1988-12-01 Rockpool
Two Johns And A Megan: McLaughlin Gets The BIG Picture From They Might Be Giants
By Megan McLaughlin, ROCKPOOL, December 1, 1988
"It's a nice night out here in Brooklyn — speaks well for our fair borough," John Linnell (accordion/vocals/misc.) comments as we hurry through the streets en route to a supposedly vandalized car. Luckily, all the vandals did was leave an empty seltzer bottle in the back seat and tear the volume knob off the radio; "what happened to civilization, huh" John Flansburgh (guitar/vocals/misc.) demands. Linnell and Flansburgh, the two halves of They Might Be Giants, are in their home of Brooklyn to talk about touring, the new album, the Banana Splits, and big hats.
L͟i͟n͟c͟o͟l͟n͟, the Giants' second album, has been out for a month or so, and is already firmly entrenched in the top of the college radio charts, and making inroads on commercial radio as well. The Giants are in the middle of a long tour of America which will return them to their borough at the end of December.
"Lincoln is the 16th President, it's partly named after him, and it's partly because we grew up in this town, Lincoln Massachusetts, although . . . really the record doesn't have that much to do with the town, it's really the name of the town that we liked, it's sorta the monumental guy weirdo president and messed-up suburb and luxury car and the log of course so you know it was a lot of things," Linnell explains. Flansburgh adds, "This album has 18 songs on it, one less than the first, that's the theme." The cover has "the sort of shrine thing, which has the picture of my (Linnell's) great grandfather and John's (Flansburgh's) grandfather, those are the two guys. It was the artist's idea originally to have our faces on the front and I didn't really go for that, it was too much of a shrine to us, so being as self-deprecating as I am . . ." Although their lyrics are often slightly less than serious, the Giants feel that they have more to their lyrics than just humor. "The upper half of the songs are serious," Flansburgh says. "There is an ambiguity with a lot of them, but the essential thing is that . . . you can take them as serious lyrics, you can read them as serious lyrics and you won't be wrong, you won't be like an idiot if you actually interpret the words," Linnell explains. The ambiguity that Linnell points up (which is evident on L͟i͟n͟c͟o͟l͟n͟) is the reason that the Giants are more than just a novelty band.
That novelty tag has been a "pain in the butt . . . but I think we brought it on ourselves," Linnell admits. Flansburgh disagrees, which brings on a long discussion on the concept of novelty. "The whole notion of novelty is incredibly offensive; it's pretty limited." Linnell says, "I think the thing is that it's a good way to relate something to a disposable unit, but there are a lot of songs that are novelty songs which are really great. It's that people think that calling it a novelty song is a way of shooting it down . . . The '70s were a total period for novelty music, you basically had the "Pina Colada Song" — pretty rough, so you know it's not something you want to identify yourself with, but the idea of novelty is a good one, things that are unique are really valuable — generally — it's certainly true of endangered species." He continues, " the thing is that there is a connotation that novelty has which is unfortunate, because it comes from the mindset that there is something disposable, . . . that basically novelty songs are someone trying to get your attention by raising their voice or doing something that is unwarranted, . . . and that's the only thing there is to recommend it, and it's in particular the problem with popular music, things that are unique in the art world are valued, and in the animal kingdom as we've already covered."
So how do they explain their stage show, a show with props such as big hats and wacky antics? Linnell answers, "People who come to see our shows seem to know what's going on and they wouldn't come to see us if they wanted a clown show. I mean they really would be disappointed, so the thing about this tour is that we're not really doing as much with props and it's not like we're apostates, . . . we think the hats are really cool and it's not really that we thought it was a mistake but it's probably a good idea now just to try and play the songs just to . . . "
"Play the songs," Flansburgh finishes. "We have lots of roots in doing the performance type stuff. The format of the band is different, it's not the straight ahead rock band at all. We have no interest in becoming the Rolling Stones Part 2, but the problem with having props and being identified with that certain visual element is that that becomes a bigger part of the show for some people. There were times on the last tour when we were playing in towns and we'd played in a couple of times when we would pull out the props and that would be the time I felt I was at the Rocky Horror Picture Show or something. We created the things ourselves, and they're for our shows, and we like them, but . . . we created them to make people go 'This is really fucked up!' and when people go 'Alright! The hats!' it's sort of the opposite effect." Flansburgh continues, "We didn't want it to be like this familiar thing, we wanted it to be jarring and unusual, and the second it stopped being jarring and unusual and become this familiar thing, it suddenly went from something interesting to something to be avoided, so we've taken the props out of the show. What's great about that is that the songs that we did with them are all of a sudden getting noticed for their own merits too, which is really good." He hastens to add, "There's still a very entertaining part of the show, it's a very audience friendly part of the show, it's not just like we're looking at our shoes now."
