1998-04-17 Yale Daily News
From shrimps to giants, They Might Be Giants traces the growth of their band
By Katie Lindgren, Name Of Publication, April 17, 1998
Archived from: https://ydnhistorical.library.yale.edu/?a=d&d=YDN19980417-01.2.57.7&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN--------false
In a small white-walled room, tucked away in the subterranean maze beneath Toad's Place, They Might Be Giants guitarist and vocalist John Flansburgh does not seem quite so imposing. A naked fluorescent light casts a flickering hue over the room's sparse furnishings: two office phones, a battered metal desk, and a wooden one, deeply carved with the marks of Toad's many patrons. "This is as good as it gets," says Flansburgh with a laugh.
He peels an orange as he speaks, the slices and skin occupying his hands, which at times become quite animated. In his blue and green flannel shirt, and white leather converse, he hardly looks the part of the musical talent who at one time displaced U2's No. One spot on the college billboards. But peering beyond his wireframe glasses is a study into his creative genius and zany sense of humor.
YDN: I understand that your name comes from a movie from the '70s.
F: Basically, a friend of ours was a ventriloquist who we backed up before we were working professionally. His name was Raoul Rosenberg and he's now a screenwriter but for awhile he was working for Physicians for Social Responsibility. He had this crazy act with this ventriloquist dummy. He had a bunch of songs and we used to just play behind him. He had a bunch of names for his act and one of them was "They Might Be Giants," and we hadn't even seen the movie at the time. It seemed like a paranoid name with the image of someone kind of hiding in their house or peeking out the window. That kind of thing appealed to us a lot of what we do is about our own personal isolation.
YDN: So you two met when you were in high school?
F: Actually, I met John in grammar school but John was a year older than me. It was sort of uncool to be friends with people who weren't in your grade so we didn't really become friends until high school.
YDN: And didn't you work together on the newspaper?
F: Yeah, we worked on the Lincoln Sudbury Regional High School Promethean.
YDN: Ah.
F: John was the editor, I was the photo editor. It was like nobody wanted to be on it. So working on the paper was sort of comparable to working in the AV Club. There was definitely a stigma involved. But it was good for us, we had a lot of fun, and I did a lot of graphic design for the paper. Besides, it was just a good sort of social clique to hang out with.
YDN: And now you're coming to the college newspaper scene?
F: You're going to be forming friendships for life.
YDN: They Might Be Giants have played at Yale before?
F: We did an outdoor show, Spring Fling a couple of years ago, and that was really fun. But it's gotten to the point where we realize we really only remember catastrophes. When the shows go well, it's just like "Oh, another OK show," but we really remember the ones where people get carted off to the hospital.
YDN: But that hasn't happened here?
F: That hasn't happened here but it's happened at a lot of other places. Toad's Place is a great place to play, of course.
YDN: What have your audiences been like, especially here at Yale.
F: Honestly, it's a difficult question to answer. In a weird way, it's a very prejudicial thing to try to sum up an audience. A lot of times when I'm in an audience, I'm standing next to somebody and I'm like, "What are they about?" It's hard to say. I think people take away a lot of different things from our shows and from our records. To a lot of people we're a party band. People come to our shows on LSD. People come to our shows and slam dance the whole time. People come to our shows and do such a variety of things. We did a show last night in this huge NCAA room.
YDN: You were at Seton Hall?
F: It was this huge place and a relatively small crowd and people were hippie-dancing like it was a Grateful Dead show...I can't really say that that's the proper response. There are certain standard reactions that are great as a performer. It's really great when audiences dance when people are visibly excited. But in a lot of ways, I feel like it's probably more important that people feel their own freaky fire by trusting that what they're doing is interesting... We're an extremely audience-friendly band and we work on the assumption that people are there to kind of loose. It's more important to have a real reaction than to be just a party band.
YDN: If we were to open up your CD player right now, what CDs would we find?
F: Well, you'd find the reference CD to the album we just finished up. YDN: What were some of your musical inspirations growing up?
F: I grew up in the late '70s. I was the perfect age to go for punk rock hook, line and sinker. First generation bowling shoes, leather jacket, short hair, bad attitude. I went to England and followed bands around. Total true believer. It's a little bit embarrassing. I was really into the diversity of the scene. But what's funny is if you look at the first generation of those New York bands Blondies, Television, Talking Heads. From that moment, they're really different from each other. In a lot of ways what defined them were the individuals in it and I think that was really inspiring for me to think about being in a band. In 1976 I was 16 years old and I had no intention of buying a guitar. In 1978 I had one. Most people don't learn to play the guitar when they're 18 years old, most people learn to play the guitar when they are 12.
YDN: But did you have the standard piano lessons?
F: Yes, and I did very badly. My whole musical career has been an act of will. I have no ability. Some people it comes naturally — my partner, John Linnell, can sit down a drum kit and he can play. But for me it took years to sing and play at the same time.
YDN: What about your Dial-a-Song Service?
F: It started out as a phone machine and now its this fancy computer driven modem thing. We're actually going to start a dial-a-song service on-line. It's almost like a demo service it previews all our songs and all the songs that are on our records appear on dial-a-song before. And a lot of songs that never appear on records are on dial-a-song. In a lot of ways, they're the most original songs because they're so f*cked up — such strange, lopsided, misguided. songs. Right now, it changes every hour. We're just about to put fifteen news songs on it.
YDN: So you guys are fans of the computer age?
F: We grew up with synthesizers and tape recorders just as much as we grew up with guitars and accordions and we're very comfortable with that idea. The generation before us thought of technology as this very imposed thing and I think for us, it's very casual and very comfortable. I feel like it's a much less neurotic relation- ship to electronic music than a lot of people have, even today.
YDN: Like the electronica movement?
F: People make such a big deal about it and it's just so damn weird and to me, it just doesn't seem that mystifying. Our relationship to technology has always been pretty casual and we've used it very freely. A lot of times we just like to have fun with the mechanical part of it.
YDN: So where are your inspirations for sound?
F: I spent so many hours in rooms with Muzak being piped in, with John talking about what a strange effect it really is to live in a world with Muzak or intercoms or speaker phones. When you become aware of it, it is really kind of overwhelming. I realize that I sound like a complete stoner.
YDN: Actually, I heard you guys are major caffeine addicts and I was wondering if when you are in the area, where you get your coffee?
F: We drink a lot of coffee. Actually, there was a woman who used to work at Willoughbys who for years had gave us these care packages, and it was so wonderful. Because we're out on the road and it's really kind of miserable in certain ways. And coming to play at Toad's Places there would always a big box of coffee from Willoughbys there. It's a very bright spot in our lives.
YDN: A lot of your songs have historical and literary allusion? Is there some sort of Schoolhouse Rock-esque trend?
F: Both John and I grow up in Massachusetts under the shadow of the folk rock revival — it was the cultural backdrop to our childhood. So the history song is not too strange to us. And Schoolhouse Rock is probably the most entertaining version. In a lot of ways, we're always hunting around for another kind of song to write. In the past couple years I've been sort of obsessed with trying to write a straight love song which seems kind of absurd because there are so many love songs. It's probably easier now that I have a working long-term relationship — that it isn't so complicated.
YDN: So no more teenage angst?
F: Yeah.
YDN: Break a leg tonight.
F: Are you going to be able to come to the show?
YDN: I am actually going to be writing at the Daily.
F: That's so sad.