1996 LAUNCHonline
They Might Be Giants (Or They Might Be The Martian Manhunter, Woozy From Fire, His Only Weakness!)
By J. Kordosh, LAUNCHonline, 1996
Archived from: https://web.archive.org/web/19961023162359/http://www.2launch.com/giants.html
Sitting in John Flansburgh's Hollywood hotel suite, I say — regarding They Might Be Giants' newly-released Factory Showroom — "There's something I find vaguely disturbing about some of the songs on this record."
"The songs we recorded in the nude, you mean? You figured that out?" replies the cheerful, bespectacled guitarist.
It's always nice when a musician helps set the tone for an interview, don't you think? And John Flansburgh, half of the creative force behind Brooklyn's They Might Be Giants, is as articulate and thoughtful as fans might imagine. (The other half — what I think of as the darker half — is, of course, John Linnell, world-famous accordianist/songwriter/keyboardist/singer. Linnell, alas, has been stricken with laryngitis so severe that he can't participate in the interview. And later on that night, when TMBG perform at The House Of Blues, Linnell will not sing a single song! For you non-fans, this is akin to, I don't know, an R.E.M. show where Michael Stipe and Peter Buck stay home. The only Linnell songs TMBG will do that night will be the obligatory "Birdhouse In Your Soul," sung by a guy from opening act the Candy Butchers, and Showroom's "James K. Polk," in which Flansburgh will forget the lyrics.
Unlike Flansburgh's relationship with those lyrics, They Might Be Giants have further cemented an unforgettable career with Factory Showroom, a remarkably eclectic collection of 13 songs that range — in subject matter — from cranky old guys who are going senile to situations in life where it's just kind of hard to hear the other fellow. In other words, pretty standard TMBG fare...quirky, funny, memorable stuff laden with multi-layered vocals. Perhaps most memorable is Linnell's "The Spiraling Shape," a superbly ominous "Be careful what you wish for" tune that appeared on the soundtrack to Brain Candy earlier this year. It raises the question: why wasn't the almost-equally-superb "SenSurround," which was on 1995's Mighty Morphin Power Rangers soundtrack, also included?
"Well, that's a good question," says Flansburgh. "This record is pretty edited — we recorded 22 songs and put 13 on it. Some of the songs we left off are truly second-rate songs, but a lot of them are actually first-rate songs. In a lot of cases, whenever we make those kind of choices (to leave off a song), it's usually because it's most like some other song. I think 'Spiraling Shape' seemed like a more successful recording, and there are more songs like 'SenSurround' on the record."
The appearance of "James K. Polk" — originally heard in a different arrangement on their Istanbul (Not Constantinople) EP in 1990 — raises different questions. "That's an example of a song that's legacy grew among our hardcore fans and, ultimately, the decision to put it on the album was prompted by the fact that the EP hasn't been available for a couple of years and won't be back in print," Flansburgh explains. It also exemplifies why we won't be hearing those aforementioned first-rate songs that were left off of Showroom any time soon: "I think we're getting a little tired of putting top-flight sonsg out as B-sides. We're gonna end up reworking a lot of the (unreleased) songs and using them later on. We've done enough EPs to realize that, a lot of times, when you do those songs they're gone forever — and the albums remain."
Flansburgh also notes how their live shows influence their recorded product. "We never referred to the original recording (of 'James K. Polk'); there's a way we've been doing it live for awhile. We just knew how the song went and there was no necessity to refer to the original recording. I guess we really focus on a record being a finished product and it's very specific that we know people are going to experience this recording.
"But after we start doing it live we feel pretty free to change it around to make it a more effective performance. Like 'Whistling In The Dark' (from They Might Be Giants' record for 1990, Flood): it has a huge bass drum part in it that comes in on the word 'whistling' on the record — even though immediately after recording it we realized it made really obvious sense to make it (sings) 'Whistling in the dark, boom!' But the record's done, so what do you do? Do you just do another thousand shows with the drum in the wrong place or do you just kind of 'fess up? We just changed it; it's not a problem."
