TMBG Info Club Archive/Fall 1993

This double sided 18x24" sheet was mailed out to Information Club members in the fall of 1993.

Front[edit]

EX-FE(a)ST[edit]

Statesman Journal, Salem, Oregon
Monday, August 9, 1993
Thousands of rockers gorge themselves on a smorgasbord of alternative rock at Salem’s Ex-Fest on Sunday.

Review by J. Michael Stockman
Photos by Gerry Lewin
The Statesman Journal

It was called the Ex-Fest, but it could have been called Salempalooza.

Seven bands that cross the spectrum of alternative music filled the Salem Armory on Sunday. And considering the stature of the bands that played later in the day, it was difficult to pinpoint who the actual headliner was.
Helmet, Social Distortion, X, Belly, They Might Be Giants, Best Kissers In The World and Everclear each had their high points, making the day a concert worth remembering for the estimated 3,000 people who attended.
The crowd favorite played early in the day. The quirky, diverse sounds of They Might Be Giants brought cheers from the audience.
Who would have expected it, considering the media hype some of the other bands have received?
And who would have thought the crowd favorite would be a band whose instrumentation included accordion and clarinet?
For one song, the Giants drummer pulled out a small box with pieces of metal attached to it
"The glockenspiel, perhaps one of the most mysterious of rock instruments,” Giants guitarist John Flansburgh said.
It wasn’t the only odd thing the Giants did. One song was basically the lecture you heard about the sun in your junior high science class set to music.
The crowd didn’t seem to mind this blend of silliness and science, cheering the band on.

Fans also got a treat as Flansburgh signed autographs at the T-shirt concession stand after the set.

On Tour With TMBG[edit]

Brian Doherty - Drums - Former member of the Silos, Brian has played on such critically acclaimed records as Freedy Johnston's "Can You Fly" and Madder Rose's "Bring It Down.” In the next few months, while recording with TMBG, Brian will also be in the studio working on a new all-star project featuring Marshall Crenshaw, Lucinda Williams, and Bob Rupe (ex-Silos).
Kurt Hoffman - Sax, Keyboards - Founding member of the now defunct NYC band The Ordinaires, Kurt currently leads the ultra-hip Band of Weeds (June’s Hello Recording Club selection). Kurt also composed the score for Viking’s book-on-tape of the award winning children’s story “The True Story of the Three Little Pigs” by Jon Scieska, and has appeared on recent albums by Frank Black, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Boss Hog.
Tony Maimone - Bass - Longtime member of legendary Cleveland rockers Pere Ubu, Tony has just formed a new band with Jon Langford (of the Mekons) and Gary Lucas called The Killer Shrews. Look for their eponymous debut album out soon on Enemy Records. In addition to playing with the Giants, Tony has also played with Bob Mould and Frank Black.

They Might Be Giants[edit]

DIAL-A-SONG
718-387-6962
free

Any questions for John or John, write to:[edit]

Questions
TMB Productions
P.O. Box 110535
Williamsburgh Station
Brooklyn, New York
11211-0003
No guarantees, but we’ll try to answer your questions in the next newsletter.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation[edit]

John Flansburgh

Greetings from the Catskills! John Flansburgh here, in a friend of a friend's haunted "fixer-upper" summer house on a cool night in August. The window is covered with dozens of moths who are swarming around what is probably the single lit bulb in a mile. In this beautiful natural setting, it is surprisingly creepy.

I spent today driving around to junk stores with my girlfriend, buying records for a recently acquired $10 record player. Along with cards and reading, listening to the record player is our primary activity. So far I have picked up two very strong Sammy Davis Jr. records from the late sixties, a Burl Ives record called "Women," a Yma Sumac 78 album set with a beautiful cover, a souvenir record from a bombastic '64 Worlds Fair exhibit, a Paul Harvey religious record, another record of organ "meditations" with a guy doing bird calls (really interesting), and a fake "live" album by a New York trio with matching mutton-chops from 1966 called "The Soul Set."

Some friends and I got our courage together and went to the ultimate shrine of Catskills class, the Nevele Resort. Kind of a Caesar's Palace of the east, without the gambling of course, but with all the wild '50's styling in tact. Evidently the resort was built right before the Catskills went into a serious and sudden decline in the late fifties. Because it has been relatively unburdened by customers, the original decor has been well maintained and now stands as a monument to high 1950's styling.

