1988-11-02 Rock Australia Magazine
Big Audio Duo-Tones
By Shane Danielsen, Rock Australia Magazine, November 2, 1988
SHANE DANIELSEN throws his voice to the Large Apple, finds one of the two Johns that inhabit the beanstalk of THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS and discovers the quirks of heart, strangeness and charm
THEY Might Be Giants was a 1971 film starring George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward, the former playing a psychiatric patient who believes themselves to be Sherlock Holmes, the latter as his bemused Doctor (whose name just happens to be Watson, natch), dragged along on a hilarious urban picaresque in search of some vague but omnipresent evil. Woodward initially attempts to draw Scott from his delusion, only to come to share in its apparent reality. He is a figure of galvanic energy and faith, inspiring the dispossessed of New York City to dream beyond their situations. All in all, it's a quite brilliant film — one of my all-time favourites. Unfairly neglected, condemned to the dross of late-night scheduling (with other occasional gems such as My Man Godfrey), and one for which the world 'quirky' might well have been devised. It was only a matter of time before a band took the name for their own.
And it's a description equally applicable to these two. John Linnell is one of the two Johns (the other is Flansburg) who constitute They Might Be Giants, the band. Two people only: one plays electric guitar; the other, piano accordion. They sing; they're accompanied by a drum machine and backing tapes. Both write songs. Strange songs, too bizarre to simply arise from nothing. History should perhaps be outlined, origins clarified:
"It's been a very low, long incline to this... this 'pinnacle', I guess, that we find ourselves at now. We started with They Might Be Giants in 1981; in early '83, we started doing shows in clubs, and that was when we started using the taped backings, the winter of '83. It was about then we started playing in earnest — although initially it was absolutely hopeless: we were playing in these showcase clubs in New York, and the only people who came to our shows were the same ten or 15 of our friends who we'd convince to come down each evening.
"But about a year later, we kind of cracked our way into the East Village scene — there were a bunch of clubs that had opened — one was called Durinka, which was a really important place for us. Another one was 8 B.C. — all these places have since closed down. They were really just performance art spaces, which seemed to be the only niche we were appropriate for at the time: had we played any of the mainstream music clubs, I'm sure we'd have been told to get lost.
"And what we were doing wasn't really comedy, and accessible in that way, so the comedy clubs were out. But here a broad range of things were acceptable — you had the person who'd do typical Laurie Anderson type of stuff, or the people who'd sit down at a desk and just read poetry. And some really outrageous type of stuff that pretty much defies description."
It doesn't exactly sound like the kind of environment to develop a sense of humour in. The performance artists I've met have all been incredibly pretentious and obsessed with the intensity of their 'art'.
"Well, yeah, that's the usual way of things, I guess -- but, just for a while, in the East Village, humour actually played an important part in the scene, and even the most serious-minded of these artists were willing to try to make people laugh a little. And that openness was particularly good for us, 'cause people were free to react in any way they wanted to."
One should note that, to 'react', for these two, often means encouraging the audience to "scream like you're in Hell" between songs.
"Yeah. We had this real compulsion — that's the only word for it — when we started, to make the audience react immediately and openly throughout the course of the show. A passive audience was something we really didn't desire at all — I don't think we could've handled it." He laughs. "Best of all was an audience that stood up and was only about four feet away from us, so they could feel as if they were somehow in on it — whereas most of the recent art movements have tended to perform in front of an audience, but not really for them.
"And there are a lot of musicians who feel they can get up and do their thing, and it can exist independently of what's going on around it. There are bands who really require nothing in the way of audience response — particularly if you've got the standard guitar, bass, drums lineup — because those people can play to one another quite easily. Yet John and I are just two guys, facing an audience, and, short of each other, there's absolutely nothing to hide behind. It's a much more frightening environment."
If you'll pardon me saying so, you guys seem slightly at odds with your environment in general. Is it difficult to live in America — which is forever claiming it's the most rational nation on earth — and try to retain the kind of bizarre worldview you two obviously have? Or does it simply fuel your inspiration?
