Black Postcards

For years, the rock & roll tell-all market has been oversaturated with half-wit De Sade wanna-bes hazily reminiscing about backstage bimbos and needle-and-spoon mishaps. But former Galaxie 500/Luna frontman-guitarist Dean Wareham qualifies for rock memoir’s Advanced Placement class. Black Postcards aligns him with the likes of Andy Summers and Eric Clapton—musicians who wear their literacy on their sleeves.

The New Zealand–born Wareham discovered sex, new wave and punk while attending the Upper East Side’s Dalton school in the late ’70s. He revisits his failed turn as a Harvard Trotskyite and his first postcollegiate band, Galaxie 500, which rose to cult status in the late ’80s and splintered by 1991. Wareham then engages Luna’s 13-year legacy and Sisyphean struggle for mainstream acceptance, plying its woozy guitar pop everywhere from a Cincinnati Laundromat to a European tour with the reunited Velvet Underground.

Although Black Postcards functions as a fun anecdotal tour diary, it delivers more than breezy Behind the Music–style dish. Wareham is gut-wrenchingly candid about his bitter divorce and adulterous high jinks on tour. And he manages to weave in a comprehensive analysis of the record business, approaching indie-versus-major-label ideological battles with a refreshingly complex perspective. His experiences also highlight recording-studio excesses that often masquerade as progress: Galaxie 500 throws together a near-perfect debut album for $750; years later, Luna’s spending $10,000 to record a single guitar solo.

Like any good writer, Wareham is expert at nailing paragraph-ending zingers. He comes off as reflective and self-effacing, but he’s also caustically funny. And if his lyrics, as one critic described them, come in “Seussian swirls,” Wareham’s prose voice is as sharp and direct as a snare hit.

—Michael Sandlin

Wareham reads Thu 13 and Tue 18.