1988-03 Option
This Is Pop?
By Michaeleen Trimarchi, Option, March 1988
Interview conducted in October 1987, five months before publication.
"They Might Be Giants, They Could Be Giants," sighs John Linnell of the pop-rock duo They Might Be Giants. "The name is easily spelled, it's just the words themselves that most people get wrong." "The Mighty Be Giants," adds partner John Flansburgh. With a critically successful debut album which included the unlikely MTV hit "Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head" and a new EP and LP set for release at press time, misnomers are quickly becoming a part of the past for the New York group. Linnell and Flansburgh are so adept at capturing both humor and pathos in their rapid-fire lyrics while mixing rockin' guitar with, say, a cheesy accordion riff or a belch from a baritone sax, that they reach an amazingly eclectic audience. "Our first performance was in Central Park at an FSLN rally where we were introduced as 'El Groupo de Rock'n'Roll,'" recalls Flansburgh. Despite the fact that only a few people in the audience of Sandinista supporters knew enough English to understand the lyrics, the fledgling group was able to bring the audience to its feet, dancing. "Here I was playing on a really clunky old guitar with John playing the clarinet for a lot of Nicaraguan men. That's where it all began."
Such unlikely conversions result from a schizophrenic catalog of tunes ranging from polka ("The Famous Polka") to blues ("Lie Still, Little Bottle") to straight pop-rock ("Don't Let's Start"), with some of the more inventive titles around today ("I Will Date the Girl From Venus For Science," "I Was a Snowball In Hell," and "Youth Culture Killed My Dog"). "The sky's the limit when we're writing," says Linnell, flashing the widest grin ever to grace a stage.
Flansburgh adds, "I very rarely feel 'Oh, I can't do that' when writing a song. Sometimes I think 'Well, that sounds a little old and tired, I think I'll put it in my song.' Music has got a universal aspect such that you don't have to worry about it being too different or too much the same, it just seems to work either way." For a new twist on the Johnny Cash riff "Daddy sang bass," give "Boat Of Car" a listen; recall Gary Glitter with "(She Was A) Hotel Detective"; or rethink the Who with "I Hope That I Get Old Before I Die?" Even the old and tired "MacArthur Park" comes to renewed life onstage in "It's Not My Birthday."
The two met in high school in Sudbury, Massachusetts. "We've both been making up stuff since we were very, very small. We used to do tape projects in high school that were really, sort of," Linnell pauses, "just sounds." "Musique concrete, John! C'mon, say it!" jumps in Flansburgh. Linnell grins, "Musique rubber. We weren't thinking too hard about doing pop music at that time, and then we weren't hanging around together while we both went to school, and I was playing in a New England band (the Bags). Then we both moved to New York at the same time and starting doing stuff and for some reason we just decided to do this. Originally we weren't even playing the East Village, we were playing these really ridiculous clubs that were completely hopeless..."
Flansburgh continues, "Showcase clubs where most bands play top 40 covers. And when we first started performing we thought the show should change every time, which is really one of the craziest ideas in the world. Like 'we've performed that song in public already, we can't do it again,' and so it was a month before we'd do another show. The format of our live show is that we have the rhythm section on tape, John plays the accordion and sings and I play the guitar and sing. We'd change everything and thought it was so much more of a production effort. Now we do the same songs..." Linnell finishes, "When we're touring we do exactly the same show generally, from show to show. Except that it's incredibly, dynamically different each time! (both laugh)
TMBG were able to present completely different shows early on as a result of their prolific output, with an estimated 300 songs ("less than we've said before but too many to remember") written during the past four years. Most of the songs have appeared on the most innovative marketing idea yet devised for an upcoming music group, the TMBG Dial-A-Song service. Fans, or people who want a musical sample before buying a record or seeing a show, can call 718-387-6962 and hear a different song each day (every three days during tours), then leave a comment "after the tone." Tunes that generate lots of mid-verse hang-ups aren't likely to make it to the stage show, but sometimes word-of-mouth acceptance of a new song can be far-reaching. After hearing rumors about "We're The Replacements," Paul Westerberg called up Dial-A-Song to hear it for himself and audiences have requested it so much that it appears on the new EP.
