Shows/1988-10-05

Fan Recaps and Comments:

Labelled in Paradise Club listings as a "Special Showtime".

Preview of the show from the Boston Globe, Oct. 5, 1988:

Sometimes it seems that there are no untouched subjects left in rock 'n' roll, that there are no off-beat song angles left. Then along comes a band such as They Might Be Giants, whose repertoire includes "Youth Culture Killed My Dog," "Stand On Your Own Head for a Change" and "Nothing's Gonna Change My Clothes," not to mention rock's first song about a shoehorn with teeth (Chorus: "He wants a shoehorn, the kind with teeth / Because he knows there is no such thing").

They Might Be Giants, who play the Paradise tonight, are a humorous band, sort of: and a serious band, sort of. "I'd like people not to think of that as two different things," says co-leader John Linnell. "People feel that humor reduces a piece of work, makes it smaller or less illuminating. That's not the way we think. There's humor in a lot of 20th century music, even if it's dark or tragic humor. And that gives it a certain warmth, something people can connect with. [Performance artist] Laurie Andersion once said that dead seriousness is a disguise for mediocrity, and I'd tend to agree. I never liked the idea that something is important only if it burns you out."

Based in New York, the two Giants – Linnell and John Flansburgh, with a tape machine for a backup band – actually grew up in Lincoln, Mass.
"By an odd chain of events, we both wound up in the same Brooklyn ghetto by the late '70s," said Flansburgh from Cape Cod this week. "Punk rock started happening, and that inspired us. People tend to forget that punk had a sense of humor: It wasn't always super-grim. We used to play in performance-art spaces, and our show used to be more bizarre than it is now, less audience-friendly. But the New York people got it, or pretended they did – New Yorkers pride themselves on getting anything."

Their new album is also called "Lincoln," though Flansburgh says that isn't a tribute to their hometown. "It's just one of those universal-sounding words.
Onstage the duo play guitars and accordion, dress like nerdy mad scientists, lead singalongs and sneak serious ideas between the lines. At the Paradise last spring, their closing number put a spin on a famous line from the Who's "My Generation" – "I hope I die before I get old" – and turned it into the existential polka, "I Hope That I Get Old Before I Die."

"That seemed the more correct point of view," says Linnell. "A lot of our songs are really pretty negative, but they're put in a friendly-sounding way. In that case, I was thinking about how our society doesn't look up to its elderly, and feeling like the old man I'll eventually become."
The band's recent radio hit, "Don't Let's Start", was one of their few straight-ahead pop songs; they're more inclined to borrow everything from bluegrass to disco to vaudeville.

"At the moment we're preoccupied with pre-rock song ideas," Linnell says. "We've got this amateurish side, being people who try certain styles out of love and not being experts. For example, we've just done a Latin-type song for the new album. Whether or not it will make us a laughing stock in the Latino community remains to be seen."