DEAN & BRITTA
Record-label woes, lineup changes, trouble at home, and an alluring new bass player on the road: a diary of a rock 'n' roll divorce from the founder of Luna. By Dean Wareham
Dean Wareham and his favorite bass player, Britta Phillips. (Photo: Michael Lavine)
We flew out to Los Angeles to tape the show, Later with Cynthia Garrett, in the studio next door to The Tonight Show. Our audience consisted of people who couldn't get tickets for Leno. We played two songs and did an awkward interview.
"How do you guys keep going?" Cynthia asked.
It sounded like an insult. Wasn't she really saying, "You've never had a gold record—why don't you just throw in the towel?" I wanted to ask her how a former VH1 host gets her own late-night network-TV show.
"What advice would you give to young people about having career longevity?" she asked.
"Go to law school," I said.
A few months before, Britta Phillips had driven from Pennsylvania to New York City to audition to be our new bass player. Britta walked into our rented rehearsal room wearing corduroy jeans, her hair cut in a bob. She was very feminine and gorgeous in a Scandinavian way, with high cheekbones and big, green eyes. Her bass was a fiesta-red Fender Precision, a classic seventies reissue.
After all the auditions, my bandmates and I stood outside on Avenue A to pick our new bassist.
"Listen," I said. "No hanky-panky. If anyone gets involved with her, they're out of the band."
I think I was joking. Perhaps I was half-joking. Perhaps I was dead serious.
Britta's first real show with the band was in Boston. She was perfect. And our show in D.C. got a good review in the next day's Washington Post, which mentioned the "beguiling Britta Phillips" on bass. That made me feel proud.
From D.C., we flew to Seattle, where we stayed at the Travelodge by the Space Needle for the hundredth time. I was feeling a little lonely and fragile, and I missed my son, Jack, who was now eight months old and lived back in New York with my wife of seven years, Claudia. I had met Claudia while performing in a high school play in 1980, and we both ended up going to Harvard.
In San Francisco at the Fillmore on April Fool's Day, we broke out "Bonnie and Clyde," a long, sexy French song about a doomed couple, with Britta singing the Brigitte Bardot part to my Serge Gainsbourg. The song ends with Bonnie and Clyde mowed down in a hail of bullets and descending into hell. I was careful not to look at Britta onstage.
"Britta's very pretty," my friend Alison told me.
"I guess so," I said, not wanting to appear too interested.
My old friend Howard Thompson, the former head of A&R at Elektra, was at the show, and he quietly told me that Britta had "the best visible panty line in rock."
Three weeks later, we found ourselves driving up to Providence—seven hours in the pouring rain. I had become acutely aware of where I was sitting in our rented van. I used to think of it as sitting in the front row or the back row, on the left or the right. But now I was in front of Britta, or next to Britta or, on that drive, behind Britta. I felt like I had fallen under a spell, and it had to stop. I took to chanting silently inside my head on these long rides: No, no, no. No, no, no. Yes.
Britta was quiet and mysterious and simply sat in front of me reading Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. Playing my six strings to her four was exciting, but I wanted more. I wanted to be her D.J., to play her my favorite songs. And she wanted to hear them. Being in a band is a bit like falling in love anyway, and Britta made the band exciting again.
Our short tour ended at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia. The last time we played here, in 1996, we opened for Lou Reed. I remember being backstage with Lou, waiting to use the men's room, when he sarcastically said, "This is so glamorous, huh?" But it was glamorous for me—I was backstage talking to Lou Reed. And the Electric Factory was high style compared with some of the places Luna had played, like the Jewish Mother in Virginia Beach or Sudsy's in Cincinnati.
Later that year, after a show at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the band was invited to a dorm-room party by a pretty blonde film student who had been dancing wildly in front of me throughout our set.
"You can tell how someone is in bed," said Lee, "from how they dance."
I'd stopped noticing the girls in the audience, consumed by my crush on the beautiful girl onstage directly to my right. I knew I should try to control it, but I just couldn't. I thought about Britta all the time.
