Galaxie 500 - Come ride the fiery breeze!

I don’t wanna talk with your friends

I don’t wanna vote for your president

I just wanna be your tugboat captain

It’s a place I’d like to be

(from “Tugboat”)

It doesn't take Galaxie 500 long to reach their initial goal: in February 1988 their first single, “Tugboat”, comes out. Two chords and off they go, but the impression is that nothing more is really needed. A change of key, a bit of guitar polish, the hypnotic – and epic, in its own way – refrain “It's a place I'd like to be” spilling into the final progression, an implicit release of emotion. Such contemplative elegance in the blend of instruments, in the simultaneous admission of relational incapacity and openness to the world… An innocence one cannot help but respond to, enclosed in the trio's idyll of friendship, the echo of Dean's voice breaking against Damon's full-bodied beat, the natural flow of riffs and basslines. Like a dream, half elusive and fleeting, half tangible, more palpable than reality itself.

Reality, meanwhile, was telling a different story: an unexpected success for their demos on college radio stations, Harvard's in particular. So much so that the band tries to “hook” Mark Kramer of New York's Noise studio. The impact of this semi-legendary figure on the band's sound requires some preliminary explanation: by the band members' own admission, as well as by the observation of industry insiders, Kramer would become the fourth galaxist. Many of the defining ideas for Galaxie 500's sound were his, particularly the reverb on the vocals, not to mention his role as a guiding hand in the studio during the songs' development.

Kramer was not just a producer but also an active musician, a central figure of New York's downtown scene in the Eighties, a member of Butthole Surfers until 1985, when he bought the Noise New York studios, and a performer alongside John Zorn. His label, Shimmy-Disc, became a point of reference, distributing artists like Gwar, Daniel Johnston and Ween. Years later, after producing Galaxie 500's entire discography, he discovered and launched Low.

The trio's meeting with Kramer lived up to the guru-like aura surrounding the man. Located on the top floor of a building on West Broadway, Noise New York felt like a shaman's den, thick pot smoke perpetually hanging over the mixing desks. In just a few hours of recording Kramer barely uttered a word, but he immediately left his mark, piling reverb upon reverb onto Dean's voice.

Encouraged by the first results achieved with an expert mentor like Kramer (the single mentioned above), the trio is approached by Alghini about a label he had just founded, Aurora. That's how Today came to see the light of day. The American band's “today” lies somewhere in July 1988. There, alongside “Daydream Nation” and “Spirit Of Eden”, it stands as a kind of musical fall of the Wall, essential in ferrying the world of music from one decade into the next.

Dean, Damon and Naomi go to Noise New York like devoted students of Kramer. They play the songs much as they would live, leaving it to the producer to indulge himself with solutions, add riffs, refine the rhythmic paths. Until the band feels confident enough to propose the songs' development on their own, or at least to pick from Kramer's suggestions the ones most in line with their idea of sound. By Damon's own admission: “The falsetto, the solos placed in the oddest moments, backwards tracks, reckless percussive arrangements… It became our sound, but we drew it from things Kramer had done that we liked”.

Today does indeed have all the New York allure of an artistic yet carefree product, full of spontaneity – Kramer famously recorded strictly in one take – but with a clearly defined identity. In this sense, it recalls the celebrated “Velvet Underground & Nico”. As the band's debut, it nonetheless sounds spry, amused in reasserting its own difference, its own unique, personal voice (see the harmonica on the almost frivolous melody of “Oblivious” and, on the other hand, the vocals of “My Temperature's Rising”, which knot the stomach with anguish). One clearly senses an innocence walking hand in hand with an uninhibited poetics (the opening “Flowers” and “Pictures”), with heartfelt stories inviting cathartic sharing, exploding in the graceless epic of tracks like “It's Getting Late” and the instrumental interlude.

This is how the expressionist primitivism of the anthem “Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste” (a Jonathan Richman cover) takes shape, a powerful portrait of youthful anxiety, of overflowing energy, seeming to spill out of Damon's stormy drumming and pour into the electrified shards of Dean's guitar. At the eye of the storm, then, lies the pure oracle of its spoken declaration:

And I could drink up everything you have

And here, once again, the storm returns to rage on… Today is, then, an incredible manual for anyone wondering how it's possible that thousands, millions of songs have been written with that same handful of chords. Every note stands out in the flow of the record with crystalline purity, ringing out as if it were being played for the first time, perfectly set between the one before and the one after: a trait developed through their passion for the Beatles.

