TMBGareOK. The Official They Might Be Giants tumblr
They Might Be Giants' official tumblr celebrating the full span of TMBGs creative output.
This tumblr is fueled by YOUR TMBG-related photos, GIFs, cover versions, questions, venn diagrams and more! Posts are always queued, and attribution is always in the original post in these archives. Please forgive reposted material lack of new attribution, but with 8-10 posts daily, we can't keep up!
The miasma of incandescent plasma mascot at the Cleveland Monsters solar eclipse party hockey game knew the sun was about 93 million miles away…and that’s why he looks so small.
The Big show is coming. Different album spotlight each night. New old songs and old new songs. 8-piece band. 3 dudes on horns.
5.14 Cincinnati/Covington https://tinyurl.com/yd9vn522
5.15 Cincinnati/Covington https://tinyurl.com/ytw8az2y
6.14 Minneapolis https://tinyurl.com/33mrxmva
6.15 Minneapolis https://tinyurl.com/bdhje5jf
Hey Flans :), was just reading Wikipedia on the debut and it says that you 'pasted up' the art on the cover.
How much of the cover did Rodney do Vs you? Or was it just a case of Rodney doing the individual elements on the cover and you combined them?
JF: oh I realize my terminology is so archaic, it might be confusing. First to be clear--Rodney Alan Greenblat created ALL the artwork including the handwriting on the first album cover. It was a work of his imagination and he deserves full credit.
To explain "paste up" Before computers, a paste up artist (which was my job for a number of years) was one of the lower level folks in an art dept. at a newspaper, magazine or book publisher. You created the mechanical, which was a board with black and white art (either type or xeroxes of art sized the board), with all the typographic information as well as art instructions usually in blue pencil so it wouldn't get reproduced--and that, along with the original color illustration or photography, was photographed to be folded in as a layer in the photo-offset printing process.
The type was output by a dedicated machine--a very early computer essentially--and there were also photostatic machines, nicknamed stat machines that would put moire dots on artwork (those patterns of dots you see in newspapers) along with resize things or marry various visual elements together into one stable piece of art.
All these tasks would require a magazine to have a staff of a dozen or so people to put out a monthly edition. When computers came in, it was one or two folks finishing the same amount of work.
heya! I’ve been doing some setlist digging and noticed one you posted here in 2013ish (marked as July 7th, 1983 @ the Pyramid Club on TMBW) lines up pretty well with some of the live stuff on Unlimited, specifically the live versions of Big Whoredom and Happy. do you know if those recordings were from that set? just curious - thanx :]
JF: Probably. I had a cassette machine set up for a bit and I archived some live tracks off an unlabeled cassette. If it includes those songs it must have been very early days for us for sure. CBGB and the Pyramid were the spots where we got tapes from the sound man, but the balances were usually very weird.