When I worked for my college newspaper years and years ago, I had the idea of tagging along when a friend’s band went on tour. I’d ride in the van, help them load in and out and generally see what it’s like to be a touring musician. As the date of the tour approached, my friend worked to convince me that this wasn’t a good idea. I don’t recall his specific argument, but it amounted to “you’ll be bored out of your mind.”

He was probably right; his argument was strong enough that I decided not to go. But now I have Dean Wareham’s memoir, Black Postcards in hand, and it makes me wish I’d gone. Sure, you don’t populate a book with the boring parts, so his account of his years with Galaxie 500 and Luna is a bit skewed in favor of the exciting bits, but it still captures the romance of the road, and makes me wish I’d been a bit more adventurous in my youth.

For fans of what evolved from college rock to alternative to indie to whatever it’s called today, the book is a mother lode of information and backstage gossip. Wareham is most focused on his own bands, of course, but the two groups came into contact with a wide swath of the indie-rock world, and Wareham doesn’t hold back when sharing his thoughts – good and bad – about his peers.

For those of us who were fans of his bands, the book serves as the dream liner notes to a career. Why did Galaxie 500 split? Why was this song on this album? Why did this member quit? It’s all here, and in surprisingly crisp detail. Wareham is a smart guy who obviously has thought about his vocation to a high degree, and his thoughts are amusing, illuminating and somewhat sobering in spots.

The hook for the book – as evidenced by the subtitle, “A Rock ’n’ Roll Romance” – is the fact that Wareham fell in love with his bass player, left his wife and toddler son, broke up his band and embarked on a new personal and professional relationship. It’s a sad story that could probably be applied to hundreds of touring musicians with only an altered detail or two, but one with a hopeful ending in the form of a creative rebirth with Dean & Britta. It gives what could have been a standard rock memoir and/or tour diary a bit of emotional heft. This isn’t exactly “Behind the Music,” but it does make the story more worthy of publication by a big house than it might have otherwise.

Wareham took the time to answer a few questions about the book, his bands and the future.

TIRBD: Do you find it strange that a major reason Luna broke up was the inability to ever move to the next level careerwise, yet a major publisher is willing to sink money into publishing and promoting a book that is at least partially about that lack of commercial success?

DW: The publishing world is new to me, but I have to think they know what they are doing. As for the record business, on one level you could argue that Luna suffered from a lack of commercial success, because we never had a multi-platinum hit album, and that is what all major labels are looking for. But if you broke down the numbers from our years at Elektra, you would find that even as the band sank slowly into a pit of "debt,” we were selling hundreds of thousands of compact discs, and with licensing money on top of that the Warner Music Group did just fine with Luna. But the expectations are so different in the music business than in book publishing. 100,000 books would make your book a bestseller, but 100,000 copies of our second CD was considered promising, but not exactly a success.

Given the level of detail in some of your tour recollections, I assume you kept a pretty detailed tour journal. What was the motivation for that, and if at any time that motivation involved a project like this, did that have an affect on what you chose to record?

I kept a detailed journal in my late teens and early twenties, from my years at Harvard through the time in Galaxie 500. I'm not sure why I was did that (because I was lonely?), but I was sure glad to find those diaries in a box when I started writing the book. Then there was a period of five years, covering the first three Luna albums, where I didn't keep a regular journal -- all I had was tour itineraries and the music, and my own recollections. So I skipped through those years pretty quickly (to the chagrin of certain fans who have complained that I don't talk enough about the making of the second Luna album, or what it was like to meet Tom Verlaine). With the advent of the Internet revolution we launched a Luna website, fuzzywuzzy.com, and I started posting tour diaries on the site - I was writing again. But the official tour diaries were sanitized - there were incidents that were not fit for public consumption, indeed, things that I wouldn't even mention in my own private journal.

