My Wife Loves Me, Hates Yo La Tengo

Growing up in the middle of nowhere, I never got to see the bands I loved. I lived in a flyover state, and NYC or LA seemed to always get the good bands; of course, having no expendable cash and a VW Beetle of dubious reliability put a realistic hamper on driving for days to see R.E.M. I resigned myself to never really seeing bands live.

Fast forward approximately 20 years until 2006. I'm divorced and remarried, living on the East Coast. I had discovered Yo La Tengo through a college friend of mine who was a DJ on the campus radio station years ago, and continued to create mix cds to trade. One one of his mixes led off with Low then went into "The Last Days of Disco" off of "And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out." I quickly acquired everything I could get my hands on; I had finally found a band that made me feel 16 again, especially the extended songs with Jesus & Mary Chain meets Neil Young through record store geek glasses. "Blue Line Swinger" became a favorite, with each part of the band seemingly off in their own world until it slowly coalesces and takes off.

When I met my wife, one of the things that was a prerequisite for me was that she had to understand and appreciate music, especially my type of music. She does, up to a point, but one of the first mixes I made for her was one that ended with "Blue Line Swinger." Of course I asked her opinion of the disc later, and she reluctantly admitted she always ended the cd when it was time for "Swinger."

I came home from work one day and she surprised me: 2 tickets to Yo La Tengo at the 9:30 Club in DC. After waiting forever for the day, we drove to DC and somehow managed to find parking. After listening to Why? open up (my wife liked them) YLT took the stage. She managed to make it through a few songs until they started the out-of-sync beginnings of "Swinger." She looked at me and said "That's it, I'm going downstairs." She remained there for the rest of the concert, eventually pulling me out of the venue during the second encore. On the walk to the car she said that she was so bored that she read the free gay weekly publications and thought that YLT sounded like monkeys banging on cans. She calls YLT "monkey bang" even now. To me, though, every time I hear the beginnings of "Swinger" I can recall standing there in the crowd, realizing that I was finally hearing one of my favorite bands rip into a song that I love. The moment when everything locks into sync and the song just goes...damn.