They Might Be Giants
at
SUNY Binghamton's Spring Fling

outside the Union on April 29, 2000.

Dylan Flipse
Tom Smith
Sam Corbett
Liz Learn
I'll be at Sam's in Corning overnight on Friday. We'll get the group together on Saturday and drive to Binghamton. There's this Spring Fling thing going on all day with local bands, TMBG is something of a featured performer it seems, but we just know that they're coming on sometime in the evening.

Here is my typical direction sheet (Liz will be navigating us to SUNY Bingo. God save our ship.)-

Saturday, April 29
Student Association
University Union Room 221A
P.O. Box 6000
Binghamton, New York 13902-6000
(607) 777-6503

Office Hours and Summer Hours
Monday-Friday 10 AM-4 PM (8/30/99-5/19/00)
Monday-Thursday 10 AM-2 PM (5/20/00-8/29/00)

April 29th
Spring Fling
TMBG Evening
Local bands throughout the day
http://www.sa.binghamton.edu
Spring Fling - Saturday, April 29th, outside the Union

The day went quite well. Liz can't exactly navigate to Binghamton like she said she could, but we got good directions from a sweaty man with a hose. We never had a solid starting time for the concert, so we went nice and early. Found a modest selection of vendors and a few very small acts playing. TMBG was by far the main attraction, and we found brightly colored posters all over the place, two of which we promptly yoinked. We spent most of the remaining time before the show playing Foxtail and frisbee on some unoccupied grass, then stood for a good long time in line.

Free show, Saturday night, college campus with not much going on- the line to get in stretched quite a ways. There also seemed to be a lot of big TMBG fans among them, which is always a good sign. We'd heard there would be no opening act, but we had heard terribly, terribly wrong.

My first They Might Be Giants show featured an opener called The Gravel Pit, which, looking back, I can see was a fairly poor band. But not offensively terrible, nor terribly loud about it. I even remember that the frontman had some funny lines. That was decent. Since then I've seen Lincoln (Good enough that I bought their CD and like it), Michael Shelley (Decent enough, few good songs, funny guy), You Were Spiraling (Suhweeeet cover over Take On Me, and some other good stuff), John Linnell (Awesome), and TMBG themselves (Opening for the Violent Femmes). All very tolerable acts. But on this night, we saw a band that called itself Evolution. Lead singer/guitar, bass, second guitar, and drummer. Extremely loud, and terrible. I'm one to respect an opening act probably as much as anyone, but these guys sucked. They looked like they were from the late 80s guitar rock scene and sounded like shit. So bad that the four of us began loudly singing Moxy Früvous's "The Drinking Song" between two of Evolution's songs. (You knew they were between songs because there was a moment of relative quiet. No clapping. The songs all sounded exactly the same, and you couldn't make out any lyrics.) A fairly large number of people joined in, till we were drowned out by the "music."

Anyway, that put a bit of a damper on the mood. TMBG didn't especially help things by taking an extra-super-long time to come out. But when they did and shook the crowd out of its opening act-induced stupor with Particle Man, then things got fun. We heard three new songs- Boss of Me, Robot Parade, and 4 of 2. We got an *especially* sly acoustic guitar intro to Istanbul from Dan Miller. Best of all, we recorded it on MiniDisc. We're pretty bad at that process of course, so some of it is crappy, but some should MP3 nicely.

Read about the rest of the concerts I've been to on my Concerts Page.
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By Dylan Flipse,