Formed in: 1987, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Key Albums: Today (1988), On Fire (1989), This is Our Music (1990)
Galaxie 500 are one of the great cult acts in alternative music history. Together for only four years, the band released three timeless LPs of stately guitar-rock. Openly evoking the New Yorker lore of the Velvet Underground and the Modern Lovers, their slow, sad, beautiful take on swirling, gentle psychedelia was rapturously praised in its time, and would became a huge influence on the slowcore movement.
Background
Galaxie 500 began at the Dalton School in New York City in 1981, when New Zealand ex-pat Dean Wareham became friends with fellow theater-student Damon Krukowski and his girlfriend, Naomi Yang. Krukowski and Wareham would, as freshmen at Harvard, form a short-lived, shambolic band called Speedy and the Castanets, in which Krukowski played drums and Wareham guitar.
Four years later, after graduation, Wareham had returned to New York, and Krukowski and Yang ventured up in the summer of 1987. Yang, inspired by Peter Hook of Joy Division/New Order, had picked up the bass guitar, and the trio decided to start a band.
"I remember standing in Bleecker Bob's with Dean and Naomi the summer we first started playing, when Dean found a single by an old high school teacher of ours in the bargain bin," Krukowski recounted, in the liner notes of Galaxie 500's Box Set. "We thought it was extremely cool, as well as extremely funny, to have a single by your old band in the bargain bin, and we set that as our future goal."
Beginnings
Galaxie 500 played their first 'show' at Wareham's apartment; a 20 minute set in front of friends. After that, they recorded a demo cassette at 6/8 Studios in New York. When Yang and Krukowski returned to grad school in Boston, Wareham followed, and Galaxie 500 became a committed concern. They played their first proper show on October 1, 1987, at Chet's Last Call; "a place anyone could get booked," Yang recalled, "because it was really just a cover for a drug operation."
After five months of low-wattage shows around Boston, Galaxie 500 ventured to Noise New York studios to record with Kramer, the infamous mastermind of Bongwater. "Kramer later said he thought we were retarded when he first heard us bashing out those chords," Wareham would recount, in his memoir Black Postcards.
Drenching their rudimentary, two-chord songs —openly inspired by the Modern Lovers, The Feelies, and the Velvet Underground— in echo and delay, Kramer contributed greatly to the singular, unique sound that Galaxie 500 had stumbled upon. Signing to the fledgling Aurora label, they released their first single, "Tugboat," on clear blue vinyl. It would go on to become one of the band's signature songs.
Galaxie 500 would return to Noise New York to record their debut LP over the course of three days. Crowned "the guitar album of 1988" by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth upon its release, Today slowly accrued a critical following and an appreciative audience. It lead them to influential English indie Rough Trade, who signed the band in 1989.
Arrival
Rough Trade released Today in England in June, 1989, and Galaxie 500 instantly became the darlings of the UK music press. They had yet to make it further West than Chicago, and only completed one tour in their homeland, but the trio were now playing at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Kramer accompanied them as live sound-man and sometimes fourth-member, giving Galaxie 500's still-shaky shows more of the qualities they had on record.
Half of their second album was already completed by then, and in August they finished off what would be their magnum opus, On Fire. Capturing the band's tender, tentative, swirling sound at its best, the album resounded with a quiet perfection; and, in the UK, it was praised for such. With that critical push, On Fire reached #7 on the UK Independent Charts. Six months later, Galaxie 500 were already recording their third, and final album, 1990's This Is Our Music.
Break-up and Bitterness
As Galaxie 500 grew into a business, and the low-rent touring started to take its toll, frictions began to grow in the band; a schism forming between Yang and Krukowski, still a couple, and Wareham.
After larger tours opening for The Sundays, the Cocteau Twins, and Throwing Muses, Wareham quit the band in 1991, bringing Galaxie 500 to an abrupt end. Wareham soon moved onto his own project, Luna, which signed to a major-label, Elektra.
Yang and Krukowski took longer to rebound. "It really felt like he had killed this creature that we had all invented together, and of course the fact that we had been friends for so long and had been through so much; it was such a rotten way to end it all," Yang recounted, to Ptolemaic Terrorscope. "It also felt, at the time, like he had taken away our musical voice."
Though the rhythm-section would soon start working as Damon & Naomi, that resentment lingered, and Galaxie 500 hashed out their post-breakup blues in public. "The ending of it all was so clouded with anger and hurt and confusion that all the good and happens which had come before got washed away," Yang wrote, in the liner-notes to the four-disc that came out in 1996. A gorgeous artifact with artwork by Yang, the posthumous celebration of their work was assembled with the two factions still not on speaking terms.
Legacy
Like many bands whose time was fleeting —or actors who died young and left a beautiful corpse— Galaxie 500 have left behind an evergreen legacy. Their timeless music hasn't come in and out of fashion in the years since, but remained constantly praised; and its influence on the slowcore movement of the early-'90s was hugely important.
And, in another rare quality, all three of their albums are really, really good; there not a misstep or clunker amongst them. "Galaxie 500 records have held up really well for, now, 20 years,” Wareham told me, in a 2009 interview. "Because we didn’t sound like anyone else around at that time.”
