2011-07 Vulture
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They Might Be Giants: Sixteen Random Tales From 30 Years on the Road
By Gwynne Watkins, Vulture, July 2011
Archived from: https://www.vulture.com/2011/07/they_might_be_giants.html
After twenty minutes of recalling strange, amusing and humiliating anecdotes from his thirty-year music career, John Flansburgh – one of the two Johns who make up the band They Might Be Giants – opened a random tour listing on the Internet for inspiration. "Sonar in Baltimore, very poorly attended," he muttered, going down the list. "The Orange Peel, one of the most pleasant gigs ever; Music Forum, torrential rain…" So yes, TMBG pretty much remembers every single show they ever played, sometimes in excruciating detail. Though we spoke separately to Flansburgh (the glasses one) and Linnell (the quiet one), both Johns took the same approach to this assignment, giving us one facepalm-inducing story after another. And if you're wondering how many of these they have – well, we spoke to each of them for the better part of an hour, with no repeats. Here are the best of the bunch, which involve electrocution, collapsing stages, Bob Mould, piles of shit, the world's largest chair, and other subjects that could easily crop up in any given TMBG song.
Contents
GIANT CHAIR
“I’ll start at the earliest thing I can remember from touring: One day, we were driving through the Carolinas in a van, and we actually had a day off. We thought it would be fun to do some completely stupid thing, because that’s how we got our entertainment back then. So we were looking through some book and it mentioned that the World’s Largest Chair was located in this particular town. So John [Flansburgh] and I seized on that: “This is what we want to do!” First, we stopped to eat at Burger King — we had low standards — and being idiotic twenty-somethings, we were wearing Burger King crowns when we emerged. And we got into this very heated discussion with Bill the driver about whether we should really stop to see this chair. He was dead set against going. We wound up forcing him to, but he just sat in the van the whole time. That’s story number one.” —John Linnell
THROWING PUNCHES
“Very early on, we did a show in Pittsburgh where I accidentally punched myself in the face. I was swinging my arm around in some crazy way, probably inspired by Billy Idol, and it was like an uppercut. I hit my some muscle in my cheek, and all of sudden I got a Popeye-like swollen face. My cheek just quadrupled in size and it was so freaky. I mean, I was a very hyperactive performer as a young man. I basically just jumped up and down continuously for the entire show. That was kind of my gimmick. Yeah, so I punched myself in the face. And I actually know the song I was playing when I did it: ‘Puppet Head.’”—John Flansburgh
DANNY BONADUCE
“We met Danny Bonaduce at his radio station in the early nineties, which was exciting and weird because John and I were the right age to see The Partridge Family when it came out. So we thought of him as this perennial child star, but he had aged into something completely different by then. He had this sort of gravelly voice. So we went and then sat down in front of the microphone and he looked at us and he said, [doing a Danny Bonaduce impersonation] ‘Are you guys twelve? You guys look like you’re twelve!’ And what he meant was we just look young for our age, I guess. But just the weird cognitive dissonance of having Danny Bonaduce say, ‘You guys look like you’re twelve’ — it just blew our minds.” —Linnell
CANADA
“We did a show in Canada once, playing at a disco tech run by, like, Cokey McJerk and his drug-dealing friend. And basically they had sort of double-sold the night: There was some weekly hell disco thing that was supposed to happen at ten o’clock or something, and they sold our concert tickets for eight o’clock. But they actually timed it wrong and so they forced us to go onstage at 7:15 to virtually no one. It was a sold-out show and yet we had to go on and play for five people. And then literally during like the last 15 minutes of the show, hundreds of people arrived. Basically, just as the audience arrives, Cokey McWeasel is at the side of the stage going, ‘Wrap it up.’ And you know what? People hated us. One thing that’s so tough about being in a band is that everybody thinks that you control everything that happens to you, like you're improv-ing your whole life. I’m very confident that we would not have gotten paid if we had said to that guy, like, ‘Fuck you man, we’re not going off.’ And we were in no position to not get paid.” —Flansburgh
MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE
“We started diversifying our portfolio in the late nineties: We did the theme song to the show Malcolm and the Middle, which was kind of a late hit for us. In some ways, this story is a great lesson about how you compromise to move your career forward. In this case, we made a video for the theme song that was not under our direct control. The video was not approved or scripted by us in any way. And it consisted of these scenarios where we were these little characters that the youngest kid from the show was playing with, like we were his action figures. And at one point in the video he's shooting at us with a toy paintball gun. So he’s shooting at the action figures and then it cuts to us live, playing our hit song — and the crew is throwing water balloons filled with paint at us. It was as unpleasant as it could have been. That was not by any means the worst of it though, because towards the end of the video they needed a shot of John Flansburgh lying in dirt. And instead of dirt, they used fertilizer — actual poo. So basically this is like the most perfectly stated metaphor for where we were at in our career.” —Linnell
