Dean and Britta give Galaxie 500 songs a new life
Galaxie 500 made three albums that sounded like nothing else in 1988-90, and then broke up. Since then, the Boston trio’s legacy of beautiful, slow-burn guitar jangle has only expanded, its place in postpunk history growing larger by the decade.
But the possibility of a reunion tour of guitarist-singer Dean Wareham, drummer Damon Krukowski and bassist Naomi Yang seems more remote than ever. The trio broke up acrimoniously, and two decades later the old wounds still haven’t healed. “A reunion would be like going back to the old girlfriend you had when you were 17,” Wareham says, quoting David Byrne.
The band members have done just fine apart. Wareham went on to form Luna, and lately has been recording and touring with his wife (and former Luna bassist), Britta Phillips, as Dean and Britta. Krukowski and Yang, meanwhile, have released a series of albums as Damon and Naomi.
Now the Galaxie 500 back catalog is getting its first extensive public airing in two decades. Dean and Britta (joined by a drummer and guitarist) are playing a few shows dedicated solely to the music of Galaxie 500, including Friday and Saturday at Lincoln Hall. The idea was prompted by a promoter in Spain, who nudged Wareham to include a few Galaxie 500 songs in a Dean and Britta set last January and then invited the duo back to play an entire set of Galaxie 500 songs a few months later.
“It made me realize I probably should’ve been playing more of these songs all along,” Wareham says. “But I didn’t want Luna playing songs of my old band and it didn’t really occur to me to do an entire set of Galaxie 500 material until the promoter asked for it this year. But as we rehearsed the set for that one show, I realized that these songs still sound pretty good. I found my voice can still hit those high notes. And I figured if I don’t do this now, then when?”
For Wareham, it was like rediscovering a part of himself that he thought he’d left behind years ago. He had to relearn many songs, and – like many listeners – discovered entire worlds of nuance and shade within the deceptively simple structures of songs like “Tugboat” and “Fourth of July.”
“Many of the songs only had three chords, two chords, sometimes one, and you think, ‘That’s easy,’ ” Wareham says with a chuckle. “But there was a lot going on in there, the ebb and flow. It took a lot of rehearsals to get them sounding good. Our drummer Jason Lawrence was very sensitive to it. He described it as compositional drumming. Some drummers just keep the beat, but there were specific parts in those songs that all had to work together in a certain way.”
That empathetic interplay was crucial to Galaxie 500’s sound, very much in the tradition of minimalists such as the Velvet Underground and the Modern Lovers. Wareham, Krukowski and Yang met in high school in New York City, and attended Harvard together. When they began playing music, the trio immediately sounded distinct from the Boston scene at the time, where bands like the Pixies, Lemonheads, Throwing Muses and Del Fuegos were getting much of the media attention.
“It wasn’t like we were going left because everybody else was going right, but we had no interest in what was going on in Boston at the time, which was just another form of grunge,” Wareham says. “There wasn’t just grunge in Seattle. There was similar stuff happening everywhere. But we were listening to Jonathan Richman, the Young Marble Giants, New Order.”
Hooking up with producer Kramer proved to be a prescient move. He became like an unofficial fourth member of the band in many ways. “He worked very quickly and would never let us redo anything,” Wareham says. “To this day I think that’s how it should be. He didn’t push for perfection ever, but he got what we hoped we sounded like in our heads. You just hope there’s going to be a moment in a song, like 10 seconds, where the hairs stand up on your arm. More often than not, we got there.”
Wareham says the band was a true partnership creatively. “We crafted this thing together. Damon and I cowrote a bunch of songs. Some I feel are more mine, but they were all arranged by the band. The songwriting process was a lot of jamming, getting a chord progression and playing it over and over until something would come of it.” But the guitarist adds that “generally, I was the one coming up with the melodies and lyrics, which frankly I think is the more difficult part. It’s easy to start a song, but very difficult to finish.”
Personal rather than creative tensions were the main reasons the band ended, though. When Wareham bailed in 1991, he felt outnumbered. “Damon and Naomi were a couple, and it felt like two-against-one at the end there,” he says. “When you’re in a trio with a couple, that’s an inherently unstable situation. I felt like we’d taken it as far as we could go.”
Did he run the idea of performing an entire set of Galaxie 500 songs past his old bandmates after all these years?
“I don’t feel like I have to run things by them,” Wareham says. “We lead different lives now. Maybe they’re not all that pleased, but I can’t control that. We’ve had a little communication since the band ended, and I like them just fine, but I wouldn’t want to be in a band with them again.”
greg@gregkot.com
Dean and Britta Play Galaxie 500: 10 p.m. Friday-Saturday at Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln Av., $20; lincolnhallchicago.com.
I'm so excited to see this show... I feel like a correcting a 20 year old mistake. The weekend I moved to Chicago Galaxie 500 played and I thought I'd just go see them next time around.
Posted by: Mike | December 02, 2010 at 08:21 AM
I've been a huge fan of Galaxie 500, Luna, Dean and Britta, and Damon and Naomi's projects for 20 years. I just saw Dean and Britta play Galaxie 500 at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh Sat and it was wonderful. I never got to see G500 when they were together but D & B sounded beautiful. The show was held in the lecture hall co-curated with the Warhol Museum and the sound was intimate yet sonic. The setting was warm and comfortable and it was such a treat to see the magic that night.
Posted by: edward villabona | January 16, 2011 at 07:38 PM