They Might Be Giants

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They Might Be Giants

Pop-rock duo

Torrent of Success, Not Praise, for Flood

Even in the alternative rock world, which allows for more diversity and eccentricity than mainstream music, They Might Be Giants seem an unlikely success story: absurd, surrealistic lyrics sung over bright melodies played on accordion, guitar, boom box, and a variety of sampled instruments. Yet only a few years after their first independent release, this New York pop duo became a major force on the alternative scene. Their knack for deadpan silliness wrapped in a catchy musical package won over college audiences, and their wildly inventive videos caught the attention of MTV viewers.

The two musician-songwriters who make up They Might Be Giants, John Linnell and John Flansburgh, first met in elementary school in Lincoln, Massachusetts. They became good friends in high school, even writing some songs together, but only began playing seriously years later. Linnell, singer, accordionist, and keyboardist for the Giants, studied music for a year after high school, but elected to leave his studies to play keyboards for a Rhode Island rock band called the Mundanes. Guitarist Flansburgh attended several colleges before dropping out of the university scene entirely; he taught himself to play guitar while working in a parking lot booth. In 1981, the two Johns moved into the same Brooklyn, New York, apartment building on the same day, marking the beginning of their musical partnership. Rather than form a traditional rock band, however, the two started using a drum machine and tape recorder to round out the songs. “At first we taped because we couldn’t afford a live drummer,” Linnell told Steve Dougherty of People. Flansburgh finished the thought: “Now we do it because we can use strange rhythms and not worry about the drummer’s head exploding.” The song “Rhythm Section Want Ad,” which appeared on their first LP, seems to suggest that potential bandmates didn’t share the duo’s vision: “Do you sing like Olive Oyl on purpose/You guys must be into the Eurythmics.”

Taking their name from a little-known movie starring George C. Scott, the pair began playing in the SoHo area of New York. Linnell played organ, while Flansburgh operated a drum tape in addition to playing guitar. Soon, They Might Be Giants were playing regularly in East Village clubs. Though they generated no record company interest in this period, they came up with an ingenious new way to share recorded material with a large audience: They put new songs on a telephone answering machine, changing the tapes regularly and leaving space at the end for listeners’ comments. Thus “Dial-a-Song” was born. By 1988, the Giants’ phone-machine song repertoire featured more than three hundred tunes. The gimmick worked well, and the band was soon receiving over one hundred calls a day.

For the Record…

Band members are: John Linnell (vocals, keyboards, accordion), born c. 1959 in Lincoln, MA, son of a psychiatrist and an artist, attended University of Massachusetts, played in rock bands and worked as a bicycle messenger, founded They Might Be Giants in 1984; John Flansburgh (guitar, vocals, drum programming), born c. 1960 in Lincoln, MA, son of an architect and a Boston tour organizer, earned B.F.A. in printmaking from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, worked as parking lot attendant and as people counter at Grand Central Station, New York, NY.

Pop-rock recording and performing duo. Pair began collaborating in 1981; began playing under current name in 1984; recorded first independent album in 1987; signed with Elektra Records in 1989; released first major-label album and toured Pacific region in 1990.

Awards: Rated best new act in Q magazine readers’ poll, 1990; awarded British Silver Record for selling 100,000 copies of Flood, 1990.

Addresses: Record company —Elektra Records, 75 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10019. Other —TMBG Information, P.O. Box 110553, Williamsburg Station, Brooklyn, NY 11211.

Called Ultimate MTV Band

Linnell and Flansburgh decided to put out their own record, and released They Might Be Giants in 1987 on the small New Jersey label Bar/None, which was founded by Hoboken record store owner Tom Prendergast and his partner Glenn Morrow. The album contained 20 songs, and the Giants filmed two inexpensive videos for the songs “Don’t Let’s Start” and “Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head.” MTV representatives saw the videos and decided that, in executive Rick Krim’s words, “the Giants were the ultimate MTV band. They’re very visual and very entertaining.” By early 1988 the video for “Don’t Let’s Start,” which features Linnell and Flansburgh with a variety of bizarre props, was playing regularly on the music video channel. As a result the record, which had been selling 1,000 copies a month, began selling 50,000 copies a month. Suddenly record companies expressed interest in the band. 1988 also saw the release of two They Might Be Giants EPs, Don’t Let’s Start and (She Was a) Hotel Detective. Both recordings mixed songs from the first album with unreleased material. High Fidelity called the EPs “chock full o’ fun.”

