1992-04 Reflex
They Might Be Giants And They Just Might Be Pop Stars, Too!
By Carle VP Groome, Reflex, April 1992
Archived from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tabloidfootprints/35573978652
This issue was distributed to subscribers along with a vinyl flexi disc which included the song "Moving To The Sun".
It was at John Linnell's kitchen table in Brooklyn, somewhere around the second pot of coffee (which the FDA should put on their list of controlled substances), that his brand of grim wit became apparent.
"Don't make it sound pretty, Carle," he says, in a flat, serious tone that mocks itself. "It's a baaad addiction. I gave it up for the last tour... but I found I really didn't like myself much. A certain dullness...." He trails off, eyes slightly glazed behind the horn-rims.
Falling prey to fits of narcolepsy? But with a couple of El Pico's in you it's like (seething) YESSSS! IT'S A BEE-YOU-TIFULL DAY! WHAT'S NEXT?!?!
"Yeah, it really makes you wonder who's driving.... Is it you..." dropping his eyes to the commemorative Star Trek mug on the table, lowering an octave significantly, "...or the bean?"
The first time I encountered the quotidian zaniness of They Might Be Giants (hereafter referred to as TMBG), these two guys playing guitar and accordion-with a reel-to-reel between them were closer to performance art than what I'd call rock. But, today—sitting and snuffing the mean bean with them—in a world where what Pere Ubu makes can be called pop music, the public agenda of John Linnell and John Flansburgh is one where they might be giants. And with its arrival in stores on March 15th, Apollo 18-their fourth album (second on Elektra, and not counting last year's b-sides compilation on Bar None)-might not exactly launch them into superstar status, but it could possibly change your orbit.
From Lincoln, MA, they have been pals since high school where, according to JL, "we worked together doing some creative teenage stuff.... John hadn't picked up any instruments yet, he was just doing stuff with tape recordings." They also published a comic book, but don't let that mislead you.
- JF: Well, I am wearing a "Big Daddy" Ed Roth T-shirt....
- —Ratfink.
- JF: Yeah, but we weren't Ratfink kinda kids into blowing things up ... as much as other kids. We blew a few things up.
- JL: We had friends who blew things up.
- JF: People ask us if we were into comics, and we weren't that much. We were in a book study group in high school and a little bit academic.
Which may account for their unbelievably erudite brand of songwriting today. Consider how Mark Mothersbaugh devolved before them, and you'll see a pattern here. TMBG gets its rep from a writing style that is amusing yet philosophical, reflecting that keener insight into the complexities of life found in their formative texts-Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, and other psycho-historical Russians studied after classes.
- JL: Yeah, that sort of stuff—psychological, left-leaning....
- But also very philosophical and metaphysical—
- JF: The teacher was trying to turn us into communists, basically. We didn't fall for the bait.
What they did swallow was The Beatles. JF had a two-track that led to a four-track: "I was definitely into sound, and sound-on-sound." JL, on the other hand, "wasn't really a rock musician. (He started the piano at 14.) Then I got into stuff that was really underground rock." JF typifies it quite neatly as "Creem instead of Rolling Stone. That was the most radical stuff we could lay our hands on." Like Zappa and Bowie, yeah, but tape loops, sound-on-sound? "Well, 'Revolution #9' was probably [laughing] very influential music for me."
By the fall of '81, JF had been cruising a few colleges while JL sought the low road with a Rhode Island band called The Mundanes, which had decided to move to the Big Apple to catch the new-wave crest. JF had returned home to, oddly enough, also make the orchard move—but for the purpose of further fine-arts study at Pratt Institute. So, they packed up one car and resumed their mutual journey together, ending up at the same building in Brooklyn. Such as it was that they found it easy to continue what had been an ongoing music-by-correspondence routine, but under much more immediate circumstances. Things proceeded apace until their first public performance (without a band name yet) at a Central Park Sandinista rally in '83.
Formed at a time when performance art was a term that still had quotation marks around it, JF remembers "We got accepted in the art-oriented clubs—the whole East Village scene was very much where we started." JL recalls their participation as "we'd just be 'the rock band'. We'd play songs and someone would come out with like a light bulb in their mouth." Which isn't to say they didn't work steadily, building a following with regular gigs at Darinka, the fabled 8BC, Limbo Lounge, etc., while learning to blend in a bit with some odd props of their own.
