“It definitely is like childhood photos,†says former Galaxie 500 bassist Naomi Yang, “because I recognize that person. I was there, but that was a long time ago.â€
She’s talking about Uncollected Noise New York ‘88-‘90, the new collection that fills in her old band’s back story by gathering loads of outtakes and heretofore unheard recordings from the few precious years the trio was together making indie rock history.
In the 30-plus years since they split, with singer/guitarist Dean Wareham going on to form Luna while Yang and drummer Damon Krukowski moved forward as Damon & Naomi, Galaxie 500 have grown in stature. In the lambent glow of their unhurried, soft-focus sound they’ve long been hailed as pioneers of slowcore and dream pop, forerunners of everybody from Low and Mazzy Star to Beach House and Lana Del Rey.
But back in the day, they mostly felt like outsiders. “We felt like what we were doing was a little bit left-field,†says Yang. “It didn’t feel like what everyone else did. The first time we played in Chicago someone threw a bottle at Dean. No one called anything slowcore or dream pop then—there was just indie rock or college rock. At the time it felt like we were doing something weird. I guess maybe it still is kind of weird. It’s not for everyone, but some people really get it.â€
Enough people continue to “get it†that a literal dive into a dusty closet belonging to Yang and Krukowski (longtime partners in life as well as music) was warranted to finally unearth all the secret history contained on the old Galaxie 500 master tapes. Howlin Rain frontman Ethan Miller’s Silver Current Records partnered with the band members to tell the whole story for the first time.
“The band ended in ‘91 and there was a Rykodisc box set in ‘96,†recounts Yang. “At that time, we had decided as a band not to put out all these other tracks. It was too close to the band having broken up…maybe we felt like it was gonna confuse people. We thought about it again so many years later and it was like, ‘Okay, let’s just put it out in the world.’ We didn’t have to feel precious about it.â€
Pretty much every phase of Galaxie 500’s evolution occurred at Noise New York, the Tribeca studio of mononymous producer, Bongwater co-founder, and Shimmy-Disc Records owner Kramer. The band had only been together a matter of months when they first visited there in February 1988.
2 x Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), Cassette
The trio became friends while attending the same NYC high school and they all went on to Harvard, where Wareham and Krukowski formed their first band. After graduation, they started Galaxie 500 with bass newbie Yang. “I was listening to a lot of Peter Hook’s basslines in Joy Division,†recalls Yang, “Kendra Smith in The Dream Syndicate… In sort of punk rock fashion, I was like, ‘I don’t play bass, but I could buy a bass and I could try and learn it.’â€
After a few months of gigging in Boston and New York the new band made a fateful decision. “There was a Jad Fair record [Half Japanese’s Kramer-produced Music to Strip By] that we liked a lot,†remembers Yang. “And Dean read an interview with Kramer in a fanzine, where he said he had a studio… We decided to try that rather than using a studio in Boston. We didn’t know what we were in for,†she laughs.
The band was still finding its feet, trying to channel their influences into a new paradigm, with The Velvet Underground, The Feelies, and early Yo La Tengo as their starting point. “Early on, we were also listening to the Paisley Underground bands from L.A. like the Dream Syndicate and Rain Parade,†says Yang. “Dean had a lot of music from New Zealand because that’s where he was from, and his older brother was sending cassettes back, so we were listening to those with him.â€
The three relative naifs’ first experience of the studio that would become their artistic crucible was pretty anticlimactic. “It was in a loft space in Tribeca up two or three flights of stairs,†reports Yang, “and there was no elevator, so you had to carry all your gear up these really steep steps… It was just this big empty space; there wasn’t a lot of fancy soundproofing. There was nothing fancy about it.â€
Kramer’s combination of outsized personality and unpredictability didn’t exactly make for a welcoming vibe either. “He would disappear and then he would reappear an hour or two later, and we would work and then he would disappear again,†recalls Yang. “We never knew what was going to happen or what his mood was or what the schedule was going to be.â€
Despite moving in mysterious ways, Kramer was strong-willed in the studio. It was in response to his forcefulness that Galaxie 500 came to find their way as a working unit. “His aesthetic was one of first takes,†explains Yang. “We had very few takes of anything and there were a lot of accidents in all the tracks. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, go redo it and get it better.’ We learned to prepare for it. We kept coming back because we loved what happened when we were with him. So, we would rehearse intensely, knowing that we might only get one take of a song. As we got older and had more experience we started wanting to have a few more opinions about the production, and Kramer sometimes would let us, but it was always a challenge to have input. He knew how he wanted to do things.â€
Of course, the band didn’t discover its identity right off the bat—and part of the idea behind this collection is letting fans in on the search. “Those were the tracks that we were like, ‘Maybe this isn’t quite the right direction,’†says Yang. “But it’s interesting to hear them now…the albums are kind of what we curated from what was happening in that room. This collection is everything from Kramer’s studio.â€
