1994-12 Tulane Hullabaloo
Talking To The Johns
By Stuart P. Broz, Tulane Hullabaloo, December 1994
Archived from: https://web.archive.org/web/20031018233853/http://www.tmbg.net/articles/hullabaloo1994.html
December 9, 1994 is well in the past now, so, if you didn't spend that Friday evening at the House of Blues, there's really nothing you can do about having missed They Might Be Giants. The show was spectacular; energetic, entertaining, and often hilarious. Before the concert, I had the opportunity to sit down with John Flansburgh and John Linnell, the duo who, over a decade ago, began to refer to themselves as They Might Be Giants.
The two Johns were nice enough to come uptown to Tulane to be interviewed. I found them to be personable and, to be honest, a lot less strange than I had expected.
Before we started, I gave them a brief tour of the offices of the Hullabaloo.
Flansburgh: It sort of reminds me of the high school newspaper office John and I used to work in.
You went to high school together?
Flansburgh: Yeah, we did. We worked on the high school paper. That's kind of how we got to know each other... It was sort of this small clique of people who mostly just needed a room to hang out in. That was a lot of the reason why the paper existed. We also just liked writing.
What sort of things did you write?
Linnell: A lot of music reviews. A certain amount of current topical stuff connected with the school... There was a certain amount of interest in being provocative for its own sake ... which is typical in high school.
Flansburgh: I remember ghostwriting some sports reviews... sports news stories. There was some basic information there, but I remember really expanding and editorializing on games I had never seen... making them really colorful.
Linnell: Our best issues were always the April Fool's issues, because then we could actually lie.
You said you wrote music reviews. What sort of music were you interested in at the time?
Flansburgh: Well, it was the mid seventies, so it was sort of pre-punk rock. I remember right in the middle of my high school life I started going to rock clubs and seeing local bands at the Rat... which was pretty influential.
Linnell: In some ways it was a pretty different time. The bigness of rock was really there. Now, I think one of the really positive trickle-down effects of the grunge era is that it has revitalized the idea that being in a crummy little band is a positive thing, but I sort of feel like the first half of my high school experience that there was a rock-hero thing. I mean even David Bowie — who was somebody I liked — also seemed very much like a rock star, and the other bands that were smaller and not as popular... like a band like Sparks — which was a glitter rock band who I thought were kind of cool — they seemed to aspire to be really, really big. Whereas the bands I saw play in the Rat... there was something gloriously low key about the whole deal. It was a small audience, for one thing, so it was undeniable that these bands — they were sort of culturally important, but they weren't reaching for the charts. You liked their music, but it wasn't like they were going to be knocking Elton John off the charts next week... which is not necessarily the case now. Green Day actually is knocking Phil Collins off the chart. The effect of Green Day is that a lot of other people feel empowered to be in bands.
Where you in bands in high school?
Flansburgh: John was in...
Linnell: Yeah, I was in a couple. I played sax in a band that did Alice Cooper covers... stuff like that, if that makes any sense.
A little, but not much. What about you?
Flansburgh: No, no. I didn't start playing until the very end of high school. The beginning of college is when I really started, when I could actually play more than three strings at a time.
Where did you go to college?
Flansburgh: I went to a bunch of different schools. I ended up at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn... which is what brought me to New York in the early eighties, and that was sort of when the band started. We were both living in this apartment building and started sharing equipment, and it just evolved into this thing where we were playing on each other's songs.
Eventually, we realized that we could perform as a duo. A friend of ours was actually doing a one-man show with drum machines. We were perfectly happy to have it sort of be this living-room project. We would just record songs and play them for our friends and express ourselves and get it out of our system, but the performance bug caught up with us after about a year or so of just recording, so we started playing in these clubs, these sort of showcase clubs, in downtown Manhattan. We were playing with a lot of cover bands who did things like Beatles songs. Like a guy who's working as a dentist and has a band on the weekend or something like that. It was pretty crummy... and then the New York scene exploded with a lot of creative bands and a lot of performance art clubs that had, like, transvestites on the bar and four different performances a night. It was very sort of hopped up, super-wild New York experience.
It was probably the closest I feel like I will ever come to feeling like part of a scene. There were a bunch of clubs that had live entertainment every night. It was getting a lot of attention, and it seemed different. There was a lot of crossover between, you know, people who had been in punk rock bands and people who were in experimental theater and people who were involved in other art-scene related things doing live performance. It would either be musical or just like... transgressive entertainment. A lot of it was really just for the people who were right there, which is different than what I've seen in general. A lot of times, New York is like... people doing their showcase to producers. What was different about the Lower East Side scene in the mid eighties was that it was really just people doing shows for their friends, and so it was very lively.
Linnell: One thing about that scene is that it was different than what had just happened. One of the reasons we were both in New York in the early eighties was that it had seemed to establish a reputation as a place where there was a lot of stuff going on just recently in the late seventies. That scene had pretty much folded up by the time we got there — which was the sort of Ramonesy, new-wavy, punky scene which was really one — even though the bands were very diverse — there was a particular idea connected with all those bands which was a very do-it-yourself sort of thing.
It seems like it was a very transitional period.
