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More than a quarter-century after its modest beginnings, this little trio from Hoboken, New Jersey, remains pop music’s preeminent indie-rock band. Option’s John Schacht spent some quality time with Ira, Georgia and James in North Carolina.
CARRBORO, N.C. — It’s the second show of a sold-out, two-night stand at Cat’s Cradle, and Yo La Tengo emerges on stage to the theme music from Wheel of Fortune. Ira Kaplan, the band’s guitarist and main singer, and James McNew, the burly bassist, push a spinning wheel to the front of the stage where Kaplan swipes the black tarp from it with a dash of game show-host brio. The wheel is split, pie-chart-style, into categories. As it will throughout this 21-date tour, a random spin will determine the night’s opening set.
 Hubley watches the wheel go round and round. (Photo by Kay Yang) Among the possibilities: An audience-to-band Q&A, echoing Yo La Tengo’s Town Hall-meetings-with-music tours of ’07-’08; parts 1 and 2 of The Sounds of the Sounds of Science, the trio’s rarely performed Jean Painlevé film soundtrack; a set from either the catalogs of Dump, McNew’s solo side project, or Condo Fucks, Yo La Tengo’s punk rock alter-ego, and a few more.
Georgia Hubley, the drummer and Kaplan’s wife of 23 years, explains the categories and quips that she will be quicker about it “than when Ira does it.” Kaplan asks for a volunteer to spin the multi-colored wheel, and hands across the room shoot up. A fresh-faced lad near the front lobbies hard and earns the honor. He bounds on stage and gives the wheel a vigorous whirl. Tonight’s first set? “Songs That Start with ‘S’.”
Kaplan, Hubley and McNew huddle briefly to compose a set list from a catalog that now spans 12 full-length albums, 15 EPs, four compilations, two soundtracks and hordes of singles over 26 years. For some immediate context, that’s five more years than tonight’s wheel-spinner, 21-year-old Matt Foster, has been alive. Before Yo La Tengo has played a note, some of the key strands that go into the band’s longevity and ongoing popularity with young fans have just played out in this on-stage microcosm.
A Love Story
Twenty-six years together is rare enough, but it’s rarer still when the band’s creative peak can be pluralized. Consider how many other long-running acts are little more than self-tribute bands skating by on back catalog, propped up by their own canonical mythology (looking at you, Pixies), car and beer ads, and fan-peer nostalgia. Some at least make the effort to write new music, though too often their best work diminishes with each disheartening release. Not Yo La Tengo, whose musical curiosity keeps adding novel twists and new dimensions to songs so strong that their latest full-length, Popular Songs, as good as any in their catalog.
The bigger picture – and the real story of Yo La Tengo – is one of a band indulging the same creative instincts that drew them to music, and to each other, in the first place. They are adventurous fans as much as adventurous musicians, and in the age of the all-access-pass Internet, that’s a big plus. It’s also the story of a group that found the elusive balance between artistic integrity and making a living, and then hewed to it. You could also call it a parable for the triumph of the independent music model Yo La Tengo lives rather than champions. Finally, it’s a love story.
Ask Foster. After two one-hour sets of the trio’s noise-spackled hooks, pastoral ’60s folk-pop, ambient drones, R&B-flavored summer ditties and epic feedback freakouts, the lucky wheel-spinner is still radiating euphoria while he waits in line at the band’s merch table. Foster made the four-hour drive from his mountain home in Hendersonville to catch both nights’ gigs, and is now clad in his “thanks for playing” prize – a tan t-shirt with the wheel’s bold colors emblazoned over most of it.
Foster cites his own polymath music interests – everything from blues and jazz to hip-hop and rock – as a pivotal link to a band whose crate-digging geekdom has mirrored its audiences’ over the years. What one writer called Yo La Tengo’s “uncalculating enthusiasm and eclectic appreciation for many kinds of music” manifests in an independent streak that dismisses hipster edicts on what’s cool or not with the same fervor it rejects classic-rock ideologues who swear rock died with the Beatles or Zeppelin.
Those aesthetics fuel Yo La Tengo’s enthusiastic embrace of cover songs, which tend to transcend generational differences. On this night the band breaks out Gene Clark’s country lament “Tried So Hard” – one of the songs from 1990’s three-quarters-covers record Fakebook – and invites opening act and Lambchop guitar ace William Tyler on stage to provide tasty accents.
The trio is known to prefer talking about their favorite artists instead of themselves, and the cover-song bond is one draw for curious young music fans who take their cues from Pitchfork and Stereogum rather than Rolling Stone or Spin. Whatever Yo La Tengo’s doing, the numbers suggest it’s been working.
