I SAW THIS DOCUMENTARY

John: I met AJ at a show. He was a rep for a video company called Moxie. This was back in ‘92 or ‘93. I had just done some videos for Frank Black, and one of them was on heavy rotation on MTV. At that point video production was a boom business, and it was very different for somebody who wasn’t working the commercial side of things to have videos doing that well on the air. So, he basically approached me about being one of the directors for Moxie, and I was intrigued about directing videos for other bands. We worked on a number of different jobs together, with both of us on the other side of the camera. We did a couple of TMBG videos, Soul Coughing, and Ben Folds Five—we did one for Edwyn Collins, which was actually a big hit. (Starts singing: Never met a girl like you before....)

Shirley: We shot that in New York City ... that was the first time I spent time with John. Consequently, we worked with him on Soul Coughing in a small town in Pennsylvania ... and the friendship grew from those experiences. And I think that the first time I met Linnell was at a taping of "The Larry Sanders Show," when they were performing “SEXXY” (from the album Factory Showroom).

            I actually studied acting and theatre but always had a knack for pulling off some sort of event, or pulling people together for some crazy idea I had. That naturally translated into producing. Around the time we started Bonfire we had several friends that had just started their own businesses, a graphics company, a flower design company, and we had the crazy idea that we could, too. I look back on that now and say thank God we didn’t really know too much. We just had that enthusiasm that saw us through. I mean, we started Bonfire with 5,000 bucks ... a lot of things could have gone wrong!

AJ: It was all just a big coincidence. I had gone to see them at this show they played years ago, and had I not gone to that show, the movie probably never would have been made. I had wanted to do a feature film; I’d done a short, and I was really excited to do a long form project. The short was a narrative film called Might As Well Be Swing, and it played in Seattle at Bumbershoot (2001). Shirley and I love Seattle, it’s probably our favorite town. Might was sort of a take off on Bob & Ted & Carol & Alice. I had seen that play late at night on cable. It’s a very funny film, but there’s a really strange moment at the end when the four of them are in bed together—it gets sort of deathly serious. And I thought it was too bad that that scene wasn’t as funny, as farcical as the rest of the movie.

            Anyways, I went to see TMBG’s show, and I just started thinking about them, not just in terms of my own history of having been a fan when they were starting up, but more about the fact that they’d lasted for a long time in the music business. And they were so unique, and the things they were doing were so unusual.... You can’t say that there’s a lot of bands quite like them. I’m big on being an independent artist, or praising people who find ways of doing it themselves. And they really sort of epitomized that. There were just a lot of things that made the idea seem appealing.

            And like a lot of ideas I have, I need to revisit them a day or two later and say, "Was I just drunk when I had that idea? Or was it really a good idea?” The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the whole notion would be entertaining. Before this, my wife Shirley and I had produced about a hundred music videos, including “What's My Age Again?” and “All The Small Things” for Blink 182. So, we made enough money to do Gigantic—which is all gone now!

John: And then, over time, working together, we became friends. AJ eventually approached me about being in Gigantic, which surprised me. Not that I didn’t think we were deserving in some abstract way—we’d been around a long time as a band, and are an interesting band as far as bands go—but we hadn’t really ... a lot of our friendship was about outside things. The stuff I did with AJ wasn’t usually that TMBG oriented. And I don’t know, it seemed unlikely that we’d be the subject of a movie. In part because we didn’t really push our story forward that much in promoting the band. We don’t usually put our pictures on our own records!

            BIG CRACKPOT REALISM

AJ: It was hard to know what to expect in terms of reactions to Gigantic. There were fans out there and people who really loved them, and I thought it would be a pretty nice thing to have. I guess I thought maybe we would play in a theatre in four cities or something, before it would come out on video or DVD. Now we’re coming up on our 75th city or something in theaters, so it was more than we ever could have hoped for.

John: When [AJ] first approached us, I just didn’t think the project was going to get off the ground! (Laughs.) Just because it seems so ambitious, so unlikely—that it would be so hard to sell. He seemed to think that there was something there that would drive the film, and you know, I was sort of excited. And I kind of dreaded the idea a little bit. We’re not the kind of people who if we perform on television we run home and stare at ourselves, you know?

            I think having worked with him, I trusted him, but the thing that concerned me most was that because we’ve been involved in rock videos—[it is] not the most idealistic end of the music business. It’s more about image making. It’s about making mortally attractive people seem like they have more going on than that, a lot of times.

