MYKE WEISKOPF presents THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS: THE INTERVIEWS

Weiskopf:One aspect of the Giants that must have been especially appealing was that they came built-in with an engineer/producer with whom they did their records. They were an autonomous organization, in a sense. Did this appeal to you as a brand-new, independent label without strong financial backing?

Pendergast: I don't think I even considered it at the time; I didn't break it down like that. They were obviously two very talented, smart, hardworking individuals who knew what they were doing. Bill Krauss was almost like a third member at the time; I didn't realize how important he was or how their whole thing worked. They were a pretty unique duo; there was nobody doing what they did at the time. As time went on, it became clear to me how important he was. It wasn't a consideration for me as to whether I'd sign them or not. I just thought they were great.

W: Did you sense that, when Bill Krauss left the Giants, there were going to be a lot of major changes in terms of their ambitions and their aspirations?

P: Not really. As important as he was, the two Johns were always the important whole. Whatever happened, happened because of those two.

W: The first album was almost identical trackwise to their demo tape. Was it their decision to re-record the songs and resequence the album?

P: As far as I was concerned, they knew best. We interfered as little as possible with them because they had such a clear picture of what they were about.

[Actually, Glenn Morrow had asked Flansburgh to "tickle up" the masters a bit; instead, the Johns re-recorded most of the album.]

W: The Giants had a very strong image on their own that seemed to perpetuate itself. Did this make your job easier in terms of marketing them to the world?

P: It helped. They were constantly evolving at that point, and in many ways they were ahead of us in terms of what they were about. We just let them do whatever they wanted to do.

W: They are almost impossible to classify, which makes it hard to sell them.

P:It worked for them in those days; it was pre-MTV. The live experience was the only experience, in those days, and nobody had ever seen anything like these two guys. They were their own lords and masters, and they did whatever they wanted to do. They were as entertaining for me as they were for everybody else at the time. Every show was different. I saw dozens of TMBG shows on occasions when they played the Village Gate every week, and they would reinvent themselves every week. They blew my mind every time; they were brilliant, absolutely brilliant. I've never seen anything like them. I haven't, to this day, seen anything like the original They Might Be Giants.

W: Who had the say about singles?

P:It was a joint decision, but I think "Don't Let's Start" was an obvious single.

W: "Puppet Head", for instance...

P: That was done before they ever even came to us; They had done that themselves in the very, very early days of video TV. A channel in this area played the video in a "Battle of the Bands"-type thing where you had to call in and vote for your favorite video. Looking at that video now, it was pretty primitive.

W: What prompted the decision to release them on the hippest of all CD formats, the three-inch?

P: Again, it was the early days of CDs. I think we were the first ones to do that on an independent label.

[Actually, Ryko's Frank Zappa "Peaches En Regalia" was the first.]

W: Their debut album was already being bootlegged in Japan before it was even released in the US. Did you know what a hot property you'd had on your hands at the time?

P:I knew the potential. One never knows, really; we were new at the time, and you trust your own judgement. It was such an odd thing: one guy playing electric guitar and the other playing an accordion.

W: Their first two records were released by different companies in the UK. Was it based on the desire to have stronger distribution for LINCOLN, or just a matter of preference?

P:It was just haphazard.

W: Was the "Puppet Head" video the first time you had seen them?

P:No, Glenn had gotten the tape from Flansburgh. I had started the label to put out the Rage To Live album, and we worked that for a number of months. I wasn't even sure if I wanted to continue with Bar/None Records at the time, and Glenn brought this tape to me. They had all these great little pop songs on there-- carchy, different little pop songs. It was odd, but there were melodies in there. I went to see them, and that was odder still: two guys with funny hats and their funny props. The first time I saw them was at CBGB's. Again, the songs were there, and I thought, "I'll give it another go."

W: Did the "Purple Toupee" promotional 8-track actually do anything to help sell LINCOLN?

