Galaxie 500 at the Unisphere, Flushing Meadow Park, Queens, NY. (Photo: Renaud Monfourny)
As I noted last week, I’m thrilled to have the U.S. paperback edition of Lou Reed: The King of New York out in the world. A while back, the New York Times excerpted a section of it — about the limbo of Lou’s years between his quitting the Velvet Underground in 1970 and the start of his solo career. You can read that here, to get a taste of the book.
I was emailing with a Brazilian journalist about Reed this week, and he asked what bands I liked that were influenced by Reed and the Velvets. There are so many! As I told him, high up among my favorites was Galaxie 500, the NYC prep-school trio of Dean Wareham, Naomi Yang and Damon Krukowski. The band didn’t last long, roughly three years, with three LPs to show for it. Wareham peeled off to start Luna, and now performs with his partner Britta Phillips as Dean & Britta. Yang and Krukowski formed Damon & Naomi. (Symmetrical, yes?)
Recently, the Galaxie 500 archives were plumbed for Uncollected Noise New York ’88-’90, a wonderful double-disc selection of b-sides, outtakes, and other rarities that, given how few records they made, stands as one of their best albums, and an excellent introduction to their magic. (My friend Joe Gross said “I would rank this just behind On Fire and in front of the other two.” And Joe is rarely wrong.)
Here’s a gift link to Jon Pareles’ excellent NY Times piece on the band’s history and Uncollected Noise New York ’88-’90. Below are two songs included on on the set. “Fourth of July” is their signature, and arguably their best original. “Here She Comes Now,” of course, is a cover of the Velvet Underground song.
Krukowski, a comp-lit major in grad school, has run a small press with Yang for decades now, Exact Change, devoted to “experimental literature with an emphasis on Surrealism, Dada, Pataphysics, and other nineteenth and twentieth century avant-garde art movements.” Unsurprisingly, he’s also a great writer, and has an excellent Substack, Dada Drummer Almanach:
I saw Damon & Naomi perform last year at a small club in upstate New York (Tubby’s in Kingston, one of the best music bars on the planet). They were wonderful; catch ‘em if you can. Dean & Britta have been busy doing great work, too, playing live soundtracks to Andy Warhol films, and recording an album of holiday music with Sonic Boom of Spacemen 3, due out next month. Britta described it as “Bing Crosby on acid.” And based on their cover of the Willie Nelson/Roy Orbison classic “Pretty Paper,” that sounds about right.
Speaking of the holidays, I’m getting lots of tips on forthcoming reissues and box sets, for you folks still attached to physical media (I’m certainly one of y’all). I’m psyched to hear the cleaned-up ‘77 CBGBs bootleg being released in this forthcoming maximalist reissue of Talking Heads ‘77, which is due out next month. There’s other unreleased stuff in it, too. I’d heard the alternate version of “Psycho Killer” recorded with the great Arthur Russell, who I wrote about in Love Goes To Buildings On Fire. (There was a wonderful new book about him published earlier this year, too.) I dig his cello on the recording (below), and the more unplugged arrangement. David Byrne does, too, as he noted recently:
“We knew cellist and singer/songwriter Arthur Russell from the downtown world. He died early from AIDS, and during his life, he released very disparate records—spacey tunes on the album ‘World of Echo’ and disco club tunes under the name Dinosaur L. He left a huge legacy of recordings, which are still filtering out 40 years after his passing. I remember seeing him play Philip Glass music for a Mabou Mines production of a Beckett play. I think Beckett's folks hated it, as they didn't want there to be music in his plays. So it wasn't a huge stretch that we'd invite Arthur to arrange and play on an alternate version of “Psycho Killer.” Somewhat perversely, I always saw the song as being a slightly more intimate folk rock thing rather than the rock song that folks seemed to love. So I had a special attachment to this version.”
Finally, one of the great musical experiences I’ve had in my life was seeing the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and his Party (as his fellow singers were called) perform qawwali songs — Sufi Islamic gospel music, basically — back in the ‘90s. Like a lot of folks, I was introduced to his music via Mustt Mustt, the “fusion” LP he and his group did for Peter Gabriel’s Real World label. That record, and his performances, would influence many singers outside of his tradition, most famously Jeff Buckley (who, rather astonishingly, covered a song of his on the breakout Live at Siné EP) and Eddie Vedder, who recorded with Khan for the Dead Man Walking soundtrack (Khan also contributed to Gabriel’s magnificent soundtrack for Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ).
It turns out that, circa 1989-90, Khan recorded an album’s worth of more traditional qawwali performances at Gabriel’s studio as a sort of warm-up for the Mustt Mustt LP. It was lost, but now it’s found, and the label issued Chain of Light last month. I think it’s even more potent than Mustt Mustt. Below is a short film, with Gabriel, about the tape vault discovery at Real World Studios — I always wondered what his place looked like — followed by a track from the new record.
Be well, listen deeply, enjoy — Will
Great news about the new Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan! Thanks for sharing. I had the good fortune to see a brilliant show of his at a theater in Chicago around '96-97.