Shows/1983-09-??
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They Might Be Giants
Brooklyn Heights Promenade in Brooklyn, NY
September, 1983
Fan Recaps and Comments:[edit]
This performance was the band's first and only attempt at busking for money. It was held on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, overlooking the East River. John Flansburgh recalled in 2019: "It's this beautiful park near Brooklyn Heights, where all the fancy rich people live. So, we were already calculating our moves by busking in an area where we knew well-heeled people would be walking around."[1]
The show was the first time that John Linnell performed live with an accordion. He had previously played an electric Farfisa organ onstage, but borrowed a friend’s accordion for this occasion.[2] Linnell explained in 1992: "It just wasn't practical to bring a keyboard onto the street corner, so I picked up the accordion and it solved a lot of problems."[3] In a 1995 interview, he elaborated:
We were living in this house, a duplex, with this woman who was going to art school with [John Flansburgh]. She had played accordion as a kid, so she had this thing, and she perceived that it would be exactly the thing that we would be into. I spent a couple of weeks learning how to play it, to the point where I could play the right hand and sort of match the bass. We did a couple of shows, we played on the Brooklyn Promenade. It was around 1983, we'd been playing together about a year.
Flansburgh has described the show as a serious effort to earn money for food — "We weren't like, 'oh, this'll be fun!' We had no dough."[4] He added in 2009: "[It came at] a very, very desperate time for both of us as individuals and collectively as a band. To say we had money would be an exaggeration."[5]
The set included "Cowtown" and "Alienation's For The Rich",[6] as well as several songs by the Ramones. Flansburgh has also mentioned "Space Suit", "Cabbagetown" and The Monkees' "What Am I Doing Hangin' 'Round?" as songs they were rehearsing around this time, which may have been performed.[7]
The final song they played was "Maybe I Know", written by Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry and originally recorded by Lesley Gore. This was the first time they performed it in public.[8] Afterward, an aunt of Greenwich approached the band and handed them $10 or $20 — the only money they made that day.[9] Flansburgh recalled: "She asked us who wrote it and we said Phil Spector. It turns out we were wrong, it was her niece."[10] The band have since made a point of crediting Greenwich as the songwriter before almost every performance of the song. Flansburgh further detailed the show in a 2003 New York Daily News interview:
We were sharing an apartment in Fort Greene and we had no money. I mean, we couldn't even buy Happy Boy margarine, hot dogs or noodles, so we went to the Brooklyn Promenade with an accordion and a guitar and played our stuff, some Ramones, and this one song, "Maybe I Know", by Ellie Greenwich. A relative [of Greenwich's] just happened to be on the boardwalk and gave us 20 bucks. We were like, "Yes! We're outta here! We're going to Junior's!"
The exact date of this performance is unknown, though it likely occurred in 1983. In a 2026 interview, John Linnell discussed the show and noted that it was followed by a performance at a friend's party:
We were just busking, basically. John had a little portable guitar amp, a battery powered amp. We thought if I had an accordion, we could play some songs just standing up. It would be very easy to get there and set up and play. That was the first time I played the accordion, and then I think we played somebody's birthday party like a week later, with more or less the same setup. By that time I was like, well, it seems like the accordion is actually pretty good — a pretty versatile instrument for this thing. And also I was not standing behind something, so it felt like we could do a more immediate kind of show as a duo.
The band are known to have played a party on September 10, 1983, possibly placing this busking performance in August or early September. Both Flansburgh and Linnell have said this show was not recorded in their personal calendars. Flansburgh stated in 2025: "Although we talked about it and prepared to some extent, we didn't decide to do it until the day of. (It wasn't like an appointment or a gig)."[11]