The Big Big Whoredom (Live)

Trivia/Info

• Recorded live in the mid-1980s.
• This recording of the song features a more complicated and energetic arrangement compared to the version released on Then: The Earlier Years. John Flansburgh described it as having a "very impressive and strange rhythm accompaniment."^[1]
• This song was performed with ventriloquist dummy heads attached to poles, which Flansburgh and Linnell would wave around on stage. The band used similar props for "Exquisite Dead Guy" and "Counterfeit Faker" in the late 1990s. John Linnell, talking about the dummy heads in 1997: "We actually did the mannequin head thing about 10 or 12 years ago, back in our Downtown New York days. Performance art, it's coming back. Remember that stuff?"
• John Flansburgh spoke about the live performances of this song in a 1997 interview:

[For "Exquisite Dead Guy,"] we have these two ventriloquist dummy heads on mic stands that are extended as long as they can be. And we just pull on the string and move the mouth, and it looks like they're singing. We actually did this thing in our show... This compilation record came out called Then and there's a song on it — there's actually a demo of the song "The Big Big Whoredom," which was a song we did for many years in our early repertoire.

Talking about improvisation versus rehearsal, it was one of these songs that — the main thing about this song, I think, that the audience got out of it, was that we were people that were working really hard to do a good job. Because it was a really tricky, really non-repetitive song; it was hard to sing, and we were singing it in unison, so it was really like [whisper] 'these guys rehearse a lot!' It's kind of weird, because I don't know if it's really important for people to know if you work hard. But for a cold audience, I think they kind of appreciated it. In some abstract way, they go, 'oh, these people aren't just stumbling onto the stage, and getting in the way of my drinking...' Using the heads was something we actually brought back from that show.

• As part of the puppet show, only the verse vocals are being performed live. The second Linnell vocal, and likely all of the instruments, are part of the song's pre-recorded backing track.
• At the end of the recording, a bass note can be heard that is identical to the intro of the 1983 demos of Hell Hotel.

Song Themes

Denial, Heads, Questions, Self-Reference, Size, Upside Down

Videos

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Other Links for “The Big Big Whoredom (Live)” [edit] Site Format Price Link TMBG Podcast 26A (Starts at 13:17) MP3 Free