1987-12 Keyboard Magazine
Accordion Revival
By Bob Doerschuk, Keyboard Magazine, December 1987
Archived from: https://web.archive.org/web/20031228172322/http://www.tmbg.net/articles/keyboard1987.html
Excerpt. The article focuses on several different artists, but this is the only section where Linnell is mentioned.
Already they've made it onto the pages of People, the summit of pop culture. They've headlined at the Village Gate. They even have their own Dial-A-Song service. And they did it all with nothing more than their wits, a guitar, and an accordion.
They Might Be Giants is a duo from Hoboken, New Jersey, consisting of John Flansburgh on guitar and John Linell on accordion. For four years they've been in New York, working their way through the subterranean club maze toward the bright lights of a People endorsement. Success hasn't spoiled them, though. Their music is just as strange as ever. You can check it out on They Might Be Giants, a collection of quirky short strikes into the dark corners of pop music consciousness.
Though there are other keyboards on the album, the accordion is perhaps the visual and musical center of TMBG's live act. "Basically, it grew out of a street-type performance that John and I did," Linnell explains, "for which I borrowed someone's accordion and discovered that it was the solution to every keyboard player's dilemma, which is that you can't move around onstage. Plus, it's much more direct for controlling the kinds of things that an organ player uses a volume pedal for. You have this enormous amount of direct dynamic control. It's like breathing.
"Also, there's a style thing that's very appealing about the accordion," he continues. "On the one hand, it's associated with schlock-you know, adult popular music from the '50s. But it also cuts through a lot of other cultures-European musics and various American subcultures."
Before incorporating the accordion into They Might Be Giants, Linnell had never played the instrument. As a result, he brought to it a set of preconceptions that players drilled in accordion since childhood might not share. "I grew up in the suburbs outside of Boston, where nobody knew anybody who played accordion, and nobody's parents had one," he says. "Since then I've met millions of people from that same environment whose grandparents actually played the accordion in Europe. But it just happens that I had no exposure to it until I was into my 20s, except for The Lawrence Welk Show. Fortunately, there's always something to be gotten out of things like that. There's something worth mining even with a cultural devil like Lawrence Welk. I'd say I probably owe as much to that as to any real European traditions.
Of course, audiences often harbor similar preconceptions. "It would be difficult for me to change those attitudes," Linnell admits. "This image of the accordion is such a deeply imbedded thing in the minds of the people we play for that I don't know how to convince them to change their minds. Even people who listen to [avant-garde composer and accordionist] Pauline Oliveros may have a certain camp enjoyment of her. And maybe that isn't so bad. I don't believe there's any such thing as an entirely new music, or music without preconception. If there is, it wouldn't hold anything for the listener. You absolutely need something to start from. On the other hand, the opposite thing, which is doing something entirely retro, is equally useless. You have to strike a balance."
TMBG do that by building their music on familiar foundation. "Number Three" starts with a thumping country beat and hillbilly harmonies, then moves through bizarre saxophone fills in unrelated tempos. "Boat Of Car" evokes early Zappa, with a Johnny Cash vocal fill tossed in at odd moments. The other songs on the album stem from straight pop or rock, but blossom in a profusion of post-punk and underground art directions, with the accordion providing full-bodied swelling chords on "The Day," rhythmic ostinati on "She's An Angel," ironic timbral references on "32 Footsteps" and "Rabid Child," and an almost sentimental texture on "Hideaway Folk Family."
"There are a few other keyboards besides the accordion on that song ['Folk Family']," Linnell says, "but they're very blended in. On that last chorus, there's a backward Casio CZ-101 as well as the forward accordion. So some funny synthetic elements are blended into the accordion, although on that particular song it all becomes a single sound. On one thing we did recently, 'When It Rains It Snows,' we ran the accordion bass through an Eventide Harmonizer and lowered it an octave, but it still has a basic accordion sound. A while back we recorded the accordion through a fuzz box, and that was a really fantastic sound, like a harmonica going into a cheap mike and being blasted through a Fender amp. Basically, it brought the quietest sounds up to the volume level of the loudest sounds, so the sound of the air going through the bellows was much louder.. I even got this terrific loud gasping noise by moving the bellows without pushing the keys down. The thing about the accordion, though, is that if you electronically alter it too much, it moves very quickly into a synthesizer sound that doesn't suggest accordion. That's why we've kept the accordion almost completely untreated on most of the recordings we've done so far."
Linnell says that it took him about a year to get used to the accordion. "I've never completely gotten the [chord and bass] buttons down, though," he admits. "I don't really sue them in a live show, since we have our bass lines on tape. I use them when I'm playing at home to get the bass going. My Walters accordion, which was made in New York in 1928, really has a great bass. It's a four-reed instrument, so you can get this vox humana richness."
Since his Walters is a somewhat delicate wooden instrument, Linnell didn't take it on TMBG's European tour this fall. He'll probably leave it at home during their Japanese tour too. Until they pass through your neighborhood, though, you can catch its meaty timbres on They Might Be Giants. Or, if your store has run out of copies, try their Dial-A-Song line at (718) 387-6962. And feel free to let the machine know you heard about them here.