They were a special live band, the musicians standing in a line across the stage. The final Galaxie 500 tour, in March 1991, was in support of Cocteau Twins on their Heaven or Las Vegas tour of the USA. We toured England with the Sundays, who had something we did not: a couple of beautiful, infectious pop songs that were bona fide radio hits. The British audience seemed more receptive to my off-kilter vocals and our stark/lush songs at any rate, things moved much faster there. But some important people liked the show that week, we recorded a BBC radio session for John Peel, who loved our recording of “Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste.” Listening to our broadcast was one Simon Raymonde of Cocteau Twins. Galaxie 500 was a pretty different live experience people had to strain to make out what we were doing. They had seen impressive American bands like Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, and Big Black. In September 1989, they brought us to London for a prestigious gig at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Naomi’s handbills drew from vintage celestial drawings and images, and our very name suggested a band from another solar system. We put up some handbills outside CBGB and on random lampposts in the East Village. It was all D.I.Y.: In July 1988, unable to get an official gig at the New Music Seminar, we played at Nightingale, a bar on Second Avenue in New York. We played a lot of shows over the next year, with the Lemonheads, the Pixies, Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore, the Flaming Lips. We kept playing shows, aided by DJs at college stations WMBR and WHRB, and then the album Today that we recorded in another three-day session with Kramer. Our new cassette got us signed to a fledgling Boston label named Aurora Records. Kramer’s unusual mixes are still hard to place as either ’80s or ’90s, and that’s a feature of many of these dream pop records: sounds that you don’t identify with a particular year, songs that are not tailored by hit producers for commercial radio play. Our little three-piece band now sounded huge. Our sound became something else: On “Tugboat,” Kramer smothered the band in an infinite, hall-size reverb and tape delay. That fall, we played some nervous local gigs, and in February, with a half-dozen half-written songs, we drove down to New York to record with producer Mark Kramer at his studio in Tribeca.
More often, it was the likes of 13th Floor Elevators, Big Star, Love, or Jonathan Richman on the turntable. I was listening to a only a few current records that year: Opal’s Happy Nightmare Baby, Sonic Youth’s Sister, and Half Japanese’s Music to Strip By. They probably knew what they were doing, while we were making it up as we went along.
In Boston, all the bands sounded heavier than us there were hardcore bands, and others playing a mix of metal and punk that was not yet called grunge. In the summer of 1987, Damon and Naomi and I started jamming together as Galaxie 500, and I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they were enrolled in graduate school. (For the first year of Galaxie 500 shows, I had exactly one pedal by my shoes: a Boss CS-3 compressor, which I fed into a Music Man 112-RD50 amplifier with onboard reverb and overdrive.) Shoegaze bands are more of an assault, a wall of sound, while there is more empty space in dream pop-allowing more room for melody and counter-melody, whether on vocals, keyboards, or guitars. “Proto-shoegaze” was another, but I know we were not shoegaze those bands buried their vocals and the guitarists strummed chords through a whole slew of effects pedals or a multi-effects processor. New York magazine called us “plain soporific.” A VJ at MTV England told us we were “wimpy.” Later, we were dubbed “slowcore,” along with bands like Low and Codeine who played a lot slower (and in a more controlled fashion) than we did. Maybe it’s a category for bands, across recent decades, who are hard to categorize.
It’s a construct created after the fact, not a movement associated with a particular time or place or hairstyle. As a musician, you often have to answer the question, “What kind of music do you play?” “Dream pop” elicits blank looks.
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