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.

Splendid: Tell me a little about the original life of the work.

Damon Krukowski: You have to put yourself back in the mindset of that era, which was before there was any commercial life to any of the bands that we were associated with. What became known as "independent music" wasn't even known as that -- it was "college rock". It wasn't even a genre, really -- it was just everything that no one else was paying attention to. Really -- no one was paying attention. So a lot of stuff was happening across these informal networks that were locally based, city-by-city, scene-by-scene, and there were bridges across the scenes only when people went on tour. This was pre-internet and email, and pre- any kind of commercial or national companies paying attention to this stuff. So it was really just a series of networks attached through independent record stores which were also still very modest businesses in comparison to what happened to some of them. It was a very different time. When we did the videos, Sergio was Naomi's friend from the art department at school -- they had painting classes together and Sergio was into film. MTV was on the air but they were playing Prince -- except even those videos were very low-rent back then -- and we just thought it would be a funny idea to make a video. So we asked Sergio to do it and he used the school's stuff and did whatever he could. And then we stuck by him. Rough Trade gave us a budget -- in England the commercial life of both the band and this kind of music was very different, because over there they actually had places they could air the video. Over here there was 120 Minutes on MTV and there was the outside chance that it might get on once. So we just kept giving the budget to Sergio and saying, "Do whatever you want." And that's what he did.

Dean Wareham: 120 Minutes used to run on MTV from midnight to 2:00 a.m. on Sunday nights. And the Galaxie 500 videos probably each got played three times. "Tugboat" would have never been played.

Splendid: I was going to ask about that, since the quality of the work improves vastly after that first experiment.

Dean Wareham: "Tugboat" was made for $150 or something.

Splendid: But for all their artfulness, was there a conscious awareness of their value as a marketing tool?

Dean Wareham: Well, at least they weren't too expensive to make. I think they were worthwhile as a marketing tool because I think people used to tune into that show on Sunday nights to see what was going on.

Damon Krukowski: But there wasn't much of a commercial life for them. It was really about having the opportunity to make something with our friend. Just like the way we were making the records with Kramer, it was a collaboration.

Splendid: So the process was really based on that friendship? Allowing for him to explore the materials after the fact, et cetera...

Damon Krukowski: For sure, and that's what Sergio was doing at the time with his own films at school. It was all found material that he was cutting up --putting the band in was what made it a music video. Although I remember saying to him, "You don't have to put the band in." But he wanted to. He filmed us four times for those videos, each time in our rehearsal space -- it didn't change. It was the same room from start to finish. There are outside shots in the first one, but the inside shots in the first one and all the shots of the band in the other three videos were taken in the same 10' x 10' practice space.

Dean Wareham: It was completely hands off and that is the much more pleasant way of doing it, actually. We didn't sit over his shoulder and tell him what to do during the editing or anything. Sergio picked all the stuff out. When you're on a major label it's a really unpleasant experience making videos because it's the focus of everyone's anxieties at the record label. With a lot of the Luna videos, they wanted to sell records so badly and if they could just have the perfect video... so much pressure is put on the final product. And so much money is spent on it.

Splendid: Did you find that the visual imagery that Sergio was exploring fit in with the sort of nostalgic bent of the Galaxie 500 cover art?

Dean Wareham: I just think they create this strange alternate universe -- which he was able to do on the cheap by hanging up and shooting through Mylar, projecting through negative, et cetera. The footage is just us in our rehearsal space that has been tampered with in one way or another, interspersed with stolen images -- some of them quite horrific. So, in fact, the videos play against the music. They're pretty violent. At the time, we were told by the record company to re-cut the video for "When Will You Come Home" because MTV refused to play it because of the footage of animals in cages. It was actually animal liberation footage.

