1990-07-24 Asbury Park Press
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No fashion models for these Giants
By Matty Karas, Asbury Park Press, July 24 1990
Pop band shuns the trappings of commercialism
Say you work for a big record company. Say you're used to heavy metal dudes with long hair and leather vests, and disco babes with long lips and leather bras. Say these two nerdy- looking guys in flannel shirts walk in and announce that their new record for your label has a song about the life of a night light, another about an alleged fad for winding pieces of string around rocks, and a love-gone-bad song that starts with the horrible news, "She set your goldfish free."
Say one of them plays an accordion, the other plays a guitar, and that's the whole band.
Say they think of themselves as a serious pop band.
Say you have to come up with a marketing campaign for this.
One such record company person was facing just this sort of dilemma when he took John Flansburgh and John Linnell, also known as They Might Be Giants, out to dinner while they were shopping around for a record label. The difference was they weren't on his label; he was trying to impress them with how he would treat them if they were. This is what he said to them, according to Flansburgh: "I would really like to see you with some fashion models in your videos. That would be so excellent."
"I couldn't believe it," Flansburgh said. "That happened relatively early in the dinner conversation, and I just thought, can't we change tables?"
Needless to say, They Might Be Giants didn't sign with the label, which will go unnamed, even though, according to Flansburgh, "they offered us an incredible amount of money." Nor did the Brooklyn-based band sign with a couple other major labels that were hot for them on the basis of two albums they released on the Hoboken independent label Bar/None, even though it would have meant an automatic jump in recording and touring budgets, and a potentially huge jump in audience size.
"They were so horrible," Flansburgh said of the record company people. "You'd be appalled at what people say to you when you're in a rock band."
Eventually, They Might Be Giants, who have been called quirky, crazy, silly, weird, thoughtful and, quite often, & great pop band, found a home with Elektra Records.
"A remarkably cool label," Flansburgh said. Still, as a member of a band who delivered a first album to Elektra that included an Elvis Costello-ish song about possibly being reincarnated as a bag of groceries and a Las Vegas lounge-ish number whose only lyric is "minimum wage" among its 19 songs (in 43 stunning and wildly varying minutes), Flansburgh sometimes wonders what the suits and ties at the record company office think.
"I imagine there are times when we leave the room and they go, 'Man, what a bunch of weirdos,'" he said. "I feel sorry for them. I think it would be very difficult to convince people that this is the wave of the future, because I think in a certain sense what we're doing is very unique and personal, and it's not gonna be a trend. You know, you're not gonna find They Might Be Giants sound-alike groups. It's not gonna be like the next Soul II Soul."
At the Fast Lane 2 in Asbury Park on Thursday, Flansburgh and Linnell will appear as a duo, as they always have. But they'll play rock 'n' roll. In place of a live rhythm section, they'll use back- ing tapes.
It started out as an economic thing, but they have stuck with the same setup over the years because they happen to like it. In the beginning, Flansburgh said, "We couldn't afford a rehearsal space. We were living in Brooklyn, and we couldn't make much noise. And we couldn't afford to pay a drummer."
Later on, when they could afford it, they once tried performing with a live jazz combo, including a stand-up bass player and a drummer using brushes. But according to Flansburgh, "It was really chaotic. I guess the thing is, we were never dissatisfied with the way we were working (as a duo). It was always an entertaining and effective show."
Audiences at They Might Be Giants' early shows in New York rock clubs in the mid-'80s would look at the two guys on stage, "and they just kind of thought these guys are kind of hopeless," Flansburgh said. But they would stick around, he believes, because, "We had good songs. And I think that was obvious, even though we just had our little setup."
They decided from the start to stay away from the standard, cliched roman- tic love songs that dominate pop. Although they have got around to writing quite a few love songs, they're usually far from ordinary. Flansburgh's "Lucky Ball & Chain" starts out as a standard lament of a guy who blew it big time with his girl: "She threw away her baby doll/I held on to my pride/But I was young and foolish then." But he goes on to say in the chorus, "Confidentially — she never called me baby doll/Confidentially — I never had much pride."
The two Giants write separately, but with similar ambition. While both listen to a wide range of music, "The primary influences are sort of pretty obvious," Flansburgh said. "The songs are pretty melodic. They kind of have a pop song construction. So, I imagine if it was a war between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, you'd figure the Beatles probably won."
As for the Giants' lyrics, "We kind of looked at the Ramones and used them as a role model," he said. "The thing about their songs is, there's a real-life quality to them."