Yo La Tengo at Rififi
Invite Them Up with Eugene Mirman and Bobby Tisdale
26 February 2008
no Georgia, Todd Barry on drums
Come On Up (The Young Rascals) (download)
Mr. Tough
Big Day Coming (fast)
Bobby's Girl (Lesley Gore) (download)
"Ripple" - Yo La Tengo (download)
recorded 19 October 2007, Landmark on Main Street, Port Washington, NY
(file expires October 29th)
Yo La Tengo at Landmark on Main Street
Port Washington, NY
19 October 2007
Chris Brokaw opened.
The Landmark being (as we discovered) across the street from Finn MacCool's, the watering hole of choice for the 1986 Mets, many of who resided in Port Washington, we naturally had to toast Danny Heep en route to the show. Via Jeff Pearlman's The Bad Guys Won:
Strawberry did much of his damage at Finn MacCool's, a tavern in Port Washington where many of the Mets hung out. One night Henry Downing, the bar's manager, concocted a drink for the Mets that he named The Nervous Breakdown. It was a potent combination of vodka, cranberry juice, tequila, and schanpps, and the twelve Mets sitting around the table eagerly devoured pitcher after pitchers. Among the participants were Ojeda, Mitchell, Dykstra, and Backman -- guys who could hold their own. Yet the one who drank the most was Strawberry. 'I remember he really took to that,' says Connie O'Reilly, MacCool's owner. 'I guess he liked the taste.' ... 'The next afternoon we were watching the game from the bar, and the broadcaster said Darryl wasn't playing,' O'Reilly says. 'They showed him sitting on tbe bench... something about a twenty-four-hour virus.'
Tom Courtenay
Beanbag Chair
Let's Save Tony Orlando's House
Fog Over Frisco
Mr. Tough
Ripple (Grateful Dead)
Surfin' With the Shah (The Urinals)
Cone of Silence
Sloop John B (trad/Beach Boys)
Black Flowers
Luci Baines (Arthur Lee)
Decora
I Found A Reason (Velvet Underground)
Oklahoma USA (The Kinks)
Story of Yo La Tango
Detouring America With Horns
Speeding Motocycle (Daniel Johnston)
You Can Have It All (George McCrea)
*(encore, with Chris Brokaw on guitar)*
A House Is Not A Motel (Arthur Lee)
Tell Me When It's Over (Dream Syndicate)
I Feel Like Going Home
"Autumn Sweater" - Yo La Tengo (download)
"This Man He Cries Tonight"- Yo La Tengo (download)
recorded 6 October 2007, Brooklyn Lyceum, Brooklyn, NY
(files expire October 15th)
Yo La Tengo at Brooklyn Lyceum
6 October 2007
New Yorker festival
between song Q&As moderated by Ben Greenman
The Cone of Silence
Stockholm Syndrome
Story of Yo La Tango
Magnet (NRBQ)
Madeleine
Autumn Sweater
I Heard You Looking
Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind
This Man He Cries Tonight (The Kinks) (live debut)
Sugarcube
"In the Craters of the Moon" - The Mountain Goats
"Autoclave" - The Mountain Goats
recorded 2 October 2007, Studio B, Brooklyn, NY
[Downloads removed at the polite request of JD.]
Mostly, this was an experiment to see how long it would take to record a show with the aforementioned iTalk, up it to my computer, and extract a few segments, as well as to see how much juice it would take, both in terms of power and memory. The answers: with laughable ease and laughably little.
So, here are two new Mountain Goats songs, performed this evening at Studio B in Brooklyn, a dance club a few blocks from the kielbasa parlors and bright-eyed/enchanting Polish girls of Greenpoint. The frame and drama are pure Mountain Goats, as hard-boiled and stylized as Bukowski or the Coen brothers. Some lines, especially on "In the Craters of the Moon," feel like stock John Darnielle: "I think I'm gonna crack, I can't live like this any more." Others are perfect and inventive: "We swim in the dark until our bodies are numb, clandestine (?) rats in the moonlight, too far from the shore."
Differentiating good & bad lines seems a tad silly, though, especially at this stage of the game. Darnielle found his voice a long time ago, and he's sticking to it. They're new songs. If you like the Mountain Goats, you'll probably dig 'em. (An autoclave, as Darnielle pointed out, is a device built to sterilize medical instruments and kill all lifeforms, except -- as recently discovered -- one particular type found at the bottom of the ocean, near volcanic seabeds, which not only survives the process, but multiplies.)