They Might Be Giants

Opinions on the Obscure, Off-Beat, and Outdated THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS Hello and welcome back to the column! Hands up everyone who’s surprised that I made it this far, LOL. …Okay, you can put your hands down, it was a joke! Anyway, they say that every idiot has an opinion, and this column is just my chance to share my opinions with you. Don’t you feel special? This month, I’m going to tell you about a musical group called “They Might Be Giants”. Ever heard of them? Well, I have… Back in my misspent and squandered youth I longed to be (among other things) a cartoonist. What can I say, I’m an intellectual. To this end, I would rush home from Junior High to watch such wonderful research material as “Tiny Toon Adventures”. One episode, they were making fun of MTV. They had these music videos, to oldies, mostly, featuring the Tiny Toons cast. For example, they had Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” featuring Babs Bunny, and Barret Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want)” with Montana Max. Well, after a commercial break, they introduce “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” by They Might Be Giants. Now, I knew the song, one of my older siblings had it on a 45 by the Four Lads (I might still have it somewhere, in the deep recesses of the closet). But I’d never heard of the band. This version had a much faster tempo, and the fast-paced video featured Plucky Duck and Hampton J. Pig. And then, vee-jay Buster Bunny says “Wow, that was SO good, let’s have another one by They Might Be Giants, called ‘Particle Man’!” Then he looks to someone off camera and asks, “Who ARE these guys?” I couldn’t help but wonder the same thing. Were they a real band? Did they just make ‘em up for the episode? Can’t be, all the other music featured in the episode was ‘real’. I was determined to find out! That was back in 1991. This is what I’ve learned between then and now… They Might Be Giants started off with John Flansburgh and John Linnell, who grew up in Lincoln Massachusetts and met in junior high school. They attended separate colleges, but then reunited in 1981 to embark on their careers. The band’s name was suggested by a friend, borrowed from the 1971 movie starring George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward, itself derived from a passage in Don Quixote. While they began performing a year earlier (as ‘El Grupo de Rock-N-Roll’, no lie!), they didn’t perform under the name ‘They Might Be Giants’ (or just “TMBG” for short) until 1983. There at the beginning, they seemed to concentrate more on developing a unique recorded sound, inspired by the Residents and other bands who worked outside the “live band” sound. They experimented extensively with a hodge-podge collection of sound equipment which included Moog synthesizers, abandoned drum kits, Music Minus One (or similar) records, tape loops, and some primitive precursor to the drum machine. With this eccentric equipment they engineered their artificial ‘rhythm section’—a collection of accompanying background tracks. Some of these were so unique that they have been unable to reproduce them with more modern equipment!

Don’t get me wrong, they did perform live, with Flansburgh on guitar and Linnell on the accordion or the sax. The lyrics were extremely abstract, inspiring fans and listeners to ponder whether they were absurd nonsense or contained some enigmatic deeper meaning. They eventually confessed in an interview that their lyrics were constructed solely to compliment the melody, so I guess ‘absurd nonsense’ wins! However, many of their songs have identifiable themes and ideas, and clever wordplay. Sounds good so far, right? Well, that’s when disaster struck! Linnell broke his wrist in a biking accident! Flansburgh’s apartment was burglarized! These setbacks forced the duo to cease performing for a time. However, the time was not wasted as they more deeply explored the innovative idea that became their Dial-A-Song service! Inspired by things like Dial-A-Prayer and Dial-A-Poem, they recorded some of their songs onto an answering machine and advertised the number in local papers, such as the Village Voice. They are one of the few bands to offer such a service, and repeat callers have reported over 500 songs and variations—making They Might Be Giants one of the most prolific rock bands in history in terms of published material. This revolutionary service was replaced in March 2000 with dialasong.com, which was much more reliable than the phone lines, and replaced again in August 2006 with a web page promoting their podcasts. They soon came up with a demo tape, which they would sell to fans at their live shows. One of these tapes ended up in the hands of a reviewer for People Magazine, who featured an article about them. That article caught the attention of the folks at Bar/None Records, who offered them a recording deal! (They took it!) Their debut album was self-titled, and came out in 1986. It quickly became a hit on college radio stations. This album featured the song “Don’t Let’s Start”, the video for which was filmed at the New York State Pavilion—you know, the one built for the 1964 World’s Fair—and became a hit on MTV. Their second album, “Lincoln” (named after their hometown, and the cover art reportedly incorporating pictures of their grandfathers), was released in 1988. The lead song, “Ana Ng” (apparently about longing for a soul mate whom you’ll never meet as they live on the opposite end of the world) was popular enough to get on the US Modern Rock Chart, peaking at #11! In ’89 TMBG apparently abandoned Bar/None to instead associate with Elektra! Here, they released their third album, “Flood” (the one with the songs featured in that Tiny Toons episode!). The album went gold! This is due largely to the song “Birdhouse in Your Soul”, which reached #3 on the US Modern Rock Chart AND #6 on the UK Singles Chart—their highest ranking song on both charts! In ’92 they released the space-themed album “Apollo 18”. This coincided with their being named the Musical Ambassadors for International Space Year. (I bet ya didn’t even know there WAS an International Space Year! I sure didn’t!) Ever innovative, this is one of the first albums ever to take advantage of the ‘shuffle’ feature on most CD players. Their song “Fingertips” was actually composed of 21 (count ‘em, 21) separate tracks ranging from about 5 seconds to a minute in length which could be injected between the full-length songs of the album. However, certain mastering errors caused the UK and Australian versions of the album to present “Fingertips” as a single track, like on the cassette version. So, you guys missed out! After “Apollo 18”, the two Johns decided to change the nature of their live shows,

