1997-06 Automobile
They Might Be Giants - An Econoline V-10 and Brooklyn's Ambassadors of Love, Over America
By Jamie Kitman, Automobile, June, 1997
Archived from: tmbg.com
Columbia, Missouri –
A crisp fall evening. A midnight blue Ford Econoline Super Club Wagon XLT with chrome wheels and smoked glass thunders down the Interstate, its Triton V-10 megamill whispering its authority softly. Iowa farmland passes by in big chunks, unnoticed. Inside the fifteen-seat passenger van, five musicians from New York cheer their hometown heroes, the Yankees, as they notch another comeback World Series victory.
High-stakes entertainment of this sort doesn't come often when you're on a rock tour in a van, no matter how great the tour, no matter how comfortable or spacious the van. After you've been on the road for about seventeen 400-mile days in a row, the CDs everyone packed grow tired. The arsenal of road tales – tall or otherwise – is depleted. Aside from the rest of your traveling party, who never seem to go away, monotony is your most constant companion.
Ask Brian Doherty, some-time drummer for They Might Be Giants. This road-damaged self-starter has taken to passing the time in his personal Econoline bench seat by working on his Celebrity Wig Watch feature, a remarkable compendium of half-truths, distortions, and total falsehoods which he files on TMBG's Website (www.TMBG.com) to share "his unique point of view on celebrity wigs and the entire world of hairfotainment."
So it's come to this.
Ten years ago, the Brooklyn-based pop music duo They Might Be Giants entered Automobile Magazine's consciousness – in a minivan. In the name of ever-better real-world testing of automobiles, this publication put the fledgling recording act (eponymous debut album just under its belt) in a new Plymouth Grand Voyager LE for the ultimate test of man and machine – a low-budget rock tour of the American heartland (Automobile Magazine, February 1988).
I went on that tour and learned a lot, so much that, to borrow a line from Victor Kiam of Remington shaver fame, I bought the company. That is to say, I became the manager of They Might Be Giants.
Ten years on, we note that the Chrysler minivan we liked so much at the time turned out to be true minivan royalty, a member of the all-time best selling family of minivans and easily one of the most significant American designs of the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Closer to home, we can report that while They Might Be Giants haven't been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, they still have a career, which is saying a lot in the fickle and cutthroat music business. Staying the course where so many have hung up their hairdos and gear, TMBG have gone on to make five more studio albums and sell more than three million records.
Would-be rock stars listen up. Want to know what reasonable success in your chosen field spells? In TMBG's case, all of the hard work, a slew of Top 10 alternative hits, a major label deal, one gold record (and another almost platinum), over 1100 gigs, plus countless national television appearances (including a recent turn on HBO's critical blockbuster The Larry Sanders Show) have ensured one thing: The boys are urgently required on the road. For the rest of their lives.
Popular demand marks only one major change for these perennial darlings of the college music scene (who, it must be said, were on a first-name basis with a rather large percentage of their audience in 1987.)
The other biggie in Giants land is that where they were once a duo with a pre-recorded backing tape for a rhythm section, they are now touring as a seven-piece band. The compact road unit of four – counting band, crew and roving journalist – that once fit so nicely in a Voyager has given way to a touring party of twelve grown men, who rumble down the road, convoy-style, five of them in the aforementioned Econoline.
No knock on Chrysler, but when the time came to lay their own money down on something big enough for the whole rock-and-roll family, They Might Be Giants' chief executive officers – guitarist John Flansburgh and accordionist/keyboard player John Linnell – revealed themselves as dyed-in-the-wool members of the Loyal Order of the Blue Oval, buying one, then another, then another and then another Econoline (plus a couple of Crown Victorias for good measure.)
Last fall marked several auspicious anniversaries and occasions in the Ford-TMBG nexus. In the world of Ford vans, the season heralded the thirty-sixth birthday of America's best-selling full-sized van, the self-same Econoline, and the introduction of an Econoline equipped with Ford's new Triton V-10. The first application of this new 6.8-liter engine from Ford's modular family, it places at the Econoline driver's disposal 265 bhp and a whopping 410 pound-feet of torque.
About the same time the Triton V-10 trundled onto the scene, TMBG celebrated the tenth anniversary of the release of its first album, with a new effort, Factory Showroom. Marking the occasion was an invitation for the Giants to join superstars Hootie and the Blowfish on a month-long leg of their epic tour of college basketball arenas.
As a manager and a flag-waving Ford van guy, the next step for me was clear: a phone call to Bill Collins, a pinstriped hipster assigned to Ford's New York press office. In the end, the folks back in Dearborn hadn't necessarily heard of They Might Be Giants, but they had heard of the Hootie chaps and their fifteen-million-selling debut. (I liked to think of them as America's other favorite band.) An Econoline Club Wagon XLT with a Triton V-10 was coming our way for a month of rock servitude.
