March 16, 2001-They Might Be Giants play at the Recher Theatre in Baltimore, MD. Someone is opening, but I have no idea who.
List of perpetrators is as follows-
Dylan Flipse
Rachel Flipse
Sam Corbett
Jesse Brown
Johanna Schmitt
I plan to spend Thursday night in Corning, at Sam's. He'll go to class/work on Friday morning, and I'll sleep in. We'll head to Mansfield to get Jesse and Johanna on Friday in the early afternoon, and get my sister in Williamsport. We'll continue on to Baltimore for the show, hopefully arriving a while before the 8:00 doors for a good spot. The Recher Theatre doesn't seem huge, I think it only holds about 700 people, and I think we should be in for a pretty good show. After, I think we'll be heading back to Williamsport. I expect a drive of about three and a half hours. In addition to that, Jesse and Johanna will be picked up at my place the next day by Jesse's mom, and they're heading to New York City, so they can be there and still get some sleep this way. Plus, finding a place to stay was going to be a pain in the ass.
Doors opened shortly after 8:00. On our way in, we spotted new TMBG tshirt and TMBG coffee. Also spotted were signs telling us that we may be filmed for something named Gigantic, and that we had no rights in the matter.
The Recher reminded me of a smaller version of the Theatre of Living Arts in Philly. Not sure why.
OkGo was a pretty cool opener. Very Soul Coughing, at times anyway, or so Jesse and I both noticed. Met the guys afterwards, very nice, very cool.
Between sets, I did productive things like yelling for them to bring Mike Leffel out. He doesn't show.
They had the sound on 11. It was pretty loud, and there was some fun distortion in the really loud bits.
Naturally, they played lots of stuff. I'm just writing about what stuck out as unusual to me. They played Fingertips, and that was really cool to hear. Near the end I yelled out for Spacesuit. A bunch of guys behind me picked up on it and started yelling for the same. I'm not sure that a live arrangement of that even exists, but it's a fun idea.
They played Minimum Wage, another one I'd never seen live before. Rachel was glad to see Twisting show up. Unless I was dehydrated and hearing things, they played Robot Parade not only at the very beginning of the show, but also during an encore. The barrier in the front was close enough and the cannon was at such an angle, if anyone right up there had been inclined to do so, they could have easily blocked much of the blast with an outstretched hand. There was no mosh pits or pass the dude. I'm cool with that.
Some guys held up an "All your base are belong to us" sign, and Flans stopped the show to talk about it. He was pretty confused. Dan Miller apparently then told him "It's a website." He was less interested then, but Linnell still introduced the next song by saying - "This next song are belong to us." As you can imagine, the very geeky crowd (Sam, Jesse, maybe Johanna, myself included) loved it. Linnell stopped once in the middle of Older to ask us if we thought the earpiece things they were wearing looked cool.
