Month: November 2014

Dateline: Vancouver, 21 years ago today.  Show’s over and we’re packing up.  It’s been a particularly fun night, a great bill with Kreviss and Cub, and Joe Puleo’s feeling fine.  He could walk from the loading dock to unlock the van, but opts instead for a toss to James.  Behind his back.  James has a long reach, but he doesn’t stand a chance–the keys land on a dumpster.  There’s a lid on the dumpster, but the keys manage to locate a gap and fall inside.  Joe rolls up his sleeves, eventually finds them, and we’re on our way.  One thing leads to another, and 19 years later, we’re in Tokyo, doing advance promo for Fade, which includes a Freewheeling Yo La Tengo concert.  We talk so much at those shows that we know we’re going to need a translator.  And in fact, we talk SO much that it’s decided that it would be helpful if each one of us had their own translator.  In standard Freewheeling style, we open with two songs, then announce the Q&A format, and introduce the translators, who enter dressed and bewigged as us.  Quoting Felix Bressart in To Be or Not to Be, it gets a terrific laugh.

Michelle and Greg write from Cornwall-on-Hudson: Our specific memory is the birth of our second son to “Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House.”  Date: November 6, 2002.  I was pretty far along in labor when we got to the hospital, so we started the album and he emerged with the song playing.  We left the CD in the labor room, and the next day the labor nurses returned it.  They told us they listened to it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two weeks of shows with Chris Knox come to a conclusion 21 years ago today in Seattle, on a bill that also includes NYC expats Kicking Giant.  We play “Let’s Compromise” to salute their old home, and “Cast a Shadow” to acknowledge their new one, then bring on Chris to sing “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.”  In 2006, our five-day Scandinavian tour with Elope ends in Copenhagen, and we take their request for “Almost True,” a song we’d never played live previously, and follow it with “Time Fades Away.”  Seems only fair since we’ve been enjoying their version of “Bad Fog of Loneliness” all week.

 

Our second appearance ever in Chicago takes place 27 years ago today, and it hasn’t taken long for it to be high on the list of our favorite cities.  Tonight we’re at the Cabaret Metro, and it goes well, a nice sendoff for the 12-hour overnight drive home as this is the last date of our tour.  As you’ll note, the beginning of our show is timed so that one can go see R.E.M. first, or indeed so that R.E.M. themselves can come hang out.  And sure enough, at one point in the evening, someone bursts into the dressing room–in my memory, his clothes are in tatters due to the difficulty of his trek, but surely I’m embellishing–to report, “Mike’s here!  Mills, not Stipe.”  In 2011, the Condo Fucks open for Athens’s own the Glands at the Mercury Lounge.

 

Reluctant though I am to toot my own horn, in nearly 30 years of being a band, we have never once shown up at a venue on the wrong day.  We have, however, shared the bill with a group that did, 27 years ago today.  Booked at the No Bar in Muncie, Indiana, we were surprised to learn that Always August had gotten confused and arrived in town a week ahead of schedule.  And as long as they were in the neighborhood,  they were also going to be added to the lineup–and really, who could argue?  The audience that night, which I believe was what my college during an application drought once referred to as “self-selecting,” was there predominantly to see Always August, an impressive demonstration of word-of-mouth in a pre-social media era.  Switching continents and centuries, last year we close the Festival Soy in Nantes.  Much the same as we grew sick of being asked (or lectured) about George W. Bush in Europe, one can only assume that the French have at the very least moved on from Jerry Lewis, so in solidarité we encored with not one, but two songs by someone we’re guessing is even more tired of hearing about him: his  son, Gary.

 

 

 

 

 

One month to go till our 30th anniversary, and the evidence shows my energy for this daily report is flagging.  This morning I pounded a six-pack of Jolt Cola and discovered that last week I managed to overlook two memories emailed to us, so let’s play catch up.

Amy and Karl currently of Portland, OR wrote: My husband and I danced to “Our Way to Fall” as our first dance on October 27, 2001.  We were married in Wilmington, DE, although we lived in Hoboken at the time.  A year or two later, we saw you at Maxwell’s and I told you about it, Ira. You said it was the first time you’d ever heard of your songs as a first dance song.  We love it still, and dance to it every year.