P:A lot of people got a great kick out of that, yeah. I talk to people still, and they say "oh yeah, I've still got that 8-track on my desk here", using it as their paperweight or whatever.

W: How soon before they officially broke with Bar/None were you aware of their decision to switch to a bigger label?

P:I don't remember, but it was obvious that they were going to go somewhere else. Neither Glenn or I would have stood in their way; We would never stand in any artist's way. You realize at some point that you're incapable of doing justice to the act. You get the best for them, and hopefully the best for yourself as well. To this day, we continue to have a good relationship with They Might Be Giants.

W: What's your favorite song?

P:"The Day". I thought it was a beautifully written song. [idyllically] "Biplanes bombed with fluffy pillows"... That line always did something for me, you know? A gentler world... I like that one a lot, and "She's An Angel".

President, Bar/None Records

President, Bar/None Records

W: How had you met them initially? K: I met John Flansburgh at Antioch. When I was in Antioch, I was in a band called Functionnaires with Dan Spock, who was a high school buddy of Flansburgh's and Linnell's, and we wanted to make a demo. Flansburgh had a four-track machine, and we got him to record our first demo. Actually, my first work with Flansburgh was the exact opposite of what it ended up being, because he was recording me.

W: What kind of stuff did they have at this time? K: They were working with a quarter-track tape recorder. It was the same type of show that it remained for many years, being on tape, but in the beginning, Flansburgh was running the tape machine from the stage. Actually, in the very early shows, he would edit the whole show at home beforehand. They would start the show and let the tape run until it was over, so they just ran one song after the other, boom-boom-boom-boom-boom. It took me quite a while to convince them that it would be better for me to control the tape from the soundboard. It was difficult.

W: From what I've read, in this period of time, they were just coming to New York. The performance art thing was in a certain gear, and the post-punk thing was just dying down. They missed the boat for both, basically... K: I guess. My feeling about it is that by '82, punk was long-gone. New wave was already over by 1982... and we all know how great that was. The club scene in New York is a very cyclical thing. Things come up, new clubs up, they get some notoriety, they attract a crowd, and then they fade for whatever reason. People are fickle, the Building Department demands to see permits, all sorts of things. They started in what I would say be an interim period, so it's not so much that they missed it, but they started when things were on the slow side-- which, ultimately, I think, worked to their advantage, because what it meant was, when the East Village scene started to happen, they were ready. We got shows at clubs like The Pyramid and 8BC, and Darinka. When we started working at the Pyramid, six months afterwards, they stopped booking bands, but they kept booking us because we had been in at the early stage. It was really like catching the crest of a wave. The only reason that that was possible was because we had been working for a while, and stuff was ready to go when the clubs opened up. We did a lot of shows like Amateur Night at CBGB's, where we would come home with two dollars apiece at the end of the night. If, after paying for the cabs to move the equipment, there was any money left over, the evening was an unqualified success in the beginning.

W: How many shows did the Giants play per month at this time? K: We worked as much as we could, and it gradually built up. In the early days, it was nowhere near a living. We all had one kind or another freelance jobs-- Flansburgh was doing graphics and paste-up work, and Linnell was doing darkroom work, and I was doing word processing-- and, eventually, the more shows we started to do, the less money we were making, because the shows weren't actually making us much money at all, and we would have to take time off from our regular jobs to do them. So, it was very paradoxical. When we started, if we got a show a month, we were happy in '82 and '83, and as things progressed we were doing more and more. Then we started doing things like the series at Darinka, or the series at the Pyramid, where we did every Saturday in May, I think in '85...