BLACKOUT
“We did a show at The Newport in Columbus, Ohio and we’re fifteen, twenty minutes into it and the power goes out. It's black. Everything — like the exits signs that should come on to guide people out of the pitch-black room did not come on. There are15,000 people and us onstage and you can’t see anything. And so we kind of shuffle offstage. Somebody trips. Somebody else hits his head. It totally sucks and meanwhile, when it happens, people boo; they’re all pissed. So we do a bunch of songs with flashlights pointed at us, singing as loud as we can. But after three or four songs we completely run out of gas. And so we get offstage and the tour manager says to me, “We can get a gas generator driven in from Cleveland in 45 minutes, but there’s no guarantee…” So we go back onstage and I say, “Everybody, we’re going to be back on in an hour. Go outside. Get yourself a drink. Find yourself something to smoke, relax, and hold on to your ticket stubs.” Everybody leaves. And then the beautiful part is the generator actually came and it turned out to be a magnificent, legendary evening. There was a plan B that didn’t involve people screaming, ‘Refund! Refund! Refund!’” —Flansburgh
SUPER 8 MOTELS
“We were unable to afford hotels in the early days, so we would actually say from the stage, ‘We'll be staying in this town this evening and we haven’t got a hotel booked, so if anybody has a couch…’ It was a crazy thing to do. And predictably, we were invited to stay with people who were probably the people you’d want to stay with the least. There was one guy who out in Iowa who had one bed for four of us, and then the weirdest part was he wanted to stay up. He said, ‘Look I’m just going to have the TV on with the sound off and I’m just going to sit and watch while you guys are sleeping.’ But then we noticed he was looking at us — he wasn’t looking at the TV. He was sitting in his chair watching us sleep. What’s funny is that there was more than one incident like that. Eventually we realized: Super 8 motels actually had great deals. Our driver had a very short hairdo, so he would get the military rate.” —Linnell
SET LIST
“I remember once I was doing an interview with this woman in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was backstage at the Chameleon Club. It was going okay, until she saw our set list, and was like, ‘You guys play with set lists?’ I was like, ‘Yeah …’ It was sort of like somebody saying like, ‘You wear underwear?’ It was such a weird question to me because every band you’ve ever heard of plays with a set list. But it was like some kind of heresy to her. I think she might have been coming from a very orthodox version of a jam band aesthetic, sort of the musical equivalent of being a Quaker, like you should only play songs if the spirit moves you. She was so crestfallen, she actually couldn’t really talk anymore. All respect for what we were doing had just flown out the window.” —Flansburgh
POLKA
“We played a polka at a theater in Milwaukee in the early nineties. You may know Milwaukee is a big polka town. So we played a polka, and John invited the people to come forward from their seats, but he did not mean come up and jump on the stage, which is what the audience did. And the stage was actually not a real stage; it was like the little wooden covering for the orchestra pit. We were standing on the actual stage. So people started polka-ing and the whole thing collapsed. They dropped only about three feet, but it was the weirdest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. Thirty people just suddenly went bomp. Fortunately no one was hurt, but of course our first thought was, Is our insurance paid up?” —Linnell
ELECTRIC SHOCK
“I once had an electrical current at CBGB’s go through my body with such velocity that the actual lights of the venue dimmed. I was hardwired to my amplifier and a mic, and something wasn’t grounded properly and I just got this tremendous shock. It nearly knocked me out and then about a half hour later I had the worst headache you could possibly imagine; it was like having an anvil on my head.” —Flansburgh
BOB MOULD
“I guess maybe there’s a theme that I’m developing here: Unglamorousness. We did a great show in San Francisco and Bob Mould was playing on the same night. And it was at a point where we both had audiences who were appreciative and we felt like, ‘This is great! We’re superstars!’ And then after the show, you spend a long time sitting around the dressing room talking. And then the guy who runs the club is like, ‘It’s time to go.’ At which point, John and I realized we were starving to death. We started driving around the city, and for some reason there was nowhere to eat. It’s hard to believe San Francisco wasn’t open that late, but there just didn’t seemed to be a lot going on. So we drove around and around. It was like, four in the morning or something. And then finally we wound up at a Subway and we were like, ‘Oh look, it’s open. Let's go in here.’ And we went in and Bob Mould was in there. By himself.” —Linnell
EXPLODING COMPUTER
