Episode 902 - They Might Be Giants
Guest:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuck stirs?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast.
Marc:WTF as it goes and keeps going.
Marc:How's it go out?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:What is happening?
Marc:How are you?
Marc:These words on this mic at this point in time right now
Marc:And what follows here in the intro, not the interview, I'm going to be talking to, they might be giants in just a second.
Marc:John Flansburg and John Linnell are both here.
Marc:The Johns are here, or we're here.
Marc:But in the present, that would be after I talk to the Johns.
Marc:These might be the last words I say in this structure.
Marc:I put it off.
Marc:They're gonna show the house one more time right after I'm done talking here.
Marc:And then I set out to purge the shelves and move the shit, folks.
Marc:The plan is to move the shit, at the very least, to move the recording apparatuses, apparati, to the new space, the new garage,
Marc:And if I'm ambitious, if I'm enjoying the pickup truck, I'm going to load it up and take the rest on Saturday.
Marc:And we'll start broadcasting there from the clutter.
Marc:Like the old days.
Marc:Back when this garage was just a garage.
Marc:It's got to start somewhere.
Marc:Yeah, before I get all this stuff on the shelves, it's going to be the mics at a table, just like we're starting over.
Marc:But this is it.
Marc:This is it.
Marc:I'm making some decisions about the books.
Marc:I'm thinking about releasing Gravity's Rainbow back into the used book ecosystem so someone else can put it on their shelf for a couple of decades with plans of embarking.
Marc:But this is it.
Marc:I'm looking around and I'm ready to take it down.
Marc:I'm ready to take the pictures off the wall.
Marc:I'm ready.
Marc:And I want to thank all you people for for being here through this process of thank you for mediating the separation.
Marc:A lot of people are interested in buying the house.
Marc:I think that's going to happen pretty quickly, too.
Marc:And I'll just I'm going to be moving not far six miles away.
Marc:Into a new, slightly more spacious garage with a bathroom.
Marc:I'm going to bring the foam from the ceilings.
Marc:Bring all the pictures and the books.
Marc:Going to absorb some sound in there too.
Marc:I'm going to refine the book collection.
Marc:I'm going to miss this place.
Marc:I'm going to miss it.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:But this is it.
Marc:These are the words.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Did I mention to you, I think I mentioned briefly at the end of the last show, that I watched all of the Stranger Things in two days in preparation to talk to David Harbour.
Marc:I wanted to watch a few, but then I ended up watching all of them.
Marc:And, you know, for the first five or six, it hit some triggers.
Marc:You know, I make the mistake of thinking that.
Marc:You know that I'm not a fantasy guy that I'm not, you know, a sci fi guy.
Marc:But if there are kids involved and, you know, they're they're at an age where the emotions are raw and also they're socially awkward.
Marc:It just it gets me right in the guts and I'm emotionally attached.
Marc:And I just thought the performances were amazing, but I locked in because of the kids.
Marc:And, you know, also because this kind of stuff, there's another reason why I learned about myself is I don't like watching sci-fi or reading sci-fi because it hits my my shadow government button.
Marc:It hits my conspiracy button.
Marc:It reopens my portal into the the what is it called?
Marc:The upside down, which is the dark part of my brain.
Marc:Because for about the first five or six episodes of Stranger Things, I was like, yep, this adds up.
Marc:Makes sense.
Marc:Adds up.
Marc:I'm a little vague on how she manifested the whole.
Marc:But yeah, MKUltra and stuff.
Marc:I could see how this could lead to the psychic phenomenon.
Marc:Then the symbiotic relationship of the psychic phenomenon with the additives.
Marc:actual parallel universe that it's not just in your mind but you think it is but we all know and i talked to david harbour about it in an upcoming episode about the elves on the parameter the elves on the periphery the uh the the weird uh faceless tooth-filled monkey dogs that are just you know kind of uh just there if you just look out the side of your eye there's a little
Marc:A little flickering going on.
Marc:I know it's there.
Marc:So it triggered that, but thankfully they didn't explore it thoroughly enough for me to get truly freaked out by my own thoughts about, yeah, what is reality?
Marc:But I was able just to enjoy it.
Marc:So there you go.
Marc:Not that it needs a...
Marc:A great review for me, but I just wanted you to know that I am apparently a latent sci-fi fantasy fan.
Marc:And I'm not ashamed of it because I don't want to say that I am a real fantasy or sci-fi fan because then I'd have to embark on that.
Marc:And go to Comic-Con and decide which characters I'm going to dress up as.
Marc:Do cosplay.
Marc:You know, there's a lot of... It's not going to happen.
Marc:I just wanted to say that I can open my heart to it.
Marc:If the journey is, you know, kids who are awkward rising above and saving the world.
Marc:Like, I can get into that.
Marc:My heart feels that.
Marc:I mean, I'm not dead inside, folks.
Marc:This is it.
Marc:The last of me talking in here.
Marc:Oh, God.
Marc:I'm not going to cry again.
Marc:Enough with the crying.
Marc:So, listen, folks.
Marc:They might be giants.
Marc:They're here.
Marc:The Johns.
Marc:Their most recent album is I Like Fun.
Marc:It came out earlier this year.
Marc:And you can get it wherever you get music.
Marc:And I enjoy talking to the Johns.
Marc:They might be giants.
Marc:A great deal.
Marc:One of them, the larger John, is quite the chatterbox.
Marc:Was that condescending?
Marc:I had a good time.
Marc:This is me and they might be giants, John Flansburg and John Linnell.
Marc:John and John.
Marc:Sir.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:They might be giants.
Marc:Here we are.
Marc:You're in my garage.
Guest:I know.
Guest:This is exciting.
Guest:I'm glad we got to be in your historic garage before it's turned over to the Smithsonian Institution.
Guest:Right next to Julia Child's Kitchen.
Marc:Is it in there?
Marc:Julia Child's Kitchen?
Guest:Yeah, they have a reproduction of it.
Guest:And by the way, if you do go, take a photograph of the wall because it has a fine wine list.
Guest:It has like a...
Guest:Of the day?
Guest:It has a chalkboard of all the wines that she needs to buy.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:So it was just there.
Guest:It's like a little nice guide.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Wow.
Marc:Well, some people thought they should do something with this place, but I don't know that... I guess it was culturally relevant.
Marc:I don't know if it's historical in the big scheme of things.
Marc:Wow.
Guest:Well, I mean, I'm not fishing for compliments either.
Marc:I'm just throwing it out there.
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:Hold on a minute.
Marc:I want to get my tea.
Marc:Okay, okay.
Marc:You guys got stuff.
Guest:Where's mine?
Guest:Yes, we need our stuff.
Guest:We're talking like we're doing this already, but I can't tell.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Is this a thing that he does?
Guest:Mark has left the room.
Guest:So have we started already?
Guest:Sure, of course.
Guest:Okay, all right.
Guest:It's hard to tell.
Guest:We just jumped right in.
Guest:Mark, I had to tell you.
Marc:I gave you more of an intro than I can give anybody.
Marc:I said John and John.
Guest:You did do that.
Guest:Those were extremely pro.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What were you going to say?
Guest:I just want to say, I've been listening to this show really from almost day one.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And nothing, I mean, I thought it was a very interesting show.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I remember actually recommending it to a bunch of people because I thought they could handle it.
Guest:um but uh you can handle he's a very needy broadcaster i mean i had to say i thought the first at first i thought like the wtf title yeah it's a huge governor on how how popular it could ever be yeah you know you thought it was a mistake you're not you're not getting it on npr but then you got it on npr with a different title i know
Guest:You're fooling everybody.
Marc:Well, then the title initially was a broad title for an unclear idea.
Marc:In the first dozen or so shows, we were kind of all over the place.
Guest:I remember the comedy bits.
Marc:Yeah, we had comedy bits.
Marc:Comedy bits.
Marc:That guy Matthew, my friend Matthew, was in the room.
Guest:They were oblique.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Comedy bits.
Guest:They did not land.
Guest:There was no place to land for this.
Marc:Oh, you mean the fake characters?
Marc:The fake characters, yeah.
Marc:Oh, that was here.
Guest:The third act.
Marc:The third act was here, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So what do you guys... The last time I saw you was at Fred's house.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:Fred Tomaselli, the artist.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:And I'd never met you before.
Marc:And Fred's a dear friend of my girlfriend, Sarah, the painter.
Marc:Yep, yep, yep.
Marc:And they're painters.
Marc:They're fantastic.
Marc:Yeah, you like her?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, thank you.
Marc:I do too.
Marc:She's painting now.
Marc:But Fred is a hell of a guy, hell of a painter.
Guest:He's terrific.
Guest:Yeah, he's a very good friend of mine.
Guest:How long did you know him?
Guest:We've been sort of goofing around together since the late 80s, early 90s, I guess.
Guest:We actually all lived in Williamsburg at a time when if you met someone under 40 on the Bedford Avenue stop, you would stop them and say, hey, we should be friends.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because there just weren't that many people around.
Guest:It was not, it was, I mean, to say it was bohemian in the true sense of the word, which is that, like, nobody would want to be that way.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But what I mean, where did you, so you guys both still live in Brooklyn?
Guest:I live in Brooklyn, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I moved east.
Guest:I just moved to a secret location.
Guest:I spend most of my time in the Cats, in Sullivan County, in the Catskills, near where the Woodstock event actually happened.
Marc:That's where you spend your time now?
Guest:Most of my time, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And, but you would, but in other, if you're not there, you're at his house?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:No, I have an apartment in East Harlem that is nice.
Guest:East Harlem, it can be revealed.
Guest:It can be revealed.
Guest:I've actually not talked about it in public until right now.
Marc:Who are you concerned is going to take that information and be bad with it?
Guest:well we're such a brooklyn identified band that it's like it's a it's a very weird thing to have yeah it's like it's like me wearing glasses right like you don't want it to be a big thing right right as you evolve yeah because people who are who are in who are committed to you who have been with you the whole ride you're like well now what yeah exactly i mean we we were in williams i don't know what to believe we weren't ready for the change right
Guest:I moved to Williamsburg in, I guess, 82.
Guest:I moved there in, like, 83.
Guest:And so we were there for a very long run.
Guest:And, of course, nothing in New York State is the same.
Guest:And it just turned into this kind of Eurodisco extension of St.
Guest:Mark's Place.
Guest:It was never my dream to live on St.
Guest:Mark's Place.
Guest:Did it?
Guest:It is kind of, it is extraordinarily new.
Guest:They've torn down everything.
Marc:Oh, in terms of the way it looks.
Marc:They don't literally have, they haven't built a tunnel from St.
Guest:Mark's.
Marc:But like Eurodisco, when I lived in Astoria, like behind, in the courtyard behind my building, there was a bar there called Boomerang.
Marc:I think it was, I want to say Baltic.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:It wasn't Euro, but it was- Oh, no, no.
Guest:I mean like that character on SNL sort of like real high-end German.
Guest:I get it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:We're buying New York.
Marc:Not the original Polish record.
Marc:That stuff.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, and then there was the Uncas with the strange, like, Middle Eastern beat.
Marc:That stuff would be... You know that Middle Eastern beat?
Marc:I would be fascinated to live near that.
Marc:I can't even do it.
