Yo La Tengo: Indie rock's standard-bearers are still experimenting

Old concert posters and relics line the walls of the 9:30 Club's basement bar in Washington. Dressed in loose jeans and sneakers on a Friday night in December, Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan and James McNew scan the relics, searching for familiar names while reminiscing about the D.C. club's original - much smaller, dingier and rat-infested - location.

Kaplan drifts over to a metal chair under the stairwell and settles in, hands dumped into sweatshirt pockets. In a few hours the band will be upstairs performing a sold-out concert, one of a handful of East Coast shows celebrating the band's 30th anniversary. But right now Kaplan is about to enter his own personal purgatory: a press interview.

Looking at Yo La Tengo's rise from ramshackle Hoboken, New Jersey, cover band to indie-rock standard-bearer, Kaplan insists that this has always been a band without a plan. "We just play and fool around with things until we hear something we like," he says. "We just try to follow our ears, not a concept."

The trio blends the divide between listener and performer with more quiet power than almost any other band in rock, pulling from across eras and genres without sounding allusive. They percolate into your brain, like memories returning. Especially since the 1993 album "Painful" - which Matador Records reissued in a deluxe edition in December, on the 30th anniversary of the band's first gig - Yo La Tengo has condensed its omnivorous impulse into a new stance: The band can play skronking, feedback-fueled, 13-minute songs that are somehow comforting instead of transgressive. And as indie rock has developed over the band's career, the trio has incorporated new streams of thought into its steadily persuasive sound.

"We listen to all different kinds of music," says drummer and vocalist Georgia Hubley, speaking by phone a few days after the concert. "There's so much sound affinity that we share. ... Appreciation of music is at the core of the band."

Even the group's way of writing centers on listening. "I think we've perfected our process, which is basically just to get together, talk about movies or sports or food for about an hour, and eventually start playing, with no goal," McNew says. The band's rehearsals are slow burns through a loose practicum of experimentation, engulfment and response. That is, they're jam sessions.

"Maybe a couple of chords sound good next to each other, or a cool rhythm will come out of nowhere," McNew says. "We'll scramble to turn on a recorder and preserve that moment, and if we like it we'll go back, revisit it and make something out of it."

Kaplan was a music columnist in the late 1970s and early '80s for the small, independent-minded publications SoHo News and New York Rocker. He helped chart alternative rock's rise in the days after punk caught flame. (He wrote liner notes for the occasional album, too.) Then he and Hubley, his girlfriend at the time and now his wife, started Yo La Tengo in their living room, and you can basically track the following 30 years of underground rock history through the sound of this band.

Kaplan, Hubley and McNew have the advantage of historical perspective: Most of rock history has unfolded in their lifetimes. Now 57, Kaplan was 10 when he got his first record, the Rolling Stones' single "Ruby Tuesday." In punk's salad days, he was a college student haunting CBGB and the record shops of the Lower East Side. As a young critic, he chronicled the rise of new wave, as well as no wave, its grittier arch rival.

He and Hubley started Yo La Tengo in 1984 and began releasing albums and EPs with a rotating cast of friends on bass and lead guitar. They toured the East Coast and Midwest and honed original songs that drew from country music's "Bakersfield" sound and brawling post-punk. When McNew joined in 1991, he brought intimacy with funk and jazz phrasing and thick, tactile warmth. Fuller possibilities bloomed.

The next year, Yo La Tengo released its first album with McNew and began recording the music that would become "Painful."

Kaplan remembers "a bunch of improvising and experimenting and switching instruments" at that session. "We could all sense ourselves finding new things to play, new ways to play and new sounds," he says.

They'd just bought an Ace Tone electric organ; together with McNew's ballooning harmonies on the bass, it added a humming, undulating depth. And for the first time the band enlisted a true producer, Roger Moutenot, instead of just asking a musician from a band they liked, as had been the policy. Moutenot pulled Kaplan's and Hubley's naturally hushed voices into the mike without making them pipe up, and Kaplan began to step forward more with dissonant bursts of effects-splotched guitar.

The album also marked the awakening of Hubley's voice, probably the most directly enchanting element of Yo La Tengo in the years since. Until that point she'd sung some, but mostly on tunes that Kaplan wrote. Her feathered, distant alto anchored some of the record's best tunes, especially her own love ballad, "Nowhere Near."

A string of strong albums followed: "Electr-O-Pura," "I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One," "And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out," "Summer Sun." It's "I Can Hear the Heart," from 1997, that goes down as the broad, definitive collection. It has McNew's first recorded lead vocal for the band, the hippie-country stunner "Stockholm Syndrome," and also features "Autumn Sweater," an organ-drums-vocals confessional sung by Kaplan. Like a more matter-of-fact sequel to "Big Day Coming," it suggests the slow give-and-take of his relationship with Hubley maturing.

Yo La Tengo has never stopped playing cover songs, even releasing the occasional album full of them. It keeps the players connected to the liberations of fandom, their feeling of awe inside the music rather than ownership of it.

"It was always a lot easier to play a guitar solo when Georgia or me hadn't written the song and it was written by Arthur Lee - it was like, 'Oh, I can pretend I'm doing this,'" Kaplan says of the band's early affinity for covers. "And that hasn't changed."

"They're always dabbling, and not afraid to experiment," says Mission of Burma bassist Clint Conley, the producer of Yo La Tengo's first album and a Maxwell's Hanukkah veteran. "There's an aspect to them that is kind of shy, but there's this audacity, too - they're playing with jazz people, they're playing with Ray Davies."

Through a connection to Yoko Ono's management, Yo La Tengo became her Plastic Ono Band on a European tour this year. "We played the song 'Mind Train,' which is about a 16-minute jam with a very hypnotic bass part," McNew says. "She said to me, 'Oh, you know, I'm sorry the bass part doesn't have much to do.' I was like: 'Are you kidding me? There's four notes in this bass part - that's three too many in my opinion!' And then I think after that she thought I was crazy. I was very proud."