Influential indie rock mainstays They Might Be Giants continue to grow, with a 50-date North American run that grossed just shy of $1.2 million and another 30 dates kicking off in September taking them to Europe and back, still finding new markets to play and growing new fans.
“What’s most exceptional about us is we’re kind of in the middle,” said They Might Be Giants co-founder John Flansburgh, who plays guitar, sings and writes alongside John Linnell. “This is an industry that has no middle. There’s legacy acts that are so big they’re probably disappointed that they’re not doing much better, and there’s all these baby bands just wondering how long they can stand sleeping on the floor of a van, and there’s not a lot in between. It’s hard to stay in the middle.
“We have kind of the most unusual career because we’ve had the same booking agent, the same manager from the very beginning,” Flansburgh said, mentioning Jamie Kitman who formally began managing the band in 1987 and High Road Touring’s Frank Riley, who started representing them in 1985.
“Frank was a really big wheel in our universe. The subculture of alternative rock was already well established by 1985. He basically booked most of the acts that meant anything,” Flansburgh added, naming college rock royalty like the Violent Femmes, The Replacements, and Hüsker Dü.
Riley, who said he would let fellow High Road Agent Dave Rowan discuss the present “while I try to resurrect the past,” told Pollstar of humble beginnings with the Giants.
“When I first started representing the Giants you know what they were? They were a duo, and you know what they played with? A boombox,” Riley told Pollstar, laughing. “It wasn’t a backing track. It was a boombox, and they mic’d the boombox.”
Flansburgh and Linnell at this point in the early ‘80s were playing New York arts clubs in a very DIY fashion, with Flansburgh joking about needing someone like Riley in their corner “just to get us a $200 guarantee at The Electric Banana on a Wednesday night – and maybe the Electric Banana didn’t do such a great job of promoting that night.”
Hornblow Group’s Kitman first saw TMBG in a Hell’s Kitchen dive bar around 1983, where the talent and showmanship were obvious.
“They seemed incredibly spontaneous and off-the-cuff and hilarious and just brilliant,” Kitman told Pollstar. “But they could not jam at all because their rhythm section was a tape recorder. A song on the first album explains the plight they faced putting a band together in the ‘80s, called ‘Rhythm Section Want Ad.’”
Since then (and after recruiting a backing band in the ‘90s) They Might Be Giants has released 20 studio albums, constantly innovating and changing with the times, going from offering the (often busy) Dial-A-Song answering machine service where fans could call in to hear new music, to adopting Usenet newsgroups online as early as 1992, and in 1999 being the first to release a full LP in MP3 format.
While the band has never stopped touring, the recently wrapped tour leg is notable, with Boxoffice reports submitted to Pollstar including House of Blues in Boston (1,928 tickets, $54,558 gross) First Avenue in Minneapolis (1,550, $39,439) and Crystal Ballroom in Portland, which sold another 1,500 tickets and grossed more than $36,000.
“They sold more tickets on this tour than I can recall, and they sold very quickly,” Rowan added of the January-April run, which sold out 28 dates and moved just under 46,000 tickets. “We moved up in some rooms and in other rooms opened up capacity.”
For the next leg that kicks off in September, “We haven’t been to Canada for over 10 years, and we’re playing certain markets for the first time – 30 years in, which is remarkable.”
Other standout reports include 1,807 tickets sold to The Pageant in St. Louis, which grossed $48,135 Feb. 9, 1,200 tickets at The 9:30 Club in D.C. ($36,000) and another 1,048 tickets sold at the Pabst Theatre in Milwaukee March 16, which grossed $30,444.
Looking at Pollstar’s yearly records since 1999, the Giants have done a similar level of business at least a few times, with $750,874 grossed in 2013 on 27 Boxoffice reports (although 53 shows were not submitted) and in 2007 with $553,246 grossed in 2007 on 35 reports, although 44 were unreported.
Asked to explain the band’s longevity, with so much changing in technology let alone popular music since they started, Flansburgh said it somehow makes sense.
“The rollercoaster of just starting is such a weird one,” he said. “In some places, you don’t have to do anything and the show is wildly successful, because there’s a song on the radio or a video in rotation or whatever. That makes a lot of performers feel like the whole nature of show business is crazy – so volatile or unpredictable. But it’s really just like growing seedlings. Different seeds grow at different rates.”
The band’s latest album, January’s I Like Fun, along with fresh content in recent years from the band’s children’s music albums and writing music for “SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical,” has seen some of those seedlings grow, with continued interest from longtime fans as well as younger generations.
“The experience of people who grew up with their children’s music in the 2000s, who listened to the Here Come the ABCs and ‘123s,’ they’re now 18 or 19 years old and have transitioned to their adult rock,” co-manager Pete Smolin, who started with the band in the early 2000s, told Pollstar. “That has kept the audience young as the band continues on. It’s a very unique situation.”
Kitman added that the quality of their work is a big factor as well. “My sense is that the press and the critics have gradually realized what they have achieved is remarkable. To make good records in your 30th year of recording music is pretty singular,” Kitman said.
About the band’s legacy and influence on others, Flansburgh said it is unfair to take credit for any other artist’s work. “The thing that’s most satisfying for me is when you go into a guitar shop and some guy, say, a total rockabilly guy – They Might Be Giants is not his favorite type of his music, but to him it stands for some kind of independent-minded thing that got over on its own terms – and he’ll have very positive feelings about They Might Be Giants. To me, that’s more gratifying on a professional level than whether or not there’s bands that are directly musically influenced by us.”
Their impact is still obvious, with just in recent months bands like Car Seat Headrest sampling part of their “Ana Ng” for the song “Cute Thing” and Meredith Graves of Perfect Pussy writing an essay about loving the band as a child and growing to love them into adulthood as a very punk-rock, on-your-own-terms band.
Kitman said, “It’s really a master class in how to pace a show and keep people from getting bored or tuckered out.”
Flansburgh says he and Linnell – consciously or unconsciously – learned from some of the best, as together in their teen years they attended shows by artists like Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, and Frank Zappa, which “in a way kind of confirmed everything about what we thought would work – how good shows work and the fan point of view, what makes a compelling show.”
Riley stressed the band’s work ethic and remarked at how they continue to keep the shows exciting and memorable for fans and – maybe just as importantly – themselves.
“God bless them,” Riley said. “There’s absolutely nothing that’s been given to They Might Be Giants. They’ve earned every single bit of what they’ve got, and I mean that sincerely.”