Putting on “Space Suit”

Zach Powers

In high school my friend Reed drove a boxy white Dodge outfitted with a custom sound system several times more valuable than the car itself. Two after-market tweeters protruded from the columns on either side of the windshield, stuck there with double-sided tape, thin black wires worming away under the dash. These Pog-sized speakers could produce enough volume to pierce an eardrum. Certain songs by certain bands—Reed had an affinity for Rush—were practically unlistenable because of the harsh tones of the high-hat.

That was the car where I discovered They Might Be Giants, an alt-rock art band proudly from Brooklyn. On a ride home from marching band practice, Reed played me TMBG’s 1992 album Apollo 18, the follow-up to their now-platinum Flood.

I owe Reed for introducing me to the band, but it was my friend Kirk with whom I truly bonded over the music. Kirk, like me, experienced TMBG as an a-ha moment, something that shook our thinking, that made us understand possibility, especially the possibilities within art, in a new way. That was the beginning of countless such shared moments with Kirk, ranging from films to comics books to cartoons. It all started simply enough, though, with Apollo 18.

TMBG’s songs are different, for sure. I have friends who dismiss the band’s music as novelty, but to me that misses the point. The band descends from post-punk, its primary musical statement a postmodern one, hinting that the creation of meaning through an arrangement of sounds is kind of absurd. Of course, my thoughts weren’t so refined at fifteen. My reaction to “Spider,” the song equivalent of a Shaw Brothers movie, was simply: I didn’t know we could do this.

I can sing every lyric off Apollo 18. Kirk would sometimes come to me to confirm an exact line. I’d even mastered TMBG cofounder John Linnell’s cascading lyrics on songs like “Dinner Bell” and “Which Describes How You’re Feeling,” staples of the Apollo 18 experience. The song from the album that haunts me, though, has no lyrics at all.

“Space Suit” is track number thirty-eight on Apollo 18, the final song, a closing credits after the multi-tracked, collage-like “Fingertips.” “Space Suit” blasts off with a hemiolic riff before settling into a weightless waltz, ethereal synths and loping rhythms, only to reignite the engines of the polyrhythm after this brief lull. Linnell’s accordion again defies gravity on the verse, a melancholy, perhaps stranded, melody.

Listening to the CD on my hulking boom box, I would often repeat the track a few times in a row. Sometimes it pops into my head as I’m falling asleep. Kirk and I once tried to suss out this haunting quality, but no easy answers came to us.

John Flansburgh, TMBG’s other cofounder, referred to by fans and bandmates alike as Flans, told me that the song was included on the album out of necessity more than planning.

“The process of making Apollo 18 was long and quite deliberate. The sequencing of ‘Fingertips’ within the whole running sequence seemed tricky. Putting such a verbal track, and a track so sonically crazy, in the middle of the sequence seemed potentially like a big interruption, and placing it as the final track might imply it was more of a bonus track or a throwaway, and that didn’t feel right.”

So the band dusted off “Space Suit,” a tune from their earliest repertoire. Flans recalls they initially used the song to open shows “so the sound man would have two minutes to hopefully sort out the track and our instruments before the vocals kicked in full-on in the next song.”

I understand the importance of a track list. After all, I made a half-dozen They Might Be Giants mixtapes over the years, culminating with The TMBG Mix, as I titled the cassette in green pen. The art of the mixtape, for those too young to remember, required first selecting the songs that must be on it, and then selecting a few songs of the right length so there would be no dead space at the end of either side, or worse yet, a song cut off in the middle. Of the dozens of mixtapes I made, none so perfectly balanced this art as well as The TMBG Mix. I made Kirk a copy. It basically lived in his car’s tape deck during high school.

Kirk ended up in college in Florida, and though it was a straight shot down I-10 to my campus in New Orleans, and though we would be even closer after graduation, I only saw Kirk a few times after we left our hometown. However, our college days coincided with the advent of digital messaging, and we were among the early adopters of ICQ and later AIM. I chatted with Kirk online far more often than I did with my college classmates, among whom I found no kindred geeks. Whenever I saw a new movie, or heard a new band, or read a new book, I ran to my computer to chat with Kirk about it.

