Put a Little Soul in Your Birdhouse

They Might Be Giants are upright citizens.

John Flansburg in Command yellow, while John Linnel risks Engineering Red. Photos by Chris X Carroll

In the mid-eighties, Spy Magazine served as a must-read bible of salty irreverence. Its editors and writers took particularly malicious joy in skewering the tabloid fly-trap and bon-vivant Donald Trump, even then the most ridiculous person alive. “Short-fingered vulgarian” was the memorable phrase they coined, which apparently annoys That Man to this day. Other terrific features were things like the centerfold map of different obscure locations (“Best Places to Bang in NYC” or “Best Publically Accessible Bathrooms”) and hilarious satire taking the stuffing out of the self-satisfied rich and famous. Their motto was “Smart, Funny, Fearless.” Not sure about the latter, but Spy had the first two, in spades.

Spy also had a particularly unique design style that involved running myriad photos of celebs, silhouetted on white seamless, but then dropped onto random pages in impossibly tiny size: like literally a quarter-inch tall. One landmark for a magazine photographer in those days was how large your photos were to appear. The holy grail was a magazine cover, but close behind was a spread or at least a full-page rendering. One generally started by shooting “back of the book” articles, where the photo would run a quarter page or less. Then you’d make the jump to features, aspiring to a cover.

Spy called to assign me to shoot They Might Be Giants, the only band with a cooler name than When People Were Shorter and Lived Near the Water. This was exciting, ‘cause Spy. And unusual, ‘cause Spy mostly used paparazzi shots where the subjects looked terrible.

The magazine would require shots in the studio, on white seamless that their art directors could silo to appear without background. No problem, I shot on white a lot back then, so I made arrangements to shoot in my studio (the one on 14th Street I haven’t told you about yet). Oh, one more thing, they would have to be hanging upside down. Ohhhkay, well, never done that before, but shouldn’t be too hard. Right?

No really, what could go wrong? John Flansburgh endures the vagaries of the head rush for art.

Oh, and one more thing: all this fuss and mishegas to hang a couple rock stars upside down was to yield pictures in the magazine that were a quarter to half. Quarter to half pages, you ask? Nope, inches. And the Giants, grand name notwithstanding, must have been doing any damn publicity they could wrangle, to put up with the indignity of being hung upside down merely to appear at a quarter-inch size in a page gutter. And before you ask me, yes I looked in the basement, and no, I don’t appear to have kept this tearsheet. So you’ll just have to trust me and my notoriously terrible memory.

Meanwhile, we were hanging our rock duo upside down, on white seamless, over a solid wooden floor. Lucky I didn’t have a lawyer in those days, as he would have probably pointedly asked if I’d gotten insurance when I put that lawyer on staff. Otto Von Bismark is reputed to have said, “God loves fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” Not much of a drinker, certainly not much of a nation, but I’ll cop to the first item in that Bismarckian list. Luckily, this fool got through the shoot without breaking any necks, and presently adjourned outside to Hudson River-side for some more normal shots. Spy may have required this white seamless upside down thing, but it sure didn’t seem like there would be much other call for those shots. So we hied out to the pier with guitars (and accordions) and made some more “normal” shots. After the fuss in the studio, we all were relieved to just be able to hang out and make some pictures. And John and John (Flansburgh and Linnel) turned out to be super nice guys.

John Linnell cries uncle even before the accordian solo.

I was about to tell you about this hilarious thing TMBG did in the eighties, Dial-a-Song. This was an answering machine in Flansburgh’s apartment that offered a new song (almost every day) in place of a message. But the internet tells me it ran from 1983-2006. Even better, it came back in 2014 and even better still, IS STILL RUNNING. 844-387-6962.

You might imagine that the type of guys who would conceive of and then implement such a scheme would be Fun, Funny, and Fearless, as Spy would have you believe. And you’d be right. After that first episode with the upside-down thing, I photographed Johns Linnel and Flansburgh several more times. One time I joined them at their kitchen table (don’t remember whose) and they gave me that TMBG gas pump mug, full of hot strong coffee, which I treasure to this day. We laughed, reminiscing about the time I hung them upside down (“Look Ma, no broken vertebrae!”) and generally agreed it was a lot more fun just making “normal” pictures. Linnel in particular, plays saxophones, accordions, and other non-guitar instruments which make for some great visuals.

I believe that device in the center of this charming domestic scene might well be the infamous Dial-A-Song

And man, who knew? The Giants have continued making music for decades, including “kids music” that our family relished. Though neither Giant has kids, they nonetheless released some of the best music for families we’d ever heard. There is this one song, “Don’t Cross the Street in the Middle of the Block,” sung by a woman (odd, TMBG has always been two dudes, even though they often collaborated with others) with an amazing lustrous vocal style that really reminded me of something playing out of a haunted victrola bearing gifts from beyond time. Check the album, and the song is credited to Robin Goldwasser. Must be plenty of those – I even went to college with one. Oh, wait, what? – this amazing vocal performance came out of someone I’d last encountered as a goofy kid in college. That can’t be! But oh yes, of course, it is THE Robin Goldwasser, who had graduated Sarah Lawrence and gone on to some serious training in the vocal arts. And then married John Flansburgh, where she appears occasionally on TMBG records. Currently listening to her fabulous purring as I drive down the highway in my new electric Volvo blasting the now-eponymous TMBG number, “Electric Car, with Goldwasser on scintillating vocals.”

And the Giants? Well, they’re still doing their thing, the Dial A Song gets updated regularly, they tour and release records (remember those?). And are still nice guys who would give you the coffee cup off their table without missing a beat. Rock on.