Dean Wareham: Booked & Back in Cambridge
by Bina Venkataraman on March 23, 2008 in Eight-Track's Revenge
When I asked Dean Wareham (the former frontman of indie bands Galaxie 500 and Luna, and the masculine half of Dean & Britta, if one can affix the label ‘masculine’ to someone who croons so sentimentally and effeminately) why he wrote a memoir, he said that most books he’d read about musicians’ lives on the road were “puff pieces” penned by outsiders, seldom true to experience.
At a book release party at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge on Friday night, Wareham (class of ‘85 at this university) read excerpts from Black Postcards that hint that he was bitten by the Veritas bug during his days at Harvard: In the memoir, he tells us how he grappled with his infidelity to his ex-wife, details fallings-out with former bandmates, and recounts stretches of witty banter from roadtrips with an almost-suspicious degree of detail. (Wareham kept extensive journals while touring that served as the basis for the book.)
Once criticized by The Village Voice as a “Harvard trust-fund semipopster” (does the writer think that Wareham’s education somehow counteracts his musical talent?), Wareham addressed a crowd refreshingly non-academic for this bank of the Charles.
He then performed a handful of songs, backed on bass by his wife and bandmate Britta Phillips, who though she seems to measure half the length of her Fender Precision plays it with casual elegance. He opened with “Blue Thunder” and “Hearing Voices” from the Galaxie 500 catalog, and played a simultaneously melancholy and self-mocking solo on a white kazoo. It was a treat to hear these songs; Wareham has rarely played them in live shows I’ve seen since his Luna days.
Last month I saw the couple perform in Austin with touring band (Anthony LaMarca on drums and the awesome Matt Sumrow on keyboards and synth). Their shows are not so much concerts as dream-like sonic cocoons that envelope you; you hope to emerge butterfly, but it’s relaxing so maybe a moth is fine.
Despite my affinity for his music, I was pretty suspect of a book about Wareham’s adventures on the road. My first thought was: What’s the point? I don’t mean that in a dismissive way, but maybe decades of music already tell this story, albeit nonlinearly and inexplicitly.
But Wareham, who writes,“it’s good to play shows when no one is listening” might find it equally fine to write a memoir if no one was reading.
After sleeping on the matter briefly (I had to get on a plane at 5am), I decided to buy the book. True, it’s better to listen to or live rock ‘n roll than it is to read it. But it’s magical when someone experiences and writes something well. From what I can tell, Wareham has the humor and humility to pull it off.
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