Music Arcades: Yo La Tengo: And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out

Tim and I went to the Leadmill to see Yo La Tengo for the first time, early May 2000, around the release of this album. At that time, all I could remember having heard of theirs was a gorgeous cover of Bob's It Takes a Lot to Laugh… that John Peel played. I've never been able to find that version before, but today Google + persistence = dodgy download). One of the first tracks I ever downloaded, dodgy or otherwise, was a live recording of YLT's Night Falls on Hoboken. iTunes thinks it's 1 hr 39 mins long (a 22.8 MB file at a crappy 32 kbps sampling rate): that can't be true can it? The song never plays for 99 minutes; it stops suddenly after 20 minutes. But if you drag the little diamond further along the track, there is still music there, but I think it might be the same music that's in the first 20 minutes. Weird. Either the file is corrupted, the metadata is incorrect, or iTunes just takes exception to it for some reason.

Stay with me here. Night Falls on Hoboken is the last track on And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out. Just a 17 minute version. It's also the track they opened with that night at the Leadmill, Ira playing acoustic throughout as I remember. Quite a brave way to start a show — they had an Arts Council grant for the tour, so maybe they felt obliged to be brave (I'm kidding) — but Tim still talks of that song as his favourite moment, the one that turned him into a smalltime fan.

I'd love to see a setlist for that show. The only other thing I can remember from it is the crowd-pleaser, You Can Have it All, Ira and James doing hand-jives and turns, O'Jays-style. I got a t-shirt as a memento. On the front it says "Yo La Tengo" with picture of a large piece of agricultural machinery. On the inside of the back it say "And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out" — so you have to wear it inside out, with the label showing, if you want your friends to be able to read that. They laugh at you: "Haven't you noticed you're wearing that inside out", then you point to the legend on the back and they genuflect at your awesome indieness. Or something.

Wikipedia fills us in with the factlet that the album's title comes from a Sun Ra quote. Awesome interstellar jazzness.

I copied this album onto mini-disc and used it to soundtrack many a wander up and down Psalter Lane. But, as with Summer Sun, the majority of the songs do not give themselves up easily to casual listening. One of Tim's favourites is/was The Crying of Lot G (almost certainly connected with what was going on in his life at the time), and he told me all the things about it that moved him, things that I had just not tuned into at all. I love it when friends do that.

Actually, I love this album. And I love the cover, too — almost worth buying a vinyl copy, so I could hang it on my wall, except that it's £60 on Amazon for a second-hand one. My one reservation, though, is that it's double-album length — over an hour and a quarter — and it suffers from that same shapelessness that I've been complaining of in Neil Young's overlong albums of the last couple of decades.