W: Now, I've heard some legendary stuff about these series, so I just wanna run a few of these by me. This is kind of what always fascinates me about early Giants shows. They seemed, from what I've heard, very thematic. I've heard '46 folk singers destroying 'Mr. Tambourine Man'', I've heard 'Pal Joey revivals'... I'm really curious about the 'Pal Joey' revivals, because that's the most curious thing I've heard. It wasn't a performance art/conceptual thing... K: No. Flansburgh has a Sinatra thing. He's really into Sinatra. I remember when the Kitty Kelly book came out about Sinatra, he read it right away. He's just got this thing about 'what it means to be Sinatra'. He's very interested in the phenomenon. So, 'Pal Joey' was part of that. He really liked 'Pal Joey,' and he decided he wanted to do some of the songs from 'Pal Joey' one night. I don't remember how many of them he did. He did 'There's A Small Hotel', and 'Lady is A Tramp', and I don't even remember, 'cause I'm not a big 'Pal Joey' fan. In the very beginning, and for a long time, and until rather recently, what started out as a necessity, which was working with the tape, we always tried to turn that to our advantage and do things with the tape that a band couldn't do, basically. If you have a band, and you've got a keyboard player, and a guitar player, and a drummer, you pretty much have to use a certain format. When you're not tied to that, and you're doing stuff on tape, if we wanted to have 38 percussionists on one song, we could have that one song. When you reach the stage of the Rolling Stones or Madonna and you want to travel with 40 musicians, and you can afford to pay them, fine. But there's really no way to do that when you're starting out, of course. So, because of that mindset, we were always looking for stuff that would be fun or interesting to do and not just have it be 'we're just going to do a bunch of songs'. It was very emphatically not about being a rock show, and in a lot of ways, it was about making fun of rock shows, which is why the fact that they're a rock band now is kind of interesting. You know the early stuff-- a lot of it is about transcending genre and bending genre. It's about taking the essence of what a certain type of song means, and playing with that. That was also true of the shows, as well as the songs. I don't know if you heard any of the taped introductions for the shows....

W: I heard the "kittens" one... K: Yeah... "a new kind of fur"? [chuckles of recognition from interviewer] Before I called you, I pulled out some old tapes to remind myself of the stuff that had happened, and there was one that was a countdown to the show...

W: They're doing that now. K: Oh, they're doing that again? I wonder if it's the same one. It's quite possible that they pulled out the same one. It's Flansburgh doing this countdown-- "Ten! Your ten eyes are blah, blah.... Nine! You wiggle your nine fingers expectantly... Meanwhile, Linnell was breaking in with random non sequitur bulletins from out in the field: "They Might Be Giants have just crash-landed their glass-bottom car in the vicinity of this hall." It goes down to "Introducing the One band that can overcome the Zero in their bank account", and then you think, 'okay, it's over, it's the countdown to zero', and it continues: "I don't mean to be the Negative One, but you'd be Negative Too, if not for the fabulous show you're about to see." That's what made it fun. The three of us.. I didn't write the songs, but I did have stuff to say about how the shows were put together, how the intros were put together...

W: Well, sure. When you work with someone like you and they did, there's a rapport there that's omnipresent. K: Yeah. It's why we worked together as long as we did and, when I stopped working with them, we had to stop cold. We really were full partners. This isn't about pushing what I did with them, it's about the fact that I know what I'm talking about. So I'll say "we" a lot, because that's what it was.

W: I think it's true, though, that I have a greater appreciation for everything that came before, which is why I'm so bent on talking to you and talking to John about what happened before, because I think that's infinitely more fascinating than 'Hey, they've got the bassist for Pere Ubu now'. It just doesn't seem fun to me anymore; it used to have that element of sheer glee. Listen to the demo version of 'Nothing's Gonna Change My Clothes'! He sounds just giddy singing that song on the demo tape! K: I was listening to some of that today-- I haven't listened to some of those songs in some time, I gotta tell you, because most of them are written in my spine at this point because I've heard them so many times. I was listening to that, and comparing that to the version on the first album. And there were demo versions of those songs from before that-- from before the [23-song] demo tape that you're talking about. The version of "Youth Culture" on the pink album was the fourth time that song was recorded! That's unusual; most of the ones on that record were the third time they were recorded. Actually, if you consider Dial A Song, it could be one more version. Usually there would be a Dial A Song version, and then some other ones. [A little unpublishable stuff; resume at live show conversation.] K: [The slam pits] are something I'm really glad that I missed. One of the reasons that I had to stop touring was that I hate crowds. And the more successful the band got, the more crowded things were, the more annoying it was.

