Q&A with Dean Wareham

What made you decide to write a memoir at this point in your life?

When Luna broke up in 2004, my life was my own. I was not under constant pressure to go out on tour or hurry up and make the next record so everyone could get paid, so for the first time in 12 years I felt I was off the treadmill of recording and touring, and actually had the time to write a book that I'd been thinking about for a while. I wrote a couple of chapters, and was just writing a proposal, when I received an unsolicited email from the Editor-in-Chief at Penguin Press, wondering if I had ever thought about writing a book.

I have read a lot of rock bios, but most of the time these books are not written by the musician, but rather by a rock critic who spends a week interviewing them. This is of course a very different proposition from sitting down and trying to weave your own experiences into an interesting narrative.

I hadn't read anything that accurately portrayed what it is like to be in a band, to collaborate with a group of people over a period of years, to travel round the world playing your music—the adventures, the misadventures, the fun and the arguments, the comedy and the stupidity. There were a couple of memoirs or diaries that I enjoyed, like Dee Dee Ramone's and Dave Hunter's (of Mott the Hoople), but they conveyed a scene very different from the one I knew.

What was the scene you knew?

Mine was a small world of 7″ singles, fanzines run by geeky kids, college radio stations and rotten little clubs. Galaxie 500 was born in the post-post-punk era, a time when indie bands did not dream of becoming rock stars. And unlike the post-punk or new wave bands, we were not looking to shock people or write manifestos or push the boundaries of music. We were content to raid the recent past for inspiration, but in doing so we came up with our own unique sound. Other bands like Opal, Mazzy Star, the Spacemen 3, Yo La Tengo and Stereolab were involved in a similar exercise.

What first interested you in music and what music first interested you?

The first music I heard was whatever was on the radio in 1967—“Georgy Girl” by the Seekers and “Hey Jude” by the Beatles. And then the records that my parents played, by Glen Campbell or Nina Simone, Sam Cooke, Elvis Presley, Joe Cocker. Later it was my older brother's record collection—Diamond Dogs by David Bowie, Transformer by Lou Reed and The Idiot by Iggy Pop.

In 1977, at age 14, I moved to New York City and attended high school here. These were the years I first got really excited about music, and fortunately these were the years of the punk explosion. In 1979 and 1980 I saw the Ramones, Richard Hell, the Clash, Talking Heads, Blondie, Pere Ubu, Devo, Gang of Four, PiL, the Specials, B-52's (on prom night at the Mudd Club), Echo & the Bunnymen and the Undertones.

During my final months at high school, I bought a red Vox Superlynx guitar and tried to learn songs by the Sex Pistols and the Clash. In college I formed a band called Speedy & the Castanets, which years later morphed into Galaxie 500. Speedy & the Castanets entered in Harvard's Battle of the Bands my Freshman year. We came in last in every category—musical ability, songs and looks. It's true, we couldn't play our instruments, but we still thought we were the most interesting band.

How do you compare the independent music scene now to what it was when you formed Galaxie 500?

When Galaxie 500 started out in 1987, it was hard for a band like us even to get signed. Forget about a major label, no one in bands even thought of approaching them. Not for any moral reasons, or because we were “proud to be indie”, but just because the major labels didn't sign that kind of music. They were busy with Huey Lewis and Madonna and Bon Jovi, not in some kids who were influenced by Jonathan Richman and Joy Division.

So we went sniffing around about a dozen independent labels, like Coyote, Ace of Hearts, Throbbing Lobster, Taang!, only to be rejected. We sent cassette tapes around to local radio stations in Boston, and built a small live following that way.

Today there are twenty times as many compact discs being released every week, and everyone is in a band, and we are all absolutely inundated by product. Distribution is available to all (not good distribution, but a presence on Amazon). So it is easier to get signed, but more difficult to stand out.

Why do you think Galaxie 500 still has such a fervent cult following?

I happen to think the records are great, innocent and melancholy and beautiful, and almost out of time. Even when we were putting those records out, people either loved us or hated us, there was something extreme in what we were doing. Most every other band in Boston was playing thrash or metal or proto-grunge. We dared to play slow, to drone on one chord for ten minutes, singing about parking lots and Twinkies and cold snowy evenings.

