Johns Linnell and Flansburgh first met as teenagers growing up in Lincoln, Massachusetts. They began writing songs together while attending Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School but did not form a band at that time. The two attended separate colleges after high school and Linnell joined The Mundanes, a new wave group from Rhode Island. The two reunited in 1981 after moving to Brooklyn (to the same apartment building on the same day) to continue their career.[11] At their first concert, They Might Be Giants were introduced as and performed under the name El Grupo De Rock and Roll (Spanish for "the Rock and Roll Band"), because the show was a Sandinista rally in Central Park, and a majority of the audience members spoke Spanish.[12] They had previously chosen a name that, according to John Flansburgh, was "so bad that John [Linnell] and I have made a vow that we will never tell anyone, even our children."[13] Soon discarding this name,[14] the band assumed the name of the 1971 film They Might Be Giants (starring George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward), which is in turn taken from a Don Quixote passage about how Quixote mistook windmills for evil giants. According to Dave Wilson, in his book Rock Formations, the name They Might Be Giants had been used and subsequently discarded by a friend of the band who had a ventriloquism act.[15] The name was then adopted by the band, who had been searching for a more suitable name. A common misconception is that the name of the band is a reference to themselves and an allusion to future success. In an interview, John Flansburgh said that the words "they might be giants" are just a very outward-looking forward thing which they liked. He clarified this in the documentary movie Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns) by explaining that the name refers to the outside world of possibilities that they saw as a fledgling band. In an earlier radio interview, John Linnell described the phrase as "something very paranoid sounding".[16] The duo began performing their own music in and around New York City at the East Village Pyramid Club[17] – Flansburgh on guitar, Linnell on accordion and saxophone and accompanied by a drum machine or prerecorded backing track on audio cassette. Their atypical instrumentation, along with their songs which featured unusual subject matter and clever wordplay, soon attracted a strong local following.[18] Their performances also featured absurdly comical stage props such as oversized fezzes and large cardboard cutout heads of newspaper editor William Allen White.[19] Many of these props would later turn up in their first music videos. From 1984 to 1987, They Might Be Giants were the house band at the Pyramid Club[14] and Darinka, a Lower East Side performance art club[20] run by Gary Ray. They played on the stage there one weekend a month and by the end of their three-year stint, their performances were selling out. On March 30, 1985, TMBG released their 7" flexi-disc, dubbed "Wiggle Diskette" at Darinka. The disc included demos of the songs "Everything Right Is Wrong Again" and "You'll Miss Me".[21] At one point, Linnell broke his wrist in a biking accident, and Flansburgh's apartment was burgled, stopping them from performing for a time. During this hiatus, they began recording their songs onto an answering machine, and then advertising the phone number in local newspapers such as The Village Voice, using the moniker "Dial-A-Song".[22] They also released a demo cassette, which earned them a review in People magazine. Authored by Michael Small,[23] the review caught the attention of Bar/None Records, who signed them to a recording deal.[24]
Thank you to the TMBG Wikipedia page :)
