“What’s this,” marveled the lady approaching the rest rooms at Humphreys before the show on the evening of April 14, “no line for the women’s rest room? And a line for the men’s?”
“It is dude-centric,” admitted the man standing next to me in line. “But it’s all good when you have this ear candy” — They Might Be Giants, performing the entirely of their 1990 breakthrough album Flood, plus some other goodies.
“I’ve been waiting three years for this,” said another gentleman, noting that covid had caused the show to be delayed not once, not twice, but thrice — a fact indicated by various crossed out dates on the official tour T-shirts.
“I’ve been waiting my whole life!” said another. “This is my first time! I didn’t realize that this place was standing room only, but it’s okay. This is the only band in the world I would see like this.”
1990 was a long time ago, and the merch table knew it. I spotted a T-shirt based on the cover for Lincoln and a vinyl edition of Apollo 18, the albums that came before and after Flood, respectively. Not much from the 20 albums since those far-off days. I even saw $5 cassette maxi-singles. Who even has the tech to play those any more?
Speaking of tech and Apollo 18: the band opened the show with that album’s “Fingertips,” a collection of 21 very short songs that were included for the sake of another piece of outdated equipment: the CD player, and its newfangled shuffle mode. Perfect little sonic amuse-bouches to refresh the ear between full-length tracks. Fans roared along to the repeated croon of “I walk along/ Darkened corridors” — a spooky mantra, but still happy-making. It was strange to feel giddy at 49, and stranger still to glance around at the crowd and meet the eye of a man much like myself: glasses in plastic frames, a little gray in the hair, nodding and grinning like an idiot. We quickly broke eye contact; that kind of goofy joy — the kind that comes from hearing a song in such a way that makes you remember what it felt like to be a geeky teenager, onto the great secret of this weird band out of the Lower East Side art scene — is private, even if felt in public.
They Might Be Giants is, first and foremost, the two Johns, Linnell and Flansburgh. They kept up a good-natured — if slightly grumpy, thanks to the misting rain in unsunny San Diego — line of banter throughout. Halfway through the first set, they paused, and Flansburgh launched into a story about hanging out with his fellow titans of the music world and posing the question, “When should you do the best part of a show?”
“Always!” screamed a lady from the audience.
“Yes, that’s what I said!” grinned Flansburgh. “Always, like the lady screamed!”
“I disagreed,” deadpanned Linnell, who said he preferred to do the best part halfway through the first set, then do “what is known in Italy as a decrescendo. It’s like when you go to a restaurant, and you have the good wine first, and then after that, you don’t care what you’re drinking. Decrescendo, that’s my whole jam. The show only gets worse from here.”
And where was here? “When we set out to do all these Flood shows,” said Flansburgh, “we asked ourselves, ‘How can we make things harder on ourselves in a way that will leave the audience in the dust?’”
The answer, according to Linnell: “Learning a song from the album sonically in reverse. That has proved to be a mistake. But we’re not going to stop. We’ve spent too much time on it for that. Then we will record it, and play it backwards for you at the beginning of the second set.”
With that, they launched into a backwards rendition of “Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love,” performed “for your satanic pleasure.” And just like that, we were back to the joys of outdated tech, with a reference to the ‘80s panic over evil subliminal messages in heavy metal records that could be discovered by playing a vinyl record backwards on its turntable.
The first set ended with their kid-friendly hit “Particle Man” — Linnell, at long last, busting out the accordion that so endeared him to me decades ago. I bought booze and a hoodie at intermission, and made it back in time to do some marveling of my own at the video of their backwards performance played backwards. No subliminal messages, just sapphire bullets of pure love.