Live Concert Series Pt 13

I Got It, I Got It

Falling down for Yo La Tengo

Standing on a concrete floor challenges people like me who find standing erect, in place, for multiple hours too demanding for an already squawking lower back. This was before yoga helped me re-establish something like core strength. So toward the end of Yo La Tengo’s show at The Orange Peel in Asheville, I slid down to that concrete floor itself, leaning against the far back wall.

The music still sounded fine, and my back cried Mary or some other familiar tune. This was way back in time, almost thirty years ago, and I had driven to the venue with my pal Owen who, in his usual core-be-damned manner, fled me for the midst of the crowd pressing up as close as possible to the stage. I had rather quietly gotten stoned, and since he was driving and got paranoid when smoking anyway, Owen considered my plight and smiled back at me as he lost himself in some other flow.

When listening to Yo La Tengo, it helps if you’ve taken something to quiet down your inner child — something that allows you to drift on, wherever they decide to take you. These were the days when they had just released my still favorite YLT album,

Painful.

I don’t remember exactly at which point in the show they played my favorite cut from that record, “From a Motel 6,” but whenever that was, I felt it, and in many ways, I still do.

“I climb where I can see You are close but I won’t reach Blank stare at the TV CNN’s on channel three”

When I first heard the song, and when they announced it this night, my mind immediately unreeled into the recurring scene of my father traveling. For almost all his working life, he managed a wholesale jewelry store for his first cousin Arnold in downtown Birmingham. He handled customers well, but mainly he stayed in the back, behind the scenes, ensuring that the lines between distributors and customers ran as smoothly as they could. It wasn’t easy because too many shipments got delayed for as many reasons as there are lonely motels out on the highways of your life.

Like Motel 6’s which, though they were supposed to leave certain lights on for you and me, weren’t those calming beacons, those beckoning fixtures that gave me any comfort at all.

For when the business finally closed in the mid-1980’s (another victim of the Wal-Mart-ization of America, though ironically enough, Dad loved the bargains of this empire), Dad had to take to the road, traveling for another jewelry firm, peddling wares like in the old days when Jewish men found the South an excellent place to establish lines of commerce.

“I like to stay in Motel 6's,” he’d tell me. “They’re clean and reasonable and have free cable.”

Hard to argue with these criteria, and when you’re on the road somewhere in rural Mississippi or Alabama, I suppose a stop like that for a night’s rest could be worse. Yet, I didn’t delight to imagine him there, my father, locked in a room, taking his evening meal from a nearby Shoney’s or Quincey’s. I wondered:

“Was this where his life had finally led…trying to scrape up a living talking out-of-the-way jewelry store owners into trying a new line, and then spending the night, surfing cable TV, for a Braves’ game or yet another episode of ‘Hill Street Blues?’”

Were these rooms really $6 a night, and was franchise owner Tom Bodett really a person? And if so, did he really say this:

“The difference between school and life? In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson.”

So what was my Dad’s test? Spending his 60’s on the road? Staying in “one-night cheap hotels?” Waiting for retirement, an eternal winding down?

And what was the lesson? Erect cheap buildings so that desperate loners like my father who after trying to maintain their working dignity could have a place to hole up in after endless days and tell his family about later?

Those are a very many images to pack into a song, and whatever Yo La Tengo meant by it all, like any other artist/collective, once they put a song like this out there, they have no control over what we do with it. In any case, had the place been a Travelodge, we wouldn’t be in this fix. This concert story.

Or rather, I wouldn’t. So many sights unravel during a song, even when you’re sitting on the floor, tired, a little bit hazy or sleepy, and wishing the guy standing right in front of you would quit stepping on your feet.

So I shut my eyes and just listened to all the sounds Yo La Tengo love to make, just for me, it seemed. I’ve never been able to describe their “Sound” accurately to anyone who’s never heard them. So, here is something of what I heard:

We made it home alive after the show, and I say “alive” because the dark drive from Asheville to Greenville along Highway 25 offers some steep declines and fall-off points. Owen’s hand was steady. No roadside attractions, either.

Almost two decades later, after their Fade album was released, I took my wife back to The Orange Peel to see YLT. I had fallen back in love with the band, especially when I heard the first cut of their new record, “Ohm.”

They opened the show with an acoustic version of the song. I closed my eyes:

“Cause this is it for all we know So say goodnight to me And lose no more time, no more time resisting the flow.”

I don’t know if my father would have understood, but I did. I thought of him again in that moment, and then I danced with my wife, who maybe didn’t understand all there was to this song or band, but she’s a firm believer in losing no more time.

Such a funny Buddhist, she is.

We stayed the night in a homey bed and breakfast on the west side of town.

And that’s a good lesson for you, Tom.

Resisting the flow.

Thank you thank you thank you for reading, for following The Riff, and for making words and music matter: Noah Levy, Frank Mastropolo, S.W. Lauden, Harry Male, Keith R. Higgons, Alex Markham, Alexander Briseño, Jessica Lee McMillan, Kathryn Dillon, Sarah Paris, Cherie Jamison, Paul Combs, Rob Janicke, If Ever You’re Listening, MDSHall, Steven Hale, Kevin Alexander, Eddie Becker, Reuben Salsa, David Acaster, JP Timko, Aimée Gramblin, TheWellSeasonedLibrarian, Christopher Robin, Hope Silverman, Mike Marolla, and Brian Lamacraft.

Here’s another in the series in case you missed it: