They Might Be Giants Will Fling this Spring
BY JOHN BYRNE

The agent representing rock band They Might be Giants confirmed Monday that the band will be playing in Oberlin May 5 for the annual Student Union-sponsored Spring Fling.
Since Spring Fling was conceived in 1998, other bands that have played at the annual concert include Wailing Souls, Black Star and Soul Coughing. Last year’s Sixth Element rave, held in Phillips, substituted for the outdoor concert. The event has yet to feature a band of such stature as TMBG.
The Student Union Programming Board sent out a survey by all-campus mailing last fall asking students who they’d most like to see brought to campus. “We felt that when we did the survey it looked like the ballot box had been a little bit stuffed,” said Assistant Director to the Student Union and Faculty Advisor to SUPC Tina Zwegat. Of the bands voted for, many were also not available.
The cost of bringing different acts varied widely, from Sonic Youth’s $15,000 to Dave Matthews Band’s fee of $500,000 to $1 million. Other popular acts, such as the Barenaked Ladies, Ani DiFranco and the Indigo Girls were far out of SUPC’s price range of $20,000 ($300,000, $50,000 and $50,000, respectively).
“We’d love to bring Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell or Bruce Springsteen to Oberlin, but they are way out of our price range,” sophomore board member Lily Matini said.
“This year, we wanted to make it an event where we get mostly Oberlin College students and not from other places,” said Kimberly Bryant, chair of SUPC. “At the rave last year, though we had a huge turnout, there were very few Obies.”
“Trying to come up with a band is laborious,” she added. “Our process was more of just brainstorming names, bands that we thought that samples of people would be willing to pay a small amount to see.”

The process of selecting a band began late because one SUPC-sponsored event originally planned for October, Les Percussions de Guinnee, got rescheduled. “We needed to wait for that to occur to see how much we had in the budget to spend on Spring Fling,” Bryant said.
The board allocated $20,000 to the event, which will include the cost of an opening band, as yet unconfirmed, and lighting rental costs. While the ticket price hasn’t yet been decided, Assistant Director of the Student Union and faculty advisor to SUPC Tina Zwegat expects prices will be cheap. “My hope with Giants would be that students would pay somewhere between five and ten dollars.”
Zwegat has been frantically making calls for several months. As advisor to the SUPC programming board she has been making calls to agents for quotes and negotiating prices.
“I was working on Dido; I had called and got a quote for $15,000, some ridiculously low amount, and I called for availability two weeks later and she went up to $150,000. I was stunned,” Zwegat said.
They Might Be Giants was not the board’s top choice, but Bryant said they appeared on their list each time they made revisions. They were not on the original Oberlin Shorts survey.
They Might Be Giants formed in New York in 1985, released their first album in 1986. The song “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” brought them instant fame. The more recent work of the group includes the theme song for Austin Powers 2, “My Evil Twin,” and the theme song for the popular Fox program, Malcolm in the Middle.
Students were excited at the announcement. Senior Gabe Carleton-Barnes said he was “very excited that they are coming. I drove to Columbus on my birthday to see them.” He described their sound as “nasal, crisp, halting geek rock.” 
“I think they’re the single most important band in pop/rock music ever,” senior Paul Madavi said “They’re like the Talking Heads without the pretension.”
“That’s impressive,” first-year Jessie Perlik said. “I will definitely be there. They’re hilarious.”
John Linnell, a member of the band, was voted People Magazine’s ninth most beautiful person of the year in 1998. In response, he wrote an Op/Ed piece for the New York Times, in which he said, “If I had the choice, I might have put myself in a different race — the most interesting mismatched socks poll.”