They Might Be Giants Set To Play State--Two Years Later

John Flansburgh, co-founder of They Might Be Giants sat down with me recently to discuss playing an anniversary tour two years late, car accidents, and Ithaca record stores.

Of all the live shows that got COVID-cancelled, you and John Linnell had been planning a 30^th anniversary tour built around your 1990 album “Flood,” and now it’s 2022. Are we still talking about “Flood” or “Apollo 18” (1992)?

We’ll be performing all of “Flood.” But “Flood” is only forty minutes long, and our show is two hours long, so there’s plenty of other stuff. For us, that’s the saving grace, ‘cause we’re not locked into something monolithic.

I’ve been having these visions of endless cartons of “Flood” commemorative merch being buried in a warehouse, like the Ark of the Covenant from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981).

[laughs] That’s a pretty good description. You know, the last two, three years have been really long for everybody, including us. So far this year, we’ve been able to do exactly one show, and then I was on my way home from the first show in an Uber, the car I was in got hit by a drunk driver in Manhattan, and it took me two months to recover.

Yeah, I broke—the doctor at the trauma center said I had broken most of my ribs. I was explaining to him how I had to get to Washington, D.C. in the morning, still very much high on the adrenaline of the accident, and not feeling that bad yet. And I was like, “I’ve got to get to D.C. in the morning, I can’t hang out.” And he was like, “Well, you’ve broken most of your ribs [laughs] as far as I can tell, some of them in a couple of places, so I suspect you’re not going anywhere for [laughs] quite some time.”

[laughs] No, I know, but try to drive as defensively as you can. So it’s been a long summer for me. I spent over a week in the hospital, and I’ve just been in bed for the last two months. I’m puttering around now, and I’m in pretty good shape. I’m doing physical therapy, and I’m definitely on the mend.

Well, we did one show [laughs], we had a week and a half of shows; we’d taken two months of touring and kind of divvied it up over about twelve months. Even if a portion of the tour gets knocked out due to COVID, we won’t be cancelling a whole month or two months of shows, which seems kind of ill advised. So we’re just doing things in kind of fits and starts now, and the official first “fit” was going to be in Manhattan and Philly in June, and that’s when I got hit by a car.

It’s insane. I mean, at a certain point, you just…It’s so funny, like, I think of the number of postponed in our career, I probably could have counted on one hand. And now with these shows like the one in Ithaca, which has been sold out for two years…I think we’ve re-scheduled it three times now.

I wonder if some people who bought tickets are students who’ve graduated and moved away.

I’m sure there’s a healthy secondary market on these tickets. I mean, yeah, people graduated, people moved to other towns. Life goes on. You know, COVID has just scrambled everything.

IT: It feels like “Flood” was the album that broke you into a wider pop awareness. Is that accurate?

JF: Absolutely. Our first four albums were all just like a steady climb, you know? Just because there were just a lot more cultural gate-keepers back then. I mean, our first album got a lot of attention on MTV and woke up a specific kind of audience: the record store clerk “High Fidelity” audience came aware very quickly through that exposure.

I worked in a place called Discount Records which was owned by Sam Goody and then we changed our name to Sam Goody.

No, I would have been in eighth grade at that time. I was there near the ever-lovin’ end from ’98 to 2000.

Oh, so, late in the day! Yeah, yeah. I bought “Hey Joe”/”Piss Factory” by Patti Smith and “Little Johnny Jewel” by Television, on 7” singles, I think on the same day, at Discount Records in Ithaca.

Well, I had, from the age of 17 to 22, I worked a lot of minimum wage jobs. I worked as a bus boy. I worked in a parking lot. I worked as a clerk. So you kinda get the full experience as you kind of cast around different experiences like that. Most of it was really dull, but I actually learned—in the parking lot, I kind of taught myself to play the guitar, so I can’t complain too much, but I do like to complain.

That was a song that my mom and my aunt actually introduced me to, when they were going through a songbook of old songs from the 40’s and 50’s. I think it was just piano music in a music bench. And that was my introduction to the song. It’s become very clear to me that it’s a soundalike of “Puttin’ On The Ritz”, or a knock-off of it. There are a lot of songs in the world like that.