W: I get a sense that Lincoln was the first album that They Might Be Giants were really established as a rock band. It seems to me that the songs on the first album were taken from this stockpile of those shows-- those really fun, loose, thematic shows-- whereas, with a song like "Ana Ng"-- it had a different feel altogether. It was really the first "single" that they had written. K: Actually, I gotta tell you, most of the songs on 'Lincoln' are from that same stock. My feeling is that 'Flood' was that record, because 'Flood' was the first record where most of the songs were written _for_ it. You know about the sophomore slump. They didn't jump it; they could have put ['Lincoln'] out, if we had had the time and the money, just about the time of the first album. By that reckoning, 'Flood' really is their second album. What it means is that it's not stuff from the trunks. The songs you've had your whole life to write generally goes on your first album, and then the stuff you've had to write since the first album goes on your second album, which is why people's second albums aren't as good. They don't have as much time to write them.

W: What did their early stuff sound like in 1982? K: They sounded really cheesy. What can I say? It was based on the technology that was available at the time. I don't even know what kind of drum machine we had at that point in 1982. It was not good, though. We were working on four-track; the earliest stuff was being done at Flansburgh's apartment, so we didn't have reverb, it didn't have any effects. It basically had a drum track, a keyboard track, a guitar track, and the vocal track. They would bounce them, so they would do three vocal tracks down to one. Major hiss. I don't know what exists from that era any more; the earliest stuff I have my hands on is from '85, maybe '84. The very earliest stuff was done on four-track mixed to quarter-track. There was a period around when Flansburgh's quarter-track machine got stolen, when we went to cassette for a while. We were doing a lot of shows on cassette, which actually had some advantages. What we would do was put two or three songs on a cassette, and I would just have a box of cassettes. [That way] if they wanted to change the set order in the middle of the show, they could. We did a bunch of shows at Darinka off of cassette. My memories are a lot more of live shows from '82 to '85, because we weren't doing that much recording. The recording was mostly for the live shows, doing rhythm tracks for Darinka, 8BC, the Pyramid, CBGB's, places like that. Most of my life was revolving around trying not to have it suck, because that's a live soundman's job anyway. For the Giants, it was particularly hard because the monitors are so critical when you work off of tape. If you can't hear the tape, it's a nightmare. Most clubs are set up for rock bands; the only thing they put through monitors is the vocals. We were trying to run everything through the monitors so that they could follow along and be on key, stuff like that. What they sounded like, in terms of what the attitude was like-- It was very fun.

W: What does the sample say at the beginning of 'Rabid Child'? K: "Lord, please don't take me away."

W: Where did the material for 'Snowball in Hell' come from? K: It's a dub off of something I gave Flansburgh for his birthday in 1985. I bought it at a bookstore in my hometown in New Jersey, and it's from a tape from some kind of series on how to manage your time effectively. I saw it on a rack with a bunch of tapes on how to make the most money in your life, how to relax.. It was just a bunch of 'how-to' cassette tapes. I was just flipping through them, and Flansburgh's birthday was coming up; I came across 'How To Manage Your Time Effectively', and I thought, 'Flansburgh will find a way to use this.' And so I gave it to him for his birthday. And we ended up putting it in 'Snowball'.