Performing in front of a packed house of 1500 in the Stardust Room at the Nevele was Johnny Maestro and the Brooklyn Bridge. He's the guy who sang "16 Candles" with the Crests, and you've probably seen Johnny in the Hair Club for Men ad on TV. (He is unidentified, but still sitting in front of a recording console.) Well, Johnny's show was very tight and his voice was amazing. The crowd seemed a bit dazed by rock and roll music, but the band was pretty spirited under the circumstances.

Real Info About They Might Be Giants[edit]

By the time this newsletter gets out, we'll have finished up a tour around the midwest and south. Pere Ubu was in the opening slot. We'll be doing another round of demos in the fall before we go in to record big album #5 in January. We'll be working with producer Paul Fox (XTC, Sugarcubes, 10,000 Maniacs) and probably recording the basic tracks with our full band in upstate New York. Guess it's time to wax up those cross country skis.

John Linnell[edit]

Saturday, Nov 10, 1990
We're in the sky again, eating honey roasted peanuts or sleeping with our mouths open in a seated position. I'm drinking lots of water but I still have the unpleasant sensation that my clothes don't fit and are bunching up around me. We're beginning the wumpteenth and final leg of our year-long world tour promoting our third album, this time to the pacific rim. Tonight we'll be in Hawaii, having left New York this morning after a week's vacation. None of us have been to Japan, New Zealand or Australia before and are equipped with very general and probably useless stereotypes of things we'll encounter when we get there.

Tuesday, Nov 13, 1990
Spent our day off (after two nights of our gear falling apart on stage at The Wave in Wakiki) uneventfully.

Friday, Nov 16, 1990
The Southern Cross hangs upside-down outside my hotel window here in Auckland. To the right of the Cross are Beta and Alpha Centauri, respectively. On the opposite end of the sky is familiar Orion, though he now hunts in the north part of the dome. And next to Orion is Mars, making its closest approach to Earth for the next ten years.

We've only done press so far in New Zealand, our show here is tomorrow night. In preparation for our trip to Japan I've taught myself the Katakana characters, which are the ones that represent foreign words. This enables me to read certain shop signs, such as the ones I saw in Hawaii that read Po-ru-no (Porno) and Ba-be-kyu-ri-bu (Barbeque Rib)

Today I bought a real 35mm camera and some film.

Saturday, Nov 24, 1990
We've had progressively rowdier audiences as we've moved through Australia this past week. Melbourne's two shows were in a theater, which partly accounts for the initially subdued response in that venue. Adelaide last night was considerably peppier, and tonight in Brisbane we had our first Aussie stage divers.

I've been whipping through the film with my little tourist's camera. I bought slide film which I thought would look nicer, though I'll need a projector to view my pictures when I get home.

Sunday, Nov 25, 1990
I found out today that we're about 500 km south of the Tropic of Capricorn, which explains why at noon on this late spring day everyone's shadows are directly under them, and why I prefer to stay indoors until it's later in the day.

Popular expressions besides the oft-cited "G'day" are "How're you going" and "Good one," as evidenced by our crowd chanting "Good one, John!" during last night's show.

Thursday, Dec 6, 1990
This drawing is my first view of Japan, an island to the southeast of Honsho, seen from the northwest as our plane approached Tokyo. I still don't know its name. This is our second day here and the feeling I have of being under the influence of psychedelic drugs has only worn off slightly.

Sunday, Dec 9, 1990
Two shows at Club Quattro very well received. It's hard to put one's finger on the difference between Japanese & Western audiences, though the difference is unmistakable. Both crowds applaud and scream and sing along (last night's audience sang the TMBG theme after we left the stage). The language barrier has a much more obvious effect here than in Germany or even Italy or Spain. The Japanese laughed at between-song comments but when Flans asked in English for everyone to raise their fist and shout "Love!," raising his own fist in example, we saw only three fists in the crowd of 600 plus.

Tuesday, Dec 11, 1990
John and I are in Osaka tonight, the crew and management are over in the Pacific, going home.

We've seen three bands in Japan this week. One was our old friends Poi Dog Pondering who played at Club Quattro the night before our first show there. We also went to a Wayne Horvitz, Bill Frisell & friends gig in the Roppongi district of Tokyo.

Wednesday, Dec 12, 1990
The third and most excellent band was our opening act in Tokyo "Constance Towers," who Jamie describes as "Weimar Republic Pop." Their songs and arrangements were all first rate, though I didn't have a clue as to what the lyrics were about because they're all in Japanese. The singer and apparent leader of the band, Yuichi Kishino, is also a fan of TMBG, and he showered us with gifts of rare Japanese records from his collection after our last show together.

