Shows/1983-09-10

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They Might Be Giants
Unknown venue in Northampton, MA
September 10, 1983

Fan Recaps and Comments:

This was the band's first show outside of New York City. The show's date was submitted by John Linnell to TMBW in late 2023, who said: "John and I drove up to Northampton, Mass and played at a friend’s party. This was our very first out-of-town gig." Linnell also briefly discussed the show in a 1996 interview:

We played Northampton at a party at a friend's house off Main Street, before getting a record deal or a booking agent. We met a bunch of friends at the show and we got a gig at the Iron Horse largely because of these friends.

This appears to have been the second show that Linnell performed with an accordion, following a busking performance on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade about one week earlier.^[1] It was this show that convinced him to adopt the accordion as his main instrument. He recalled in a 1995 interview:

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.
Then we did a party and we used the accordion sort of for convenience, because it was too much of a hassle to bring all the other keyboards. That was when it occurred to us that we could do a whole show with just the accordion. And it got a really good response.