John Linnell of They Might Be Giants Talks Tech

harrymcc writes "We've published Benj Edwards' wide-ranging interview with John Linnell, one half of the 30-year musical partnership known as They Might Be Giants. He talks about his life as a technology user--from his first encounter with the Radio Shack TRS-80 to his mastery of Asteroids to the band's long-time use of Macs to its pioneering experiments on online music."

Comments

TRS-80 was the #1 computer of late 70s

[commodore6502]

I'm not surprised he used a TRS-80 as his "first". It was the best-selling computer of 1978, 79 and 80*.

"If you went back to that time and told yourself, âoeIn thirty years, weâ(TM)re going to be distributing all of our music through this device,â what would you think?" - John Linnell says he would not be surprised. At the time, people were already recording songs on their Ataris, Commodores, and Amigas and distributing them via the BBS and Usenet.

>>>John Linnell's first PC, the Macintosh Plus (1986).

IMHO he would have been better-off buying an Atari ST or Amiga. Like Andy Warhol and Disney Animation did. The Mac Plus wasn't very strong for video or sound.

*1981-82 was Atari 400/800
*1983-86 was Commodore 64
*1987 onward was IBM PC and clones

Re:The sun...

[johnnysaucepn]

...is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace.

^my new favorite TMBG song

Good song. But not written by them. http://tmbw.net/wiki/Hy_Zaret_And_Lou_Singer On the other hand, "Why Does the Sun Really Shine? (The Sun Is a Miasma of Incandescent Plasma)" was. "The sun is a miasma Of incandescent plasma The sun's not simply made out of gas The sun is a quagmire It's not made of fire Forget what you've been told in the past"

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Theme from The Daily Show, Grammy-winning kids' albums, a new regular album coming out next month (they do about one every three years), a tour just starting up with Jonathan "Still Alive" Coulton as the opener -- yeah, they're pretty relevant.

If "Istanbul" is your favorite, I pity you your ignorance and envy you your opportunity to still discover them.

Re:Their music?

[TexVex]

Back in their early days they used to run something called "Dial-A-Song". It was basically just an answering machine with one of their songs recorded as the greeting. They would switch out the song often.

One time the machine recorded part of a two-way conversation when a woman named Gloria called the machine to listen to it with someone else on the line. TMBG released that recording as an unnamed track on their "Miscellaneous T" b-side compilation album. There is a transcript here.