1989-09 Guitar
< Archived Interviews & Articles
Idea Man
By Bruce Pollock, Guitar Magazine, September 1989
Archived from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tabloidfootprints/35572889802/in/album-72157685943168955/
It was, in its own perverse way, appropriate that John Flansburgh, seemingly on a whim, should have at the last minute decided to relocate our interview from the esteemed and sedate pastry shoppe, DiBerti's, in lower Manhattan, to a tiny, Souvlaki shack a couple of blocks south, where the piped in bouzouki music on the Greek radio station provided a demented obbligato to our taped conversation, which nearly obliterated most of his ingenious and perspicacious comments on the life and times of his ingenious and perspicacious combo, They Might Be Giants. They Might Be Giants are mainly about sound, anyway, odd and incongruous juxtapositions of familiar music, popping up in the most ludicrous of contexts—the brief koto-like solo in "Ana Ng," for instance, the single perfect ding in "Shoehorn with Teeth" slithering between your synapses like a bubble in a bathysphere.
"Actually, I got into music through recording," says Flansburgh, not surprisingly. "I think my first interest in sound was working with a tape recorder my father brought home when I was ten years old." As the designated guitarist of They Might Be Giants, Flansburgh is less the typical rock ‘n' roll equivalent of a Teddy Roosevelt, who speaks softly but carries a big shtick, than he is a Calvin Coolidge, who would choose not to play.
"I've always hated solos," he states. "I wasn't in a band until I was twenty, and so I didn't get into all the standard "make your show longer" things, where I think it originally came out of. I never idolized rock guitarists. I know a lot of people get into music because they think that one musician is So cool that they just want to be more like that person than anything else. I've never felt that way. Even guitarists that I really love, I merely like their solos. I think it's kind of lazy for a rock band. I mean, in jazz or improvisational music, it's a different thing, because it's more what your focus is on. I think for pop music, it's very rare you find a solo that's worth hearing. Robert Quine has done a couple of good pop solos; Richard Thompson has done some compelling musical things that can actually be categorized as solos. George Harrison is a perfect example of someone who has completely put a song over the top with a part, but it's not what I'd call a solo.
"I think not having a great technical facility right off the bat probably helped me more than I realized, because I had no crutches to rely on. You really get into "If I do this kind of trick, it'll have this-and-this kind of impact.' When you really can't play, you have to have ideas. That's the only thing that you can present. A lot of the best musical ideas are really simple ideas.
"If I hadn't been 17 in 1977, I don't think that I'd be the kind of guitarist that I am. I'd have probably worked harder, trying to know what people who went to Berklee know. But when I learned, the entire notion of learning how to play the guitar was incredibly bogus. That was so obviously not the point of a guitar player. Being a guitar player was an anti-social act. It was like more of a statement of defiance."
One doesn't immediately think of these two Science Lab types, the Johns, Flansburgh and Linnell, as in any way defiant. Yet, in following in the footsteps of some thinking man's geniuses of rock, like Randy Newman, Elvis Costello and Buddy Holly, Flansburgh, for one, has produced a look that is as defiant as a spitball between the eyes of pop glamour and pretense, and one that melds perfectly with their droll sound: Spike Jones meets PDQ Bach and takes him to a performance of the Firesign Theater. So you can call They Might Be Giants hip or you can call them square, but please, don't call them Weird Al Yankovich.
"I hate insincerity as a genre, and it really saddens me when people compare us to Weird Al," Flansburgh laments. "If there's any relationship, I'd feel it's more like the opposite." Yet Flansburgh is easily as existential as Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs was, when he discovered that marines in Vietnam were wearing "Kill For Peace" on their helmets. Sometimes, no matter what you do, people aren't going to get the joke.
"But maybe they did," says Flansburgh, like a true Zen conehead. "It's like not everybody who wore a helmet in Vietnam wanted to wear a helmet. So even when you think they didn't get the joke, they did get the joke. There is that thing about life. You never really know. Even though I think that we're probably largely misunderstood—that's okay. I just don't like being reminded of it."
Enough people have gotten the joke, and appreciated the nuances of They Might Be Giants' textured, conceptual, quirky, kaleidoscopic approach to sound and music, for a major label to be sponsoring their next album, for their last Lp, the independently released Lincoln, to have succeeded on the Album Charts and for Esquire magazine to name them to their honor roll of distinguished persons under 40.
These occurrences have produced in Flansburgh a decided nostalgia for the old days of creative obscurity. "I guess we'll probably get a lot more famous than we ever thought we'd be," he says. "We're already more famous than we thought we'd be. But the great thing about being in a band that nobody cares about is that you can really hone your fine points. I think we were graciously granted total obscurity when we started, which allowed us to be brave and to develop. I think that it's a nice place to be, actually, as long as you can pay the rent."
Fame does have certain advantages, he will admit. "One thing I've done is I've actually bought the tape recorder that we recorded our last record on, and brought it back to my house. Working with your own semi-pro unit is much more flexible, whereas, if you go into the Power Station and you tell the guy operating the 24-track thing. "Flip those 2" reels over because I want to do something backwards, maybe it won't work, but that's what I want to do." they won't do it, because he's got to align the whole damn thing, and it'll take forever. The striking thing about studios is that they're totally focused on making passive, commercial music that has no edge to it at all; they just want to sound like everything else on the radio. It's mostly fear that somehow transforms you into sounding like that. Most of our aesthetic judgements are pretty random to a lot of other people, but they make absolute sense to us. When we do a piano sound, for instance, there's almost an aesthetic of making sure that it's so loud it makes your head kick back a bit. If it doesn't have that kind of quality, then it's really not important putting it there. It's like the whole thing with the sound of the guitar in the Beatles—it was an incredible guitar sound that you wouldn't know was possible to get through a modern studio. They wouldn't let you mess up the equipment at that level. So I think that the big problem we're in with people who make commercial music is that they don't understand why you want to have stuff like that."
Within the They Might Be Giants aesthetic are numerous offbeat nuggets. "We realized that the best way to get a convincing kick-drum sound was just by tapping your thumb on the top of the microphone," Flansburgh reveals. "I recorded the vocals to "You'll Miss Me," on the last album, through a Chandler Tube Driver distortion unit, which is, by the way, one of the finest things available for the guitar. It's half of my live sound. The Chandler company makes really inventive and interesting stuff. The Tube Driver is ingenious. They overdrive a tube to put inside a Marshall amplifier, only it's a foot pedal. I mean, it's so obvious, it only took twenty years."
Which is just about how long Flansburgh and Linnell have known each other. "When we met, John was into early Zappa, and got me into Zappa. I think that we're both heavily into the x-factor in songs, like the way Roy Orbison's voice sounds a lot of the time. In a way, a lot of our songs lyrically have these radical right or left turns that derail you from the natural course of events. The way we put down a lot of the instruments is meant to keep you involved. I know we seem really psychotic to a lot of people, because how much do we need to change something over the course of three minutes? But even a three minute song is a long period of time to hear sounds you've heard before. There are few sounds you haven't actually experienced. We hear incredible amounts of music in films and TV, and we're exposed to every kind of stuff. We know what African pop music sounds like. A few years ago, there was no such thing as African pop, and I think it's important not to shut yourself off to it. What really speaks to you, though, has to be somehow greater."