The Real Mr. Tough
Yo La Tengo w/ The Rosebuds @ Starr Hill
Since the opening of Satellite Ballroom and the renaissance of Starr Hill, Charlottesville music lovers have been a little bit spoiled. Big acts come to town with alarming regularity now, and it seems like we all take it for granted. That big Peaches show? Oh, I’ll just get tickets the day or two before. Of Montreal? Again? It’s easy to forget that just a few years ago there was a huge drought of shows here, with poor students forced to drive two hours to DC to see any band big enough to not fit in the basement of Tokyo Rose. It’s easy to remind yourself, missing a show, that someone else will be here within a few weeks, and you’ll probably want to see them more anyway, and man, that bank account sure is suffering right now.
But Yo La Tengo is different. Yo La Tengo is special.
The seminal indie-rock band has been here before, but not in almost seven years. That means Clinton was still president, the dot-com market hadn’t yet crashed, and I was still a senior in high school: in other words, it was ages ago. Last Thursday night, they returned to a sold-out crowd, a packed upper room at Starr Hill, and plenty of resentment from those who weren’t able to get tickets.
The Rosebuds, from Raleigh, NC, played an excellent opening set that even managed to get a few crowd members (and we’re talking old school, cross-your-arms-stand-still audience members) moving around on the show floor. Playing as a five-piece band (they’re nominally a husband-and-wife pop band along the lines of Mates of State), they kept the songs coming fast, nice, and poppy in a genial tone. It was decent, competent indie pop, the kind of thing you throw on while cleaning your room to keep you going.
But then it got awesome. About halfway through their set, the lead guitarist and vocalist (Ivan Howard) switched positions with the keyboardist (Kelly Crisp), and the band laid into the bass line for a song, “I Better Run,” off their new album. Heavier than the songs that had come before, with the bass and the drums turned up, the song had an strong 80s feel to it–you could practically feel the spirit of a new wave haircut descending on the room as some people–gasp–actually started to dance.
The rest of the set sounded excellent–even if the band never quite recaptured the intensity of “I Better Run,” that was mostly due to the surprise at the change in sound. Ivan put down the guitar and started shaking percussion instruments, even during a sweet, twangy duet that revealed their Merge record roots. It was a solid set, and their sound matched well with what was still to come.
Half an hour after the Rosebuds left the stage, Yo La Tengo came out to surprisingly less applause than one might think. The floor was so packed with people it was hard to see the band’s entrance. It didn’t take long to get the crowd going, though. “Sudden Organ” lived up to it’s name, as Ira Kaplan came out with a huge amount of energy, playing the keyboard with his entire arm, and within two minutes was going crazy, looking like he was playing with his entire upper body. Even stretching “Flying Lesson,” from Electr-O-Pura, for fifteen minutes couldn’t dampen the enthusiasm–though it helped that James McNew didn’t miss a note on the bass.
The band from Hoboken kept its banter with the audience to a minimum, preferring to spend more time just playing music. It seemed to be what the crowd wanted–the merest hint of a hook to a song was enough to elicit cheers and whistles from the floor. But as the night went on, and they went deeper into their more recent catalogue, the show seemed to suffer a bit. “The Weakest Part,” sung by Georgia Hubley, was the first song not to get a rise out of the audience–a shame, since it’s one of the prettier songs on I Am Not Afraid of You . . . That they followed it up with a couple of other quiet songs didn’t help; as often happens at Starr Hill, the quieter songs became drowned out by people chatting at the bar, and the energy that they had carried in from the first few songs dropped away.
Mr. Kaplan promised one more quiet song before starting to “rock it out a bit,” and that brought the crowd back around. The spacey guitar hits and swirls seemed a little out of place–leading one audience member to shout, “My God, where are they?” But then it all came back together: Ira was playing the opening chords to “Sugarcube.” They stayed faithful to the album version, with some extra craziness thrown in the middle. After a quick guitar change, they started playing “Tom Courtenay,” causing a reaction as loud as “Sugarcube” but driven by about half as many people.
Afterwards, the band backed away from the major hits again, though the crowd stayed united this time around. As the show came to a close, they began playing “Nuclear War,” their cover of the Sun Ra tune. Beginning with Hubley keeping a steady, syncopated beat, Mr. McNew helping out on drums and singing the vocals, and Mr. Kaplan playing the keys again, they cycled through at least a couple versions from the EP. “Nuclear War” showcased everyone’s ability to shift roles in Yo La Tengo–everyone sang the lead vocals at one point, and instrument-switching (one of those things I really miss about the late ’90s) kept the sound constantly changing. A long noise instrumental died down into quiet, spoken lyrics–in my notes, I wrote “outro” as Kaplan kept a call and response going: “Kiss your ass / Goodbye, Goodbye.” Surely this was the end of the show, but no–the music came up again, and I had to cross out “outro.”
Yo La Tengo left the stage, the crowd cheered, they came out again–you know this bit. Then they played the only song from And Then Nothing Turned Itself Out of the night, “Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House.” I desperately hoped they’d play “Autumn Sweater,” but it turned out instead to be “Burn Out the Day”–a cover of the Blue Oyster Cult song that probably could have been a little bit more powerful. Finally, after nearly two hours of playing, Yo La Tengo ended with their cover of “Yellow Sarong,” from Fakebook, drawing still more cheers and rewarding everyone who came out to the show (and, apparently, followed proper song request protocol).
After nine years of waiting, I finally got to see Yo La Tengo live. Because Yo La Tengo is different. Yo La Tengo is special. Yo La Tengo thinks nothing of playing almost two hours, essentially non-stop, trying to cover as much of their catalogue (stylistically, at least), as it possibly can. Yo La Tengo thinks nothing of making otherwise sane men utter the phrase, “nuclear holocaust of a show.” Yo La Tengo may very well be back in the semi-near future, because it’s Charlottesville in 2007, and you never know what big band’s concert is going to be announced next. Please, don’t take it for granted.
This article originally appeared in The Declaration on 15 February 2007.