Wednesday, December 05, 2007

We're missing out on Yo La Tengo's Hanukkah shows this year, but Ira Kaplan is keeping a diary

and Versus opened (reunited?) for the first show....

3 comments:

5 Red Pandas said...

I had a ticket for the versus ylt show but had to opt out because I had two final papers due this week. My sister went instead and by all accounts it was a great show.

I don't like versus so I wasn't too disappointed to miss them, but I'm still upset that I missed the clean 5 times in the span of a week. That really burns me up.

*Sigh* I better get some goddamn A's in these classes!

Anonymous said...

Not only did Versus open, but Mark Arm from Mudhoney joined Yo La Tengo for the encore. They played (he sang) four songs written by Jewish songwriters - "What's My Name" by the Clash (co-written by Keith Levene), "Animalistic" by Vom, "Operation" by the Circle Jerks, and "Cabaret" by Kander and Ebb. Yes, it was a blast. It also seemed like Arm had more "professional" stage presence than the three members of Yo La combined. (Not a criticism, mind you - just an amusing observation).

blucarbnpinwheel said...

So the guests for these YLTshows are pretty great. I saw that Jim James guested in the encore last night.

I was entirely satisfied by the "Freewheeling" YLT show we saw a few weeks ago, but it's still frustrating to miss out this year. Although some of the Hanukkah shows I've seen in the past (with Other Dimensions in Music and Sun Ra Arkestra augmenting YLT) have been somewhat less than wonderful. I think they'd be fun shows to play ( and I enjoyed the separate sets OK) but those kind of shows can be a bit much in places.

I don't fully understand the venues the clean were playing....there are ample small but not tiny venues around here. All I can think was that they didn't want to deal with any real expectations?