Marc:It's like, it's not 4-4, it's something else.
Marc:It's a other thing that's kind of engaging.
Marc:The 16th, like, 30 seconds.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:It cannot be... A beat that cannot be sung.
Marc:It's like Egyptian-y.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Is that possible?
Guest:I like... It could be.
Marc:You guys are the scientists.
Guest:It's not the music.
Marc:It's not the music that's the problem.
Marc:No, I get it.
Marc:I get it.
Marc:It's the people that own New York now.
Marc:It's the lifestyle choices.
Marc:Well, let's go back because I want to go back to the day, back in the day, because I'm not getting nostalgic with my own life, but I think we must be around the same age.
Guest:Probably, yeah.
Guest:We're a little bit older than you, I think.
Guest:Are you really?
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Is that true?
Guest:When did you show up in Astoria?
Guest:When were you?
Marc:I think I was in Astoria.
Marc:How's that going to determine my age?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I'm triangulating.
Guest:I'm starting by triangulating.
Marc:I think we ended up in Astoria in like 94, 95.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:All right.
Guest:So you were here before that.
Marc:I was here in the late 80s for a couple of years.
Marc:Then I went back to LA.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:I went back to New York in like 92.
Guest:You've lived almost everywhere.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And then I went to San Francisco for a couple of years.
Marc:But then I was back in New York like 92.
Marc:293 and then i dug back in 94 got married 95 got that place in a story i held on to it for a while we were old guys by that time is that yeah what jody lennon place yeah yeah i held on to that for a while i think she's still in it she is yeah i ran into with her asthmatic cat
Marc:How's Stoli doing?
Marc:I think he's doing good.
Marc:They're both okay?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Good, good.
Guest:I mean, my wife has friends, so I'm not close with them.
Guest:I just know them.
Marc:See, we do run in similar circles, and I ran into you in a circle that I'm new to.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But I didn't know you, but I feel like we have similar friends.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But I was sort of in a dirtier world than you, I feel like.
Marc:It's possible.
Guest:Although, so we had more time to clean up because we got to New York in 81, I think.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Right?
Guest:And we were probably 21, 22.
Guest:Oh, you are older than me.
Guest:We're definitely older than you.
Guest:I'm 54.
Guest:I'm 58.
Guest:I'm 57.
Marc:But it's still generationally.
Marc:How many minutes before we're talking about the Beatles?
Marc:How many minutes before we're talking about the Beatles?
Marc:You're not going to get that from me.
Marc:I mean, I could see it.
Marc:All right, then.
Marc:The Rolling Stones.
Marc:That's fine.
Marc:I can talk about the Rolling Stones.
Marc:You got two boxes to check off.
Marc:But you guys didn't grow up in New York.
Marc:I did, partly.
Guest:He was born.
Guest:I'm going to yell that at you.
Marc:You didn't grow up there.
Guest:I still haven't grown up, but I lived in New York until I was eight, moved to the suburbs of Boston where John and I met.
Guest:Suburbs of Boston?
Marc:Suburbs of Boston.
Guest:Metro West, as it's called.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, because it's all the dot-com millionaires.
Guest:Is that true?
Guest:Yeah, it's all techie now.
Guest:What part are we talking about?
Guest:The Tom Schultze part.
Marc:Oh, wow.
Marc:I got the Walkman right back there.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Tom Schultze's Walkman.
Guest:He lived in the town of Lincoln.
Guest:We grew up in this beautiful town called Lincoln.
Guest:What's that mirror?
Guest:it's it's near concord and lexington it's basically between for a long time it was an un it was unincorporated lands between like all these revolutionary war towns right and then i guess maybe i don't know when it was actually it didn't have a school for a long time there weren't that many people there lincoln it's like 20 minutes west out of boston and it's a beautiful beautiful it's where the audubon society is i mean it's that it's that beautiful i miss it i miss like it's a very pretty place
Marc:You know, I did a lot of time in New England.
Guest:It can feel like doing time.
Marc:It can, but like when I was there, I was in college, so I was sort of oblivious to the nature of the city itself.
Marc:And it wasn't until I started doing comedy where I realized, wow, it's pretty intense out here in some of these suburbs.
Guest:But, well, there's a lot of ideas going around.
Guest:But we were just talking yesterday or two days ago about the strange thing about Boston now, and I guess this is true of all cities everywhere, but I was recently back in Central Square, which is a place I hung out a lot, in the 70s.
Guest:And Central Square, I mean, it wasn't Times Square filthy, but it was like...
Guest:taxi driver, cigarette butt.
Guest:It was a dirtier one.
Guest:It was an extremely dirty, like it was definitely like, you know, there would be like a trash can and in the trash can there would be a porn magazine.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, it was that kind of place.
Guest:Like it was a very kind of raunchy.
Guest:But it was weird, wasn't it?
Marc:It was a morbidly obese kind of neighborhood.
Guest:Right.
Marc:But people used to say like, you know, can you believe it's that close to Cambridge?
Marc:Like it's that close to Harvard Square.
Marc:Right, right, right.
Marc:But it was really only a few blocks.
Marc:I mean, Central Square was dicey.
Marc:Oh, it was a five minute walk.
Marc:Five minute walk.
Marc:But it's very interesting about Boston and San Francisco to some degree, though, it's a little more spread out, is that the zone, the combat zone, was like four blocks.
Guest:It was like nothing.
Guest:Oh, it's a tiny town for sure.
Guest:But the thing is, it's also, that's all gone.
Guest:When you go to Central Square now, it's just like a gigantic Old Navy.
Guest:Is that true?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's been erased.
Guest:Is the Middle East still there?
Guest:It is like the- Oh, the club?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:oh yeah it's that's still there that's still there tt the bears i'm not sure about tt the bears is uh is oh calcutta the indian restaurant the people we did we did a new year's show or around new year's show at tt the bears and sold so our audience bought so few drinks that the the managers of tt the bears asked that we never returned did you pack it though it was sold out they sold like you know one one uh one beer you're
Guest:That was Boston.
Guest:You attract good people.
Guest:Our audience is a very sober crowd.
Guest:But it was a night that heavily relied on drinks.
Guest:Like a bar, you mean?
Marc:Like a club where you play music?
Guest:Well, but that's the thing.
Guest:When you go from clubs to theaters, everything changes.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Oh, absolutely.
Guest:The dynamic changes because the promoters aren't looking to sell.
Marc:You're not in the business of selling drinks.
Guest:You're in the business of selling tickets.
Guest:You can be a different kind of act.
Marc:Of course, you can be an act that plays at a place where you're proud to have your fans come.
Marc:There's not going to be an element.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I don't know if you guys ever had to deal with that.
Marc:We've had elements.
Marc:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm trying to think if we had elements in our Boston show.
Guest:Well, I'm thinking it seemed like there was a stretch there.
Guest:I'm almost positive my mother is going to hear this.
Guest:This podcast, which is one of the disturbing things about the internet is that- So you can just do it?
Guest:Your mom can just figure it out?
Guest:Your mom can catch up with you.
Guest:We just got an interview request from High Times.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They were like, they would just like you to discuss your drug, your life with drugs, like even in the past tense.
Guest:And I'm like-
Guest:My mom's going to... I don't know if I want to go to a... How much of a life for drugs did you guys have?
Guest:I don't want to talk about it here.
Guest:I don't want to talk about it here either.
Marc:But you're a grown-ass man.
Guest:Yeah, but it's like... What are you hiding from your mother, John?
Marc:Maybe it's time to let it out.
Guest:Let me just speak to Pauly Flansburg right now if I could.
Guest:There's nothing to talk about.
Guest:No drugs.
Guest:Okay, I'll admit it.
Guest:Pretty much no drugs.
Guest:I've done no drugs.
Marc:So that's what you're hiding.
Marc:That's what I'm hiding.
Guest:There is no mistrust.
Guest:That's the part we don't want to get out.
Guest:And it's not John's mom that doesn't need to know.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:But anyway, I was just thinking back on the show's
Guest:We did a show at, what was the place in Jamaica Plain that we played a bunch of times?
Guest:Oh.
Guest:It was in the mid, early 90s.
Guest:What was that place?
Guest:It was like a proto-grunge moment.
Guest:And the Pixies opened up for us, which was before they were famous, and it was an amazing show.
Guest:I thought that was Green Street Station.
Guest:Green Street is out there.
Guest:Green Street Station, is that what it's called?
Guest:I believe that's what... We played with the Pixies before their album came out.
Guest:Sure, yeah.
Guest:They were a virtually unknown band, and it was like one of those things where... I mean, it was kind of like being in a club and... No, I mean, I've had this experience a couple of times.
Guest:I saw Elvis Costello before his record came out, and it was like... It was a very similar thing.
Guest:In London.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:I saw his... Before the first record?
Guest:Yeah, before his first public show.
Guest:And it was a very similar experience where you're just like...
Guest:Oh.
Guest:Because you see a lot of good bands.
Guest:We've had a lot of great... We've had amazing openers and very talented people.
Guest:But when you see something that's just like, oh, this is something completely... This is a musical unobtainium.
Guest:But the thing is, I think my mom came to that show.
Marc:Oh, and she said, those boys would buy druggies.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:Look at that girl.
Guest:I'm not sure if it was a triple bill or if this was a show that happened to you.
Guest:I think you're right.
Guest:No, it was the same show, and there was a third act.
Guest:There was a third act.
Guest:And it was a man doing performance art, and he was dressed in a full body-length vagina outfit, which, you know, was completely... Was it Jonathan Hayes?
Guest:As far as our performances in New York, this would be completely ordinary.
Guest:Was it Jonathan Hayes?
Guest:new york yeah bring this in boston bring the vagina guy out yeah he's on next they might right they might be giants are on we we need a we need a vagina was it was it the mangina is that what it was it was a boston act we don't know what but i don't remember what he was called i don't think it particularly went over i mean it was a very uh how could that go over how's it gonna go what do you do for the second minute right right i think it was about his he was he had raps right i forget what he talked about but he was like he was saying stuff about himself and he just that was his outfit
Guest:Ladies and gentlemen, Get It Off Me Productions introduces the man in the human size.
Guest:But basically, every time John's mom came out to see us, there'd be some appallingly transgressive thing.
Guest:And it happened in New York.
Guest:Yeah, the same thing happened in New York with the guy who... Guy dressed as a giant cock.
Guest:That was actually too weird to talk about.
Marc:The one in New York is too weird to talk about?
Guest:The point is, I think she probably got used to it.
Guest:Your mother already went through it.
Guest:She became inured to the idea.
Marc:What happened in New York?
Marc:You can't just say it.
Guest:It was a guy with no arms wearing a dress who was doing, again, performance art.
Guest:It was mostly in German.
Guest:I think he was like saying stuff in German and and that was the end that he did.
Guest:And then his his friend did a striptease.
Guest:Was that what it was?
Marc:Was he the closer?
Marc:Are you they open for you?
Guest:It was on one of these bills where, you know, you know, PS 122 in New York.
Guest:I have like a hundred different acts.
Marc:It was a variety show.
Guest:yeah but this is important because this is new york in 19 what 82 no no 89 because this is like it's sort of the end of that performance art oh yeah yeah yeah we basically started like when we arrived in new york new york was like the new wave fad was like which was in in some ways kind of a hoax the resurrection of new wave no no way no way no way like 1981 82 there was like
Guest:Suicide.
