When NYC music journalist and WFMU deejay Jesse Jarnow decided to write a biography of Yo La Tengo, he knew that his book would have to encompass more than just the lives of three relatively ordinary people who happened to form one of the country’s longest-lived indie-rock bands. He just didn’t realize how much more.
As it turns out, “Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo & The Rise of Indie Rock” – published on June 5 by Gotham Books – is really as much about Yo La Tengo’s adopted hometown of Hoboken as it is about the band itself.
“I knew when I started the book that it wasn’t just going to be a biography of Yo La Tengo, it was going to be a story that was much bigger than just this one band,” Jarnow explains. “But I didn’t realize how much bigger it was. I knew that Maxwell’s would be part of it, I knew that Matador Records would be part of the story, I knew that WFMU’s history would be part of it. But I really didn’t realize how deep those stories went, and how all the lives of these various characters intermingled over the years."
"For instance," he continues, "I knew Gerard Cosloy was this sort of mythical figure who started Matador Records, but I didn’t really realize his role as a teenage fanzine editor or the fact that he had always been this huge Yo La Tengo fan and had been at their early shows. I knew that (original Maxwell’s owner) Steve Fallon would be part of the story, but I didn’t realize the full extent of his role in the early indie rock scene, and how he touched the early careers of bands like R.E.M. and Husker Du. And I definitely didn’t have the sense of what Maxwell’s was, and how incredibly important it’s been to indie music over the last 30 years.”
Jarnow grew up in nearby Northport, Long Island – “the town where Jack Kerouac drank away some of his final years,” he notes wryly –but had relatives in Brooklyn, and started traveling into New York City to see bands as soon as we was old enough to ride the train by himself. “It helped that my grandma for a while lived right near St. Mark’s Place in the East Village,” he notes. “So I’d go into the city, see a show, crash on her couch, get a little grandma time in the morning, and then go back home. It was sweet.”
Jarnow is sure he’d discovered Maxwell’s at some point in high school but didn’t really become a regular until after he moved back to New York City after college, which he attended in Ohio. “By the time I started going there all the time, it was the Nineties, after Steve Fallon had sold the club and the new owner had tried to turn it into a brew pub,” he recalls. “It’s funny, I can’t remember the name of the band I saw the first time I went to Maxwell’s, but I definitely remember them eating dinner at the table right next to ours before the show, and I just thought that was the coolest thing ever.”
Since the story of Yo La Tengo is inextricably intertwined with the city of Hoboken, Jarnow begins the book by looking back at the city’s past, including the fascinating story of how professional baseball was born on Elysian Field, which today is the corner of Washington and Eleventh Streets and the home of Maxwell’s.
“When I started researching the history of Hoboken, I figured there’d be a wealth of information about the early days of baseball,” Jarnow says. Not true, as it turned out. “There is one book that came out last year called ‘Baseball In The Garden of Eden,’ which is all about the origins of baseball, and there’s a lot of Elysian Fields history in there. But really, a lot of that stuff just isn’t documented. I went to the New York Public Library and went through their old newspaper archives, just looking for articles. For the stuff about Maxwell’s itself, I went to the Hall of Records in Jersey City and just looked at the property records and tried to figure out who owned the property at 1039 Washington Street over the years. I lucked out when I went to the property records department in Hoboken, and the guy working in City Hall was an old-timer who had gone to Maxwell’s in the Fifties and Sixties. It was his neighborhood hangout and he had a lot of stories about going to weddings and communions there. Then through the Hoboken Historical Society, I met someone who actually worked at the old Maxwell’s coffee plant. I even wound up ordering old fire maps to find out when the original bar that stood on Elysian Fields was torn down. As it turns out, there are only three pages in the book that covers that era of early Hoboken, but I probably got more obsessive about that part of the story than anything else.”
“To me, there are so many parallels between the early days of baseball and what happened decades later with the birth of the Do It Yourself indie-rock movement in Hoboken,” Jarnow notes. “I don’t think I could have told one story without going back and telling the other.”
The book skips over a good chunk of Hoboken history, from the turn of the 20th Century to the beginnings of the punk movement in the late Seventies, when writers from New York Rocker magazine (where Ira Kaplan worked) and a few brave musicians first started migrating to the Mile Square City.
“That part, in the first draft, was actually much longer than what finally appears in the book,” Jarnow notes. “There was a whole part about the period between baseball and the Seventies that I had to leave out. For instance, during World War I, the whole waterfront had to be shut down because there were a bunch of German-owned shipping companies on the piers. That was the first time that Hoboken became really economically depressed. Hoboken knew very hard times long before the Depression really started.”
Jarnow details the family histories of Yo La Tengo's two founding members, Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, especially Georgia's parents' remarkable career as Oscar-winning independent filmmakers. Georgia's father, while working for major studios and later in advertising as a young man, helped invent both the character of Mr. Magoo and the "I want my Maypo!" campaign that revolutionized television advertising in the Sixties, before abandoning the commercial world for independent filmmaking.
Things really get interesting at a seminal point in history, when New York Rocker editor Glenn Morrow finds a dirt-cheap two bedroom apartment on Hudson Street, and then asks the new owners of the bar around the corner if his band can play there.
Jarnow delves deeply into the history of Maxwell’s – how the Fallon family bought it as a restaurant, its metamorphosis into one of the most prestigious rock clubs in the country, and the various changes of ownership through the years. And of course he chronicles how Yo La Tengo used Maxwell’s as a home base, from an early residency where the band first honed its chops to its annual Eights Nights of Chanukah charity blowouts.
But even as Jarnow chronicles the story of how small rock clubs, fanzines, college radio, and independent record labels helped forge American indie rock, he also delves deeply into the story of Yo La Tengo – of how Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley met at a show, fell in love, discovered Hoboken, and played in cover bands with their musician friends at parties, until they decided to take the leap and start performing themselves. Jarnow takes us through the band's history with painstaking detail, from the revolving cast of musicians who passed through the group in its early years to eventually finding bassist-for-life James McNew. Jarnow takes us through the band's catalog - how each album came to be written, recorded, released, and how each advanced Yo La Tengo's ever-evolving sound.
The little band that Ira and Georgia started in their basement nearly 30 years ago has since sold hundreds of thousands of records, released over a dozen full length albums, and toured the world to international acclaim. But as Jesse Jarnow so convincingly demonstrates, the story of Yo La Tengo is also very much the story of Hoboken.