TMBG

Finally getting to talk with one of the members of They Might Be Giants seemed like a dream come true. I can't think of a time when I didn't worship their zany songs, accordion and Casio duets or their quirky lyrics. I finally got to talk with John Linnell, who plays the accordion, among other things, in time for the release of Severe Tire Damage, their first live album. Rather than deluge you with a lot of cursory information, I’ll get straight to the point.

I was curious because I'm one of your biggest fans...

Really?

...so, do I get a toaster for nine years of devotion?

A toaster?

Yeah.

We don't have any to give out, but you know it's still a reward...

I know, I'm getting my reward here, I'm getting to talk with you. I've always wanted to talk with you guys, so this is a great honor.

Well, what are you going to say? The spotlight is on you...

I do want to know if you guys ever had a viola player playing with you because I love playing my viola to They Might Be Giants albums.

Well we had a viola player on our last album.

On Factory Showroom?

Yeah, we had a whole string quartet play with us and he [the viola player] was the funny one. Actually no, the cello player was the real cut-up.

Well you know those cellists, they are quite...

He was [funny] actually. You know what's funny is, I know this cello player named Gary Young—he's played on a bunch of our records—and then we also worked with this violinist, Mark Feldman, who's kind of a kooky guy as well, and I had dinner with him one night when we were, you know, doing some work and because there was no viola player there, the two of them started telling viola jokes...

Oh-oh

...which you've probably already heard.

I've heard plenty of viola jokes.

Yeah, I'd never heard either one of these, but they were really into this whole type of humor. One of them was "Why does the viola player leave the case in the back seat of the car?"

Hmm...

Do you know the answer?

No.

It's so that he or she can park in the handicapped.

(laughing)

I can't remember all the jokes, actually, but they were really into this whole viola thing—I guess the whole idea being that since viola players are in demand they don't have to be as high quality as violinists and cello players

That's actually why I took up the viola.

(laughs) Is that right?

It really is. I was a crummy second violinist and I started playing viola and everybody wanted me to play with them.

Well, that's a good idea. You should try the accordion—then you'll have even more jobs.

I've always wanted to do that. I'm curious just how you guys have made your living so far? 

Well, we're not rich. In the last fifteen years we've been making enough to live on. We've saved a little money up, actually.

 Well, that's good. 

Not a lot. It's like a funny place to be. It's not like hand-to-mouth—we're not playing in bars, but we have a lot of expenses because we're playing shows with a road crew. I think the thing with any band is that you manage to expand to your, whatever your level of income is as a band. We find ways to spend the money that we make, but like I said, we live OK. We're not rich, but we're comfortable for now, and I think in the future it could go either way. We could find ourselves a little more in need, or maybe we'll have a big huge hit.

 Well there's always that hope, huh? You've had a few pretty good sized hits, though. 

We've had. They're not really, technically—they're not hits because we've never gotten a chart hit in the United States, but we've had a lot of songs played on the radio and we've sold a lot of albums. You know the thing is like the Grateful Dead, for example, has never really been played on the radio, not that much, and yet they sell a lot of albums and do a lot of ticket sales. Actually probably that's the main thing—at one time, they could play anywhere at any time and make money that way. So there are a lot of different ways to make your money as a musician, I think.

 There's other things you could do? 

Well, there's other ways besides having hit songs.

 I was listening to Severe Tire Damage and I really like the a cappella version of "Meet James Ensor." It came out really well and I was wondering have you guys ever done whole shows a cappella? 

Um, no. But that was actually a...we recorded that in a hotel room for a radio show that the guys in Minnesota were putting together, and it just happened to come out nice—it just happened to be mixed nicely. You know, it's not super reliable. Like the thing about playing in the small modest way I think that we've had, I think we feel like we do need to rely on the other musicians to do a convincing show. Especially like a big show. We're really not a duo, we can't really play totally on our own. Although, the first show that we ever did, that was exactly what we did. We played as a duo in Central Park. John played guitar and I played the electric organ, and we sang and that was pretty much it, but the expectations were not high, so we could get away with a bit more than we can now.

I  will always think of They Might Be Giants as these two guys cooped up in a garage somewhere with a Casio, an accordion and an answering machine with weird sounds on it. 

Well that was actually most of our history. I think we thought at the time that that was what we'd always do, so when we actually got a band it was like very late in life you know—a mid-life career change. So uh, we're still… I mean who knows what will happen in the future? I mean, we're still totally into the big band.

 Have you ever worked with The Resiednts ?

Well, no but um, Flansburgh, my partner, had for four years a kind of CD of the month club where he was putting out non-standard material by artists, and The Residents did one of those. So he got to talk with them a little bit but we still have never met them. Their whole bag is this kind of mysterious secret society bit, you know, nobody knows who they are.

 I also think of you guys when I think of Daniel Johnston. Had any rounds with that guy? 

He sent us a tape a long time ago of songs and we didn't really... I think we didn't really quite know what it was about.

 I'm not sure anyone does. 

So actually he's playing the piano and singing, and they were like, these deeply sad songs, and then later we got to hear some of his other material. I think it started to click more what was going on and what was so great about him, and actually I really think he's great now. I have a record of his that he did with a band, that I liked as well, but there's some particular records with him mostly playing sort of chord organ thing that I really liked.

 Which one of you was a science major? 

Um, neither one of us. In fact, I only spent one year in college and then I dropped out and joined a band. I think that it's not for everybody. Somebody asked me if I had a message for the kids today during another interview, and it's like the old saw, "Stay in school." I mean, I'm sure that's what I'll tell my kids. "Don't do what I did." I think that there is nothing wrong with it if you can apply yourself to school. It just happened that I succeeded doing this thing that was basically irresponsible and I know that other people have done that too. I think if you're self-directed and you know what you want to do, then you can make a decision about it, but there's nothing wrong with college. I feel like I missed out.