Guest:Suicide musically fits in, but I don't even know if they ever even had any audience at all.
Guest:The hot acts were like DNA, Lydia Lunch, The Contortions, which is a fantastic act.
Marc:The Swans.
Guest:The Swans were part of their, I think, like Live Skull, maybe sort of like proto-Sonic Youth kind of stuff, Glenn Branca stuff.
Guest:That stuff was all kind of getting a lot of notice, but the thing that was weird, the thing that they all had in common is that audiences hated it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So there was like this weird void and because of that, clubs were all these clubs that we, you know, we were arriving in New York thinking like, you know, we're just going to slide into, like we, I think we sort of thought like, you know, we were new wave guys.
Guest:We were punk rock guys.
Marc:You put it together.
Marc:So you grew up in Lincoln.
Marc:You met in Lincoln?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You grew up together.
Guest:Correct.
Guest:He's a year older than me.
Guest:So we didn't like, we didn't really become friends until high school.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Marc:So you don't remember him moving with his family when he was eight?
Guest:I remember him when he was eight, yeah.
Marc:Yeah?
Guest:It was a small school.
Guest:I wasn't aware of John at that time.
Marc:The awkward kid who showed up.
Marc:He remembers you because he did something terrible.
Guest:This is new information.
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:Really?
Guest:I mean, I didn't have like a strong... Trust me, you did not make a strong impression on me.
Guest:Don't flatter yourself.
Guest:Hey.
Guest:But you remember when the new kid showed up.
Guest:When I showed up, everything changed.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:My whole life changed.
Yeah.
Marc:No, no, it was, it was, it was fun.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But in high school you became friends.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:We both worked on the newspaper together.
Marc:Oh, newspaper nerds.
Marc:Correct.
Marc:So you were, you were doing layout.
Guest:You were doing what you, he was the editor of the paper.
Guest:We were writing articles, which were basically like one of the teacher advisors was like, you should just call this vanity fair.
Guest:And he was right.
Guest:Why?
Guest:Because we were writing for ourselves.
Guest:Well, because the problem was like, you know, the function of most high school papers is to like write stories about like the football team.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But there was nobody on the paper who even could fit.
Guest:Well, I mean, we did actually fake.
Guest:Didn't go to games.
Guest:We would get submissions of articles about what happened at the football game.
Guest:And it was a good expository writing lesson to try to figure out how to write an interesting article about a football game that you hadn't seen before.
Guest:You know, so that was a good.
Guest:That's a whole school of journalism in and of itself.
Guest:Yeah, it's like, this was a fantastic game.
Guest:And so, you know, I wrote some of those articles, I'll admit it.
Marc:And all right, so you're hanging out.
Marc:And what's going on musically at that time?
Marc:This is 76, 77?
Marc:Yeah, in there.
Guest:I had started playing piano, just teaching myself, and John owned a tape recorder.
Guest:Oh, very important.
Guest:But was not a musician.
Guest:I'm sort of obsessed with sound.
Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I get that.
Marc:So like a regular tape recorder or a four-track?
Guest:I saved up like summer job money to buy a Tascam 3340 four-track simul-sync tape recorder.
Guest:Most importantly, there were no drum machines, which is really the key element to- So you had to record a-
Guest:Yeah, if you did anything with a pulse, if you wanted something with a pulse, you'd have to find a pulse-making thing or make your own.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You could concoct, and also a lot of times you would do stuff with like tape loops, and because it's a loop, you can kind of create like a pulsing thing out of the loop.
Marc:Yeah, I knew a guy that was very into layering things and doing, I remember we did a recording at his house on something similar to that, and he did a drum loop on playing with the sticks on a guitar case and just layered that in.
Guest:Sure, absolutely.
Guest:Right.
Guest:God, it's so good.
Guest:But it comes up against this idea that I think is sort of like, there's a lot of, I mean, this idea comes up on your show a lot, which is the thing that's more fun to do than it is to experience as an audience.
Guest:And I think the problem with that kind of music, like the bedroom rock in general, is it's really fun to make, but it's not particularly fun to listen to.
Marc:But now when you say bedroom rock, you're talking about Brian Eno.
Marc:That's anybody.
Marc:I mean, anyone's working in their studio right now.
Guest:Well, it felt like it didn't feel that different than probably Brian Eno in some ways.
Guest:I mean, I think Brian Eno's probably better at it.
Marc:He's got a nicer bedroom and probably a nicer equipment.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Well, I don't know how much it matters how good the equipment is.
Marc:No, I think you're right.
Marc:I think the excitement of discovery that you can do when you get a handle on that technology has got to be just mind-blowing.
Marc:I mean, just like if you have that kind of focus.
Guest:Oh, it's completely magical.
Guest:You're in all day.
Guest:You're in.
Guest:It's super fun.
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:There's nothing more fun.
Marc:So you met him and he had the Tascam?
Guest:He had the tape recorder.
Guest:I had the – and a little – a few years into our friendship, I –
Guest:Well, two things.
Guest:I started playing with a new wave band.
Guest:A real band.
Guest:And you picked up a guitar that your friend had given you which had only three strings.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And started to teach yourself just the first three strings.
Marc:This is one of those altered guitar sort of discovery invention.
Guest:Well, not intentionally.
Guest:Catharsis.
Guest:I think it was more like you only had three strings.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so you started with that.
Guest:Well, it was also... You didn't know it needed more?
Yeah.
Guest:Well, I could make chords with it, and that was all I felt like I really needed to.
Marc:That's not even a full ukulele.
Guest:No, it was like, no.
Guest:But it was sort of like punk rock Amnesty Day.
Guest:Like, it was 1977.
Guest:Like, there was, you know, I remember I saw- You don't need all the strings for punk rock.
Guest:I saw the Sex Pistole.
Guest:You know, like, our friend Jimmy, who was like a big Cream Magazine kind of, I mean, he's, I feel like Lester Bangs is kind of like, if you just think of Lester Bangs, he's like the Lester Bangs of our personal life.
Marc:Right.
Guest:He introduced us to a million things.
Guest:You had to have one at that time.
Guest:He played us Patti Smith's Piss Factory, and he played us the Ramones.
Guest:The first time I heard the Ramones was in his attic room, and he had a copy of the Ramones.
Guest:How great was that?
Guest:You've got to listen to this.
Guest:We fell out.
Guest:It was just like, this is the most insane thing.
Guest:Because part of it that was so great was that it was incredibly powerful music.
Guest:It'll never happen again.
Guest:It was incredibly powerful music.
Guest:And also there's this part of it that's like, is this a joke?
Guest:And the combination of like, is this a joke?
Guest:And it being so good.
Guest:What they're talking about is so funny.
Guest:fucked up yeah i mean it's like there's like glue and yeah i mean it's just like all and and it's like without no apologies they're not bragging yet because of the type of music it is it almost sounds like novelty music yeah well it's like but it rocks so hard it rocks so hard i mean it's not and yeah i mean it it it it asks a lot more questions than it answers that's
Marc:But I like that.
Marc:That's the interesting sort of reaction to the Ramones.
Marc:Like, is this a joke?
Marc:But then you realize how hard it's rocking.
Marc:It's undeniably not a joke.
Guest:There's a great cassette tape that Danny Fields made of Lou Reed that was recorded in a recording studio right after Danny Fields played him the Ramones.
Guest:And it's a very similar thing.
Guest:And Lou Reed is just like, that's it.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:I'm done.
Guest:We're done.
Guest:It's over.
Guest:Forget it.
Guest:They nailed it.
Guest:They did it.
Guest:They did it.
Guest:And it's like, what?
Yeah.
Guest:And you think about Lou Reed.
Guest:Lou Reed is the guy who does the press conference in Japan with like 800 people there.
Guest:He's like, I don't want to talk about it.
Guest:What are you people doing?
Guest:But Lou Reed, he had an advantage over us, which is he kind of came from that same world.
Marc:He invented something.
Guest:But he also came from the working class New York thing.
Guest:Oh, that's right.
Guest:And so part of the mystery for us was like, we're these suburban kids who are like, what are these guys doing?
Marc:But at some level, there has to be this timeline where Lou Reed knows that without him, that whole thing down there doesn't happen.
Guest:I'd be curious to know how much he...
Marc:credited himself i want yeah i don't think sound wise but certainly in terms of pushing the envelope and pushing it in new york yeah yeah and making room but also i think new york also just grows stuff like that you know so that's true so it just grows ramones right right right there are a lot of ramones
Guest:But also, I think musicians often, nobody wants to admit it, but they will feel competitive with their contemporaries.
Guest:And nothing is as much like when you play a rock festival.
Guest:It's like behind the scenes, it's like, well, who won?
Marc:I'm sure it's the same.
Marc:Well, I don't do it with comedy much because it's not fair in the sense that- Because you're lying to yourself?
Marc:No, because after a certain point, you realize that certain comics with certain audiences are going to do certain things.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Of course.
Marc:I think that's the same with music.
Marc:Last night, I went out, and I rarely play publicly.
Marc:And I took my Les Paul Deluxe.
Marc:Oh, you played music publicly?
Guest:Yeah, Jimmy Vivino.
Guest:Oh, well, he's a very generous guy.
Marc:Jimmy?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He's great.
Marc:He's a nice guy.
Marc:Well, he does a night out in Burbank at this joint.
Marc:And he said, come down and play a couple.
Marc:And I was like, oh my God.
Marc:And there's all these old dudes, these old guitar players, and they're just around, hanging out.
Marc:And I definitely felt that like, God, I hope I can get it up for this.
Marc:I hope I can land this thing just so I don't feel like I'm impotent.
Marc:There's an almost biological challenge to it that you want to at least show up for yourself.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:And, you know, it's not losing.
Marc:I knew I was going to lose.
Marc:But if I could honor what it is that I do, you know, as rough as I do it and it's mine, then I did all right.
Guest:That's interesting.
Guest:Well, I think we take more of like an auteur approach where like we can not necessarily, you know, do the thing you're talking about.
Guest:We can suck pretty hard.
Guest:We can suck, but we're hiding behind our ideas.
Marc:No, but the thing is that no matter what you guys do, I think it's very similar is that you've created this world for yourself, a sound, a tone, a voice, a structure.
Marc:You're undeniably you.
Guest:We've got a brand, yeah.
Marc:Wait, I don't know why call it a brand.
Marc:Why not call it a- Universe.
Marc:Yeah, or just like a voice.
Marc:We've got a voice.
Guest:I want a universe.
Guest:You do have a voice.
Guest:I'll take it.
Guest:I'll take it.
Marc:Because after two seconds of one of your songs, you're like, ah, they might be charged.
Marc:There's no denying it.
Guest:But I think the thing- Isn't that what you're trying to do, though?
Guest:I think we're trying to do a lot of different things.
Guest:No, I mean at the beginning.
Guest:At the beginning.
Guest:Well, I think even at the beginning.
Guest:So the thing about it is, though, is that we're doing this for ourselves, you know, primarily.
Guest:Like, we're trying to impress ourselves.
Guest:And I think part of it is, like, you know how you don't necessarily recognize yourself in the mirror?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like, you're so used to your... It's getting harder.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Dad?
