Shows/1993-08-03
You must be logged in to mark yourself for being at this show.
Links:
Setlist: (Incomplete and possibly out of order)
They Might Be Giants
— with Funk Buffalo opening —
The Met in Spokane, WA
August 3, 1993
Fan Recaps and Comments:
"An evening of lunatic entertainment" by Don Adair
The Spokesman-Review, Aug. 6, 1993:
They Might Be Giants will stop at nothing as they pursue a state of inspired lunacy.
Take their rendition of the Allman Brothers' "Jessica" - the instrumental has one of rock's best solos, a lilting Dickey Betts guitar part.
Spokane's Funk Buffalo opened impressively with a strong acoustic set. Jennifer Lussier has a powerful set of pipes but needs to wean herself of her Natalie Merchant/Maria McKee tendencies.
Tres mundane: If you're TMBG and you have a clarinet in the band, you use it. So the clarinet took the Betts lead, and the trumpet took the second part.
Silly? Dang straight?
Hilarious? Yep.
TMBG - John Flansburgh and John Linnell are the DaDa masters of modern rock: The fact-filled new song, "The Sun Is An Incandescent Ball of Gas," had a glockenspiel-and-accordion intro and a fifth-grade science-film narrative.
"The sun is nearly 93 million miles from Earth, which is why it looks so small," Linnell intoned.
The funky "The Guitar" broke into a take-off on "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" - "Hush my darling/Be still my darling/The lion's on the phone" - before collapsing into a chaotic instrumental free-for-all dominated by Linnell's baritone sax.
During "Spy" - a song "about a secret agent and Frank Black," Flansburgh explained - Linnell "conducted" the band in a Frank Zappa parody and during the extravagantly elongated climax rolled his eyes at the ceiling with a cheesy, bemused "Oh Lord, when will this end?" look.
But the TMBG universe is about more than finding creative ways to be silly: "The Statue Got Me High" is a genuine tribute to art; songs like "Turn Around," "Ondine" and "Dig My Grave" confront death; and "Your Racist Friend" struggles with polite bigotry: "This is where the party ends/I can't stand here listening to you and your racist friend/I know politics bore you But I feel like a hypocrite talking to you You and your racist friend."
Linnell and Flansburg [sic] have an encyclopedic grasp of pop music and deftly drop snatches of both parody and tribute into their own tight compositions.
"I Palindrome I" echoed the bouncy innocence of the early British Invasion, while "Sleeping in the Flowers" revived middle-period Beatles psychedelia. "Ondine" had a crunchy "Tobacco Road" guitar, and a cover of Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein" subverted the original's crash and fury with polka-band instrumentation.
Linnell and Flansburgh have re-placed the old drum machine and synthesizer with a first-rate back-up band. The bass/percussion rhythm section was stitched as tight as a Flansburgh/Linnell couplet and two utility players contributed trumpet, clarinet, saxophone and synthesizer.
Add Flansburgh on guitar and Linnell on accordion and saxes, and the sheer weight of the instrumentation often obscured the lyrics - the show's only real flaw. but Flans--burgh and Linnell are intent on stretching themselves beyond the limits of a two-man band and a real band lets them flesh out their wildest musical imaginings.
The capacity crowd rewarded them with the kind of eardrum-shattering approval normally reserved for supergroups, so it seems clear they're mining a rich vein.
(P.S.: Tragically, no one survived the They Might Be Giants Plane Crash when the entire balcony plunged into the crowd below, killing everyone and complete with sound effects provided by the victims.)
