1995-02 Flipside
Interview with the Johns
By Gwynne Kahn and Jill Meschke, Flipside, Feb/Mar 1995
Archived from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tabloidfootprints/42078327524/
Gwynne: On the new album, I noticed a distinct lack of accordion, and a lot more horn section. Are you trying to intentionally phase out the accordion, or have you just been listening to a lot of Herb Alpert records?
John L: No, neither one. Actually, we just had this really great Hammond B3 up at Bearsville (where the album was recorded), and we just ended up using it a lot. I will say that we generally had a lot more accordion in the live show than on any of the records we made. There's lots of songs on the other records that, when we got in the studio, we just figured out whatever things we wanted to do on the record. It wasn't intentional, and I sort of hope people won't think I've abandoned the accordion for any ulterior reason.
Gwynne: Like to be more "commercial" or something? No, I just thought you might be getting tired of it artistically, and were maybe branching out into other things.
John L: No, not at all! We really liked the sound of this B3, and we did record all the rhythm tracks live in the studio: guitar, keyboards, bass, drums, and a lot of the horns, were all done simultaneously. So that was really different for us. In fact, it was the exact opposite of what we've ever done before. And the accordion is a little harder to record in that situation than the B3.
Gwynne: It's pretty common knowledge that you've known one another since high school. But what were your musical projects previous to They Might Be Giants, and how did you come around to playing with one another again? And what was it that made you want to be in a band in the first place?
John L: We made tapes together before we were actually doing any music. They were sort of semi-musical. Some of them were noise kind of things or oddball projects. We made a recording of "Don't Worry Kyoko" with these sort of Rod Serling voices.
Jill: Any chance of us hearing a tape of that?
John L: I think they've been destroyed.
Gwynne: What were your bands before TMBG?
John L: I was in a band called The Mundanes, and that was the only other band I was in. That was in Providence. And John (F.) was in a couple of college bands.
Gwynne: What were you doing in Providence? Were going to school, too?
John L: I was pretty much playing in The Mundanes. That's why I went there. Some of the band lived in Boston, some of the band lived in Providence, and I joined the band and somehow wound up in Providence.
Gwynne: So you didn't play in any bands while you were in college (at University of Massachusetts)?
John L: Well, this is really embarrassing, but I had this sort of like, lounge-y jazz group that did, like, John Coltrane. This wasn't the kind of "sophisticated," tongue-in-cheek type...we were actually playing jazz out of the "real" book.
Jill: (laughs) It's a step up from playing David Sanborn's Straight From The Heart album note-for-note.
Gwynne: It's a step up from (mumbles the name of her first band incoherently). Now what about you, John (F.)? What did you do before They Might Be Giants.
John F: Well, the things I did with John in high school were put together on...I had this stereo tape recorder I did sound-on-sound recordings with. That was the first thing I ever made recordings on. That was really what introduced me to the world of sound. I really became a musician so I could continue my experiments in recording with sound. I had a toy organ, and other assorted things that I made noise with, and there was a piano at my house, and a friend of mine gave me a guitar when I was seventeen. It wasn't until I was eighteen that I could really get my fingers around the neck of it.
Gwynne: Had to wait for that growth spurt!
John F: Yeah! About the opposite of the intuitive, natural musician who's been playing since they were, you know, born. It was really a lot of hard work for very modest results. For about a year I had just a three-string guitar. I was writing songs on the top of three strings because it's very easy to just come up with, like, chords. I didn't even know what any chords I was playing were called! So I started writing songs almost right away because it was too hard to figure out other people's songs. Started doing a lot of home-taping, and the first couple of bands I was in, we barely played out. The first band I was in was in Ohio, when I was at Antioch College, I was in a band with a guy named Shell White, who's now an animator. He animated the "Boy in the Bubble" video for Paul Simon and the Michael Jackson video "Leave Me Alone." The "townie" guy was the bass player; he was into tripping onstage.
Gwynne: Tripping over his cord? I do that.
John F: No, tripping on LSD. [I knew that -- G.] And this guy Dan Spock, who we knew from high school. So it was a lot of fun, it was this total party band. Very crude playing. In some ways, it was ahead of its time, because this was like 1980, and punk rock was still, you know, an extremely viable thing. But there were other musical aspects to it, too. Then I had this band that was the immediate predecessor to They Might Be Giants in the sense that, I feel the spirit of the band was more kind of coming from where They Might Be Giants was coming from. It was a group called The Turtlenecks. We did all original material...uh, except "Sweet Home Alabama." The bass player could play the entire riff on the guitar, so it was like... this impressive display...
Gwynne: Like the joke about "Why does a dog lick its balls"...