“Space Suit” became a soundtrack for the half of my existence that occurred digitally. I don’t know if it’s TMBG’s signature synths that paired so well with the internet, or if it’s the disembodiedness of the song itself. Outer space versus cyberspace. And the feeling of the internet then differs from how I experience it today. Nostalgia certainly tinges my memory, but the early internet was conducive to geeking in a way the contemporary internet is not. In 1999, information had to be assembled piecemeal from various websites. To obsess over a band, you had to dive deep into search results for new nuggets. You had to try multiple search engines. Google wasn’t yet among them.

In a 2010 editorial for Wired, comedian Patton Oswalt points out that it’s now too easy to be a geek. “The problem with the Internet…is that it lets anyone become otaku [the Japanese word for people with obsessive interests] about anything instantly.”

Once upon a time, to obsess over something required effort. You had to track down obscure magazines and scour for bootlegs and join fan clubs. The early internet retained some of this uncertainty. The information a geek desired was suddenly more available, but it remained not-quite-easy to discover. To use the internet back then was to float untethered through a virtual frontier. Kirk was a master of such explorations, sharing new online artifacts almost every time we chatted.

“Space Suit” was also the soundtrack of late nights, watching Space Ghost Coast to Coast on Cartoon Network, and later the network’s adult animation block, Adult Swim. These shows paired well with the existential absurdity of They Might Be Giants, creating a hazy otherworld in the space between wakefulness and sleep. Kirk and I geeked out about these shows on a regular basis. Home Movies, the first original program on Adult Swim, dealt in the currency of the absurd as much as any track off Apollo 18.

In researching this piece, I discovered Linnell and Flans voiced characters in an episode of Home Movies’ final season. This is the kind of information I would have immediately sent a message to Kirk to share. Sadly, I can’t.

In 2004 or 2005, Kirk was absent from our chats for a couple of weeks. I assumed he’d been traveling. Maybe he had a new girlfriend. When he finally popped back online again, I asked him where he’d been.

I still remember the arrangement of my computer desktop: AIM in the lower right, chat box beside that. My background at the time was one I’d cobbled together out of stills from the anime FLCL, a show I’d watched on Kirk’s recommendation. I remember these details, but I don’t remember his exact words. That seems an important omission now.

Kirk had experienced a crippling headache on his birthday, two weeks before. The next day, doctors discovered a malignant tumor in his brain. Emergency surgery. Depression and denial. And then Kirk was back online like nothing unusual had happened.

We, Kirk’s friends, were lucky. We shared several years with him before a third resurgence of the cancer finally claimed a portion of his brain where doctors couldn’t operate. I learned he was in hospice too late to visit. It broke me then, not being there with him at the end. But now I think he was cool with my physical absence. For over a decade we’d maintained a friendship based on the absurd idea that shared thoughts were enough for human connection.

Before I flew to Louisville for Kirk’s funeral, I played The TMBG Mix, now an MP3 playlist, the physical turned virtual. Kirk had requested this playlist after he finally wore out the tape I’d given him years before. He told me the songs didn’t sound right played any other way.

“Space Suit” isn’t among the tracks in the mix, and it feels a gaping absence now. At the very least, lasting only a minute and a half, it’s an ideal candidate for the end of a side, when a good mix tape needs a song that’s the right length more than anything. A song that perfectly fills an empty space. A song to surround you when everything else is vacuum. Ninety seconds of weightlessness.

No, that’s not much time, but I’m better for having listened for any time at all.

© 2019 Zach Powers

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Zach Powers is the author of the novel FIRST COSMIC VELOCITY (Putnam, August 2019) and the story collection GRAVITY CHANGES (BOA Editions, 2017). His work has been featured by American Short Fiction, Lit Hub, Tin House, and elsewhere. He is Director of Communications at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and teaches writing at Northern Virginia Community College. Get to know him at ZachPowers.com.