This tour will be different from the last, Linnell says, because finally the two Johns (and their road crew, all also named John — no lie) can stay in somewhat more comfortable surroundings than the last tour. "We generally are not in tip-top shape by the end of the tour. People comment on how much skinnier we are, we basically do everything we can to stay sane on the tour. On the first two tours we were trying to find places to stay because we didn't have enough money to go to motels. We'd go to someone's house and they'd invite us and say 'we have all these beds, we'll give you orange juice,' but some of these people were being deceptive, they just wanted to have fun with the band they'd seen. All it takes is, one in ten places you stay at, for people to be like total weirdos and creeps, or wanting to have a party that runs all night. On the other hand, we met a lot of really friendly people in the South and the Midwest. It's a weird lifestyle to spend one night in a town, it's not as if the work is all that hard, you're just going up for an hour or so each night, and after that you can relax, although there is a lot of press stuff in the midst of all this. I think it seems like it should be an easier style than it actually is. It's also been really exciting, it's definitely something that if it ever subsides I'll be really happy about having done, even if it doesn't come to anything.
If people can't, or don't come to see the Giants' show, they can receive a dose of Giants' music by calling Dial-A-Song, the answering machine set up in Flansburgh's home which plays a different Giants' song every day. Before the current crop of "540-" and "900" numbers, the Giants were tapping into the enormous audience they could reach through the phone. "Dial-A-Song is a non-money making operation that They Might Be Giants started five years ago," Linnell says. "You can see it's still thriving and it's a single phone line I'd say we get about a hundred calls a day . . this thing was just like a way for people to stay in their homes and get some good music at the same time. It seemed like there were different people calling than were coming to the shows, or at least the overlap was not very large which was sort of interesting, there really were a lot of people who were using Dial-A-Song because of, or in spite of, the fact that they couldn't come see us live." "Think of all the people who have babies," Flansburgh says. "Think of all the babies who can't leave the house because they're babies," Linnell adds. "The kids, the toddlers," Flansburgh completes. Actually, the Giants (not surprisingly) appeal to kids as well as adults, and have done two appearances on "Nick Rocks", an "ostensibly kids' show, but . . . you run into a lot of people in their 30s who say 'I saw you guys on 'Nick Rocks'." Doing these shows, Flansburgh says, "is a really good vehicle for meeting these television ashamed people: 'well I was just switching channels -- continuously' and actually we've done a lot of offbeat TV shows. We've been on the Joe Franklin show a bunch of times. People don't know that the Joe Franklin Show is in one large room opposite the Romper Room set, so it seems like you're sitting in this real video void but across the way are giant Do-Bees and Don't-Bees." Mentioning Romper Room unaccountably brings up the Giants' musical influences, among them the Banana Splits' show.
"Everyone but me hated them . . . it's an acquired taste," Linnell says. "I was so into them, my friend and I bought all of the stuff — Barry White did a lot of the Banana Splits' songs, he did "Doin' the Banana Split" . . . I think I still have one of the records. So that was like the first influence on me, well the Beatles first and then the Banana Splits . . . that's the standard question is the influence thing, there's nothing wrong with it, but it makes John and I run screaming because we can't figure out what to say." Flansburgh says, "It's one of those questions where there's no good answer, because if you answer like the Violent Femmes, which I've heard maybe 15 seconds of, people would go 'well that makes sense' because their music sounds like ours. I don't know anything about them, but I listen more to hip-hop on the radio, and that's sort of like the one end of it that people would have already suspected anyway, this weird lame nothing thing. Or you can get this flip rock critic informed answer, like if I said I'm really into Parliament Funkadelic . . . I am, but . . ." They prefer "stand alone application"; "We write songs that are interesting to us, we don't live our songs. I mean I think if we were living our songs we'd probably have to be on acid pretty much all the time, but the thing is I love listening to songs that make me feel like I'm on acid and I want to create songs that have that effect, and I think that's an interesting thing to do, but it's not entirely realistic — there's this certain kind of Johnny Thunders 'live the dream' thing that we definitely feel very alien to. So, back to the influence question/problem, the thing is that if you say someone who makes sense in a certain way, it's sort of not worth saying."
As well as touring, the new album, and Dial-A-Song, the Giants plan to continue their success on music television by releasing videos for the songs on L͟i͟n͟c͟o͟l͟n͟. "Ana Ng", the first single and video, will be out soon, if not now, and has "live fish swimming in front of a giant bust of Chiang Kai-shek, and there are two girls who are six years old, they are identical twins, it happens that they're big Giants' fans, the know all the words to all the songs. We met them a year ago when they were five, they would come to our soundcheck and sing along, and we would forget the worlds and they would remind us how they went." The success of "Ana Ng" has been a real surprise, Flansburgh says: "It's taken off! Everybody loves it! It's a sleeper — we put it out as a promo single thinking this will just get people to put it on the radio, and then we'll pull out the r͟e͟a͟l͟ single and it's gone!" The Giants are also finishing up a home studio in Flansburgh's house, which will allow them to take longer to work on their songs, rather than working in the Times Square studio where they recorded L͟i͟n͟c͟o͟l͟n͟ . . . Linnell says, "I think we work well with the freedom to take our time, and that's really been the key to all this, we took two years to make L͟i͟n͟c͟o͟l͟n͟, although we didn't start right away, we took a year to get started."
They Might Be Giants; two guys, some hats, and pop tunes that reinvent the idea of "catchy." Flansburgh says, "we're on the road, we'll be in your hometown real soon, don't be afraid, talk to you later, bye-bye." They're a nice band; play their records and see if you can get "Ana Ng" and the other 17 songs on L͟i͟n͟c͟o͟l͟n͟ out of your head — I can't.