YOU'RE NOT SO BIG

AJ: I had been a fan of the band in college, and not that I stopped being a fan, but my music tastes are pretty wide. There’s very few bands or individual artists that I go crazy over, and they had been a band that had been a big part of my overall love for music. When I started researching the project, I did notice though this whole ‘nerd rock’ thing. I didn’t even know that’s how anyone viewed them. It’s this weird idea to me, knowing them and becoming friends with them—they’re not nerds....

            It’s an example of the sad state of rock criticism, that there’s such a need to portray yourself as a rock critic on the cutting edge—knowing what to do and what’s hip. That anything that’s been around for awhile, but hasn’t taken the world by storm, or is just in its own comfortable niche—you have to find a way to dismiss or belittle it.

John: Things have changed over the years. I remember being very excited by Lester Bangs as a teenager. There was something very breezy about his irreverence. But kind of like Led Zeppelin, there’s only one Lester. And just as it’s easy to love Led Zeppelin, it’s a horrible mistake to imitate Led Zeppelin. And Lester Bangs is also somebody who, in some weird way, is the worst thing that ever happened to rock criticism. I mean, ironically, he’s a very tough person to be influenced by, because most readers don’t have the kind of scope, or the knowledge, or the level of interest you really need to have.... I mean, speaking of inside jokes, there’s something about rock criticism that is like watching that Dennis Miller guy making a cultural reference that’s beamed off a satellite. Like, what does he know, what is he talking about? There’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t quite make sense.

            And also it never ceases to amaze me how narrow critics think audiences are. I mean, the people who go to see the Dixie Chicks buy Ozzie Osbourne records. You know? There’s an actual statistical overlap of audiences that could not exist according to the world of critics. They need to think of every artist having a cultural mandate to all other things. It’s like, “Ska music or death!” Like every band is a symbol of a lifestyle, or a mandate, and the reality is that bands are really small units of expression. And audiences can embrace a lot of different things, and hold all of them very close to their hearts, and they can almost be contradictory to one another. I mean, people have very different moods and interests, and they want to experience music more than one way. And critics will knock themselves out explaining to you how catholic their tastes are, like they’re all free and liberated, but nobody else is. Which I find incredibly irritating. (Laughs.)

AJ: If you look back to when TMBG was doing its thing in New York [in the 80s]—I mean, if you feel that the way people write about the Trachtenburg Family is glowing—people thought TMBG was the greatest rock thing happening. It was a surprise to me that anyone felt that [they were “nerd rock”]. I certainly wasn’t going to let that influence how I made the film. Other than just to say that’s not how I see them—this is how I see them. And people who watch it can take that or leave it. My feeling has always been, and it’s reinforced by looking at their career as a whole, that they give themselves true freedom to do whatever they want to do. They're not sitting around thinking, “How are our fans going to take this experiment that we’re going to try? How is someone going to respond to our desire to do ‘X’ or ‘Y’ or do a song that is in this particular genre?” They did some shows in New York recently in which their backups were a tuba, a trombone, a trumpet, and a drummer. And they did very strange versions of their songs. So, they’re always looking to challenge themselves, to do something in a new way. And I think that’s not that usual in the rock world. And I guess in a way that’s fucking with people, but I look at it more that they’re fucking with themselves.

John: We had a hard time finding our voice. We had a lot of different influences, and contrary impulses.... We cast around a long time to find what we were good at. When we started we had a lot of ugly improvisational aspects to what we did, which seemed really interesting at the time, but are actually pretty unlistenable. In a recorded way, it was sort of confusing, but in performance we would do some things that were very compelling in a theatrical way. When we tried to document or record them, they just didn’t add up to repeated listening. The more recordings we did, the more we realized the part where I scream for four minutes straight is really not cutting it. It would wear us out!

            Writing is such a strange activity, such a world unto itself. It’s hard to talk about anything but the actual task, the song at hand, the idea you’re trying to chisel away at—that’s enough to worry about that it keeps the idea of an audience pretty far away.

            In some ways, I consider the audience of John Linnell more present in my mind, because when we’re putting songs together he’s the first person to see whatever kind of idea I got. And John is a very musical guy, and he’s got a very sophisticated musical taste. When I’m writing, I’m trying to find a way to impress him. So, in some ways, John and my band mates, and my family and my friends, are really my audience.

            I’m very grateful that we have a hardcore following that’s very preoccupied with what we do. It’s very flattering. But at the same time, I’m not sure it’s a very good group of people to let steer your artistic vision. Because, you know, we’ve evolved a lot over the years as songwriters. And people are interested, and they’ll go with you on that journey, but they’re not going to lead the way. If they already like it, there’s something inherently conservative, or orthodox about the way they think of you, which is why you see the best, the most artistically ambitious songwriters sort of have this weird, arm’s-length relationship to their audience. We have respect for our audience the way that we have respect for strangers. We don’t know who they are, we’re not completely sure why we like them ... I mean, why they like us....

