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Now for something different. Sam and I managed to hit just about every genre of rock this week. First the jam band (Phish), then arena rock (Muse), the new kids on the block (just joking, Backseat Lovers) and now we have the 90’s college/modern alt-rock. At least my college alt-rock. In the late 80’s and early 90’s I was into early REM and U2 before they sold out to the man (as opposed to TMBG who sang a song in the concert from their album “Mink Car” called “Working Undercover For The Man”). I always liked TMBG but was never what you would call a super-fan. TMBG were more witty and eclectic than either of the other examples though and surprisingly (to me) the music has held up well and even gained a new generation of fans. Sam, as an example. It was a very diverse audience.
This tour was billed as the 30th anniversary of TMBG seminal record, Flood. Now, that record was released in 1990 and the tour was scheduled for 2020. The plan was to play the record in it’s entirety. How did that work out? Well, you know. Covid and whatnot. The Seattle date ended up getting postponed three times. John (the main band is comprised of John Flansburgh and John Linnell but for purposes of this conversation it’s irrelevant which John said what…) jokingly thanked the crowd for their organization because, he said, if he had been a ticket holder he would have long ago lost his tickets and never made it to the show.
This three year delay matters because Sam wanted to go in the worst way when the tour was announced but there was a 16 year old age requirement to attend and he was 14 at the time. We don’t know why the age restriction but assume it’s because TMBG have released several kid focused records and they probably wanted to make sure that parents realized none of that was what this tour is about. Anyway, Sam couldn’t go in ’20 but due to the constant delays has no such problem now. There were two sold out shows at the Neptune Theater but there are only so many nights in the week so we just attended one show. That and the shows were probably very similar, not like Phish where every night is completely different.
Much of TMBG music is humorous, bordering on absurd. This is not a bad thing. They’re just plain fun and the concert was a blast. After almost every song they would stop and banter back and forth, maybe to tell a story about the upcoming song or just ruminate on life. One of the Johns told about walking from the hotel they’re staying at in Seattle to the theater and seeing a guy pulling some sort of cart down the street that had a cover over it and for some reason he had a bubble machine inside of it and the cart was streaming bubbles out the back. John had posted a picture on social media, which Sam had noticed and told me about prior to the show so we know he was telling the truth.
They played two sets (no opening act due to them wanting to stay true to the catch phrase, “An evening with TMBG”). As the last song in the first set they played a song backwards and recorded it and then after the intermission, as the first song in the second set, played the recording in reverse (so now it’s forward, get it?). Either way was nonsense and utterly unintelligible (to me, Sam could make out the lyrics just fine) but good fun. Another example, in the early ’90’s they had recorded a song called “Fingertips”. CD’s were new technology at the time as was the concept of being able to shuffle the songs so the CD played in random order. The song was broken into 21 tracks which functioned as little stand-alone snippets, most only a few seconds long. The joke was that if you played the CD on random then the song was broken into pieces and would be interspersed among the other full-length songs on the CD. They played “Fingertips” as one of the last songs in it’s correct order…
Three years in the making but well worth it.
[…] in the middle somewhere you have bands like They Might Be Giants, who Sam and I went to see a couple of weeks ago, and Crowded House. These bands have a solid fan […]