They Might Be Giants @ The Pageant In Saint Louis, Missouri 10/09/09

[jabberwocky]

1. Meet The Elements
2. James K. Polk
3. Theme From Flood
4. Birdhouse In Your Soul
5. Lucky Ball And Chain
6. Istanbul (Not Constantinople
7. Dead
8. Shoehorn With Teeth
9. What Is A Shooting Star?
10. Someone Keeps Moving My Chair
11. Twisting
12. Hearing Aid
13. Minimum Wage
14. Letterbox
15. Clap Your Hands
16. Cowtown
17. Whistling In The Dark
18. Hot Cha
19. Your Racist Friend
20. Women And Men
21. Why Does The Sun Shine? (The Sun Is A Mass Of Incandescent Gas)
22. Sapphire Bullets Of Love
23. We Want A Rock
24. Particle Man
25. They Might Be Giants
26. Road Movie To Berlin
27. Damn Good Times
28. The Mesopotamians
29. (Band Introductions)
30. New York City
31. Drink!
32. Fingertips

See, they were supposed to do their album Flood in sequence, and looking at the track listing in full, it is now obvious what happened. They were taking breaks to do a few songs here and there--that first break included "Shoehorn With Teeth" included a little video-screen segment with sock puppets singing and Danny Weinkauf on the hotel bells (in lieu of the glockenspiel--and when they came back from that first break, they came back into Flood later than they were supposed to, having skipped a handful of songs ("Your Racist Friend"/"Particle Man"/"Twisting"/"We Want A Rock"), then Flansburgh realized they'd skipped "Twisting" but not all those others, and slowly throughout the rest of the show this was realized and they'd play whatever they'd missed as they remembered what it was. Basically it just made making out the above set list much more difficult than I expected it to be (at first I was just writing down "Flood, Part 1" and the like, but it quickly became apparent that wasn't gonna cut it). For the longest time in the set (as you can imagine) I kept thinking "I am almost CERTAIN that 'We Want A Rock' appears earlier on Flood, I am gonna have to call Bill after the show is over, if I don't see him here, and tell ask him why they left that one out." I basically just figured for awhile that I didn't know the track listing (in order) of Flood as well as I thought, or something. Admittedly it has been a long time since Flood was getting a lot of play on the Robert Severson music-listening machine. Then sometime around "Women And Men" Danny Weinkauf realized that "We Want A Rock" had yet to be played, and he was telling the band, and eventually they did come back and do it. In any case it was a tight show; aside from the Flood material there was a decent scattering of stuff from various albums (including their newest kids album Here Comes Science and TWO count 'em TWO cuts from Lincoln). I was glad they were able to make such light of their inability to get Flood right after 19 years. It's not like this was a new idea, they've done a lot of Flood shows in the past few years, but I guess when you're popular enough to sell out the Pageant, you don't worry too much about using a set list! After the show I saw Christine and Megan and not many others; I was getting a lame vibe from some dude Christine was hanging out with/talking to so I sorta excused myself. Then I bought too much candy and went to see Army Of Darkness at the Tivoli around midnight! I don't think I'd watched it (in spite of owning a VHS widescreen copy) since the last time I saw it at the Tivoli midnight show, probably five years ago, but I've seen it so many danged times I still knew all the key lines of course.