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John Flansburgh

From This Might Be A Wiki
John Flansburgh | John Linnell

Marty Beller | Dan Miller | Danny Weinkauf

Older/Guest Members
Flansburgh - Now
Flansburgh - Now
Flansburgh - Then
Flansburgh - Then
Flansburgh - The Earlier Years
Flansburgh - The Earlier Years

Contents

[edit] Biography

John Conant Flansburgh (born May 6th, 1960) is one half of rock duo They Might Be Giants. He co-founded the band with John Linnell in the early eighties, and is a primary songwriter and singer for the duo. Flansburgh sings and plays guitar for the band during live concerts, and can often be seen directing the band and providing much of the between-song banter. For this reason, he is often referred to as being the "extrovert John."

Flansburgh is a left-handed guitarist. He contributes an amount of songs to TMBG equal to that of Linnell, and has had many side-projects over the years. He's the more social of the two Johns, and is often found after concerts mingling with fans and signing autographs. Flansburgh is the bigger "showman" of the duo and reportedly plans all the large presentations, including devising setlists for shows. He's also a visual artist, and takes a big part in planning the design of TMBG's CD liner notes, and covers. The back and front covers of Miscellaneous T are photos of letters he constructed with papier-mâché.

Before joining TMBG, Flansburgh attended George Washington University, Antioch College and the Pratt Institute, where he got a BFA in Printmaking in 1984. He then got a job counting commuters at Grand Central Station, which proves college is really worth the money. At some point, he was also in a band called The Blackouts and another by the name of Frieda. After joining TMBG, he started the Hello Recording Club with Marjorie Galen, and then formed Hello The Band with Joshua Fried, which had a one-off on the Hello club and no further releases. Soon afterwards, Flans started the band Mono Puff, which released a series of EP's on Hello and then a full LP on Rykodisc entitled Unsupervised. The album's single video The Devil Went Down To Newport was played on MTV's 120 Minutes, and wasn't a complete failure. Two years later, Mono Puff released the Bar-None LP It's Fun To Steal (which Flans produced himself, along with Pat Dillett). The album had no EPs or videos associated with it, but the band did tour to promote it. Since then, they've not officially broken up, but the members have relocated to far-away places and a new release is not forthcoming.

In addition to all these other things, Flans is an excellent music video director. He has directed music videos for Harvey Danger, Soul Coughing and Ben Folds Five, two for Frank Black, and another two of TMBG's own videos, The Guitar and Doctor Worm. He also produced Muckafurgason's self-titled album, and engineered Drink Me's self-titled. He was involved with the production of several EPs that were released on the Hello club.

Flansy's always had an autograph that reads "John F." Sometimes he draws a dude's face in the O and sometimes he turns the letter into a guitar. According to Linnell, Flans is about an inch taller than he is, which makes him 5'11". His wife is named Robin Goldwasser and she has collaborated with TMBG for various projects. His brother's name is Schuyler. He has a cat.

Flans claims "Roadrunner" by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers inspired him to become a musician. He taught himself to play guitar while working as a parking lot attendant (and only 2 cars were stolen the whole time he was working!). He learned to play on just the top three strings of the guitar, because that's all the Ramones used.

  • According to this, his father was an MIT graduate.
  • The first CD he bought was A Hard Day's Night by The Beatles.

He thinks it would be funny if they changed the name of the band to WAFMNWANFG without telling anybody that it means "We Apologize For the Misunderstanding, but No We Are Not in Fact Giants".

  • Flansburgh was given special thanks in the movie Chuck&Buck; released in 2000.

[edit] Likes

[edit] Dislikes

  • 2/4 "rinky-dink" beats
  • being called quirky, wacky, zany, etc.
  • The Rolling Stones
  • radio DJs talking during songs
  • The Bush Administrations
  • Reading - "I read so little. For a dude who people say is smart, I sure get by on magazines."
  • We Built This City by Jefferson Starship -- In this BBC article Flans says "It was so incredibly bad, I was positive I would never hear it again, and I wanted to fully comprehend the strange vileness of it. I thought it might be Christian rock or something, but then it became a big hit."
  • Drum Solos - from a 2003 Fresh Air interview: "No one likes drum solos."
  • Fans hitting beach balls during their festival shows.

[edit] Favorite foods/drinks

  • carrot juice
  • coffee -- subsists on it; likes it "lite"
  • Martinis with extra olives
  • salad -- for the dressing; Flans is not a vegetarian, though he tried it for a year but concluded it was "too dull living without barbecue"
  • Campari & Soda, as per a New York Magazine 21 Questions article featuring Flans.

[edit] Side project releases of note:

[edit] Instruments

Flansburgh has played the following instruments in recordings or live:

  • acoustic guitar (6- and 12-string)
  • electric guitar (ditto)
  • drums
  • bass guitar
  • keyboard
  • melodica
  • piano
  • tremolo harmonica
  • harmonica
  • trumpet (he can even play two at the same time, admittedly not very well)
  • organ
  • egg shaker
  • kazoo
  • The Stick

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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