By mid-1988 They Might Be Giants finished their second album, Lincoln. Bar/None joined Enigma Records, and the album sold even better than the Giants’ debut. The first video, “Ana Ng,” became one of the most popular alternative clips on MTV when it appeared. Though the second clip, “They’ll Need a Crane,” was less successful, the record sold impressively, even knocking the popular group U2 out of first place on the college radio singles chart. The LP also featured “Purple Toupee,” a weird parody of sixties nostalgia, and “Shoehorn with Teeth,” whose chorus proclaims that “people should get beat up for stating their beliefs.” Lincoln earned the band some very positive reviews: Michael Small, reviewing the album in People, referred to the Giants as “probably the most inventive rock and roll duo on earth. Lincoln … includes more of the weird, catchy and wonderful music that has earned this band an ever-expanding cult following.” Steve Simels of Stereo Review called the album “a clever, quirky, often brilliantly arranged and produced piece of postmodern art.” Rolling Stone’s Ira Robbins wrote that “the Giants’ unique blend of the Beatles, [Alice in Wonderland author] Lewis Carroll, [British songwriter] Elvis Costello, and [jazz bandleader and novelty musician-composer] Spike Jones begins with finely crafted melodies … but invariably adds lyrics that wander into topsy-turvy land.” Shortly after releasing Lincoln, the band put out another Bar/None EP, They’ll Need a Crane. In January of 1989, They Might Be Giants signed a record deal with Elektra.

Torrent of Success, Not Praise, for Flood

Their first major-label album, Flood, released in 1990, garnered mixed reviews. Small praised its “torrent of catchy tunes and surprising lyrics in a range of styles, including reggae, country, swing, folk rock and even Monty Python-style parodies of show tunes and TV jingles.” David Browne’s review in Rolling Stone, however, remarked that “this is music with one sole purpose: to attract attention to its own cleverness.” New York’s Elizabeth Wurtzel was similarly disappointed: “The Giants have failed to make an album that will matter to more than the select few who are in on the joke. Linnell and Flansburgh seem to be afraid that if they make another album with emotional depth [like Lincoln ], instead of being clever spinmeisters with attitude, they might become the cranky, bloated rock stars that their music implicitly mocks.”

Even so, the Giants once again made waves on MTV with their videos for the album’s first two singles, “Birdhouse in Your Soul” and a dance-oriented version of the fifties song “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).” Produced by the band with the exception of four tracks produced by studio veterans Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, and featuring a variety of guest musicians, the album had a more polished feel than the duo’s earlier records. Even so, the distinctive TMBG songwriting style shone through on tunes like “Particle Man” and “We Want a Rock,” which features the refrain “Everybody wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads.” Although the songs on Flood retained the satirical and often nonsensical vision of the Giants, the album also showed the band’s more serious side, particularly on “Your Racist Friend,” which contains the lines “I know politics bores you/But I feel like a hypocrite talking to you/You and your racist friend.”

The British pop music magazine Q voted They Might Be Giants the best new act of 1990. The award, based on a poll of the magazine’s readers, reflected the band’s popularity in the United Kingdom, where Flood’s excellent sales earned the Giants a British Silver Record. Late in 1990 the band embarked on an extended tour that included performances in Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan. The Giants’ manager, Jamie Kitman, told The Might Be Times that at the time of the duo’s Japanese concerts, “Screaming mobs of teenage girls were chasing them through the streets. It was like something out of [the Beatles film] ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’” Following the tour, Flansburgh and Linnell set about writing songs for their next LP, which the band anticipated releasing in 1992.

Given their escalating popularity, the band’s name began to sound less and less like a clever joke. The challenge would be to stay true to their unconventional instincts while appealing to a mass audience. As Linnell remarked in Rolling Stone, “The most desirable thing is to be completely explicit about what you’re doing and still have it be something that can’t be encapsulated.”