That night I deliberately left my cigarettes in the van, which gave me an excuse to knock on Britta's door. I could have just lied about needing a cigarette, of course, but I was going to play the charade properly.
I knocked on Britta's door; she gave me a cigarette and a kiss, and by the next day we were coconspirators.
I shouldn't have done that. It led to a world of hurt. And yet I did it, so perhaps it's wrong to say I shouldn't have. Why then did my feet lead me there, to that spot in front of her door? Was I just immoral and selfish? Perhaps.
The morning started off well—I was in a daze from the night before—but as our van rattled toward home, I started to panic. How could I possibly walk into my apartment and not have the whole thing written all over my face? But I opened the door, was greeted by Claudia and Jack and our dog, Samantha, and life went on.
We are all capable of grand deceptions. It's difficult at first—terrifying, even—but you get used to it. Sort of. Britta and I carried on an affair for months, rushing to our hotel rooms to meet in secret. It was exhilarating. It was also awful. The secrets were killing me. I was lying to everyone around me.
Interviewers asked, "Has the dynamic changed with a woman in the band?"
Sean and Lee called a meeting, ostensibly to discuss the making of our next record. Lee spoke first.
He and Sean were aware that something was going on between Britta and me. Sean was mostly bothered by having to pretend that he didn't know anything; Lee was more concerned that all of this would blow up in our faces. If word got out, he said, our whole lives as Luna would end.
I was humble and contrite that afternoon, but later that day I became incensed. How dare they tell me who to sleep with? I'd kept secrets for Sean and Lee over the years. We had an official band policy—what happens on the road is locked into the vault. That's how it was supposed to be, at least. Everyone likes to share a little secret now and then.
Claudia and I had been in denial about the state of our marriage—we loved each other, somewhere, but we had lost the romantic connection. Our life together was about diapers and chores and being sure not to wake the baby. We were irritable and sleep-deprived, and becoming parents seemed to highlight latent differences in our personalities. Still, I had no intention of leaving her and Jack. The very thought of it struck fear in my heart. And yet I couldn't stop. I've heard preachers say that once you let the devil into your life, it's hard to get him out, and I have found this to be true.
I promised myself that I would make a move, a decision, do something to fix my life. Soon, I said, soon.
The decision was made for me by the maid at the Days Inn in Fredonia, New York. Tarbox Road Studios, where we were recording what would turn out to be our last album, is in the middle of nowhere. I booked a room at the Days Inn in town, a 10-minute drive away. Britta came with me. I didn't feel quite comfortable with this arrangement—it was a whole new level of deception—yet I did it anyway.
On the final day of mixing, I checked out of the hotel and arrived at the studio at noon. There was a phone call waiting for me—Claudia, who had just called the hotel. The receptionist had put her call through to my room, where it was answered by the maid.
"Oh, no," she said, "they just left."
And with that utterance, I was cooked. Claudia ordered me to get my ass on a plane home—immediately.
I felt sick to my stomach.
How do we make the important decisions in our lives? I'm not sure when I actually decide to get out of bed in the morning. One second, I'm lying there thinking; the next, I'm walking to the kitchen to grind the coffee beans.
I took that JetBlue plane from Buffalo to JFK feeling like I was about to walk the plank. And walk the plank I did, through my apartment door into a sea of anger and tears and questions.
Claudia made it easier than it might have been. She gave me two choices, and five days to decide. Either Britta would leave Luna or I would pack my things and move out.
I was panic-stricken. I had no idea what I would do come Friday. I didn't want to leave Claudia and Jack—nor did I want to kick Britta out of Luna and out of my life.
Friday rolled around, and I still hadn't fired Britta. I pulled my suitcase down from the closet shelf, stuffed it with summer clothes, grabbed my '58 Les Paul, walked out the door, and cabbed it down to my horrid 100-square-foot studio, where I lay on the floor and cried.