W: So, basically, from '82 to '84 was light gigging. K: Yeah, we were trying really hard; some of the most fun stuff came out then. Did you ever hear about 'Art in Context'? Flansburgh and I, in a spirit of just having fun, created an eight-page magazine called 'Art in Context', which we did mostly on my early Macintosh in '85. Flansburgh did paste-up and stuff, and we created a really pretentious art magazine. We did it all under pseudonyms, although my name and address is in it as something to find. All of the names were made up. There's 'Klaus Novek Osterhog'-- we figured it was German expatriates in New York, so the editors were 'Luftholm R. Auftika' and 'Klaus Novek Osterhog'. The publisher was 'Ingrid Renfield'. They had two foreign bureaus-- one in Berlin and one in Los Angeles-- that was foreign to New York-- and the two interns were the sort of WASP preppies, 'Hutchinson Connelly IV' and 'Francis Beef'. We reviewed all these East Village musicians and performers and artists. Freda was this friend of Flansburgh's; it was this lady named Barbie Lipp who had created this performance art thing. She was the queen of disco, and she wore this long flowing dress up to the top of her head, and on top of her head she had a make-up Barbie head. It looked like this seven-foot-tall Barbie. She did all of her stuff on tape, and would dance around on stage to Barbie. We reviewed the Jicketts, Chet Grant, Nick Zed-- who's this downtown, nasty old filmmaker, Arto Lindsay, Joshua [Fried]... So we had pictures and did reviews of them. They each had about half a page. We took excerpts from real art magazines, like 'Art in Context', 'Art in America', and 'Performance', took them out of context, and inserted the names of the people we did reviews of. Here's the performance of They Might Be Giants; this is by someone named Franz Heidler: It is now undeniable fact that the doppelganger has always existed in art, much to the dismay of the sycophants of cult gentrification. Its recent re-emergence breaks the reflection's surface with double-headed aplomb. The guys of the performance duo They Might Be Giants, thus reversing the virtual and the real, the figure and the ground. Their technological matrix acts as camouflage. The raw image of mirth concealed therein forges the foundational figure to define the form: Cryogenic art. That's just half of it. What we did was we took the structure of these things, and the only things we changed were the names and the adjectives. We mailed out about 300 of these things. All the stuff that isn't reviews are ads for They Might Be Giants. Nothing was done just for preservation; everything was done to have a use. We did a lot of demo recording so we could send demos out to get shows. The other reason we put demos together was to try and get a record deal. No one showed any interest at all for a really long time; I really have nothing but praise and thanks for Glenn and Tom at Bar/None. This is around '85, when the Giants weren't big stars but were definitely on the scene in New York. Their shows were getting picks in the Village Voice; people knew we were around. There would be some lower-level assistant of an A&R guy who would fall in love with the band and try and convince the boss to sign us. They would play him a tape, and the people would go, 'there's no category for these people; How do we market them?' We heard that a lot. When we were trying to get shows out of town was, 'Why don't you do any covers? Just do something that people know!' Insisting on doing exactly what they wanted to do was the only way to go, but it takes longer. By insisting on being true to yourself when what you are doing is not easily categorized, you have to cut your own path through the forest, basically. I remember the first time I saw a band described as 'They Might Be Giants-like', that was a real accomplishment. It meant that they had carved out a new type of music that hadn't existed before. That was really important.

W: How did they start working with the Ordinaires? K: We met the Ordinaires at 8BC, which was run by a couple of guys named Dennis and Cornelius. It was the greatest club in the world for about two years. They had something like 3000 performances in two years. It was running non-stop. They had plays in the afternoon and performance art at dinner time, and bands at night. It was just a wonderful time. It may have been the first time we played there. People liked to book TMBG with the Ordinaires because there were nine people in the Ordinaires. Logistically, it was really easy, because to have another full band when you had the Ordinaires on stage meant moving a whole lot of equipment. We did some shows at the Pyramid for them and the Village Gate. In the very earliest shows, the Ordinaires had been around a bit longer and had more of a following, so we opened for them. Later, they opened for us. When we started doing Village Gate shows, we brought them along because they're friends. When it was time to do recording, bringing them in to do 'Kiss Me Son Of God' seemed like a natural idea.

W: Gee... I think that just about covers it. K: Are you sure? Got any questions about specific songs?

W: Well, mostly what I've heard is early demos of stuff that's been released. The only thing I have that was never released was 'Living Doll'... K: I don't remember that one.

