1993 Rock Names
Rock Names: From ABBA to ZZ Top
By Adam Dolgins, 1993
Excerpt taken from pages 201-203.
Guitarist John Flansburgh and accordion player John Linnell, both natives of Lincoln, Massachusetts, formed They Might Be Giants in Brooklyn in the early eighties. The name comes from an obscure 1971 film starring George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward, which Halliwell's Film Guide describes as a "curious fantasy comedy which rather tentatively satirizes modern life and the need to retreat into unreality; mildly pleasing entertainment for intellectuals." In an interview, Flansburgh discusses the band's beginnings:
How did you guys come up with the name?
Well, we first had a really bad name — a name so bad that John and I have made a vow that we will never tell anyone, even our children. We used it for our first show, a Sandinista rally in Central Park. We had this really terrible, terrible, embarrassing name. So we put together this long list of new names, a page of names, but none of them were that great. This long list of names included Dumptruck, and we liked that one okay. This friend of ours, Raoul Rosenberg, had this act with his dummy, Julius. He's now a political activist, but back then he was a ventriloquist. He was trying to think of a name for his act that would be something more than just "Raoul and Julius," and he came up with the idea of calling his act They Might Be Giants, but then decided not to use it. It was a reference to this movie that I hadn't seen at the time, this sort of second-rate seventies cult movie.
What was that about?
It's about a delusional guy. So anyway, we asked him if we could borrow his name, and he said yes. So we made up two posters for our next gig, and one of them was Dumptruck and one of them was They Might Be Giants, and fortunately we chose They Might Be Giants because there was a band from Boston called Dumptruck, so we would've had to become Dumptruck N.Y.C. or Brooklyn Dumptruck or something.
So we named ourselves They Might Be Giants. The key ingredient to its interest to us was the fact that it was a full sentence. It wasn't so much that it had the word giants in it, or that it suggested that we had some larger future. In fact, we were kind of surprised that people thought that the they was referring to us. We always thought it was an outward-looking name, and that was another point of interest. Y'know, they as opposed to we. Everyone knows that bands name themselves, so why would you call your band "they" if you meant yourselves?
We just thought it was kind of an outward-looking, paranoid name, and the fact that it was a full sentence seemed kind of interesting. This was at the point where bands had just moved from The Pencils to Pencil Pencil, and there were very few bands who had any names more interesting than that. It was in the era of New Wave. It was like 1983, so still, if New Wave wasn't the most vital thing, it was still influential. The reference to Don Quixote didn't seem that important, it seemed pretty obscure.
I only just heard that this afternoon, that "They Might Be Giants" is the title of a chapter in Don Quixote.
Is it a chapter? I think it's just made reference to in the windmill part. I've never read the book, but I have read the passage. It wasn't that big a part of it. We didn't believe that people would catch the reference. It just seemed like a good full sentence.
Any regrets that you chose the name?
One of the things about our name is that people got the impression that we were ambitious because of it, when nothing could have been further from the truth. To us, it seemed obvious that we were destined for the margins of popular culture. It was just a functioning name for a bar band. It actually took us a long time to figure out that people didn't even understand the name. It was so totally uncalculated. I think if we knew then what we know now, we probably would have gone for a more streamlined name. But it does look good on a marquee sometimes, filling up all the space.