Eventually I went out for a tuna melt and a chocolate shake at a greasy diner on Broadway. It was a gorgeous summer day. I managed a few bites of my sandwich and then walked up Broadway, then east and south to Tompkins Square Park. At four in the afternoon I found myself wandering aimlessly down Second Avenue, having unconsciously veered very close to home—if I was still allowed to use that word.
I looked across the street and saw our babysitter, Nicoleen, pushing Jack along in his stroller. I wanted so badly to run across the street. Jack was only a couple weeks shy of his second birthday and was talking now. He didn't know a lot of words yet, but his vocabulary was increasing each day. How could I explain to him that as of noon that day we no longer shared a roof? So there I stood, frozen, watching my son being wheeled out of my life.
A few days after September 11, 2001, the band went ahead with a planned tour of Brazil and Argentina. I convinced myself that I was not having a nervous breakdown, because I was able to eat and sleep and get up onstage singing "nyah nyah nyah" and "baa baa baa." And the food was great and the shows were well attended, and it was fun being with Britta, and I was crying a little less each day.
I called home to speak to Jack every day. "Why are you calling here?" Claudia would ask. There was no correct answer to that question. I had always called home.
I had stopped wearing my wedding ring and stowed it in the zippered side compartment of my toiletry bag. I could have moved it, but where would I move it to?
In October, I moved into a tiny one-bedroom apartment at First Street and Avenue A. Claudia and I divided the stereo system: I took the receiver and the CD player, and she kept the big speakers. I treated myself to a good pair of B&W bookshelf speakers. There are certain advantages to living alone, I told myself. Now I could listen to music as loud as I wanted, whenever I wanted.
In its review of Romantica, Luna's first album with Britta, Spin gave us 7 out of 10: "There is no avoiding Romantica's sad, sad heart...Fizzy delights like 'Black Champagne' and 'Renée Is Crying' greet the sunset with a Sex on the Beach in one hand and a freshly served divorce summons in the other."
Did they know something? Of course they did. Everyone knew. I didn't need to go on pretending.
Claudia and I signed our divorce papers on January 15, 2003. Quite possibly, we worked harder on our divorce than we had on the marriage. We attended weekly sessions with a mediator to sort out all the issues that divorce entailed—a weekly schedule for Jack, a summer schedule, who would pay for what, what would happen on holidays, what would happen to our joint assets.
But after a year and a half of therapy, negotiation, anger, and sadness, I woke up one morning and didn't feel like a failure as a husband and a father. I wasn't miserable anymore. Britta and I moved in together, into a cute fourth-floor walk-up in the East Village. One day, the four of us—Claudia and Jack and Britta and I—even went to lunch together. This was Claudia's idea, and it was a good one. We realized that we could all get along, and everyone was going to be all right.
Two years later, on what turned out to be Luna's farewell tour, I was interviewed by a reporter in Germany who asked me, "What will be your legacy?"
I had been getting that question a lot, and I didn't have an answer for it. I'd recently received an e-mail from a 17-year-old girl in Sweden who said that she'd gone to a three-day pop festival that ended each night with everyone hanging out, drinking beer, watching the sun come up, and listening to On Fire by my previous band, Galaxie 500. We didn't set the world on fire, but it feels good to think that people were still listening to a little album I made with my friends back in 1989, halfway around the world, as the sun comes up.
We planned to do our two final shows at the Bowery Ballroom in New York, but when they sold out within a couple of hours, a Sunday matinee was added, and then a Monday night. Jack and Claudia came to the matinee. This was Jack's first time seeing Luna since he was two years old. He sat up in the balcony and waved to me excitedly. He told anyone who would listen, "That's my daddy!"
After the Monday-night show I drank Champagne and shook a lot of hands till I had had enough. I grabbed my Les Paul and my coat from the dressing room, and when Britta and I reentered the bar, people started clapping. It was like that moment at a wedding when the married couple reappears, in different clothes, before taking off.
I hugged Lee good-bye. He was off to L.A. in the morning. I hugged Sean good-bye. I would see him the next week for his fortieth birthday party, but it was an important farewell nonetheless. After 12 years of dueling guitars, from that moment on we were just two guys who used to be in a band together.
