Night and day

Luna's memory lane

by Lydia Vanderloo

NEW YORK -- Dean Wareham has to be home at 7:30 p.m. sharp. His wife has an appointment and she needs him there to look after their four-month-old son, Jack. "Sorry I didn't bring a photo," apologizes the congenial 36-year-old father in a voice that carries traces of a New Zealand accent that has survived his two decades in the States. "I stopped home and took it out of my wallet."

In most respects, Wareham, who has joined me for a pint at a swanky bar on the Lower East Side, is still the same consummate cult hero whose Velvetsy songwriting, mesmerizing guitar solos, melancholy moods, and wry lyrics have helped define the sounds of two acclaimed indie-rock bands: Galaxie 500 and, for the past seven years, Luna. Fatherhood, he admits, has shaken him up a bit. And, though Luna remain a stable foursome (rounded out by Justin Harwood, Sean Eden, and Lee Wall) with a new album and a tour that will bring them to Lupo's, the band have had to make some major readjustments of their own this year.

Back in the first half of '99, after Elektra sent advance copies of what was to be Luna's fifth album on the label, the band were dropped. "I was both annoyed and relieved," Wareham recalls. "It would have been fine -- and almost expected -- if we'd handed the album in and they'd just said, `No, it's really not for us.' Instead, they put the album on the schedule, took it off, put it back on, and took it off again."

Fortunately, Luna didn't have much trouble finding a new home for The Days of Our Nights, which is finally out on the Sire-distributed imprint Jericho. As far as Wareham's concerned, the band are better off at Jericho, where The Days of Our Nights is a high-priority release, than they would have been at Elektra, where it would have been competing for attention with new releases by platinum-selling artists like Natalie Merchant and Third Eye Blind. And he feels fortunate to have come through his experience at Elektra relatively unscathed: "Elektra never interfered with us, even though they put out four of our records without us ever having a hit. Much worse things have happened to bands."

Oddly, The Days of Our Nights is one Luna album that actually includes a potential radio hit of sorts -- a deadpan cover of the Guns N' Roses classic power ballad "Sweet Child o' Mine." It's a very Luna version of the song: Wareham whispers rather than wails, his guitar weeps instead of roaring, and the overall feel is folk pop, not power rock. But the tune's signature melody and guitar hook remain intact. The song was originally recorded as a potential B-side, but as Wareham tells it, the band's A&R rep persuaded them to put it on the album because she thought it had commercial potential (something Sheryl Crow proved when she recorded the same tune for the soundtrack to the Adam Sandler film Big Daddy earlier this year). Elektra's head of alternative radio promotion apparently didn't agree, however, since he nixed the idea of a "Sweet Child o' Mine" single.

Luna kept "Sweet Child" on The Days of Our Nights, but the rest of the disc is reserved for another typically witty, tuneful, and, well, Lou Reedy collection of Wareham originals, including the mildly funky "Dear Diary" and the jangle-and-strum pop tune "Hello Little One," with its quirky trumpet solo. In the past, Luna have had a lot of luck with tunes that are studies in contrast -- songs where Wareham scatters dark images against a backdrop of light, lulling melodies. It's a tactic he employs once again on one of the new disc's standouts, "Superfreaky Memories." Although the tune's chorus is adorned with a bright, ringing guitar hook, the verses are laced with stark images of what would appear to be a pair of desperate Drugstore Cowboy addicts.

Of course, Wareham insists his songs, including that one, are mostly fictional, or at least not quite meant to be taken literally. He reveals, for example, that the lyric in "Superfreaky Memories" about a girl named Christina taking a photo of someone who's holding a needle and a spoon has some basis in reality. "In high school there was this girl who wanted to take photos of me with drug paraphernalia. She thought it would be cool. I was 15, she was 18, and I had a crush on her, so I would've done whatever she'd said. So she did take the pictures. I never saw them, but I actually saw her at the beach this summer for the first time in like 17 years. It was weird. And that's kind of what the song is about. The older you get, the more super-freaky memories you have."

Luna will appear at Lupo's with Gorky's Zygotic Mynci opening on Wednesday December 8.