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Listen to “Words You Used To Say” by Dean & Britta»

Q&A with Dean Wareham (continued)

Readers are going to be interested in the reasons why Galaxie 500 and Luna split up. Can you talk about what led to the break-up of the two bands?

The simple answer is that I decided I had had enough, and decided to quit both bands. But bands are supposed to break up, that's part of the story, unless your band develops into a large multinational corporation like U2 or the Rolling Stones.

The breakup happens when you can't stop thinking about breaking up, when you no longer want to spend the majority of your waking hours in close proximity to your fellow musicians, when the reasons to break up outweigh the reasons to stay together. And when resentments, some of them petty, build… to the point where you can't see what you loved about each other, but only what is driving you crazy.

I left Galaxie 500 because I felt trapped and controlled. The situation was inherently untenable—a 3-piece band where the rhythm section form a married faction who meet prior to band meetings (at home) and vote as a bloc. It may have been a democracy, but it didn't feel democratic to me. I felt trapped inside my own band. When I dared to record a song outside the band, for a compilation album that our producer Kramer had put together, my bandmates were upset. When I participated in a benefit show for the Chemical Imbalance fanzine (playing songs on acoustic guitar after Damon and Naomi said they didn't want Galaxie 500 to do it), they were angrier still, and said I had no right to play Galaxie 500 songs without them. Our friendship was deteriorating—we were business partners, not friends, and the joy of making music together was gone.

Luna lasted much longer—twelve years—until we reached a point where I really thought there were enough Luna albums in existence (seven). What was the point of making another? Perhaps if we had been making millions of dollars. But we weren't, and I felt a constant pressure to help making a living for four band members, in a time when it was becoming more difficult to sell CDs, partly on account of the internet revolution.

And things that were fun and easy at age 28 were different at age 40. Rock and roll bands are for kids. As you get older (and maybe have a family), you find it is not the easiest way to organize your life—that family life and rock and roll do not mix easily. A life on the road presents many hazards for your life at home.

How did you remember all the details from past performances for your book? Did you keep notes while on the road?

I found I had extensive notes on the Galaxie 500 years. I did not have as much on the first few years of Luna, but then, around 1997, I started keeping a tour diary, which I would post on our website. Only there were certain private details that were not suitable for public consumption that were left out. I didn't say anything about my occasional infidelities. I didn't mention crushing yellow Dilaudid pills and snorting them in the back of the van. And certainly I didn't mention that I had a crush on the new bass player, or that we started seeing each other secretly after an end-of-tour party in a dorm room at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, unbeknownst to anyone in the band (we thought). When I started writing the book, with the band broken up and my marriage finished, I was able to include these details.

There were other sources—my old itineraries from the Luna tours, with the club names and dates, and I found I could usually remember something about each evening, each city that we visited, whether it was playing foosball at sound check, or getting into an argument backstage about having to light Sean's cigarettes for him, or walking around Lake Geneva at 4 A.M.

Tell us about some of your best and worst experiences on the road with Galaxie 500 and Luna.

Worst experiences on the road usually involve horrendous travel days, driving in the snow, driving all night long, the bus breaking down, getting lost. You have to expect something like that on every tour. I remember one long drive from Boston to New York with Galaxie 500, and I was annoyed that Damon wouldn't let me drive our rented Aerostar minivan. So I chanted silently inside my head “crash, crash, crash the van.” When we met up at sound check at the Knitting Factory later that day, he had crashed the van. I had to go out to Newark airport at three in the morning to get another one.

The final Galaxie 500 tour of Europe was less than fun, as I had already half-decided to quit. I recall driving from London all the way to Rennes in Western France one day, and feeling that we were about ready to kill each other. Two weeks later we were stranded at the airport in Copenhagen, trying to get a flight home. Our tickets were on Pan Am, but between the start and the end of the tour Pan Am had gone out of business. So there we were, pleading with a guy behind the counter, and Damon told him “I'm going to kill you if you don't put us on a flight.” He put us on a flight.