Britta and I trudged upstairs and out into the snowstorm and hailed a cab at the corner of Bowery and Delancey. I sat in bed for a week, thinking maybe this was the end of my career in music, that no one would care anymore, that all I had to look forward to was occasional soundtrack work or a guest vocal on someone else's record. But a year later, Britta and I were in the studio working on a new album for a new label. One Monday during the recording, we called our producer, the legendary Tony Visconti, to tell him we'd be late to the studio. "We're going down to city hall," I said. Tony insisted that we at least take the day off.
We were married by Judge Richard Owen, who had famously ruled against George Harrison in a music-plagiarism lawsuit brought by the Chiffons. Britta and I weren't so sure about this ruling—but we didn't feel like we had to defend the honor of our favorite Beatle just now.
From Black Postcards by Dean Wareham. Published by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright © Dean Wareham, 2008.
When Dean Met Britta
La revista Men´s Vogue publica un extracto del nuevo libro"Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance" del miembro fundador y frontman de Galaxie 500 y Luna, Dean Wreham.
No lo he leído, salvo el extracto que a continuación reproduzco.
Pero para todos aquellos que disfrutamos de su música siempre hemos tenido la curiosidad de saber como se conocieron Dean y Britta, y no por satisfacer un morbo o curiosidad próxima a la de los consumidores de los programas de corazón, sino para descubrir como se puede ser feliz haciendo lo que a uno le gusta sin tener nunca un exito profesional (fuera de un pequeño grupo de personas que admiran su creatividad) y a la vez ser capaz de encontrar una persona maravillosa le complemente. Para mi es un historia de rock & Roll mucho más interesante que la de la mayoria de los grupos de música que simplemente mezclan alcohol, drogas, con personalidades conflictivas donde generalmente solo destaca una egolatria vacia de sentimientos
Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance, the new book by former Galaxie 500/Luna frontman Dean Wareham is an honest look at a critically lauded, commercially neglected decade his band spent in cheap hotels, before dissolving (along with Dean's marriage) in 2004. Of course, Dean and ex-Jem singer Britta are now a married, musical duo. Unclear if Ms. Phillips still has, as the piece mentions, "the best visible panty line in rock." We'll always have Penthouse.
Facing the Music
Facing the Music
Record-label woes, lineup changes, trouble at home, and an alluring new bass player on the road: a diary of a rock 'n' roll divorce from the founder of Luna. By Dean Wareham
Dean Wareham and his favorite bass player, Britta Phillips. (Photo: Michael Lavine)
In 2000, my band, LUNA , was booked for our very first network-television appearance after eight years and five albums together. We played a kind of spacey twin-guitar rock 'n' roll—with the "roll" being just as important as the "rock"—that was probably best suited for late-night listening. We had sold out clubs all over the country, but we'd never had a bona fide radio hit.
Our biggest album, Bewitched, sold about 100,000 copies in the U.S.—good numbers for a book, but not for a massive record company. We'd just lost our major-label deal with Elektra, been dropped by our publisher, and been let go by our accountant. As if this wasn't enough, our bass player quit rock 'n' roll for good and flew home to New Zealand.
We flew out to Los Angeles to tape the show, Later with Cynthia Garrett, in the studio next door to The Tonight Show. Our audience consisted of people who couldn't get tickets for Leno. We played two songs and did an awkward interview.
"How do you guys keep going?" Cynthia asked.
It sounded like an insult. Wasn't she really saying, "You've never had a gold record—why don't you just throw in the towel?" I wanted to ask her how a former VH1 host gets her own late-night network-TV show.
"What advice would you give to young people about having career longevity?" she asked.
"Go to law school," I said.
A few months before, Britta Phillips had driven from Pennsylvania to New York City to audition to be our new bass player. Britta walked into our rented rehearsal room wearing corduroy jeans, her hair cut in a bob. She was very feminine and gorgeous in a Scandinavian way, with high cheekbones and big, green eyes. Her bass was a fiesta-red Fender Precision, a classic seventies reissue.
