Galaxie 500

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Galaxie 500
Background information
Genre(s) Slowcore
Dream Pop
Shoegaze
Years active 1988 – 1991
Label(s) Aurora
Rough Trade
Former members
Dean Wareham
Damon Krukowski
Naomi Yang
This article is about the US alternative rock band. For other uses, see Galaxie (disambiguation).

Galaxie 500 was a seminal slowcore/shoegaze guitar band from the late 1980s.

Contents

[edit] History

Album cover for On Fire
Album cover for On Fire

Guitarist Dean Wareham, drummer Damon Krukowski and bassist Naomi Yang began playing together during their time as students at Harvard University. In their early years, Krukowski didn't own a drum kit, so he borrowed one from his Harvard classmate Conan O'Brien, who'd bought a kit but had recently given up playing it. This drum kit can be heard on many of Galaxie 500's early recordings. In interviews on the Galaxie 500 DVD "Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste", Wareham cites the Spacemen 3 as another key inspiration. The band's name comes from a Ford car of the 1960s, the Ford Galaxie 500.

Galaxie 500 leveraged fairly minimal instrumental technique with intense atmospherics, provided by producer Mark Kramer, and their distinctive sound bore an influence beyond the small audience for their independently released albums. With Kramer's live sound production at the mixing board at the band's every gig, the sound and the increasingly loyal audience grew with each release until Wareham quit the band in 1991 to form Luna.

Krukowski and Yang, devastated by Wareham's departure, remained inactive for two years until Kramer convinced them to return to his Noise New Jersey recording studio. They continued to record under the moniker Damon and Naomi (whose first two releases were also produced by Kramer), and additionally began the avant-garde press Exact Change.

Galaxie 500's records were released in the US and UK on the independent Rough Trade label. When Rough Trade went bankrupt in 1991, the group purchased the masters at auction, reissuing them on Ryko in 1997.

[edit] Cover Material

The group's oeuvre included a fair amount of cover songs, often with arrangements that were drastically different from their original counterparts. These include:

[edit] Trivia

  • In Liz Phair's song "Stratford-on-Guy," she sings, "And I was pretending that I was in a Galaxie 500 video." [1]
  • The Submarines did a cover of "Tugboat" in their recent iTunes Live Session EP, recorded with famed indie rock producer Adam Lassus (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah).


[edit] Discography

[edit] Albums

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  • Today (1988)
  • On Fire (1989)
  • This Is Our Music (1990)
  • Copenhagen [Live] (1997)
  • The Portable Galaxie 500 [Best of] (1998)
  • Uncollected [Rarities] (2004)
  • Galaxie 500 Peel Sessions [Radio Broadcasts from 1989 and 1990 on the BBC's John Peel Show] (2005) (#200 U.S.) Sales: 1,002 RIAA Certification: N/A

[edit] Singles

  • "Tugboat" (1988)
  • "Blue Thunder" (1989)
  • "Fourth of July" (1990)

[edit] DVD

  • Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste (2004)

[edit] External links

  • A Head Full of Wishes – comprehensive site that includes a discography, lyrics, tablature, and a tour and setlist archive.
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