Yo La Tengo Interview

By Soren A. Gauger

If you were one of the 25-odd people who caught Yo La Tengo (in Spnaish it means I Have Her) at Zulu records for an hour of cozy unplugged bliss, you don’t need me to tell you why this band is great. They are awkward, soothing, sprawling and dissonant all at the same time, borrowing techniques from everyone from the Velvet Underground to the Tall Dwarfs to My Bloody Valentine, and turning it into something distinctly Yo La Tengo. I sat in the back of a van with Ira Hubley the day of the Starfish Room show, and talked about lots of things.

Peak: What is Electr-o-Pura (the title of their new album)?

Ira: It’s a…uh… soda, of some sort. We went to the Museum of Beverage Containers while we were in Nashville, mostly as a joke, to tell people we had been to the MoBC. We thought it would be a funny story. But it ended up being a really cool place, a lot like, uh… I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the library, and just look at old magazines on microfilm. You can enjoy the old layout styles, and the old ads, the typography… just everything. It was like that, only centred on, uh… soda.

Peak: So- a lot of kitsch?

Ira: Kind of, but also… I mean, we expected that, but it was more interesting than that, because it was like this portrait of a time, but seen through this bizarre…

Peak: Medium?

Ira: Yeah, medium. And as we were walking through there, our album was still untitled, and we were starting to think, “Hmmm, these sure are weird names for sodas. And I bet you somewhere in this room is the name for our next album.” And Georgia found this bottle of Electropura, and we still don’t even know what it is. The hyphens were our own editorial comment.

Peak: You can buy Yo La Tengo CDs at HMV now! Does that mean the money is rollin’ right in?

Ira: We’re living off of what we do. I don’t know what HMV is like…

Peak: It’s your basic mall-style record superstore.

Ira: Ah, so HMV doesn’t carry little stuff… um… that doesn’t mean anyone’s buying it! Things are going pretty well for us in Canada. We always seem to… when you said “rolling in,” that was interesting. We do just seem to roll along, just gathering very, very slow momentum. Things are always getting a little better than they were before.

Peak: You’ve been going for about a decade now; do you ever think, “Well, we’ve done this little indie band routine to death, now let’s just make a Pearl Jam-esque, wash-out record, and make lots of dough?”

Ira: I don’t think we would. I think the people who try to do that generally fail. I think the record-buying public know what they like, and when people are trying to pander to them, I think they know it. They want the genuine article, so if we try to sort of “dumb down” for the mass public, I think they’re too smart for that, and would recognize us as fakes. It seems like the bands that do crossover do so really on their own terms, and they just find that their terms just kind of make a big dove-tail with the masses. You know, I don’t think R.E.M. thought “well, y’know, if we could only change this, we’ll be a lot more successful. I think their natural evolution coincided with making them more popular. That’s how it works for bands that I have any respect for.

Peak: Do you get many obsessive freak fans?

Ira: No, well, I don’t know (hedging)…

Peak: The Flaming Lips once had a man cover himself with gas and then set himself on fire because the band wouldn’t let him be a groupie.

Ira: Do you think that’s true? If it is, it’s horrible. There was one guy who sent us these photographs… have you ever seen “Dead Ringers?”

Peak: Yeah.

Ira: Yeah? Okay, it was just like that. He had driven something like 100 miles to see us play live, and somehow, before he got there, a ten-ton truck fell on his legs. Crushed them flat. But he lived, and he sent us these photographs of his prosthetic legs, as an excuse why he couldn’t make our show. There was a very apologetic letter, too.

Peak: Sweet jesus.

Ira: Yeah, he came to see us at one of our last shows.

Peak: Have you made the perfect Yo La Tengo album yet?

Ira: We were worried about that after we made “Painful”, actually. We thought it was the best we were ever going to do, so when we started making the new album, we sort of froze up. I think Electr-o-pura was a fairly natural progression, though.

Peak: Ever toured Europe?

Ira: Oh, many times.

Peak: Are you appreciated over in England?

Ira: No.

Peak: Not at all?

Ira: Ah… slightly. Not very much. France, Spain, and Germany like us– almost everywhere in Europe except for England.

Peak: How do you account for that?

Ira: I really don’t know. I could say something self- serving, but… I think, uh… there are… it seems to me… this will seem self-serving. They respond best to bands that emerge fully-formed, and then get rid of them.

Peak: Like Suede.

Ira: Or even American bands, who I don’t want to name because it’s sort of an insult, but… bands that have everything. That do everything right that they’re ever going to do right from the beginning. And a band like us, where, you know, whether Electr-o-pura is your favorite record by us or not, we’ve unquestionably gotten better … a lot better. I think it’s just a weird band for that culture. Whatever.