Photo by Cheryl Dunn
Yo La Tengo
Yo La Tengo
In a 1982 article by famed music writer Robert Palmer, the New York Timesproclaimed Hoboken, N.J., to be a new mecca for rock’n’roll bands. “It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely rock-n-roll mecca than Hoboken,” wrote Palmer.
Two years later, Yo La Tengo would emerge from Hoboken, and, nearly 40 years on, their remarkable tale is no less unlikely. Beyond longevity, the Yo La Tengo story includes widespread acclaim, international popularity, many, many bassists (though resolved in 1992), television’s The Gilmore Girls, and a song and album catalog you can file under Indie Rock Bible.
With a new album out, This Stupid World, the trio (guitarist Ira Kaplan, drummer Georgia Hubley, and bassist James McNew) returns to Milwaukee for the first time since 2013 for a sold-out show on Saturday at Turner Hall.
Kaplan attributes a lot of the success of Hoboken’s music scene—and his band’s—to the presence of the music club Maxwell’s, which closed in 2018, and the passion of the club’s co-owner Steve Fallon. The club would play a part in motivating both Kaplan and Hubley to move to Hoboken from New York City; they would also end up working at the club (and eventually marrying) and performing cover songs there as Georgia and Those Guys before creating Yo La Tengo.
“There’s no question in my mind that I doubt we would have even existed without Maxwell’s, and we certainly wouldn’t have existed the same way,” he says.
Out of the Spotlight
Hoboken was the perfect place out of the spotlight and scrutiny of New York City for the band to figure out what they wanted to be and sound like, Kaplan says.
“Our band took a long time to be worth anything,” he says. “We were not like the Violent Femmes, who the first time you see them it’s like, ‘This is amazing.’ Kind of arrived fully formed. There’s a lot of bands liked that. There’s kind of the truism that the first album you’ve got your whole life to prepare for it. Somehow Georgia and I wasted that part of our life, and we really didn’t figure out what we wanted to do until James came along to help us.”
Speaking of the Violent Femmes. Before starting Yo La Tengo, Kaplan wrote for the legendary NY Rocker magazine started by Alan Betrock in 1976. After the magazine folded, he began booking shows with editor Michael Hill as part of a series called Music for Dozens at Folk City in Greenwich Village. He helped bring attention to the Milwaukee band by inviting them to perform as part of the series for their first New York City gig.
“That was an amazing show,” Kaplan says. “I think they played twice, but the first time was with the Morells. It was packed with people. It was a little club. I guess I helped them. I remember we had the Morells booked already, and we got offered the Violent Femmes for that night. We had to juggle things to make them all fit. I didn’t feel like I was doing them a favor. I felt like they were doing me one.”
The Violent Femmes would go on to open for Richard Hell and received acclaim in the New York Times and from critic Robert Christgau, further boosting recognition for the band in the days before they put out their first record.
“Weird on the Avenue”
The last time Yo La Tengo played in town they also revealed themselves to be fans of Milwaukee’s The Frogs, dedicating “Weird on the Avenue” to brothers Jimmy and Dennis Flemion. Dennis died in a boating accident in 2012. “We’ve been loving the songs he’s (Jimmy) posting online,” says Kaplan. “What’s not to like?”
This Stupid World is the band’s first full-length album in five years and is a welcome return from beginning to end.
Kaplan says the band doesn’t really spend a lot of time working on their catalog these days; songs develop more organically.
McNew has recorded the band during rehearsals for some time, which has ultimately led to Yo La Tengo becoming more independent in the studio. The band produced and mixed This Stupid World on its own; it marks their first album without any outside help.
“As time has gone on he has made more and more elaborate multi-track recordings of just us messing around in rehearsal,” he says. “A lot of those things are on the record. … From time to time, we sit down and listen to the recordings to see if there is anything we want to revisit and flesh out, and sometimes there is and sometimes there isn’t.”
Kaplan said the band didn’t really “decide” to become independent over their last two albums, including 2018’s self-produced There’s a Riot Going On, they just kind of recognized it was happening. Riot was mixed by John McEntire, who had also produced 2013’s Fade. “When we got to work on what became This Stupid World, we were thinking that way,” he says. “We would record everything and get together whether it was John or someone else, somewhere we would mix the record. But in the course of doing the rough mixes, we had the same epiphany of this sounds good to us. It seemed to us we didn’t need an outsider to finish the job for us. The job we are doing is satisfying us. It wasn’t a decision so much as us recognizing what we were doing unconsciously.”
On the road to support This Stupid World, Yo La Tengo made headlines and stirred up social media with a performance in Nashville in which Kaplan and McNew left the stage during the show before returning dressed in drag to protest Tennessee’s recent anti-drag law. Kaplan says he is cut off from the social media reaction because he doesn’t use a cell phone and sticks to his laptop.
“I saw some of the news articles and got some emails from friends,” he says. “Most of it has been chit-chattering elsewhere out of my field of vision.”
The crowd reaction at the show, however, was overwhelmingly positive, Kaplan says. Before doing it, Kaplan said the band worried it might be too distracting and take away from the show, but that was not the case.
“It ended up just providing focus, and I think it just made for a special night all around,” he says.
Yo La Tengo performs at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 25, Turner Hall. The show is sold out.