Dad?
Guest:But you know what I mean?
Guest:You're so used to your own thing that what you're really trying to do is try and expand on it as much as possible.
Guest:So I don't think, in other words, I think that we, for example, we'd been doing this for, what was it, like 20?
Guest:20 years before we started doing, we made our first children's record.
Guest:And one of the reasons we waited so long was we didn't think people would, we didn't want to confuse anybody.
Guest:What do you mean?
Guest:They think, oh, this is what they are.
Guest:We didn't want people to think that we had fundamentally changed our act.
Marc:Well, but let me ask you something, though.
Marc:I mean, the interesting thing about the timing of that, though, looking at it, is that given that your fans are generally decent people who don't drink, I'm sure that most of them have families.
Marc:A lot of them do.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Marc:That generation of your, I think, do you have kids?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:You both have kids.
Guest:I do not have kids.
Guest:I have two cats.
Marc:Yeah, I have cats, three cats, no kids.
Marc:I'm with you.
Marc:But you must have known, like, you know, these kids need things.
Marc:And it'd be nice to entertain them.
Guest:Well, John and I did discuss this from the position of, like, kids deserve not just that... Good pop music?
Guest:...kind of classic, like, condescending, like, blah, blah, blah.
Guest:This is good enough.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know?
Guest:Right.
Guest:When you do a kid's album, people come out of the woodwork telling you, like, how you should do it.
Guest:They're like, it's like that part in The Graduate where the guy says plastics.
Guest:Plastics, yeah.
Guest:It's like that.
Guest:They're like, dinosaurs.
Guest:I'm telling you.
Guest:Kids love dinosaurs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's true.
Guest:Kids do love dinosaurs.
Guest:And one of our most popular songs is about dinosaurs written by our bass player.
Guest:But the truth is, I think what we want to do, and John sort of nailed this in one conversation we were having about it, which is like,
Guest:The way adults like the soprano, we want to write kids' music that appeals to kids the way the sopranos appeals to adults.
Guest:Like they're just waiting for the next song?
Guest:Yeah, it's surprising.
Guest:Something that's surprising, something that captures their imagination, that takes them to somewhere else, that isn't just about fortifying them with vitamin-enriched information.
Marc:Or like a morality tale about a dinosaur?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:The dinosaur that broke its foot?
Guest:Not everything that kids experience has to be good for them.
Guest:And I think that was sort of our little breakthrough.
Marc:Oh, you're like, we're going to do the kids' album for the dark stuff.
Marc:The stuff that they're going to be a little uncomfortable with.
Marc:It doesn't have to be nutritional.
Guest:It doesn't have to make them better at being kids.
Marc:Oh, I see.
Marc:Or they don't have to learn.
Guest:Yeah, it doesn't have to be about people.
Guest:They don't have to learn.
Guest:And even the records we've done that are, you know, in air quotes, like, educational, they're still, I mean, they're just interesting records.
Guest:I mean, it's just, and we dedicate a lot of production value and a lot of time, and, like, we take on those projects very seriously, which is the other thing is that the more you do educational, the more you do kid stuff, you realize what a world of hacks.
Guest:The rest of, I mean, a lot of people doing kid stuff.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:It's just like, well, I couldn't do the real stuff, so I did some kid stuff.
Marc:Oh, really?
Marc:And a lot of them find success in that.
Guest:Oh, you can find tons of success.
Guest:That's the cliche anyway.
Marc:But I mean, once you get a break with a kid sing, it's not like the Wild West.
Marc:Not like anybody can just make a fortune doing kid stuff.
Guest:I don't know about fortunes, but you can certainly... I mean, there's a whole regional kids music making world.
Marc:Yeah, I had Zanes in here from the Del Fuego.
Marc:And he's like the world music kids guy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He makes great kids' albums, though.
Guest:Yeah, he uses great musicians.
Marc:But let's go back before we get to exploiting children for money.
Marc:We'll come back to the exploiting kids.
Guest:That'll be hour two.
Marc:No, because I think that, like I said at the beginning, the time that you guys sort of surfaced was a very exciting and changing time in music.
Marc:So you're in a band now in Lincoln, a new wave band?
Guest:Well, yes.
Guest:I moved out to Boston.
Marc:And what year is this, 77?
Guest:This was 70...
Guest:Nine.
Guest:So you moved to Boston.
Guest:Moved to Boston.
Guest:To play music.
Guest:Yep.
Guest:Where were you living?
Guest:Everywhere.
Guest:You know, like when you're a certain age, you just move every month, basically.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Where'd you sort of land it, though?
Marc:Because you're talking about Central Square.
Marc:You remember Kenmore Square, dude?
Marc:Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:I mean, that place is just nothing.
Guest:He played in Kenmore Square many times at the In Square Men's Bar.
Marc:In Square Men's Bar?
Guest:Yeah, the Mundanes.
Guest:The Mundanes were a huge... He was in a band called The Mundanes.
Guest:The Mundanes.
Guest:New AF band, yeah.
Guest:And they were based out of Providence right now.
Guest:They were a big, like, brown, RISD-y kind of band.
Guest:And this is right after, like, the Talking Heads had blown up.
Guest:So there was, like, this whole sort of, like...
Guest:So we got to be the opening act for every new wave thing that came through Providence.
Marc:Through Providence.
Guest:Yeah, so we opened for the Ramones and the Talking Heads because there was nobody else that was appropriate.
Guest:And this was in the late 70s.
Guest:Late 70s.
Guest:But the post-new wave thing, like the late, late 70s, early 80s stuff...
Guest:spawn some of the weirdest, most mutant kind of ideas because everyone was like, all right, we've done this short song thing.
Guest:That and this weird hardcore, like post-Slamdancey, post-Skinhead, post-Oi thing.
Guest:There was like sort of like what I guess like the guy who just died from The Fall, like that kind of music kind of- What's his name?
Guest:Mark E. Smith.
Marc:But, like, I remember New Wave really set out to kill disco, because I was in junior high.
Marc:I mean, you guys were out already, but, like, we had a real problem with disco.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:You know, in 76, 75.
Guest:Oh, see, we kind of loved disco.
Guest:You were out.
Marc:We kind of loved disco.
Marc:I like it now.
Marc:I mean, I can listen to it, and I can respect it, and I have BG's records, and
Guest:donna summer well you always liked it no no i would say for me it was it was it was treacly horrible stuff until somewhere around i feel love by i feel that was a real game changer that was donna summer yeah something else but georgia marauder georgia marauder did the production yeah so he's so it was had this you know very german kind of base craft work yeah i didn't get in the craft work till like a year ago jimmy mack
Guest:also played us Kraftwerk for the first time.
Guest:That's true.
Marc:Kraftwerk and the Ramones.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So he laid out your life for you.
Guest:He was the source.
Guest:He was huge.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:It's a shame he's passed away, but he was sort of the Holy Ghost.
Marc:Did you send him Christmas cards every year?
Marc:Like thank you notes?
Marc:Hey, dude, thanks.
Guest:Oh, we dedicated our first album to him, actually.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Jimmy what?
Guest:Jimmy Mac, James McIntyre.
Guest:He was like an incredible guy.
Guest:He just had really, really- Kraftwerk and the Ramones.
Marc:He was like, you guys ready?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He wrote all the music reviews in the newspaper.
Guest:School paper?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:School paper.
Guest:So he was notorious.
Marc:But he was writing music reviews about music I would think that was very not popular.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:I mean, he would write about the popular stuff as well.
Guest:He was very Lester Bangsy.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:I think the whole thing of growing up in the 70s and the time that we did, there were a lot of cultural things that barely even scan now that were so influential, like just the idea of freeform radio.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, we make these records that have a lot of different musical styles.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, we started without a drummer.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so we were, like, very free to do any kind of rhythms we wanted to do or any, like, make arrangements big or small.
Guest:But I think also just growing up with BCN.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Where they would have, you know, the playlist would be this wide open thing where you'd be listening to stuff from the, you know, the 40s and the 50s and the 60s.
Guest:It didn't matter what era it was.
Guest:It was militant.
Guest:I mean, they play, like, the Rite of Spring and stuff.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:They play
Guest:They were all over the way at night, too.
Guest:Who's the late night guy?
Guest:But it was like late night all the time there.
Guest:I know.
Guest:I mean, they were out to blow your mind.
Guest:They really wanted to change your expectation of what was happening on the radio.
Guest:How great was that?
Guest:And I think it's almost impossible to describe.
Guest:It's like saying, like, there was a time when, you know, I mean, I'm not saying
Guest:Children gathered around.
Guest:I'm not saying it was necessarily the best radio ever made, but it was so different than... It's almost inconceivable to me now that somebody would do that.
Marc:Well, the mainstream was so defined and so market-driven.
Marc:So to get out from under Bob Seger at any given point in time was sort of a chore.
Guest:Which, I mean, they played Bob Seger.
Guest:I imagine it maybe wouldn't be that impressive to hear it or to see the playlist
Guest:Now, it's like we talk to the younger members of our band about watching Laugh-In when we were kids.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And they're like, what the hell is wrong with you?
Guest:Like, why do you?
Guest:It's like, it was never funny.
Guest:It was never funny.
Guest:No, it was funny.
Marc:Actually, at a moment, it was, I mean.
Marc:It was mind-blowing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's hard to get your mind blown so much now.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, like, the Cars were a huge shift.
Guest:I saw the Cars second show because Jimmy Mack took me to it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So that was a big shift.
Guest:Much better when you couldn't understand the lyrics.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Amazing when you couldn't understand the lyrics.
Guest:Also, they didn't have the big three-part harmonies.
Guest:The live show was very different before their first album.
Guest:But they were very well rehearsed.
Guest:And a lot of the new wave, a lot of the bands at the Rat, every weekend I would go to the Rat in 77 with my big-
Guest:Yeah, I had a fake WBCN ID.
Guest:And so I could just get in.
Guest:Actually, I was 15 years old.
Guest:But I could get into every show with my fake.
Guest:Jimmy worked at WBCN as a promo guy.
Guest:And I would get into the show, and we'd get really good seats.
Guest:We'd be like the first people there.
Guest:You'd go downstairs.
Guest:Yeah, go downstairs.
Guest:I had my cassette tape recorder.
Guest:I'd record everything.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, and I saw the cars.
Guest:And they were shockingly good.
Marc:Well, yeah, and going into the basement of the rat was pretty exciting.
Marc:Oh, it was super fun.
Marc:You got to play the rat, I imagine.
Guest:Well, in the Mundanes, we played the rat.
Marc:That horrible back dressing room?
Guest:We never played the rat.
Guest:I guess the Giants never played there.
Marc:Why?
Marc:Because you were around then.
Guest:I think we actually got... Because we were out of New York, our real club days were in New York City.
Guest:I mean, we played every club in New York constantly from like... Okay, so he's in the Mundanes.
Marc:When does the thing start?
Guest:The Mundanes moved to New York to make it big.
Guest:From Providence.
Guest:From Providence.
Guest:I moved from Ohio, where I'm going to Antioch College, to Pratt Institute to get a degree in fine arts.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And...
Guest:What fine art?
Guest:Painting, printmaking.
