Dr. B's

They Might Be Giants performing at Dr. B's

Doctor B's was a "rock 'n roll, rockabilly, and new wave nightclub" on 77 Greene St. in SoHo, Manhattan, New York that operated in the early 1980s. They Might Be Giants performed several times in 1983, including their first show under the name They Might Be Giants.

History[edit]

The poster for the March 19 show was reproduced in a TMBG newsletter with the following text: "This is the poster for our third show. It was our return engagement with Dr. B's, where we debuted as They Might Be Giants. It is now a wine bar."

John Linnell discussed the band's performances at the venue on the Bullseye podcast with Jesse Thorn in 2021:

The thing with Dr. B's was we just sent out invitations and people who we knew came to see us and nobody else who was there who happened to be in there was particularly interested in what we were doing. And you know, it just felt a little bit weird and alien. And we were not very confident in what we were doing.

John Flansburgh also described the venue and their first show at Dr. B's in a 1996 interview with Pitchfork:

A couple of years after we moved [to New York], a friend of ours got us a gig at this crappy showcase club called Dr. B's which was in Soho. He booked it a couple of months in advance so we had a lot of time to get the show together. We wrote a lot of material for it and really rehearsed like tons before this show. We were so over-caffeinated at that point. I imagine that we seemed like just the most hyperactive people. It's kind of taken us a while to calm down and gain some composure, but that first show was pretty interesting.

At that first show, we were doing a lot of stuff that I thought was kind of creepy and I thought that people would react to the material in a creepy way. And I remember being very surprised at how light everyone took everything. We weren't presenting ourselves as sort of heavy, goth people, but we were fairly influenced by The Residents and Pere Ubu and a lot of post-punk art rock bands that had kind of a legit thing about them, even though they were kind of weird. We were a little bit taken aback at how... jolly the perception in the crowd was to our like, fucked-up kind of, "My arm... I can't feel my arm!" kind of songs. The songs were far weirder than the songs we do now. There was probably a lot less to smile about than there is now. I wouldn't have been surprised if people thought we were really self-involved and maybe even self-indulgent, but I wasn't expecting people to think that it was just so much... "fun."