Concert Preview: Spoof proof
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By MATT ELLIOTT World Scene Writer
4/6/2007
Yo La Tengo members get a kick out of band's rock-snob rep
Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan may be one of the few voices in music decrying the information age's "everything at your fingertips."
There's something to be said about seeking out something that interests you, Kaplan said. The classic indie rock trio will perform Tuesday at Cain's Ballroom, with opening act David Kilgour & the Heavy Eights.
Kaplan, who lives in Hoboken, N.J., said people used to learn about music by hearing stuff on a record or through reading something. Now it's all there for everyone with a computer to see.
"So maybe it'll be easier and maybe it is easier now, but I don't know that that 's strictly an improvement. It kind of enforces the idea of it just being entertainment and less of yourself is involved in it. (There's) less dedication to it, which isn't necessarily a good thing."
Conversely, it's probably a lot easier to find Yo La Tengo's most recent album, last year's "I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your A--." The album, a sweeping arc of quiet ballads and punk songs, is the band's first on Matador Records since "Summer Sun." It is the latest chapter in a 22-year plus career that has brought the band much critical praise but an art rock-snob stereotype.
In fact, the Onion, the newspaper that makes a living selling fake news, lampooned the band back in 2002. The article, featuring the headline "37 Record-Store Clerks Feared Dead In Yo La Tengo Concert Disaster," described the "senseless hipster carnage" wrought by a roof collapse, which left a tangled mess of "black-frame glasses and ironic Girl Scouts T-Shirts."
"We certainly thought it was funny. I think, if anything, the swipe had as much to do with the way we are (perceived) as who we are. It didn't matter to me at all. We can't deny that's what people think of the band."
There were no hard feelings. The band played the Onion's staff Christmas party that year. Kaplan and his bandmates had a condition though -- they wanted to reenact the story, only with it ending in their deaths instead of the audience.
"They got super into it and got people to construct some very elaborate and real looking fake stage, fake PA equipment. At a certain point in the show, the lights went out and there was the sound of a short circuit. Then the lights came back on, and this fake rigging was released, knocking us out and killing us."
Kaplan is no stranger to the workings of the media, not only through the band, but through a previous job working as a freelance proofreader and copy editor.
But with album titles such as "Genius + Love = Yo La Tengo" and "And then nothing turned itself inside-out," maybe that's not much of a surprise.
He used to have to read the most godawful stuff and was known to mark the margins of the books he was editing with multiple notes.
"There was a recurring series called 'Scout' and these kind of Western novels. Novels. They weren't novels. They weren't even books. Stories. Capers. A typical scene in the 'Scout' would be that bandits would prey on a village and leave all the men dead and gang rape a woman. I'm barely exaggerating this, too. And then the Scout would come on the scene and find all these dead people and this brutalized woman.
"And, through his tender ministrations, they'd be having passionate sex like 30 seconds later . . . He even misspelled 'penis.' "
YO LA TENGO
When: 7 p.m., Tuesday, with opener David Kilgour & the Heavy Eights.
Where: Cain's Ballroom, 423 N. Main St.
Tickets: $19 in advance, $21 day of show, available at Starship Records & Tapes, Reasor's, www.Gettix.net, Cain's box office, 584-2306
By MATT ELLIOTT World Scene Writer
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