Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock

Yo La Tengo, the influential rock band formed in the post-punk fervor of the early 1980s and still going strong today, receives its due in this fascinating if sprawling biography by music journalist Jarnow. He focuses primarily on the band’s founders, Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, and their efforts to make a quirky, eclectic sound out of their many influences and their “equally intense love of art-noise bands like Mission of Burma alongside perennial favorites NRBQ, the Kinks, and others.” Jarnow is clearly an unabashed fan of the band and its creators, who he describes as “a nearly ageless rock-and-roll couple in loving bohemian matrimony.” But he is also out for bigger game: an attempt to use Yo La Tengo to chart the rise of alternative or “indie” rock. He details the early days of rising and soon-to-be influential bands such as Black Flag and the Replacements experimenting in Maxwell’s, Yo La Tengo’s favorite bar in its home base of Hoboken, N.J. He excels at following the intricate rise and fall of indie labels such as Gerard Cosloy’s Homestead Records. And he captures the all-encompassing spirit of the current post-indie scene, a “continuum between the Velvet Underground at Max’s Kansas City and the eternal now of live music.” (July)