Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock by Jesse Jarnow

Author:Jesse Jarnow [Jarnow, Jesse]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101588680
Publisher: Gotham Books
Published: 2012-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

“Boston is kind of a pugnacious place,” Michael Cudahy once said. “It’s really one of the meanest cities in America. I got pummeled all the time, walking down the street. One time, I was at a party where I thought I was safe with my wimpy punk-rock pals, and some drunken guys from Quincy—tripping, thuggy guys—sort of clocked me. I was in the hospital for nearly a month and nearly died. That shit went on pretty often.”

Cudahy affected what he described as a “Jerry Mathers/Don Knotts, least-likely-guy-in-the-crowd-to-have-a-gun” look and followed his “strong belief that unless somebody was bleeding or something was broken it wasn’t a good gig.” Gerard Cosloy loved Christmas, going out of his way to not apologize for writing about them (and Yo La Tengo) too much in Conflict. They briefly hired him as their manager. “He was underage, but he was tenacious,” Cudahy remembered.

By 1988, they were ready to exit Boston and, with unsurprisingly perverse humor, had chosen Las Vegas. Cudahy calculated that it was within commuting distance of Los Angeles, and “the least likely place to live for a rock band.” They’d passed through earlier that year while on tour with Hüsker Dü, and Cudahy marveled at the giant, kitschy suburb in the desert.

The band found a house off Fremont Street, a short walk to the old Strip. Built in the ‘50s, the house was ancient by the standards of Las Vegas’s contemporary expansion. Cudahy drove to the edge of town to look at the “cookie-cutter houses, like the houses in Monopoly. Go another block, and it’d be houses under construction, and then in another block, it’d be desert. If you came back a few months later, it’d be another mile before you hit the desert.” On maps of the city, he noticed streets named for Star Wars characters. Elsewhere in the town, there were the Knights of the Round Table. The city had expanded so fast that it had run out of street names.

With its cheap rent and strange local conditions, Las Vegas seemed like an outsider bet for Hoboken-style gentrification. Cudahy envisioned the potential result as something bizarre and wonderful: boho kitsch. Christmas knew one or two other bands in town. There was one hip record store. They’d connected with psychobilly novelty songwriter the Legendary Stardust Cowboy at a gig in Boston and he visited them occasionally at their house for barbecues and backyard Pictionary.

They rented a space in a vast rehearsal complex to write songs for a long-overdue second album for I.R.S. The band’s neighbors were local heavy metal combos, including one (never encountered in person) who left a drum set with a triple kick drum on the corner. They saw Sammy Davis Jr. perform a few times, but drove to Los Angeles many weekends. Their latest bassist had split in the middle of the year.

They’d been charmed by James’s tales of the Parking Lot in his letters. Earlier in the year, they’d shared a bill with James’s band the Maynards in Charlottesville,

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