- "Hats off to the use of hats as megaphones—"
- JF: Well, we never actually did that. But we did have large hats.... It got to the point where we were afraid that if we didn't rein it in, we'd become known as a prop band. Our primary focus has always been to put on a good show—but more artistic and less theatrical, more musical. It got to the point where people would be calling out for whatever "thing" was next—like it was The Rocky Horror Picture Show or something. But I think we'll always have that element in the show because we are a two-man band. It gets a little... static... if you're just sittin' there strummin' away....
Which leads to the heart and soul and crux of the identity of TMBG. You may want to try to understand the dynamic here. Having grown up as friends and grown together as artists, their development parallels that of film's Coen Brothers (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, and Barton Fink). Both pairs have internalized a system of thought that requires little or no exterior communication to create unique and fully realized personal artworks.
- JF: It's definitely an odd format—and I'm not sure it's necessarily a good format—but it's worked for us. [jitter sniggers from JL] I would not recommend it. There was certainly a matter of economic necessity: This was something we could do easily.
- JL: There's this way we have when we work together. Any time we did any projects, we were always working off this shared vocabulary where we never had to tell each other what we were doing, and as soon as we brought in other people... I mean, this happens—to a limited extent—just when we're working with engineers... trying to explain why this particular decision's being made. When we think too hard about it, we get into trouble, because a lot of it is a nonverbal thing I mean, not to sound too doily about itbut that's the way we've always worked. Without having to explain it.
- JF: Or defend it.
This point of contact with the art world then, was not one where the usual theory-as-product kinda leading-edge-deconstructivism was extant. For their first album cover, they went for primitivist painter Rodney Alan Greenblatt. Rodney's neo-Fisher-Price view of the world—glowing primary colors and ultra-cartoon figures in positivist fantasy dreamscapes of pure idealism—perfectly complemented their vivid takes on our reality.
- When I saw the cover and heard the music I thought—
- JL: "Hmmm. Good, but not good enough...."
- No, but rather some essential Ur-kid perspective, as shared a commonality as a Burl Ives record (two "uh-huh" assents), and—coupled with that and later visits from Mr. Mister, Particle Man, Mr. Chess-Piece Head, then Flood's "Birdhouse in Your Soul" revealing a spiritual relationship with infant icons-it comes down to a very short-to-the-ground POV like: "This is the way adults work" and atop that—with a name like They Might Be Giants—you get something like a sophisticated Jonathan Richman.
- JF: We were definitely influenced by Jonathan Richman, but I don't think.... We're cynical people.
- JL: What I think he's saying is that we're writing from a perspective of looking up at the adult world. It's very interesting.... The things that are considered "adult" are, to me, the things you go through when you're 18. And while it may sound like John and I are saying "Oh, we're adults now and are concerned with adult things," but what I'm saying is the things that are considered "childish" are really important.
- JF: I think that innocence is what we're about... and a sense of wonderment. There is something powerful about music; anything that sets your imagination going is really running parallel to a lot of childhood experiences.
The other side of that coin is their bizarro-journalism on 20th-century culture in skewed scans that resemble the high-impact graphics found in advertising, and sudden edits that homogenize chaos into order and memory into nostalgia. But in the hands of TMBG, these sales devices turn into assault weapons on our preconceptions—as if Nickelodeon's world of venerable sitcoms, brand-name stylizations, and warpo cartoons becomes the network on which the revolution is televised.
- JF: I still get a certain joy from observing things from modern life that aren't part of other generations' lives. "Twisting" actually mentions a couple of fairly obscure rock bands like The Young Fresh Fellows. But, to me, that makes it a more authentic song. It's about a very particular kind of relationship, about breaking up the records—it's not a divorce. It's about people who live in apartments; it's not some grand projection of man and woman figures breaking up. We live in a rock culture, and it's just a realistic reflection of that. When you talk about living today, that's the backdrop.
- JL: We're doing stuff for people now—but, on the other hand, it doesn't become useless later. I hope.
Not a chance. These guys pack songs with year-long safari-type planning, compared to everyone else's picnic lunch. In songs of AM-pop length, there are hooks, vamps, riffs, and tempo changes combined with dozens of wordplays-any of which could be the entire motivation/chorus/verse structure of many another's oeuvre-almost thrown away. And they do it almost every damn time.
