Yo La Tengo playing to a crowd that can’t believe our luck (including the author, in the upper left corner). Photo by Rand Foster. Additional photos by Greggory Moore.
Yo La Tengo may not be as revolutionary as The Beatles or Velvet Underground, but for me there is no band—ever—that is more magnificent.
“I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to hear that,” says Fingerprints owner Rand Foster when I giddily share my feelings. Not that it’s news to him that, for his customer base, a new Yo La Tengo album is a big deal. But we’re not sitting upstairs in his office because of the new album: we’re there because two days later this most magnificent of bands was set to grace his gem of an indie record shop with an in-store performance. When I heard the news, I was shocked. Foster fully relates to my surprise, because he shared it.
“The label [i.e., Matador Records] called us and said, ‘Hey, Yo La Tengo may be available,'” he recounts. “[…] I’m a very firm believer that if you want something, ask for it, but I wouldn’t have thought to ask [to have Yo La Tengo play at Fingerprints], because I wouldn’t have thought it was a possibility. So, I couldn’t be happier that they came to us. It makes it mean that much more. Because I’ve done the math, [Laughs] and it’s not like they’re being self-serving by playing here. It’s a very generous thing they’re doing.”
Of course, this isn’t the first time that Fingerprints—even just in its East Village space, which it’s occupied for less than two years—has been graced by big-name artists. It was at about this time last year that Lou Reed dropped in for a spoken-word performance; and in April 2011 Foo Fighters pop/rocked the house for Record Store Day.
Nonetheless, Foster gets that hosting what he calls “the band the term ‘college radio’ was pretty much coined to describe,” a hugely respected group still in its prime, is something truly special—not only because of the music, but also because of the band’s commitment to the indie scene. Foster notes that not only is Yo La Tengo doing a series of in-store shows (including at Amoeba Records in Hollywood and San Francisco), but they’ve also released a vinyl version of the album that is an indie-store exclusive, with a couple of bells and whistles, including a bonus 7″ and a download of an 11-minute freak-out jam.
“They did all this extra stuff, because that’s them again supporting this [indie] community,” Foster says. “That’s one of the things that I take away from this band so strongly.”
Yo La Tengo’s new album, Fade, happens to be playing in the store as Foster and I chat, and it confirms that Yo La Tengo is as vibrant as ever. That’s saying something, considering that the band was formed in 1984 (though its current lineup didn’t solidify until 1992) and consists of three members in their mid 50s. But each of the eight albums Yo La Tengo has released since joining mighty Matador in 1993 has killed, always staying true the group’s Sonic Youth/Velvet Underground roots without ever sounding derivative, while incorporating so many different styles[1] that every album is a fresh chapter in the story of Yo La Tengo.
“One of the things I love about Yo La Tengo is that their records don’t sound like other records of theirs,” says Foster. “[…] They have stayed very true to the ideal of what they’re about. […] The records they put out make the charts now, which they didn’t necessarily before, and I think that’s because the world caught up with them, not that they changed to fit the world. It’s a big deal, this record coming out.”
And then came the show.
***
About 250 people—in other words, a capacity crowd for Fingerprints—queued along the 4th Street sidewalk, while Berlin was unusually packed 7:15PM on a Wednesday (I wonder why?), with all being treat to the soundcheck. It was fitting for a band as unassuming as Yo La Tengo to be prepping in such a public fashion.
Satisfied with the sound, guitarist Ira Kaplan, drummer Georgia Hubley, and bassist James McNew did exactly what you’d expect such regular-seeming, musically-inclined folk to do in a place like Fingerprints: they record-shopped. At what I hoped was a none-too-obtrusive moment, I approached Kaplan and Hubley as the couple lingered in the book section and asked why doing something like this show was important enough to them to fly across the country fewer than 24 hours after doing Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. None of the band members has what one might call a “public figure” personality, and you might think Hubley a bit distant if you misread her apparent shyness. She left the answer to her husband, who’s a bit less shy but evinces the kind of mild social awkwardness we recognize in many of our dearest friends (and ourselves).
Georgia and Ira of Yo La Tengo
“Um, well, I mean, it’s in our best interests,” Kaplan says after a thoughtful pause. “And it’s sort of: everybody wins. It’s really good for us to be here. We’re not doing this for our altruistic love of independent record stores. We’ve got a record out—it’s great for us to come and play to our fans in a way that they’ll be excited by. So everybody wins in a situation like this. Which is why we…It was a”—he’s chuckling here—”a big effort to get here, yeah. But this is the time to do it. The record is brand-new…. We’re not doing charity work.”
A laugh before the last song
As he laughs, an obviously starstruck fan who spied us chatting from inside Berlin takes the opportunity to gush a bit. It’s very sweet, and Kaplan receives it just as sweetly. I do a quick bit of gushing myself and then leave Kaplan to shop on, and before long the 250 people are filing in, and it’s showtime.
The band played eight songs (for a full review, go here), and while it seems there was not a person in the crowd who wouldn’t have welcomed the band’s playing thrice as long, it would have been impossible to be justly disappointed even had the trio not hung around to say hello to and do autographs for all interested parties, which resulted in the second very long line of the night.
Rand and a final hand for the band
As Foster says, “This was one of the memory books.” For many of us, last night was about as meaningful a musical experience as could ever be had. It’s the kind of magic that happens only when the right people come together in the right place. In a world so often out of whack, it’s nice to have a night in a tiny little corner of the world where everything lines up perfectly, and for one fleeting moment everything seems right. With a great soundtrack.
[1] For example, 2006’s I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass is so schizophrenic that by rights it should not be able to hang together as a single album, and yet it does by sheer force of how well the band can switch from Motown-inspired soul pop (“Mr. Tough”) to the quietest of shadowy soundscapes (“I Feel Like Going Home”) to keyboard-centered dance rave-ups (“The Room Got Heavy”) to 12-minute walls of distortion (“The Story of Yo La Tango”).