1996-12-12 The Carroll News
TMBG's John Linnell a real Giant among men
By Joe Halaiko, The Carroll News, December 12, 1996
Archived from: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/232536502.pdf#page=8
At 1:10 p.m. Sunday afternoon, the phone rang with the distinctive and urgent double ring that signals an off-campus call. Awake with anticipation for the last two hours, the time had arrived for my scheduled interview with John Linnell who along with John Flansburgh makes up the band They Might Be Giants.
I was warm in my dorm room but well aware of the snow still lurking on the ground outside. Linnell was on the sun-drenched West Coast, fresh off of a slew of shows in Portland and Los Angeles and preparing to play in San Diego. Familiar with TMBG's unique sound and off-the-wall lyrics, wasn't sure what to expect. To my surprise, Linnell asked the first question: "Have you heard the new album?" I told him I had played the tune "Exquisite Dead Guy" off this same new album, Factory Showroom, on WUJC. "Exquisite Dead Guy" is definitely a part of what we're all about," he replied. "I'm not sure if you know the story behind that one."
I did not, so he proceeded to tell me about this game invented by surrealists. "I guess you're supposed to sit in a group and write the parts of a sentence. Each person contributes one word, and the first time they tried this, the sentence read something like, 'The exquisite corpse drinks... some kind of wine or something. I can't remember exactly. The game ended up being called 'The Exquisite Corpse Game.'
"Both of us have these multi-track tape recorders," he continued. "One of us would record, much like the game, and then pass the tape to the other. We recorded one song roughly in that manner. It didn't make it on any of our records, and so the idea kind of surfaced lyrically in the tune "Exquisite Dead Guy."
The willingness of TMBG to adopt unconventional methods and mix musical styles is what gives them their allure. Surprisingly, their success comes with little or no formal musical training. "One thing I remember, my family had this big house in the suburbs of Boston. Somebody needed a bunch of stuff moved and arranged to have this piano in our living room over the winter. They basically just disappeared for seven years or so."
"Every day after school ended, it was just the piano in front of me. I gravitated to it. It was quite serendipitous. My mother's fairly decorous woman, so she cleaned up the piano a bit and put new ivory on the keys. When our friends reappeared after seven years they took the piano back, and my Mom could tell I was not the same. She actually went out and bought me an expensive upright."
Linnell continued to teach himself, picking up stray brass instruments in the high school band room. He actually attended high school with Flansburgh. "We worked on the high school newspaper together."
"Flansburgh's story is actually more interesting He didn't take up an instrument in high school. He was more concerned with recording. He had this fancy two-track tape recorder-this open-reel thing where you could record tracks individually. You could bounce back and forth and overdub. It was really the preferred method in those days."
"He was finally given a guitar by this friend of ours," Linnell went on. He had always wanted one, but it was one of those leaps he couldn't make. He immediately immersed himself into it. As I recall, it only had two or three strings at first. He very gradually started adding strings. Actually, now that think about it, he might have started off with only one string. At any rate, it was a very gradual stringing process."
Flansburgh and Linnell went to different colleges. Flansburgh attended school at Antioch in Ohio for a period. "It was just sort of luck that John and I ended up in New York in 1981. We moved into this one building where everybody seemed to be living. It was really a dump, actually, quite frightening By that time, John had a four-track reel-to-reel. We were able to do more of the original thing we were trying for."
The five-member band that appears on the new album was not always a reality. "In '82, we per formed as a duo. We felt like we were a rock band, although we had tape recorders behind us backing us up. By '84, we had gotten to the point where we were part of this performance art' scene. We were not exactly the typical performance artists, where you would read from a book, stand on a tree stump and put light bulbs in your eyes. After about four years, we felt like we were old-timers."
A career that has spanned more than a decade started off small. "An independent recording company, Bar None, got ahold of the first cassette. Our second release came on Bar None and was this minor indie success. It was really lucky for us. In fact, we managed to make a video that actually got on Nickelodeon first, then out of pure luck landed on MTV. There we were-right between Whitney Houston and Whitesnake. The song was called 'Puppet Head.' It wasn't played on-air a lot, but the attendance at our shows went from 50 or 75 to 100 or 200. We seemed pretty excited although I wouldn't say we were catapulting into stardom at the time."
Not strangers to exploring different creative mediums, I asked Linnell what he thought of the internet. "We have our own. website now. There's also a newsgroup where I believe people chat about concerts or songs - people who maybe should get outdoors more often." Still another avenue for TMBG is their Dial-A-Song service. "We've been running the thing since '83. It's really the simplest way to get out new material. When you're on the road, you have to carry your gear back and forth to the clubs, and there is so much other business stuff. The Dial-A-Song requires no work. Really, it's peculiar to me that no one else does this. You can call up and listen to new They Might Be Giants. Some people have tried to tell us to make a profit of it, but we've stood our ground. For time immemorial you get to hear material that is not on a record and does not overlap with our recorded material."
With the volume of their recordings, I wondered if he had a favorite song or album. Some artists respond that they treat their songs like children, so then they love them all equally. "That's a pretty evasive response. We've used that one before, Linnell responded. "We probably do have favorite songs. We don't really think that lovingly about our songs. As parents, we'd probably be the type that says, 'You'll have to pay your own college tuition."
As the interview wound down I wanted to conclude with an open-ended question. I was sure he'd gone through the interview process a great many times, so I wanted to know if there were any questions he wished he would have been asked. "You probably should have asked me that at the beginning," he joked. Does their music fit more with the 90's? "We are a very contemporary band. We've always been wary of the idea of being fashionable, though. It's not a real dependable type of career move. If you end up being successful at something that's not your personal thing you're going to be miserable."