Their first recorded release was a homemade cassette that ended up being reviewed in, of all places, People magazine. Flansburgh recalls, "We just wanted to get something out. We were tired of record companies going 'Well, you guys sound really interesting but we need more songs,' and so you give them 50 songs and they're like 'Oh, that's great but if only we had more songs.' You start feeling like you're going insane after a while, so we just did it ourselves and sold a lot more than we expected to (the tape's no longer available). Once we were in People, everybody else climbed on board. It was kind of a surprising place to start."
Taking advantage of the exposure, TMBG quickly did a video for "Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head," directed by Adam Bernstein. John F. notes, "We did it for an extremely small amount of money. The record wasn't out yet but we thought that maybe it would be a way to get people to see more of what we do. When we made it we thought it would get on 'The Joe Franklin Show' or '120 Minutes' maybe once, but we never thought it would get on MTV. People put down video a lot 'because it's run by corporations,' but you don't hear these people grousing about how record stores or radio stations are controlled by corporations. As a way for alternative things to get to people, sometimes MTV's the most progressive thing they can get, which is really a sorry state of affairs, but it is a way that people have heard about us. I'm glad we did it, I think videos are bogus, but they can be reasonably entertaining."
But Linnell comments wryly, "Video is the medium of the future, and I wish it would stay there. It's easy for people to get into the thing of the video being an authentic cousin or counterpart to the song. I think it's really agonizing to play in a band for years and to suddenly have this ridiculous image stuck permanently onto your song, when really the song's supposed to be the whole thing. You're not supposed to need a visual aid for the song, but video is one of those necessary things for getting the word out and it's possible to work within it." Their new video, "Don't Let's Start," will also be directed by Bernstein, and will coincide with the release of an EP on Bar/None.
Not content to remain in the confines of Lower Manhattan, TMBG has begun to invade England and Japan with releases on Rough Trade and Victor RCA. "Yeah, we're working on the old 'big in England' thing that so many bands have tried to perfect before us," says John. "We just played London and will tour Europe in November. We'll also be going to Japan in January or February." These frenetic new ambassadors of U.S. pop will deliver a stage show that generates impassioned audience participation via cue cards ("we can't expect people to know the words, but we certainly want them to sing along"), a stick capped with purple fur that keeps time as well as any metronome, oversized paper-mache hands and other puppets, and perhaps dueling loaves of French bread.
Even though they are fully capable of eliciting claps and clucks and peeps from Sandinistas and generally aloof Loisaida New Yorkers, they do like to maintain a certain degree of control over the audience reaction. "We did a show in Pittsburgh where a commercial radio station had totally jumped on two songs, so all these people showed up just wanting to hear these two songs. EVERYBODY was singing along, knew all the words, it was this ridiculous thing. It was kind of satisfying to have people being so enthusiastic, but there was something really psychotic and scary to feeling like there were 'more of them' than us," says Flansburgh. "They were more enthusiastic than I was about the song," adds Linnell. "It was really weird. But in general, the audience that we've got is a good one for us, they're gonna continue demanding interesting songs. Even when we're on the road playing for people who have never seen us before, they're just as interested in the new stuff as they are the songs off the record."
John F. recalls another memorable show. "On the first leg of the 'Bring Me the Head of Kenny Rogers World Tour '87,' we went down south and played in Norfolk, Virginia, where half the people work for the army or navy, kind of a tough town. The owner made us do two sets of two hours of music and, of course, our songs are really short so we were contractually obliged to do like every single song we know. There were four guys in the audience getting just totally twisted, and when we were introducing the song 'Pencil Rain' these guys shout out 'Pencil Dick!', so that was when we realized that we'd better be careful about what we say," says Flansburgh, whose chemistry-lab eyeglasses disguise his good looks and create quite the pencil-pack-toting, geeky appearance. But the sight of reed-thin Linnell wailing away on a baritone sax that's as big as he is or squeezing out the most danceable tunes ever to come out of an accordion, with Flansburgh tirelessly flailing at his guitar, leading singalongs with huge cue cards, and calling out for perfectly timed screams, clucks and claps, converted even the would-be marauders. "We really felt like we were gonna get beaten up when we left, but by the end of the night we had actually gotten these guys to scream on cue, make peeping sounds, dance along to us on their own speed, and they all bought records. They understood. We touched them."