Phthursday Musings: Yo lo he perdido

Saturday night, I had the great pleasure of seeing Yo La Tengo. During the show, the thought occurred to me that it was the best rock show I’d seen in at least a decade. It was a truly uplifting experience.

The next day, it felt utterly distant.

What gives!

I first saw them eons ago, May 1997, when the opening bands were Lambchop and Magnetic Fields. Can you even imagine a tour like that today?

We got back to Bloomington from Chicago at like 4:30 in the morning. The sun was just beginning to appear. And it didn’t matter. The show was magnificent, utterly elating. This would have been on the tour for I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, which is still my favorite.

Inexplicably I kept missing them for years. I didn’t see them again until 2009 at Pitchfork, which was simply the wrong setting for a band like that. The sound wasn’t right, I was too far away. But I saw them in Vermont in 2018, and of course they were terrific, and then this time around… as good as anything in recent memory.

What struck me this time around is how, in their very essence, they are the Velvet Underground of our generation, if the Velvets were only, you know, fun.

They did a particularly rousing version of “Ohm”:

Another observation I had was how about half of the set, my wife would have thoroughly enjoyed… and the other half would have thoroughly freaked her out. (This mixture, incidentally, is just about right for everything in the world.)

This is the sort of thing she might enjoy:

Their cover of the Circle Jerks’ “Live Fast Die Young”? Probably not.

Concerts used to have more of a carryover effect though. More of a residual glow. Especially when this good!

This time around though, I got home a little later than expected, ran into Daylight Savings, got up early so we could all get to the gym, and… the show totally out of mind.

Back in college if I’d see a show, there would be build up and then reinforcement. Since I was on the radio at least weekly, I’d be playing bands I was going to see, and then playing bands I’d just seen. The show therefore had more of a duration to it.

And I guess you could argue that just by writing about it here I’m instilling a duration? Maybe this is part of the point of this entire exercise, why even on a night like tonight when I was damn near ready to just go to sleep at 7:45, I make a point of seeing it through, seeing where it all will go.

I don’t like the fleeting feeling though. And I’m not sure I can associate it with being older. I feel like it’s at least as much just the heaviness of every day. About the only way I can find to truly slow down is to take a book to bed and read. And I’ve been doing more of that - 15 books so far this year, after 16 all of last year! - but here too it’s like, I finish a book, I move on. Unless I happen to bring it up here, most of the books register hardly a mention even to my wife, let alone to anyone else, and it’s not because they’re not interesting. Well, mostly. Maybe.

Lately I’ve been getting to a point in time, often early Thursday afternoon, where it just feels like my brain has filled up for the week, like I need to clear my thoughts completely before I can get back to anything.

My dad used to get home from work and find time to sit down and listen to a record and that was it. I can’t remember the last time I did only that. I’m always doing at least something else. It didn’t used to be like this! It used to be that at the most I was only also sort of fiddling around online. I remember times in college when I’d load up my roommate’s five-disc CD changer and have music going for 4 hours, then swap the discs out and start it all over again. (Eli, where were you all those times I did that?)

Alas, while writing this, even, my boy walked into the room, saw I had the NCAA tournament on, saw I had a Yo La Tengo video on my second monitor, saw I had something else going on on my main screen, and seemed baffled and asked me how I was doing all of this, and I hadn’t even thought I was doing much at all, except of course I was also checking the phone whenever a notification popped up? I suppose he had a point…

So, anyway, here are a couple more things for you and me both (all?) to pay attention to:

The original video for “Tom Courtenay”, which was almost certainly the first Yo La Tengo song I ever heard, probably via the video:

For some reason, a 15 minute discussion about the video:

Yes, James McNew is ver ver much in the Jerry Garcia vibe these days.

Here’s Lucy Dacus covering “Tom Courtenay”:

Also she wrote a short essay about Electr-o-Pura, the album having come out on the day she was born!

A live version of “Stockholm Syndrome”, which was one of Saturday’s highlights:

And a cover of the song by a then 8 year old Taiwanese ukulele player Feng E which really must be seen:

My kid should have been in the room when I found the above!

A lot of these Thursday nights play out kind of like this though. Whatever my mind was on, it winds up on wacky things, like finding Taiwanese child ukulele videos.

Maybe I have lost it.

But, maybe, still, I have got it.