Guest:And then, so we move into the same building, which is filled with our friends from Lincoln and Sudbury.
Guest:By coincidence?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:Well, it's just like- That's how we, the people that we knew in New York.
Guest:You know one person, you say like, is there an apartment opening up?
Guest:It's like-
Guest:Yes, there is.
Guest:It's in the worst building in Brooklyn.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But we're all there.
Guest:Which, by the way, is now entirely unaffordable by any of us.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:It's in Park Slope.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's in Park Slope, but at the time, it was on a block with one third.
Marc:Where you sit there going like, we're not even really in New York.
Marc:I think we kind of like Brooklyn, actually.
Guest:Even though it was scary, it was super high crime and scary.
Guest:And as John was about to say, a third of the buildings on the row had actually been torched by the landlords to collect the insurance.
Guest:It was that post-Fort Apache moment where a lot of landlords' buildings were up.
Guest:In the mid-70s?
Guest:Late, like 1980, 81.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:There was a huge amount of flight out of Brooklyn.
Guest:And so the buildings became too expensive to make.
Guest:They didn't want to pay for the, like just paying for the insurance or the mortgage was killing landlords.
Guest:So they would just burn the building down.
Guest:And it was a little bit of, you know, lightning would strike these buildings.
Guest:And so next, the block over from us was like the heroin.
Guest:Thank you for not saying Jewish lightning.
Guest:well it's people use all sorts there's also italian lightning yeah there's no insert your your racial your racist epithet right here um uh but uh yeah so it was ethnic lightning ethnic ethnic lightning was was everywhere and so like the heroin district was right next door to us and like i would look out the back of my you know i was in a railroad apartment looking out my window and there would just be garbage can fires like every single night i'm like
Guest:Why do those people want to light those garbage cans?
Guest:Like, what's going on out there?
Marc:The dope beans, they were there?
Guest:That was the district.
Marc:I lived in Alphabet City.
Marc:It's just like there were very defined heroin neighborhoods.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, you want to know where you are.
Guest:It's a big business.
Guest:It was a big business.
Guest:So that...
Guest:Brought you guys together?
Guest:That put us back in the same place.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And then we started sharing equipment.
Guest:I still had my tape recorder with me.
Guest:I think we actually started doing recordings even when I was still in this other band.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And John was in school.
Guest:And then gradually that just started to seem like, well, this is more interesting.
Marc:On the TASCAM?
Guest:On the TAC.
Guest:On the TAC, yeah, yeah.
Marc:On the TAC?
Marc:It was a TAC.
Marc:Oh, a TAC, sorry.
Marc:So-
Marc:What were you playing?
Marc:Who was playing what?
Guest:Well, John had a Moog synthesizer, which we could then create a pulse with.
Guest:And we sort of construct these rhythm tracks on the three tracks, bounce them down to one.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then we'd play along and then maybe add a couple overdubs.
Guest:I think you had a bunch of tambourines and stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We just had like sort of pots and pans.
Guest:And so we just kind of create these tracks that we would then play.
Guest:We would rehearse to these tracks.
Guest:Rehearse what?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Songs.
Guest:Like we would write songs to these rhythm tracks.
Guest:Rhythm tracks.
Guest:I get it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So we were like a two-man band.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then- And you were playing guitar?
Guest:I was playing the guitar.
Guest:I'd sort of learned how to play the guitar.
Guest:Although right when we started, I couldn't sing and play at the same time, which is an idea that really blows my mind.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was that rough.
Guest:It's hard.
Marc:It's hard.
Marc:It's like juggling.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But now, you know, then the drum machines started coming in very soon after that, like just emerging.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Chris Butler from The Waitresses actually lent us his DMX drum machine, which is the sound of like King of, I guess, King of Rock by Run DMC.
Guest:It's like all the drum sounds, you know, the snare sound is...
Guest:And the kick drum sound is... So everything you do on it, like, you know, it's like, you want to do a ballad?
Guest:How about... But it was very synthy, right?
Guest:In other words, it was not samples.
Guest:It was like the tom-tom was like...
Guest:It wasn't a recording of a tone.
Guest:So it was a drum machine.
Guest:Emphasis on machine.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:They hadn't done this amp one day yet.
Marc:Because I remember when that happened, everyone was like, oh, my God.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:It meant everything to us.
Guest:We saw it was like a truck coming towards us.
Guest:Because that was developing while we were doing this thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was kind of exciting.
Guest:So you were excited.
Guest:We were very excited.
Guest:And we were very excited to be in a two-man band because the truth is, like, you know, John had been in bands.
Guest:I was in other bands in college with people.
Guest:And, you know, it's hard to be in a band.
Guest:It's hard to, you know, everybody has this sort of, like, it's a democracy sort of maybe.
Guest:Maybe you're with, like, a visionary person who's got a very clear idea of how to do something great.
Guest:But the push-pull of a band can make you feel like you're doing something sort of mediocre.
Guest:You learn the problem of things made by committee very quickly being in a band.
Guest:And I think for both me and John, we wanted to do something that had no compromises.
Guest:Even if it's the most fragile, indefensible idea, let's just do something that is just for ourselves, that satisfies us.
Marc:Well, it was fortunate that you guys thought the same way, I guess.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Because you're saying you didn't fight each other.
Guest:Oh, I think we also, we convinced each other.
Guest:I think there was sort of like- I think we made each other braver.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Individually and certainly in my earlier events, I was like, I got to figure out what people want and do that.
Guest:What is it?
Guest:What do they want?
Guest:And then eventually John and I discussed and we're like, fuck that.
Guest:We're going to- You don't really need to care about what people want.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You don't.
Guest:Let the people come to us.
Guest:Well, and then the weird thing is, so we kind of like, you know, toiled away.
Marc:But did you think at that time we're sort of like, we're doing things that we cannot perform live?
Guest:Yes, yes.
Guest:That was a part of it.
Guest:That was something we wanted to make sure we didn't do too much of.
Guest:We didn't want the tape.
Guest:We restricted the tape to just be rhythms and a bass line.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And we didn't really have too many things that were sound effects driven.
Guest:Even though it was years before Milli Vanilli, I think we had an awareness that we didn't want the track to overwhelm what we were doing on stage.
Guest:So we kind of had a little bit of a governor on what was on the track.
Guest:But to be perfectly honest, and I think I realized in the fullness of time, our impression for a lot of people was not the same.
Guest:What do you mean?
Guest:We thought we were a real band.
Guest:I mean, we thought there was no shortcoming to what we were doing.
Guest:I think, Dave, because I remember discussing this.
Guest:At some point, I said something about how quaint the drums were, and you were like, what are you talking about?
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:I mean, personally, as the guitar player in the band, I felt like we were ACDC, man.
Guest:We were rocking.
Guest:When we were really rocking out, we were rocking out as hard as anybody rocks out.
Guest:yeah and it was like totally visceral and physical and real yeah and the fact that there was like a drum machine behind us like yeah there's a drum machine behind us because drum machines are the coolest thing in the world like you wish you had a drum machine you just got a drummer we've got a drum machine yeah exactly it doesn't make mistakes it doesn't get high before the show deal
Guest:with that remember john saying this thing about like somebody who'd seen van halen playing in a in one of the earliest gigs at a tiny club right and they were playing as if they were playing in a in a gigantic uh yeah sure like right from the beginning right and how crazy like how deluded you have to be to convince yourself that that's you know yeah but then that carries you you know then then people get the the three guys watching are like oh
Guest:I just saw the most awesome show.
Marc:And then the truth is- Is it like your Pixies moment?
Marc:Where you're like, oh my God, this is bigger than life.
Marc:But they were doing something no one did.
Guest:They were doing something else.
Guest:But the truth is our luckiest break is that even though we had made the decision that we weren't going to try to calculate what audiences want.
Guest:I mean, I think there are a lot of performers and a lot of songwriters who do a really good job of like-
Guest:They do a very good job of figuring out what satisfies people.
Guest:Even though we had kind of put that on the shelf, audiences took to what we were doing almost right away.
Guest:I think maybe they saw a lot of themselves reflected in what we were doing, like that we might not have reminded them of Mick Jagger, but we...
Guest:probably reminded them of their crazy, creative brother.
Guest:It's hard to reconstruct what people made of it.
Guest:But it went over, I guess.
Guest:Yeah, it definitely went over.
Marc:Well, you found your audience pretty quickly.
Guest:Yeah, immediately.
Guest:It began with friends.
Guest:We had friends come to see us.
Marc:And it's before the first record.
Guest:Yes, yes.
Marc:And there was a long interval before our first record.
Guest:And there was a little, as you know, there was a little scene in the East Village.
Guest:And so it turned out it wasn't CBGB.
Guest:It was these performance spaces.
Guest:The Pyramid Club, HFC, Dorico.
Guest:Those places.
Guest:The Pyramid where?
Guest:Pyramid Club.
Guest:Avenue A. Avenue A. Yeah, I know that one.
Guest:It was wildly successful at the time.
Guest:I mean, the mid-'80s scene was like when performance art was really happening.
Guest:And we folded into that perfectly.
Marc:Like the second generation of the performance artists, right?
Guest:Yeah, not Soho.
Guest:like loft performance art.
Guest:This was much more gonzo.
Guest:There was a lot of drag.
Guest:There was a lot of really transgressive stuff that I would invite my mother to.
Guest:And then there were these campy musicians and things.
Guest:Who were some of the other ones?
Guest:I mean, we did shows with the bands that made it out of there were Live Skull, Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth.
Guest:You're very different from them.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You're almost like musically the opposite.
Guest:We would be like at the top of the bill and they would be at the end of the bill and they'd have performance art in the middle.
Guest:The performance art was the big draw.
Guest:So it'd be like Karen Finley was the headliner.
Guest:Karen Finley or Popo or something.
Guest:I get it.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:It's just a different scene.
Marc:It was not a rock scene.
Marc:Right, but what you were doing were sort of finely crafted pop songs.
Guest:See, we had a lot of transgressive stuff in the beginning when we started.
Guest:These screamy songs that really went over great, but on record sound unlistenable.
Marc:Wait, you guys telling me that you did, like, noise rock, like, no wave?
Guest:Not quite.
Guest:Well, I mean, it was musical, but also it involved, like, John had a gigantic... And we've still done this recently.
Guest:He had a tree trunk that he would bash on the stage, which was mic'd.
Guest:Which had a mic on it.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Sounded great.
Guest:And we did, you know, like, we did little...
Guest:we did i think we were like trying to fit in to some extent we were we did like little we did a thing where we had an kind of art rock we had an egg yeah that spoke to the audience and then we did a magic trick where we crushed the egg right so you had a comedy bit it's kind of i don't know if it was funny but we smashed the egg it was not it started singing and we smashed it and then it continued singing that was the oh that's what i remember of that so you had an act
Guest:It was an act, yeah.
Guest:It was all very much an act.
Guest:Yeah, it was an act.
Guest:I mean, you know, in those clubs, props didn't mean what they mean in like a comedy venue.
Guest:No, no, I'm just trying.
Marc:No, no, I know.
Guest:I mean, that's the weird thing is that it recontextualized everything.
Guest:It like really reshuffled it.
Marc:But there was always a comic element to a lot of performance art, whether they wanted to be there or not.
