Shows/1990-04-21
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Links:
Setlist: (Incomplete!)
They Might Be Giants
— with The Jack Rubies opening —
Mississippi Nights in St. Louis, MO
April 21, 1990
Fan Recaps and Comments:
"They Might Be Giants, But They're Fun" by Steve Pick
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Apr. 23, 1990:
"What kind of music does They Might Be Giants play?" I overheard one patron at Mississippi Nights ask one Saturday before the band performed in concert. "Are they like any other band?"
On the other hand, the opening act was a very conventional rock band, the Jack Rubies. These guys, despite a pretty solid rhythm section and passable playing by the guitarists, became dull very quickly, because of a complete lack of imagination in the song-writing department.
The answer to this question has to be no. There is no other band quite like They Might Be Giants.
For one thing, there are only two members of the band: John Flansburgh and John Linnell. One of these Johns (I've never met anyone who can remember which one is which) plays guitar, and the other plays accordion. All the other instruments are recorded beforehand, including drum machine, bass and synthesizers.
They Might Be Giants have released three LPs and a couple of EPs of their quirky but catchy distorted pop music. The group mines any sort of music it likes for source material; there may be a square dance, a polka or a reggae song. But fans of any one of these genres would scarcely recognize them.
For example, when was the last time you heard a polka played with a booming drum machine keeping the beat at double time, while an electric guitar screeched and skronked its way around the rhythm?
The idea here is to take something familiar and mess around with it in a way to make it serve a new purpose.
To that end, They Might Be Giants gave a rock concert, with all the trappings of playing in a large nightclub with a big PA system and a light show. In the group's two previous St. Louis appearances, things were on a much smaller scale; this time, everything was big.
Rock shows don't normally have so much bounce to them, but They Might Be Giants songs often could be used as background music for a trampoline commercial. And rock shows don't usually include the performers asking the crowd to be quieter; I have never before heard anyone stand on stage and say, "OK, it's time to pump down the volume."
One problem with the show was that the volume was consistently higher than it needed to be, thus causing many songs to fade into a blur when reaching a climax. This was particularly troublesome because the group writes such clever lyrics. Most people in the crowd knew the words by heart, but that didn't help someone who hadn't played the records over and over again.
Still, the show worked well as a rock 'n' roll event, and enough of the group's intelligent twist on rock lyric convention came through to make it work on that level as well.
