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Giant steps out

John Flansburgh makes his own Mono Puff

by Gary Susman

"I'm not quite sure of my motivations myself," he admits. "Usually people do side projects when they're really dissatisfied with what they're doing in their primary thing, and that's hardly the case. I had a bunch of extra songs, and I was interested in doing things on a different scale. In an established band, you're not paranoid if you think people are watching you. Critics track your career, and people compare your current efforts to your previous efforts. One of the nice things about a side project like Mono Puff is it cleans the slate. It's relatively free of associations. I can do a lot of different kinds of stuff.

"There are things on the record that might not fit onto a They Might Be Giants record. There's a song called `Don't I Have the Right?', sung by Nancy Lynn Howell, which is a very straight song. It's essentially a torch song. It fits in the rest of the record in a grab-bag kind of way, whereas if it were on a They Might Be Giants record, people might think, `Oh, they want people to take them seriously now.' We do a range of stuff, but we don't want people to take us seriously when we're not being serious. We want people to respect our dedication to whatever messed-up ideas we have.

"Another aspect of the record is that it's guitar-oriented. That's really exciting for me, as an electric guitarist, to be involved in something that has that over-the-top rock thing going for it. There's some pretty rowdy material. That's what's going to come across in the live shows we do." Flansburgh also wanted to return to smaller venues than those demanded by the Giants' popularity. "A lot of my favorite experiences are in rock clubs. I feel more capable of having a good time as a performer and delivering an interesting show in a club than I do in a theater."

Where did the name come from? "It was the morning after New Year's Eve last year. I was in San Francisco. I went to the John Coltrane Church, where people worship John Coltrane as a saint, in Haight Ashbury. They had this wide-open jam with, like, 20 people playing instruments. There's an audience of people, and a lot of them are playing instruments as well. There's all these little kids, and some of the little girls had Afro-puff hairdos. A traditional Afro-puff looks like Mickey Mouse, with two big puffs of hair. And this one little girl had just one big, round puff on the top of her head in a perfect circle. I thought that hairdo must be `Mono Puff.' That's the origin. No drug reference there."

Mono Puff, who include Iggy Pop bassist Hal Cragin and Skeleton Key's Steve Calhoon on drums, dig up a lot from Flansburgh's pop-obsessed childhood in the '60s and '70s. There's the sonic palette of Mellotron, Farfisa organ, and wah-wah guitar. There's a Gary Glitter cover, "Hello Hello," in a perversely whispery rendition, with some abbreviated samples of Glitter's hockey-arena shouts. There's "Nixon's the One," a brief kiss-off to the Trickster. "I was shook up when he died and all the obituaries called him a genius in diplomacy," Flansburgh explains. "Well, let's see, the Vietnam War was not exactly a masterstroke of diplomacy."

There are also songs that evoke Flansburgh's teenage years in Boston (he and Linnell grew up in Lincoln). One is a hard-rocking cover of the Clamdiggers' surf epic "The Devil Went Down to Newport" (by 'Diggers/Upper Crust guys Ted Widmer and Nat Freedberg). Another is a strange, ambivalent ode to Red Sox wildman Bill Lee, "What Bothers the Spaceman." "It's not even the first song about Bill Lee, which I was distressed to find out. In fact, I was backstage at the Conan O'Brien show and Bill Lee was there. It was too weird. And then the music booker for the show asked me, `Have you heard that Warren Zevon song?' I guess Warren Zevon wrote a song about him. I hope it's not the exact same song."

Mostly, Unsupervised is just a fun album, like an old B-52's disc, only with a gamut of styles, from Beatlesque pop (the lovely "Don't Break the Heart," written by Flansburgh's Brooklyn neighbor Amy Rigby) to ska to Delta blues to country. "Each song works on its own level," says Flansburgh. "Beyond that, I just want the music to be taken at face value. Some of it is good-time rock music, and some of it is bad-time rock music."