How could I not read Dean Wareham's autobiography, "Black Postcards," in less than two weeks? There was a period of my life, probably circa 2001-2003, where I thought his life was the most enviable possible -- working occasionally and even then, it was never really working, but rather, making a record and playing shows, and making a career of it. Turns out it was quite unattractive, which is what makes his book so engrossing.
The book has some of what one would expect from a rock 'n' roll autobiography -- casual drug use makes lots of appearances, for example. But the rest of the book demystifies being in a band in a hard-hitting way. Much of it is about petty squabbles in the touring van and the recording studio, dirty hotel rooms, underwhelming audiences at shows, underwhelming affairs, (aside from the one with his band Luna's second bassist, which led to his second marriage), underwhelming receptions from the label, labels that disappear from under you. As I described it to someone, the book, at its philosophical level, is about the choices people make, never quite breaking through and never quite being happy. The book's subtitle, "A Rock 'N' Roll Romance," must be a joke, because Wareham seems very (narcissitically?) bitter about his rock 'n' roll life.
Wareham is also quite talented at showing brief glimpses of important moments, enough to satisfy and then tantalize when he leaves it behind. (He often did the same equally well with lyrics, I always thought.) It's impressively literary, though. What would one expect from a Harvard graduate? Vargas Llosa would be proud.
Above all, the book has same very valuable lessons about being in a band, mainly from when he chronicles his days in Galaxie 500, his first band and the best band ever to come from Boston. (I used to stridently take Luna over Galaxie 500, but these days I realize they're even. My friend says Luna is Dean Wareham playing with B+ ideas. I disagree.) Here are some of the ones I jotted down before returning the book to the library:
1. "You can spend your time placing ads in the Village Voice and sifting through messages left on your answering machine by idiot musicians, or auditioning for other people's bands, but the best thing is to start a band with your friends. Your friends are tasteful and smart and like the same things you do. Who cares if one of you doesn't play an instrument? She can learn."
2. "It's hard to get your friends to go out of their way to see you at midnight on a Thursday. They'll do it once, but you can't really ask them to come back again two weeks later. People have stuff to do."
3. "The moment you make a record, you are in business. It's too bad that we never bothered to sit down with a manager or a lawyer who might have explained that lots of bands fight about this staff, and that there are common formulas for working out who contributed what...I think critical incidents like this arise for many bands, and that in those moments your friendship essentially disappears for good. You may still be able to laugh together and have fun, but at the heart of it all something has changed forever. Your friendship has been poisoned."
The first two quotes are essentially my band. Three of my friends were playing songs together for a couple of weeks, wanted me to be the bassist and asked me if I wanted to learn. I said "Yes" pretty shortly after. That was nearly three years ago. It's so great. We don't do much publicly either, mainly because we have other career ambitions, but related to that, we don't want to bother our friends to come to many shows (or bother to promote ourselves) so we play when we have a new set of polished songs. We've played two shows. Hopefully, we never reach the feelings that provoked the third quoted passage. I don't think we will.
This is a much better way to follow Wareham, I think. Play by his mantras, rather than write fake concert reviews of Luna at Southpaw in August 2003, back when I thought being a music critic would be a cool career (it wouldn't) or encourage making out to "Penthouse" in my college radio station's studio, which, regrettably, I wrote in my record review. And it's regrettably memorialized in black pen ink. We still can't get away from Wareham, though. "Who needs more than three slow chords with lots of reverb?"
It was always a pleasure, though, to see the band during one of its between-record monthly shows in the city. There was the time my friends shouted a request for "Bonnie and Clyde" in my honor. (Reading "Black Postcards" reveals Wareham probably hated that. The request devolved into lots of people shouting out other people's names.) Or the time when I was 16 and didn't know how to use the subway that well yet, especially when around Tribeca, and missed the last train home. (My parents picked us up.) Now, we play our instruments like Wareham does, generally motionless, though I think that's because we're too nervous to do much else, whereas he was purposefully detached.
It's hard to separate myself from Wareham's music. When I changed the approach of my Facebook profile from all-time favorite bands to what I'm listening to at the moment, thereby removing Luna temporarily from the list, a friend wrote, shocked, "Oh my god, you no longer like Luna?" (That's why I don't like Facebook's "news updates.")
Was searching YouTube for an old clip from the good days -- one of those monthly New York shows, but was unsuccessful. Instead, here's a professional video of them playing "Chinatown" in Belo Horizonte, Brazil:
Update: My newspaper's excellent editorial page editor has an annual end-of-year column where he asks the staff for their favorite book of the year. Predictably, I e-mailed a blurb about "Black Postcards." While I may have read better books earlier in the year, Dean Wareham's photo is now on the front page of last Sunday's "Opinion" section. Mission accomplished.
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