1993-06-27 The Fresno Bee
You can expect the unexpected from the Hello Recording Club
By Don Mayhew, The Fresno Bee, June 27, 1993
John Flansburgh sat in the Russian Tea Room in midtown Manhattan, sipping his wine spritzer and pondering the endless possibilities: recording star, media mogul, inventor of the wheel, master of the universe.
OK, OK, so Flansburgh, half of the quirky rock duo They Might Be Giants, didn't really do any of that. What he did was sit in the kitchen of his Brooklyn apartment with a huge tumbler of coffee in front of him and answer the question via phone: Does the world really need another record club?
If it's the Hello Recording Club, Flansburgh would have you believe, the answer is yes.
He is co-founder-co-conspirator, really of the club, which is designed to offer otherwise unheard music for adventurous listeners. It's billed as an alternative to "corporate controlled 'modern rock'."
For $41, subscribers will receive 10 EP-length compact discs this year. About half of the performers are so obscure that even fans of independent labels and college radio probably haven't heard of them. The first one has about 12 minutes (four songs) from Brian Dewan, who accompanies himself on his self-made electric zither.
Something different
The other half are musicians who already have recordings out and are a little better known, creating music that doesn't necessarily fit the niches they've carved for themselves. Among them are Frank Black, who sang as Black Francis for the late, great Pixies, and longtime unseen San Francisco band the Residents.
Anybody familiar with the fluttering idiosyncrasies of They Might Be Giants will not be surprised to hear that the Hello Recording Club is permeated with a sense of whimsy. Case in point: Dewan is touted as "the vice principal of rock."
His zither is described as an oversized autoharp, without the felt dampeners, that sits on a table and is plucked. It has a much more exotic name than sound, actually, something akin to an acoustic guitar but with a certain edgy, airy flair for elegy.
Flansburgh said the recording club is a modest project, thus "is looking for stuff that's really finished, since we can't go, like, look at a band and say, 'There's something about you we like, and we're going to find out what it is.'
"Dewan is ready to make a record, but we live in a world where they don't exactly know where to put someone like him," Flansburgh said.
Though Flansburgh loves the project ("pretty much all killer, no filler"), he laughed at the idea that he's something of a burgeoning junior mogul: "If there's any moguling going on, it's very heavy on the junior side."
How would he get the average fan of, say, Whitney Houston interested in the Hello Recording Club?
"Ohhhh, that's a tough one. Let's see. I think I would have to lie, because I don't know if they really would be interested," Flansburgh said. In his favor, though, is his belief that massively popular performers don't inspire much loyalty, perhaps because stardom generates distance and detachment.
Exposure
He said the Hello Recording Club is an antidote for music played for the lowest common denominator: "If you're interested in exposing yourself to interesting new music, it's a great way to broaden your horizons. You find out about a bunch of new artists, and you get new stuff all the time that's different from what you're going to hear on the radio."
Though Flansburgh is the kind of guy who says, "It's great to see radio stations and record companies squirm at things they just don't understand," he also said little of the Hello Recording Club's music is going to be experimental.
"Most of it is song structures, not improvisational stuff," Flansburgh said. "Most of the people in some sense are Beatles-based or folk-based, the classic music form of the song presented in different varieties."
The club started in March. Flansburgh said people who join the club now still will receive everything the club already has released. For $5 more, subscribers will receive They Might Be Giants' 1985 23-song demo cassette — essentially, Flansburgh said, the tape that got the duo signed to a record contract. Proceeds from cassette sales are to be donated to the People With AIDS Coalition.