Nashville has long been something of a second home for Hoboken, N.J., indie-rock lifers Yo La Tengo. In advance of the band’s Basement East shows this Friday and Saturday — touring on their 15th (!) studio album, the extremely-chill-even-for-YLT There’s a Riot Going On — the Scene checked in with some of the people who’ve helped make it so.
If you’ve gone record shopping at Grimey’s lately, there’s a good chance the shop was jamming some Yo La Tengo on the house speakers. Since late November, when The Basement East shows were announced, manager Anna Lundy and store co-owner Doyle Davis have made a point of playing at least one of the group’s many releases in full each day.
“Part of why we got so excited was because they’ve never played The Basement, or Basement East,” Lundy explains. Both venues are co-owned by Grimey’s proprietor and namesake Mike “Grimey” Grimes. “Now they’re here, and not only did Grimey book the show, they’re playing for two nights. So we’re going to help sell these shows out. We’re going to play these records all the time. We’re going to celebrate them.”
Singer-guitarist Ira Kaplan and his wife, drummer-vocalist Georgia Hubley, formed the band in 1984. YLT had already made five albums — most notably 1992’s raucous May I Sing With Me, their first with bassist James McNew, who’s been in the fold ever since — before dialing in what’s become their signature sound. Enter producer-engineer Roger Moutenot, who helped shape that sound, and indie-country experimentalists Lambchop, whom it’s fair to call the band’s closest friends in town.
A fellow New Jerseyan, Moutenot first worked with YLT on 1993’s Painful, a creative and sonic breakthrough for the band. At once heavy and mellow, its 11 songs embraced repetition, big, warm guitars and throbbing organ. Something of an American counterpart to U.K. band My Bloody Valentine’s 1991 shoegaze landmark Loveless, Painful established a working relationship that would last throughout the decade and well into the next. (2009’s Popular Songs was the most recent YLT-Moutenot joint effort.)
“Painful sold me,” Davis says. “It’s the album that first showed the mature, fully formed Yo La Tengo. May I Sing had some of the same ideas, but Roger was able to shape them into the sonic space that we know as their sound. It blew my mind.”
“Painful blew my mind,” echoes Lambchop bandleader Kurt Wagner. To former Lambchop horn player (and former Scene managing editor) Jonathan Marx: “The organ on that record was so striking at the time. That really captured everyone’s attention.”
Moutenot relocated from NYC to Music City in 1994. Soon after, Kaplan, Hubley and McNew came down to track their next album, Electr-O-Pura, at Alex the Great Studios. During the downtime between sessions, the Lambchop/Yo La Tengo friendship blossomed.
“The first time I met Ira and Georgia together was at a party that [my wife] Mary [Mancini] and I crashed,” remembers Wagner, laughing heartily. “We really had no business being there, but that didn’t dissuade them from leaving with us to get in a van and go get Mary’s Bar-B-Que,” he adds, referring to the Nashville barbecue landmark on Jefferson Street.
Marx appeared on two subsequent records that Yo La Tengo made with Moutenot, 1997’s I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, widely regarded as the ideal starting point for new listeners, and 2000’s slow-burning follow-up, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. Members of the band would also stay at Marx’s house when they came down to record, and soak in the local culture.
“We spent a lot of time sitting around talking about playing music and records we loved,” Marx recalls. “Because they were so welcoming, enthusiastic, inquisitive and engaged, it naturally grew into a friendship based around shared interests and values ... a love of good food, and good music.”
The first mention many non-Nashville indie heads ever heard of our city’s deliciously gnarly signature delicacy came courtesy of Yo La Tengo: “Flying Lesson (Hot Chicken #1)” and “Don’t Say a Word (Hot Chicken #2)” off Electr-O-Pura and “Return to Hot Chicken,” the opener on I Can Hear the Heart — not to mention nods to Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack in liner notes. “Now it’s this massive thing around the country,” says Davis, shaking his head, “and to me it’s like, ‘Yo La Tengo did that!’ ”
It was after wrapping Heart in 1996 that, after years of skipping Nashville on tour despite recording here, Yo La Tengo finally played a Nashville show — at Lucy’s Record Shop, Mancini’s Church Street store and all-ages venue. Those who were there remember the erstwhile Lucy’s as the locus of left-of-center guitar music in what was then decidedly more a recording industry town than a live-music town.
“It was last-minute, and Lambchop opened,” remembers Davis. “Lucy’s had no production — just a couple lights — so they hung up flashlights on strings over the stage. They’d turn them on — that was the lighting. Now and then someone would hit one of them, and they’d spin around. It was very DIY, very low-tech, but memorable.”
Lundy first caught Yo La Tengo on the same tour, but in her hometown, Knoxville. “They were amazing,” she says. “It was at that point one of the loudest rock shows I’d ever seen. … The guitars were just — soaring. I had no idea then they’d become such an integral part of my life. But they are without a doubt one of my favorites. I got married in 2012, and walked down the aisle to ‘Return to Hot Chicken.’ I am a fan.”
More than three decades into the band’s career, Yo La Tengo is not only still playing but creatively thriving. The version of YLT that appears on Riot is contemplative, but it’s stretching and bending forms, seeking out the unexpected. It’s the sound of a veteran band’s band living the dream.
“They’re pretty incredible,” says Wagner. “For me, it was a great period of time in Nashville when they ended up spending so much time here, making records here. They really did make this sort of a home for themselves. And I think Nashville remembers that, responds to that, appreciates it.”