According to their label, Matador, the group’s sales rose steadily through 2000’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, which remains their highest selling album to date. After the lull of 2003’s Summer Sun coincided with the industry-wide tanking of CD sales, the group’s last two full-lengths, 2006’s I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass and 2009’s Popular Songs, both outsold their immediate predecessor.
Watch 13 videos of songs from Yo La Tengo’s catalog.
Foster is hardly the only fan in his age bracket here on this Sunday night. Yo La Tengo’s own age peers pepper the outskirts of the crowd, but the packed floor is comprised primarily of people under 30. And after the show, it’s mostly the young crowd waiting with Foster in the merch-table line to chat with the band, cop an autograph, or add to their Yo La Tengo cache. To many musicians, this part of the gig is at best a necessary evil, but not to this group. This is where Hubley, Kaplan and McNew have forged memorable face-to-face relationships with fans that keep both parties coming back.
“They’re phenomenal with the fans,” Foster says. “They’re always willing to talk to the fans and play requests, and they even get back to you on e-mails.”
McNew gets it. “I’ve felt that way about other musicians and artists throughout my entire life,” the bassist says, “so I know how incredibly much that means.”
Star Power
The following afternoon, Kaplan, Hubley and McNew are at a table in the empty lounge of the Franklin Hotel in Chapel Hill, the swank digs in which they’ve lodged for the past two nights. With its dark-mahogany tables, cushy leather chairs and fancifully upholstered settees, the room has the air of a Victorian club with a strict dress code.
Yo La Tengo, though, are clad in the same casual, un-rock star garb they typically perform in. The loquacious Kaplan, who on the “Freewheeling” tours admitted he talks more than his bandmates combined, still dresses like a ’70s skate kid – colorful Chuck Taylors, loose-fitting jeans, and oversized T-shirts. During his trance-like feedback storms on stage, that baggy clothing heightens the visual effect that Kaplan is a marionette whose puppeteer is below stage, yanking him floor-ward with each note-bending howl.
Hubley favors Western shirts and more often than not pins or ties her blonde hair back; save for a few extra wrinkles around her eyes when she smiles, she still has the look of that cute shy girl in your Western Civics class. But the wallflower mien and her hushed vocals can be misleading. Hubley has evolved into a big-league drummer, red-lining or downshifting the band’s engine where needed.
McNew looms even burlier up close. But like a lot of big men, he has a mild demeanor as if to compensate for his intimidating size. Earlier, he was spotted walking down Chapel Hill’s main drag toward the band’s tour bus with a shopping bag in each hand, as impartial to his surroundings as a sturdy cargo ship in his blue-and-white-striped wool cap and pea coat. While all three members laugh easily, you sense that McNew – whose rare-but-amusing TV commentaries are chronicled on the Yo La Tengo blog On the Couch with James — is the comic pivot.
All three are coy about their ages, and their modesty and humor conceal many of the same passions held by the 20-somethings in their audiences. Kaplan says it’s not part of the band’s agenda to court these younger crowds. But they are aware that without newbies they could be the indie equivalent of that tired fair-ground ’80s hair-metal act playing to ever-diminishing crowds of graying diehards.
“I suspect you go to less shows than you did when you were 21, and I know we do,” Kaplan says. “You can’t keep an audience forever.”
So, without overtly courting new generations, how do Yo La Tengo manage to keep bringing younger people into the fold? An eclectic, era-spanning songbook may be one answer, but another is found in the same game of chance that their on-stage wheel promises. “We are explicitly uninterested in repeating ourselves,” says Kaplan, and it’s true: the band’s openness to improv and chance is programmed into its members’ chromosomes. In an attention-deficit, touch-screen culture, consistent change doesn’t hurt.
The wheel, which McNew says they came up with in South America while waiting for a ferry from Montevideo to Buenos Aires, takes it all one step further by uniting audience and band in uncertainty. A pleasant by-product of it, Kaplan says, “is finding yourself out on a limb” each night. Even if the wheel repeats certain material, it doesn’t mean the band does. When The Sounds of the Sounds of Science came up two nights in a row, the soundtrack’s open-ended instrumentals left plenty of room to “dig around and find a fresh approach” each night, Kaplan says. “That’s going to come out in whatever we end up doing.”
Paradoxically, career stability is the anchor that allows for all the experimentation and risk-taking. Yo La Tengo has had the same line-up for nearly two decades. They’ve been on the same label for 16 years, and they’ve used the same producer (Roger Moutenot) for every record since 1993. They’ve based their entire career in or near their hometown of Hoboken, N.J., highlighted by their (nearly) annual “Eight Nights of Hanukkah” special-guest extravaganzas at Maxwell’s – the venue where Kaplan mixed sound in the early ’80s – and their infamous WFMU fundraiser appearances.