Another day, another wedding, and (oy) another screwup by me.  Our pal Jim from Chicago wrote: My wife Manning and I danced our first wedding dance to the YLT version of ‘You Can Have it All’ — October 28, 2000.

I’m right on time with these two, the first from Leisha in Kansas City.  My (now) husband and I went on our first real date to see YLT at the Bottleneck in Lawrence, KS.  This would have been on the Electr-o-Pura tour, so around April 1996?  We worked together in Kansas City and skipped out early so we could see their pre-show in-store appearance at Love Garden Records. It was awesome.  Our favorite memory is when Georgia came out from behind the drums to play guitar.  I don’t remember the song but we were close enough to hear an annoyed Ira whisper to Georgia, “It’s G-C-A.”  To this day, whenever one of us messes something up, the other will whisper “It’s G-C–A.”  Thank you for 30 years of beautiful music.  We’ve been huge fans from the start.  Cheers!  Boy, would I like to claim this never happened, but I’m afraid the best I can do is provide the actual date (November 2, 1995) and emphasize just how close Leisha must have been to me and how quietly I had to be whispering, because she misheard.  The song was undoubtedly “Speeding Motorcycle” and Georgia’s part goes G-E-C.  Play along at home!

Let’s not close the mailbag just yet.  Myleen and John write from San Francisco.  (Two memories of November 2, one from each city from this year’s World Series!)  We have a friend in common, Dan Lee in San Francisco.  Recently as a wedding present, he gave us an LP of And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out signed by you and Georgia and James! (thank you very much!)  We were so touched – he probably told you the story, but yes, one of your songs is “our song.”  A lot of your music was constantly playing when John and I first met and fell in love – in those first quiet moments at home, first party moments, first road trips – we’d have a Yo La Tengo record playing . . . John and I first met 13 years ago. We have nothing but sentimental, happy memories associated with YLT.  So when Dan gave us the album we were really touched (I cried. I’m a wuss).  It was that thoughtful and meaningful to us.  John and I got married last year on Saturday, November 2, 2013.  Our first dance was “Our Way To Fall” and we made sure to play the very record that you all autographed.  Thanks so much again for sharing your music with us for all these years.

We’ve played a dozen times on this date, sharing bills with Chris Knox and Refrigerator in 1993 (and getting hissed at for taking Sam Kinison’s name in vain), Uncle Tupelo in 1987, Nick Tosches in 1996, and Los Lobos in 1990.  Georgia and I performed “Pale Blue Eyes” with Hot Chip last year in Paris.  But I’m afraid we’re out of time for today.  See you tomorrow.

 

 

To the best of my knowledge, this is how we ended up in Japan on this day 25 years ago.  There was talk of a Japanese edition of CMJ, and therefore it made sense for certain people to be exposed to some College Music.  Those people could have traveled to the U.S. for a first-hand experience, but instead it was decided that a representative act would make the trip east.  I don’t know how we became a finalist (I can’t honestly say I “know” any of this), but one day some focus group was asked to choose between our band, 24-7 Spyz, 13 Engines, and the Subdudes, and we won.  Georgia and I, along with Robert Vickers, our bassist at the time, were flown to Tokyo along with Coyote’s Steve Fallon and our pal, Phil Morrison.  I’m not going to even try to do justice to this trip.  I will say that our four concerts were very strange, and that none of them was as successful as the night Georgia, Phil and I sang at a local karaoke bar.  It was shocking that westerners were there–the songbook was overwhelmingly Japanese.  We sat and drank for a while, and then Phil and I decided to perform a duet.  Without thinking about the cultural implications of our selection, we picked “Surfin’ USA,” and only the eggs we were laying elsewhere permits me the immodesty to report we slayed ’em.  With our next number, “Ghostbusters,” we learned the karaoke lesson that knowing the chorus to a song is not the same as knowing the song.  Still, the other denizens of the bar responded enthusiastically to our stage craft, singing along when we pointed the microphone their way.  Georgia and Phil were up next, for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”  When Georgia pretty much laughed through the whole song, Phil finally went off book and pleaded with her, “Sing!”  She pulled it together for her closer, a duet with me on “Be My Baby.”  When one of the other patrons asked Phil, “May I sing with me?” we found ourselves with a future album title and some friends to tour Tokyo with on our last day in town.