 I noticed that you guys have a Planet of the Apes theme towards the end of your latest CD. There seems to be a lot of Planet of the Apes references going around. What's the deal? 

There are.

 I had to finally go out and watch all the Planet of the Apes movies back to back to see if I could figure it out. 

You're probably the only person I've spoken to who actually has seen all of them. We had this long confused debate about what the names of them were. We never quite figured it out. We actually came up with six songs, even though there are I know only five movies, and we couldn't figure out which of the song titles was not actually a Planet of the Apes movie. Nobody could agree about it. Everyone kept saying, "Oh yeah, that's definitely one, and that is also definitely one," and we'd add it up and there'd be six. So all six of them are on the record. We never figured it out. But you know the answer. What are the titles of the movies?

I f you told me the names of your songs, I could probably tell you which one wasn't a film. 

OK, these are the ones we picked. Planet of the Apes, that was the first one. We have Beneath the Planet of the Apes, which is a disputed one

 Wasn't that Underneath? Shoot, that was the second one, I think. 

Well, then there was Return to the Planet of the Apes; then we have Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, another one that was controversial; Battle for the Planet of the Apes which I actually saw, and I know that's a real one; and then uh, one more. Let's see, Planet, Beneath, Return, Battle, Conquest, uhh, Escape From the Planet of the Apes.

 Oh yeah, Escape is definitely one. I think Conquest is the one 

It's the fake one?

 Yeah, the Fake Planet of the Apes title 

The apocryphal Planet of the Apes.

 (laughing) I've always had this lasting impression of the fallen Statue of Liberty at the end. 

You know I think it must be one of those things in the air culturally and everyone is all-of-a-sudden obsessed on this one topic. I don't know why we decided to do this, you know? It just kind of came out of nowhere. Middle of last year, we started playing the songs and we were making them all up on the stage, and then we managed to do a whole long list. Not only did we do the ones after the movie titles, but we had a couple of others. We did a love theme and a song called "This Ape’s For You," and it just happened that we could get a recording. Either we'd recorded them, or somebody had made a bootleg recording, so we collected them all together. But I don't know what the point of all that was.

 It's just something to obsess over, I suppose. 

The funny thing is that, last year, right as we were recording, I was talking to this guy who name is Peter Zarimba in the band called the Fleshtones, and he said that when he was a kid, he saw this thing in Queens which was a band dressed as the characters in the Planet of the Apes and they actually did a whole show where they were singing—this was in the ’70s—they were doing songs that they'd made up based on the Planet of the Apes. They were like a band called, like, "The Apes" or something and they were named after the characters, had the outfits, and I think that they even had the facial putty or whatever it was.

He was telling me this while we were doing this project and he didn't even know that we were doing this, but he said that they had an album somewhere out there. It was some kind of independently released album.

 It's something going around. It must be in the collective consciousness. 

That's right.

 I've actually put off calling Dial-A-Song (718-387-6962) but I finally did, and I got it on the second try. That's been going on for 15 years, hasn't it? 

Yes, we started Dial-A-Song in '83—[it’s been going for]15 years now and it's really low maintenance. I mean for most of its history, it was just a phone machine, so it's really been a simple thing to run. I mean, not that it never broke down or anything; we went through a lot of phone machines that just wore out, like stacks of them that we kept getting repaired. Now, we’ve switched to a sort of a computer voice mail thing which also has its own problems, but it's something that any band could have done. We were always surprised that no one else wanted to do something like that. There've been a lot of numbers that you can call and get to hear Marky Mark say what his favorite color is or something, but there isn't any other place where you hear the music of the band by calling them up.

 Is that recording on Misc. T and on your Then collection... 

The lady?

 Yes, the lady. Is that recording from Dial-A-Song, when it was a phone machine? 

Yeah, she I guess called up on a conference line with somebody else and, owing to the way that conference lines work, you can't disconnect the third party, they have to hang up. So the two of them were on the line with Dial-a-Song and they finished listening to the song and they had this 45 minute long conversation. It was all recorded; it was this incredibly long thing where they were going into all these details about their personal lives, and we just cut out like a minute long section of that and put that on the record.

 It's funny, I've tried to figure that recording out a few times. I didn't know about Dial-A-Song when I first heard that, and I was trying to decide what had happened. She's got such a great voice. 

You know, I think a lot of people thought we were making fun of her. I really think there's something deeply interesting about this person who is obviously from a kind of working-class, Brooklyn background, who is obsessed with obscure oddball things that you read about in the back of the Village Voice, that she pursues them, is like making a list of them, and is really kind of obsessing on this stuff. It makes me wonder what is going on there. It's kind of fascinating and she's obviously incomprehensible to her friends.

 I should also ask you what you think about, Mono Puff. 

Oh, I think they're great. I'm actually going to see them next week.

 That's cool. Do you think they'll ever make any big tours? 

Well, not any big tours, but I think that John [the other John of They Might Be Giants] is going to be out a couple weeks. He's actually on tour at this very moment. I know he's doing some other shows, but he's playing Central Park. Yeah, I think his band's great and I'm like the person who most likes his songs of anybody in the world so, I'm a big fan.

 I went out and I found It's Fun to Steal and I like it a lot, it's really fun. The song "It's Fun to Steal" is hysterical. 

"It's Fun to Steal" is really a great song. The thing about it is that it's a very sincere song. I had a long conversation with John about that song and we were talking about it. It's actually a very moralistic song in a way, like, it's disguised as a kind of amoral song but it's sort of condemning the person who cheats, but in an interesting way.

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