New Song → "Eve Babitz"

The dish behind our new song "Eve Babitz" and some very special companion art.

YACHT - Eve Babitz (2024)

Don’t Underestimate a Pawn

For a brief moment in the winter of 1963, Los Angeles—at the time still more or less considered a cultural backwater—became the center of the art universe. That’s because Marcel Duchamp, who had retired from art 40 years earlier in order to dedicate his life wholly to chess, came to town to stage a retrospective of his career at the tiny Pasadena Art Museum. The opening was the art event of 1963, and the wild afterparty at the Castle Green Hotel, during which Andy Warhol puked up pink champagne and Dennis Hopper stole the tablecloth, has spawned several oral histories and at least one documentary.

But the image most indelibly associated with Duchamp’s time in Los Angeles was not taken at the opening, nor at the legendary party that followed—it was taken several days later, on a cold morning before the museum opened, by photographer Julian Wasser. You’ve probably seen it.

The nude woman playing chess with Duchamp is, of course, the late writer Eve Babitz, one of the great literary voices of Los Angeles. She was barely 20 at the time, but already a fixture of the LA party scene. In her dishy behind-the-scenes essay for Esquire, “I Was a Naked Pawn for Art,” she revealed that she agreed to pose nude, mostly, to settle a score with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, the curator Walter Hopps, who had brought Duchamp to California.

Eve came out on top in that relationship, but we always wondered about the game itself, between Eve Babitz and Marcel Duchamp: who won?

We’ll let Eve tell it:

I sat down quickly at the chess set and wondered if we could just pose or did we actually have to play, but Marcel—whose obsession with chess made him give up not only art but girls—was waiting for me to make the first move.

“Et alors,” he said. “You go.”

I, of course, had youth and beauty over him, but he had brains on his side—or at least chess brains—and though I tried my best, moving a knight so at least he knew I had some idea what a knight was, he moved his pawn and the next thing I knew, I was checkmated. “Fool’s mate,” they call it when you’re so stupid that the game hasn’t even begun and you’ve lost.

I became interested in playing and tried to stop thinking about holding in my stomach, but every time I thought I was so brilliant, like taking his queen on the fourth move, I’d lose.

Of all the things that have ever gone on between men and women, this was the strangest, in my experience.

We started reading Eve Babitz’s work around the same time we got into chess, in the early weeks of lockdown, so this story felt like a perfect little parfait of our favorite things: chess, Los Angeles, parties, champagne, conceptual art, etc. Our only disappointment was Eve Babitz falling for a fool’s mate, the fastest and most easily avoidable checkmate in chess. We were rooting for her!

So we decided to go into the studio and make a little revisionist pop song about Eve Babitz absolutely demolishing Marcel Duchamp at his own game, by pushing a pawn across the board until it became a Queen.

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“Eve Babitz” is out now, exclusively on Bandcamp:

1. Eve Babitz 03:13

2. Eve Babitz (Rob's Dub) 03:33

3. Eve Babitz (Instrumental) 3:13

4. Eve Babitz (Rob's Dub Instrumental) 03:33

Written, Recorded, and Produced by YACHT
Mastered by Timothy Stollenwerk at Stereophonic Mastering
Single art by Celia Hollander

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Longtime readers will know we’ve been sitting on “Eve Babitz” for a while. We had grand plans, in 2022, to release the song with a custom-designed chess board—a collaboration with a chess museum we shall not name here. We designed a whole bundle that would be sold in the gift shop and they invited us to perform at the museum to launch the project. Then poof! It all fell through. Our hearts were a little broken and we’ve been sitting on the song and special stuff ever since.

But now we’re gearing up to release a new album, and we want to clear the docket before we do.

"Eve Babitz" Limited Edition Glasses and Artwork.

A very special “Eve Babitz” offer for our early adopters, YACHT completists, and chess-heads: buy this limited-edition two-color Risograph print of the single artwork (by the musician and monster chess player Celia Hollander) and you’ll receive a pair of “Don’t Underestimate a Pawn” red-and-blue anaglyph glasses—for viewing the print in 3D, naturally—and a digital download of the tune itself.

Use the code “pawnsacrifice” on Bandcamp today only for a 20% discount.

Checkmate,
YACHT

PS—If anyone out there wants to make a chess board with us, we have a great idea for one.