They Thursday #8
Today is April 2, 2026.
Hi everybody, Olive Maroon is here! I’m back, and I’m ready to roll. The break I took for a couple weeks was just what I needed to reflect (and also to do something else), but now I’m going back to work on my book series They Might Be Giants: Time Is Marching On.
I want to tell you about what happened yesterday, and some of the events leading up. A while ago, I mentioned that I was in touch with Dave Lindsay, and he was going to give me a demo tape which he recorded on a Fostex 4-track cassette recorder, in which one of the songs was co-written and co-performed with John Linnell, c. 1983. Well…
In my ongoing quest to find people who have something new to say about John Flansburgh and John Linnell (and promptly contacting and interviewing them), I found out about the bassist and writer Dave Lindsay. They will always remember him for his specific unique contribution to the band’s formation, in a short-lived 1981-82 trio called Brave New Whales. The lineup for Brave New Whales was:
John Flansburgh, guitar
Dave Lindsay, bass
John Linnell, keyboards
Accounts vary on just how many songs were in BNW’s repetoire (some sources say 3, others say 5), but three songs which have been confirmed are “Cowtown” and “Cabbagetown” (co-written by Flansburgh and Linnell), and “Slow Ambulance To Heaven” (written by Lindsay). A key aspect that often gets overlooked, though, is that without Dave Lindsay, Flansburgh and Linnell might not have thought about forming a band. It could have been possible, but this is the way things went down.
JL, 1990: When we decided to put a band together it was because there was this bass player who lived in the building we were both living in in Brooklyn. He said, ‘Let’s make a band.’ John and I would never have admitted that that was something we actually wanted to do, but suddenly it seemed groovy. We never performed, but we felt like a band because we practiced our three songs over and over.¹
I inteviewed Dave Lindsay on January 19, 2026. This is why I have to remember that I love what I’m doing: I’m learning all this new information that nobody else has ever got before. Just a few revelatory things Dave told me:
Dave Lindsay, a.k.a. Allolo Trehorn, came up with the Klezmatics’ name (and he’s still good friends with trumpeter Frank London).
A lot of the names credited in Flansburgh and Bill Krause’s 1985 zine Art In Context are pseudonyms for Dave Lindsay. There are some notable contributions by one “Franz Heidler” for his cousin Arto, and for Flans and Linnell’s group They Might Be Giants.
In 1984, Dave had a one-man-band solo act called John Henry.
And, most revelatory of all, is that he had co-written a song with John Linnell that nobody else had ever even heard about. It’s called “In Bathtub World”. It was written and recorded in 1983. That year, when John, John, and Dave moved out of the Park Slope apartment in Brooklyn that they had all lived in since 1981, they split ways; the Johns moved to an apartment in Fort Greene, and Dave had relocated to Jamaica Plain in Boston. Sometimes the Johns would visit Dave, and on one occasion when Linnell visited him, they decided to co-write this song in the Exquisite Corpse style,² and of course they made a recording of it.
Naturally, I wanted to hear it.
There was a format war with the recording tape industry, and consumers had a lot of choices as far as 4-track home cassette recorders go. Fostex was just one of many companies manufacturing and distributing cassette recorders; their machines ran at twice the speed of a normal cassette tape, meaning if you tried listening to it in a regular tape deck not only would you hear just 2 of 4 tracks, you’d also hear the recording significantly slowed down. This creates a problem for us now, in the era of digital-only file sharing and music streaming. Physical media will never die, but it will probably become outdated and obsolete. The Fostex tape that Lindsay and Linnell recorded “In Bathtub World” on is one of those obsolete formats. He also said that relatively recently, he got in touch with Linnell and asked him if he or anybody he knows could play the tape, to which Linnell said no.
I told him I wanted to have a go at digitizing the tape.
And of course, the 21st century effect of the late 20th century’s format war is, I had to buy a specific machine just for one express purpose. But this just shows you how far I’m willing to go in order for my books to be as concise as possible.
Earlier in March, I made a fast friend in a musician and fellow TMBG fan named Lucy Thorkelson, who reads this blog (hi!) and messaged me. She records some really rockin’ songs with her band on a Fostex 4-track tape machine, and she offered to help me digitize Dave Lindsay’s tape. I told her that I really appreciated that, and that I’d call upon her if, for whatever reason, I couldn’t do it.
I got a used Fostex X-24 machine for $60 online.
Dave’s family lives in Buncombe County, North Carolina, and sometimes he passes through my hometown of Hendersonville to get there. This meant that he didn’t necessarily have to mail me the tape, as I had initially thought things would go; instead, he’d literally just hand the tape to me in person.
I suggested we meet up for coffee, and he agreed. We settled on 2 PM on April 1 (yesterday) — no joke. I told him about a really neat local coffee shop in downtown Hendo called Black Bear Coffee Co., which sits snugly among the geology museum, the music store, the bookstore, the ‘50s style diner, and many boutiques. Downtown Hendo is great, and if you’re ever here please check it out.