Damon Krukowski: I think the idea with the videos is to work against the grain, and Sergio has a very contrarian streak in him -- he really revelled in the idea of taking our sweet approach to a lot of our music and pairing it with really aggressive and violent, even offensive, images. I think that was part of Sergio's technique, to work these opposites together. And it really worked. But the key to those videos is listening to the lyrics. Well, two things that I think Sergio is really careful about: one is the rhythm -- his cuts are incredibly rhythmic and I think he had a great sense of time and key into the rhythms in the songs. His videos actually lend them more rhythmic interest than some of those songs have, even now, as if it were another percussion track. And the second thing is that he's really listening to the lyrics and he sometimes makes laughably obvious associations with the lyrics, and sometimes very obscure leaps of logic, but I think he's really tying images to the lyrics. But the mood of it was very much Sergio's, it was not Galaxie 500's -- we didn't have exploding things on our record covers.

Splendid: Does the sophistication of Sergio's last two videos reflect the improving confidence of the Galaxie 500 sound?

Damon Krukowski: Nobody at the time thought the albums or the performances were very polished. We were always pegged as being very rough and raw and simple. I don't think anybody had any problem with putting us and Beat Happening in the same sentence, all the way through to the end. It was almost impossible to convince people that we were becoming more sophisticated, musically, than we were when we started out, because that wasn't what people pegged us as or what people loved us for, so no matter how complex the music would have become if we'd continued playing, it would have always been pegged as naïve. In the interview included on the DVD, you can hear the interviewer mouthing the generic type of description that was going around about the band. That was pretty universal -- I don't think there was anyone saying anything differently.

Splendid: Have you been getting just as much of that in your conversations about the anthology over the last few months, or have people finally moved away from all the shorthand?

Damon Krukowski: No, we're not getting it at all, but it's really funny, because most of the people I've talked to are much younger than me, and to them the DVD really feels like a letter from another time -- which in a sense is how we put it together, that this is a document of that moment, of that era, unedited and very unpolished in terms of presentation of the images, but very, very real. This is what it was, this is what we all lived through -- not just us, but every band in that scene. When you see the bootlegs on the second disc, especially the US show, there is such a sense that these are just bands playing in bars. There is absolutely no hint of the kind of alternative-rock world that emerged later.

Splendid: Is the live footage included on the DVD a fair illustration of the band's progression through the ranks of live performance? I never assigned any special meaning to the name "Commonwealth School" when I was getting ready to watch the performances, and I was amazed that I was watching Galaxie 500 playing in a school gym with all of the lights on!

Dean Wareham: I think it's a fair illustration. When you're learning to play, you have to have some time on stage when you sorta suck. Some of the songs at the Commonwealth School show had come a long way and we were a lot better already. That show at the Middle East... ughh. We didn't know what we were doing. I was even hesitant to even put that stuff on there. But there it is.

Damon Krukowski: Every show was odd back then, but what you see is exactly it. It's also all that we had. We rejected some tapes that were completely beyond watchable quality, but this was the cream of the crop. Video cameras back then weren't completely prevalent, they weren't so cheap, and they weren't so small. I don't even know how many live tapes we have of the band -- it just wasn't common to be documenting these things. In the end, there just weren't that many tapes to be compiled. The audience tapes were literally bootlegs. In one case we purchased the tape in Camden Market in London. But that would never have happened to us in the US. That was very much about our profile over there. The US tape was a tape that had been traded by a few people, so it made its way around -- very much a "fan" tape, the kind of thing someone makes for themselves. To me that Atlanta tape is hilarious, just a few people in a bar.

Splendid: Moving through those first few shows, perhaps more in terms of the US audiences than the UK audiences for the reasons we talked about, there's this idea of "slowcore" being a tag that is attached to Galaxie 500 retroactively but at its outset was introduced with bands like Codeine and Red House Painters. I've had conversations with artists who comment that it was a process of showing up at venues and in some ways self-consciously breaking-down a barrier created by people who had stigmatized the genre by arguing it was slow and boring enough to clear a club before it was ever full. It probably seems fairer to suggest that Galaxie 500 were on the front lines of having to explain to people that a down tempo sound still qualified as a rock performance.

