1996-01-15 UCONN Daily Campus
They Might Be Giants
By Scott Herman and David Fennema, UCONN Daily Campus, January 15, 1996
John Flansburgh and John Linnell, the two primary creative forces that drive the quirky and often misunderstood They Might Be Giants, spent the entire day last Thursday driving from Washington, D.C. to New Haven. Along the way they battled thick fog and bad radio stations, but still managed to arrive at Toad's Place just in time for their 7 p.m. sound check. They pulled up in front of Toad's in their oversized Crown Victoria, double-parked, and made their way toward the front door of the club, looking noticeably unlike rock stars and more like tired roadtrippers.
One 15-year old fan ran up to Flansburgh on the sidewalk with a tape in his hand. "John, will you listen to this?" he begged. "Sure, no problem," Flansburgh said as he entered Toad's, never taking the tape or even giving the kid a second look.
Two hours later, Flansburgh was a different person entirely. We caught up with him for an interview in his dressing room just before the band's 10 p.m. set. As the opening band The Candy Butchers tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to keep the crowd interested until the headliners appeared, Flansburgh relaxed in the dingy dressing room, unwinding after a long day on the road by fiddling with his black Les Paul guitar.
He turned the tables on us by asking the first questions, and it gave us a chance to talk with him about such artists as Frank Sinatra and Earth Wind and Fire.
"I always wonder why Earth, Wind and Fire aren't cool now," Flansburgh said. "I would think that they'd be monsters now. What's holding them back? I mean, Stevie Wonder still has hits.
"So anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt," he continued. "What are the questions?"
GWI: Let start off by talking about the tour you're doing now. It's a really short tour.
Flansburgh: It's not really a tour at all. We're just doing a week up the East Coast.
GWI: What cities are you playing in?
Flansburgh: D.C., Boston, here, Providence. We did show in Pennsylvania. We did New Year's in New York, and we did Philadelphia.
GW: Where did you play in New York?
Flansburgh: We did two shows at Tramps. Not the old, but the new, revised Tramps, which holds like 1,100 people. So, we did a couple shows there for New Year's. We're kind of just warming up for our next record. We put some songs from the next record into the show. We're just kind of working stuff out. This is a four-piece band, so it's kind of a departure for us. We've worked with a six-piece until now...
Our old bass player. Tony Maimone, is starting a studio in New York, so we're working with Graham Maby, who we've also recorded with. So, we've had the task of rehearsing with a new player and we thought, "Why not change the repertoire up and sort of put the whole show on jacks and figure out some new songs and do a different bunch of old songs?" As for any band that's been around about 10 years making records... there are a lot of songs we can't not do. We basically get off the stage and just hear people yelling "Istanbul" until they start booing, and then they'd go home. We've tried it, and it just doesn't work.
We've tried that "We don't play that song anymore, man" thing. In some ways, the weirdest thing about being an established band is that you're stuck with your own history. history. You can't really reinvent yourself... Part of the problem for us is that this band is so close to being an exact representation of who we are, because it's not really this projected image. It's not like we were wearing space-suits and then we're like "We're not going to wear space suits anymore!" I feel like this is who we are and we can't really stray too far from that.
GWI: So will this new album - like this tour - be recorded without a horn section?
Flansburgh: We've done some songs already for it, and it's sort of more like halfway between our old records and John Henry. I guess it's sort of inevitable. When we went to having a full band, we were figuring out how to do everything through a full band, and I think having the horns really helped. Now we want to kind of fuse the MIDI/sample and the electronic, synth stuff we did with the instrument stuff and try to get some kind of blend that's actually as compelling as either approach would be by itself. We've actually had pretty good luck with it. We recently got these super-fancy home digital tape recorders that are very new on the market. Like a better version of the ADAT machine. You can basically not be an engineer and still make very pristine recordings in your house.
We have good luck recording stuff ourselves, then taking it to the studio and adding tracks. It's sort of like the most advanced and enhanced version on home recording I can imagine, because you really have the means to link up the studio with the home recordings, which really appeals to me because I feel that a lot of our best recordings really came out of home recording. We never made big thing of it, but some of our best recordings were stuff that we made at home. We didn't want people to feel cheated. Some of our earlier recordings are really crummy-sounding, In terms of performance, there's stuff that you can do when there's nobody else in the room that you just can't do when there's an engineer in the room, 'cause they're just looking at you, going "this guy is f**ked up!""
GWI: Do you know the release date of the next album?
Flansburgh: It will be out in the fall.
GWI: In the past, on the same tour a lot of the same songs are played. Are you guys playing around with your set list, or is there a predetermined set list?
Flansburgh: I think about half the is always changing, and the other half we'll still be playing at Foxwoods in 2040. There's always a percentage of people at our show that have a bunch of songs they want to hear. We've started playing "Spider" recently, which is all done with samples we had made ourselves at home... so we always figured that was not the kind of song we can do at a show. But inevitably, people would be requesting it. We finally just figured out a way to play it live. Tonight we're going to play "Spider" and even though the song is, like, three years old, it's only, like, the fourth time we've ever played it.
There's definitely a bunch of new old stuff in the show. We're playing "Santa's Beard" off Lincoln. I had to pretty much relearn how to play it for this tour.
GWI: You didn't play "She's an Angel" until the last time you guys were here.
Flansburgh: Yeah. That was just, like, a staple of the show for years and years and years, and it does get to a point where, like, since that's not a hit - obviously some people feel passionate about it - but it wasn't a song we did a video for or anything like that. I remember once John forgot the words and everyone in the audience knew them.
GWL: That's Sinatra influence there.
Flansburgh: Right! We were looking for the Teleprompter but it was nowhere in sight. That was when John was like "I don't think we should do this song anymore." That song and "Kiss Me Son Of God" are songs that we've probably done about a million times... At a certain point it was like, "Wow! we really shouldn't do that song any more." We started forming a public in our late 20s. We started the band in our early 20s but we really didn't start playing until our late 20s.
GWI: How old are you now?
Flansburgh: I'm 35. So it's like, as an adult I feel like I'm very lucky I'm not dealing with any formative questions, like my feelings about my rock career. Every time we do a festival I see people who really believe in the myth of what they're doing on a level that is really unrealistic. Rock bands in general don't really matter that much. Most people's rock careers don't really last that long and I think the bands that we toured with 10 years ago, almost categorically, none of them exist. Even the most interesting, ambitious, phenomenal bands that had a huge influence on me... It's not something you should hitch your star to. It's just not going to last.
GWI: To what do you attribute your longevity?
Flansburgh: I think we're really lucky that we started so small. We didn't quit our day jobs for years and years, and we didn't really think of it as a career, we thought about it as something that was just interesting to us. So we created this thing that provided total satisfaction to ourselves. I think that's the biggest problem people have. In a little way. people start to undo themselves when they start their bands. I don't know. By some people's standards, maybe we haven't had any real success. We're not household words. We've never been on the cover of magazines.
We're clearly not for everybody. It's not a big cult, it's a little cult. It's for some people. I think that recognizing that has been the key to our longevity. Most people are really trying to claw their way into the charts... I don't care about street credibility. I don't know what street credibility is, you know. I dress like my father! It's, like, f**k that sh*t. I'm doing exactly what I'm interested in, and I'm trying to find people who are interested in what we're doing. It's not about trying to fit in with something else. It's about expression. I think that's probably what's worked for us. Bands like us usually play on Wednesday nights at the local bar, and that's pretty much as far as they can get. We definitely clicked in a way I think [it's] the fact that [John Linnell and I] are friends and that we sort of saw things in the same way and saw the same miserable drum solos in the same way. We went to a lot of the same concerts and said "Oh, that doesn't work. Bands shouldn't try that." Ask the hard-hitting questions... 'Are you still beating your wife?'
GWI: Can you talk about some of your side projects?
Flansburgh: I've got a bunch of side projects. Actually I would love to plug the "Hello CD of the Month Club." Because it's so small, we don't have any ad budget for it... It works like [a] book of the month club. You join for a year, you get 10 CDs and each CD is dedicated to a different artist, and half the year is about up-and-coming people and the other half is side projects by established artists. Last year we had Annie Partridge, and my partner John Linnell did the State Songs EP. We did a Christmas CD that was pretty cool. You call (800) HELLO41 and we send out free brochures. Just leave your name and address.
This year is a pretty cool subscription. One of the months people will get a full-length LP of my Mono Puff project, which is a whole album of material - 14 songs. Magnetic Fields are doing it. Gordon Gano from the Violent Femmes is doing a disc that he is actually recording at my house next week. Soul Coughing is doing a project. A lot of cool bands. John Linnell is doing another one.
