Photos: Yo La Tengo @ the Bell House (Night 1)

Yo La Tengo @ the Bell House, May 10th, 2011

Yo La Tengo played the first of two "Spin the Wheel" shows last night at the Bell House in Gowanus, Brooklyn. The fate of the show was in the hands of a random fan invited on stage to spin the band's meticulously designed wheel. After being presented with some rather scary options, including the possibility the band would act out an entire episode of a classic sitcom (the chance of that happening was purposely slim), the wheel landed on the "Name Game," in which all the songs for the first set (about 45 minutes) were songs named after someone.

This led to quite an amazing first set including Fakebook's "Griselda," I Am Not Afraid of You And I Will Beat Your Ass's "Watch Out For Me Ronnie," And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out's "Let's Save Tony Orlando's House, and a stellar rendition of "Moby Octopad" (yep, Moby is a name). A lot of these songs I've never seen performed live before, so it really was a treat seeing them whip out some of these.

After a rather long intermission, the second set included Yo La classics such as "Stockholm Syndrome," "Nothing to Hide" and "The Crying of Lot G." Who knows what tonight's show will bring, as there is always a chance you'll get an entire set of Condo Fucks songs, or even all of The Sounds of Science. As long as Yo La Tengo doesn't act out an episode of Family Matters, I think everyone will leave happy. Actually, that sounds pretty amazing...

For those going tonight, opener Antietam (who opened for YLT's first show at Maxwell's 26 years ago) took the stage at 8:30pm, and Yo La Tengo followed at 9:30pm. The Baxx Sisis's open tonight. Tickets for the show are sold out, but again, try your luck with craigslist, as there seem to be a lot of people selling tickets on there. There was also that woman walking around scalping tickets that I've seen at literally EVERY Yo La Tengo show doing just that. Good luck! Full set of photos of Yo La Tengo are below....