Scenes From a Dream

By Dean Wareham

As a musician, you often have to answer the question, “What kind of music do you play?” “Dream pop” elicits blank looks. It’s a construct created after the fact, not a movement associated with a particular time or place or hairstyle. Maybe it’s a category for bands, across recent decades, who are hard to categorize.

Galaxie 500 were called a lot of things. 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. “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. (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.

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. 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. They probably knew what they were doing, while we were making it up as we went along. 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. More often, it was the likes of 13th Floor Elevators, Big Star, Love, or Jonathan Richman on the turntable.

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. Our sound became something else: On “Tugboat,” Kramer smothered the band in an infinite, hall-size reverb and tape delay. Our little three-piece band now sounded huge. 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.