1987-01-27 The Village Voice
New York Giants
By RJ Smith, The Village Voice, January 27, 1987
Archived from: https://archive.org/details/per_village-voice_the-village-voice_1987-01-27_32_4/
Under the canopy of plastic oranges, you can't get much at Gray's Papaya at Broadway and 72nd. It's totally about juice and hot dogs. This heaven isn't varied, but it is abundant. The best: a 50/50 mix of papaya and coconut juice, so chunky you can eat it with a fork, a loamy head of orange scum atop. I met John Flansburgh (rhythm box) and John Linnell (accordion) at Gray's, thinking these absurdists, who are They Might Be Giants, might go nuts in this tube-steak temple. You could call them minimalist—they depend on tapes, their arrangements are well drawn and spare. But cheap is as apropos, and so is skeptical: they're control freaks. We talked about their debut They Might Be Giants (Bar/None, Box 1704 Main Post Office, Hoboken 07030), David Byrne, the South, Joe Franklin. I got an orange mustache from the juice. Absurdly, they stuck to coffee.
"We like to think of ourselves as the Hall and Oates of music," Flansburgh says. For the last three years the Giants have played around town as much as anybody, including stints on the Brooklyn Bridge promenade and a bar appearance that collided with a wake. "There was this entire row of extremely sad people, and they all turned around and looked at us," remembers Linnell.
They call themselves real coffee achievers, and their songwriting has the caffeine addict's high-speed verve. When one John broke his wrist bike-messengering and the other couldn't perform cause his equipment was ripped off, they devised Dial-A-Song instead (718-387-6962). Changing the tune most days in the past three years, they figure the service gets about 50 calls each day and a good half hour of messages after the beep. This from a Sports Illustrated piece on University of Missouri forward Derrick Chievous (who has just poured 25 envelopes of sugar into his iced tea): "I love sugar. Ten Twinkies and I'm energized. Then, once I'm up and all the sugar's gone, I go into down syndrome." Some day Flansburgh and Linnell are gonna crash. And you are not going to want to be there, then. Right now, they build tunes—Kraftwerk parodies, drinking songs, Vegas naturals, waltzes—the way others build toothpick houses or carve biblical scenes on whalebone.
"Are there other songwriters you guys admire?" I ask.
Linnell: "We're into this formal thing, which doesn't specifically relate to particular songwriters so much as the idea of certain kinds of music. It would be hard to nail down what kinds of influences we have. A lot of it is like, elevator music. And a lot of it is like rock music."
"Like rock music," adds Flansburgh.
"But that question's always an embarrassing one, especially if you owe anything to your contemporaries," Linnell adds.
"Besides Paul McCartney?"
"Besides Paul, who is a given. That's like the space in the middle of the bingo card, the Paul space."
"Do you guys have big record collections?"
Linnell: "I have a very small record collection. I tend to like it quiet in my house, I tend to turn the radio off. Although, there is this restaurant where I go where they play light music. And that's a gas, because you have no choice—you can't go and eat without hearing this stuff, you have to accept it. The arrangements can really be amazing. They can do, like, Police songs that way."
They Might Be Giants are good at mocking all kinds of wood-toned, inoffensive sounds—like rock music. They invent clichés. But these guys aren't merely ironic. Their satire has subjects, like Lower East Side art angst ("Alienation's For The Rich") and like death ("Hope I Get Old Before I Die").
Writing songs for each other before they became Giants, they have the energy (and weirdness) of confirmed cultists as well as the wit and pop-tune legibility to poke beyond—to MTV and college radio, all of a sudden. And don't underestimate that Dial-A-Song: with no means to reach people, they thought up a cheap new way to find an audience. "All these record company guys are like, “We've got a place for you in the songwriting dungeon in hell,'" says Flansburgh. They have taken a break from their day jobs to go on their first road trip, 18 shows in 21 days in the South, after that the Midwest. "Then we get jobs warming beds in Bellevue," Linnell says. "We're just taking Bill Krauss, our producer, with us," says Flansburgh. "Bill's the spine of this band."
"We're the lungs," Linnell adds. "That's us, just another spine and lung show."