John F: Yeah, he's gonna do it because he can! So we were called The Turtlenecks, we played a bunch of songs...and the drummer of the band had this weird thing. He liked stopping in the middle of songs, and waiting 'til everybody would turn around...and just as the thread of the song was about lost, he's start playing again. So, like, we wouldn't actually stop playing, but he would stop long enough to make everybody feel really edgy. And he'd do this in performance, at shows! It was really this strange control thing, he was trying to show that he was driving the car. So that was the group; we actually did a couple of songs that are still in our repertoire. "Alienation's For The Rich" was written for that band. Then I moved to New York and lived in the same building as John. There was a three-piece group with John, me, and a guy named Dave Lindsay, who's apparently Arto's cousin. We had this trio, we never had a drummer. This guy we knew was actually playing in clubs in New York as a one-man band with a drum-machine. That was in '83, and drum machine technology had gone from being really primitive to... slightly less primitive. Although it was really more the fact that he was making a go of it as a one-man band that made us think, like, maybe we could just do stuff as a two-piece. Originally, we didn't even have a drum machine, we just did a lot of the rhythm tracks with just, like, we would hit the microphone with our thumbs as the kick-drum, and then we'd use the synthesizer for the snare parts.
Gwynne: Did you have one of those Casios with the really cheesy built-in beats, like "Mambo" and stuff?
John F: No, we had a Moog and a four-track and that was pretty much it. Then we bought a Doctor Rhythm, the old kinds "Sexual Healing"-era Doctor Rhythm. That was the big advance for us.
Gwynne: John (L), what made you decide to switch from regular keyboard to accordion.
John L: Somebody loaned us an accordion. We were living in this house, a duplex, with this woman who was going to art school with you...
John F: ...I finished up at Pratt (Art Institute) in Brooklyn...
John L:...She had played accordion as a kid, so she had this thing, and she perceived that it would be exactly the thing that we would be into. I spent a couple of weeks learning how to play it, to the point where I could play the right hand and sort of match the bells. We did a couple of shows, we played on the Brooklyn Promenade. It was around 1983, we'd been playing together about a year.
Gwynne: Wow, you've been playing together 12 years! Imagine that!
John F: I know, it's sick.
John L: Then we did a party and we used the accordion sort of for convenience, because it was too much of a hassle to bring all the other keyboards. That was when it occurred to us that we could do a whole show with just the accordion. And it got a really good response.
Gwynne: What was the first record you bought? I remember you took on the spot requests by asking the audience that once at an in-store show.
John L: Oh right! The first record I ever paid for - this will interest you Gwynne - it was one of those Banana Splits 45s you could get from the back of a cereal box. I sent away for it.
Gwynne: Do you still have it?
John L: I have one of them, somewhere... actually it's kind of lost amongst my stuff now, but... those are really good records. And I'm sure you know Barry White was the guy who wrote one of the songs.
Gwynne: What about you, John (F.)?
John F: It was The Beatles' Hard Day's Night. I bought it with money from my grandmother the Christmas it came out. I also bought the Batman soundtrack album right after that. I realized that, with my generous Grandma, I could buy records. So I bought Beatles records, Monkees records, and Batman.
Gwynne: Then what was your first musical passion, that made you want to start writing songs or being a musician?
John L: I don't know! Somebody boarded a piano at our house, and they were only supposed to leave it there for one winter, and then they split. We couldn't even find them or contact them. So we had this piano for, like, seven years. And that became sort of the thing, I was really hooked on the piano when I was a teenager.
Gwynne: Did you have a hero?
John L: I was really into Frank Zappa, actually. Which is, again, deeply humiliating!
Gwynne: Not it isn't! Not at all!
John L: I just recently got a copy of Weasels Ripped My Flesh, which was the record I was particularly into, and, uh...yeah, I kinda liked hearing that one again. I think I got really turned off by the `70s stuff. It's funny, because I think John and I both feel like we're pretty solidly into the East coast and New York scene, but when I think of a lot of the bands I'm into, there's a really heavy proportion of California and English bands.
Gwynne: I don't think you can avoid it if you love pop. California had the Turtles and The Monkees, and England had the Beatles and The Who. You can't write pop and hate that stuff. Although you can hate the `Stones, and I do!
John L: Right on!
John F: We were just talking about how much we hate the `Stones recently.
Gwynne: Are you into any of the more obscure `60s "pop" "vocal" groups, like all that Jimmy Webb or Burt Bacharach-damaged stuff?
John F: We still think talking about Jimmy Webb is...daring.
At this point, the road manager steps in and announces that John Linnell must eat, so the interview is circumvented before I had a chance to ask them what kind of girls they like, their favorite colors, or their hat sizes.