Nightmarish Alternate Versions of Myself
by Will
As an Xmas present, Eliza took me to see They Might Be Giants in Williamsburg on New Year’s Eve. I was disproportionately excited for this show since there was the strong likelihood that there would be mostly adults in the crowd. Most people who love TMBG begin doing so when they are 13-19 year old honor students. The odd thing is that the fan base never seems to age. For 17 years (!) I have gone to TMBG shows and while I (and the band) get older and older — the majority of the crowd seems to have arrived straight from their Calculus AP tests.
My devotion to them has ebbed and flowed over the years. It’s hard to listen to a LOT of TMBG in a row — and I have many other places to go for the sensibility I once depended on them to provide. And my personality has long since solidified, while their concerts are filled with teenagers, trying to figure out their own senses of humor. But the opening notes of Flood can still — no shit — bring tears to my eyes, and I will sometimes break out my handwritten log of what was playing on their Dial-A-Song in 1988, just to remind myself of how far (or how NOT far) I’ve come.
It’s good to remember that when TMBG hit the scene — it was before Mr. Show, Kids in the Hall, Ben Folds, Barenaked Ladies, The Onion, Seinfeld, Liz Phair, Nirvana, The Pixies, The Simpsons, Phil Hartman, even before the world wide web and cell phones. Was it before Ween? I think it might have been before Ween. In the late 1980s, if you were a verbal, nerdy, funny sort with decent taste in things — you watched David Letterman and you listened to They Might Be Giants — and everything else you did you did only to make fun of it, and that’s all there was to it.
So I was excited for this show, and it did not disappoint. The band passed out lyrics to Auld Lang Syne, with parts separated for men, women and cro-magnon humans. They counted down to midnight, passed around a bottle of champagne. They played the best of their “Venue Songs” (they had written a new song for every place they played in 2004), with hilarious narration introducing each song (“with this final song, they had proved they were indeed Might Be Giants.”). It felt much like I was recharging my personlity against a huge green lantern which also happened to be playing Ana Ng.
Seeing them in their hometown of Brooklyn — in their home neighborhood of Williamsburg — which is now MY home — was thrilling. Having an actual girlfriend at the show, who had indeed bought the tickets to attend, was amazing and also meant I had finally become the man I once envied from afar.
I should note that even though there were for-real grown-ups throughout the crowd, there were still healthy handfuls of Nightmarish Alternate Versions of Myself everywhere. Foremost among these was a pudgy, curly-haired geek in line behind us who sighed loudly to no one that the early show had been great, and grumbled with fake weariness that only the truly sheltered can affect. Inside the concert, Eliza reported that he had sat down by the wall, belligerently demarking a too-big area all to himself with some bottles of beer. He was wearing, to my dismay and delight, an Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre t-shirt.
I looked down on this man as I simulataneously thought “I can’t wait to write about this show on my blog.”
Comments
An old Astronomy teacher of mine used to like to play Astronomy-themed music as students were arriving to get them “in the mood.” Usually it was something light like Gustav Holst’s “The Planets Suite,” but once she rocked us out with TMBG’s “Why Does the Sun Shine?” I had newfound respect for Ms. Judy Young that day. (I was a 16-year-old verbal, nerdy, honors student sort at the time.)
They Might Be Giants, my all-time favorite favorite band, makes me think of the snipper from the back cover to T.H. White’s “The Once and Future King” (and I actually went to find this, thank you, Amazon.com):
“… all things lost and wonderful and sad.”
God damn. That’s how I feel about TMBG. All things lost and wonderful and sad. I’m never going to be that age again, I’m never going to drive my Saturn up and down the Florida coast with my TMBG CDs, never going to see them for the first time, never going to have so many possibilities open toward me as I did when I was that age and we’re never gonna tour again. No, we’re never gonna tour again.
Small correction –
The grumbly nerd sat down in the MIDDLE of the floor. The crowded floor. And yes, he had bottles of beer set up around him that people kept knocking down, much to his loud (SIIIIIIIIIIIGH!) chagrin. Ridic!
update your blog, eliza.
At what I thought would be the end of my childhood, I spent a night riding in a car with four girls who had been childhood friends (I had not known them in their youth) as they said goodbye to each other and their hometown before they all went their separate ways to college. At one point they remembered that they had once figured out how to sing “Dead” with each syllable distributed to a different girl. And then they sang it again, one last time, as we drove towards the end of the night.