So far removed from the prevailing taste in the United States at the time – long criticized for the out-of-tune, unrestrained vocals of Dean (!) – success would come first in England, then in the rest of Europe. After signing a distribution deal with Rough Trade, Galaxie 500 would frequently tour overseas, playing to ever-growing crowds.

In the United States things were slow to get moving: the difficulties in landing a record deal were such that they had to ask Rough Trade itself to distribute them in America too, until the label's American branch went bankrupt, grotesquely forcing the band to buy back their own contract at auction.

“On Fire”: a Promethean glimpse

“[…] Sometimes I'd see a thousand blue caribou, racing across a sandstorm toward the finish line, neck and neck the whole way as if it were some natural version of the Indy 500! Flesh and blood against the elements! And I remember wondering… ‘Why are they running?’ Then one fine day I understood why that race was being held. It was all because the hair on the back of those caribou's necks was tingling with the instinctive knowledge of a fire burning not too far off, and, in all likelihood, that's exactly where they were headed. Men often get the same feeling… Like a strangely warm breeze, malevolently propelled by the devastating flames behind it. Climb aboard the blazing breeze of Galaxie 500!”

(Mark Kramer, original liner notes for “On Fire”)

Between one mini-tour organized by Kramer and the next, in the autumn of 1989 Galaxie 500 completed their masterpiece, released through Rough Trade: On Fire. Having gained full command of their instruments, the trio lets loose a powerful stream of notes, whose scorching bite and fluid, perfect flickering you can almost feel. Never on any other record do you get such a sense of precision in the outline, of clarity of intent, lending the trio's interplay an imposing, almost supernatural vitality. And, above all, a communicative urgency that hasn't just failed to fade, but has grown even more uncontainable.

You're literally swept up in a storm of the most disparate emotions, from the defenseless, powerless shyness (“Tell me one more time/ You like the shoes I like”, Dean sings a few minutes in, at the start of the second track) to the fitful restlessness of the desperate loneliness of “When Will You Come Home”, all the way to the irresistible, intoxicated confession of “Isn't A Pity” (a tribute to George Harrison).

It's the fire of an explosive humanity, whose pyre climbs ever higher until it shoots toward the sky in the opening solo of “Strange”, the band's true anthem. Something is born in that cry, something that seems to work its way through Dean's vocal cords to migrate toward other worlds, other galaxies. It's the anthem of Man, of his desperate and euphoric bewilderment in the face of other people, of the intrinsic otherness of things and events, of the constant sense of inadequacy in the face of life.

The musical backdrop is more than equal to this seething mass of suggestions. Simmering guitar interludes (“When Will You Come Home”), unexpected and intoxicating instrumental cameos, like the dialogue with the saxophone on “Decomposing Trees”. It's the unmistakable quality of reality, the sharpness of its colors, of its smells, that makes this Galaxie 500 record something that transcends the boundaries of genre, perhaps even of artistic expression itself.

Rightly so, in fact, Naomi Yang describes the recording of On Fire as the “liminal moment” between naivety and musical experience. It's also the American press – with a resounding endorsement in the Sunday supplement of the New York Times, underlining the enormous progress made by the band – that hails Galaxie 500's arrival among the greats.

You can hear it in the oblique psychedelia of “Snowstorm”, in a spirit that seems to rise above the dull, everyday weather report (“Well I listen to the weather/ And he's changed his tone of voice”), to soar, ineffable and carefree, through the lashing snow and ice, as in a sublime purification, together with the blue caribou:

Well I’m lookin at the snowflakes

That's the whole essence of Galaxie 500's Fire: it doesn't just awaken consciences, it remains, burning, to mark the path for the years to come.

Final chronicles of a pseudo-legend

In 1990, This Is Our Music arrives at a moment of grace for Galaxie 500: the success of On Fire hasn't just had the side effect of forcing them to drop out of school. Now they're able to live off their own music, and not only that: they're being courted by major labels, they're booking tours in Japan, they play together with a confidence they've never had before, and they can afford to bring Kramer along even on their European shows, among them an appearance at Glastonbury, in front of 40,000 people.

Yet, although it retains the trademarks of the band's sound – the magical interplay between soaring chords and Wareham's voice, at once pained and trembling, the stormy rumble of Krukowski's drums and cymbals, and Yang's smooth, circular basslines – This Is Our Music sounds muted, inoffensive. Even though the three musicians' growing instrumental ability is noticeable, in the unleashed sessions of “Summertime” and “Fourth Of July”, for instance – which play like a good record by seasoned stage professionals – Dean's voice acts as a reliable litmus test for the expressive difficulties at hand.