Dean Wareham: We didn't really have to explain anything, but what we were doing certainly wasn't very popular. Even in Boston we weren't very popular -- we started doing better in New York, after all. We were certainly conscious of our sound in Boston, but there were still a few people who liked us. Everyone else was doing punk or hardcore or a punk-metal fusion. And then the early days of grunge came alone as well... even Luna didn't fit in there either and it was the process of building our own following.

Damon Krukowski: The labelling of the Galaxie 500 sound came later, after the band had broken up. Frankly, I never liked any of it, or at least most of it that I heard being tagged as "slowcore". It just seemed really profoundly boring to me. Ironically, I shared the same reaction as those who would dissuade other listeners from the genre -- it seemed self-indulgent and boring. These were things levelled at Galaxie 500, the idea that we weren't trying, but I think there's a difference between trying your hardest and having only three chords come out -- that's it, you've done everything you could to make the best possible song and it could only come out that way, either because you only knew three chords or because you didn't want to move past that point because that's what worked -- and saying, "Cool music is three chords and I'm going to make songs with three chords." There is a huge difference to me, and I think a lot of the bands that were part of the self-conscious "slowcore" thing made me hear the other side, that this was not necessarily from the heart or out of necessity. It was a style. We were not playing a style, we were just trying to play as well as we could.

Splendid: Was there a point during the promotion of any of the Galaxie 500 albums where you finally noticed a difference in terms of not having to take control of an audience, but instead they were there just to see you?

Dean Wareham: Definitely, by the time we were touring (behind) our third album, people were definitely there to see us. I remember playing at CBGB's and people were really paying attention and really enjoying the slowness of it. We could be good live.

Damon Krukowski: Audience response is always a separate thing, because with that you're always battling so many variables. It's dependent on who the audience is, the mood of the room, and what the situation is. My experience has been that even show-to-show is radically different if you're open to the audience's influence on the room. There are bands and there is a type of touring that can shield you from that, but I think if you're vulnerable to the situation in the room -- which Galaxie 500 certainly was, and I feel Damon & Naomi is now -- then every night is determined by things other than you. That said, the band changed radically and constantly. I mean, we learned to play our instruments. On the DVD we allowed ourselves to be embarrassed and we included that early stuff where we can barely play. We learned quickly and that's what happens when you keep playing. And we played a lot and tried very hard. We were never self-consciously holding back in order to achieve some sort of idealist style. As we learned to play more, we continued to play more, and that's the difference between the records and what you heard when we played live. All of this meant that, by the end, we were not playing the same type of songs that we were at the beginning. And the songs we continued to play that were earlier songs -- and this is still true for Naomi and I today -- are the songs that present a framework that you can continue to develop inside of... you can go back and play the songs in a new fashion. You don't hear us playing "Tugboat" at the end of the DVD, because that was a song that, as much as we loved it and felt proud of it, we couldn't keep adding layers to it as time went on. It worked as a very simple thing. Some songs work that way and you can't touch them, you can't develop them. On other songs we were able to add flourishes and add layers of interest as time went on and we kept them in our set. It might be a very strange choice from the first record that we continued playing, like "Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste", which was just a drone that we continued to embellish.

Splendid: Did the Galaxie 500 routine at its peak play out the cliché of one tour feeling like the rest of them? Or do they each have identities?

Dean Wareham: They don't all blur together, because some of them go better than others. But you're usually measure them by the things that go wrong. Certainly for Galaxie 500 tours they were usually a catalogue of funny things. Our very first tour probably stands out because several of the dates were cancelled and someone threw a bottle at me (while I was) playing to only twenty people.

Splendid: So when things went wrong they went really wrong.

Dean Wareham: But it was different back then: the club circuit wasn't set up the same way, you were lucky if you got beer, and you were lucky if they fed you. It's different now.

