Month: November 2014

If at any time in the last 14 years, you’ve listened to my guitar playing and wished it were better, hey, it’s not my fault, it’s Alan’s.  Writing a few months ago from Baltimore (or as they helpfully point out Charm City), he and Stacey recall: Okay, way back in late November of 2000, we saw the band at Bowery Ballroom with Damon and Naomi opening.  I asked you and Georgia why you didn’t play “Red Buckets” more often.  Alan attempted to describe the virtues of Jorma Kaukonen’s guitar video.  He offered to send you a copy, a gesture you good-naturedly accepted.  He later realized this would be pirating and thought better of it.  This was the first show we ever went to together and we’re still at it, married 11 years last November.

Happy 12th anniversary!  Here’s a retroactive memory for the next time you tell that story.  It was the first of a three-night run at the Bowery Ballroom.  I don’t have to remind you that Damon and Naomi sat in with us on a few songs that evening, and maybe you even remember us inviting a member of the audience to play bongos on “You Sexy Thing.”  Did you recognize him?  Though we like to flatter ourselves that we’re cinéastes, I sheepishly confess that between Georgia, James and me, not a one of us figured out our percussionist was screen star Jason Woliner!  We had no choice but to burn our Film Forum cards.  It wasn’t until years later when Jason had moved to the other side of the camera and we were (re-)introduced that he told us of our previous meeting.

 

 

As we draw ever closer to December 2 and our 30th birthday, these reminiscences are threatening to create a feedback loop, as I start looking back at a year of looking back.  I am especially gratified that among all of the contributions we have gotten, none have included corrections of previous posts, because this history game can be tricky.  A perusal of HistoryOrb.com lets us know that the great George O’Hanlon was born today . . . in either 1912 or 1917.  Susan Anspach, too, somewhere between 1939 and 1942.  Well, that We Report, You Decide hogwash may fly over at HistoryOrb, but we take our journalistic oath more seriously here at Yo La Tengo hq.  When I tell you that the only time we’ve played outside of Germany on this date was in 1993, at the 930 Club, no need to fact-check.  What better song to open with in D.C. than “Bad Politics”?

 

So we’ve only played twice on this date in the last 17 years, and both times it was at the same club!  To be precise, Zakk in Dusseldorf, 2006 and 2009, the latter with Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby.  Setting the Wayback Machine even earlier, our first visit to the Vera in Groningen was 27 years ago today (we’ve returned seven times).  Brought back for an unwarranted third encore, we finally resort to playing something we’ve never even rehearsed: Roky Erickson’s arrangement of “Heroin,” which remains in the repertoire all these years later.  Our pal, Heather from Texas, was at none of those shows, but she’s been to plenty of others, most recently in Austin and New Orleans earlier this month.  She writes: I have been all over this time line from day one.  I can’t believe I’m submitting this so late, but I have found it nearly impossible to think of one memory to share because there are so many!  So I wrote a bunch of entries and then just never submitted them.  If I want to get in a good date-specific story, I better do it now, with just a few minutes left on the clock!  OK so here is my little YLT story that I hope you think is funny.  It’s a cookie story, a Yo La Tengo cookie story and it’s a birthday party.  It was Nov. 22nd of 2011, my 35th birthday.  (I think if I remember correctly, I share a birthday with the hater of trios?)  My friend threw me a small YLT themed birthday party, there were YLT balloons and my main birthday present was a big box of YLT cookies!  Cookies that had your beautiful images emblazoned on them.  It was similar to my 10th birthday party when it was all Boy George.  Anyway, a few weeks later, in December, we took the cookies that weren’t finished at the party and shared them with another YLT fan, your favorite, Allen Hill of the Allen Oldies Band.  (Oh and don’t worry the cookies were air vacuumed sealed and used before the expiration date.)  Allen had a small event at a local Houston record store where he was spinning his newly released 45 rpm record 45 times in a row.  My friend and I thought it would be fun to go and hand out a few of the cookies to random people that we thought might appreciate a Yo La Tengo treat.  Needless to say, Allen ended up with a set of Ira and Georgia cookies (unfortunately, we had run out of James cookies by then).  So in a way, Ira and Georgia were able to remotely join Allen Hill that day, in the spirit of sugar cookies, for spins 37 through 45 and the pictures attached have caught this fine moment in Yo La Tengo history . . . and you know I have YLT Monomania, so I’m sure none of this is surprising, haha!

 

In 2010, City Slang nabob Christof Ellinghaus invited us to take part in his label’s 20th anniversary celebration.  Specifically, he asked us to play, in its entirety, Fakebook, the first record of ours he released (previous to that he was our German booking agent).  We politely–at least I think it was politely–declined, making the counteroffer to see if Dave Schramm would join us for an acoustic set of songs that came out on City Slang (everything through Electr-o-pura, though looking at the setlist, I see nothing post-Painful).  Dave was amenable, so that’s what we did, four years ago today.  The concert took place in a beautiful old Berlin theater, the downside of which was that anything German of a certain age comes with a Nazi past–it was pointed out to us the box from where Goebbels enjoyed many an opera, perhaps accompanied on occasion by Hitler.  We sat somewhere else for Lambchop’s performance of Is a Woman.

 

 

 

 

During 1993-1995, we played five concerts in Atlanta, and four of them were at The Masquerade, one of which was 21 years ago today.  And yet this is the first time I’ve written about the place–that is not an accident.  We never had a particularly good time there, due primarily to it being three venues in one multilevel building: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell.  Naturally, you could always find us in Heaven, but in case you were curious what was going on elsewhere, you needn’t go to another floor to find out, because the thumping disco from below was pretty much omnipresent.  (Didn’t this bother everyone going to The Masquerade is the question I’ve always had, but having consulted the F.A.Q.’s on their web site, I’m forced to conclude maybe not.)  What to do?  We didn’t want to have to drop the quiet songs from the set, but they sounded ridiculous–we compromised by playing the impromptu club remix of, say, “Nowhere Near” and grumbling about it, letting a frown be our umbrella, as it were.  When our first Atlanta date of 1996 took place at The Point during an ice storm, there was still no mistaking it for anything but a step in the right direction.

 

Twenty-seven years ago today, we make our European debut, in Dordrecht, Holland.  That tour, which was both rigorous and exhilarating in the extreme, was an early pivotal moment for the band.  Without it, who knows if we would have found ourselves in Arhus, Denmark 10 years later.  I’m sure the show was fun, but what I recall best is what came afterwards.  Our promoter worked at a cinema, and when I jokingly asked if we could go there post-show, he not jokingly said yes.  Having just finished our eighth concert in nine nights, with long Scandinavian drives between many of them, everyone but me passed on the offer.  So me, the promoter and one of his pals went to the theater, grabbed a beer and had a private screening of Microcosmos.  Sure, I fought to stay awake, but there wasn’t much of a plot, and when my eyes were open I felt like Elvis.  Got back to the hotel and found Georgia watching Yentl on tv with Danish subtitles.  Luckily, I had already seen it in the theater.