GWI: What about the videos you've directed in the past?
Flansburgh: I did a couple of videos for Frank Black, I did an Edwyn Collins video for "A Girl Like You." It was in the Buzz Bin a couple months ago. That was pretty cool. The one thing I've found is that it is so much more work than I ever dreamed it would be... There's a whole other part of, like, pulling stuff together that's like, the work part of it. It's not that big a deal, but it just takes so much time. I'm open to doing it. I went to art school, so directing videos is probably the closest thing to the visual art stuff I was doing in college. I feel well-equipped for doing it while I'm doing it, but it's so much work, and then at the end you have, like, a rock video. In a way it's more satisfying writing rock music.
GWI: Who is the older gentleman whose face randomly pops up in many of your videos?
Flansburgh: I used to work for Macmillan Publishing, which also owned a distributing company and I would go down to the stat room and basically make posters for They Might Be Giants, make stat things for myself, and basically hide from my boss in the darkroom. But they also had all these encyclopedias there, and this guy's face was just in an encyclopedia he looked kind of benevolent, interesting.
I think the idea of having a logo for the band, or, like, some kind of image for the band that wasn't us sort of appealed to us. Even the name They Might Be Giants, the point of it is not to reflect on ourselves, but to kind of be outward-looking. And, of course, nobody thinks of it in those terms. That's the sad irony of naming your band - it's the first thing you do and it's usually real ly uninformed. You're not really thinking it through that well. It's certainly not the worst name for a band. I think "Live..." [is the worst.]
GWI: And they changed their name to Live after they had another name!
Flansburgh: I know! It's like calling yourself "Free Beer" or "Open Mike" or something. You see it on a bill and you don't even know if it's a name. I think it's holding them back.
GWI: What about that girl on the cover of John Henry?
Flansburgh: She's a professional girl... We've always had illustrators do our covers, and we wanted to break away from that but not fall into the thing of putting our picture on the cover. I think it's kind of a relief having a band that is not quite so identified with our faces. Not Not only does it allow us to get old gracefully, but also, we can walk into our shows and nobody knows it's us. I've heard people talk about us when if they knew we were there it would blow their minds - both good and bad.
We did this free show in Prospect Park in Brooklyn this last summer. It was, like, this huge show. I went down to this record store because we forgot to bring any pre-show music. The guy behind the desk said to this woman. "You gonna see They Might Be Giants in the park?" She was like "Ahhhhhhhhh..." It was really horrible. To a lot of people we're like the most obnoxious thought that could cross your mind. It kind of reminded me of how I feel when somebody says "Did you see the new Richard Dreyfus movie!" I kind of go "Ahhhhhh..."
GWI: If you had a wedding, which band would you pick to play at it?
Flansburgh: There's this guy in New York who plays at this rodeo bar named Rick Smith. Ever heard Stevie West? It's like this whole genre of music that's kind of a hybrid between country western and swing It's actually, like, swingy, but it's string instruments and guitars. It's pretty high-octane music.
GWI: What other types of music are you into?
Flansburgh: I'm producing this song for Freedy a Marshall Johnston at the end of this week Crenshaw song So I've been listening to a lot of Manhall Crenshaw records just to bone up on my Marshall Crenshaw. That's been pretty interesting. For contemporary bands, I'm really impressed with [The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion]... They're totally great. He's sort of got this recessive Elvis gene along with a healthy dose of Captain Beefheart. It's really great. It's really transcendentally good.
GWI: It seems like you are always working on projects with various musicians. How often do you really step back and listen to music as a fan?
Flansburgh: In a way I sort of welcome the stuff that is sort of task-like because it makes doing the music seem like a vacation. To an extent I'm a workaholic. To another extent, doing outside projects often keeps me grateful that I actually have the opportunity to be a musician. If you just do one thing all the just time it's really easy to pin all your bad feelings on one thing and go, "oh, this is a raw deal." Every time I venture into another project... I realize that this is the easiest job in the world. Maybe not easiest, but the job satisfaction is really high, and it's just really interesting and really worth doing.
And most people work a lot harder than rock musicians. It's great to be your own boss. Being a rock video director, you definitely can't go "F**k you!" to the manager the way you can when you're in a band. Anyway, I think our time is up because Mike [Kelley, the tour manager] has entered the room.
GWI: Thank you very much.
Flansburgh: Yeah, it was a gas.