Most bands travel overnight by bus in similar circumstances, but John and John prefer to drive all day in favor of the good night's sleep that only a nondescript hotel chain can supply.
You wonder why. But then you've probably never tried the alternative, lurching through the night on a bus, trying to sleep in a claustrophobic bunk while a bored and horny road crew set into seven cases of Schlitz and a pile of dirty videos about eight feet away from your pillow. Meantime, your collective fate is in the hands of some improbably wide-awake redneck up front, who's trying to keep the hallucinations at bay while keeping the cigarettes lit and the hammer down.
So naturally most bands prefer riding the bus. But the real truth is, a bus is a big place that's not big enough. And it's not necessarily pretty.
The Hootie delegation sidestep these concerns by traveling in not one, but four, top-of the-line forty-eight-foot Prevost touring buses – the Canadian-built gold standard – equipped with everything from weight rooms to separate satellite dishes. Eight Peterbilts with forty-foot trailers are also along to carry their awesome sound and lighting display.
Bringing up the rear is the TMBG caravan. Most days, John and John ride in their Crown Victoria LX, a 1996 leftover picked up recently and known as the Super Vic on account of its video-display dashboard and leather seats. The band's 1993 sedan, known as the Crown Vince, or simply the Vince on account of its close resemblance to a Mafia staff car, has cloth seats. The Vince stayed in Brooklyn, though, so TMBG's topflight sound crew could take the band's spartan 1990 Econoline E-350 cargo van, a 103,000-mile veteran of the rock wars, for comparative purposes and for someplace to leave all those empty Schlitz cans.
Keys to the object of our test, Ford's V10 luxowagon, were handed to Brian Doherty, drummer, Celebrity Wig Watcher, and personal spokesperson for the Giants' rhythm section. It helps to know that the Econoline Club Wagon was the rocker's favorite even before the big redesign of 1992. That triumph in van comfort and safety only increased the Econoline's appeal. It's no wonder, with 176,480 sales in 1996, that Econolines represent almost one of every two full-size vans sold in America. Upgrades for 1997, including standard four-wheel ABS on Club Wagons, a passenger's-side airbag, and a redesigned instrument panel, raise the pole higher.
General Motors and Chrysler may have cut costs by sticking with unibody construction, but framelessness undercut their vans' durability and repairability. It also made rust – a given in vans from the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, no matter who built them – an even more serious problem. Rust isn't a big factor anymore, but bands will surely take notice of the fact that Chevrolet and GMC have done what Ford did in 1975 and introduced a new full-size van for 1997, featuring... a separate frame.
Between performances at glamorous destinations that included East Lansing, Michigan; Moline, Illinois; and Fargo, North Dakota, trombonist Dan Levine, a graduate of Ray Charles' band and a regular Automobile Magazine reader, logged the band's observations for posterity:
- "It's the best-looking van on the road. The wheels are supercool and tough looking and we're all sure that we're indeed the envy of all other van owners. I like the sleeper element – nothing on the outside indicates its multi-cylindered brawn."
- "It's a hot rod with a commanding view of the road. We all had to sample the greatness of that ten-cylinder engine. It hauls ass."
- "The adjustable power front seat is a hit with everyone. When we drive through bad neighborhoods, we pump it way up, hoping to appear about six feet, eight inches."
- "The brakes are as inspiring as the engine. A trumpet player who shall remain nameless got a little close to stopped traffic in Columbia [Missouri] and subjected the rest of the band to their awesome stopping power. They really work!"
So, having established that Levine is ready for a job writing ad copy for Ford when the gigs with his horn dry up, let's cut to the chase. The 13,000 miles TMBG covered in their month with the V-10 were typical of all the band's Econoline experiences dating back to 1988: pleasant, with nothing exceptional to report. (Unless you count as exceptional the high level of comfort and the smooth pulling power of the V-10.) But of course that's the main idea behind a working vehicle, no surprises.
All of the band's Econolines have run to six-figure mileages with no expenses other than brakes, tires, et cetera. We like that because there's nothing boring about stone-cold reliability when it's sixteen degrees outside and there's a club 400 miles down the highway with a borderline psychotic in charge expecting you to fill his bar that night.
But that's not to say our $31,365 Econoline Super Club Wagon XLT is just any Econoline. Seriously comfortable and safer than ever, it is notably rapid. It may be more engine than you'll ever need, but hey. The Triton V-10 is the Marshall (amplifier) stack of internal combustion engines, and it's only a $415 option. Attention rockers, church groups and devout procreators: you're looking at the best American passenger van ever.
And here's the final proof: Before setting out on their own world-domination tour, They Might Be Giants bought a Club Wagon XLT, equipped with the Triton V-10. It should be Giant.