dropping the pre-recorded backing tracks and recruiting a live band. These included Kurt Hoffman of the Ordinaires on reeds and keys, Tony Maimone of Pere Ubu on bass, and Brian Doherty on drums. The addition of a live back-up band changed their sound, and their 1994 album “John Henry” was given mixed reviews by both critics and fans. Personally, I think it’s as good as their previous stuff, and it contains two of my favorite TMBG songs. But the criticism caused them to return to the more diverse sounds of their previous work when releasing their next album “Factory Showroom”. This album was released with little fanfare, due to this and other exposure-related issues, they left Elektra. Seems like they’ve always been using the internet to their advantage, too. Why, as early as ’92, they took advantage of Usenet newsgroups to get info out to their fans. In ’99 they became the first major-label recording artist to release an entire album exclusively as an MP3! The album was “Long, Tall Weekend” and was distributed through Emusic. And then… They got involved with TV and movies, so you might have heard them, even if you don’t know it. They’ve done a slew of theme songs including (but not limited to) Austin Powers: the Spy Who Shagged Me, Nightline Primetime, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Oblongs, and Malcolm in the Middle. Their songs have appeared in a wide variety of shows from The Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers to Pushing Daisies and in commercials for Chrysler, Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Pizza Hut, Play Doh, and Dunkin Donuts. Oh yeah, almost forgot to mention, ‘Boss of Me’, the theme song for Malcolm in the Middle, won them a Grammy in 2002. By 2001 they had moved to Restless Records, and released the album “Mink Car”. The making of this album is featured in the documentary (yes, there is a documentary about these guys!) made by AJ Shnack. The movie is called: Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns. Released in 2003, it made the rounds of film festivals and was a big hit, receiving rave reviews and winning awards. I can’t say much about it firsthand, as I’ve only just found out about it. But it’s on DVD, so I plan to track it down. In 2002, they expounded upon their “kid appeal” by branching out into kids music. They came up with “No!” and album “for the entire family”. It featured the enhanced CD format, playing normally in a CD player and offering flash animations and interactive games when played in a CD-ROM. In 2004 they created one of the first artist-owned online music stores where you can buy Mp3 downloads of new and old releases. They also released “The Spine”, their first “adult” album in three years, and recorded “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too”, a political campaign song from the presidential election of 1840 (no lie!) for “Future Soundtrack for America”. This album was compiled by Flansburgh and released through Barsuk Records; all proceeds went to progressive organizations like Music for America and MoveOn.org. About this time, they produced the off-Broadway musical “People Are Wrong”, written by Robin Goldwasser (Flansburgh’s wife) and Julia Greenberg. It’s about a New York couple who move upstate and are tormented by a cult leader posing as a landscape artist, and is supposedly inspired by a true incident. I can believe that, because you can’t make up stuff like that. It played at the Vineyard Theatre from October 22 to December 11, 2004. In 2005 they released their second children’s album, “Here Come the ABCs”,

which won several awards and is the second-highest selling TMBG album, second only to “Flood”. They also released “Venue Songs”, a collection of unique songs written specifically for and about the various locations of their 2004 tour. Beginning in December of ’05 they began a monthly podcast; chock full of special remixes, covers, new songs and skits thus far unavailable anywhere else. In 2007 they were commissioned to write a piece for the robotic musicians of the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots. This is an outfit of artists and technologists based in Brooklyn who build robotic musical instruments. They also released “The Else” which, as a sort of experiment, was available through iTunes for approximately two months before it was released in CD form. I have not been able to find what, if anything, this experiment proved. Most recently, in 2008 they released “Here Come the 123s”, their third children’s album. According to Flansburgh in an interview on the Super Cool Fun Show, their next album will be “Here Comes Science”. The band’s roster has changed over the years. I’m not entirely sure where and when. The band currently consists of the two Johns, Flansburgh and Linnell, Dan Miller, Danny Weinkauf, and Marty Beller. Whew! That’s probably all you ever wanted to know about They Might Be Giants and then some! I gotta tell ya, when I started writing this article I thought I knew a lot about these guys, but further research showed me I only knew about half the story! Now comes the really hard part. I have to come up with a rating. Let’s see… Well, they count as Alternative Rock, or Children’s Music, and they have cool but weird songs. The music is great and evocative, what I like to refer as ‘mood music’ (I often let some music or other play in the background while I write). Their lyrics make little or no sense, which could be a plus or a minus depending on what you’re into, music-wise. They might be an acquired taste, yet they seem pretty popular, winning critical acclaim, a cult-like fan following, and several awards. Nope, it’s too difficult. Gotta pull out the old D&D dice to define their degree of dandiness!

Hmm, I rolled an 89. That can’t be high enough. What a stupid rating system. *Shrugs* Oh well, 89 is still a passing grade, which means that they are still well worth checking out. At least, that’s one idiot’s opinion, and you don’t have to accept it. You could check ‘em out for yourself and form your own! If you’re inclined to do so, I suggest you check out their official websites. Yes, “websites”, plural! Here’s a handy link: http://theymightbegiants.com/ That should lead you to a page that’ll direct you to all four of their sites. You can also see many of their videos (and fan-made videos, and TV appearances) on You Tube. Also, a quick web search will provide you with many other pages you check out for further info. Well, I guess that about wraps up another one! Wanna know what I’m gonna talk about next month? So do I! I guess we’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, listen to music, or read a good eZine (oh wait, you are!), and I’ll be back next month to talk about something-or-other! So, be there and be square!

-----Your Buddy, Oddcube