1992-10-29 The Ram
Whales and squids battled in the seas
By Erin Edman, The Ram, October 29, 1992
About three weeks ago, Will cornered me in the 'Skellar and asked if I wanted to interview They Might Be Giants. Like a gullible fool. I said. "Sure, sounds like fun." Silly me. What followed was three weeks of late tour buses, missed phone calls, bad timing, and general irritation. After several false starts, however. I finally managed to have a nice long chat with John Flansburgh, one half of the musical genius that is They Might Be Giants. This interview was supposed to take place last week, before their New York shows, but better late than never.
EE: Let's start at the beginning...tell me about how you and John Linnell met and formed the band.
JF: Well, we were actually friends in high school, and we did some other creative projects when we were kids. We both worked on the school paper — I was the photography editor — he was actually the editor senior year — and we both did a lot of drawing, and we both had a lot of similar interests — you know, glam rock, and you know, what is now called "art rock"... we liked David Bowie, Frank Zappa, the Runaways.... It was a really different era, in a way. There was no such thing as "alternative rock" because rock, in and of itself, was alternative to the culture.
EE: How long ago was this?
JF: Well. I'm a hundred years old, so...[laughs]. No, we were teenagers in the seventies, and I guess the thing that really swept us away was when punk rock happened...I was seventeen in 1977, which reveals that I am thirty two years old... but when the punk rock thing hit, I was at the age where I was going to bars and checking out bands that were coming up from New York, and of course, all the bands that were from New York were what would become legendary bands. We had, you know, very immediate access to Blondie, and Television and Talking Heads, Patti Smith, and all these bands that would be considered seminal... and they were playing for three dollars, but I could get in for free because I had a fake I.D. from a radio station.... At the time, it seemed so common, it was there for the taking, it was not such a big deal on a certain level. But in retrospect, I realized that it was a really high quality time for local New York music. So we got kind of caught up in that.
I guess... I don't know, it seemed like before then, the whole notion of rock bands was like, the end of the road. There wasn't really too much you could do that was interesting. And then, punk rock came and blew that all away, and in a way, also kind of reinvented...there were bands like Human Sexual Response out of Boston, that did a much more unusual stage shows than just straight-up rock and they were part of the punk rock scene...I remember seeing Pere Ubu at that time, and also thinking, rock can be anything. Rock is totally wide open.
EE: How did you move from "punk rock" to They Might Be Giants?
JF: I feel like a lot of the ideas that we put in our songs fall into — I mean, we're just a bunch of aging punk rockers at this point [laughs]. Our songs are really short, a lot of our songs are about things outside of, like, cliche romance songs, which was a big part of punk rock. People wrote more about riding on the subway than about falling in love.....
EE: It's kind of funny, then, that your first real "hit" song was "Don't Let's Start," right?
JF: Uh huh.....
EE: And that was kind of a love song, in a way....
JF: Yeah, well, it was our first big breakout song, but it wasn't our first song.... I still don't feel like the songs that are our hit songs are the whole story of what the band is about. I mean. I think in some senses they're our best songs — like. "Birdhouse" and "Ana Ng" and "Don't Let's Start" and "I Palindrome I" are like our best efforts, in a lot of senses; they're really well-crafted; they're super-melodic they're really memorable — but I think that the real spirit of the band is in whatever the nineteenth most marginal and obscure song on any given album is, because that's what makes it a kind of project that I think offers a little bit more to people than just, like, here's the next groovy band to check out....
Actually, something I think is kind of disturbing about the whole "alternative rock" thing is that although it is a different chart, a different list of things to get into, it's a different set of ideas; you know, it's still very much a uniform thing.
EE: Well, what do you personally enjoy musically? Which of your "contemporaries" do you admire?
JF: I'm a big Pixies fan.... We listen to Public Enemy, LL Cool J; we like a lot of hip-hop stuff for the production value; the way the songs are put together seems interesting, and very challenging to our ears. We listen to a lot of standards, a lot of vocalists from the fifties-Sarah Vaughan. Diana Wash ington. Frank Sinatra, you know, stuff that your parents listened to [laughs]. We've got a lot of singular obsessions.... There's a guy named Johnny Horton who wrote historical pop songs. He wrote "The Battle of New Orleans" and "Sink the Bismarck" and a number of other historical songs that became big hits in the early sixties. We listen to his record a lot. It's essentially country music... We're not big country music fans. We just like Johnny.
EE: Okay, let's talk about the new album a little bit. What — I know questions like these are kinda hard to answer — what is Apollo 18? What does that mean? How did that come about?