Tonight we are in Kyoto, an older looking city than the other three we've seen. This is due, we're told, to the fact that Kyoto wasn't flattened by bombs during WWII. I am continuing my quest for Japanese products with interesting English expressions on them. So far the best ones have been too expensive or impractical to take home. I found a boy's sweatshirt that said, "New York Papa - Boys Will Be Boys - both Lincoln and Kennedy remained a child at heart." I did purchase a bust of a black man with a saxophone that had the inscription:

GOOD-OLD-DAYS
The Sepia Portrait
Once upon a time when the man was the man and the woman was the woman they had something to elegant ferocity with each other.

Saturday morning, Dec 15, 1990
I awoke this morning in a ryokan: a traditional Japanese inn with tatami floor mats and a communal hot bath, plus a TV and air conditioner. Hoping to avoid creating an international incident, I read as much as I could about how to conduct oneself in a ryokan, but it is clear now that if I inadvertently violate any formal rule my hosts are generally too polite to correct me. For example I went downstairs last night for my bath with my robe wrapped with the left side over the right side; later I read that this arrangement is reserved for the dead.

Monday(?), Dec 17, 1990
The jet in my mind's tired eye is pointed backward now, we've recrossed the international dateline by now, forever having lost Wednesday November 14th but receiving a double ration of Monday December 17th as compensation. In Kyoto we visited the Heian Shrine and the Kiyomizu Temple and the odd lesser shrine, twice we bowled at Dream Lanes, the most high-tech bowling alley I've ever heard of (where your score is kept automatically and video cameras monitor your bowling form and show a close-up of the pins going down). Yesterday(?) in Tokyo we returned to our favorite conveyor belt sushi bar in Udagawa-Cho, Shibuya Ku, just down the street from the Tobu Hotel and below the strange weekly event at Harajuku. On Sundays at this southern edge of Yoyogi Park, Japanese rock bands perform on several stages and hordes of teenage and pre-teenage girls stand in rows in front of the bands and perform highly choreographed dances. Each dance appears to correspond to the individual song that's being played. And how such a large group establishes such a complicated repertoire is a mystery to Flans & me. We thought maybe they learned the dances from each other at school.

New Jersey has appeared in my window. Wedges of snow are scattered among the little lakes and hills.

Rear[edit]

T-Shirts[edit]

All 100% cotton.
SHORT SLEEVE L & XL $16
OVERSIZE XXL $18
LONG SLEEVE $18
BABY 4T $10

NASCAR (short sleeve L & XL, or long sleeve XL only) - Shake the ground with 10,000 watts of earth-shattering TMBG funny car power. Actually, it's TMBG's NASCAR shirt. Available in long sleeve with racing stripes on the sleeves or short sleeve with no stripes but a bonus design on the back.
Big Head (oversize - XXL - only) - The enigmatic head from many of TMBG's videos on a black oversize shirt. The "T" is neon green and the "MBG" is neon orange.
The Hayseed Johns (XL only) - From an original cartoon by Mark Marek. Three color design in blue, purple, and orange inks on a white shirt.
Snowman (L & XL) - The ever-popular TMBG snowman, warming his hands over a pile of burning money. Black ink on white shirt or white ink on black shirt.
The Big Cup (L & XL only) - Weirdly distorted red lettering beneath a Giants-sized cup of steaming hot black java.
Sun Shine Tour (XL only) - The TMBG family crest backed with September 1993 tour dates.
Dial A Song (XL only) - T-shirt with the correct dial a song phone number illustrated by Jotto Seibold.
The Man (XL only) - Big happy purple guy from TMBG's "Why Does The Sun Shine?" record cover with bright green lettering on the back and a secret message on the sleeve.
Dead (XL only, long sleeve, or short sleeve) - With its distinctive dead roach on the front and all the 1992 tour dates from around the globe listed on the back, this shirt is guaranteed to be a real collectors item.
Skull (L & XL, baby size 4T) - Our most popular item this last tour, this shirt was designed by Meat Puppets guitarist Curt Kirkwood. This shirt is also available in a baby size. The perfect gift for the sophisticated baby.
Worker Johns (L & XL) - Another Mark Marek cartoon of the Johns in bright industrial colors.
Stamps (oversize - XXL - only) - Big red letters with black postage stamps.
Apollo 18 Tour (SALE!) (L & XL) - New album cover art on black or white t-shirt with 1992 tour dates on back. SALE $13

EPs[edit]