With Luna we sure spent an awful lot of time riding in Ford Econoline vans, for four, six or eight hours a day, for five weeks at a stretch. Riding in a van can turn you all into infants, playing out roles you learned as children. It is not a very civilized way to spend your life. One day we ate breakfast, lunch and dinner at Denny's. There were a couple of times that Sean and I actually got into shoving matches over ridiculous things, like my holding his shoe out the window, or me laughing when he left a bag of cookies at the airport.

The best live experiences were not necessarily on the big stage, though those could be fun. They can be the little shows you play in Malmo, Sweden or Albuquerque, New Mexico, to 300 people or to 50 die-hard fans in Osaka, fans who have been waiting for years to hear you and actually cry when you play your songs. When people are excited to see you, then you are excited to be there.

How have you had to adjust to the changes in the music business from the 80s to your experience as part of Dean & Britta?

The one thing I have learned about the music business is that it is in a constant state of flux. You don't see that at first—you think you have a handle on the structure of it, indie labels here, major labels there, compact discs providing perfect sound forever. But who would have predicted that the entire thing would come crashing down, as is happening now.

The music business was built on the spending power of affluent Western teenagers. The teenagers are still affluent, but they have figured out a way to get the music for free, and this is a problem. In 2008, the labels find themselves selling a product (compact discs) that fewer and fewer people buy.

And the relationship between making records and touring has changed. It used to be that you toured to promote your new record. Your record company recognized this, and they actually gave you money (tour support) to help you get out there and promote the product. But today the labels enviously look at the money artists make at live shows (something that you cannot experience on the internet), or selling T-shirts, and some of them are moving to get a cut of that income.

How does the creative process differ for you in writing a book and writing music?

Writing music is easy enough, all it takes is a little practice. You pick up a guitar and start playing some old song and then maybe you turn it around and your fingers play something you weren't expecting and there's the beginnings of a new song. But writing lyrics is more difficult. For any given song, I would first work on the melody, which determined to a great extent the structure of the lyrics, because of course each syllable corresponds with a note. Putting together an album's worth of lyrics often felt like completing a large jigsaw puzzle, a puzzle that would take months to complete. I would take lines from TV shows or fashion magazines or the title of a painting, and mix it perhaps with a story from my own life, and sometimes this worked and sometimes it didn't.

Writing a book was far more difficult. With lyrics, you can be clever and cryptic, hide behind rhymes and wordplay, and reveal very little about yourself. The songs might be about me, or they might be about someone else. I can write them in the first person or the third. I can be serious or silly. Writing non-fiction, especially a memoir, involves actually taking a stand, examining how you actually feel, expressing an opinion, offering yourself up to be judged. And examining my own behavior over the course of the last twenty years was not always easy—it was emotional at times. When you write about the saddest days in your life, you get sad all over again. I relived the day that my affair with Britta was discovered, the day I walked out of the house, the day my 2-year old son asked me what had happened to my toothbrush, and the many hours spent in my shrink's office.

What's next for you?

As I write these words I am sitting in the back lounge of a tour bus, on Day 1 of a North American tour, a Dean & Britta tour. We recently released our second album, Back Numbers, recorded by the legendary producer Tony Visconti (David Bowie, T.Rex, Thin Lizzy). Bowie himself came by the studio a couple of times when we were recording, gave a little advice, and told us stories like about how he came to write the lyrics for “Fashion.”

After two years away from touring, it was back on the road last year, with a new band. I confess I had a moment of crisis and/or clarity when I found myself loading amps and drums into a van again. I thought I had escaped all that. But this is what I do.

Later this year, Britta and I will be scoring and performing music for 13 Andy Warhol screen tests, a project conceived by the Warhol Museum and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. I have been flying down to the museum in Pittsburgh and sifting through the hundreds of screen tests that they have on tape. Warhol filmed these screen tests whenever a new character visited the Factory, from Salvador Dali to Nico to Edie Sedgwick.

Britta and I have been doing a bit of film scoring lately—our first score together was for The Squid & the Whale and that turned out very well. We record these film scores mostly in our East Village apartment. We have very different skills—I am able to write simple pieces on the guitar, but Britta is a very talented arranger and she also mixes and engineers our sessions at home. It's fun—we have a great musical connection, as well as the personal one.

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