- JL: We want the record to have something there to listen to. So it's not necessarily a virtue to have this rapid-fire.... There's a whole history of new-wave bands spitting out puns that are actually meaningless, and this is not the kind of thing that we feel makes us good. It really comes down to what the actual ideas are. I think we've really paid attention to the music, and one shouldn't get the impression that we're whipping these things off. It takes forever to write these songs.
If you play around with the idea of alternate universes, you can wonder what Apollo 18 would've been like, but don't expect any Oliver Stone-type answers from these guys. Outside the Jules Verne-meets-Plan 9 cover art, the major space exploration occurs in allusion—such as the revamped "Wimoweh"/big-band blowout of "The Guitar." And then there's the usual complement of non-extempore metaphors for life and its adjuncts "Which Describes How You're Feeling" (song title!). Or takes you on trips into weirder areas, including the comic side of David Lynch found in "My Evil Twin;" the near-Roky Erickson tribute (JF: "I've heard of him and I know he's supposed to be cool, but I've never really heard anything by him.") called "Dig My Grave;" and the solid power-pop hopper "See the Constellation."
But then there's a couple that simply defy any attempts at categorization.
- Okay, tell me about "Spider."
- JL: [Syrupy with caffeine stupor] What do you want to know, Carle?
- To put it bluntly, this thing, added into the rest... well, "Fingertips," "The Guitar," it all comes off like Abbey Road, side two.
- JL: "Abbey Roadside," hmmm....
Sitting approximately dead center in the recording, "Spider" has as much to do with rock as John Cage's "12 Radios" had to do with pop radio. So, when you get to the second-to-last track, "Fingertips"—and its mind-blower fracturing of time-displaced non-sequiturs and cut-up head-twisters—then it's time to reconsider if Un Chien Andalou could replace Benji.
- JL: Well, I just put together these vocal bits and handed it off to John, who put on the music. That's an example of what we were talking about before. It was something we never explained to each other; we just liked it.
- JF: Yeah, and also you never know how it's gonna turn out when you start it. There was no master plan; we didn't sit down and say, "Let's make a real psychedelic record," although, in many ways, this is more kaleidoscopic and psychedelic than Flood. And, for me, the strange thing about "Fingertips" is it kind of blows up the whole record at the end. We did it at the end of the recording session, and it really changes the entire record because it's so fractured it almost annihilates the solid foundation of the rest of the record.
Indeed it does, since following it up and ending with the instrumental "Space Suit" leaves the listener tethered at the end of an umbilical cord trying to get back to the stereo. So when JF also imparts the info that the 19 or so different parts of "Fingertips" have been coded into the CD as discrete units, which in the case of the use of this format in a shuffle mode makes them independent tracks, then there is a 50% probability of tapping into this surreal vein, scrambling your brains even more.
So plan your escape window well, okay?
Dial-A-Song
As the most unique way of self-advertisement, long before the advent of the 200 Budweiser line, TMBG simply turned the burgeoning answering machine trend into yet another fresh art form. Even fans like the NYPD would call in for an absurdist rockin' jolt and leave appreciative messages.
It was JF's concept back in '85 to put a new song on the answering machine every day. Inspiration sprang from when his mother would Dial-a-Prayer in the early '60s, and let John and his brother listen for a hoot.
The most memorable D-a-S moment? "We once got a call from the Wall Street Journal. So I got all excited 'cause I read it sometimes for good synopses and these quite-funny business profiles on these kind of cracked, entrepreneurial American spirits. I thought: Great! Now they're going to do a story on us and Dial-a-Song. This is soooo cool!
"And I called up the number and they said: 'Oh, we call up and listen on the office speaker phone and there's this girl Patty going away and we were wondering if you could leave a message saying: Goodbye Patty we'll all miss you..."
JL: "It was the mail room."
Of course, that was in their salad days when this was their main exposure, and it worked...
JF: "It's totally out of control now. I just had all these phone machines repaired and then they just... crumbled... under the weight of all these calls, 'cause we'd get hundreds a day at any given time. We should start to think of a more industrial way, because no amount of maintenance seems to keep these machines together."
...Worked too well, it seems.
JF: "We get our share of creepy 'I-know-where-you-live' type messages, and that's part of the celebrity experience we don't enjoy. So, in a way, shutting it down is not such a bad idea."
But they probably won't. It still works. Try it and see: (718) 387-6962.