Yo La Tengo Plays its Final Show at Maxwell's

It was a poignant evening at Maxwell's Saturday, with local favorites Yo La Tengo making what is probably its final appearance at the club, which is closing at the end of July. Actually, fans in attendance got a double dose of the trio: YLT's cover-band alter ego Condo F*cks was to play the show with Scottish band The Pastels, but when the latter couldn't get into the U.S. because of visa problems, Yo La Tengo stepped in to fill the void.

Yo La Tengo, as photographed from the back of a sold-out Maxwell's.

Opening for itself, in a way, YLT played a mellow, mostly acoustic set, setting a stage for the rocking electric sound of Condo F*cks. As you'd expect, many of the night's tunes touched on the end of the Maxwell's era. CF's first song was the Rolling Stones' "The Last Time," and their final song was The Kinks' "This is Where I Belong" (though both songs are in the band's repertoire of covers).

You can find the full Yo La Tengo/Condo F*cks set list here, giving the original artists for the covers. And NJ.com did a good article on the night.

(There was one bizarre moment in the night when a young woman fell to the floor. One person said she slipped, but another said that she had passed out and was flat on the floor with no pulse. In any case, an ambulance came and took her away after the paramedics checked her out. We hope she's OK now.)

As Yo La Tengo has mentioned many times, it owes its very being to Maxwell's (as Ira Kaplan noted in a recent interview, he and wife-to-be Georgia Hubley worked at the club before they formed YLT).

Kaplan said it simply from the stage: "This band does not exist without this club."