Shows/1998-08-06

5 wikians attended: Airrun95 Derrek Equinox21 Ripner Sales

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Setlist:

• They Got Lost
• Twisting
• Turn Around
• James K. Polk
• Return To The Planet Of The Apes
• Why Does The Sun Shine?
• I Am Not Your Broom
• Istanbul (Not Constantinople)
• S-E-X-X-Y
• Spy
• Lie Still, Little Bottle
• To All The Girls I've Loved Before
• Doctor Worm
• Ana Ng
• New York City
• Birdhouse In Your Soul
• Why Must I Be Sad?
• No One Knows My Plan
• Shoehorn With Teeth
• Doctor Worm (Reprise)

They Might Be Giants
GenCon in Milwaukee, WI
August 6, 1998

Fan Recaps and Comments:

Mike Kolitz:

Well, after fighting a huge rainstorm twice during the two hour drive to Milwaukee from Madison, my friends and I entered the Midwest Express Building and got our GenCon badges. To make things brief, GenCon itself totally failed to please me at all... the people were assholes, and there wasn't very much CyberPunk stuff there... ;)

So we left.

We walked down the street in the pouring rain to where we were told TMBG would be playing later that night. Sitting under an overhang of a condemned building to keep dry for 2.5 hours, there was a lot of time to reflect on what kind of a concert we would be in for. Finally, the rain stopped, and the sound checks began.

After the sound guys played around for a while, Linnell finally took the stage and yelled at one of them for not handling his accordion correctly. He brought with him his bass sax (I think that's what it is... but I could be wrong).

Flans followed, along with the rest of Them eventually. A historic event was about to take place. The coolest cound check ever was about to go down, and I was there to see it!

The "big" sound guy (the one sitting in the chair behind all the buttons, with the "God" microphone) asked if They would test the levels...

Flans started to sing "Raindrops Keep Falling On Your Head", and changed the words slightly to something about raindrops eating him. ;) New York City was after that, with Linnell saying "Yeah!" in a homey-G funk-inner city-gang boy kind of way, and then they played Dr. Worm to test the accordion.

Flans finished them up by saying "Thanks for coming to our sound check! We're They Might Be Giants from Brooklyn! Good night everybody!" He chuckled and left the stage...

Then came the Darkest Hillside Mountain Thicket of Fuckballness or whatever they're called... I'm sorry. I hated them. They were good... musically... and that's it. They should have been called The Band You Will Probably Want To Ignore.

Anyway, TMBG came on about an hour and a half later, and rocked.

There were a group of people in front of me who I could tell were very new to TMBG... Probably just like Factory Showroom... they said "This sucks" when They were doing the improv at the end of Spy... I told them to "Shut the fuck up... it's supposed to sound like that" then they said they liked it... Oh well...

Flans: "We've got this new record, and it's live... and we're performing the live versions of our live songs... live tonight... for you... now..."

Linnell: "This next song is the first song... wait... [To Flans] Is this the first song on the album?

Flans: [Gets a weird "I dunno" look] Yeah!

They left the stage, the audience shouts "Apes! Apes! Apes!" which is what we were supposed to chant when the Johns were playing in the Planet Of The Apes song...

The show is ended because they can't play past a certain time, which was about 20 minutes ago...

All in all, it was a great show. If anyone else was there, and wants to add to this, please do.