Category: News

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.

 

Seventeen years ago today, we are playing with Barbara Manning at the Troubadour in LA.  I’m selling t-shirts while Joe attends to other business and someone approaches the table and says he’s a writer for The Simpsons.  Sheepish that I can’t recognize a Simpsons writer on sight, I ask his name, and it’s Donick Cary.  Though his face needs an introduction, his name does not.  As soon as Joe returns, I take Donick backstage to meet Georgia and James, and before you know it, we’re contributing our music to “D’oh-in’ in the Wind” and are modeling wigs on Parks & Recreation.  Meanwhile, a gentleman named Hector has been in touch, asking if we’d let him play the trumpet solo from “Shadows” (performed on I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One by Jonathan Marx) during the show.  We don’t make any promises, but invite him to come by early for an audition.  He does, and he sounds just fine–he’s got the job.  We let him know where in the set it lands, and are seconds away from going on when someone, can’t recall if it’s James or Georgia, but it’s definitely not me, remembers that we’ve changed the key of “Shadows” from the one we recorded it in.  The last thing we hear as we go on stage is the sound of Hector trying to transpose the solo, which has less than a calming effect.  But in my recollection, it goes great, and if you know otherwise, please keep it to yourself.  Two years earlier, we made our San Antonio debut at Taco Land.  There’s no stage, it’s possible that we’re lit by nothing more than some overhanging light bulbs, the power definitely goes out not once but twice during our set, and we have a blast.  A few weeks later, we’re hanging around the northwest awaiting the start of Lollapalooza, and are opening for Doug Sahm’s Last Real Texas Blues Band.  I get a belly laugh out of Augie Meyers when I tell him that we just played Taco Land, which makes my day.  In a gruesome postscript to this story nearly 10 years to the day later, owner Ram Ayala and employee Douglas Morgan were murdered during a robbery.

 

Finally, I’d like to reminisce about something a little more current, and thank each and every person who came to see us in South America over the last two weeks.  We had an amazing time.

 

Feeling overlooked in Boston, we decide to play our unoverlookable noise set 26 years ago today at Green Street Station, to the consternation of Steve Michener, and perhaps others.  Three years later, Eleventh Dream Day and YLT have made our way to Frankfurt.  Somehow, we convince City Slang prexy Christof Ellinghaus to sing lead on “Barstool Blues”–years later some German music critic steals Christof’s car just to get his hands on the recording.  But it’s 1992 that’s on my mind today.  Our tour with Seam has reached Spain, Valencia to be precise, aka paella ground zero.  The always challenging act of eating dinner on a show night (i.e. most every night) is never harder than in Spain, where restaurants serving before 9 pm are pretty much nonexistent.  Luckily, our concert in Valencia is late as well, so our party of eight is the first table to be filled and basically have the place to ourselves because we’re eating so “early.”  All tour the omnivores of Yo La Tengo have been amused by dining with Seam.  Bassist Lexi Mitchell would invariably sniff any food placed in front of her, and if it was acceptable–and not much of it was–she would pass it along to Sooyoung Park, who was even pickier, and wouldn’t entertain eating anything Lexi turned down.  When our group was asked if we wanted seafood in the paella, Seam’s food anxiety reflexes were quicker than our We Like It All response, and seafood was declined.  I won’t lie to you: I was not pleased.  Until, that is, our table was filled with tapas, all varieties of delicious fish–if we had been told dinner was over at this point, it would have already qualified as the best meal of the trip.  But dinner was not over.  Someone took off the soundtrack to Beatlemania that had been playing since our arrival, and put on what we’ve always assumed was the National Anthem of Paella.  An enormous paella paraded by for our approval, which was unreserved from our side of the table, in part because that was the night we learned that in Europe “seafood” and “shellfish” are two distinct food groups (presumably Seam were just learning this as well).  As Beatlemania returned to the stereo we tucked into an amazing paella.  No memory of the set, but there’s no way it was our best.  Sorry, Valencia!

 

JP from the Joiner Inners writes: My wedding song was “Our Way to Fall” – June 10, 2007.  Our DJ opted to cut it about 30 seconds short, but rather than utilize an elegant fadeout, he opted for the abrupt record-scratch ending.  It went downhill from there.  Since the email is signed Kristen and JP from Cheshire, CT, one can hope that it was the DJ set that went sour and not the marriage.

 

Inexplicably, nothing we’ve done on this day over the years is as memorable as all three of these shows that I didn’t get around to mentioning in yesterday’s all things Clean post.  1991: Running late in Dortmund on our tour with Eleventh Dream Day.  Past curfew, with the audience requesting more music, we’re allowed to continue, so long as we play acoustically, which we do for another four songs.  1995: Our English tour with Stereolab concludes in London.  When it is discovered that Sebadoh are booked to play London the same night, the two shows join forces.   With Quickspace on the bill as well, our set is but a half hour, comprised in its entirety of a medley of “From a Motel 6” and “Blue Line Swinger.”  2011: Live at Leeds, the spinner lands on Sitcom Theater, and we discover that though it appears on English cable tv, not everyone is as au courant with Judge Judy as we are.  Nevertheless, Georgia’s performance as Robert Williams and James’s as John Lydon win plaudits from the critics.