Splendid: James McNew teases you in the DVD's liner notes about wearing both a Galaxie 500 and Spacemen 3 t-shirt night-after-night. Was that the experience: that whatever was in the cardboard box at the end of the night was the wardrobe for the next day?

Dean Wareham: Well, it didn't occur to me that there would be a DVD later -- otherwise I would have had different outfits and I wouldn't have worn the same thing twice.

Splendid: How much do your experiences touring now help you evaluate or celebrate your experiences touring then?

Damon Krukowski: That's an interesting question. It's funny... In many ways it's all the same -- going on tour is still going on tour. So much doesn't change about that experience, which I guess you could say is both a positive and a negative thing about the past, as well -- the bad aspects of touring persist and the great ones are still there as well. It's still the cockamamie mixed-bag that it was. Damon & Naomi shows now have a very different emphasis in that we worry a lot about the singing, we worry a lot about the lyrics, and we worry about communication with the audience through different means than we used to when we were a rhythm section. I like both. That's the other thing that gets in the way of me evaluating the Galaxie 500 shows in hindsight -- this is me playing drums on tour, which was really fun for me to see, because I don't do that on the road any more and I haven't for a while. The idea of lugging your drums around during the day and having to set them up at night is now a nostalgic thing for me.

Splendid: What do you have to say about the anticipation that existed in some circles in advance of the DVD's release, and perhaps the irony that exists relative to the fact these were records that didn't necessarily sell that well when they were available and only became coveted when they were unavailable?

Damon Krukowski: It's been seven years since the box-set and we felt like this was a new way to address the band and the band's history in a way that no one had seen. And different for us, too, going back through these videotapes just as we did the audio tapes seven years ago. It's a very different experience this time. We have a lot more distance from it and it entered a different realm of nostalgia, in some ways a lot easier to deal with. The band was very much a case of "careful what you wish for" in terms of the legacy, just because we didn't set out to make commercially viable records but we did very much want to make records that would last. I think the present situation is still bound to our original goals -- the records still don't sell in any sort of quantity.

Dean Wareham: I guess for a lot of bands that's not true, but for us it is -- we've sold more records since we disbanded than we did at the time.

Splendid: The band broke up after a tour...

Dean Wareham: Right at the very end, actually -- that's how it usually is. I quit the day after we finished the Cocteau Twins tour.

Splendid: Was it a case of "enough is enough"?

Dean Wareham: I had been thinking about it for a long time and we'd sort of discussed it. We weren't having a good time and we were getting on each other's nerves, I think. It's hard to travel together all the time.

Splendid: Did the process of compiling the anthology do anything to rehabilitate relations between the three of you? I think many people will wonder. It's a lot easier to preserve the jagged edge of a band breaking up than it is to explain any degree of reconciliation decades after the fact. The anthology certainly gives a shine to what could be a dark space in the band's history.

Damon Krukowski: In a way, but we haven't been in the same room since the band broke up. We are extremely estranged but it's receding rapidly into the past. That's not where we all are now. It's definitely a different mood than when we put the box-set together.

Splendid: Does the DVD anthology acknowledge the legacy of Galaxie 500 or is it playing a part in continuing to build something resembling a legacy?

Dean Wareham: It rekindles it. The truth is, somebody has to make some kind of an effort in building a legacy. It's not just who does something first or who builds a case for themselves, maybe not consciously.

Splendid: It's very much a cultural project, and every reviewer who mentions Galaxie 500 while discussing Luna or Damon & Naomi is playing a part in creating a myth about "this thing that was before".

Dean Wareham: That's true.

Damon Krukowski: Naomi and I joked throughout the process of compiling the DVD that we didn't know if we were contributing to the legacy or destroying it, because it seemed like we were running outside without our clothes on -- it was all a kind of unpremeditated exposure of what things were really like then.

Splendid: Kind of a reversal on the title's pun?

