By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 18, 2002; Page WE06

HOW DID it come to this -- McSweeney's Vs. They Might Be Giants?

They Might Be Giants have been a familiar presence on the periphery of smart pop for close to two decades now. McSweeney's is a literary quarterly edited by Dave Eggers, who first popped up on the radar 2 1/2 years ago with his acclaimed memoir, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius."

Friday, they'll square off at Lisner Auditorium, but it'll be neither boxing match nor courtroom drama. Actually, it's going to be more of an old-fashioned happening. That's because TMBG contributed most of the soundtrack to the sixth issue of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. Published last year, this special "Art and Music" issue featured 44 "pieces" -- stories, graphics, photos -- accompanied by a CD with 44 corresponding tracks of "discrete" music, each composed at a length commensurate with the time needed to read or look at a particular piece. Readers were admonished to listen along only while reading or looking at a corresponding piece, one of several odd directions unlikely to surprise fans of either party, and unlikely to be adapted to tonight's concert format.

"Anything involving They Might Be Giants and McSweeney's, there's no master plan," admits John Flansburgh, Who Is Definitely a Giant, along with his accordion-toting partner John Linnell.

Here's what actually does sound like a master plan: an opening performance by the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players ("a real family from Seattle -- mom, dad and their 9-year-old drummer daughter Rachel -- playing original songs inspired by slides recovered from yard sales or flea markets, projected while they play," Flansburgh gushes). After a multimedia reading by Eddy Joe Cotton ("Hobo: A Young Man's Thoughts on Trains and Tramping in America"), Eggers and Sarah Vowell, essayist and contributing editor to NPR's "This American Life," will read works from McSweeney's issue #6, some to accompaniment by TMBG, who will conclude with a full-on performance.

"It's a very high-brow variety show," suggests Flansburgh, saying it's also in the '60s tradition of happenings. "They Might Be Giants came up in the 'performance art' era, which was the '80s version of happenings and there are things about the whole evening that have a similar tone. Considering how complicated it sounds, there's a lot of entertainment value -- it's not that far away from vaudeville."

It was Vowell who formally introduced Eggers and TMBG -- she's profiled the duo, including their latest insta-song, "I'm Sick (of This American Life)" -- but Flansburgh had been a fan of Eggers's first magazine, Might.

"And I knew his name because I'd addressed many a label and affixed it for the Hello CD singles club that I ran in the mid-'90s. Dave was one of only 4,000 subscribers and he was from Brooklyn," also home to the Giants.

The two parties' eventual union on McSweeney's #6 was probably inevitable, since few artists have better maximized the power of the Internet. Among the band services are an online store and the free Dialasong.com (updating Dial-a-Song, the answering machine service they started in 1983 as an end-around radio, it offers a constant flow of new, unreleased songs). Meanwhile, McSweeney's Web site includes a store, a book publishing division, and all sorts of goodies that suggest both parties are particularly Web-savvy.

"A lot of people think if you know how to do anything on the Web, you're Web-savvy," Flansburgh says.

"Finding an audience for what you're doing and figuring out what's available to you makes you seem like you're doing things that are kind of far-flung but actually it's all you can do. One of the things that drew us to the Web is that lots of mainstream stuff is no longer open to us -- MTV is completely preoccupied with sexualizing 12-year-olds, so we're moving on, which is fine with us."

Same with Dial-A-Song and other alternate routes.

"We made a decision a long time ago to have a good time at what we do rather than having it be a struggle," Flansburgh explains. "It's a thrill to find new ways to have people hear your songs and these things are essentially exciting for us, as with a show like [tonight's]. We've been on the road for 17 years and most bands that you see at that point aren't particularly excited about what they're doing on the road currently, and one of the reasons is they're doing kind of the same things they were doing 17 years ago. This is going to be a very different, challenging show to put together and that's cool and good for us. We get a lot out of it ourselves. It keeps it fresh."

It's a quality Flansburgh and Linnell have pursued since they were pals working on their high school paper in the Boston suburb of Lincoln. Mutual tastes in music led to tasty musicmaking in a duo that took its name from a George C. Scott movie about a delusional New York lawyer. Their culturally literate, musically diverse, humor-drenched efforts are captured on "Dial-A-Song: 20 Years of They Might Be Giants," a new career-spanning set from Rhino Records, as well as on a new documentary, "Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns."

"Rhino approached us and we selected the tracks ourselves," says Flansburgh of the new collection. The first CD includes the closest TMBG have gotten to having bona fide hits ("Birdhouse in Your Soul," an odd love song from the point of view of a night light that reached Top 5 status in England), as well as songs attached to videos and soundtracks, including "Boss of Me," their Grammy-winning television theme for Fox's "Malcolm in the Middle."

"The other disc is a survey of the kinds of songs that are really unique to TMBG," Flansburgh says. "Some are beautiful, some are crazy, some are just strange," including "I Can Hear You," recorded on a wax cylinder machine at the Edison Laboratory without using any electricity.

The duo now has a No. 1 hit to its credit, but, typically, it's come from left field: their first overt children's album, "No!" recently topped Billboard's kid chart (they're looking to develop it into an animated DVD).

"We've done a lot of different things in the last five years in terms of outside work and collaborations," Flansburgh says. That includes providing the incidental music for "Malcolm in the Middle," which came about after they did music for ABC's "Nightline," which led to doing music for Jon Stewart's talk show, as well as the opening and closing music for "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me" (count Mike Myers a major TMBG fan).

"And we do jingle work that is as faceless as it can possibly be," Flansburgh adds. "No one knows it's us and it's really liberating to work on something that will never be discussed with our faces attached." (If you want to discuss, they've done jingles for Coca-Cola, Diet Dr Pepper, Chrysler and Weber grills.)

"I find it really interesting as a writer on the craft level," he says. "It's a different kind of workout than you normally get -- it makes you write in concise ways and learn how to work a studio and arrange things. It's cool work."

Meanwhile, the wider variety of projects has raised TMBG's profile beyond cult status.

"It's impossible not to recognize that we have liberated ourselves from the position of buried national treasure," Flansburgh notes wryly. "It's exciting to be recognized as a band, because we're really ambitious about what we do. Because we incorporate humor in what we're doing, it always makes people a little nervous that they're somehow going to be manipulated. It's a very fragile equation, mixing rock and humor, and sometimes, people may think we're a little pretentious about what we do. But this project means everything to us, it's our entire lives. We've always been in an odd place and we're extraordinarily comfortable in our odd place."

And, according to a recent New Yorker profile, comfortable to the point of grossing between $1 million to $2 million a year, what the magazine called "the wonderful state of obscure success."

Flansburgh laughs about the millions.

"That is true and some years it's even more, but the sad reality is that just as with every other business, 90 percent of it goes to hiring semi-trucks and lighting rigs and payroll for 20 people. But it's great for my parents to think I'm a much wealthier man than I really am!

"We have a middle-class existence, which is not too much to jump up and down about," Flansburgh says. "Between you and me, I'd like to be a little bit richer."

MCSWEENEY'S VS. THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS -- At Lisner Auditorium Friday.

• To hear a free Sound Bite from They Might Be Giants, call Post-Haste at 202-334-9000 and press 8121. (Prince William residents, call 703-690-4110.)