And, yes, those live shows. I don't know if all of They Might Be Giantdom was thrown for a loop when the original Linnell/Flansburgh duo expanded into a full-fledged band — which happened on their John Henry disc two years ago and continues with the guys now complemented by guitarist Eric Schermerhorn, bassist Graham Maby and drummer Brian Doherty — but I sure was. Frankly, I feared it was a reaction to their being perceived by the world as a novelty act, a dearth of record sales, or both. Flansburgh lays these fears to rest.
"We didn't do it as a reaction to anything," he says. "We did it as an experiment, and it works. I think the biggest problem people have with the band is the idea that our actions are somehow motivated by any perception of the outside world. We're the most self-unaware, uniformed individuals that you could imagine. A lot of things matter to us so much on a personal level that we would never allow — " he begins, then veers another way. "No matter how many times our manager tells us something is a mistake, there are things we've blown off for over a decade, like perception ideas about how we should present ourselves.
"All we ever wanted out of the band was to do something that was interesting to us. We worked for four years before we got signed to an indie (Bar None). We worked for, like, eight years before we got signed to a major. You don't stick around a project that long unless there's something working for you on a totally personal level. It's not that fun of an ego ride, being in an unsigned band for eight years. It's just not that cool unless it's interesting to you.
"The reality of why we went to the live band format is that we've done so many shows. When we first started working with the tape (onstage) it was this incredibly flexible, plastic, fluid medium (with which) we could do anything we wanted. The scope of the sound we could get onstage was completely wide open. We'd do a show, basically, every Friday or Saturday night in the East Village and then we'd work our day jobs during the week. And we'd come home every night and between 7:00 and 9:00 we'd work on our show. We'd actually be playing out every weekend with kind of a different show, so it was a really work-intensive musical project. Suddenly, in 1989, we had an international career, so instead of playing once a week we were playing every night. And all of a sudden the amount the show could change was really limited. We did the Apollo 18 album (1992), which is probably the most sample/MIDI intense album that we've ever done...in a lot of ways, it's so electronic that it's almost foreboding for people who aren't oriented that way. And on that tour, because it was such an electronic album, it was really difficult to reproduce a lot of those songs live without it seeming like a puppet show. We did the entire Apollo 18 tour without playing 'The Guitar,' which is, like, the primary track off that record, 'cause it's like this total groove song and it has all these rhythm breakdowns in it. So suddenly what had seemed for a very long time like a very flexible format seemed really limiting, and bringing the live rhythm section and the horn players in freed us up to change the show around while we're on the road. Which, for practical reasons, is really cool."
The first LP with the live group, John Henry, sold about 200,000 units. "It put us into a holding pattern with our fan base, " Flansburgh says. "It wasn't as strong as people were hoping." He goes on to note that there was "an extraordinary amount of turmoil within (Elektra Records) as John Henry was being released. It was pretty catastrophic, the way records get worked and promoted; most of the people we worked with in making John Henry were not there when it came out."
Factory Showroom will, hopefully, fare better. Musically, it's probably a little more left-field than John Henry (which wasn't exactly dead center, either), with elements of disco ("S.E.X.X.Y."), folk ("James K. Polk") and even some blues ("Pet Name") in its grooves. And there's brilliant experimentation, something TMBG have always stood for: Flansburgh's "I Can Hear You" was recorded at the Edison Laboratory in New Jersey entirely without using nuisance-filled, oft-dangerous electricity.
We didn't know anything about it until we got invited to do this thing — there's this kind of free-form radio station, WFME, out in New York City," the guitarist explains. "It's a great station, they actually had a show that played pre-electric recordings. They asked us to do it because we're a local band and they saw us as a band who'd be up for it. Pre-electric recordings basically means 78s — I learned so much about the history of recording from this, it was like a one-day crash seminar. I guess in the 1880s, 1890s, Edison invented the wax cylinder, which is essentially a record player in a different format. It's a cylinder instead of a flat disc, but it's the same idea, grooves and a needle. The difference is that every record was cut directly from the microphone to the record; there was no electricity involved in the process of making wax cylinder recordings. There's a spring mechanism that revolves this warm wax cylinder which has a needle cutting a groove into it. And the sound pressure that's collected by these giant cones (or they might be giant cones — the author) goes to a point, where a diaphragm carries the vibrations to a needle. It's that simple. It's like a magic trick."