            It’s become fairly obvious to us that some people think that we’re a party band, and other people think we’re incredibly precious about what we do. And those ideas seem kind of contrary, as far as fans go.

            If it was up to us, to successfully do the band without our faces being attached in even the most basic way, I think we would be happy with that. I think that we feel to a certain extent keeping an anonymous image helps our music, keeps it a little more mysterious. A lot of our songs are kind of kind of character songs. They’re more like songs with an unreasonable point of view....

            I’ll give you a good example of when it doesn’t work. “Every Breath You Take,” according to Sting, is like a character song about a guy who is essentially a stalker, which is an interesting idea for a song. In some ways, it’s probably not that far removed from the impulse David Byrne had for “Psycho Killer.” When ‘Psycho Killer’ came out, nobody knew anything about the Talking Heads. I remember working in a record store, and a lot of people I worked with there found that song very disturbing, because they didn’t know who the Talking Heads were. They just knew there was this kind of creepy song by a guy who thought it would be interesting if he were a psycho killer. What’s strange is that the music of “Every Breath” maybe undercuts the lyrical impulse of the song, but also a lot of effort was made to make people, especially women, think that Sting was a very attractive fellow. And that’s in the way of the music, in a very direct way.

            John and I write some very lighthearted songs, some very elliptical songs, some very ambitious songs, and some very insignificant songs—we don’t think of them as being very significant—we write a lot of very different kinds of songs. But we have ambitions for the different ways we want to write. And we were aware very early on that if our faces were attached to our art—this band is essentially sold as “nice guys”—this could be an obstacle to keeping our music interesting. I’ve dedicated my entire life to the idea that people can put on these records, and be swept away in this very crazy, kaleidoscopic world of songs. We’re trying to create an experience that is very intense for the listener. Music doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You’ve got to make it.

            There’s more than one idea of thinking about what an audience is. Who is twenty rows back, and discovered the band five years ago, and kind of got into it? That’s the really important person. There are people, hardcore fans, who are so present in our lives I actually know who they are. We’re not trying to be like Barbara Mandrell — you can’t help but notice that there are some people who follow you around the country, that do that super-fan stuff. I don’t think this music is anymore theirs than it is for anybody who’s a less active listener. To me, what really guides our notion of audience is really quite abstract.

            I really like music a lot, and when I go to see bands I tend to stand in the back and I don’t dance, and I often don’t applaud between songs. I’m a terrible audience participant, because I’ll just sit there ... but then I go home and think about their songs for the next month, you know? I find seeing live music is incredibly powerful, it affects me in a really big way.

THE GERTRUDE STEIN MAP

AJ: I’d started out on my own by doing a Public Service Announcement for a Boys & Girls Town suicide prevention hotline. It was a coincidence that I started working in production and ended up doing music stuff, as I always wanted to be a filmmaker.

            I have to say that TMBG were incredibly generous to me by allowing me to make the film I wanted to make, despite the fact that it’s very, very unusual for them to have something come out that has their name on it that they aren’t controlling. They’ve never done that. Someone had come into one of their interviews and said that it wasn’t like them to let someone decide how they would be put across, or something like that. And I was like, “Interesting, because that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

            Gigantic is very much my own style, but I was certainly going to create something that was them. I wasn’t going to do this very sober project, because it would have seemed really strange that it wasn’t completely of their world. I think the thing the band is happiest about is ... how it conveyed who they are. The people who know them see the film and go, “Yeah, that’s them.” And I think they’re happy that it conveyed the specialness of their relationship with one another, and what they do together. Because I think that they view themselves individually as not particularly interesting or important, but that the work they’re doing together—their musical marriage—is worthwhile.

John: There are only a few things our image has been involved in—rock videos, live shows—and they’re very easy to control. It was a big leap of faith to have AJ do [Gigantic]! I think AJ captured us, and I was very surprised, as I didn’t realize he was that tuned into our thing.

            We were so uninvolved in the process of editing. He had total control. We didn’t see a frame of it until it was finished. So, he came in and shot a bunch of things in the course of a year, and then he kind of went away. And a year after that, the thing was a finished entity. It was all very mysterious to us.

            That’s OK. I think that was the only way he could do it. I can’t even hardly bear to watch myself on film — after the fifteenth reel of footage of myself I’d be going down to the gun store. (Laughs.) It’s very flattering.

            I think in some ways, you know, it’s hard for us to have a perspective on it. We’re fans of the idea of our band, too. We made a real effort to not just be a regular project. We continue to strive to challenge ourselves, and keep things moving forward in an essential way. There’s not many reasons to be in a band after twenty years if you’re not actively pursuing new stuff, or you will be repeating yourself. A lot of bands have a lot of trouble after a few years, trying to keep it alive. But we’ve been very fortunate.

            I feel like we’ve been in a manic state for twenty years. I can’t believe how fast it’s gone.