“When we were recording Lincoln, we were actually using the very first incarnation of the Macintosh computer — the little sort of cubey one with the tiny screen. And we were running drum machine sequences off of it. And we were working very long hours in a room that was kind of the size of a walk-in closet and there were four of us in there, and the computer actually caught on fire. It started to billow smoke as if we were on a Hollywood set. We were all staring intently at the screen and then all of a sudden this plume of smoke started going up”. —Flansburgh
CHEESESTEAKS
“We played a show in Philadelphia and because it was Philly, they delivered all these cheesesteaks to our dressing room; big piles of cheesesteaks wrapped in foil. So we had a big bag of cheesesteaks but nobody was that hungry, so we put them in the car and start heading towards the Ben Franklin Bridge, and suddenly a car pulled up alongside us and it was these women who had been to the show who recognized us. And they were obviously not turning in, so they were like, ‘Hey, great show…party…blah blah.’ And we were like, ‘Hey how’s it going?’ But not intending to hang out with them, really tired, wanting to drive home to New York. Then we said, ‘Do you ladies like cheesesteaks?’ And they did not realize we were not inviting to go out and find cheesesteaks but in fact we had cheesesteaks with us. So they were like, ‘Yeah, great.’ And then our trumpet player picked up the bag and started handing cheesesteaks from one car window to the other. And you could see from the way their faces dropped this is not what they had in mind.” —Linnell
WENDY JAMES
“I’ve said many stupid things from the stage. I remember we were doing a show at a very influential men’s club in London — and do you remember who Wendy James is? She was in a band called Transvision Vamp. Well, there’s a thing in Britain where they don't just promote bands; they like to swallow bands whole. If you’re a band like us and you go to Britain every couple of years and do a little press junket, the people will stare at you and they will say, ‘So what do you think of insert band of the moment? They must be a huge influence on you.’ And meanwhile, you’re from the United States, half the time you haven’t even heard of them. But it would be like, ‘Oasis, you must love Oasis!’ And you're like, ‘I don’t — I guess — I don’t know.’ And then you get the thousand stares back like, How could you not? Like that was the only band that matters. And I remember we were in London and Transition Vamp was on the cover of NME that week or whatever, and every interviewer was like, ‘Oh my god, you know, can you believe the genius of Transition Vamp?’ And so then by end of this week of press and TV, we start our show at this club and I thought I’d be a little bit dramatic and in the moment and I said, ‘Greetings everybody, we’re They Might Be Giants from New York City. We come not to praise Wendy James but to bury her.’ It was a bitchy little thing to say, but I was just trying to be clever in au courant kind of way. And it turns out Wendy James was in the crowd. I was so embarrassed. If she hadn’t been in the room I’m sure it just would have been wonderfully funny.” —Flansburgh
JURY DUTY
I’m in this gigantic jury-pool room in Brooklyn and across the way I see Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields. And we’ve played shows with him. We’ve hung out. So I’m looking over and put my hand up and give him sort of a casual wave, like, ‘Hey, it’s funny we’re both in the jury pool.’ And he looks straight at me and then turns his head and looks away. And that was kind of disturbing. And then I go in, I do the empanelling thing and come back out and he’s still out there. And I walk right past him and at this point he really turns his neck and looks directly away. I speak to our mutual friend later that week and I’m telling him what happened and he says, ‘Well, Stephin’s a weird guy.’ But then later that same day I got a call from Stephin and it turns out, he is sick with the flu and he lives in Manhattan, so he’s not somebody who would be empanelled to be on a jury in Brooklyn in the first place. In other words, it wasn’t him. It was some total Stephin Merritt lookalike, who even has the same way of looking kind of blasé, if you know what I mean. And Stephin called up practically apologizing. And I’m thinking, There’s some guy in Brooklyn who thinks I’m a serious stalker. —Linnell
A FAINTING SPELL
“We were playing in a place in Florida called the Milk Bar when John Linnell got heatstroke on stage. We get onstage and it's just impossibly hot, like it’s easily a hundred degrees and we’re under these big old-fashioned theatrical lights that when they turn on you just get hit with a wall of heat. We start playing “Twisting,” which is like a sort of revved up rock-and-rolly kind of song, and John walks over to me 15 seconds into the song and sort of puts his hand on my shoulder. I’m like, What is this? Like, John just does not put his hand on my shoulder very often. I didn’t think, Oh, he’s about to keel over from heat stroke. But of course that’s exactly what was happening. So the tour manager’s like, ‘Oh well, you just gotta cancel the show.’ And so I go back onstage and I say, ‘I’m sorry folks, but John is sick and we can’t do the show.’ At which point, the audience started to boo in a way that is so — it’s such a bummer. The thing that’s so sad about touring is that you can do a dozen shows that all do great and more people will come, and then do one show that’s just catastrophic and you are behind the eight ball for five years, ten years. We've had so much trouble in Florida just because of that. You really have to deliver in a very consistent way. I mean, unless you’re Ryan Adams and people just celebrate you for your bad-assery.” —Flansburgh