Touch the Puppet Head—Live!

Back in 1986, when I first heard the very first They Might be Giants album, I had no idea that a) they would still be around 20 years hence, and b) I would still like them. And yet, here it is, 2007, and They are still going strong, are getting even better, and I still like them as much, if not more, than I did two decades earlier.

So last Friday, I ventured out to Boston to see They Might Be Giants live at the Roxy with Robert and Kristin. (That is, I went to the show with Robert and Kristin, and it was not the case that Robert and Kristin were playing with the band.) I had first seen They back in 1990 at the Beacon Theater in New York, when They had first started playing with a backing band (rather than a rhythm machine). I saw them about three or four times more over the years, as They would often play concerts in Central Park or Prospect Park in Brooklyn. I had last seen They in 1998 at the House of Blues in L.A.

As always, They put on a great show. With the giant cardboard head of longtime TMBG “mascot” William Allen White (a renowned newspaper editor chosen simply because he looked like the quintessential “old guy”), they played most of the new album The Else, a fair number of songs from their previous album (2004’s The Spine) and a smattering of songs from throughout their prolific career (my iTunes lists 349 songs, which includes just about everything they have released).

Almost every album was represented (even the “kids’ album” Here Come the ABCs), except John Henry (my least favorite album of theirs) and No! (their first kids’ album, although “Four of Two” and “Where Do They Make Balloons?” are quintessential TMBG songs and would have fit perfectly in their live set).

The Johns (Linnell and Flansburgh, the core of TMBG) are personable and funny and have always been ones for various onstage antics and weird props. For years, they would have a segment where they solicited requests from the audience, which usually comprised non-TMBG songs (at the 1990 Beacon show, someone yelled out “Le Marseillaise” which yielded a lot of accordion playing and gibbering in something that sounded like French).

This time, they took the audience request segment to a new dimension (literally) and featured “Phone Calls from the Dead” where they channeled the ghost of Ernie Boch, (who was apparently the P.T. Barnum of the automotive world and something of a local celebrity in the Boston area) who requested Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way.” Ernie Boch returned later in the show during a segment called “Ernie Boch vs. Skeleton Arm" that somehow segued into “Particle Man.”

The intro to the song “Drink!” also asked the audience of “interventioneers” to respond to the word “drink” when sung by yelling “No, stop!”. Since we were staked out at the bar, we were a fine bunch to advocate temperance.

Anyway, the complete set list was as follows:

• "The Cap’m" (“People seem to think you can’t be called the cap’m unless you drive a boat”) —from The Else (2007)
• "Damn Good Times" (“I got a friend who’s got a record machine/She acts like David Lee Roth before he turned 21”) —from The Spine (2004)
• "The Mesopotamians" (“Sargon, Hammurabi, Asurbanipal, and Gilgameth”) —from The Else (2007)
• "Take Out the Trash" (“And once you get him out tell him not to come back again”) —from The Else (2007)
• "Don’t Let’s Start" (“No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful”) —from They Might Be Giants (1986)
• "XTC vs. Adam Ant" (“Even the singer from Bow Wow Wow can’t make up her mind”) —from the horribly underrated Factory Showroom (1996)
• "It’s Not My Birthday" (“It’s not my birthday so why do you lunge out at me?”) —from the B side of the “They’ll Need a Crane” single (1988)
• "Drink!" (“I’ll take back my pinata, it’s wasted on you”) —from Mink Car (2001)
• "Alphabet of Nations" ("Algeria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Dominica, Egypt, France, The Gambia, Hungary, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, Libya and Mongolia, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Suriname, Turkey, Uruguay, Vietnam, West Xylophone, Yemen, Zimbabwe”) —from Here Come the ABCs (2004)
• "E Eats Everything" (“A hardly has an appetite and pokes at food too long/and B can barely bother because all the food is wrong”) —from Here Come the ABCs (2004)
• "Upside Down Frown" (“Black is white and the rainbow has a beard”) —from The Else (2007)
• "Memo to Human Resources" (“I’m searching for some disbelief that I can still suspend”) —from The Spine (2004)
• "I’m Impressed" (“I’m impressed, I’m impressed when that gorilla pounds his desk”) —from The Else (2007)
• "Mammal" (“So the warm blood flows/with the red blood cells lacking nuclei/through the large four-chambered heart/Maintaining the very high metabolism rate they have”) —from my favorite TMBG album Apollo 18 (1992)
• "Mr. Me" (“So take the hand of Mister Me and mister, make him glad/To swim the Mister Misty Sea and cease the Mister Mystery/That mister, made him sad”) —from Lincoln (1988)
• "Ant" (“One day that ant, he will grow up to be president”) —from the “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" EP (1990) and remade with a full band and new arrangement on the “Indestructible Object” EP (2004)
• "Museum of Idiots" (“If you and I had any brains we wouldn’t be in this place”) —from The Spine (2004)
• "With the Dark" (“My mind naturally turns to taxidermy”) —from The Else (2007)
• "Withered Hope" (“Today withered hope saw the very sad sack and she tried not to catch his eye”) —from The Else (2007)
• "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" (“If you’ve a date in Constantinople she’ll be waiting in Istanbul”) —from Flood (1990)
• "Bee of the Bird of the Moth" (“It’s just a hummingbird moth that’s acting like a bird that thinks it’s a bee”) —from The Else (2007)
• "Dr. Worm" (“I’m not a real doctor but I am a real worm”) —from Severe Tire Damage (1998)
• "Particle Man" (“When he’s underwater does he get wet/Or does the water get him instead?”) —from Flood (1990)
• Maybe I Know (unreleased)

Via the latest cutting edge cellphone technology, Robert was able to use his cellphone to capture small video snippets, including the "Ernie Boch vs. Skeleton Arm" segment of "Particle Man"...


and half of "Dr. Worm":