Marc:And that's not in a mocking way, is that when you go over the top, whether it's with drag or with cans of yams or nudity, whatever you're going to do, that you're elevating something to a burlesque of some kind.
Guest:A lot of people thought the Karen Finley yam thing was funny.
Guest:It was transgressive and it was funny, even though she was deadly serious and actually acting out a lot of serious...
Guest:issues.
Marc:Yams is a funny word.
Marc:Yeah, I know.
Marc:But the thing is that environment was sort of allowed anything.
Marc:It was completely permissive.
Marc:And it was permissive to the degree where if you didn't take chances that were somewhat extraordinary, you were a bore.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:It was very sensationalist.
Guest:And the thing that was interesting about coming up as an act at that time, and we played every weekend, like 84, 85, 86, I've got a calendar of all the
Guest:We played virtually every weekend at least one show, sometimes two, which was an insane thing in New York City.
Guest:There were so many venues to do this stuff and such a huge audience.
Guest:There were so many venues of 100 people, 150 people, and they...
Guest:They just wanted something new.
Guest:They wanted something different.
Guest:And it was not a rehearsal.
Guest:It was not a showcase club.
Guest:There was no notion that anyone was careering.
Guest:Right.
Guest:There was no end destination.
Guest:There was no final place that you would go.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's not like, you know, and what do you call your act?
Guest:It was just the thing that was happening in that moment.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:you weren't auditioning and also you were like it's an odd uh you know you did you have the uh accordion yeah so you had the accordion then so you you had a physicality you had a you know a strange lack of instruments you had an old instrument yeah you had uh the you know clever uh uh lyrics and a and a look so you know you were kind of you were part of uh uh of the freak show
Guest:Yeah, a little bit.
Guest:I guess so.
Guest:Not in a bad way.
Guest:I think we didn't feel like as big freaks as probably some people thought we were.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:I think we felt like our side was winning.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, it did.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, I think that you were sort of ahead of the curve in, you know, like that an audience, whatever audience you built around you initially and whatever audience came from the...
Marc:the first hit records that you had, that, you know, whatever culture has become now in this sort of nerd, the broader nerd branding world, you were ahead of the curve on that.
Guest:I guess, although in some ways I feel like that a lot of that stuff, like the stuff we've been talking about, about that scene is like so gone now.
Marc:No, I know, but like once you guys started making sweet songs and the sweet people started coming to see you and not drinking, that that was sort of a precursor to what became a dominant force in culture.
Guest:Yeah, it's definitely no longer a UFO.
Guest:I mean, we can play a song.
Guest:Yeah, it's something that can be described.
Guest:I feel like when we talk to younger bands, we realize a lot of young people are not worried about any of these issues about selling out and stuff like that.
Guest:We were obsessed with at that.
Marc:Selling out in terms of maintaining your integrity?
Guest:Or yeah.
Guest:The idea of integrity seems to have gone away.
Guest:That's gone now, right?
Marc:Now they call it authenticity and it's a little more flexible.
Guest:Authenticity.
Marc:You can actually hold on to your authenticity and compromise your integrity.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:How do we do that?
Guest:We've got to learn how to do that.
Guest:I remember seeing like an ad.
Guest:I remember seeing the Red Hot Chili Peppers very early on in their career.
Guest:We had gotten actually the very first record offer we got was from the label that they were on.
Guest:Which label?
Guest:I think it was EMI, which was, I think, one of the most Coke-fueled labels of that era.
Guest:And they were not a particularly successful act, but they obviously had an incredible look.
Guest:Who, the peppers?
Guest:The chili peppers.
Guest:And they did an ad for, I think, Nike or some sort of on-trend Swatch, some hipster-ish kind of big 80s thing.
Guest:They did a television ad, and it was like watching TV.
Guest:I'm watching the Phil Donahue show, and all of a sudden, the Red Hot Chili Peppers...
Guest:were on television.
Guest:And the Ringo Sexual in me just was like, you're not allowed to do that.
Marc:You gave away your cool card.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Now I was thinking like, well, now the Red Hot Chili Peppers will never be able to work again.
Guest:And it was sort of climbing down from that preset to where we are now, where people just think that's the best thing that could ever happen to you would be to be in a Nike commercial.
Guest:It's such a hard... I don't feel old.
Guest:I feel like I am from another world.
Marc:Extinct, right.
Marc:Do you remember when the Del Fuego's did that Miller commercial?
Guest:Well, that was a contentious thing.
Guest:That was a big deal, actually.
Marc:That was a contentious thing.
Guest:because oh they they chose them to represent boston well it we had a weird you see part of that was weird is that it i mean i think the uh what is the word frisson uh was that they it was about authenticity right so like it was like you can't you don't want the topic to be authenticity in the thing that scans as a commercial yeah right it's a little bit yeah yeah a little bit difficult but that sort of ended that a heavy lift
Guest:Well, I don't know, but we perceived it as a bad move at the time.
Guest:Yeah, because you were around?
Guest:Because we had those concerns.
Guest:But everything was gatekeepers.
Guest:Everything was like, who approves you?
Guest:We couldn't play at all these places.
Guest:We couldn't get reviews.
Guest:When we started, the New York Times would not review any show south of 14th Street.
Yeah.
Guest:really new yorker would not review any yeah because we promoted our own shows and we would like solicit that you know just to get a listing we knew it would sell tickets right and like you know you call up the person who like does just the preview section and say like we're playing uh you know at the cat club playing at shitniks oh the cat you've never heard of yeah we're playing at pj shitniks
Guest:And we're wondering if you'd list our show.
Guest:Like, we're doing really well.
Guest:We're selling out, blah, blah, blah.
Guest:Like, you know, sincere.
Guest:Like, you know, I'm just like a 25-year-old talking to another 25-year-old.
Guest:And they're like, I'd love to help you, schmo.
Guest:But we do not list shows below 14th Street.
Guest:When you're north of 14th Street, we will... What the fuck is north of 14th Street?
Guest:That was the dividing line between... No, but I don't even know what's north of 14th Street.
Guest:What would they be reviewing?
Guest:Everything.
Guest:Rock clubs that adults go to.
Guest:The Beacon.
Guest:The Beacon, yeah.
Marc:Places that hold 1,000 people.
Marc:So when did...
Guest:did it change for you guys well it that didn't change till after we had we were playing we were playing at the beacon before that changed yeah yeah i mean that all changed in the 90s but how'd you get the first record deal uh glenn morrow uh who just put out a really great record of the replacements recently the live one yeah yeah i think we might have opened the night that that we might have been the opening act on that bill the 86 uh at maxwell's yeah that's a great fucking record
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Glenn Morrow ran a record label called Barnon, which I think put out that record in question.
Guest:And he made the tape.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And his partner came to us and said, would you like to make a record?
Guest:And we had had a cassette that was for sale at our shows for like a year that we were selling many, many copies of.
Guest:Which had been reviewed in People magazine.
Guest:How'd that happen?
Guest:That is a really good question.
Guest:We don't know.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:There were a lot of people who, there were a lot of people- But didn't you get some notoriety at that time for your performances and then for the answering machine stuff?
Guest:Yeah, we had this Dallasong service that was kind of its own phenomenon.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And that was an interesting way for people to find out about us because they weren't, speaking of performance art, it sort of fell into that category of- How did it work?
Guest:It just played a song.
Marc:There was a number available?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was a phone machine in my kitchen, and we just changed it every day.
Guest:It was very hard to reach John at that time, because you had to sit through the whole, I'm listening to me singing, going like, pick up the phone.
Guest:God damn it.
Guest:Yeah, it was very easy.
Guest:I started my sort of like Michael Seip aloofness at that moment.
Guest:Um, but you know, a lot of people would call it up and it was sort of its own thing.
Guest:Like people didn't necessarily even think of us as a band.
Guest:They just thought of us as this phone line for a long time.
Guest:And, uh, but a lot of, I don't know, like it's, it's probably not that different than being a comedian who gets like celebrated by other comedians.
Guest:There's a community, a lot of other people, you know, like, you know, Chris Butler from the waitresses and, and, uh, Joel sheer, um, who's a big songwriter.
Guest:Um,
Guest:They would get us gigs at clubs.
Guest:Our first show at Dance of Cherry was a gig that was arranged by somebody we didn't know.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was just like, how can you be that nice?
Marc:Right.
Guest:Who gets gigs for other people they don't know?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But we kind of had this... People went out of their way to help us in this way.
Guest:Maybe they felt sorry.
Guest:I'm not sure exactly, but it was just like...
Guest:It was like a very unusual- Maybe we should help the two nerdy kids.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:The kid with the accordion.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Lord knows they needed help.
Guest:But like, you know, like Marshall Crenshaw, same with like Marshall Crenshaw.
Guest:These are people that, you know, really helped us at very specific times.
Marc:Crenshaw did?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And like, but we didn't know them.
Guest:so it was like we had fans yeah they were there i guess they were fans and they were sort of expressing that but it was it was so you they would bring you into open for them or you do not even open well well that was the other thing is we decided very early on we didn't want to open for people yeah and that was a big mistake oh yeah well i mean kept you out of the well it's a morale killer i think doing a lot touring opening for another band can really crush your your spirit
Marc:So you knew well enough that you were sensitive and that you didn't want to necessarily watch people walking in?
Guest:We just wanted to keep it fun.
Guest:I think early on we decided we wanted it.
Guest:As long as it was fun, it seemed like it would be worthwhile.
Guest:And it's very hard to keep it fun.
Marc:So you do the deal with Bar None.
Guest:And they put out this album.
Guest:Your first album.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the first video on it we made with this guy, Adam Bernstein, who's now a very, very successful and he's a very gifted director.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he basically created 30 Rock.
Guest:He did the pilot for 30 Rock and does lots of... Yeah, Adam is a big wheel in comedy stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I guess he worked on... He did your video?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, we did the first videos for pretty much zero money.
Marc:But that was when MTV was relevant, right?
Guest:It was brand new, and it was extremely important at breaking new acts.
Guest:And we shot our videos.
Guest:He was very smart of Adam.
Guest:We shot them on film.
Guest:So they looked really different and distinctly unsweaty compared to a lot of the other...
Guest:Like the Rolling Stones would be like shooting a video in like some hot, weird TV studio looking very uncomfortable.
Guest:And then our video would come on and it would look sort of like this sort of beautiful, even though it was made for two cents.
Guest:I think it also had the quality.
Guest:I mean, it looks nice now, but it looked sort of archaic too.
Guest:It kind of looked like Hard Day's Night.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:So like we were these clearly kind of like operating with less money and scrappy...
Guest:guys and it they really stood out because we when we did get played on mtv would be between like the whitney houston and so it was like it really stuck and so for the people who would would be inclined again they were like right that that was like oh here's something i can relate to yeah right these two guys yeah yeah who are the weirdos with the with the cordy exactly yeah but the second one we did with adam which
Guest:It was unclear whether it would even get played at all, but ended up being like the real breakthrough was the Don't Let's Start video, which we did in Queens at the World's Fairgrounds, which was sort of semi-abandoned.
Guest:And now, sadly, it's super demolished.
Guest:Is it?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, man.
Guest:I think they sort of took down the gates, and people just come in.
Guest:Don't Let's Start was on the first record?
