sarramkrop

article by mike baker

Galaxie 500's kinship with the Velvet Underground isn't limited to musical parallels. The group, founded in Boston in the late 1980s, was far more successful after its break-up than it was over the span of its three full-length releases -- Today (1988), On Fire (1989) and This Is Our Music (1990).
Overshadowed by the behemoth Pixies at the time of their greatest successes and subsequent swan song, Galaxie 500 are once again battling those alt-rock giants in the summer of 2004. The release of Plexifilm's video anthology Don't Let Our Yourth Go To Waste: Galaxie 500 1987-1991 arrives in the midst of a Pixies reunion, an irony that is far from lost on members Damon Krukowski, Dean Wareham and Naomi Yang. But the Plexifilm collection, which includes all four of the band's videos (all directed by friend and collaborator Sergio Huidor), five full-length concert performances, two bootleg concerts from the band's final year of touring and a rarely-seen UK television performance, once again puts the band in the center of a maelstrom, as fans and critics argue for Galaxie 500's legendary status within the history of alternative music.
Galaxie 500 frontman Dean Wareham (now of Luna) and drummer Damon Krukowski (now of Damon & Naomi) spoke to Splendid about the release of the Plexifilm anthology, and discussed the group's history and ever-expanding legacy. · · · · · · ·

Splendid: Dean, for readers who are unfamiliar with the band's history, could you offer a quick summary of how you, Damon, and Naomi all met?
Dean Wareham: I moved to the US from New Zealand in 1977 and went to high school in New York City with Damon and Naomi. We all wound up going to Harvard together -- I studied the social sciences -- and we started Galaxie 500 after graduation. We were about twenty-three when we started doing it.
Splendid: So who finished their degrees?
Dean Wareham: We all finished our degrees, which is the opposite of the standard story. Galaxie 500 didn't start until after we all already had our degrees, and when we started the band Naomi was in architecture school, which I guess she did not finish, and Damon was a grad student as well -- Comparative Literature, I think. He didn't finish that either, so the band did destroy their academic careers. (laughs)
Splendid: How did the Plexifilm disc come together, and what was the motivation?
Damon Krukowski: We had these videotapes that were not only unreleased but unwatched -- there was a pile of tapes in the closet. Dean had some too. The idea had sort of been bouncing around for a little while. Since the format had come in, Naomi and I were attracted to DVDs -- VHS tape just always seemed like such a crappy format. DVDs are very appealing. Naomi made a DVD for our last album on Sub Pop, Song to the Siren, a live CD packaged with a DVD that Naomi created -- it was a tour diary. In putting that together, she had authored the disc as well, so we learned how to make a DVD from scratch. We were just enjoying the format and we'd never owned a TV until we bought a DVD player, so it was partly that, actually. And then there were these tapes, and we had the feeling that if we didn't compile the material, someone else will, meaning it would just be bootlegged, which is okay with us but we had material that no one else had. And just as we did when we put out a live Galaxie 500 album, Copenhagen, we felt like we would like to make the choice and make the best possible presentation that we can. Dean was very into it also, so we all catalogued what we had and made dupes and showed everything to each other.
Dean Wareham: We started looking at the tapes and found all the stuff that we didn't even know existed, including a bunch of bootlegs that had been bought at various places -- but some of them were just too awful to include. Some of them, though poor quality, had something going on in them. The London show, for example, doesn't look so good, but it actually sounds good.
AUDIO: Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste
Splendid: Is it safe to assume that Rykodisc was supportive of the project as a way of boosting the catalogue?
Damon Krukowski: Absolutely, but we took it to Plexifilm instead of Ryko because Naomi and I have a history with the people at Plexi before they were "Plexi". The person who runs it, Gary Hustwit, used to run a book publishing company, and Naomi and I have a book publishing company called Exact Change -- Gary's former company and ours went through the same distributor. We used to see each other at trade fairs and business things so we actually knew each other from before he was even doing DVDs. So that was another thing that happened -- we had an eye on what he was doing with Plexi and we thought it was a great program that he had and we felt it was very comfortable place for the Galaxie 500 stuff.

Splendid: It's probably fair to say that the growing prestige of being associated with Plexi will probably come to mean something very different than if your DVD was just another catalogue release on a record label.
Damon Krukowski: I agree. And I really like what they're doing, the mix of music and interesting cultural artifacts from avant-garde film to the Christo release (Five Films About Christo and Jeanne-Claude) -- I like the whole spirit of the collection and it didn't feel like we were inserting it into the context of those straight-ahead music video compilations that are being spit out a lot right now. With good reason, I suppose, because DVDs are a great format for this stuff.
Splendid: I would argue that Sergio Huidor's work fits quite well with the Plexifilm aesthetic -- his videos are the sort of experimental fare that Plexi is exploring on other releases.
Damon Krukowski: I think that's a very nice point.



the rest on here: http://www.splendidmagazine.com/features/galaxie/