My Top 1000 Songs #281: Blue Line Swinger

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

As my concert-going continues to diminish in middle age--can't they start the shows a little earlier for us old folks?!--Yo La Tengo remains on my short-list of artists I'll still see religiously. I've probably caught them on every visit to San Francisco since around '94, and the performance I saw just a few weeks ago was every bit as stunning as the ones I saw 30 years ago.

"Blue Line Swinger," the closing track on 1995's Electr-O-Pura (arguably the band's artistic peak, tied with its 1997 follow-up), could be the band's definitive live showcase. (Ok, the frenetic instrumental "I Heard You Looking" is close.) But the studio version is no slough. It's a sprawling epic--9+ minutes on the LP, often significantly longer in concert--which covers many of the band's strengths and packs them into a single interconnected work. 

You've got a long, slow build-up, something to fill the diehards with anticipation (or frighten away the impatient newbies), bassist James McNew blasting a repeated and slightly-shrill organ riff broken up by short, staccato bursts of muscular drums from Georgia Hubley, as Ira Kaplan plays with his guitar pedals and offers up washes of feedback and skronky lines. After a couple minutes, Ira's guitar starts to congeal into a discernible riff, and a few minutes later James & Georgia lock into a steady rhythmic groove, and out of the morass you're thrust into a rousing little rocker, a bit of shoegaze noise pop topped off by an almost-whispered vocal from Georgia.

The chaos returns for the final third, a classic Ira Kaplan all-out assault on his guitar, Geogia's melody joined by a nice bah-bah-bah finale that feels a bit like a reprise to the album's earlier "Tom Courtenay." By the time the squall grinds to a halt, you've been through a musical wringer.

And that's just the studio version. The set-closing live version stretches things out further, cranks the volume up a little louder, makes the encore that follows feel more like a post-workout cool-down than a rock concert.

I still remember a review of a YLT show from back in the 90s, the critic quoting an attendee watching Ira go at it with his guitar and remarking, "That fucker really believes." Don't know which song he was talking about, but I'm guessing it's this one.

(For those a little intimidated by the noise and the sprawl, the band helpfully released a condensed single version, "Thin Blue Line Swinger," which chops it down to a more user-friendly three minutes and gives it a gentler lead-in (with more breathing room for Georgia's vocals) while retaining its power on the back-end.)

Live, just a couple weeks ago:
Live in 1995:
The condensed "Thin Blue Line Swinger" version:

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