Yo La Tengo | June 21 | Englert | $25 | 7:00 p.m.
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If any given band is lucky enough to last for a full quarter century, and release a dozen studio albums, you might expect them to bring a little baggage along when they come to your town. For Yo La Tengo, that baggage travels in the form of multiple side projects, at least one of which will be on display when they arrive at the Englert Theatre on June 21. Will you be treated to a set of Yo La Tengo songs that start with the letter S? Or perhaps the melodic tunes of bassist James McNew’s side project, Dump? One lucky fan will be plucked from the audience to spin a wheel, and from there on, the first half of the show is in the hands of Fortuna.
I recently spoke with long-time Yo La Tengo bass player James McNew, and he said the Spinning Wheel shows sprang from the band’s desire to open for themselves under the guise of their garage-rock alter egos, Condo Fucks. The first album of that project–Fuckbook–was released in early 2009 to much critical acclaim. When the band began planning their current tour, McNew said the band realized that, because of the diversity of their discography, they “had a lot of options as far as different ways that the band could present itself.” Rather than just picking one persona and sticking with it, he said they “just decided to be prepared for all of them.” Thus the Spinning Wheel was born and categories were selected that divide up Yo La Tengo into its many forms. The options include, but are not limited to; The Freewheeling Yo La Tengo, which is a kind of acoustic Q&A session; The Sounds of Science (Parts 1 & 2), which is instrumental music composed by the band to accompany the films of French surrealist Jean Painlevé; and Dump, McNew’s rarely performed side project.
An unexplained category on the Wheel is “Sitcom Theater,” which has the band perform–live on-stage–the entire script of a popular television show. One night in Chicago they performed the famous “Chinese Restaurant” episode of Seinfeld and, on another night, in Los Angeles, they performed an episode of Spongebob Squarepants, with McNew in the titular role, which he said is a character he’s “pretty close to.” McNew assured me in our interview that the band is traveling with a secret stash of sitcom scripts, ready for a reading at a moment’s notice.
All sitcoms aside, McNew said the Wheel shows have been good for the band because it has allowed them to perform material that is not part of their regular show. Within the categories of Songs Starting With S and Name Game–in which they perform only songs that include a person’s name in the title–Yo La Tengo reach deep into a catalogue of over 200 original compositions. During a two-night stand at Brooklyn’s Bell House earlier this spring, McNew said, “We played one song we hadn’t played in 16 years and another song we hadn’t played in eight years.” They’ve been allowed to revisit songs that might otherwise get lost in such a large catalogue. He said they are enjoying the challenges of recalling distant tunes, no matter how well they are (or are not) prepared: “That on any given night you could, after the spin of a wheel, put on any one of a dozen different shows, that you’re kind of prepared for, but not really, it’s exhilarating.”
Exhilarating sure, but Fate is notoriously fickle and when the Wheel makes her choice, even if it is the same choice night after night, there is no turning back, much to the frustration of band members. “The idea of playing the same thing…two nights in a row, is maddening. We’ve never done that before. We’ve never ever played the same set two nights in a row,” said McNew. When I asked him about the specific categories the Wheel had landed on in recent shows, he was quick to point out that it has never once landed on Condo Fucks, much to the chagrin of the band members. As a result, they have been tossing a few of those songs into the encore of the performance, mainly “out of frustration.”
If the prospect of facing randomness is too much to bear for the average fan, fear not, for after the first 45-minute set, plain-old amazing Yo La Tengo will come back out onto the stage for a second half and perform songs of their own choosing. In recent shows they’ve been drawing material from a wide swath of their recorded history. There are sure to be many screeching guitars as well as the beautiful, quiet moments we have come to expect from these indie-rock stalwarts. It is not in question that it will be a good show; the question is what kind of show will it be?
When I asked McNew if the band had ever considered a veto of fate, he had only this to say: “You live by the Wheel, you die by the Wheel. We have to do what it says.”