JF: Well... I think the problem with making records is that you collect songs that have nothing to do with one another and then you have to figure out a title to describe them all, and so you just avoid that issue.... In a way. I think all the titles of our records could be the word "Title": it's just kind of an umbrella term. Our first album was called They Might Be Giants — we couldn't think of another name for our record, and since it was our first record, we could get away with it. We've always had a hard time with this.
The second record we were gonna call Lincoln Calling, because we both went to school in Lincoln. Massachusetts, but then we thought it would be too ridiculous, too "rock-referential," so we just called it Lincoln. Our third album is called Flood, and the idea behind that is just here is a flood of songs, here is an avalanche of music.... Apollo 18 is the name of the next mission to the moon, which actually never happened...so the idea is: this record is an adventure. So in a way, all of our records kind of have the same name; even though they're very different on some levels, they're essentially trying to sum up a bunch of things that don't have that much in common... They tend to be these catch-all, open ended ideas.
EE: So how did you come up with the cover, of deep space exploration and the big octopus—
JF: Right, right...it's a squid, actually.
EE: Oh. Squid. Sorry.
JF: The illustration of the squid and the whale is from a pulp magazine, actually a precursor to, like, crystal-obsessed fantasy magazines. It was called Fate magazine, and it had a lot of things about reincarnation, and other lives. It was very strange. I just thought it was very beautiful.
Actually, the illustration appears in a lot of different places — it's in encyclopedias, it's in natural history museums, because I guess it's like the two largest animals in the world battling in the seas.
EE: I didn't know whales and squids battled in the seas.
JF: They do... evidently, the whales pretty much always win.
What followed was a few minutes of nonsensical blather about whales, octopi (okay, squids), the Museum of Natural History and the dinosaur exhibit. Finally, getting back on track...
EE: One thing I wanted to ask you: How well known are you? Can you go to the supermarket or the mall and be a normal person?
JF: Oh, sure. Actually, it's funny for many years I wore these very strong, dark glasses, and it made me very easily identifiable. For the past couple of years. I've been wearing regular. English-teacher type glasses, and almost immediately I stopped being recognized, which was kind of interesting, because I'd never really thought about why I was recognized, but it's because I was easily recognizable. So, it's kind of back to normal. It also really depends on the context. When we're doing a show in a town and everybody knows we're around, people recognize me. But by and large, we get very little recognition.
EE: Is it all still fun for you? The recording, the touring, just the whole thing, is it still enjoyable?
JF: My personal credo is, "the great thing about rock is that you get to do what you want, and a whole lot of other things too." It's very exciting to make records and to perform..... We've been working with a new band for the past six months, and it's been a total gas.... It's a very challenging and very rocking show, and we do a lot of things we've never been able to do before.... Essentially, right now it seems very new; there are things completely different than we've ever done before. It's infinitely better than any other job I could have.
EE: If you weren't making music what do you think you'd be doing?
JF: I'd probably be a graphic designer: I only know that because that's what I did before I was in music.... If I wasn't in this band. I'd probably just be in a local band: It's something worth doing even in a semi-professional basis. It was something we did because we were really obsessed with it. I think this is what we'd be doing whether we had any success or not.... We never went to record companies; we never went that route. I think we pretty much figured that bands like us don't get to make records. We wanted to make records, but we'd listen to the radio and it would be, you know, Duran Duran. Five relatively handsome guys, wearing makeup, doing really awful music....
EE: I loved Duran Duran in junior high school....
JF: And more power to 'em. The only point I'm making is that if you survey the scene and how much music is putting forward sexy people and catchy melodies, it's a very image-driven thing. And I think part of it is, we have a lot more in common with the bar band down the street. And we always thought, if you can rock 'em on Saturday night, that's probably about as good as it's gonna get. So we didn't have any great master plan; we were perfectly happy to try to get those weekend gigs, and it's still true: Saturday night is still the fun night to play, and that's what keeps us going.
EE: Is "Dial-a-Song" still going strong?
JF: Oh, yeah. Let me give you the proper number: 718-387-6962
EE: Do you get a lot of calls?
JF: Pretty much as many as the machine can handle.
EE: One more question: who are you going to vote for?
JF: I'm gonna vote for Clinton, but, you know, I don't think that's gonna solve our problems. It'll be exciting to have a pro-choice President in the White House, and a lot of things about the Democratic Party appeals to me, but ultimately I think the state of the country is gonna get weirder and weirder. You know, it's hard times all around the world. Another round of gloom for everybody [laughs].
EE: What a cheerful note to end this.
Many thanks to Jody from Elektra records, who arranged the interview. Erin Edman is going out for a beer.