Shows/1996-10-05
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Links:
- Ink 19 interview with Flans, who discusses the show
- "Sixteen Random Tales From 30 Years on the Road", 2011 Vulture article also discussing the show
- Listen to the audio on YouTube
Setlist:
They Might Be Giants
Milkbar in Jacksonville, FL
October 5, 1996 at 8:00 PM
Fan Recaps and Comments:
Four songs into this show, John Linnell nearly passed out from heatstroke, forcing the band to cancel the rest of the performance. Flansburgh via Vulture:
We get onstage and it's just impossibly hot, like it’s easily a hundred degrees and we’re under these big old-fashioned theatrical lights that when they turn on you just get hit with a wall of heat. We start playing “Twisting,” which is like a sort of revved up rock-and-rolly kind of song, and John walks over to me 15 seconds into the song and sort of puts his hand on my shoulder. I’m like, What is this? Like, John just does not put his hand on my shoulder very often. I didn’t think, Oh, he’s about to keel over from heat stroke. But of course that’s exactly what was happening. So the tour manager’s like, ‘Oh well, you just gotta cancel the show.’ And so I go back onstage and I say, ‘I’m sorry folks, but John is sick and we can’t do the show.’ At which point, the audience started to boo in a way that is so — it’s such a bummer. The thing that’s so sad about touring is that you can do a dozen shows that all do great and more people will come, and then do one show that’s just catastrophic and you are behind the eight ball for five years, ten years.
Flansburgh again, via Ink 19:[1]
I’ve done hundreds of shows, or thousands of shows, and I realized, at that one moment, I had never been booed before, and God, it’s a horrible feeling to be booed. They had oversold the show, there were like 1500 people in a place that probably could comfortably hold like 600 people or something, so they were just like stacking people into this club downstairs. The temperature on stage… there were lights, and it was slightly elevated but there wasn’t a high ceiling, so it was just very compressed and brutally hot. We hit the stage, and John basically had a heatstroke. He pretty much hit the deck, he just kind of keeled over, and the first thing I thought was, “Wow, Little Mr. Show Business doesn’t want to play!” [laughs] I had no concept, because he didn’t actually faint, he just kind of crumpled to the ground, and I was just thinking, “Wow, weird, it’s like some kind of Michael Stipe routine he’s never done before.” Then he was just like, “John, I gotta lie down,” and he went offstage, and we just played another song without him, and then I went to the side of the stage, and went into the dressing room, and I was like, “Are you OK?” He was out.
Linnell via Spare the Rock, Spoil the Child:[2]
There was a show we did in Florida where I felt so sick that we couldn't finish. It almost wasn't even a show, really. It was just terrible. I was feeling so sick that I sat down on the drum riser and couldn't get up and John Flansburgh thought I was mad at him, that I was fed up with playing in the band. He didn't realize that I was actually about to pass out.
A review of the show from The Bolles Bugle, Volume 59, Number 1 - November 1996:
For hundreds of They Might Be Giants fans in Jacksonville, the night of Saturday, October 5 will live in infamy. The doors of the Milk Bar opened at eight o' clock that night for TMBG's first Jacksonville show since their groundshaking fun-fest at The Edge two years ago, and legions of fans poured through the doors and paced down the stairs to the club itself with expectations of another wild party from the notoriously humorous and irreverent "Ambassadors of Love From Brooklyn."
The group, made up of frontmen John Linnell (vocals, keyboard, accordion, and saxophone) and John Flansburgh (lead vocals and guitar), with Eric Schremerhorn on lead guitar, Graham Maby on bass and vocals, and Brian Doherty on drums, finally appeared on the stage at eleven o' clock, after three hours of anxious anticipation from the crowd. They played four songs (including two from their new album Factory Showroom) and started another which Linnell cut short after only a few bars. He said that they were going to "take five," then they all promptly marched off the stage. The word around the floor was that Maby's mike wasn't working, and they were fixing the sound system.
After about twenty minutes, Flansburgh walked back on stage and said that due to "health problems" (later determined to be exhaustion suffered by Linnell), they were going to have to cut the gig. There was a stunned silence in the room, followed by a general disappointed murmur and the occassional "You suck!" from the crowd. All of TMBG's biggest fans in Jacksonville left the Milk Bar with a terrible feeling of emptiness, brought on by the fact that you can't quench anticipation for a two-plus hour show with only fifteen minutes of music.