W: Lemme play it for you.... [Myke plays 'Living Doll' to Bill, who can be heard making noises of recognition in the background.] Anyway, my main point tonight was to get a clearer understanding of what the earlier days were like. K: Well, I feel like we've been all over the map tonight. Do you have a clearer understanding of what it was like? It was just very much about doing what we thought would be the coolest, and only the coolest in terms of us, not other people. It had to be what would be the most fun and what we wanted to hear. And that's really what it always was about. Because nobody was paying any attention, we could pretty much do whatever we wanted. The dynamic for me was that it never could have happened without the two of them together. Linnell was a great songwriter, and I think even Flansburgh would say that Flansburgh surpasses most people in the world in terms of sheer creative output; the ideas just pour out of him. Flansburgh-- not to slight him-- has to work much harder at it.

W: Well, he's a hack, basically. K: Yeah, he's an inspired hack. But he has the drive that made them what they are. With Linnell, he would still be making demos in his bedroom if he had worked by himself, because Linnell hates schmoozing, and Flansburgh is a master of it. So it was a rare thing for them to be able to come together. [Pause.] And I still think 'Lincoln' is their best record. ---

ADAM BERNSTEIN

President, Bar/None Records

W: How did you first meet the Giants? In 1986, I had just left my day job and I wanted to direct a music video, and had saved up about $1500. I was going to clubs and calling around, looking for a band to work with. A guy named Mark Boyer grew up in the same town with the two Johns, so he suggested I go see them. I went down, saw them at Darinka, and immediately liked them; I thought they were very funny. I went backstage after their set, said hello to John and John, and told them that I wanted to work with them. Then I picked up this cassette tape that they had on sale at Finyl Vinyl (the 23-song tape). A week later, Flansburgh came down to my apartment to talk about the video. Flansburgh was wearing deep dark purple nail polish, and he looked at me and he said, "I'm gay." So, we mapped out what we wanted to do. Flansburgh told me that he either wanted to be a rock star or an art-world bully. We put together "Puppet Head", which we shot in and around the Williamsburg waterfront area for $1500; I think the Johns bought a couple hundred dollars' worth of film stock. We cut that and, through some crazy fluke, made it onto MTV before the Johns even had a record out. It was during an unusually liberal window in MTV's programming. Then, through Jamie, they got some connections with Joe Franklin, and Joe played it on his show. The video made a little splash for everybody. The next one I did for them was "Don't Let's Start" , "Hotel Detective", "Ana Ng", "They'll Need A Crane"... I think they were all escalating budgets, because "Ana Ng" was $9000, "TNAC" was $16,000, and after that we did "Birdhouse" and "The Statue Got Me High".

W: You're one of the only people that continued your professional relationship with the Johns after Bar/None. Yeah.

W: Tell me a little bit about "Ana Ng". If there's one thing I learned from "Ana Ng", it's that Linnell has giant front teeth. (laughs) That was an interesting one, because I was really inspired by the Cold War, that weird espionage theme. There are a couple of things that went into that video: One was the location, which was the Ward's Island Fireman's Training Center, which is a location that I had known about for a couple of years and had been dying to use in a video. There's something about that song that suggests this "Man From U.N.C.L.E." world/Cold War secrecy somehow. That location became perfect for it, because it looked like some sort of spy headquarters with the numbered buildings. Then there's a protracted use of these extreme close-ups. I had been watching a great David Fincher video for Foreigner that used all these great, extreme close-ups. It was my little homage; the use of the close-ups was very interesting. That was my inspiration for getting macro-close on all of these objects. I just went to a really big, shitty prop rental service called State Supply with a shopping cart and filled it up with junk so that we could prop that weird John and John office area. The Johns brought that weird Cheng Kai-Shek statue in the fishtank, and one of the telephones. The maps I got at the Map Center in midtown Manhattan; that was an aeronautical map of Romania, or some bizarre Eastern European country. It was fun; we shot it all macro-close so that everyone thought it was completely fraught with significance. The best thing about music videos is that all you have to do is suggest this heady meaning in the imagery. ... For every video, the Giants would cook up their own synchronized dance step. We had a much more advanced synchronized dance step for "Don't Let's Start", and for "Ana Ng" they did that great Ukrainian folk stomp in front of the building. The next time we picked up the synchronized dance step was for "Birdhouse", when we did the massive synchronized dance step with all of the people. It's fun working with the Giants because they are very contrary. They have a real aversion to the imagery having any direct response to the lyrics. They want to be as oblique as possible, and with their music, it's gotten increasingly oblique to the point of complete impenetrability. That was always fun; it was a nice thing to muck around with, being not completely on-the-head. They are real tough customers; it's very hard to sell them something, because they're very into controlling their world. It was good directorial practice, because if I had an idea, I had to figure out exactly how to phrase it so that I wouldn't set them off. Or, you have to figure out how to sell them so that they would eventually like the idea.

