1988-02-10 Washington Square News
Taking a Giant step into the music world
By Dorene Lomanto, Washington Square News, February 10, 1988
"It's time for the famous polka!" cried John Linnell, pounding out a tune on his accordion and thumping his foot. The audience cheered, yelling a few "Heys!" as John Flansburgh pounded his chest between screeching guitar solos.
Soon it was time for The Stick's performance. "The Stick, The Stick!" cried the audience. "This song was written to be performed by The Stick," said Flansburgh before he began pounding "the instrument" on the floor and singing "Lie Still, Little Bottle." "More Stick! More Stick!" requested the audience. Flansburgh pounded the stick harder.
"Would the drunk person please get off the tape recorder," Flansburgh yelled toward the back of the room. This "technical problem we call a fuck up," as he put it, preempted the performance of "Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head." Then there was the group's musical science lesson: The sun is a mass of incandescent gas / A gigantic nuclear furnace / Where hydrogen is turned into helium / At a temperature of millions of degrees.
The above took place at a recent They Might Be Giants concert at Maxwells in Hoboken, N.J. With such zany performances — including many New York City gigs, hit songs like "Don't Let's Start" from its debut LP, and the ingenious Dial-A-Song, the duo is living up to its name.
"We were on Nickelodeon before we were ever on MTV. So, the 5-year-olds of America were involved in our creation. We are the most happening band," Flansburgh said of the group's emergence on the musical scene two years ago, as he sat sipping coffee in a midtown restaurant. "This guy Neil at Nickelodeon just liked us for whatever reason and played our video. He then brought the video ["The Puppet Head"] up to the people at MTV, and it was like if Nickelodeon can play it how come MTV can't?"
Although Flansburgh and Linnell met in high school in Lincoln, Mass., it wasn't until they came to Brooklyn in 1981 that the band formed. "A friend of ours wanted to start a band and we all played the appropriate instruments," Flansburgh said. "We lived in the same building which was this nightmare, sort of burnt-out house on Third Street," Linnell said.
"The New York Times described our block as 'filled with criminals, prostitutes and drug dealers,'" Flansburgh added. "We were a little hurt."
"It wasn't that bad," Linnell interrupted. "All our friends happened to live there, so we started making dinner recordings together and mostly the whole thing was kind of generated out of doing home recordings."
It was actually very productive because we were terrified of leaving our house," Flansburgh added.
The trio dissolved before they even started playing. "Then John and I decided we were going to do a duo," Linnell said. "We had a friend who got us a gig in Central Park at a Sandinista rally. That was the one show that was referred to as our first gig. We didn't really have a name then. We were called El Grupo de Rock 'n' Roll by the Sandinistas. Some people said it was the best thing we ever did."
The Giants took their name from a ventriloquist friend's list of potential project titles. (It's also the name of a movie, Linnell pointed out.) It was from another friend that the Giants decided to use recorded background music for live performances.
From there, the duo started recording on flexidiscs by sneaking into a studio late at night where a friend worked. Things were going well. AND THEN — tragedy struck. "I had a bike accident," Linnell said. "It wasn't too serious. I broke my wrist, but the same week John got his apartment broken into. We lost the brain of our show — a two-track tape recorder."”
But something good did come out of this fiasco (which happened about three years ago,) namely their invention of Dial-a-Song - (718) 387-6962, an answering machine message which features a new They Might Be Giants song daily. “We had to think of something else to do after the accidents and the idea of Dial-a-Song never seemed like a good idea until we had nothing else to do," Flansburgh said.
About 99 percent of the songs They Might Be Giants perform live and have recorded we created on Dial-a-Song. "That's our demo world," Flansburgh said, "We use Dial as a demo service for ourselves. It's a way for us to record a song really fast, hear the sound, and if we like it, do something with it."
“A lot of times when they [the songs] appear on Dial-a-Song they are in their embryonic stage," Flansburgh continued. "It might just be a chorus or it might just be a verse and then it might just be something that will be a verse of something else. It's definitely kind of like… ya' know those garages that are sort of like chop shops. Dial-a-Song is sort of a musical chop shop."
The only drawback to Dial-a-Song is that listeners can't leave messages after the beep. "It used to take messages," Flansburgh said. "But after a certain amount of messages it would fill up the tape and it would stop sending the outgoing Dial-a-Song message so we had to stop. I wish we could get messages."
It wasn't until late 1986 that They Might be Giants released their first album, They Might Be Giants (Bar None Records), which includes "Don't Let's Start" and "The Puppet Head" — two songs which have received local radio airplay. A celebration in honor of the sale of 300,000 copies of the album was held last night in Brooklyn.
The duo is now in the studio recording their second album, Lincoln, which is scheduled for release next month. According to Flansburgh, this album will have "a little more range to it" as compared to their first LP. Most of the songs the two have already performed live, including "Lie Still Little Bottle" and "Cowtown."
But don't expect all of their Dial-a-Songs to go vinyl. "There's some songs we do that are some people's favorite songs, live, like the science song "The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas," Flansburgh said. "People really like that song, but there would be no purpose in recording that, unless we really want people to think of us as just a comedy band."
And a comedy band they are not, "I think we are funnier than U2, and not as funny as Gilbert Gottfried," Linnell said, "but we rock harder than Gilbert Gottfried."
This image of a comedy band may be accredited not only to their humorous songs, but also to the duo's use during performances of three-foot-tall hats, large reproduced heads of a man, and the infamous stick. The props are used, Flansburgh said, "to vary the show, keep it exciting. I think I thought of a [sing the stick in concert] when I was falling asleep."
"Hey, you guys are really great," said a young man as he was leaving the restaurant.
"Hey, thanks a lot," Flansburgh said.
"Thank you," Linnell said.
"We paid that guy," Flansburgh added.
They Might Be Giants believe that more and more people are noticing them. "I'm getting more and more paranoid about it," Linnell said, "but probably anyone who knows who we are actually feels like they can come up to us and say hello."
But, he added, "It's probably disproportionate. You sort of feel at times like everybody is staring. Then there's the other side where you tell someone you are in a band and they've never heard of you."
"It's much better to have someone say hello than to stare at you in a funny way," Flansburgh said. "You don't know if they've seen your video or want to take your wallet."