“Shout You Down†from that first session, heard here for the first time ever, is speedier and more forceful than what we know now as Galaxie 500’s languorous signature sound. “When I was listening back to it, I was thinking about how much we loved The Feelies and were trying to sound like The Feelies,†Yang confesses. “At that point we were really wearing our influences on our sleeves. But it’s also interesting to hear myself playing bass, I was still figuring out how I wanted to play.â€
You can hear all three members feeling their way towards a style that made the most of the least. “It’s just a kind of a tightrope act that you have to do as a trio,†says Yang, “especially live. Live, when Dean went to play a lead on guitar there was no rhythm guitar, and bass and drums had to do something that would hold that space. We just worked with what we had.â€
Consequently, Yang became the melodic fulcrum whenever there were no vocals or guitar solos. Her tuneful, upper register lines were a defining element of Galaxie 500. “When I first picked up the bass,†she says, “people showed me conventionally ‘This is what a bass player might play here.’ And those things seemed very boring and repetitive to me—the bass staying as a foundation and not wandering around. I just wanted to wander around. Damon was raised listening to jazz, so on the drums he was much more influenced by all the jazz he listened to growing up than straight-ahead rock drummers.â€
You can hear the band stretch its wings beyond the typical 4/4 rock beat for the first time on the July ‘88 session’s “Song in 3,†one of the tracks that was only out before on the 1996 box. “That felt very technical,†laughs Yang, “I think it felt like, ‘Oh wow, look, we’re playing something in three! We even named it that, it’s so funny, because we were so impressed with ourselves. But I always loved the trance-like quality of that song, the circular feeling of it.â€
A cover of New Order’s debut single, “Ceremony,†from the February ‘89 session, was only ever available on a 1990 EP and as a CD bonus track. Yang finally got to dig into those Peter Hook basslines she loved so much, and the original’s emotional chilliness finds fruitful contrast in Galaxie 500’s version. The tune is slowed almost to ballad territory and the emotional temperature is upped several degrees, highlighting the warmth that always emanated from the band’s core.
2 x Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), Cassette
“I knew I wasn’t playing it exactly like Peter Hook,†says Yang, “but we never tried to do that with covers. I love being able to transform a song that I love into something else. I think that’s a great thing to be able to do with covers. You sort of inhabit a song and yet you make it your own. I think [“Ceremonyâ€] was from the Joy Division era but then New Order did it. It was a song that sort of floated between the two bands, maybe that’s what intrigued us about it.â€
Another cover, this one from the band’s final Noise New York session of June 1990, brings both their sense of humor and taste for psychedelia into focus. Their version of The Rutles’s psych pastiche “Cheese and Onions,†never included on a Galaxie 500 album, gave both band and producer a chance to trip out.
“Kramer was doing a Rutles cover record [1990’s Rutles Highway Revisited],†recalls Yang, “so all different bands were choosing Rutles songs. The Rutles of course was a parody of The Beatles, and Kramer was a huge Beatles fan. So, Kramer had this encyclopedic sense of the Beatles records and how they’d been produced. We heard ‘Cheese and Onions’ and we laughed because to us it sounded like a parody of us—slow tempos, mournful singing—and so we decided we would do that as sort of poking a little bit of fun at ourselves as well. And of course, it was perfect for Kramer to be producing it, because he just went full Beatles/Rutles. Listening back to it always makes me laugh.â€
When Damon and Naomi went rummaging for Galaxie 500’s complete Noise New York masters, it was a total trip into the past. “We hadn’t opened them up since the ‘90s,†says Yang. “They’re all big reel-to-reel tapes, it’s not like we would just listen to them for fun.â€
Focusing on the tapes now, Yang can hear flashes of the Galaxie 500 sound even from the beginning, singling out the first session’s gentle, unassuming “Can’t Believe It’s Me†as the earliest example. “It sounds very Velvet Underground-y,†she allows, “It sounded like things we were listening to, but also didn’t sound like anything we’d heard, and I think those are the moments that are exciting. On the second album, On Fire, there was a lot more of that happening, because we were sort of looking for it. By the third album we knew more what we were doing but we were also trying to be a bit more expansive. By that time Damon and I had heard Can, we had heard more experimental, open-ended music and we were looking to that.â€
But for both newcomers and completists, Uncollected Noise New York reveals a lot about a band whose influence outweighs its renown. “Hopefully, people who don’t know the band at all will just learn about the band from this,†ventures Yang. “People who know the band, I guess there’s a kind of great innocence to listening to all these tracks. I think it’s kind of fantastic we had them stored away for all these years so there could be something you hear now that you never heard before…that view into a young band looking for their sound. And finding it.â€
