Back in the ’80s, Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley started playing cover songs for their friends; now they fill clubs like Metro on a regular basis (they’ll play a two-night stand there on Saturday and June 18). One of the most inventive and respected bands of the ’90s indie-rock movement, they’ve finally found a permanent bass player (James McNew) and even found recognition in mainstream journals like Rolling Stone. Ten years ago, Greg Kot talked to Kaplan about his journey from rock scribe to rocker.
Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley of Hoboken, N.J., are far too shy and unaffected to ever be rock stars.
Neither was born to the stage: They had to work to shake the spotlight jitters and at first could barely project their singing voices across a room.
But they formed a band anyway a few years ago, naming it Yo La Tengo (“I got it!” in Spanish). Saturday they’ll headline the late show at Cabaret Metro, having become one of the darlings of college radio and the alternative press after a string of well-received albums.
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It was only a few years ago that Kaplan and Hubley brought their guitar and drums out of the living room and started playing at parties while their friends sang. Kaplan eventually took over the vocals, and the band began building a repertoire of cover songs.
Along the way, Kaplan and Hubley got married, and things got serious musically as well. A series of releases with a constantly shifting lineup of bassists and lead guitarists culminated in a critically acclaimed 1989 EP, “President Yo La Tengo” and the recent album “Fakebook.” . . .
“When I was younger, I was not foolhardy enough to get up on a stage and thrash around–I wish I was,” he says. “When I finally got a little braver, I realized it’s all I ever wanted to do.”
As he began enumerating the virtues of bands he admires such as the Clean and Eleventh Dream Day, Kaplan interjected: “Now this is what I really love talking about.”
Though he’s in a band, he remains, above all, a fan, an enthusiast.
“Playing in a band feels like a job, in the good sense of that term,” he says. “I like taking it seriously.” . . .