Category: News

On the eve of 2007, the A-Bones were booked to play at Magnetic Field in Brooklyn, and I offered my services on piano, and schedule permitting I’ve played with them ever since.  In 2008, owners Lee and William decided to padlock the door, and the A-Bones were engaged for one of the last shows, six years ago today.  Yo La Tengo, having had our share of good times there, particularly while mixing I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass at Brooklyn Recording, offered to be the opening act.  We put together a repertoire of appropriate cover songs (the Beach Boys’ “Shut Down,” Slade’s “Gudbuy t’Jane,” the Beach Boys’ “Shut Down, part 2”) and sought a nom d’occasion, settling on the Condo Fucks.   And the rest is alter ego history.

 

 

Having bid goodbye to the Happy Flowers in Atlanta, we arrive in Nashville to play at the Belcourt Theatre with Lambchop, fourteen years ago today. And as happy a memory at that show is, and as much as we cherish our each and every get-together with Lambchop, that’s how bittersweet it is to look at the set list, and remember our friend, Marc “Buddie T.” Trovillion, who died last year, alive and well and dancing along with our goofy “You Can Have It All” routine (with his bandmates C. Scott Chase, Allen Lowrey and Paul Niehaus).  Lambchop members shuttled on and off stage the whole night, and we even convinced Roger Moutenot to play bongos on three songs. Hope opposition research doesn’t find out that current State Senate candidate Mary Mancini (along with husband Kurt Wagner) occupied the Ace Tone chair on “I Heard You Looking.”

 

I’m not here to pretend that we had high hopes for our Milwaukee show on this day 25 years ago.   Yes, it was our first time in the city, but it was also Easter Sunday.  As we drove in from Minneapolis, we became aware that we were the only car on the road in which no one was dressed for church, and while that might not literally have been true, maybe it was.  We had a friend who had been in the Weathermen, and he couldn’t make the show because of Easter.   Making matters worse: We were booked at the Odd Rock Cafe, which less than a month earlier had been the site of a GG Allin performance that was still making news (and in fact would continue to for years to come, culminating in his arrest and conviction for disorderly conduct).   So ours was an intimate soiree.  Eleventh Dream Day’s Rick Rizzo made the trip from Chicago, and played guitar on “Halloween” and “Time Fades Away”–mid-set, of course.  There was no encore.

 

For the first four dates of our second tour 2000, we were joined by James’s Charlottesville buddies, the Happy Flowers, their first shows in a decade.   The run ended March 25 in Atlanta.  The night before in Chapel Hill, Mr. Horribly Charred Infant and Mr. Anus had sat in on our cover of Blondie’s “Dreaming,” but there would be no repeat performance in Atlanta–I’m afraid we were distracted.  Less than three months earlier, Atlanta Braves’ numbskull/closer John Rocker had popped off to Sports Illustrated, confirming his role as the face of the Mets-Braves rivalry.  As we pulled up to the Cotton Club that afternoon, I noticed a ticker on the nearby CNN Building advertising Braves souvenirs.  I had a few minutes to kill, so I went over to price John Rocker merchandise.  It wasn’t cheap.  Now if you know me, you know I’m an anything-for-a-joke kind of guy, but that doesn’t mean anything.  I returned to the Cotton Club empty-handed, and that’s when Joe Puleo went to work.  He discovered the Braves’ store had a no-questions-asked 30-day money-back policy.  One thing led to another and before our encore, all three of us changed into John Rocker jerseys and Braves hats, price tags waving proudly, and charged back on stage, flipping off the audience and each other before launching into the Randoms’ “Let’s Get Rid of New York.”   We’re not taking full credit, but a little more than a year later, Rocker was traded to Cleveland.

 

Did we really play a show with the Afghan Whigs on this day 25 years ago at the Cubby Bear Lounge in Chicago?  There’s every indication we did, but I have zero memory of it.

 

We threw together a benefit at Maxwell’s three years ago today to aid with the recovery from the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan.  Fred Armisen comes by to play drums for the entirety of our two sets.  The last four songs of the opener feature David Byrne, including an arrangement of “Thank You for Sending Me an Angel” that we threw at him–am I remembering it right that he had to go online to fill in some gaps in his memory of the lyrics?   Glenn Mercer finishes the night with a couple of Feelies songs, one of ours, and the Velvet Underground’s “Run Run Run” (as opposed to “Run Run Run” by the Who, the Gestures, the Supremes, or the Third Rail).   Speaking of the Velvet Underground, in 1989 we make our Indiana debut, at the Second Story in Bloomington.  As sparsely attended shows go, this was a real fun one, even before it started, as I watched Bob Knight and Indiana University get eliminated from the NCAA tournament at the bar on the first story.  Heading back upstairs, we open (“Craig’s Version”) and close (“Pablo’s Version”) with “The Evil That Men Do,” which I suspect we’d never done before, and then return for an uncharacteristic two encores totaling seven songs, each one requested by name.  Well, almost: A request for the Velvet Underground (I promised you we were speaking of the Velvet Underground) leads to us ending the first encore with “I Heard Her Call My Name,” and someone’s “Play some more Velvets” results in a night-ending “Sweet Jane.”