Author: Ira

Merge Records determined that there was no way they could throw a fifth anniversary party in 1994 without my other group, Double Dynamite, and who could blame them?   After a grueling rehearsal, we went to Cat’s Cradle for the evening’s festivities and that was my first encounter with Lambchop.  It was love at first sight.  Yo La Tengo got to know them a bit while we were recording Electr-o-pura, the first of many sessions in Nashville with Hoboken ex-pat Roger Moutenot, and when we started touring on that album, they were at the top of our  bands-to-play-with list.  I was about to say that our first show with them was 19 years ago today, but actually I got a little confused crossing the international date line–it was in fact 19 years and one day ago.  Oh well, this is definitely the anniversary of the first time any of them sat in with us; at the 930 Club in D.C., Jonathan Marx and Deanna Varagona played saxophone on “Bad Politics.”  Hold the phone!  Jonathan on sax?  That’s what my notes say, but I don’t remember that at all.  Clarinet, trumpet, yes, but sax?  My research doesn’t lie (except of course when it suggests that our first show with Lambchop was May 13).

 

I don’t remember the sequence of events that led us to open for Disappear Fear in Madison, Wisconsin on this date in 1993, but I am pretty confident in my recollection that no one was happy with the outcome.  We were playing at the Club De Wash, on a stage that could not easily accommodate two bands.  Tense negotiations resulted in our having sufficient room to set up (I suspect a drum kit was struck against Disappear Fear’s wishes).  After soundcheck, we watched Game 2 of the Eastern Conference semifinal between the Knicks and Hornets.  The game was close, and went right up to and past our start time.  And then it went into overtime.  We managed to stall until the Knicks prevailed, which couldn’t have done anything good for tension between the bands.  There’s no punchline to this story, unless this counts.

 

Though not exactly Hanukkah-esque in their duration, two short residencies come to a close on this date.  At the Bell House in 2011, our Spinning Wheel lands on I’d Like to Buy a Vowel resulting in our first rendition of “86-Second Blowout” in 17 years.  Last year, we concluded a weekend at the Fillmore in San Francisco (the only Fillmore that matters), reprising such starting-with-vowel numbers as “Autumn Sweater” and “I’m on My Way,” and encoring with “The Golden Road (to Unlimited Devotion).”

 

M. Ward joined us on the first half of our May 2003 tour of Europe.  We spent a few days getting acquainted, a relatively smooth process since we were traveling together too, and then started working him into the act, starting with this date 11 years ago.  At the AB in Brussels, he helped out on “Can’t Forget,” “I Heard You Looking” and the rarely called “Living in the Country.”  Another guest guitarist on “I Heard You Looking,” eight years later, at the Bell House.  Tara Key sat in, as she had so many times before, starting with our very first show.   She also played “Barnaby Hardly Working” and “Demons” with us, and I suspect we encored with “The Door Into Summer” to salute our pal and fellow Monkees enthusiast.

 

When the Noise Pop festival invited us to join them in Chicago on this date in 2001, we thought we’d try something a little different, having played three shows in the city the previous year, one with Mac McCaughan and David Kilgour, and two as a trio.  We got to town a day early and did a warmup of sorts in Evanston with Deanna Varagona, although our mostly-covers set bore little relation to what we planned for the next night.  Susie Ibarra–who played on two tracks on And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out–sat in on various percussion for the whole set.  (We had done that once before in New York in June, 2000.)   I am afraid I cannot recall how she reacted when during the penultimate number, a version of “Time Fades Away,” our guest guitarist Rick Rizzo had his pants pulled down by his Eleventh Dream Day bandmate Janet Bean, though no doubt she was relieved that, according to my research, Rick “neither lost his cool nor his grip on the guitar.”

 

 

Neil Innes was not available to play all of the dates on our UK tour of 2000, his place taken by Robyn Hitchcock.  For our London show, 14 years ago today, we decided to have both Neil and Robyn take part, most spectacularly on a version of “Mr. Apollo,” with Robyn in the role of Vivian Stanshall.  On this date in 1989, Georgia and I took advantage of an off day on our European tour and took a train to Amsterdam, seeing and meeting the Clean and Chris Knox for the first time.  But neither of those occasions inspired this letter from Jason from Minneapolis:

When I was in school at SUNY-Binghamton (now Binghamton University) I was involved with the college radio station, WHRW, and also booked concerts for a small campus organization called S.C.A.B. (Straight Country And Blues). I went off the S.C.A.B. rails a bit for my final show, a co-bill of The Wedding Present and Yo La Tengo, but I figured if CBGBs could do it, so could we. I wasn’t used to hosting two separate acts, and for some reason The Wedding Present used our usual dressing room and Yo La Tengo was put up in the gay student organization office. We fed The Wedding Present ratatouille from our campus food co-op, and then our little S.C.A.B. staff fed ourselves down the hall in the WHRW lobby. I was shovelling it down when Georgia and Ira walked in with a mighty annoyed look and asked when they were going to get to eat too. Whoops. Forgot about the other band. I tried to lighten the air by talking about seeing The Feelies on Letterman.

The show went on a little further down the hall in the Susquehanna Room, known by day as the cafeteria.  It was my first time seeing Yo La Tengo play a full set and it covered all the bases — loud and quiet, old and new songs, and a bunch of covers.  I discretely taped the show from the soundboard (sorry, guys).  They kicked it off with a scorching cover of Let’s Compromise.  Lewis was introduced as a song they likely played at their last Binghamton show in the mid-80s, one of their first as a trio.  We were also treated to an early version of Sudden Organ.