Note: This new series will take up a seriously interesting topic, band break-ups. We will also look at some bands that don’t like each other but somehow stay together, such as The Rolling Stones. Some bands I hope to write about include Jane’s Addiction, The Smiths, and Pink Floyd–these are all situations I know something about and am interested in. Other bands that had a bad break up, or at least serious tension, include of course The Beatles, The Clash, and Guns ‘N Roses. I’m not sure if I’ll write about The Beatles because that has all been heavily covered, but the other two maybe, when I can look into them. But we will start with the breakup of the late 80’s and early 90’s band, Galaxie 500. This piece draws on a collection of snippets about the situation on the website A Head Full of Wishes, which is run by Galaxie and Luna’s biggest fan, who I believe lives in the U.K. Dean knows him well I believe. I think a lot of people are interested in this general topic, so I hope this series reaches some of you.

Galaxie 500 broke up in 1991, when the lead singer and songwriter Dean Wareham quit the band on the phone after a final show at Bowdoin College on the 5th of April of that year. The band had been on an extensive tour, and played some dates as the opener for The Cocteau Twins, which would have been a pretty big deal for what was still an up-and-coming band. Galaxie 500 was set to begin a tour in Japan shortly after this, and Dean quit when his bandmate Damon Krukowski called him to book plane tickets. AI gets the part about Dean quitting, suddenly, at least from Damon’s perspective, but also says that a contributing factor was that Damon and his partner Naomi Yang were becoming “disillusioned” with the band’s situation. However I don’t think this is really right, because Damon and Naomi are on the record saying how devastated they were by the breakup and that they did not see Dean quitting coming at all. It is clear that Dean and Damon were not getting along for a while prior, but Damon definitely wanted to continue the band. Dean would go on to form Luna almost immediately, one of the great bands of all time, and Damon and Naomi would record several records under their own names, some of which are good, however it would take them some years to recover from the ending of Galaxie.

I have actually written about this breakup a bit twice before, in the context of other pieces. I first wrote about it in my piece about seeing Damon and Naomi live in Kyoto in the earlier part of this century. This was the famous night that Damon told me to shut up, and the whole story is pretty funny. I also alluded to the breakup in a different piece about stage banter when I was discussing the Luna record Luna Live. The two extracts below actually tell a good bit of the story.

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From my piece on Damon:

Damon and Naomi were members of the late 80s/ early 90’s band Galaxie 500 with Dean Wareham. The band didn’t really know what it was doing at first, like many a band before, and kind of stumbled into near-greatness before Wareham walked and started Luna, the world’s greatest band. Wareham details the reasons behind the break-up in his memoir Black Postcards. Poe is supposed to have said that any man who tells the simple truth of his life would write a masterpiece. Wareham gets pretty close to following Poe’s dictum.

The ending of Galaxie 500 came about, according to Wareham, essentially because Wareham was tired of being treated like a child by the other two, a long-time couple. I think he wanted his own band, and wanted to chill a little.  From Black Postcards:

Traveling is stressful. And with Damon tour-managing, it seemed like every hotel check-in, every seat assignment, and every rental car was a problem. Damon would argue about what floor his room was on. He would get annoyed if he didn’t get the seat he wanted on the flight. I shouldn’t have let this bother me. I should have minded my own business. But traveling together highlights your differences.

At one show in late 1990, a techie shone a spotlight on Dean as he stepped downstage for a solo. This seems to have been the breaking point. Black Postcards again:

Damon: “In retrospect I notice that Dean chose the L.A. show to launch this new trick, when the audience was full of music industry people. We hadn’t had any spotlights in Columbus or Dallas!”

Dean in his contemporaneous tour diary: “Damon said he doesn’t like me walking in front of his drum kit–it throws him off. I didn’t tell him to go fuck himself.”

Things were rough, and Dean split in 1991. (Wareham quotes a Damon interview saying “Here are the dirty facts!  What happened was simply that Dean quit, more or less out of the blue, on the telephone one day.”  Ah oui, les sales faits.) Galaxie 500 is still an interesting band and has a handful of great songs. Then, Damon and Naomi formed their own group, named eponymously. They are pretty good. I like “This Car Climbed Mount Washington,” from More Sad Hits, and the whole record Playback Singers is strong.  Still, they are a far cry from Galaxie, much less Luna.

From my piece on Dean’s stage banter:

Luna Live is a showcase record from 2005 from one of the greatest bands ever, Luna. It basically serves as a greatest hits pre-Rendevous (their final album and my personal favorite), and features killer renditions of a number of classics, including “Chinatown,” (their poppiest tune); “Friendly Advice,” (guitar on the original by Sterling Morrison); “23 Minutes in Brussels” (Luna’s “Marquee Moon,” and somehow their most popular song); and, epically, “4th of July,” originally a Galaxie 500 song.

4th of July, from Galaxie 500’s last album This is Our Music, is relevant here as it firmly established Wareham as a comedian. The inter-band dynamic of Galaxie 500 is interesting, suffice it to say here that the sonic and lyrical nature of the band did not obviously lend itself to comedy, although comedy was there in Wareham, the beating heart of the band, all along. In his awesome memoir Black Postcards, Wareham calls This is Our Music the band’s weakest record, and Wareham at the time was in the process of leaving the band. Wareham has his own reasons for his opinion about the final Galaxie record, however 4th of July is the seminal Galaxie song, with “Don’t Let Our Youth go to Waste,” as its only real competition. 

The song opens with one of Wareham’s deadpan mini-monologues — a tossed-off poem rejected by a dog, a drunken glance at the Empire State Building, everything reduced to the size of a nickel — all of it funny and self-deflating in the signature Galaxie way.

