Yo La Tengo Meet the Challenge of Jamming With Wilco

During last month's Wilco show at Brooklyn, N.Y.'s Coney Island, Yo La Tengo were brought up on stage to help out during 'Spiders (Kidsmoke),' effectively marking a meeting of two great indie-rock institutions. But more so, for Yo La Tengo -- who are known for having scores of special guests sit in with them, especially at their Hanukkah shows -- the fact that the tables were turned on them didn't go unnoticed.

"That was not lost on all of us when it was being talked about," guitarist/vocalist Ira Kaplan tells Spinner. "We always put people in the situations, where we say 'Well, we won't really have time to rehearse, but you'll see. It's really easy, here's the chords, this is what happens, follow me and you'll be fine.' We frequently get that kind of eyes wide, 'Okay.' We're always saying, 'No really, it'll be fine.' And there we were, Jeff showing us the song, and we were like "okay." The exact same thing that people had said to us."

Those who were at Coney Island that night (or nabbed the MP3's floating around the internet) surely noticed that Kaplan and Wilco guitarist Nels Cline went at it pretty hard, delivering a rather jaw-dropping guitar duel. Kaplan says at first they were a bit hesitant about being overbearing, but quickly got right into the mix. "It was a blast to get up there and try, on the spur of the moment, to figure out where you could fit in, including the notion of not laying back too much," he says. "My first thought was not getting in the way, but then I thought 'well, they wanted us up here, not to presumably blend in, but to be here. So maybe I should be a bit more assertive. And all of these things go on in real time."

Yo La Tengo is currently prepping the release of their twelfth studio album 'Popular Songs' on September 8 via Matador.