Giants Are Learning the Facts of Live : Pop music: John Linnell and John Flansburgh say that the switch from taped backup to a band is a dramatic change for them.

OK, so maybe it’s not as big a deal as Dylan going electric, but the decision by They Might Be Giants to hire a band after nine years of performing to taped backup is causing a bit of apprehension among some fans of the quirky Brooklyn-based duo.

“This is a very dramatic change for us,” acknowledged John Linnell, the accordion-playing half of the team. “For years, we’ve had people asking us when we were going to get a band together. . . . Now we’ve got all these people saying, ‘Why are you getting a band together?’ And they’re some of the same people.”

Linnell and partner John Flansburgh, who play the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano tonight, began their unconventional pop career in New York’s bohemian Lower East Side in the early ‘80s. At first, TMBG was a mostly studio-bound project--just a couple of guys with day jobs playing around with musical ideas in their spare time.

“We were mostly just recording songs. We didn’t really perform that much,” said Linnell, talking in the tour bus after a sound check at the Ventura Theater last week. Eventually, though, “we came up with this way of performing where we just played a tape behind us and sang and played instruments over it.

“That suited our material pretty well, because there was a lot of stuff on the tape that was . . . very studio-generated kind of music that we couldn’t possibly play with a live band. In the beginning it was really essential that we have the tape--we really couldn’t do it another way.”

In a They Might Be Giants song, any manner of sound might pop up, from fire alarms to a speed-talking auctioneer, often in spots where most bands would put the obligatory guitar solo. The drums and basses are mostly programmed. Friends will drop by the studio sometimes to play on a track or two, but most of the “real” noises come from Flansburgh (singing and playing guitar) and Linnell (singing and playing accordion, in addition to some sax and woodwinds).

This approach to recording and performing was celebrated in the duo’s debut album, in the song “Rhythm Section Want Ad,” and was reaffirmed in interviews as recently as 1990 following the release of TMBG’s major-label debut album, “Flood.” Said Flansburgh to the New York Times: “One of the liberating things about our band is that we don’t have a drummer or a rhythm section who would determine how the songs have to be arranged.”

The newest album, “Apollo 18,” was recorded “more or less the way we always do things,” Linnell said, but when it came time to plan the tour, he and Flansburgh found themselves seriously discussing the idea of supplementing the taped accompaniment by adding some musicians.

“As soon as we started talking about it,” Linnell recalled, “we realized that bringing along any musicians at all and also having tape just seemed like this halfway measure, and we might as well get a complete band.” So they auditioned and hired some players and went off to Europe for some traditional two-guys-and-a-tape gigs while the new members learned their parts for the U.S. tour.

“It was kind of an efficient way of doing it. We managed to get things going very quickly,” Linnell said. “Also, they are ridiculously good.” The new members include drummer Jonathan Feinberg, a Los Angeles native; Kurt Hoffman, a friend from another New York band, the Ordinaires, who adds saxophone, keyboards and some clarinet, and bass player Tony Maimone, veteran of alternative rock stalwarts Pere Ubu.

As for those offbeat sound effects, the band has added a sampler triggered by a pad on Feinberg’s drum kit. “It turns out that there’s not very much that we needed,” Linnell said. “Just a gunshot here and a crazy sound there.”

In some ways, on the evidence of shows last week in Ventura and Los Angeles (see accompanying review), the addition of a full band has transformed They Might Be Giants from a couple of clever guys with pop sensibilities into that rare commodity--a rock band with brains.

Their sound in the past has been on the minimalist side, with the programmed rhythm tracks and live accordion fills contributing to a slightly manic, wind-up sonic trademark. While that has suited the material well, the addition of a band adds muscle to TMBG’s always-present pop hooks and expands, rather than restricts, the options.

New on the current tour are a “stump the band” segment (they’ve done everything from “Freebird” to “YMCA”) and a rocking version of Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein” with an accordion and clarinet duet.

One thing not likely to change is the Linnell and Flansburgh songwriting approach. Their biggest hit so far was 1990’s “Birdhouse in Your Soul,” sung from the perspective of a night light plugged into a kitchen wall. Singles released so far off “Apollo 18” include “The Statue Got Me High,” about a guy who explodes after staring at a statue, and “I Palindrome I.” In the lyrics, twisted cliches and non sequiturs collide in convoluted rhyme schemes, often suggesting a strange marriage of Dada and Dr. Seuss.

These guys write short, too--a propensity that has been taken to its illogical extreme on “Apollo 18” with an extended musical experiment, a sonic collage, collectively titled “Fingertips,” of nearly 20 disembodied refrains and choruses in a variety of styles from songs that never were. Most of these snippets run between 5 and 10 seconds.

The main inspiration was “those ads on TV where they’re selling a compilation of songs from some era and they just chop up all the choruses,” Linnell explained. Of course, no pop era in recent memory boasted hit songs with such refrains as “Please pass the milk” and “What’s that blue thing doing here?”

Some of the snippets are laugh-out-loud funny, as are many They Might Be Giants songs, but Linnell and Flansburgh are careful to stress they don’t want to be labeled a “humor band.”

“We try and keep it entertaining, and I think because we don’t edit out the humor completely people get the feeling that, maybe by contrast to Dokken, we’re kidding. (But) we really take ourselves way too seriously,” Linnell said.

“I think the humor part is really quite abstract,” Flansburgh added. “When you’re writing a song, it’s really hard to tell what people are going to think is funny.

“I remember the first show we ever did. I was really surprised that people were so jolly, that the mood of the show was so up, because a lot of our songs seem relentlessly grim with just this very thin facade of fun. . . . There’s a lot of really scary stuff in the show.”

The main goal, he continued, is “creating songs that we find interesting. I think a lot of the ideas we find interesting, people might think of as being awkward or off the beaten track, but I think it’s just a matter of taste.”

After noting that paranoia, in its various forms, is a running theme, Flansburgh explained that “all these sort of 20th-Century issues of mental health are very interesting. But we know we’re not crazy. We’ve been to doctors.”

* They Might Be Giants and Freedy Johnston play tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Show time: 8 p.m. Tickets: $19.50. Information: (714) 496-8930.