1995-12-18 Time Off
Flying wax in the Factory Showroom
By Simon McKenzie, Time Off Magazine, December 18, 1995
Archived from: https://web.archive.org/web/20031026140739/http://www.tmbg.net/articles/timeoff1995.html
Kansas City, in the US, actually exists in two states. A little like Albury-Wodonga, Kansas City Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas are divided by a border - a road called State Line Road - but are, for many intents and purposes, the same city. They Might Be Giants' John Linnell is sitting in a hotel in KC Missouri, preparing to play a gig in KC Kansas, and squeezing in a few phone interviews in the meantime.
"It's a bi-state experience," he laughs. "I think one of the things about it is that Kansas City, Missouri really dwarfs Kansas City, Kansas. It's a much bigger place, and Kansas City, Kansas is kind of a dump, actually."
Whether it be Istanbul, Constantinople of one of either Kansas Cities, one motel room can look pretty much like the next. Asked when the current tour began, Linnell offers an answer which seems to suggest he's not the world's biggest fan of life on the road.
"It depends on when you begin counting," he says. "Sometimes I'm under the impression that the tour began in 1986. We haven't had all that much time, aside from when we've been writing and recording, that we haven't been touring. In fact, we started playing this summer well before the album came out - in other words, the months of June, July and August."
The album to which Linnell refers is Factory Showroom, the Giants' sixth record and second with a full band lineup. Having forgone their usual duo format for their last album, John Henry, they've now settled into method of working that's a collision of the old duo approach and the group effort.
"That's correct," Linnell says. "The funny thing about this record is that it took us two albums to get to the point of working in the way we'd originally worked - where we were picking and choosing sounds to suit each song, and really thinking in terms of every song sounding unique on the record. That's sort of been our traditional approach. The approach of the last record was more on the side of recording a live band and getting a consistent sound throughout, which we really learned how to do with John Henry. We'd never recorded a band, period, before that, and we'd never had a band. We tried to work out all the arrangements in advance, and kind of come up with a band sound. That was the idea of the previous record.
"This one is more of a return to form, in a way. This is doing something that's closer to what we've done all along, and yet we have a band."
While John Henry was released to mixed responses, the subsequent tour - with a band for the first time - ended up being quite special. It was a hell of a night when they hit Brisbane in May last year, and it seemed to exemplify the spirit the Giants had worked in over their whole career. But were any old fans lost when they initially became a "real" group?
"I wonder about that, but I didn't get the impression that people were jumping off," Linnell says. "Like I was suggesting, I think some people had problems with the last record, but I don't think it had so much to do with the band. In actually working with a band, we kind of were doing something that a lot of long-term fans had been nagging us to do all along. We'd actually been very resistant to getting a band, because we partly were defensive about what it was we'd been doing. We thought, 'Well, is there something wrong with being a duo, Goddamit? We'll just keep doing it until everybody likes it'. Eventually, we thought, 'Well, I guess we've proved our point', and we decided to go ahead and get a band."
Factory Showroom is a delightfully consistent and classically melodic pop album, probably more so than any of their other releases. That's not to say they're ironing out all their eccentricities - take 'I Can Hear You', a song recorded at the historic Edison Laboratory with a non-electrical wax cylinder recorder built in 1898.
"It was utterly fascinating," Linnell says. "We stood on the stage next to this recorder, and there were a couple of cones emanating from this small machine. The machine was about the size of a cigar box, but the cones were something like six feet and twelve feet long respectively, and the biggest one was about two feet wide. And we were really instructed to play and sing as loud as we could into these cones, so it was very different from anything we'd ever done before.
"We recorded four songs, and we actually did a series of performances in the course of the day. They kept bringing in the tour group, and then they would leave and they'd bring in the next group. And we recorded each of the four songs I think maybe three or four times. The wax was flying."
Linnell still agrees, however, that there's more in the way of classic pop on this record.
"Our albums are really collections of all our recent work. We've yet to really make a record that has a concept to it, you know? But we love pop songs, and that's always been a big thing for us. I think maybe, as we're getting older, we're getting more conversant with the idiom. We're also not as brash as we used to be, so maybe it's easier to make a pop album."