News You Can Bruise for 2008 January 13

There are a lot funny things about Leonard Nimoy singing "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins", but I like to think the funniest thing would be Lobelia Sackville-Baggins's reaction if she heard it.

This story begins with Linnette the Psycho Elf, a friend of mine and Andy's from Prodigy, who sent Andy a tape of rare They Might Be Giants bootlegs. At the end of the tape there were three songs, possibly a demo's worth, by a non-TMBG band which used what sounds like a Hammond organ. One of the songs ("The Latest Theory") is just okay, but the other two are excellent and have stayed in my head ever since. Today I digitized them as part of my digitize-and-get-rid-of-tapes project. Here they are, with my inaccurate title guesses chosen for maximum Googlability.

No reliable information has survived about this band. I think they were local to Linnette, who lived in Massachusetts, I think, or somewhere in the East with a lot of trees, I guess because where else would an elf live? And the band may have opened for TMBG at one point. I've been low-key searching for information about this band for fifteen years, and although the amount of data I can search has grown by orders of magnitude this information is never in the pile. So I'm taking the first step and hoping someone attaches another piece eventually. And if not, you can at least enjoy the songs. Also it would be cool to hear from Linnette again if she reads this.

Disappointing update #1: Andy sez, "Wow, I'd completely forgotten about that tape, those mystery tunes, and their supplier! I think the original tape melted in my old VW."

Non-disappointing update #2: Caleb Wilson identifies the musician as Brian Dewan! The songs are from an EP put out by John Flansburgh's Hello Recording Club. Andy says, "The Internet saves the day again!"