Shows/1994-11-05

Fan Recaps and Comments:

Tickets were $18.75.

"They Might Have Been Giants" by Frank Seglenieks
Imprint, Nov. 11, 1994:

TMBG hit the stage with the band with which they recorded their latest album John Henry. I don't know if its just that I am not familiar with their new material as their other stuff, but the new songs had a certain sameness which got tiresome after a while.

They started out by playing most of their biggest songs including "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)," "Don't Let's Start" and "Ana Ng." After this however, they were left with playing a lit of stuff from the new album which the audience wasn't familiar with, combined with the fact the audience was sitting and during the night most of the 6 members of the band had some extended solos, there seemed to be a few in the audience who were wishing for the old days.

The band, consisting of bassist Tony Maimone, drummer Brian Doherty and horn section Kurt Hoffman and Steven Bernstein was good enough, but there is something about playing with a band that takes away from the TMBG sound. John Linnell spent far too much time behind the keyboards for my taste, he only strapped on the accordion for the older songs. A lot of time was devoted to each member of the band getting a solo during songs, this seemes like a bit of overkill as they ended off with Edgar Winter Group's "Frankenstein" during which everybody again got a solo.

During the set, they mostly played songs from their two previous albums Flood and Apollo 18, not going any further back than this. Frank Black came back joining in for one song, where he got to do yet another guitar wank. The stage set up was as quirky as the band with streetlights, park benches and giant metre tall blowups of the girl's face from the cover of John Henry.
They ended off the main set with "Birdhouse in Your Soul" and "Dig My Grave," it was here that the crowd fought the power and collectively stood up and started dancing. This exposed the fact that you have to be able to dance to really enjoy TMBG and perhaps this venue wasn't best suited to their type of show.

The encore started off with one of the best songs off of John Henry "The End of the Tour," then "Snail Shell," and the aforementioned "Frankenstein." TMBG should have easily been the best band this night, however given all the reasons above, some of which were their own doing (plentiful band solos) some of which were thrust upon them (fixed seating venue) they were only as good as the other performers that night.