Guest:It was on the first record.
Guest:It was one of those records that some DJ in Pittsburgh started playing it just on his own.
Marc:That was a huge song, right?
Marc:Yeah, it came out pretty good.
Marc:But I mean, it did well on the charts.
Guest:Well, we've never had a number one hit in the US.
Guest:We have yet to have an actual hit.
Marc:But at that time, the alternative.
Guest:In the alternative scene.
Guest:But that was just, the alternative was just.
Guest:It was called College Radio.
Guest:It was called College Radio.
Guest:It was the College Charts or College Rock was what it was called.
Guest:So it didn't even have the name that it would ultimately have.
Marc:But I remember hearing that song everywhere.
Marc:Is it just that sticky a song?
Guest:It was played in a lot of bars in the East Village, I can tell you that.
Guest:Well, maybe that would have been it.
Guest:What year was that?
Guest:86?
Guest:87.
Marc:No, I'm still out here.
Marc:I mean, was it used on a- Oh, it was on K-Rock.
Guest:It was on K-Rock.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:And in fact, the first time we came to California, that was the very first time we'd ever been anywhere.
Guest:where people had heard of us before we even arrived.
Guest:Everywhere else, we built up an audience.
Guest:And then by the time we were touring enough, we got all the way here.
Guest:And it was really different because there was a crowd of people waiting for us, which felt completely new.
Marc:And then you had, I mean, the second record was like, what do I know?
Marc:But I think Anna Ng was huge, right?
Guest:Well, same thing.
Guest:It was a college chart kind of thing.
Marc:In my mind, it's like you couldn't escape that song.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:It's inscapable.
Marc:It was everywhere in my head.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I mean, but you were also in the places where it was going to.
Guest:I guess I was.
Guest:I'm sure there's a song right now.
Guest:If you lived in Bushwick, there's a song right now by Schmuh and the Schmuhs.
Guest:That's doing that to people?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I guess so, but I'm surprised that it didn't chart on the regular chart.
Guest:It didn't, but it felt to us like we were superstars.
Guest:I mean, that definitely... But speaking of gatekeepers, the major labels were really more concerned about holding on to the things that had already worked for them.
Guest:This is when Rod Stewart was still on the charts.
Guest:The people on the real charts when we were coming up were formidable rock stadium acts.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:So they had a huge amount of money behind them.
Guest:And I think...
Guest:i think the labels just they were very reluctant to i mean that's what opened the door for all the indies was because they just didn't see they didn't see any money there but still that you guys were part of that wave though that was pushing up against it that maybe didn't break until the early 90s i mean we sold a lot of records on an indie label i mean you know tom and and glenn and bar none yeah they sold a lot of records they sold hundreds and hundreds i think we i think we did at some point we topped the cmj chart yeah i don't
Marc:And you were cut in for the appropriate amount of money?
Marc:Oh, yeah, we did.
Marc:It was great.
Marc:But when did you switch labels?
Guest:We got signed to Elektra.
Guest:Why wouldn't you make that choice?
Marc:Why wouldn't you stay with Bar None?
Guest:Well, there's this thing about... I mean, there's a thing about success on... Success can bankrupt an indie label.
Guest:They don't have the ability to ride...
Guest:the crazy up and down wave.
Guest:I think Glenn was happy to get a huge cash buyout from Elektra for whatever it was.
Marc:That's the easier way to make money.
Guest:Well, because also, what if the third album comes out and they've paid us a huge advance and they print up a million copies and it doesn't sell?
Guest:If you're an indie, that puts you straight out of business.
Guest:Whereas if you're a major label, it's just like, oh, that's one of 10 records that didn't work.
Guest:But as far as for our purposes, as far as we were concerned, it was also an opportunity to go.
Guest:This thing that we thought, we had this notion, I think, that this is what bands do is they go to Europe and you can be a much bigger deal over there and then you ride the wave back to them.
Guest:And that seems like there were a lot of bands that had been doing that.
Guest:I mean, we played in 88, 89, we played multiple tours of Germany playing in tiny towns.
Guest:Beer halls?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And a lot of times it would be- With an accordion.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it would be like American GI kids would come out to our shows.
Guest:But they were super fun shows, but they were very, very strange.
Guest:So our third album, Flood, we had international marketing and everything.
Guest:That was a completely new thing.
Guest:How did you do?
Guest:And we did actually chart, and we got on the top 10 in the UK.
Guest:So that did work.
Guest:They had enough machinery.
Guest:Sold a lot of records.
Guest:It was platinum.
Guest:yeah wow so that was that was that was a good yeah and uh but you know i mean i think the thing is also like we had a very un-neurotic relationship with a lot of times like when you hear people talk about like dealing with their record label it's like you know the person who's talking is like clearly ambitious like they want to do good stuff they want to be successful they're not crazy yeah you know and the record companies you know they want it to be successful but it's like um you know it's like uh trying to get like pandas to mate in captivity like like
Guest:You have these two entities that unless the circumstance is exactly right, they just can't get it going.
Guest:And I think we were just very lucky that we were old enough that we weren't afraid that the thing we were doing was going to get ruined.
Guest:I think bands aren't wrong.
Guest:When bands are nervous about the thing they're doing being ruined by a label, they're not wrong.
Guest:That happens all the time.
Guest:But I think we felt like we had done enough and we were so self-defined.
Guest:that even though there might be people having all sorts of big ideas about what we should do or how we should do it, it's like we were going to steer our own ship, and it didn't really matter what Mr. Guy in the executive suite says.
Guest:It's like he doesn't run this band.
Guest:And did you stay with Electra for a while?
Guest:We were on there for almost a decade.
Guest:How many records?
Guest:I think we made four.
Marc:Four albums, yeah.
Marc:And then what happened?
Guest:Uh, like basically like they offered us a, like a lesser advance, which is what they do when they sort of like, they're sort of ask you to leave.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:One thing that was lecture was that the, the people that had the team that had signed us had all sort of moved on.
Guest:Right.
Guest:There was almost nobody left.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The president had left.
Guest:Like it was a, it was a very different company by the end of that.
Guest:And also like, you know, grunge had come and gone and hip hop and hip hop had arrived.
Guest:So the, like the whole, whole cultural.
Marc:Did anyone sample, uh, they might be giants.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I think they thought we were easy enough to deal with.
Marc:No, but I mean, did anyone use your songs in hip-hop songs?
Guest:I'm trying to remember.
Guest:There are some, I mean, Girl Talk samples, they might be Giants of Punch, but I don't know who else.
Guest:But those aren't legal samples.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:We're waiting for the one to be cleared.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:It's still in the future, is what it is.
Guest:DJs, listen to the sound of my voice.
Guest:Sample, they might be trying.
Guest:There's so much stuff that you can sample.
Guest:Easy terms.
Guest:We got some hot beats.
Marc:The fact that you steered your own ship and you maintained the integrity of your sound and all that stuff, and you eventually added musicians and became a real band, was that a big day for you to have a drummer?
Guest:That was kind of a heart attack for us, actually.
Guest:Well, the thing is, the actual, the weird thing is...
Marc:You tour with a band now, right?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:For years.
Guest:We have guys in our band who've been with us for 20 years.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they're still the new guys.
Guest:You're that band now.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's like, when you're in this band for 35 years, you can talk about what we're going to do.
Guest:You're like Terrell Jones.
Guest:The second season of Laugh-In really is the one you have to check out.
Guest:Admit it.
Marc:It's like Daryl Jones.
Guest:Joanne Worley, a genius.
Marc:The bass player in the Rolling Stones has been with him for 25 years.
Marc:Because I said that to Keith.
Marc:I said, I'm this bill.
Marc:He's like, Daryl's been with us for 25 years.
Marc:He's the bass player.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Well, yeah, we had a documentary film made about us that was a very interesting thing to see.
Guest:But one of the things that's weird about it is that there's this whole sort of kerfuffle created in the movie about how our core audience didn't like the band.
Guest:And I just want to say for the record, just as a sort of a corrective, or if that's the term, like...
Guest:As soon as we got a live band, the shows became like a complete celebration.
Guest:It was like there was nothing missing.
Marc:Right.
Guest:But it did change what we were doing.
Marc:It's like me moving from the garage.
Marc:It's like we said earlier, what were we talking about when you moved?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like you're no longer in Brooklyn.
Marc:right right you know like people are weird about change because then like then they have this this conflict within them it's like well i knew them when they right it's always going to be like we're better because i'm me and we were younger and and they were different and right yeah i mean we took when we were a duo we talked a lot between songs yeah and i and a lot of that talking would sort of probably fall under the category of like comedy i mean like sure a lot of like just like when it was just
Guest:Yeah, we're just shooting the shit on stage and saying things that, you know, thank God.
Guest:Trying to be funny.
Guest:Yeah, we were trying to be funny.
Guest:And it was funny.
Guest:And it was like, you know, sort of like a nervous kind of funny.
Guest:But it was also like a lot of times it was stuff that like, I'm very grateful there was no YouTube.
Guest:I'd like to thank YouTube for not existing at that time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or phones that you could record on.
Guest:And then we got the band, and when we got the band, suddenly when you're on stage with five other guys, you kind of want to keep the music going.
Guest:You're not just going to sit there and filibuster about what you think of three signs.
Marc:Some guys will do that, though.
Marc:I don't know if they do it as much anymore.
Guest:We still do plenty of things.
Guest:We got back into it, and that's the best part.
Marc:Do you try to crack up the band?
Guest:Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Guest:That's the goal, right?
Guest:Yeah, that's the... You know, it's good.
Marc:And how did the stuff, like having the theme song for Malcolm, that must have been a nice paycheck for a long time.
Guest:Yeah, it was kind of a page turned around the turn of the century, I guess, for us.
Guest:Because we'd had a band for a while, but we had still not done, as I said, we were holding off on doing other projects like...
Guest:not just the kids' music, but commercial stuff of any kind.
Marc:You mean the actual product support?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, that, but also doing movie music.
Guest:I mean, I think we would have liked to have done movie music earlier than we did.
Guest:One thing we noticed the moment we left Elektra was that our phone, we actually got the phone calls that came in for us.
Guest:Oh, oh, right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That they've been keeping for you.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's like, well, maybe that would be a better project for Bjork.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But part of it, I mean, earlier we had been just saying no to everything.
Guest:Well, yeah.
Guest:Because of the sellout issue?
Guest:Because of the sellout issue, yeah.
Guest:Which was, you know, just like a youngster kind of thing.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:But we ended up doing a ton of TV stuff.
Guest:We did like the Daily Show.
Guest:We recorded the Bob Mould's song for the Daily Show.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And so like the ba-ba-da-ba-da, that's us.
Guest:That's you guys?
Guest:That's us.
Guest:They still use that?
Guest:They do.
Guest:They used a remix version of our recording now instead of the original.
Guest:But it's still us.
Guest:But it's really Bob.
Guest:He wrote the theme.
Guest:Although we wrote the second part of the theme.
Guest:And then we did the Malcolm thing, which was huge.
Guest:Was that a pre-existing song or you asked to write that?
Guest:It was like a half-written song and it only had to be 30 seconds long, so it was like...
