The cover of the They Might Be Giants album, “Venue Songs.”
In 2004, the quirky pop-rock group They Might Be Giants decided to write a song about every venue they visited on a tour. (That’s the kind of thing They Might Be Giants has been known to do throughout their long, adamantly offbeat career). Their Jersey stop on the tour was at The Stone Pony in Asbury Park, so that’s what they wrote about: Specifically, an experience where someone got kicked in the head, backstage, because he was mistaken for somebody else (who had taken a beer that belonged to the guy who was doing the kicking).
It may be a true story, and it may be imagined, but it certainly has the ring of truth.
It’s a short, jazzy song, clocking in at less than a minute; fast-forward to the 43-second mark of the video below if you just want to hear the song (and not the comic bit that precedes it, which is worth sitting through).
They Might Be Giants’ venue songs were collected as an MP3 album in 2004, then re-released as a CD/DVD set in 2005.
New Jersey celebrated its 350th birthday in 2014. And in the 350 Jersey Songs series, we marked the occasion by posting 350 songs — one a day, from September 2014 to September 2015 — that have something to do with the state, its musical history, or both. To see the entire list, click here.
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