By John Hamlin
Staff Writer

If you weren’t in the Gray Cage Saturday night , you can call your parents right now and tell them that you’ve wasted 4 years and $150,000. When the Roots opened for Beck in ’97 I had a good time. But last night was…WOW. I haven’t smiled this much since I fell in love. I wandered around like an idiot for about an hour after the show. I even made Ira sign my ticket.

They opened with Autumn Sweater. If the words Yo La Tengo mean anything to you, I can just stop now. At this point I should point out that Ira, James and Georgia are not “rock stars,” they are the kind of people that don’t look cool, that actually seem to know what cool is, and are ready to share it with anyone who will listen to them play. Speaking as someone who got beat up a lot as a kid, it made me glad to see three people I could actually relate to on stage, being so heartbreakingly awesome. How do I know this? Because I was not just offered the opportunity, but asked, to help set up the show. That’s right, we hung out, we listened to the sound check, we even played basketball with them.

If you didn’t go to the show, let me fill in the blanks. Imagine your favorite band. Now forget all about them and imagine something good. SPIN magazine described them as “a Bergman film set in a Hoboken record store: abstract and intimate, sweetly whispering, raging like a distant thunderstorm.” I thought that was great writing until I heard Yo La Tengo in concert and realized it was flat and meaningless. It may be as close as one can come to describing something that embodies it’s own medium so perfectly that it defies explication in any other. It’s like trying to describe a sunset in words. Allmusic.com lists their tone as: “Circular, Intimate, Soothing, Trippy, Playful, Ethereal, Spring-like, Autumnal, Wry, Bittersweet, Hypnotic and Nocturnal.” Their music has an emotional power that makes your favorite “singer songwriter” seem like a phony, and the ass-kicking, rock-your-socks-off power to match any metal band. Yo La Tengo is in possession of three of the most devastatingly comforting voices in all of music. Each and every song is a sugar-coated punch in the soul.

When they played “I Heard You Looking” I shat myself, wept and saw God. Ira was like Bob Dylan possessed by the ghost of Hendrix. Georgia and James’s rhythm section is like the world’s best drum machine with the soul of a wise old man. It’s that perfect, and that human. As raging and powerful as that song was, they never over-did anything. My ears didn’t ring when the show was over, and every time I began to be overwhelmed, they seemed to know, and slowed down to give me time to catch my breath and think about what was happening.

Yo La Tengo plays a lot of covers, and when they do, they turn old songs into something completely new and insane. They took requests from the crowd for their encore, starting with a cage-shaking version of Jackson Browne’s “Somebody’s Baby.” That song has always been kind of a guilty pleasure of mine. They made me realize why I’ve always loved it.

The night ended perfectly with one of their saddest and sweetest songs: “Damage.” They pulled my heart gently from my chest, took it to pieces, kissed them sweetly and sent them on their way. I laughed, I sighed, I jumped up and down and screamed. It’s all downhill from here. Thank you.



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