Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head

Music video for "Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head"

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Trivia/Info

• This song was written in an unusually collaborative way; John Linnell wrote the song's music and chorus, and John Flansburgh wrote the rest of the lyrics.^[1] Linnell spoke about the song in a 1994 interview: "On some songs, like for example "Puppet Head," I wrote the song and I didn't like the verses. So I gave it to John [Flansburgh], and he filled in all the blanks."
• Flansburgh briefly described the song's lyrics in a 2021 Tumblr ask: "The lyric revolves around the idea that looking back on anything colors it in sentimentality. So the ultimate message is to wake up from that." He elaborated in a 2024 interview:

John put the music together and had the title, so I just sort of applied my imagination to that. It was a little bit of a dance. It's not really about puppets, it's sort of about taking control of your own imagination and trying to avoid sentimentality. That's sort of a theme for both John and myself. We find a lot of primary impulses in songwriting end up feeling very sentimental, and so a lot of the lyrics in our songs seem to be reactions against sentimentality.

• The spoken break ("Memo to myself...") was an improvisation performed during the recording of the song's 1985 demo at Studio PASS^[2]. Flansburgh has confirmed that the line "Do the dumb things I gotta do" is based on an actual series of notepads that was popular at the time.^[3] In live performances of the song before 2007, Flansburgh performed various other speeches during the song's break. These include:
  • Gibberish noises and screaming during one recorded performance at the Kitchen in 1986^[4].
  • Repeated chants of "Awesome guitar solo" at several recorded shows from 1986^[5] to 1988, and again from 1992 to 1999.
  • The imperative phrase of "Kill George Bush!" at shows in early 1989 after he was elected president that year.
• The lyrics "Quit my job down at the car wash / Didn't have to write no-one a good-bye note" are most likely inspired by the song "Guitar Man," made famous by Elvis Presley. It begins "I quit my job down at the car wash / Left my mamma a good-bye note."
• The arpeggiating synthesizer in this song is likely the "Funny" preset on a Casiotone keyboard.
• The song's music video was directed by Adam Bernstein. This was the band's first music video, and was Bernstein's directorial debut. The video was completed on July 15, 1986.^[6] John Flansburgh wrote about the music video in a 2019 article:

In 1985 [sic], before we had any record deal at all, we were approached by an ambitious young man named Adam Bernstein who wanted to direct a rock video. He said he would pay for it and that he had no budget, but that contradiction didn't seem so important. As he seemed to have no credits, we figured he was probably doing it for the practice. The video for "Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head", entirely improvised save for some dance moves stolen directly from New Edition videos, was shot on the docks down the street from our Williamsburg apartments. It got a fair bit of play on late night MTV and helped us land a deal with two fellows running an independent label out of Hoboken called Bar/None Records.

• Adam Bernstein first met the band in mid-1986. He was an aspiring music video director without experience, and was searching for an appropriate band to collaborate with. On the suggestion of his friend Mark Boyer, he went to see They Might Be Giants perform at the club Darinka.^[7] Bernstein was impressed, and offered to create a music video for them. He recalled in 1997: "I approached John Flansburgh backstage and said 'Look, I got fifteen hundred bucks. Do you need to do a video?' Initially they were distrustful, but eventually they came around to the idea that they were getting a video for free. At that point they didn't even have a record out. [...] We shot it in two eight-hour days, for the all-in price of $1,750."^[8]
  • The video was shot with a 16mm Bolex camera,^[9][10] using the tails (pieces of film cut if a whole scene cannot fit on them) of the movie Married to the Mob. Flansburgh has estimated that the video had a shooting ratio of 2:1 — they shot four minutes of footage, and two minutes of it were used in the clip.^[11] It was filmed in an empty lot next to the Con Edison plant, at North 12th St & Kent Ave in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. This was also the shooting location for the duo couch interview scenes in the documentary Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns.
  • The music video predates the band's debut album by five months, and was really created to promote their 23-song demo tape. The video features an early mix of the song, which appeared on that tape. The song seems to have been a priority track for the band at the time — it was the first song on their demo tape, and was featured on a number of promotional sampler tapes. The band also issued a promotional VHS tape of the music video.
  • The video received significant play on music television, even though the band hadn't released a record. It was first played on Nickelodeon's music show Nick Rocks. Adam Bernstein was working at Nickelodeon at the time, and convinced Nick Rocks' producer Neil Krupnick to play the video on the show. Krupnick then convinced producers at MTV to play the video as well, where it entered regular rotation. At around the same time, the video was put into heavy rotation on the local New York music station U68,^[12][13] and was played on The Joe Franklin Show.^[14]
  • In 2022, the film preservation organization IndieCollect created a 4K restoration of the music video. The full restored video has not been released, though clips of it have been posted on the band's TikTok account.^[15][16][17]
• The music video featured a few props that the band used in their live shows. The cut-out head is William Allen White, an American newspaper editor and politician. The large paper mache hands were created by Flansburgh, who described the process of making them in a 2024 Tumblr post:

I got a big stack of New York Times, rolled them up in various tubes and blobs and held their shape initially with duct tape. Roughly shaped the hands, and built handles inside them with more tape than paper. Then covered the surfaces with what I call "art school paper mache" which was slightly diluted Elmers Glue (dries much faster than standard paper mache recipes or wheat paste, and makes a harder surface) then spray painted them with some day-glow pink paint.

• The song can be heard in the background of a chase scene from the 1988 John Cusack movie Tapeheads.
• In the original script for Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman's film Being John Malkovich, this song was going to run over the end credits.

Song Themes

Animals, Aversion To Work, Body Parts, Doors, Falling, Fire, Hands, Heads, Love, Misanthropy, Occupations, Puppets, References To Other Songs Or Musicians, Religion, Sadness, School, Spoken Word, Streets, The Senses, Traded Tracks, Transportation, Writing, Zombies Or The Undead

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