Category: News

Not that long ago, Vernon from Birmingham, AL dropped us a line, asking me to be more generous to our early years, citing one show belittled in these pages as the one that turned him into a convert.  Sorry, Vernon, but like Paul McCartney before me, here I go again.  For the second consecutive day, we’re in Berlin–this time it’s 1989, our first time in the city, back when east and west were still divided.   We’re nearly two weeks into what will be our final tour before Stephan retires from the organization once and for all, and we’re not having a great time.  Having committed ourselves to seven weeks in Europe, we ultimately have one day off for nearly every show we do, and that’s after scaring up at least a half dozen dates during the tour.  Shigaku Presents, our English label at the time, proposes recording tonight’s show at the Ecstasy, 25 years ago today.  I can’t say we’re particularly pleased with the results; can we pretend to blame the mix rather than our performance?  Eventually, five songs appear on the Bar/None “Here Comes My Baby” cd ep .

 

 

Fourteen years ago today, we flew into Berlin to take part in City Slang’s 10th anniversary.  It had been five years since we’d parted with the label, but nothing could diminish our love and appreciation for Christof.  And I do mean nothing, because if this show couldn’t, nothing can.  A seven-band spectacular set in a gigantic former post office, things started off innocently.  We did our soundcheck without incident, and later began our set as we often did with “Night Falls in Hoboken.”  I played that one on acoustic guitar, then switched to electric for “Tears Are in Your Eyes.”  The first time I went to the mic to sing, I was thrown backwards (fortunately) by the largest electrical shock of my life.  Still don’t know how the ground changed in between soundcheck and show, but it did.  We weren’t precisely finished for the night, but for the purpose of brevity, let’s just say we may as well have been.  Alec Empire would soon criticize our performance, suggesting that it should be every artist’s goal to die on stage.  Fourteen years earlier, we took part in a triple-bill record-release show at another non-music venue, the Limelight disco (current home of Limelight Shops).  Once again the reviews were not good.  I can’t really argue with Robert Palmer’s critique except to say he had clearly not seen us before, because–sad but true–that night was actually us at our most confident.  We brought a kitchen timer on stage with us and set it to 20 minutes, and squeezed in six of the songs from Ride the Tiger with guest bassist Steve Michener, before giving way to Mofungo (End of the World, Part 2) and the Feelies (The Good Earth).  More uncomfortable memories tomorrow!

 

 

 

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.