W: What's nice about it is that you were able to make these in-jokey videos, yet people still thought they were great. When I initially tried to do a video and gravitated towards doing one with them, there was a certain amount of shared sensibility between us: the New York, sardonic, ironic, Northeastern, artsy, liberal establishment outlook. I tend to be more broadly comic than they are. The thing is that their constant litany is "We are not a joke band!! We are not a comedy band!!" and they would be really adamant about that, but the minute you turned the cameras on it became like Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. The minute they're performing, they immediately want to act as funny as possible.

W: "They'll Need A Crane" seemed to be a parody of '60s merseybeat videos, with the syrupy close-ups of John Linnell... That video, they hate.

W: Tell me about "Hotel Detective". That was animated by a guy named Joey Album. We had a whole budget of $7,500, and he did over a minute of full-fill animation. He did a pretty amazing job. That was another one they didn't seem to like very much... They did their own video for "Rabid Child".

High-school teacher / mentor

S:About four or five years before the Johns came, (Lincoln-Sudbury) had reached its peak enrollment of about 2,000, and slowly descended to about half the size. This school, which had been a fairly traditional school until the late '60s, became transformed-- something of an educational experiment itself. There are no bells in the school, kids are allowed to wander through the halls, and- probably more significantly- teachers have their own offices. That not only physically made possible, but supported, the encouragement that teachers received to develop out-of-class relationships with students. It's hard to divide up how I came to know them. On the one hand, I was a teacher; on the other, we had friends in common I don't think they participated in special programs, like student-teacher camping and so on. There was a lot of hanging out together.

Let me give you some context about them, and then you can ask specific questions. In my teaching career, there are various periods where I came to know very interesting, outstanding groups of students. They were definitely part of a group of students that I found very interesting and very exciting. What was very unusual about them was that they hung out in a group that was not solely male. It was unusual to have so many guys who were so interesting. I think it has to do with the fact that, as adolescents, girls develop more quickly. The guys tend to be more sports-oriented and increasingly so as we receded from the 1960's. It's rare that you find guys who want to express themselves so much, particularly in writing. If you look at the history of our school-- and I bet most high schools are like this-- most of the people on the newspaper, and a lot of extracurricular groups, tend to be female. But these were guys who were, among other things, really caught up in the written word. I don't think they knew a lot about journalistic rules, but they were definitely into being very provocative; they wrote well, [which is] unusual for guys.

They were not typical suburban boys, even then. The two Johns came from Lincoln, which is the smaller of the two towns. I think the average income in both Lincoln and Sudbury are about the same, but the per capita wealth in Lincoln is much greater-- it's more of an old-money town. The kids from Sudbury tended to be more nouveau riche and more conformist, whereas the kids from Lincoln were more counter-cultural, had an old-money disdain for wealth. It was the people from Lincoln who would be driving Volvos and the people from Sudbury who would be driving Cadillacs. That's the cultural context they came out of. Lincoln was the more liberal of the two towns.