Guest:i got it right here uh you know and it kind of fit the energy of the show because we just we knew it's a nice payout right i mean well they didn't pay us a ton of money at first but it's you know over time it's you know because it's in syndication and the residuals and stuff like that we get it you still get it oh sure yeah yeah the
Guest:long envelopes arrive yeah but that was I mean that's the main thing because we entered this whole time which is of doing things where nobody even knows it's us yeah people don't know it's us doing the daily show yeah I didn't know that but I don't know a lot of things well almost nobody even our fans a lot of them don't know we're doing that like what other things what are the secret the Malcolm theme sure amazing vacation homes oh yeah what is that that's a it's on the travel channel oh you did the theme yeah yeah
Guest:We did a lot of themes for these sort of cable-y shows.
Marc:Because you just can knock them out or what?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Your go-to guys for that stuff?
Guest:We tried.
Guest:We were more in the beginning of the century, I guess.
Guest:Well, we got a Grammy for the Malcolm thing, and then all of a sudden, then the phone's ringing off the hook.
Guest:Because it's like you're actually L.A.
Guest:You're in the mix in Hollywood.
Guest:You win a Grammy, it's like you're...
Guest:Yeah, and at that time... You're token LA people.
Marc:And yet, how did you reconcile selling out with what you were about to be doing?
Guest:Well, the thing that was nice about the TV stuff is that it was faceless.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It wasn't really... You weren't singing.
Guest:It was the reputation, by and large.
Guest:But I think we also just got over the notion of... We also did a whole string of Dunkin' Donuts ads.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And we were hired to basically do us.
Guest:It's like, we want you guys.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We weren't identified in the ads...
Guest:But people knew.
Guest:But my wife instantly, when she saw it, she was like.
Guest:But as a project, that was a blast.
Guest:Like, we were doing original.
Marc:I like Dunkin' Donuts.
Guest:Well, part of the thing that's fun about doing stuff like TV themes is if you're actually doing some.
Guest:It's one thing to, like, license your band's established hit and kind of, like, have somebody take your vibe and brand it on their thing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's something else to actually collaborate with people and make something new.
Guest:It's fun to make something new.
Marc:Yeah, and also if you can confidently be okay with the product, it's just part of the work on some level.
Marc:It's like this is another revenue stream, and someone's got to compose this stuff, and there is challenges to it that I think ultimately inform other things.
Guest:Well, but also, just to get right down to it, if there was ever a band that was part of television, I mean, They Might Be Giants is clearly a band that has watched television.
Guest:That's how you're going to reconcile it.
Guest:We are television.
Guest:No, but I mean, just like growing up with- We can't sell out because we're in.
Guest:We're inside the television.
Guest:I mean, just like, you know, growing up with like the Twilight Zone theme, growing up with like TV music.
Guest:It's such a part of your consciousness.
Guest:I think it's a very personal thing to decide what your threshold for being compromised artistically is.
Guest:There's a ton of things we definitely don't do.
Guest:It's something you feel and you know it when you feel it, but it's hard to define it.
Guest:Yeah, I think so.
Guest:Well, even there's a concept that comes up on this show a lot, which is like being liked the wrong way, which I think is a really interesting idea because I think it's especially true of, I mean, I know that comedians, like they'll feel like it's like they were laughing, but they were laughing the wrong way.
Guest:I think musicians are even more tuned into that idea.
Guest:Like you really want to be liked.
Guest:Just it's got to be right.
Guest:It's got to be the right way.
Marc:Yeah, but if you're like, you know, Bruce Springsteen,
Marc:And you've got some Yahoo meathead fans.
Guest:Oh, I hadn't thought about that.
Marc:You're going to have to make peace with that a little bit.
Marc:Because I went to a Cold Steady show years ago.
Guest:I would never think about that.
Guest:I just met him.
Guest:He's such a nice man.
Guest:Oh, he's great.
Marc:But there is an element.
Marc:There's a broad sort of poetic element to the Bruce oeuvre.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So, you know, like, you know, the working class, you know, what he means to people and it transcends politics.
Marc:But, you know, I went to a whole study show at South by Southwest early on before I even knew who they were.
Marc:And I'm like looking at some of these people and I'm like this, you know, Craig is such a sensitive, thoughtful kind of embrace.
Marc:And like, these guys are frat guys.
Marc:And, you know, there's got to be an element like, no, there they are again.
Guest:Is that really true?
Guest:I would think the whole steady audience would be the highest percentage of lit majors.
Marc:Yeah, dude.
Marc:I mean, that album that got big for them was a big record.
Marc:It was a big college record.
Marc:I mean, Cobain talked about it, too.
Marc:He wrote a fucking song about it.
Guest:right that you know that these people aren't going to understand the poetry or the sensitivity or even the tone i feel like what you're doing i feel like i shield myself i mean if there is an element of of people yeah i don't know if they i don't know that you guys have them i don't know although we do have a thing online where if we ever say like you know i'm really interested in like evolution and somebody there's somebody who oh yeah twitter feed who's like i thought you guys were cool
Guest:right the YouTube comments on like anything related to science is like on anything forget it on anything period so we talked a little bit about like about the children stuff but wait what is the do you have a relationship with Disney not now we did we put out in the O's we did three projects we did a bunch of kids projects for DVDs for Disney and they were themed they asked you yeah yeah after the first album the first kids album like took off like they were like very very interested in working with us and what happened to that
Guest:It was good.
Guest:It was great.
Guest:It was a fun thing.
Marc:Was it fun to be part of that legacy in a way?
Guest:Well, the president of Disney was this nutty rogue dude named David Agnew who was just basically sticking his neck out for us because he allowed us to do it our own way.
Guest:So it really didn't feel like the mouse's three fingers were pushing down on our heads.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We had total control over everything, and David made sure that that was what it was.
Guest:So we were in a very unique spot.
Guest:Previously, we had done... It's a big difference to work for Disney and then work with Disney.
Guest:There's a big distinction to be made.
Guest:And we had actually did some job that I think technically we were fired from for some Disney animated movie, and they just were like...
Guest:we don't like this at all.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Please revise this.
Marc:God, that would seem like, whether it's Disney or not, it would seem like you guys could do almost all the music for, you could be like the new Randy Newmans for Pixar and stuff.
Marc:Say that one more time.
Marc:You guys could be the next Randy Newmans.
Guest:We just did this song for the SpongeBob musical, and they did a very great bunch of staging for it.
Guest:It really turns it into a big number in the show.
Guest:And it's very gratifying.
Guest:We're-
Guest:We're in this amazing company of like, you know, like David Bowie did a song for it and like there's an Aerosmith song.
Guest:And so there's all these like big deal show business people in it.
Guest:And, but it was nice that like we actually got a chance to be part of it.
Guest:I mean, we're, you know, we're, you know, we're essentially, you know, still an indie act.
Guest:So.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you're open to doing that kind of stuff.
Guest:Well, we'd love to do more stuff where we just send them the demo and then we get to just sit around the house.
Guest:We're especially into the big money stuff.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you'd like to do big money stuff where you don't have to travel.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And also that's easy.
Guest:Easy.
Marc:Easy's good.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:How do you get those things?
Guest:How do we get that job?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Maybe someone will hear this and say, like, we have just the kind of thing where you can sit down and make a lot of money.
Marc:I also wanted to mention Netflix.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:You need some Netflix money?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's funny how, like, these, if you're around long enough, you see these cycles of crazy money happening.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I feel like right now it's, like, especially crazy money time.
Guest:For some people.
Guest:For all these things.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:For Netflix.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, I'm just happy to be making a living.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Ultimately.
Guest:I think we're all, you know, everybody's in it for the long haul.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, you know, like, I remember when, like, all the dot-com first generation stuff came around.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we would get, like, you know, flown out to L.A.
Guest:and, like, get some tour of some weird, or San Francisco.
Guest:I mean, like, some place that's, every single thing is white.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, like, there's a guy.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:There's a non-disclosure agreement.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just to go in the house.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And, you know, it's like, who did that?
Marc:Mr. Show did such a great riff on that with Dave Cross playing the guy who invented the deletes.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And the goats and the Tofutti breaks.
Marc:That was genius.
Guest:The amount of venom that he has for this is very satisfying.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, hopefully there'll be more good times like that ahead.
Marc:Sure, more free money, you're hoping for.
Guest:More delete buttons.
Marc:It'll be some Bitcoin-y thing, probably.
Marc:I don't even know where you buy those or how you get your money back.
Guest:You gotta get on the dark web.
Marc:I'm not.
Marc:Okay, that's it.
Marc:That's where I get my drugs.
Marc:Oh, see?
Marc:Mom, you waited till the end.
Marc:Yeah, she's got bored.
Marc:She stopped listening.
Marc:Now we can talk.
Marc:Okay, so what's going on?
Marc:You got a new record, or it just came out in January?
Guest:Yes.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:What's that one called?
Guest:It's called I Like Fun.
Marc:And it's your 39th record?
Guest:39th.
Guest:Yep, yep.
Guest:49th.
Guest:But what's weird, and speaking of things going in cycles, is it's getting really good reviews.
Guest:Like four records ago, we had a record that got really good reviews, and this one's getting really good reviews, too.
Guest:So we're just riding the good vibes of the good reviews.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, good.
Marc:It is a lot of records.
Marc:Are you doing another kid's record?
Guest:No.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:You said that very quickly.
Guest:Who knows?
Guest:It's over.
Guest:No more.
Marc:Who could say, Mark?
Marc:Who could say?
Marc:If the money was right and it didn't take a lot of work.
Guest:You see, the problem is that we have a commitment to quality.
Marc:Oh, see, that's what's going to be the- That's what's slowing us down.
Marc:That's the rub, man.
Guest:That is the rub.
Marc:For the simple, easy, huge money on the couch.
Guest:Well, I mean, the SpongeBob was a great nexus of the quality was good, and it was an easy thing.
Marc:Look, I have complete confidence, you guys, to continue on.
Marc:You seem well.
Marc:Well, congratulations to you on all your stuff.
Marc:Well, thank you.
Marc:It was a long time coming.
Guest:It was.
Marc:And I'm almost enjoying it.
Marc:I like the happy mark.
Marc:Oh, boy.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Are you coming out to New York anytime?
Marc:I was going to come out in a couple of weeks.
Marc:Let's have an overpriced meal together.
Marc:Yeah, we'll do it.
Marc:Let's get the artists together.
Marc:Our treat.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Excellent.
Marc:Deal.
Marc:Thanks, Johns.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:All right.
Marc:That was that.
Marc:That was them.
Marc:That was They Might Be Giants.
Marc:That was fun, though, right?
Marc:They feel like old friends to me.
Marc:You know, they've been around.
Marc:Their music has been around.
Marc:They developed with me in their thing, and I developed over here in my thing, and occasionally I'd listen to their music, and then I got to talk to them.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Well, before I go for the last time talking in this garage, we're about two weeks away from my a few parts of the world tour in Europe.
Marc:Go to WTF pod dot com slash tour to get venue and ticket information for London, Stockholm, Oslo, Amsterdam and Dublin, Dublin.
Marc:And I guess I'll try to play a little guitar.
Marc:I don't have much equipment here, but I might as well play guitar for the last time in here.
Guest:Oh, no.
OK.
Guest:you you
.
Guest:.
Guest:Boomer Lives!