Each year, in the WFMU studio, the band promises to tackle any song thrown their way (or die on-air trying) in exchange for pledges. It’s not always pretty — Yo La Tengo Is Murdering the Classics, released in 2006, compiles 30 of the good, bad and just plain clam-y. But as the self-professed dean of American rock critics, Robert Christgau, once wrote, that’s part of the group’s inherent appeal: “Not all the music emanating from Yo La Tengo is perfect. That’s intentional—this paradise not only has room for error, it revels in the human-scale joys of inexpertise.”
That tight-wire act between control and chaos is second nature to the band now. You can see it in how grounded they are about what they do. They take their music seriously, but not themselves or their place in the zeitgeist. You won’t hear much post-modern contextualization about consistency or change from them.
“I’m not sure how much we really articulate that stuff, even to ourselves,” Kaplan says. “I also wouldn’t say it’s that important to us to change – we just enjoy it.”
That’s been true since the band’s formation.
Shy and shyer
In 1981, Kaplan met Hubley, the daughter of film animators John and Faith Hubley. The two young music fanatics were both wild for the burgeoning New York City indie scene and present at the same shows where crowds could be so sparse, Kaplan says, “it was almost impossible to not know everybody in the audience — though somehow we were shy enough to not know each other.”
Once they met, the two learned they shared the same eclectic tastes – as well as a passion for the New York Mets, where they got their name from a Spanish-speaking outfielder yelling ,“I got it.” And just as Kaplan considered himself an amateur guitarist at the time, he learned Hubley was a closet drummer. They began writing original material in their New Jersey apartment, and played for the first time in public at the New York Rocker offices – where Kaplan was a music journalist — backing the dBs’ Peter Holsapple. “It was terrifying and exhilarating,” Kaplan says.
In tribute at the Cat’s Cradle Sunday night, Kaplan saluted the N.C. natives and told the audience, “We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the dBs.”
During their first six years, Yo La Tengo was essentially a two-piece. A long queue of bassists – among them the dBs’ Gene Holder and Mission of Burma’s Clint Conley, as well as Dave Rick, Al Greller, Mike Lewis and Stephan Wichnewski – came and went through the band’s first four LPs: Ride the Tiger (1986), New Wave Hot Dogs (1987), President Yo La Tengo (1989) and Fakebook (1990). McNew took over for domestic and European tours in ’91, though at the time he was in the Providence, R.I., band Christmas. Kaplan says McNew was initially just “the last in a sequence of people who were helping out, just getting us from this square to that square.”
Christmas ground to a halt when their label, IRS, dropped them. Meanwhile, McNew was getting “gentle, loving pressure” from his parents to return home and finish school. He was on the verge of quitting music when Yo La Tengo called. He may have been considered a temp at first, but the trio cited a winter practice in ’92 prior to the release of May I Sing With Me — on which McNew was the default bassist — as the day the two became three.
With no shows to rehearse for, the trio met anyway at their shared practice space and began goofing around. Kaplan switched over to a borrowed organ for his “roller-rink versions” of covers and originals, and somewhere along the line the group’s trademark blend of organ, percussion and guitars first emerged that day. Along with it came a shared sense of camaraderie and discovery, and — McNew reminds everyone – a lot of talk about television shows.
“A practice like that could’ve never happened unless it was a band practicing,” Kaplan says. “Everything kind of grew out of that day.”
With the release of Painful in 1993, the trio leapt headlong into their new sound. The album confidently featured extended feedback-kissed melodies (“Big Day Coming”), trance-inducing rhythms (“I Saw You Looking”), wistful dreampop (“Nowhere Near”) and boisterous rockers (“From a Motel 6”). Painful’s songs synthesized the band’s more well-known influences – Sonic Youth and the Velvet Underground (whom Yo La Tengo would portray in the 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol) – into an atmospheric mélange of melody, noise and repetition singular to Yo La Tengo.
Electr-O-Pura (’95) followed, adding what should have been radio hits (“Tom Courtenay”) and beautiful ballads (“Pablo & Andrea”) to the mix. I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One (1997) came next, and it is the record many critics consider the band’s high-water mark because it showcased so many of Yo La Tengo’s styles so well.
The band’s profile was growing steadily through this period, helped by a couple of prime opening slots with both Johnny Cash (’94) and My Bloody Valentine (’95). McNew says that prior to those mid-’90s dates their experience opening for headliners had had been “frequently horrifying and not fun.” He credited Kevin Shields’ band for behaving like they’d actually invited Yo La Tengo along (which they had), and says of the Cash tour that “even though we were like the super-weird cousins who had been invited to the reunion, they still treated us like family.”