He makes a sound in his throat: half-agreement, half-dispute. "Mm, I don't know if that's entirely true. I find Americans always believe deep down they're less rational than the so-called 'Old World'. There's a feeling of colonialism, and a kind of self-conscious maverick streak, which I expect you find in Australia as well. You've got these vast areas of outback, and what you could romantically imagine to be lawless, untamed territory, where all the rules can be remade. And I think Americans like to pretend that's true of them too. It's all just play-acting, really. Kid-stuff.
"But then again, there's a very formal way that culture is dictated to this country — you can't help but be aware of that. Just in the way that a country as big as American still looks to Britain for its musical influences. Yet at the same time, you've got bands like the Residents and Pere Ubu, but I think they're perhaps not very self-aware, in a sense; they're not very clear on the formalised aspects of what they're doing. It's a... a naivete, I guess. Whereas in Britain, bands doing independent music have a much larger idiom to draw upon — and a greater sense of community, too. The geography of this place means you're really working in a vacuum — though whether John and I, living in one of the world's biggest cities, are necessarily a good example of that or not, I don't know...
"But like, the Residents, they come from this little part of Louisiana, and Pere Ubu from Ohio, neither of which are exactly capitals of world art, you know? It's very much your typical provincial Americans trying to grow up, but doing on their own." He pauses, gathering the unravelling threads of this reply. "It's a kind of stripped-down work-ethic — but at the same time, I'd like to think we still retain some of those qualities..." And another pause: "I think maybe I'd better drink another cup of coffee before I try to confuse us both any further."
Which gives us just time enough to consider the album. Eponymously titled, it features no less than 19 compositions ("Next one has 18: I figure in ten years we'll have it down pat, have a whole album of nothing. Real art"), ranging in tone from the ridiculous to the utterly absurd — yet always sublime, always intriguing. From the now familiar staccato of Don't Let's Start to the 45-second Toddler Highway, from the dimestore acid-rock guitar solo infusing (She Was A) Hotel Detective, to the hopelessly prosaic (not to mention literal) romanticism of She's An Angel (‘When you're following an angel does it mean you have to throw your body off a building? / Somewhere they're meeting on a pinhead / Calling you an angel, calling you the nicest things’) — it consistently defies not only ready classification, but also easy acceptance. Subterranean folk-hero Eugene Chadbourne contributes a phone-in guitar solo on one track, a gesture which speaks volumes about the spirit at work here.
The closing track Rhythm Section Want Ad contains a real howler: among the responses they gather comes the wide-eyed surmise that ‘You guys must be really into the Eurythmics’ — which is sadly, about as far left-of-centre as some innocents dare imagine:
Linnell laughs at the memory. "That specific remark came from a guy who was interested in managing us, but didn't really know precisely what to make of us. We were still handling it all ourselves at that time. And he must have thought that, because we were two people with tapes — which was like real avant-garde, y'know? — the Eurythmics must have been a huge influence on us," A kind of stifled giggle. "And we were just completely stopped short by that remark. We just thought, 'What had he missed?' 'Why does he like us?' Which was a pity, because he was really doing very well up to that point."
Also there is a curious but brilliant entrepreneurial venture: the TMBG dial-a-song service, from whose humble beginnings practically all their piece have arisen. On their answering service is recorded an original song, changing every few days. The response has been staggering, and as Linnell points out,
"The beauty of it lies in the fact that the overheads are basically nil. It's at Flansburg's house, it's his answering service, and we make a new four-track tape every few days or so. It's all the most rough, untried stuff — from that we pick out the few we want to learn for shows, or put on records. We have literally hundreds of songs, but most of them are horrible. Almost all the good ones are on the record: there's a new album out soon, so we're clearing some more out of our closet..."
They're unique, they're innovative. They've released one of the most fascinating records in years, and will in all likelihood continue to puzzle and enchant us for some time to come. And I can think of no better compliment than simply that they more than do justice to the tradition of their name.