Yo La Tengo: four decades of 'indie rock' as couples therapy

Ira Kaplan, guitarist and singer of the American

band Yo La Tengo (YLT), loves sound checks, that time before a concert that musicians usually hate and that consists of taking over the acoustics of the room in which they are going to play at night.

It is such a repetitive and exasperating ritual that one would think that Kaplan (Hoboken, New Jersey, 66 years old) says it only for sport, his favorite sport: to offer the world an image of a modest type, far from the tired mythology of rock.

It's not that he's back from a wildlife walk, it's that he didn't even leave the house.

“YLT was founded by a married couple, so we never went through our period of excess,” he excuses himself.

“What are we going to do if we like monotony”.

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Mysteries hidden in the everyday.

2013 interview

Kaplan is in a dressing room in Charlottesville, a university city in Virginia where in mid-March the presentation tour of his new and wonderful album,

(Matador / Popstock!), which will be defended from Saturday in four Spanish cities, ended (in this order: Barcelona, ​​Murcia, Madrid and Bilbao).

Outside having a great time (sound checking, that is) the rest of the band: drummer Georgia Hubley, his wife of 36 years, and James McNew, who became a permanent member in 1992 after the couple Try it out with 15 other bassists first.

And just as all Marines are riflemen, all three YLT members are vocalists.

Its seemingly conflict-free history, the fidelity of the marriage, the patience of the third party, and the longevity of the ensemble make YLT a

in American rock, and in an enigma for lovers of folds.

They, survivors of the alternative rock explosion of the eighties, of the fifth of Sonic Youth, REM or Dinasour Jr., seem comfortable feeding that intrigue by keeping information from themselves in their meetings with the press, which they almost always attend. Kaplan or maybe McNew, very rarely Hubley.

"Explaining myself is not my favorite pastime", the guitarist will say at one point in the interview.

In another, he will answer "no" to the question of whether he missed life on the road during the pandemic.

"My personality and that of the band is not one of those who want what they can't get."

All this may be due to a master move to focus attention on the music, an unmistakable sound in which melancholy and sweetness coexist with noise and fury, and whispers and the talent for pop songs with litanies. experimental distortion.

This 2023 marks two anniversaries in the trio's history: four decades since the debut on stage of Georgia and Those Guys, the first incarnation of YLT, and 30 years since they signed with the independent label Matador, another proof of the faithful personality of the band. .

Gerard Cosloy, co-owner of the record company, told EL PAÍS a couple of weeks ago in an email that he is still amazed at "his work ethic, his determination and his willingness to trust the public to guide his career."

And he described the relationship between YLT and Matador with a playbook joke only suitable for (very) baseball fans: “When they say 'jump,' we say 'how high?'

Which has worked better for us than for Edwin Díaz (get well soon, etc.)”.

Díaz is a Puerto Rican pitcher for the New York Mets;

In March, he was seriously injured while celebrating his team's victory over the Dominican Republic.

They also understand each other.

Kaplan is a Mets fan, and if he was wondering why musicians from Hoboken, birthplace of Frank Sinatra, call themselves Yo La Tengo, the reason again has to do with baseball.

Once upon a time there was a player named Richie Ashburn who in the 1962 season collided non-stop when he went for the ball with a Venezuelan teammate, Elio Chacón, who did not speak English.

To avoid this, Ashburn learned three words in Spanish: “yo la tengo”.

The many confusions that the name caused at the beginning (Wo La Tango, Yo lo Tengo, Ya Lo Tengo) served the journalist Jesse Jarnow to open his biography of the band in 2012, which is also a portrait of the scene in which they emerged and the friendships they forged.

He titled it

just like one of the most beautiful songs of the group.

The book, full of anecdotes in which the reader is left waiting for a script twist that never comes, is to one of those rock biographies full of excesses what a sound check to the concert of your life.

But that's precisely what makes it relevant, his account of how the marriage helped build the

mold as a sedate derivative of the punk rock ethic.

“[In the mid-'80s] they were wearing Converse All-Stars, playing loud moves, sometimes singing quietly, putting out seven inches, playing on college stations and recording on independent labels.

With the passing of the decades, the term became increasingly blurred”, writes Jarnow in

, which in Spain was published by Libros del Ruido (in the translation by the journalist Ignacio Julià).

In his case, time also contributed to his greatness;

They did not shine immediately with a flash, like others, but their fidelity to a modest but important sound, a proposal that hatched in the mid-nineties, turned them into one of those rare bands whose records one knows they will be able to continue celebrating their birthdays. .

Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan, from Yo La Tengo in Wetlands, in 1990.Steve Eichner (WireImage)

“What interested me most about their story, and what I think makes them different,” Jarnow said in a telephone interview on Thursday, “is how long it took them to find their voice and learn to be themselves.

Since they achieved it, they have remained firm in that position, but adapting to the times.

Behind that appearance of shyness there is a strong sense of confidence in his artistic commitment.