            A lot of my conversations with AJ before we made the movie were very practical. My concern was that I didn’t want it to be an editorial on the shallowness of the record industry, which I didn’t think was an exciting through-line for a film about any band. I had no idea what it was going to be like, but I was impressed that the real through-line of the movie was the power of friendship, and commitment, and collaboration over an idea.

            As far as I can tell, the two reasons that John and I are in a band after 20 years are much smaller and more specific than getting a Grammy or getting a song featured in a movie, and are the fact that we really do get along, and that we’ve always gone over as a live band in a very immediate way. Those are the kinds of things I’ve found that are very uncommon. Most bands’ live shows are just kind of OK, and we’ve just been lucky that we click so well together on stage, without working particularly hard at it.

Sarah: I have probably seen TMBG more than any other band, except for maybe the Waco Brothers and Jonathan Richman. I was a rock critic for a few years, and reviewed a lot of shows. But I remember feeling really relieved when I read something rock critic Chuck Eddy once wrote. He said that he stopped going to concerts for awhile because all he was doing was standing there waiting for them to be over. I like my apartment. I’ll leave it to stand in a dark, crowded, smoky, sweaty room for a few hours, but only if I care.

John: AJ made his intentions clear when he proposed the movie (i.e. not a straight documentary, but capturing the idea of TMBG), but what people say they’ll do and what they end up doing are often very different things. I was really surprised at the end of it, how close it was to his original intentions. He actually really did make the movie he set out to make, to tell the story he saw. But until I saw the movie, I didn’t quite get it.

            I think the movie tells larger truths about our projects, the larger truths of our intentions. John and I have been very ambitious about how to deal with what this band is capable of. John and I are guys who could be in a party band. When we get together we have fun and laugh really hard, and could have done something a lot less ambitious artistically than the one we ended up doing. Our friendship is not that different than a lot of other people’s friendships ... but I think that at some point early on we decided to do something a little bit beyond, a little bit special.

            When we were in our mid-20s and starting this band, we had other friends in bands who were really trying to make it. I’m sure you know people who are in bands too who are trying to “crack the code” of popular music, and figure out what the next big thing is going to be. We knew a lot of people who were sort of hung up on that kind of stuff, preoccupied with those kinds of things, and it’s not an unreasonable thing. I mean, if you want to pay for your rehearsal space, you gotta have something to go on, or you’re just spending all your spare money on your band. And you sort of want to think it will move forward.

            I think we took a very opposite tact—this band is never going to make it, this band is totally a personal project, we’re going to take the lowest road imaginable, and basically give up becoming commercially viable immediately. Let’s just make the most interesting songs we can think of, make these songs for ourselves. And I think if we have an interesting time, it will be worth it, even if nothing comes of it. And maybe, if we're lucky, we’ll find an audience for what we do.

IMPORTANT IN YOUR LIFE

AJ: It’s great watching an artist turn a corner, from being a band that you heard of, that reached a peak of their time, but now they’ve reached the point of being perennial artists, and people are starting to re-look at what they do, and what was important about them, and what was and is interesting about them. And I think the notion that they’re ever going to go away, or stop making music, even people who don’t like them, or wish they were different, have realized that they’re stuck with them. They’re not going away.

Sarah: One thing I do like about them is the way the culture filters in and out of their songs. And by “the culture” I mean, simply living here. Frequently, pop music is so universal because most pop songs are about love, which is the same in Finland or Angola. TMBG’s songs take place here in the United States. I love how “Purple Toupee” (Lincoln) hints at the way children process the news, lumping Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X into “Martin X.”

John: We’re very abstract. We’re very committed to what we’re doing, and very sincere. I just think—I don’t know what that means, when you’re writing a song from the perspective of a dictator—what does it mean? And also, you know, there’s an element of humor in what we do, an elliptical quality. There are people who, and I could see why this happens, but they are suspicious of what they may see as an “inside joke” way of working, which is actually worlds away from anything that we would be interested in. We would be disgusted with ourselves if we thought we were “getting over” in that way. I mean, honestly, making our first recordings, and figuring out how things would be held up to repeated listening was such a big challenge for us. If it doesn’t live up to repeated listening, what’s the point to it for us?

