posted Nov 18, 04:39 PM by
Rick Webb
File under:
Hit the Road ,
So me and some friends hit Yo La Tengo at Mass Moca a week or so ago…..
Judi and I got up earliesh and headed to the Miracle for breakfast, along with dropping off my suit, finally, for dry cleaning. Came home, made a 5 CD mix and then hopped in a zipcar to drive to North Adams, which was a BEAUTIFUL drive. Yay fall foliage! I was worried I’d missed it. We were also slightly chagrinned because we realized just before we left that the Mass Moca was only open till five. It was our plan to check it out before the show, but we were not not sure we’d make it. But all worked out when a) we realized the drive was only going to take two hours or so and not three and a half, and b) when we got there and they had let the museum stay open between five and seven because of the show that night, so that worked out really well. The Mass Moca was really impressive – just huge galleries and awesome, monolithic work. The main room was pretty empty as they had just given it to Jenny Holtzer to make it an open studio for a few months before the exhibit. She was there though, and we saw her, at least so says our friend Brandon, who had arrived by separate car with and . There was also an exhibit featuring the work of Genesis P-Orridge and Lade Jaye Breyer and their ongoing art project of trying to look more like each other through surgical procedures, etc. It was sad because I remembered that Lady Jaye had died just a few weeks ago. That made it all the more sad and though I’ve known of their project for a long time, and, of course, been a follower of Genesis’s work since the throbbing gristle days, I hadn’t really stopped to consider how sad this was for him, and how totally lost he may now feel. Dude’s like 57 as well. That’s kind of painful. I also thought it interesting that the exhibit had no mention of the fact that one of the artists had died since they had put it up. I wonder if they even know. They must, right? Anyway, then we hit an awesome local North Adams bar for a beer – $1.50 for a pint of PBR how awesome is that? And then we went back to the Mass Moca, or at least to this restaurant right next to it called Cafe Latino which was astonishingly, wonderfully good. Or maybe I was just biased because I was in North Adams. I don’t know. But they were super polite, and everything I had was awesome – the calimari was perfectly, lightly flash fried. The farmer’s queso fresco was perfect. The Chorizo? Awesome. It ruled. Anyway there were like 12 of us for dinner and they were so nice to us, and we sat at the table next to Yo La Tengo so that was funny. Then we went to the show. The theater at the Mass Moca is like a huge, goth gynmasium – all black like a theater but with these weird portable bleachers like a gym. Held about 1,000 people. We got plum seats. Dredd Foole was pretty entertaining in his weirdness. He’s a friend of my sister’s and I had texted her asking if he was good these days, and she pretty much nailed it : “Dan is like therapy – it’s useful and good but you have to want it to be, if you know what i mean.” And, yeah, that’s it. He has a good voice, but he’s doing a lot of weird freakout warbling that sounds like a tone deaf kid imitating Mariah Carey, and yeah, if you’re aware of music you can tell it’s good, or that he’s doing something specific with it, but that was lost on a lot of the kids there, and I can’t help but wonder if the fact that it’s lost on easily 80% of the audience is maybe enough of a reason to not pursue that specific form of artistic exploration, though maybe that’s a bit too populist of me. Anyway, in a different setting I could have gotten behind him more. Yo La Tengo were awesome. It was a “Q&A style” show, where they elicit questions from the audience and answer them, and spontaneously play songs that were related to what the audience had asked. It was a wonderful show, and the banter was pretty genius, but they really, clearly, had no interest in actually answering real questions, though they did admit that up front. So it kind of degraded into a funny sort of game like jeopardy where people would request songs in the form of questions like “georgia will you let us into your little corner of the world” or “what does an american band sound like?” They were pretty accommodating with the requests, though, playing pretty much anything anyone wanted to hear except for the Hot Chicken song, which they said they never played. They also kept starting stories and not finishing them: “there are some songs we’ve never played for artistic reasons” (like what? why?) and “wasn’t that the night we almost got banned from CBGBs?” (why??). The funniest thing was some guy was requesting a song over and over and halfway through the show Ira said “every time you request that it makes it that much less likely that we’ll play it.” Then at the end of the show he was like “I sorta made a deal with this guy that if he stopped requesting a song we’d play it, and he did so we’ll play it” and it turned out the guy had left! ha! “even better!” Ira said, and they played it. Musically, they were fuckin’ genius. No keyboards, no frippery, but man, did they nail it. Completely reworked a bunch of songs – autumn sweater, in particularly, was almost unrecognizable – but they’re just so good. You forget how gorgeous Georgia’s voice is and really what an amazing guitar player Ira is. YES. So Judi and I booked it out of there as they finished and hoped to make it home in time to hit the model for last call or something but in the end we got home at 1:40, just late enough to not make anything. Pooh.
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