Shows/1988-01-23b

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Links:

• Alternate poster
• City Gardens 1988 monthly planner
• The Central New Jersey Home News show preview; Jan. 22, 1988
• Philadelphia Inquirer listing; Jan. 22, 1988

• Listing

Setlist: (Incomplete!)

• Shoehorn With Teeth
• Lie Still, Little Bottle
• I've Got A Match
• Don't Let's Start
• I Hope That I Get Old Before I Die

They Might Be Giants
— with Ween, Dick Destiny & the Highway Kings opening —
City Gardens in Trenton, NJ
January 23, 1988 at 9:00 PM

Fan Recaps and Comments:

Show review by Joellynn K. Monahan, from the February 5, 1988 issue of Drew University's Acorn:

They will be giants — Joellynn and skinheads

To bring you folks up to date: the U2 mobile has lain dormant, the concert trail overgrown, while I convalesced from unexpected back surgery. It's Saturday, January 23. My friend Erica decides it's time I get out of the house. Erica and I went to second grade together. She's also the person to credit for my musical renaissance—without her I'd still be listening to Get the Knack; a Lynyrd Skynyrd 45, and everything Billy Joel ever made. (Yes, I know what you're thinking: "My God, she wasn't always this cool. I guess there’s still hope for me.")

So we go—dressed in our art fag black, of course—to City Gardens in Trenton. The sign at the door reads "No stage diving. No slam dancing. No spikes." Oh great! Except for two angst-ridden twelve-year-old annoyances who [were] considered the opening band—the place was pretty mellow. The next delight was Dick Destiny and His Highwaymen. I always wondered why no one does hard core covers of Bowie's "Gene, Genie." And now I know.

At this point in the evening I'm tired and want to go home. The one good event so far was running into The Jeremiahs, a hot New Jersey band. (OK, you see right through me. It's just ex-Bonnet Rouge bassist Tom Gibbons and his new entourage. But I'm happy to see them nonetheless.) They didn't like Dick Destiny either. Tom was saving himself from utter boredom by trying to charge people $1 to check their coats in the room he was blocking the entrance to.

I hoped against hope that the headliner band would be good or even fair.

The headlining band, "They Might be Giants," was superb. The guitar-accordion-bass-sax playing duo, two energetic guys from Flanders, MA, looked like the next decade's answer to the B52's. Erica reminds me to tell you they're very similar to the mid-seventies band "The Sparks." I don't get it—maybe you will.

My personal favorites of the show were the two-foot high fuzzy fuchsia fezzes they wore and the jazz fusion instrument, "the big stick." They are very talented musician/lyricists, but with all their zaniness you really have to concentrate on what they're saying in songs like "I've got a match, your embrace and my collapse." Like Squeeze, their lyrics hit the nail right on the head. They closed the set with a song I had heard a week earlier on the radio called "Don't Let's Start," a song I had gone crazy trying to find.

Two encore sets later the guys closed with a sing-a-long (complete with cue cards). Yes, they even had the skinheads behind us singing. Keep your eyes open for tour dates and beg, borrow, or steal to get your hands on either their first or second debut album.