The Baggs
The Baggs (or possibly The Bags) was a band in which John Linnell played saxophone and keyboards for a brief period while in college.
Linnell attended The University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1977 and 1978, and performed with The Baggs during that time. He described the band in a 1995 interview: "Well, this is really embarrassing, but I had this sort of like, lounge-y jazz group that did, like, John Coltrane. This wasn't the kind of 'sophisticated', tongue-in-cheek type... we were actually playing jazz out of the 'real' book." It is not known how many times Linnell played with the band, or who the other members of the band were. The band's theme song, "Boogie with The Baggs Tonight," was reworked into the early They Might Be Giants song "Giant Halloween Tonight."[1]
Linnell spoke about playing with The Baggs in a 1990 interview:
I started playing saxophone for a band called The Baggs and there was a moment when I'd step out and do a solo. But I'd just bought the pick-up for my sax and when the time came all I could play was the highest note! I moved all my fingers around and nothing happened. The wire on my pick-up was holding open one of the valves on my sax. I had just played a one-note solo.
The Baggs were not the only band that Linnell performed with around this time. He stated in a 1994 interview: "I was in a couple [high school bands]. I played sax in a band that did Alice Cooper covers." Linnell also briefly played tenor saxophone in the UMass marching band: "It was kind of an unpleasant experience. Particularly because the marching was this kind of militaristic trap -- the people they had hired to train [us] how to march were really into the humor of intimidating people."[2] In late 1978, Linnell joined The Mundanes. He played keyboards and saxophone in that band for three years, and departed in 1981.
