A mere five days after driving up and back to see the Cure in Sacramento, we drove the extra couple of hours into the City to see They Might be Giants for the first time.
I am pretty sure this show was just CF, PCH and I – I don’t remember anyone else joining us. In any case, it seems that would be appropriate because other than Depeche Mode, I don’t think there is any other band that unites our friendship like TMBG.
When we all first started getting CD players, CF bought a copy of Lincoln, their second album, on a whim at the CD store across the street from my condo in Reno. I am not positive, but I think it might have been the first CD he ever bought – and if it wasn’t, it was in the first five or so. To this day I’m not sure why he bought it, I guess he heard one of the songs somewhere and thought it was cool. We were all college students, so it took a while to really start building up a critical mass of discs…needless to say we listened to that disc constantly for several months.
TMBG were different from any band I had ever heard before. Silly lyrics, goofy music, just generally happy, fun stuff to hear at any time of day. Listening to it for the first time was very bizarre – after listening to all these tragically hip, gothy 80s bands, hearing lyrics like – “We’re going down to Cowtown, the cow’s a friend to me. Lives beneath the ocean, that’s where I will be….I’m going to see the cow beneath the sea,” was kind of a relief in a way. Plus the two Johns were just plain cool. They used to (and perhaps still do) have a Dial-A-Song answering machine you could call in Brooklyn any time to hear some snippet of music or perhaps even a real new song. They didn’t look or act like rock stars; they were just two geeks with Macs having a good time.
A year or so later, during one of our road trips to the Beat in Sacramento to get music, PCH brought along his CD stereo (or ghetto blaster) in the back seat of his Subaru wagon and he bought the new TMBG album, Flood, and we listened to it a couple of times just on the trip back to Reno. That is the album that made TMBG famous – with Birdhouse in your Soul, Istanbul Not Constantinople, and Particle Man – and we listened to it to death. I think to this day I probably still know most every lyric from Lincoln, Flood and Apollo 18 and can recite them on demand. There’s a lot of construction around here lately and the other day I caught myself singing “They’ll need a crane” to myself.
This was also my first show at the Warfield, which is a pretty cool theater on Market Street in San Francisco. It was kind of strange, there were a lot of tables so it made it hard to crowd up to the front to dance, but we managed. I remember there being a really diverse crowd for a concert – people of all ages, shapes, sizes and styles. Lots of geeks and misfits too.
The show was a blast, of course, and definitely lived up to our expectations. Towards the end we learned they were going to come back for a free concert in Union Square in the fall, and PCH locked that away in his memory bank. It was the first of several TMBG shows for me, and even though I haven’t followed their music much these days, I would never hesitate to see them live anytime, anywhere.
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