They Might Still Be Giants

Most rock bands fail to create anything spectacular or innovative after a decade of playing together. Creative tensions, breakdowns in group communication, or simply a lack of ideas force them to abandon their configurations although they may still have years left to rehash old hits to groups of loyalists. As Neil Young sung in "Keep on Rocking in the Free World," "It's better to burn out / Than to fade away," a sentiment that Jagger, Richards, and fellow Rolling Stones, would do well to remember. Although They Might Be Giants (TMBG) started as a quasi-punk band, it has achieved everything from pop stardom to college rock favoritism to novelty and even to modern rock gigantism.

The founders and musical geniuses behind the band are John Linnell and John Flansburgh, both originally from Lincoln, Massachusetts. The duo, who now live in Brooklyn, have been playing together since 1981, a situation that their tight yet improvisatory stage show reveals. They garnered their first album contract in 1986 after starting an answering machine listing of songs called Dial-a-Song to play their music over the radio. With the release of the college-radio favorite Flood in 1990, featuring the ever-popular "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)," TMBG gained a following that has proven durable and enthusiastic, even as their record sales have diminished.

As their Irving Plaza show at the end of January demonstrated, Linnell and Flansburgh possess a live show that accounts for their longevity as a band. Whether or not their music might have interested the listener, TMBG employed enough showmanship and sound gags to power a Broadway musical. When the band entered the stage, they did so as their own opening band. "We're Sapphire Bullets, from Syracuse, New York. We're going to recreate the album Flood by TMBG for you tonight," Flansburgh informed the audience. The recreation was precise yet also irreverent, a perfect combination from a band that has never taken their fame or their music too seriously. From the very first song, "Birdhouse in Your Soul," the two Johns reveled in a style that owed much to jazz stylings and improvisatory passages from the trombone and trumpet that sounded like a goofy, Anglocized version of Los Lobos.

During the intermission between the "opening band" and the set, the crowd grew larger, composed as it was of ska kids, families, 30-year-old businessmen, and, of course, the New York Fire Department. Irving Plaza, a redecorated ballroom with chandeliers and mirrored lobby that contrasts with the standard black upstairs space, helps explain the connection between such disparate audience members. The concert doubled as a party, with the older members of the crowd commenting on the songs, and everybody, from 13-year-olds to 30-year-old balding aficionados, skanking to the music. Perhaps the concert resembled too much of a party: a woman was overheard commenting to the man next to her, "Didn't you use to work for Time Warner? I seem to remember you from a party where I was very drunk."

The majority of the crowd, however, was there to enjoy themselves; for a small venue, the concert lacked any of the snobbishness associated with typical modern rock scenesters. TMBG might have been responsible for the change in attitude. "Those guys sucked," they announced at the beginning of the second set.

This next set, composed of more recent songs as well as some of their old favorites, exhibited a surprising mixture of studio tautness and improvisatory abandon. The band, composed of accordionist Flansburgh, lead guitarist Linnell, the requisite rhythm section, and a horn duo that lent the songs a free-styling, goofy grace, seemed in control of the very favorites that they would undermine with commands such as "play it like it is on the album." TMBG had earlier introduced "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" with a two-minute long arabesque-heavy trombone solo that sounded like No Doubt fraternizing with Tito Puente.

Next they employed call-and-response structures to keep the audience from maintaining their distance and to keep themselves from lapsing into their status as a cult band by playing favorite songs long worn out to placate a fickle audience. It was impossible not to be a TMBG fan during the second section, when M. Doughty, the lead singer of the unfortunately defunct Soul Coughing, and Robin Goldwasser, a children's singer, took turns singing nonsense lyrics along with the band. How could you not love a band whose most serious lyric involved the joke, "I know politics bores you / But I feel like a hypocrite talking to you / You and your racist friend" ("Mr. Horrible"). No teenage angst for this band. Doughty's contribution "You're Not the Boss of Me" contained a similar sentiment and frenzied vocals over a polka beat.

Long before the self-referential song "The Guitar" finished the second encore, TMBG had ensured that they were in no danger of fading away.

They Might Be Giants

Irving Plaza

January 27, 2001