Damon Krukowski: Exactly, kind of like letting it all be seen. What people make of that, I don't know. We were joking with each other but it was really true -- we don't know. It could easily destroy the mystery around the band. But it was what it was, and we're perfectly happy to share that with people. At this point we're certainly not interested in hiding behind any sort of shroud of mystery or legends. I'd really rather people knew exactly what it was like and let people know what it was, what went into it, and what it was like to be at those shows.

Dean Wareham: I love the Galaxie 500 records and I think that sometimes we were really good live and sometimes we were not. Luna is more consistent in that respect.

Splendid: So maybe the irony is that the live performances of Galaxie 500 have been anthologized when, in fact, you were really more of an album band?

Dean Wareham: That's true. We were definitely more of an album band. But like you said, looking back on the videos, there are some great musical moments.

Splendid: It's as though their function as a document is separate from its function as a gift to fans. If I don't put any distance between myself and the object, I'm just amazed that I have the chance to watch Galaxie 500 play.

Damon Krukowski: That's how we felt, too -- nobody saw us then, so they might as well see us now. But I'm not blind to why no one saw us then; we weren't great show people and the band did not put on the type of show that most people go out to see on a Saturday night.

Splendid: Timing is everything, so I probably wouldn't be asking this question if it were a year ago or a year from now, but in light of the big Pixies reunion this summer, where you can't go a day without reading something about something as it pertains to the band, is the video anthology your reunion with Galaxie 500? It really feels that way -- I was more excited to read there was Galaxie 500 DVD than I was at the thought of lining up for hours to see the Pixies.

Dean Wareham: That's a good idea. I really like that. All I can say about them is that they're making a shitload of money. And they hate each other. The nice thing about this DVD is that Damon, Naomi and I are on better terms than we have been, which is nice. We still don't really speak -- they were really angry when I quit -- but I think it's hard to say angry at someone.

Damon Krukowski: It's probably as much a reunion as there will be, because we put it together as a band and we certainly don't intend to get on the stage together, I don't think. It's as close as we'll get to what the Pixies are doing. I think it's interesting how the Pixies are doing this right now because they were the band that overshadowed us when we were together, too.

Splendid: And I'm glad you say, that so when I transcribe the interview those words can come from your mouth, because I'm not convinced that those of us looking forward to the Plexi discs and then racing out the day before or the day after to grab Pixies tickets can appreciate the irony attached to all of this -- that this is happening when and how it's happening.

Damon Krukowski: You're right, it's the moment, and a lot of things from that time are coming back. I met a young band the other week, Sons & Daughters from Glasgow -- because we have a mutual working relationship with someone -- and they are listening to exactly the bands we were listening to in 1984. That is amazing to me.

Splendid: It also illustrates how precise the split was, insofar as thirteen year-olds in 1990 were buying Pixies records, yet the name Galaxie 500 meant nothing to them.

Damon Krukowski: And that makes perfect sense, because when you're selling records to thirteen year-olds you know you're really selling a lot of records. And we never did. The Pixies did then and they do now -- they will always be a more commercial band.

Splendid: But you do own your music and the collapse of Rough Trade provided that opportunity.

Damon Krukowski: It did, and it made a good thing happen out of an otherwise bad situation. We were never getting royalties from Rough Trade, so that was the other side of that coin. We do have control of the material, which is pretty much a godsend at this point because we signed the same bad contract that every young band signs -- but then the company went bust and we did something about it.

Dean Wareham: In some ways were very lucky -- we own the rights to all of our stuff because our record company went bankrupt. Damon went down and bought them at auction. If we'd been on a major label they would have owned all the stuff and it would have been a lot more complicated. It's the advantage of being on an indie.

Splendid: Especially bankrupt ones.

Dean Wareham: Especially bankrupt ones. In some ways it was good for the band that Rough Trade went out of business and the records were out of print for five years. Ultimately, I don't think it hurt the band.