I kept waiting for the moment when you put down the drugs and talked about getting clean and sober and healthy (just like seemingly every other performer with a tale like this to tell), but it never came. Any thoughts about that, or better yet, second thoughts about that thread being simply one of many that make up the fabric of the story rather than a sort of through-line cautionary tale?

Maybe it appears from the book that I was ingesting vast quantities of drugs, because those nights made for some funny stories. Sure, I might have done a line or two of cocaine if someone offered it to me after a show (a fan perhaps, or someone from the record company, or management), and I certainly had a few drinks every night while on tour, but we didn't not travel around the country with a bus full of liquor and drugs, nor did we take drugs while we were in the studio -- we were there to make music, not to party.

So I don't feel like I have to apologize for having a good time once in a while (though certainly I saw other people very close to me whose lives were derailed by drug use). For the cautionary drug stories, I recommend the recent rock memoirs by Slash, Nikki Sixx, and Eric Clapton -- former junkies all. I was a mere dabbler.

There seems to be no love lost between you and dozens of your peers. I lost count of the number of people who are dismissed with a cutting remark, from bandmates to tourmates to casual acquaintances. It's one thing to feel this way, it's another to express those feelings so publicly and permanently. Any trepidation about that? Any backlash?

With respect to my peers, perhaps I was opinionated, but it's just music we're talking about -- and I don't have to pretend that I liked Lenny Kravitz or Bono. I don't imagine they would care too much what I think anyway. I was more concerned about my ex-bandmates. But being in a rock and roll band is about conflict. You push and shove, and argue about small things and large ones - that is an essential part of the experience. I made an effort be as fair and objective as I could, but I wanted to go into the conflict in some detail, to bring out the humor and the drama, not just gloss over it while citing the standard "musical and personal differences." At any rate, if I made cutting remarks, I made them about myself also.

Looking back on your career like this, do you see any points at which you wonder about the path not taken and where you might be otherwise? If so, where did these occur and what do you imagine might have been the ultimate destination of those alternate paths?

I could spend days trying to answer this question. I guess I could have taken a job working in the trading department at Chase Manhattan Bank in 1986, and my life might have turned out very differently indeed. But I didn't.

Spending this much time analyzing your own songwriting, recording and performing, will you approach future endeavors in all three arenas any differently?

Since I'm not in a rock band anymore, and I am no longer signed to a seven-record deal, I can take my time making records. I am no longer on an annual cycle of writing songs, making a new record, touring to support it, and then starting all over again. And with the changes in technology, I do more of the recording at home, on my own time. Songwriting does not get any easier, but with the two Dean & Britta albums I've chosen to record half original material and half covers, and it is easier to write six new songs than twelve, so I think I may stick with this formula - which is what everyone did before the Beatles started writing all their own material.

It isn't clear from your recounting of your earliest days as a musician whether you always wanted to be a professional musician or if it just became what you did because other people responded to it. What that your career goal coming out of high school or college, or did you have other plans? Was there ever a real long-term fall-back position?

I thought about going to grad school after graduating college, studying anthropology - but when I read Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss, and he talked about bees crawling up his nose while he slept by the banks of the Amazon, I changed my mind. I didn't dare to think that I could be a professional musician - this notion would have seemed absurd in America in 1986 (though perhaps not so ridiculous in England). And anyway, I could barely play the guitar at that point, how could I be a professional musician? But then you learn (and perhaps this is the lesson of punk rock) that you don't have to be amazing players to cook up something beautiful. Still, I think in Galaxie 500 we were surprised every step of the way: surprised that we recorded a seven-inch single that sounded so perfect, and an album that we were really proud of, surprised when the record was played on college radio, amazed that Slash Records and Rough Trade wanted to sign the band.

Do you have a favorite rock 'n' roll and/or tour memoir other than your own?

I really liked Dee Dee Ramone's memoir, Lobotomy, and Dylan's Chronicles. And White Bicycles by folk producer Joe Boyd. But my favorite book about a rock star is Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo, which is of course a work of fiction.

Labels: books, Monday Interview, music