I don’t drive, so my close friend and roommate Jules drove me there, and she sat in with us. We met perfectly on schedule, at the expected time, at the expected place. Things went completely without a hitch. I can honestly say that for an in-person interview (which I’m not exactly used to, as most of my interviews have been done via phone calls and Zoom meetings), it went very well.
Black Bear Coffee Co. has several specially crafted lattes to choose from. They’re all pretty good, but my favorite one is the Cozy Cub: brown sugar syrup, white chocolate sauce, cinnamon, and nutmeg. I love the sweeter, more substantial side of lattes, and this one hits every single button. When I’m interviewing someone, I want to honor them and show them how much I appreciate their contribution to this story, so I went and ordered Dave his black coffee. (I want this to be a trend!)
We joked and laughed, we had rich conversations, we had a really good time.
I felt compelled to tell him about The Incident. (If you don’t know, I detailed “The Incident” in the previous They Thursday post.) I think that is exactly what I needed to do.³ Dave really helped me process my feelings, and he could totally relate to my nervousness in the moment in which The Incident occurred.
We talked about the tape. There it was, sitting on the wooden table. I thought ahead of time and brought my Fostex machine and a pair of headphones along with me, so that Dave could hear the tape for the first time in over 4 decades. When he did, he pointed out that my machine was playing the tape too fast, even on its slowest speed setting. All that means is I have to slow the recording down digitally.
I decided to bring my tablet along and show him some pictures that could help jog his memory. My friend Jon Uleis lives just a short walk away from the Park Slope apartment, so a few years ago he just snapped a photo of it. That was one photo I showed Dave, who remembers 3rd Street to this day. He pointed out that sometime after the ‘80s they had the front door replaced, and he also told me that when he and the Johns lived there in 1981-83 the building was owned by an older lady who was letting her son live there. After this, we were just talking about writing books and what goes into that.
By the end of this meeting, I asked him to sign my cassette copy of Lincoln, for his contributions to the song “Cowtown” alone (I’m still a fan, after all) — and he did.
I want to conduct more in-person interviews and get them to sign my albums so I can eventually accumulate exclusive copies of these albums with all these people’s autographs. After all, I think it’s a good idea.
We all walked to his car just before he had to leave, and I talked to him about my short film Disabled World, which he saw on YouTube (and enjoyed), and I decided to give him an extra copy I had on DVD.⁴ (There are only 8 limited-edition copies of this DVD in existence. Soon I’ll make more.)
This left me in a good mood for the rest of the day, and I still feel really good about making this happen. Obviously I’m going back to writing They Thursday posts, but this meeting has revitalized my efforts in the book. It’s gonna happen.
Now, about that tape.
It’s in my hands now. It’s still Dave’s property, but for the time being I have access to it. I haven’t digitized it yet, because all I need at this point is a cord that goes from an auxiliary input to a USB input. I quickly ordered that on Amazon for $6, and it’s coming in the mail tomorrow. I plan on not only digitizing each song in full, but also each of the 4 individual tracks on the tape, so I can see what’s on each track. Next week, I’m going to let you know what’s on the tape!
Thank you.
-OM, from a 2009 MacBook laptop.
NOTES AND CITATIONS
“What do Giants eat?”, Karen Catchpole, Sassy, March 1990.
The lyric sheet (which I have included in a previous installment of They Thursday) is revelatory in and of itself, because we now know that Linnell recycled phrases; “and when it’s so / there’s this to know” was reused in “The Bells Are Ringing” (1996), and “like a broken record” was reused in “Ana Ng”. In 2023, Bandbox reissued TMBG’s second album Lincoln on vinyl, with a track-by-track booklet called Everything Sticks Like A Broken Record, so even these days they still harken back to the days with Dave Lindsay.
26,000 people saw me embarrass myself in front of my musical heroes, so The Incident is probably lolcow legend by now, and is the reason why I’m now using a pen name. I’ve told other people about The Incident, including former TMBG members Eric Schermerhorn and Hal Cragin, who have become very good friends of mine. Eric let me know that he thought the Johns were “actually really interested in what [I was] saying, but those other guys were trying to be mean”, and Hal let me know that he felt I was “a very thoughtful and deep thinker about people”, and that he “know[s] from experience that the Johns are very sensitive to their fans and while distant in some ways, they understand their audience very well.” These people knew the Johns longer than I’ve even been alive. I’m gonna trust what they have to say.
I also had an extra DVD copy of Disabled World that I wanted the Johns to have. I left it with a member of the krewe at The Orange Peel in Asheville when I saw TMBG in concert there on 11/17/2025, and she let me know that though she couldn’t promise the Johns would see it, she’d leave it in a prominent place near the stage where the Johns would see it. When The Incident happened, I asked them if they got the DVD. Tim Heidecker thought I was asking him, so he answered my question which was meant for the Johns. I still don’t know if they actually got it or not. I’d like to think they did. More people have seen The Incident than have seen Disabled World. You can remedy that by watching it here: https://tinyurl.com/DisabledWorld2024