1993 Hello Reissue

• 1993 reissue of the tape for the Hello Recording Club. Limited release of 3,000 copies, and all proceeds were donated to the People With Aids Coalition.
• Based on Examples 3 & 4. Lacks the unlisted "The Famous Polka," but is otherwise identical in content.
• Includes a new description on the cassette's J-card:

Hello Recording Club, PO Box 551, Palisades, New York 10694 - 1 year subscription send $41 check or money order (NY residents add 8.25% sales tax) or call 1-800-HELLO-41 for credit cards - For an additional $5 receive this cassette - All proceeds from the sale of this cassette go to the People With Aids Coalition - All songs written by They Might Be Giants, published by They Might Be Giants Music ASCAP, administered by WB Music Corp. - ℗ & © 1985 They Might Be Giants Music. All Rights Reserved. HEL-T

Images: 1993 Hello Reissue

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  Hello reissue, side 1

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  Hello reissue, side 2

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  Hello reissue, cover