TMBG Information Bulletin Archive/Fall 1993

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

FRONT - Section 1

EX-FE(a)ST

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

• 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

DIAL-A-SONG
718-387-6962
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Any questions for John or John, write to:

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.

FRONT - Section 2

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

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

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.

FRONT - Section 3

John Linnell

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.