There was this DJ in New York when the Beatles came who was doing this big hype in '64, '65, who fancied himself the Fifth Beatle. Just thinking of that as a metaphor, there was a "third Giant". A lot of times, people who are in the scene have very different perceptions (from the teachers). I don't think you can really understand their high school years without knowing about this guy, Jimmy McEntyre. John Linnell was very quiet, very thoughtful, interior, introspective person who definitely did not fit the mold of the suburban high-school student, and did not find the suburban aspects of Lincoln-Sud life very interesting. Flansburgh was much more extroverted; he was witty and clever, and I think that often that masked a real sensitivity that he had, which he didn't always let show. I think Flansburgh's a person who was very capable of being moved by injustice. He was, compared to Linnell, much more lively. Jimmy left Lincoln-Sud at the end of his sophomore year. He worked on the listener line of (Boston's) WBCN, and within two years he was the music director of the station. Even as a sophomore, Lincoln-Sud was no longer of great interest to him. He was writing music criticism for the then-underground newspaper, the Boston Phoenix. Linnell's writing I don't remember very well; Flansburgh was a good writer. McEntire was one of the best professional writers I've ever come across; again, it was unusual to have a boy who wrote that well and was getting professional press. He was an incredibly bright, smart, clever, witty, knowledgeable kid. When I think of Flansburgh and Linnell, I think of McEntyre; these were kids who were really in the avant-garde of the school. McEntyre would write 90% of the newspaper in one night; he had an enormous collection of LPs that we would go over and listen to. I'm not talking about "you should know they had a friend who later died" and that sentimental business. This is why the Giants agreed to come back to Lincoln-Sud and do a benefit for this MLK Action AIDS project; they did it in Jimmy's memory. I think that you can't understand their high-school years without understanding the catalytic qualities of Jimmy McEntyre. This is the kid who was the genius. Looking at it historically, he was very important.

W: There are some anecdotes that I've heard from various people, such as the teacher who would give writing assignments. The Johns would write these eloquent, beautiful papers that had little or nothing to do with the subjects. They were given A's regardless, simply because of the quality of their work.

S:Lincoln-Sudbury at this time was still recovering from the '60s: Cutting was rife, people didn't do their homework. There was much more than today, a response to what a kid wrote whether or not it was on the subject or not, simply because it was his. So, that story doesn't surprise me. I used to teach a class called American Issues in which Flansburgh was very vocal; he was a great debater, he was a very lively person to have in class. There's no single thing they did that was spectacular. They were part of an extraordinary group of kids; these were kids who lived life with a lot of passion. They read books; they argued about those books, they argued about issues as if they mattered. They saw themselves as being on the cultural cutting edge. They dressed in a funky way, but there were a lot of kids like that. Because they were active in the newspaper, they spoke to a wider community of people. There's still one article by Flansburgh which he wrote for the (school paper) Promethean that I still use in my postwar class to introduce issues in the civil rights movement. He talks about some of the subtle racism that existed, so I use it as a historical aspect. It's typically Flansburgh, but it's not an outrageous piece.

W: Subtle but intellectual.

S:Right! They-- McIntyre, Flansburgh, Linnell-- were the kind of kids that, if they wanted to, could have been A students. Despite the fact that we were an open school, and many of our classes were fairly provocative, they probably didn't find their classes the most exciting thing going on in terms of culture and politics. They were two extraordinary kids who were part of an extraordinary group. They were definitely the most exciting group.

W: Did they have any problems with the other kids as outside intellectuals?

S:There used to be a group of kids called Rats who wore black leather jackets-- the toughs. They were the sons and daughters of the working class of the two towns. The population of kids completely disappeared. I don't think they would have intimidated them particularly; they had an equal-opportunity contempt for everyone. McIntyre was once involved in some drug dealing, and he wrote an article in the paper about how he sold marijuana. Somebody in the Rat group wasn't humored by it, and threatened his life. But, the other kids in school shared their sensibility. There was a way that the countercultural aspect of the high school probably supported them.