I wasn't interested in writing the story of a band like Fleetwood Mac, with its breakups and all the drama, I wanted to write a book where the music was the main thing.

YLT are first and foremost great music lovers.

And they fall into a lineage that has to do with the sound of New York.

Anger was always there;

in the audience and then on stage.

He was part of all that from a very young age ”

punk's inspiration

He attributes the longevity of his relationship with Hubley (New York, 63 years old) to the fact that the idea of ​​playing and forming a couple were basically the same.

“I'm not original: I decided to try being a musician when I saw a punk concert, and I thought: 'I could do it.'

It was with her that I convinced myself to try it.

Ours worked from the beginning.

And it got better as our sound did”, recalls the guitarist.

In 2024, the couple, who met "at a Feelies concert," will celebrate 40 years of YLT.

It will fall in December, the month in which they practice another of their rituals: the week of Hanukkah concerts, with which they celebrate the Jewish holiday with comedians, bands and soloists invited to take them up on the stage of a New York club.

Tickets sell out quickly, despite the fact that those who buy them do not know until the day of the show what the poster will be.

Decisions about who will play with them on those days are made like others affecting the trio, which, Kaplan notes, "doesn't function as a democracy."

“If there's something two of us want to do, but the third doesn't, we don't go over their wishes.

We are not like those groups in which each one composes their song and they move on to the next one.

Over the years I have learned that fighting, exploding, letting loose, can be fun, yes, but it is a very temporary emotion, which, in reality, only makes things worse, ”she adds.

As well as a monument to understanding,

his seventeenth studio album—“as you get older it's not that the world gets stupider,” Kaplan quips, “maybe it's that you get smarter”—sounds like a compendium of all ages of YLT.

They recorded it during lockdown at the band's Hoboken rehearsal space.

They had it easier than others: two thirds of the group shared a family nucleus.

“And the rest could be put away,” Kaplan explains wryly.

“Essay” is a “broad” concept for YLT.

“It could be talking about what we did over the weekend for a long time and then playing for the fun of playing for 10 minutes.”

When it's time for the musical part, McNew (Baltimore, 53 years old) always has his microphones ready, which record what the trio does, often pure improvisation.

From a certain moment on, they knew that all this pandemic material would end up being something, for example,

the first album for which they have not had an external producer.

Once the songs were ready - whose lyrics, mostly by Kaplan, talk about playing yo-yo, looking at the sky or preparing to die - they went on tour again, a ceremony in which they also impose their rules: they always divide the show in two parts and the repertoire of one night is not repeated in the same order on the next.

This eagerness to offer something different in each square has earned them one of the most faithful parishes of

That day they played in a storied concert hall in Charlottesville, which is the kind of city in which that musical style known as

of which they were idols germinated.

McNew also studied at his university and formed a band called Ectoslavia, together with Stephen Malkmus and David Berman, who would later found, respectively, Pavement and Silver Jews, which turns that experiment into a kind of alternative nation supergroup, but early.

The CBRN Quintet at Yankee Stadium, New York, in 1978.Michael Ochs Archives

In the afternoon, a guy stopped Kaplan on his way to the corner record store to buy

rock and

to tell him that he had seen YLT live 27 times.

In the interview, the guitarist, who was a music journalist in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s before going to the other side of the mirror, did not seem very impressed.

“There are groups that I have seen many more than 27 times.”

For example?

“For example, [veteran American rock band] CBRN.

They always manage to sound different."

Two days earlier, YLT had played in Nashville, where they made headlines because Kaplan and McNew performed cross-dressing on the second

to protest a Tennessee law banning drag shows

.

"Things are getting very ugly in this country," explains Kaplan to justify that decision.

“I am 66 years old, I am not saying that they are worse than when I was young.

But at least we had the feeling that they were going to improve.

That doesn't happen to me now…it's hard for me to be optimistic when I see, for example, the news about [the defamation lawsuit between] Fox News and Dominion.

Those people knew he was lying.

They didn't believe that nonsense, but they still said it on the air.

I don't know if I find that more depressing, or the fact that people aren't shocked when they find out."

The singer of the group Yo la tengo, Ira Kaplan, during his performance on the first night of Mad Cool, on July 12, 2018.Victor Lerena (EFE)

The guitarist later recounted a visit with Hubley to the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, where "the idea of ​​good and evil" came to mind.

“Beyond the tremendous mistakes he made and the ugly political compromises he made, Johnson was trying to make the world better.

I think Richard Nixon tried too.

I'm afraid [ex-Fox News ultra host] Tucker Carlson isn't trying to make the world better."

That reflection seemed to be taken up again by the guitarist when, a few days later, he stopped at his concert in Washington in the middle of one of his most playful songs,

starring a jerk, and said: “In these times, when so many people say anything stupid they don't believe in to get attention, we ask you not to put us in that bag for singing these lyrics.

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