Keeping true to Yo La Tengo’s restless nature, the band didn’t try to repeat I Can Hear the Heart’s critical success on 2000’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. Instead, the trio crafted a quiet, album-long lullaby (“Cherry Chapstick” notwithstanding) on which Kaplan’s guitar rarely rises above a whisper and Hubley’s brushes showcase an increasingly sophisticated touch. Ballads like “Our Way to Fall” and “Last Days of Disco” emphasize the band’s increasingly intimate songwriting, and several cuts skitter and stutter with processed beats for the first time.
The confessional nature of the record chronicles the ups and downs that any successful marriage still encounters, and Kaplan and Hubley seem to communicate in song throughout. “Sometimes I wonder why we have so much trouble/Cheering each other up sometimes/When one or the other of us is down,” Kaplan speak-sings on “The Crying of Lot G,” which Hubley seems to answer in “Tears Are In Your Eyes”: “Although you don’t believe me, you are strong/Darkness always turns into the dawn/And you won’t even remember this for long/When it ends alright.”
Their love story may be the beating heart of Yo La Tengo since its inception, but their marriage is a topic Hubley and Kaplan deem off-limits. But they call bullshit on the commonly held belief that working with a spouse while cohabiting is a formula for failure. “The band is the band,” Hubley puts it, politely steering the conversation elsewhere while Kaplan cites the “half of all marriages fail” statistic.
“I’m always reluctant to accept any kind of rule, whether it’s couples should be in a band, couples shouldn’t be in a band, songs should be three minutes, songs shouldn’t be three minutes,” Kaplan says. “Anything that short-circuits thinking and feeling, or operating by a manual, doesn’t really seem to be helpful.”
 Workin’ for the Matador
What has proved helpful to Yo La Tengo is sticking to their business model while the old-guard music industry topples like ancient Rome around them. The band’s success turns out to be another tacit validation of the independent label model. While the majors succumb to their own greed and hubris, more artist-friendly imprints like Matador, Sub Pop and Merge – whose owners and staff came of age in the same era as Yo La Tengo – have survived, and even sometimes thrived. Merge even had a band, Arcade Fire, take a Grammy for Album of the year this year. That balance of artistic integrity and business smarts defines Yo La Tengo’s approach and explains why – despite plenty of offers – the band never made the major-label leap.
Put simply, for Yo La Tengo, enjoying what they do for a living and how they go about it trumps making more money. But the group recoils from seeing that as some grand artistic gesture or socio-political statement; they’ve been just successful enough to keep doing things in a way they’re comfortable with. “Making a living wasn’t why people signed to major labels,” Kaplan says, “they signed to become huge. If you were signed to a major label and were making a living – you got dropped. They didn’t want you.”
Even in today’s radically shifting music-business landscape, there are parts of the game Yo La Tengo refuses to play. The trio may license songs to films and TV shows, but they won’t sell their songs to advertisers (although they have written original music for ads on a couple of occasions).
McNew may believe the advertisers-song nexus makes the “mobster-driven, AM-radio, hit-single world seem so much more dignified,” but Kaplan refuses to pass judgment on musicians who see it as an in-road to success. “People make the decisions they make for all sorts of good, honest reasons,” says Kaplan, “and they don’t have to be the same decisions we make. Besides, I would never be comfortable being The Commissioner.”
Yo La Tengo spoofed the major-label mindset – and its own reputation as indie-rock Commissioners – in their 1997 video for the song “Sugarcube.” Opening with a proposed video-clip of an uninspired Yo La Tengo shoegazing its way through the up-tempo rocker, a trio of label execs – including comedians Bob Odenkirk and David Cross – berate the trio for being afraid “to make money.” They’re marched off to Rock School and reprogrammed to appreciate such classic-rock staples as hotel trashing, over-the-top showmanship, groupie-collecting, and consulting Tolkien for lyric ideas.
It’s good ham-fisted fun, but then that’s the point: Whether it’s classic rock’s comic excess or indie rock’s perceived snobbery, in the end all that matters is whether the music moves you. “In answer to the question that was posed to us in our ‘Sugarcube’ video,” Kaplan says, “I don’t think we are afraid of making money, but there were always things we were not willing to do to make money.”
But spend a few bucks on a wheel of fortune? That’s a worthwhile investment in the future.
Watch John Schacht’s “baker’s dozen” of great Yo La Tengo video clips.
See more of Kay Yang’s photography including additional Yo La Tengo photos. |