After all the auditions, my bandmates and I stood outside on Avenue A to pick our new bassist.
Our drummer, Lee, was sure that we should hire Britta. I was leaning that way. Sean, who played guitar, was on the fence. This was as close to a unanimous decision as we were going to get. It would be the first time a girl was part of our lineup.
"Listen," I said. "No hanky-panky. If anyone gets involved with her, they're out of the band."
I think I was joking. Perhaps I was half-joking. Perhaps I was dead serious.
Britta's first real show with the band was in Boston. She was perfect. And our show in D.C. got a good review in the next day's Washington Post, which mentioned the "beguiling Britta Phillips" on bass. That made me feel proud.
From D.C., we flew to Seattle, where we stayed at the Travelodge by the Space Needle for the hundredth time. I was feeling a little lonely and fragile, and I missed my son, Jack, who was now eight months old and lived back in New York with my wife of seven years, Claudia. I had met Claudia while performing in a high school play in 1980, and we both ended up going to Harvard.
In San Francisco at the Fillmore on April Fool's Day, we broke out "Bonnie and Clyde," a long, sexy French song about a doomed couple, with Britta singing the Brigitte Bardot part to my Serge Gainsbourg. The song ends with Bonnie and Clyde mowed down in a hail of bullets and descending into hell. I was careful not to look at Britta onstage.
"Britta's very pretty," my friend Alison told me.
"I guess so," I said, not wanting to appear too interested.
My old friend Howard Thompson, the former head of A&R at Elektra, was at the show, and he quietly told me that Britta had "the best visible panty line in rock."
Three weeks later, we found ourselves driving up to Providence—seven hours in the pouring rain. I had become acutely aware of where I was sitting in our rented van. I used to think of it as sitting in the front row or the back row, on the left or the right. But now I was in front of Britta, or next to Britta or, on that drive, behind Britta. I felt like I had fallen under a spell, and it had to stop. I took to chanting silently inside my head on these long rides: No, no, no. No, no, no. Yes.
Britta was quiet and mysterious and simply sat in front of me reading Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. Playing my six strings to her four was exciting, but I wanted more. I wanted to be her D.J., to play her my favorite songs. And she wanted to hear them. Being in a band is a bit like falling in love anyway, and Britta made the band exciting again.
Our short tour ended at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia. The last time we played here, in 1996, we opened for Lou Reed. I remember being backstage with Lou, waiting to use the men's room, when he sarcastically said, "This is so glamorous, huh?" But it was glamorous for me—I was backstage talking to Lou Reed. And the Electric Factory was high style compared with some of the places Luna had played, like the Jewish Mother in Virginia Beach or Sudsy's in Cincinnati.
Later that year, after a show at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the band was invited to a dorm-room party by a pretty blonde film student who had been dancing wildly in front of me throughout our set.
"You can tell how someone is in bed," said Lee, "from how they dance."
I'd stopped noticing the girls in the audience, consumed by my crush on the beautiful girl onstage directly to my right. I knew I should try to control it, but I just couldn't. I thought about Britta all the time.
That night I deliberately left my cigarettes in the van, which gave me an excuse to knock on Britta's door. I could have just lied about needing a cigarette, of course, but I was going to play the charade properly.
I knocked on Britta's door; she gave me a cigarette and a kiss, and by the next day we were coconspirators.
I shouldn't have done that. It led to a world of hurt. And yet I did it, so perhaps it's wrong to say I shouldn't have. Why then did my feet lead me there, to that spot in front of her door? Was I just immoral and selfish? Perhaps.
The morning started off well—I was in a daze from the night before—but as our van rattled toward home, I started to panic. How could I possibly walk into my apartment and not have the whole thing written all over my face? But I opened the door, was greeted by Claudia and Jack and our dog, Samantha, and life went on.
We are all capable of grand deceptions. It's difficult at first—terrifying, even—but you get used to it. Sort of. Britta and I carried on an affair for months, rushing to our hotel rooms to meet in secret. It was exhilarating. It was also awful. The secrets were killing me. I was lying to everyone around me.