Linnell: Yeah, yeah. I mean at the time it seemed... but in retro- spect it seems like it wasn't as unified as it seemed at the time. The thing about the performance scene of the mid eighties that we felt like we sort of stuck our foot into was that it was even less unified. It was obviously not unified to us at the time. It was not even a single scene. The thing that defined it was that there were a lot of bands and performers and things that had nothing to do with each other which were all something you could produce in a little room with... What am I trying to say? There was no rationale for it. It was just anything goes. It was actually much more anything goes than the punk scene, which actually had a real formal basis. There was a real dress code. There was a real idea of what was in and what was out. The performance scene was really perfect for us because it didn't have that feeling of restriction. We were on the bill with things that had nothing to do with us whatsoever.
Flansburgh: It seemed almost that the point was that variety was a positive thing ...which actually has a nice quality to it... but there was a lot of stuff that was pretty grotesque too.
Linnell: A lot of things were done to offend our parents who would occasionally come to New York and check out what we were doing and inevitably see something else on the same bill that was totally offensive.
Flansburgh: Yeah, it would have been offensive to Jeffrey Dahmer... some of that stuff was really beyond the pale.
Speaking of the grotesque, what's with the recent fascination with skulls in your albums?
Linnell: It's actually not that recent, it goes back to...
Flansburgh: ... The Dawn of Skulls...
Linnell: Originally, well... It seems like we've always had skulls in our work. We've probably had more visual skulls in the last two records. We've had pictures of skulls and songs about skulls, but you know this is one of these things... We put twenty songs on every record. There is a limited number of objects you can talk about.
Flansburgh: We drag a lot of nouns in there.
Linnell: We pretty much cover the animal kingdom, death and skulls, modes of transportation... a lot of modes of transportation, including spaceships, but even much more pedestrian ones, too.
Uh, huh. So, back when you guys started out... were you doing the same sorts of things as you are now?
Linnell: In a certain way... As far as the spirit of what we were doing was defined by what we were into, and we didn't have this idea of like 'we are a reggae project.' We didn't define what we were doing except that it was our own bag, and we haven't really changed that in that way. We still don't have a real genre set up for ourselves. We just do the kind of stuff we're into, and, obviously, there's a general rock-center to it, and there's a certain set of things that we're limited by what we can do. So that's what defines it more or less... but, unlike other bands that we've both been in, we didn't have this clear idea of what we were doing.
Flansburgh: On our earliest demos, you can really hear this overwhelming Residents influence. I think that in a lot of ways we were inspired by them in the way they put themselves forward. They're like a faceless band, and they don't have any public persona which is... obviously we... people know what we look like a little bit more, but I think the idea of having the freedom to write a song and create points of view that are not linked to a persona is of interest to us.
On our first record there were a lot more odd-voices singing songs. They are really coming from a more extreme place, and, as time has gone on, I think we've kind of cooled that out a little bit, and its hard to say... it's really part of what we do. It's always been there. It's on "Extra Savoire-Faire" on our current record. It's not a personal song in any way. It's a complete character song. Part of it is like... I think we toned it down because on repeat listenings the funny voices don't really hold up as nicely as a more straight performance, but also I think we do realize that we're going to perform these songs, and they are linked up to our personalities a little bit. There is something very powerful about writing from an anonymous point of view. You know, listening to a song off our second album called "You'll Miss Me," which is a really extreme and ugly song, I don't know if I'd feel compelled to write something as grotesque now because it would just be like, "oh, he's doing something really gross." I mean, you're very free to explore things when nobody knows who you are, and they're not going to say "Oh, its that guy." It's a weird sort of restriction once you become a known... I don't know maybe it's too complicated a point to get across. I think that we could certainly return to that kind of material if we wanted to. I don't really see any reason to stop it... being grotesque. One thing... getting back to the influence of the Residents. They seemed very disconnected to a lot of conventions of pop, and at the same time there's something very formal, almost excessively formal, in what they were doing even though it was like ... the music to us probably seemed very primitive in the way it doesn't connote any exoticism...they weren't on some sort of safari. There were just very simple rhythms, and they were saying stuff that seemed very real. So maybe that's still something that seems important. That's a good thing for any band. It makes what you're saying seem much more fresh when it's not in the service of something you've already heard that's being more refined this time around.
So, with John Henry, your new album, the two of you are no longer alone. You now have a full band. How does that work out? Have you had any problems with the transition?
Flansburgh: We've been doing this thing for like ten years, so it runs like most bands in the sense that we're the band leaders. That is sort of established, and what probably makes it a little bit more comfortable is that it is clearly established and we're the songwriters in the band. It's been a pretty positive experience. It's challenged us, John and I , in a bunch of different ways that have probably actually helped us. For one thing, we end up playing a lot more than we've ever played before. We rehearse a lot more. That's really changed our... I never thought of us as being lazy, but we used to rehearse for just an hour a night. It was just the two of us, and it seemed like we had it pretty much under control. Now we rehearse, you know, five to six hours a day for days in a row. It really has brought up our performing. Beyond that, I think that the song writing is pretty much coming from the same place. There are certain things that the band can do really effectively and very quickly that definitely comes across on the recordings. The loud songs are sort of more... they just rock harder, and the quiet songs have a nice dynamic quality to them. It's interesting, because Apollo 18 was probably the most full-blown MIDI record that we could have made. There is a real sonic range on it that is very exciting... but in a totally different direction. You're sort of trading one set of advantages and limitations off for another. Both formats have a lot to recommend them. They're both unlimited if you feel they're unlimited. They both offer a lot.
At this point, Flansburgh looked at his watch and asked if he could use the telephone. After a brief argument with the taxi dispatcher, the two of them excused themselves in order to make it back to the House of Blues in time for their sound-check.