Shows/1987-11-03
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Setlist: (incomplete and out of order)
They Might Be Giants
— with Diane Ponzio Band opening —
Lone Star Cafe in New York, NY
November 3, 1987
Fan Recaps and Comments:
This show was a release party for the Don't Let's Start single. Tickets were $10 and the band performed two sets.[1]
Review excerpted from "Giants in a Big Village" by Niels Frid-Nielsen,
Dabladet Information, December 2, 1987
(Translated from Danish)
- They run onto the stage. One swings the microphone stand over his head, and the next moment he hits the same microphone stand, as he's shouting into it, with an iron rod. The third moment, he hammers his hand against all the strings on the electric guitar, which completely drowns out the other guy on stage, who is sitting bent over an accordion. Their names are John and John and they produce sounds on electric guitar, accordion, iron rods, saxophone, mouth harp, drum machine, microphones with constantly overdriven voices, and a Revox tape recorder, which the soundman looks after down at the bar.
- John and John grew up in the same neighborhood outside Boston, USA. They went to the same high school, and when they later moved into the same apartment building in New York, John and John discovered that they had the same penchant for sampling sounds on a tape recorder — and for the same kind of humor, which can perhaps be characterized as soft, sick and cheerful. A neighbor suggested that instead of ruining his night's sleep, they start performing with their tape recorder sounds. So they did, under the name They Might Be Giants.
- It's a little after midnight now, and the Lone Star folk music club in the cheap end of Greenwich Village is filled with several hundred people, who have paid more than a hundred Danish kroner to see They Might Be Giants. The first song of the set ends before a minute and a half has passed, and before I have figured out whether they are singing black, with a Boston dialect or just paraphrasing someone I don't know. Then, at an extremely fast pace, dozens of crisp acoustic pop and country-sounding songs follow, served with a friendly irony — which is suggested by titles like "Youth Culture Killed My Cat" and "Nothing Gonna Change My Clothes" — and which balances on the fine line between student-like platitudes and exquisitely good/bad taste; the same kind They Might Be Giants demonstrate on a maxi-single of the opening number "Don't Lets Start", which is released this evening at Lone Star and is sold by the cloakroom lady in the break.
- After the third country pastiche, only ten minutes into the set, a broad-shouldered guy in cowboy clothes puts on his hat and leads his female companion out of Lone Star. "I know him. He's an asshole," whispers one John into the microphone as the door slams shut behind the couple.