            Jonathan Richman came from the same western suburbs of Boston that we’re from, and the song “Roadrunner” was actually kind of a local radio hit, on WCBN in the early 70s. I probably heard “Roadrunner” more than I ever heard the Velvet Underground. The VU were resurrected by rock critics at the dawn of punk rock, they became much more relevant again ... in that way that things kind of ebb and flow. I came to find out more about the VU retroactively after finding out about Jonathan Richman. But I love him. He’s a genius. There’s something very brave about how his songs evolved. He started out kind of a miniature tough guy, and kind of evolved into.... There are two parts of his career that he sort of lived through. When the second album (Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers, 1977) came out, with “New England” and those songs on it, it was sort of a new challenge.

            Even the cover—the striped shirt he’s wearing, it’s like what people wear on sailboats. The photograph was taken in one of those portrait studios that’s on Newbury Street in Boston, like where your parents get their anniversary photographs taken. I forget the name of the place.... But there’s something so extraordinarily earthbound about it, as a New Englander. It’s just super-extra normal. Having your photo taken in that studio was just the absolute opposite of cool. It was like the most knowable thing. That studio has photographs outside it, blown up, that look almost exactly like the cover, that just look like civilian people.

            So to see an album cover that looked like that, it was like, “I could be anybody walking down the street.” It was very mysterious. It suddenly made the whole world seem a lot more interesting.

            When I play things of his for people who are not partial to it, they always seem like they’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. And in some ways, it feels like maybe that's.... I’ve always noticed—we tend to get two kinds of reviews. We get people who just hate us because we’re not cool enough, and we don’t fit into their emotionally arrested ideas of how tough rock music should be. Which I find tedious, but of course everybody hates bad reviews! Or we get those who love us, just for the stuff that we do, and they get it. But when we get mixed reviews I’m always kind of interested, because what generates the mixed reviews, or the qualified reviews, is like this sort of strange suspiciousness of our actual intentions. One thing that’s sort of nice about sticking to our guns the way we have is that some of that has fallen away.

            Some people thought that we could be so on top that they would be subjected to a song of ours far more often than they would ever want to hear it. You know, because we write melodic songs. Well, melody is a very powerful secret weapon in music, and in the wrong hands it’s a very dangerous thing. People would sometimes say, “Oh, they could have huge hits if they wanted to,” but I sort of felt like the way people talked about it was as if we had an atomic bomb strapped to our chests, and were ready to blow it off at any moment....

Sarah: Well, I suppose [TMBG and Jonathan Richman] have that good-natured Massachusetts connection, and an inventive use of language. But I actually think Jonathan Richman reminds me more of Jerry Lee Lewis. He’s such a singular individual, sort of mythic and above the fray. “I’m going to meet you on the Astral Plane,” he used to sing, and that’s where I think of him. The Giants, for all of their lyrical flights of fancy, seem more realistic, maybe because of Brooklyn. They’re not the “Astral Plane” to me. They’re the first stop on the “L” train.

AJ: TMBG, like David Byrne and Jonathan Richman, all have a literary quality about them. That’s one of the reasons they can survive—that’s always going to be interesting. Not all music has to grab you by the crotch. Some of it can get in your brain and stimulate your senses. It can rock out, but it doesn’t have to aim below the belt (in more than hypothetical terms). I’m suspicious of people who need it to be one way or the other.

John: We all live in the world, the physical limitations of the physical world are real. It’s hard to get away from gravity, it’s hard to get away from consciousness. All of those things tether us to reality. And I think that when art is really successful that we can somehow be free of those things. And that’s a very magical thing. You’re basically taking common things and seeing them again for the first time. In any good art, you see common things reanimated in a way that makes you reconsider them. You know, like Shakespeare is really tragic and funny, and all those things, but the main thing about Shakespeare is that you hear the words and you didn’t understand that the words could be reorganized in such a powerful way.

            Yeah, there was something unpretentious about that Boston scene. In some ways, I’m not sure we could have been a Boston band. I felt like we had to get away from Boston a little bit to “get our freak on” with the project, because we were interested in more over-the-top theatrical ideas, and how the songs would work. And it wouldn’t be in keeping with the Boston thing. In a way, Jonathan Richman did everything we could have done in the context of the Boston rock scene ... like Willie Alexander, something more straight ahead.

CONTINUE: Read Part 3