Realize that Flansburgh's vocals on "I Can Hear You" are so strident (hell, whiny) that it could just as easily be Weird Al Yankovic imitating John Linnell. (In fact, I thought it was John Linnell imitating Weird Al on first listen, myself.) According to Flansburgh, though, it was inevitable. "Everyone's familiar with the sound of vocalists of that time, this really piercing, kind of small way of singing. Like that was the style of that time — and it's not. It's the only way you can record on those devices. You have to sing incredibly loud. You basically put the louder instruments in the back — the bass and the tuba are in the back. The tuba cuts really well, and that was a common instrument at that time. I'm singing insanely loud and, it's weird, the actual tone of your voice gets really reedy and thin."
"I Can Hear You" was only one of five songs They Might Be Giants cut that day, performing each before a small audience of onlookers strolling through the Lab, which is a national monument. "When we did it we thought we'd put out an EP of songs, along with the priority track, as B-sides. And they're so low-fidelity, in a certain sense, that I think if you sold them at Blockbuster Music a lot of people would just bring the disc back and say 'These songs sound like hell.' It's really something you'd have to sell as a novelty item 'cause it's so different. I think it sounds like music; it's just not a wide-screen musical horizon." He suggests that TMBG may sell it as a mail order thing through their fan club.
My initial confusion over which John sang "I Can Hear You" is actually pretty common among casual TMBG listeners. "It's taken a long time, but now I think people hear the differences in our voices a little more," Flansburgh says. (Flansburgh is more full-voiced, Linnell is more, uh, whiny; both are quite good). A couple of reasons: TMBG have never put their pictures on their records (although Linnell once told me that it was them in the space suits on the inside art of Apollo 18, something Flansburgh denies), and their songs are always credited to "They Might Be Giants," when you know damned well that, for example, Flansburgh wrote "Out Of Jail" and Linnell wrote "Stompbox" on John Henry.
"We've basically put everything under one umbrella for a long time," John F. says. "I think we really want people to experience the music in an unrealistically pure way. We really don't want our personas to lead people's perceptions of the music. This is sort of the topic of the song 'XTC vs. Adam Ant' (the brilliantly-titled Flansburgh tune on Showroom, with equally brilliant lyrics like "Only one will survive...Beatle-based pop versus New Romantic...History will decide"). Even though Andy Partridge is a persona, he's not nearly as over-the-top rock persona as someone like Adam Ant. Adam Ant's thing is his character, not his music."
As for me, I'm amazed to be discussing Antmusic at all, at this late date. Later on, when I ask him if the song is a put-on, thinking we should really be kind of joshing about Adam Ant's career (such as it was), Flansburgh replies, "I really mean it! I absolutely mean it. The song is in no way a slag on (Adam Ant). The thing is, they're from the exact same moment in time and when that paragraph — post-punk rock — is written, they're gonna be right against one another, fighting for those two lines in the miserable Rolling Stone History Of Rock." He does admit that his own collection tilts toward XTC. "As good as the Ants rhythm section was, I don't feel there's that much musical interest there for me," he says. Yep — Watts & Wyman, Moon & Entwistle, the Ants...
We discuss the set they'll play that night — which will become pretty well moot when Linnell's throat refuses to cooperate — and Flansburgh says he wants to open the show with "Exquisite Dead Guy," a winning tune off the new album, and one they've never played live. "It's probably the weirdest song we've recorded in the last couple of years," he says. He adds that the lead vocals "will be performed by disembodied ventriloquist's dummy's heads." Well, that should take the edge off the weirdness, I guess.
At the same time, he says "We haven't used anything remotely resembling a prop for, like, seven years, and still the residue of having a prop-driven show haunts us to this day." We agree it would be wiser to open with Apollo 18 ' combo of "The Spider" and "The Guitar," saving the new, weird song for later in the set. (Which is how it was done, in fact, with "Dead Guy" simply played on tape in deference to Linnell's agonized throat.)
I ask Flansburgh if this set is for the critics — it is the Hollywood showcase for Factory Showroom — or their fans. We can't decide, but I come down on the side of the fans. As a random thought, I ask him if some of their fans aren't a little too involved with their music — check out any TMBG show and marvel at hundreds of people knowing the back-up lyrics to "I Palindrome I." They seem to be that kind of group.
"Oh, we're a freak magnet!" he cheerfully replies.
Concur.