7" $4.00
CS $5.50
12" $4.50
CD $6.50
(EXCEPT "STATUE" IMPORT CD $11)

Don't Let's Start (LP,CS,CD) - Remix of the title track plus We're The Replacements, When It Rains It Snows & The Famous Polka.
(She Was A) Hotel Detective (LP,CS,CD) - Remix of the title track plus For Science, The Biggest One, Mr. Klaw Kiss Me, Son of God (alternate version).
They'll Need A Crane (CS & CD) - Title track plus It's Not My Birthday, I'll Sink Manhattan Z& Nightgown Of The Sullen Moon.
The Statue Got Me High (Import CD only) - Title Track plus She's Actual Size, I'm Def & Which Describes How You're Feeling.
The Guitar (CD only) - Extended mix of title track, two Cold Cut remixes, Welcome To The Jungle, I Blame You, & Moving To The Sun.
I Palindrome I (CS & CD) - Title track plus Cabbagetown, Siftin'* & Larger Than Life* (Joshua Fried's remix). *song on CD only
Istanbul (not Constantinople) - Sorry, temporarily -- we hope -- unavailable.
Why Does The Sun Shine? (The Sun Is A Mass Of Incandescent Gas) (2 song 7" or 4 song CD) - The title track is TMBG's version of a song from a 1959 educational record with a cover of the Allman Brothers classic Jessica on the 7." The cd includes two bonus tracks: a horn-filled version of the Meat Puppets song Whirlpool and a new TMBG original entitled Spy.
O Tannenbaum (7" only) - John and John sing this classic Christmas carol in the original German. Backed with the ultra hilarious Christmas Cards. Absolutely the perfect gift for this holiday season.

Buttons[edit]

3 button set with Apollo 18 album art $2/set

Postcards[edit]

Two shots of John and John. Each set comes with an extra pair, so you can save one set and send the other. $2/set

Video Compilation[edit]

The first six videos: Put Your Hand Inside the Puppethead, Don't Let's Start, (She Was A) Hotel Detective, Ana Ng, They'll Need A Crane and Purple Toupee. $15

Shot Glasses[edit]

Four beautiful shot glasses with red and black printing featuring the They Might Be Giants logo and card suit symbols. Perfect for poker games or just drinking alone! Set of 4 just $10/set

Bumper Stickers[edit]

Screen-printed on weather-resistant paper.
- Coffee Cup Black & red design
- TMBG Black & white design

$2 Each or 3 for $5

Albums[edit]

LP $7.50
(EXCEPT FLOOD $10)
CS $8.50
CD $14.00

They Might Be Giants (LP, CS, CD) - The debut album. 19 songs including, Don't Let's Start, Hotel Detective, Puppet Head & She's An Angel.
Lincoln (LP, CS, CD) - The 2nd album. 18 songs including, Ana Ng, They'll Need A Crane, Purple Toupee & Shoehorn With Teeth.
Flood (LP, CS, CD) - The 3rd album. 19 songs including, Birdhouse In Your Soul, Istanbul (Not Constantinople) & Your Racist Friend.
Miscellaneous T (CS & CD) - The B Side/Remix Compilation Album. 18 songs including Hey Mr. DJ, I Thought You Said We Had A Deal, Birds Fly & Hello Radio.
Apollo 18 (CS & CD) - The 4th Album. 18 songs including, I Palindrome I, The Statue Got Me High & The Guitar.

Order Form[edit]

TMB Productions
Dept. PPFNP - P.O. Box 110535
Williamsburgh Station - Brooklyn, NY 11211-0003

How To Order[edit]

Read the fine print! Fill out this form (or a copy of it). Please print clearly and add correctly! Use the chart below to figure out the correct Shipping and Handling charge. Orders to be shipped to NY addresses must also include sales tax. Payments may also be made by American Express, VISA, or MasterCard or enclose a check or money order for the total amount due, in US Funds only, payable to TMB Productions. Do not send cash!

The Fine Print[edit]

Allow 4-8 weeks for delivery within the US & Canada. Allow 8-12 weeks for delivery outside the US & Canada. Most domestic orders are shipped via UPS (US mail by request). All foreign orders shipped by US mail. All prices are in US dollars and payment can only be accepted in US funds. Prices and descriptions are those in effect as of October 1, 1993 and are subject to change without notice.

Money Back Guarantee[edit]

If not fully satisfied, return merchandise to TMB Productions within 30 days of receipt for a full refund. Please enclose the packing slip for faster processing.

*New York residents add 8.25% sales tax on cost of goods plus shipping and handling.