Tengo in the night

Although, sadly, it won’t be making the trip to Dublin for Forbidden Fruit, Hoboken indie rock veterans Yo La Tengo have of late been utilising a ‘wheel of fortune’ at their gigs. The wheel features numerous options and after giving it a spin, the group commit to whichever choice it lands on. Intriguingly, one option is ‘sitcom theatre’ and its selection resulted in the band recently starting one of their gigs by – wait for it – performing an episode of Seinfeld in its entirety.

“We’ve done it twice so far; we did Seinfeld once and the other time it was Spongebob Squarepants,” explains Yo La Tengo frontman Ira Kaplan, who has an engagingly wry sense of humour. “Really, the snippet of Seinfeld that’s available on YouTube can’t convey the enormity of it, because it’s the entire episode. We did the episode where they’re waiting for the Chinese restaurant. It was particularly suited to our needs because Kramer’s not in that episode, so the three principals were the three band members.
“In terms of whether or not it went over well, when it started the audience were laughing quite a bit at the idea of it, even laughing at some of the jokes. By the end the response had really kind of turned in a different way, but considering who I’m talking to right now, when an audience was gobbing in the ‘70s, was that really a sign of dissatisfaction, or was that participating in the show in a way that struck them as appropriate? So the fact that people may have been chanting en masse, ‘Music! Music! Music!’ – I’m not 100% sure that connoted lack of enjoyment. It may just have been their way of expressing enjoyment!”
How did the performance of Spongebob Squarepants go?
“For one thing, the fact that it was half as long didn’t give the audience enough time to get organised against us,” replies Ira. “And then perhaps, James (McNair’s) amazing portrayal of Spongebob kept the hecklers at bay for a few minutes, so we got away with it.”
So if we won’t be getting sitcom theatre in Dublin, what can we expect? A “career-spanning retrospective” as they say?
“Yeah, I think so,” affirms Ira. “I haven’t looked yet, but I’d assume our set is about an hour. Given the length of some of our songs, that would give time for about three or four. One of the things about these shows is that we’re learning old songs of ours that we’ve rarely played or never played, so we’ve been rehearsing unusually intensely for these shows. But it’s fun.”
Intriguingly, there is a further sitcom link for Yo La Tengo, whose performance at the wedding reception of Simpsons writer Donnick Cary (once upon a time, they even played an Xmas party for renowned photographer Annie Leibowitz) eventually led to them playing the theme song on an episode of the show.
“One of the things that was interesting was that they asked us how long it would take,” recalls Ira. “We were like, ‘We don’t know – we don’t work that way!’ Also, they weren’t expecting that we were going to mix it ourselves, cos that’s part of the creative process for us. So, we had a limited amount of time to get everything done. If you’ve seen the episode, it ends with Dan Castellanetta as Homer tunelessly singing ‘Uptown Girl’ over our version of the theme song. They were recording that at the same time, and we got to see Dan Castellanetta singing, and the various writers throwing out suggestions.
“So we were on the one hand able to get a first-hand glimpse of the creative process on the show, which was super exciting, but it was also eating into the time limit we had for recording the song, so it was a bit bad.”
Yo La Tengo’s brilliant mix of noise-rock and avant-pop has made them the archetypal critics’ band (and indeed Kaplan himself is a former rock critic), a fact which once prompted The Onion to run an hilarious piece with the headline ‘37 Record Store Clerks Feared Dead In Yo La Tengo Concert Disaster’.
“They subsequently asked us to play their Christmas concert,” remembers Ira. “And we said ‘yes’, but only if we could recreate the story. So we had this fake rigging which collapsed on top of us at the end of the set, then we came back in angel costumes and did one more song. We also had the comedian David Cross on hand to narrate what was happening, and he yelled, ‘The humanity, the humanity!’ à la the Hindenburg Zeppelin disaster. So that made everything clear!”

Yo La Tengo play Forbidden Fruit in the Royal Hospital Kilkmainham on June 4. See the hotpress.com archive for more Yo La Tengo interviews.