Then Galaxie 500 broke up after releasing three albums, and when our label, Rough Trade, filed for bankruptcy, the records disappeared for some years in the early 90s. This was still a period where it was hard to find out-of-print records (today, if your record isn't available on Amazon, then surely someone has digitized it and uploaded it to their filesharing website), and I think the fact that the records were impossible to find for a while maybe helped the mystique grow. People had to resort to making cassette copies of those albums for their friends.

How did Luna begin and how did things change when Britta joined the band?

After leaving Galaxie 500, I recorded a handful of demos and was soon offered a deal by Terry Tolkin at Elektra Records (Terry had been let go by Rough Trade a few months earlier). This was 1991—and the music scene had undergone some quick changes. Sonic Youth had signed to Geffen Records, and a lot of other bands followed suit, and when Nirvana became huge all the major labels rushed to sign something “alternative”—a word that made little sense to me, anyway. Luna were called alternative, but so were Pearl Jam and Helmet and Green Day, and I never thought we had much in common with them.

I signed the deal with Elektra and put together a new band, calling my bass-playing friend Justin Harwood of the Chills, who I had met in London, and later drummer Stanley Demeski of the Feelies (probably my favorite band at the time, and certainly the best band that ever came out of New Jersey, but they had recently broken up). With the addition of guitarist Sean Eden, who we found by placing an ad in the Village Voice, this was the Luna lineup for the years 1992-96.

With Luna, I found myself on a major label, with radio reps trying (unscuccessfully, for the most part) to get us played on commercial rock stations, with sales teams hoping to shift millions of units, not thousands. With vinyl being replaced by the compact disc, the 90s were the salad days for major labels—they were making money like they never had before.

Justin left the band in 1999, returning to New Zealand, where his wife was expecting a baby. We had just been dropped by Elektra; perhaps Justin saw the writing on the wall. He was replaced by Britta Phillips. Of course I had no idea when she walked into our practice room on West 26th Street that my whole life would change.

One thing Britta immediately brought to the band was enthusiasm—it was exciting for her to join a band that was going on tour and selling out the Fillmore in San Francisco, whereas for Justin this was old hat—he had done it before. For that reason alone, Britta made being in Luna fun again. When you find yourself surrounded by grumpy, pessimistic people, it wears you down. But when people are enthusiastic, it rubs off on you.

And then of course Britta and I became romantically involved, and of course that changed the dynamic of the band, and of my life. As my psychiatrist observed at the time, if you put a woman into a band with three guys, there is of course going to be competition among the males. So there was a little of that. And then there were secrets and lies and all that, till finally, thankfully, it was all out in the open.

Britta was a good thing for Luna—before she joined I was seriously contemplating quitting myself, so rather than seeing her as a “Yoko,” I would credit her with keeping the band together for five more years and a couple of our best records.

Tell us about the pressure to create a radio hit and build mainstream success for Luna.

The pressure was there, but I don't think we took it that seriously. Sure, we heard the questions, and our manager warned us that it would all be over if we didn't deliver a radio hit, but you don't really think about that stuff when you're writing songs. At least I didn't.

Actually Luna had it relatively easy at Elektra, there were a lot of changes going on there, but our Artists & Repertoire (A&R) guy protected us in his own crazy way. After our second album a whole new regime came in (when Warner merged with Time, Inc. and the legendary record business characters running Warner, Elektra and Atlantic were pushed out). But we sold enough records and got enough press that it made sense for them to keep us on. Things really changed around 1999, when alternative rock was in steep decline. The labels were no longer looking for the next Nirvana, but for another Britney Spears, and a lot of A&R people lost their jobs. By that point Elektra bore little resemblance to the label that we had signed to in 1992. In the early years the motto had been “small but beautiful”, and Elektra was considered a “boutique major label” due to its small roster. But AOL Time Warner had now merged Elektra with East West into a much larger company, run not by A&R people but by the radio department. The head of the A&R department, Nancy Jeffries, loved our fifth record, but the guys in the “alternative radio” department told her there was no hit song on it, and maybe they were right—we were let go, and the record sat unreleased till we were picked up by the indie label Jericho Records. Interestingly, Sheryl Crow had a hit that summer with a song that we had also recorded—“Sweet Child O Mine” by Guns N Roses. But she was Sheryl Crow; we were not.

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