Author: Ira

Let’s drop in on Chicago, shall we?  Fourteen years ago today we are there, at the Cabaret Metro, with Rick Brown & Sue Garner.  Taking Ernie Banks’s advice, we’ve decided to play two; tweaking his recommendation, we’re playing consecutive days and not a doubleheader.  This is night two, with Brokeback on the bill as well.  We encore with “Come On, Come On.”  (Before I continue, a Chicago baseball digression, as we wish a happy birthday to Lou Brock, whose misguided trade from the Cubs to the Cardinals smoothed the way to another few years of Cubs mediocrity.)  Two years ago, we are back in Chicago–it’s the first day of our Fade recording session with John McEntire at Soma.  Can’t recall precisely what we worked on that day, but I can all but guarantee we ran into Pat Sansone at Big Star.

June 18 looms large in the lives of Michael (and Heather) from Gloucester, Massachusetts: In June of 1997 I asked my wife to marry me while walking through the Maudslay estate in Newburyport MA one afternoon.  We decided to walk our highly emotional selves through town later that afternoon and have some fun before dinner, which for me meant visiting the record store.  I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One just looked really appealing on the shelf, and I had read a few things about it, so I bought it without having heard a note.  It was a “stare-at-my-speakers-for-a-week” event after I put that CD on.  This kind of event has only happened a few times in my life, and I’ve listened to a lot of music.  The record is deeply and permanently integrated with that moment, and even that period, of my life, which was one of my happiest, and since then I’ve looked under every rock for every scrap of YLT material I could find, and had the pleasure of seeing YLT play many times.  A few years later I wrote the band a note telling our story and I got a card back from Ira, which I will always appreciate.  

Maybe not the most unique story, but momentous in its own way.  Thanks for such great music.

And it’s the anniversary of Roger Ebert’s birth, too.

 

Thirty years, one show in Santa Fe, three years ago today.  We play “Right Side of My Mind,” just in case Gregg Turner‘s on hand (he isn’t).  Sixteen years earlier, we’re again in the southwest, Tucson, to be precise.  I’m looking at the set list, and I don’t remember a thing–we used to cover Hypnolovewheel’s “You Choose“?!  But here’s what I do recall:  dinner earlier that night at the Congress Hotel.  Our soundman Terry Pearson is having a rough tour.  Traveling the USA by van, troubleshooting p.a.’s on a nightly basis is a full-time job, but Terry–whose main gig is mixing Sonic Youth–is also doing pre-production for the upcoming Lollapalooza, which is one headache after another.  We’re doing all we can to make him comfortable, but all we can do is cede him the entire back seat of our van (and dub it Terry’s Room) and it’s not enough.  He’s growing increasingly short-tempered, and when the Congress serves him a martini with one olive instead of two, he’s inconsolable.  OK, right now I’m typing this with a smile on my face, but I do nothing but sympathize.  Who among us hasn’t been driven by the combination of stress and fatigue to overreact?

 

We haven’t played in Albuquerque all that often, but somehow we appeared there twice on this day, in 1995 and 1997 (the latter show featured a reading from my just-purchased copy of Dr. Eugene Landy’s The Underground Dictionary).  Not in attendance: Bryan & Heather from Philadelphia:

My (now) wife Heather suggested that we go see YLT on New Year’s Eve 12/31/1998 at the TLA in Philly.  Said it would likely be an interesting show, I had never seen them before.  Needless to say, the show was fantastic.  At midnight the band tore into an amazing cover of New Day Rising, one of my top 5 all-time favorites songs/albums by one of my all-time favorite bands Husker Du.  This not only secured the night as a definitive moment, but YLT became forever ingrained in my soul. That night I also realized that I would spend the rest of my life with Heather.

On June 16th 2001 we got married and danced to the YLT version of Whole of the Law.

We have since seen YLT dozens of times, and are always thrilled to see them again.

 

Last year, when it was announced that Maxwell’s would be closing, it seemed possible that we wouldn’t be able to fit in a farewell show, and we were fine with that.  But then the Pastels asked if the Condo Fucks would open for them when they were in town for the Chickfactor shindig, and it turned out we’d get in one more appearance after all.  And when the watchdogs at U.S. Immigration decided that we as citizens would sleep easier if Stephen, Katrina and the gang were denied entry, plans changed again.  Maybe under normal circumstances, we’d have canceled, but that was never considered.  Instead we opened the evening with an acoustic YLT set, including “3 Blocks from Groove Street,” played at our very first appearance in 1984, and “Mr. Tough,” with its shout-out to Maxwell’s impresario Todd Abramson.  Performing “Speeding Motorcycle,” dedicated to the Pastels, who recorded it too, proved a challenge–I had to ignore a commotion in the audience, couldn’t tell if it was requests or questions or heckling.  It was definitely tempting to put on the brakes and see what was going on, but there was a separate-admission late show after ours, and we wanted to use our limited time wisely.  Only between sets did I discover that the source of the ruckus was Maxwell’s founder Steve Fallon.  He had surprised us by coming to the show, and picked the moment of us playing a song he put out on his SOL label to let the cat out of the bag, except I missed it entirely, despite him standing right in front of–and yelling at–me.  Following the Condo Fucks set, we did a single, acoustic encore: “This Is Where I Belong.”

 

We look back once more at our 2003 tour with the Clean, though in fact I have nothing to say about the Clean today.  On this date 11 years ago, at Portland’s Crystal Ballroom, we invited the great Richard Meltzer to open the show by reading some of his poetry.  And when he accepted, we decided to go for broke and ask him to sing the Vom classic “I’m in Love with Your Mom” with us, and he said yes to that too.  In the days leading up to the show, we diligently went about mastering the arrangement from the 25-year-old Live at Surf City 7″, and the idea that we ever considered that Richard Meltzer was doing anything remotely similar is one of the enduring mysteries of the last 30 years.  Instead, one song into our encore, we brought him on stage.  Meltzer took hold of the microphone with his right hand, placed his left hand authoritatively on the stand, planted one foot in front of the other, and hollered, “I’M IN LOVE WITH YOUR MOM!”  We launched into the introduction and waited for the first line “I’m in love for the first time” . . . and waited.  We’re still waiting.  Never deviating from his rock stance, every once in a while Meltzer would yell “I’M IN LOVE WITH YOUR MOM!” and one of the other enduring mysteries of our career is how long it took us to embrace the moment.   (Four-plus years later, during Hanukkah, with the help of Mark Arm, we played a more faithful rendition of Vom’s “Too Animalistic.”)

 

For our second appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, 13 years ago today, we were asked to play “You Can Have It All.”  We had spent most of the year singing along with a backing track, James and I dancing a Pips-inspired routine to accompany Georgia’s lead.  But that felt out of context for tv, so we put on our thinking caps and came up with an all-new approach.  The three of us agreed that Georgia should not both sing and play, so we lined up Rachael McNally and Patrick Ramos as double drummers.  Our pal, Garo Yellin, put together a string quartet and we fleshed out the cello arrangement that appears on the And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out version.  And we got Kelsey Grammer’s autograph!  All in all, a good day at the office.