Interviewers asked, "Has the dynamic changed with a woman in the band?"
Sean and Lee called a meeting, ostensibly to discuss the making of our next record. Lee spoke first.
He and Sean were aware that something was going on between Britta and me. Sean was mostly bothered by having to pretend that he didn't know anything; Lee was more concerned that all of this would blow up in our faces. If word got out, he said, our whole lives as Luna would end.
I was humble and contrite that afternoon, but later that day I became incensed. How dare they tell me who to sleep with? I'd kept secrets for Sean and Lee over the years. We had an official band policy—what happens on the road is locked into the vault. That's how it was supposed to be, at least. Everyone likes to share a little secret now and then.
Claudia and I had been in denial about the state of our marriage—we loved each other, somewhere, but we had lost the romantic connection. Our life together was about diapers and chores and being sure not to wake the baby. We were irritable and sleep-deprived, and becoming parents seemed to highlight latent differences in our personalities. Still, I had no intention of leaving her and Jack. The very thought of it struck fear in my heart. And yet I couldn't stop. I've heard preachers say that once you let the devil into your life, it's hard to get him out, and I have found this to be true.
I promised myself that I would make a move, a decision, do something to fix my life. Soon, I said, soon.
The decision was made for me by the maid at the Days Inn in Fredonia, New York. Tarbox Road Studios, where we were recording what would turn out to be our last album, is in the middle of nowhere. I booked a room at the Days Inn in town, a 10-minute drive away. Britta came with me. I didn't feel quite comfortable with this arrangement—it was a whole new level of deception—yet I did it anyway.
On the final day of mixing, I checked out of the hotel and arrived at the studio at noon. There was a phone call waiting for me—Claudia, who had just called the hotel. The receptionist had put her call through to my room, where it was answered by the maid.
"Oh, no," she said, "they just left."
And with that utterance, I was cooked. Claudia ordered me to get my ass on a plane home—immediately.
I felt sick to my stomach.
How do we make the important decisions in our lives? I'm not sure when I actually decide to get out of bed in the morning. One second, I'm lying there thinking; the next, I'm walking to the kitchen to grind the coffee beans.
I took that JetBlue plane from Buffalo to JFK feeling like I was about to walk the plank. And walk the plank I did, through my apartment door into a sea of anger and tears and questions.
Claudia made it easier than it might have been. She gave me two choices, and five days to decide. Either Britta would leave Luna or I would pack my things and move out.
I was panic-stricken. I had no idea what I would do come Friday. I didn't want to leave Claudia and Jack—nor did I want to kick Britta out of Luna and out of my life.
Friday rolled around, and I still hadn't fired Britta. I pulled my suitcase down from the closet shelf, stuffed it with summer clothes, grabbed my '58 Les Paul, walked out the door, and cabbed it down to my horrid 100-square-foot studio, where I lay on the floor and cried.
Eventually I went out for a tuna melt and a chocolate shake at a greasy diner on Broadway. It was a gorgeous summer day. I managed a few bites of my sandwich and then walked up Broadway, then east and south to Tompkins Square Park. At four in the afternoon I found myself wandering aimlessly down Second Avenue, having unconsciously veered very close to home—if I was still allowed to use that word.
I looked across the street and saw our babysitter, Nicoleen, pushing Jack along in his stroller. I wanted so badly to run across the street. Jack was only a couple weeks shy of his second birthday and was talking now. He didn't know a lot of words yet, but his vocabulary was increasing each day. How could I explain to him that as of noon that day we no longer shared a roof? So there I stood, frozen, watching my son being wheeled out of my life.
A few days after September 11, 2001, the band went ahead with a planned tour of Brazil and Argentina. I convinced myself that I was not having a nervous breakdown, because I was able to eat and sleep and get up onstage singing "nyah nyah nyah" and "baa baa baa." And the food was great and the shows were well attended, and it was fun being with Britta, and I was crying a little less each day.
