Yo La Tengo

“People here seem… happier,” my friend stage-whispers as we exit the Hoboken PATH station on a warm early-December evening, a jaded Brooklynite’s pause in her voice. It might be true. The cheapness of everything certainly helps. The cabs are communal, and a ride to Maxwell’s is a flat $4 fee. The bar eats are yummy as hell. And they have a coat rack! Not a coat check, but a rack—like we’re decent human beings who can trust each other with our jackets.

The club proper, down a small hallway and through surprisingly noise-resilient doors, is—as David Byrne once said about something else entirely—a multi-purpose shape: a box. There, a pair of shy record collectors (and future husband and wife) first performed in December 1984. And there Yo La Tengo—so dubbed from an anecdote about the bumbling 1962 New York Mets—celebrates its 20th birthday with customary unassuming brilliance.

Over the eight nights of Hanukkah (a semi-annual YLT tradition), all benefit shows, they play 134 different songs, supplementing deep trawls through their 12-LP/umpteen-EP catalog with covers of 50-plus artists (from The Rutles to Sun Ra to Hank Williams). They welcome friends old and new, from Bright Eyes frontman Conor Oberst stumbling through “Like a Rolling Stone” to a chorus of the band members’ nieces and nephews chanting “Nuclear war! It’s a motherfucker!” There are stand-up comedians. And there are squalling guitars and the quietest three-part harmonies known to indie pop.

While nothing beats a pilgrimage to the Jerseyian other-world to catch YLT in its natural habitat, Prisoners of Love, Matador’s two-CD “smattering of senescent songs” (plus an all-important rarities disc) does just fine. As an entrance to Yo La Tengo’s formidable catalogue, it’s logical and listenable. As a document of their marginalia, there are small delights galore. As a Yo La Tengo release, it’s just another album.

“[Maxwell’s] was why we picked Hoboken over Brooklyn or Queens,” guitarist Ira Kaplan noted recently. Already a couple, he and drummer Georgia Hubley crossed the river for good around 1981. “We needed a less un-affordable place to move to [from Manhattan], and picked a place where we could walk to something we could do that night. At the time, people in Brooklyn had to go to Manhattan [to see shows.]”

Soon, between Hubley’s animation and Kaplan’s rock-crit gigs—his first job was writing for the Soho Weekly News, and later for New York Rocker—the two were working at the venue, Hubley DJ-ing, Kaplan mixing sound and occasionally booking talent. “I know what we played,” Kaplan recalls of the first show. “But mostly I remember just being com- pletely petrified. The first song was ‘Surfin’ With The Shah’ by the Urinals, and the second song we did was a very embryonic version of what we ultimately called ‘Five-Cornered Drone’ [released on 1992’s May I Sing With Me].

“When I opened my mouth to sing, nothing came out. That I remember vividly. We did two sets. By the second set, I was less petrified. I learned very quickly that the notion that it’d be easier to play for your friends than for strangers was 100 percent incorrect.”

While stage fright at a first gig is perfectly normal, consider that this shyness permeated nearly everything about YLT’s early years. Where much rock ’n’ roll is peacockery—lonesome geekboys flaunting for potential mates by shredding in tight trousers—Hubley and Kaplan were together from the start, which possibly explains that initial lack of flare.

Yo La Tengo’s early albums—cocktails of garage-y guitar blasts and folksy sweetness—seem unimpressive at first, as they might’ve in the heady days of the still-jangly R.E.M. and the up-against-the-wall psychedelics of Sonic Youth. If you missed YLT, you’d be forgiven. They didn’t announce themselves with smoke machines or music videos. (Kaplan did once sing, “I try my best to hide in crowded rooms.”) And they couldn’t hold down a lineup either, bassists coming and going from EP to album to tour.