On this date in 1985, Yo La Tengo hopped on the tour bus for our first out-of-town engagement, negotiating 12 miles of New Jersey’s trickiest highways to arrive at Eats U Want in Passaic. We opened for the Creeping Pumpkins. A tough showbiz lesson was learned that night: When Pumpkins drummer Dave Weckerman‘s bass drum kept shifting forward, it fell upon original YLT bassist, Dave Rick, to sit on the floor (there was no stage) with his back to the drum to keep it in place. Flash forward a mere 17 years and we’re concluding a David Cross show at Irving Plaza, a night that also featured the Girls Guitar Club, Jon Benjamin, Sam Seder, and Janeane Garofalo among others. Our set included a medley we concocted of every song from Mr. Show’s Monsters of Megaphone sketch, put to music by us.
Catching up, January 11 is the 7 year and 1 day anniversary of our I’m Not There sessions. Asked by director Todd Haynes to record “Fourth Time Around” and invited by music supervisor Randall Poster to add outside musicians, we put together our version of the Hawks: Terry Adams on piano, Stanley “Buckwheat” Dural on organ, John Sebastian on harmonica, and Peter Phillips on lead guitar. We recorded “Fourth Time Around” and “I Wanna Be Your Lover” on the 9th and mixed on the 10th, Roger Moutenot at the controls.