I called home to speak to Jack every day. "Why are you calling here?" Claudia would ask. There was no correct answer to that question. I had always called home.
I had stopped wearing my wedding ring and stowed it in the zippered side compartment of my toiletry bag. I could have moved it, but where would I move it to?
In October, I moved into a tiny one-bedroom apartment at First Street and Avenue A. Claudia and I divided the stereo system: I took the receiver and the CD player, and she kept the big speakers. I treated myself to a good pair of B&W bookshelf speakers. There are certain advantages to living alone, I told myself. Now I could listen to music as loud as I wanted, whenever I wanted.
In its review of Romantica, Luna's first album with Britta, Spin gave us 7 out of 10: "There is no avoiding Romantica's sad, sad heart...Fizzy delights like 'Black Champagne' and 'Renée Is Crying' greet the sunset with a Sex on the Beach in one hand and a freshly served divorce summons in the other."
Did they know something? Of course they did. Everyone knew. I didn't need to go on pretending.
Claudia and I signed our divorce papers on January 15, 2003. Quite possibly, we worked harder on our divorce than we had on the marriage. We attended weekly sessions with a mediator to sort out all the issues that divorce entailed—a weekly schedule for Jack, a summer schedule, who would pay for what, what would happen on holidays, what would happen to our joint assets.
But after a year and a half of therapy, negotiation, anger, and sadness, I woke up one morning and didn't feel like a failure as a husband and a father. I wasn't miserable anymore. Britta and I moved in together, into a cute fourth-floor walk-up in the East Village. One day, the four of us—Claudia and Jack and Britta and I—even went to lunch together. This was Claudia's idea, and it was a good one. We realized that we could all get along, and everyone was going to be all right.
Two years later, on what turned out to be Luna's farewell tour, I was interviewed by a reporter in Germany who asked me, "What will be your legacy?"
I had been getting that question a lot, and I didn't have an answer for it. I'd recently received an e-mail from a 17-year-old girl in Sweden who said that she'd gone to a three-day pop festival that ended each night with everyone hanging out, drinking beer, watching the sun come up, and listening to On Fire by my previous band, Galaxie 500. We didn't set the world on fire, but it feels good to think that people were still listening to a little album I made with my friends back in 1989, halfway around the world, as the sun comes up.
We planned to do our two final shows at the Bowery Ballroom in New York, but when they sold out within a couple of hours, a Sunday matinee was added, and then a Monday night. Jack and Claudia came to the matinee. This was Jack's first time seeing Luna since he was two years old. He sat up in the balcony and waved to me excitedly. He told anyone who would listen, "That's my daddy!"
After the Monday-night show I drank Champagne and shook a lot of hands till I had had enough. I grabbed my Les Paul and my coat from the dressing room, and when Britta and I reentered the bar, people started clapping. It was like that moment at a wedding when the married couple reappears, in different clothes, before taking off.
I hugged Lee good-bye. He was off to L.A. in the morning. I hugged Sean good-bye. I would see him the next week for his fortieth birthday party, but it was an important farewell nonetheless. After 12 years of dueling guitars, from that moment on we were just two guys who used to be in a band together.
Britta and I trudged upstairs and out into the snowstorm and hailed a cab at the corner of Bowery and Delancey. I sat in bed for a week, thinking maybe this was the end of my career in music, that no one would care anymore, that all I had to look forward to was occasional soundtrack work or a guest vocal on someone else's record. But a year later, Britta and I were in the studio working on a new album for a new label. One Monday during the recording, we called our producer, the legendary Tony Visconti, to tell him we'd be late to the studio. "We're going down to city hall," I said. Tony insisted that we at least take the day off.
We were married by Judge Richard Owen, who had famously ruled against George Harrison in a music-plagiarism lawsuit brought by the Chiffons. Britta and I weren't so sure about this ruling—but we didn't feel like we had to defend the honor of our favorite Beatle just now.
From Black Postcards by Dean Wareham. Published by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright © Dean Wareham, 2008.
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