Controlled, at times almost expressionless (“Hearing Voices” sounds like a Sparhawk-style litany): it betrays a weariness that isn't nearly as pronounced in the other members of the band. And so, at the end of an American tour – on the last show they'll open for Cocteau Twins – Wareham leaves the band, without his bandmates being able to explain why. In the public's eye, Galaxie 500 come across, with odd regularity, as a band that “gave everything it had to give”, for which “three albums were probably the ideal lifespan”.

There's no telling where all this certainty comes from: what is certain is that This Is Our Music is, by Galaxie 500's standards, a mannered record. The long instrumental interludes – among them worth mentioning is the cover, sung by Naomi, of Yoko Ono's “Listen, The Snow Is Falling” – seem to cage the band in, rather than the other way around. They often resort to orchestration and showy guest appearances (the horns on “King Of Spain, Pt.2”, the flutes on “Listen, The Snow Is Falling”) in an attempt to recapture that emotional spark. With This Is Our Music they may have satisfied the critics who called them clumsy and untrained, acquiring a “musical style”, but in doing so they failed to notice that Dean's expressive spark had dimmed.

Within the band, things had indeed grown complicated: looking back, Naomi sees Galaxie 500's career as a growth in their abilities as musicians that was inversely proportional to the strength of their friendship. This is what Damon has to say on the matter, with touching candor: “The amazing thing is that, somewhere along the way, we learned how to play music. I never thought we'd pull it off. It ruined the fun of being in a band. That's the sad bottom line”. Certainly, as already noted, things looked promising: the reasons behind Wareham's departure seem far deeper than that. So deep, in fact, that they need no explanation.

As a joke, the three had hoped to reach “pseudo-legend” status, the way Kramer had been described in a newspaper article. One thing is certain: over the years Galaxie 500 have earned exactly that kind of regard in the music world. Their records are objects of devotion for fans, and they're regarded as the forefathers of entire musical movements. Galaxie 500, in short, have risen to the “pseudo-fame” of those who did something unrepeatable, something that will carry devastating importance for a few and remain buried in indifference for many.

All of this is confirmed by the 1996 release, on Rykodisc, of a fine box set of their entire output, containing their three albums plus a collection of unreleased tracks, covers, demos and live recordings titled Uncollected, later issued, in 2004, as a standalone release. Not an essential collection, except for completism's sake. Worth noting are the interesting expressive detours of the Rutles cover “Cheese And Onions”, fun and clearly having fun with itself, and in particular the unreleased version of “Blue Thunder”, which once again features Ralph Carney's tenor sax. Add to these the more direct Sonic Youth-style experiments of “Crazy”, the psych-pop of “Song In 3”, and the indie-pop that even peeks through on “Walking Song”.

It's, in short, a compendium that shows the breadth of the band's expressive potential and portrays a period in which everything seemed possible for the three New Yorkers. Uncollected then closes with a fine live set that opens with a fun cover – you can almost already hear the “noise” of britpop in it – of the Beatles's “Rain”, before landing on “Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste”, with its monstrous guitar coda.

In 2005, meanwhile, their Peel Sessions were released, half dating back to September 1989, the other half to October 1990. In this latter part – which actually opens the record – the material, four songs, consists mostly of covers. From a “controlled” yet no less intense version of Sex Pistols' “Submission”, we move to a folk-leaning rendition of Young Marble Giants' “Final Day”, sung by Naomi. It's on their own songs, though, that Galaxie 500 shine brightest. They all sound like exact replicas of the originals, but rendered more vivid by the live energy. The second half of the record – earlier in chronological terms, dating back to the release of On Fire – consists solely of the band's own songs, though among them is the cover of “Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste”. The Today songs are perhaps the most interesting of the lot, given the better production of these sessions.

It's clear, then, from the periodic reappearance of a compilation, a reissue, a collection of unreleased material, that Galaxie 500 left an indelible mark on music history – not least the 2010 remastering of their albums, reissued in a special edition. Each of them comes with a bonus disc containing, respectively, Uncollected, the Peel Sessions, and the live album Copenhagen.

Galaxie 500's music is, in short, alive and well: every relisten invariably proves that something was born in those years that still gives off light, a beacon for anyone venturing into the stormy seas of contemporary music. A light that would exist, however, even without the sea, which seems to welcome the listener with the cry: “Come ride the fiery breeze!”.

Ride the wave of great music

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