Shows/1996-11-15b

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Setlist:

• Spider
• The Guitar
• Don't Let's Start
• Older
• AKA Driver
• Stayin' Alive
• Ana Ng
• Your Own Worst Enemy
• Pet Name
• Snail Shell
• New York City
• No One Knows My Plan
• Introducing The Band
• Istanbul (Not Constantinople)
• XTC Vs. Adam Ant
• Whistling In The Dark
• Maybe I Know
• How Can I Sing Like A Girl?
• Subliminal
• Spy
• Twisting
• Till My Head Falls Off
• S-E-X-X-Y
• James K. Polk

They Might Be Giants
— with cub opening —
Utah State Fairpark Coliseum in Salt Lake City, UT
November 15, 1996 at 7:30 PM

Fan Recaps and Comments:

Review by Chadd VanZanten:

This show was at the Fair Park Colosseum, which is a big echoey place that was always a little too large for the crowds that turned out to TMBG shows. Still, TMBG played there many times throughout the 1990s. I was there with a group of friends, one of whom did not have a ticket. As we approached the box office, a scalper sold her a ticket at face value, I think.

The all-girl punk band Cub opened the show, and members of Cub sold their own merch throughout the night. The song "New York City" is a Cub song, but I don't think they played that song, and the crowd didn't really dig Cub -- they were pretty anxious for TMBG to play. A few jerks near me started heckling them and chanting "GIANTS! GIANTS!" or some such. I'm not a huge Cub fan, but I thought they played a solid set.

The crowd came unglued when TMBG finally appeared, and it was a good, high-energy show. Factory Showroom had just recently been released, so a lot of the songs were from that album. There is no seating in the Colosseum. It's just a big concrete floor, and as I said, the venue was quite a bit larger than the crowd that night, so the fans would press in forward toward the stage but then they would squish out to the sides, which created a rotational effect. I started the night in the middle of the pack and was floated to the front and then off to the left. Then I went to the back and started again. At some point I was in front of the stacks and I forgot to bring ear plugs, so my ears were all dim and ringy for a day or two afterwards.

I got a setlist from the stage. It's written in Sharpie marker and still has fragments of the black friction tape on it. Unfortunately, although there are two encores indicated on the setlist, the band only played through the "regular" set and then left the stage. The crowd howled and stomped for the encore, but no one came out. So the crowd hooted and shouted some more. Finally Linnell took the stage and announced that Flansburgh wasn't feeling well and that while they had intended to play an encore, they couldn't do it this time. Linnell apologized profusely and then I think he said, "so long," and that was that.

A few weeks later there was an online audio chat thing on the website of a radio station or record store or something. The Johns did a live interview and the audio was streamed on the website. Streaming audio was sort of new at the time and the audio quality was atrocious. However, fans were invited to ask questions via a chat room. I managed to get in there and ask what had happened at the recent Salt Lake City show. Flansburgh replied that he had hurt his leg or foot on a piece of stage equipment as they were exiting the stage. I told him that TMBG owed Utah an encore.

Flansburgh's Nov. 20, 1996 live-streamed interview for HotWired was posted by Michael Small on the site for his podcast, "I Couldn't Throw It Out." Here is his response to a question about the Salt Lake City show:

"We'd like to know what the circumstances were at the Salt Lake City show when TMBG could not play the two encores they had on the set list." Well, I'll tell you what happened. We were playing at the show in Salt Lake. And I was walking off the stage, and there's these things called genies, which are what lighting rigs are set up on. They're basically just like giant tripods. And normally, when you're doing a professionally rigged show, there's big pieces of yellow tape all around them that say, "Stay away." Because they're these three-foot-long metal rods running along the ground that are basically just like five or six inches off the ground for a distance of say three feet. And so they'll mark them off so you can't trip over them. And I actually, well, I wasn't the only one. Our bass player fell over one on the other side of the stage and the guitar player in Cub, our opening band, had also previously injured herself on the very same thing because they were completely unmarked and in total darkness. So I hit this thing and fell over and fell on both knees and basically thought, you know, I was just like paralyzed in pain. And my first thought was, "Well, the tour is over, but at least I can go home." So we didn't get to play because I couldn't even stand. But I'm better now, and that was only like a couple of days ago. So I'm kind of glad, because it could have been much worse. I thought I had broken something.