Later, the narrator holes up on July 4th, staging what he calls a “bed-in” for one, a perfect slacker-era joke that half-mocks and half-honors Yoko-and-Lennon theatrics. Given that his band mate Naomi Yang was heavily influenced by Yoko Ono, that Dean was trying to get out of Galexie and change his style but having a hard time getting up the nerve to make the break, that the song comes from 1991, the beginning of the “slacker” era, and that Wareham himself describes himself as “lazy” on numerous occasions in his memoir, there is no finer kiss-off to the idea of a visibly politically engaged artist than this line. (Of course Wareham was also a big Lennon fan, and his cover of Jealous Guy on The Best of Luna is sweet and cool.)  4th of July also blows Oasis’ “start a revolution from my bed” from the water. Oasis doesn’t come within a million miles of Dean Wareham.

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According to A Head Full of Wishes, there were about forty of fifty people at the Bowdoin show, which was kind of normal for shows at a small college back in the day. I have written elsewhere about shows at small colleges in one of my pieces about my time at Hamilton College. In Black Postcards, Dean states that the opening band at the Bowdoin show played too long and the band was irritated about it. After the show Dean left in his car (an attendee of the show said “he packed up and went out the door and drove away. I don’t even think he said thank you”) and apart from the Japan phone call I don’t know if Dean and Damon have ever spoken again. In 1997, Damon stated that they had not, but that’s a long time ago and Galaxie 500 still collects royalties so there must be some communication, at least between business managers. I find the whole royalties situation in general very interesting, and would like to know more about how it all works.

As seen above, in Black Postcards, Dean details some of his running frustrations with Damon and it is clear from this book that he had been getting up the nerve to leave for a while, and had discussed this with Damon and Naomi more than once. “Damon called first. My heart skipped a beat. The moment was upon me. I said don’t buy the tickets to Japan because I was leaving the band, and this time it was for real. They weren’t so nice and understanding this time. They were furious. There were three days of angry phone calls.”

Naomi basically confirms this, saying that, in an out of character moment, she yelled at Dean on the phone. “I couldn’t believe that Dean could just throw everything away so carelessly and not even want to discuss it.”

Now Galaxie 500 were a very good band, but I also suspect that what was happening was that Dean, over and above his frustrations with Damon’s tour managing and the rest, just wanted his own thing. Luna’s first album is Lunapark from 1992, released on Elektra Records, and although there may be traces of the Galaxie sound on it, it basically sounds quite a bit different. Luna is much smoother than Galaxie, less experimental, and, by the time of 1994’s Bewitched (also on Elektra), at least in my opinion, much more polished. For my money, Luna is a far better band, especially after the arrival of the guitarist Sean Eden who played on Bewitched and has played on all of their subsequent records. There is another funny bit from Black Postcards where Dean talks about Sean’s approach to making music:

By the end of the Rendevous sessions, Bryce had come up with a new way to produce Sean.  “Sean,” he said.  “You can come in at eleven tomorrow morning and play your twenty guitar solos, and figure out which one you like.  Adam will record you.  I don’t need to be here for that.”  “Sean is a brilliant guitarist,” Bryce told me.  “But he is one of these people who equates the music-making process with a great deal of pain.”

Dean also talks about in his book how at their final shows (Luna actually also broke up in 2005 but got back together in 2014 and are still together today, although Dean records more under his own name these days) Sean kept pushing to get his own songs (Eden wrote and sang two songs on Rendezvous) on the setlist, and Dean resisted because the songs aren’t much good, which is true, but because Eden is a key part of Luna, Dean was willing to give way. However another member of the Luna universe, not a band member more like a producer of their live shows I kind of forget, would change the setlist at the last minute to remove the Eden songs. Dean approved, but didn’t want to do it himself.

Dean was the beating heart of both Galaxie 500 and Luna, so it is understandable to me that he called the shots in both cases. Damon and Naomi are both interesting musicians, and contributed a lot to Galaxie’s more arty sound, however sans Dean they are ultimately pretty minor, artistically. Damon is known today for two other reasons; the first is he is a prominent and very articulate, critic of Spotify, and secondly he hosted a podcast, and maybe still does, on sound and its various incarnations, which I have listened to and it’s good. So Damon is pretty high level, even if he got in my face in 2005 or 2006.

Overall, the break up of Galaxie 500 (as well as the much less dramatic tension in Luna) is a fascinating example of the push and pull that occurs in bands. Personally, I’m glad the band did break up because the Luna records are indispensable and the Galaxie ones, for the most part, are not, at least for me. I have not, incidentally, had a chance to see Luna play live, however I did see Dean play in 2018 as a kind of support for a guy called Cheval Sombre. They did a record together, which is pretty good, but not great. I didn’t get a chance to talk with Dean after the show, however I did speak with Cheval and he said “now I need to go and hide” and basically told me how miserable he was. Now that was not great, because he was playing with Dean motherfucking Wareham! But Cheval clearly had his own things going on. In any case, I really want to see Luna live. They are still touring, but seem to be only playing a few shows here and there according to Songkick.com, a super great website that tells you where everyone is playing. If I can get my little resources together I’m gonna do it. As for Damon and Naomi, they haven’t played live for about a year, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they added new dates sometime. And if they come to Japan, I’ll be sure to be there with my Pernod.

Dedication: For all three members of Galaxie 500, who have all had a pretty big impact on me one way or another.

Sources:
Black Postcards (Dean Wareham),
A Head Full of Wishes (galaxie500.com),
Prior Kyoto Kibbitzer posts.