Music Arcades: Luna: Rendezvous

It's a dangerous thing, reading a music book. You'll end up paying, on average, twice the price of the book to hear the music described in its pages, because reading about music you can't hear is just too frustrating. I resisted reading Dean Wareham's Black Postcards memoir all through the time Andy and the other Galaxie 500 list members were discussing it animatedly (you know Dean Wareham was in Galaxie 500 before going on to form Luna, right?). Last summer I got a bumper birthday present from the in-laws of three books. When it came time to write the thank-you letter, I had at least to have started one of them, and, well, the other two were the latest Thomas Pynchon (1,220 pages) and Theodore Zeldin's Intimate History of Humanity. So Black Postcards was the obvious choice for a lightweight like me (the other two remain unread).

The book covers the years in Dean's life from the beginning of Galaxie 500 to the end of Luna in 2005.I went to see Luna every time they toured, which wasn't often in England, but I stepped off the treadmill of buying each new album some time before they called it quits. Hence, when I got to the later stages of the book, I got into frustration territory. Romantica is on eMusic, so I was able to grab that, but Rendezvous was/is only available on the second-hand CD market. Besides the folks on the list said it was a pretty good Luna album. I guess it is — some fine moments — but it also follows their well-established template without adding anything new, with the questionable exception of a couple of songs written and sung by Sean Eden instead of Dean.

The year after Luna split, I interviewed Andy about the G500 list community for The Book, in a West London pub. One of the things he reflected on was the dynamics of scale and influence — and commitment — among fans. As catalyst and custodian of a core fan community, Andy has become the de facto official archivist of the Galaxie 500 'family' of acts that includes Luna. But, he pointed out to me, that community has never numbered more than a few hundred globally — a similar number to those who attended the farewell tour show we both saw in London, and thus a tiny proportion of the total fanbase. Small but influential.

The economics of this world are also counter-intuitive. In Tell Me Do You Miss Me, the film portrait of Luna's farewell tour, Dean points out that selling 100,000 thousand books gets you on the New York Times bestsellers list, while regularly selling 100,000 albums leaves your record label grumbling and you barely able to make a living. This may explain his decision to write a book. And it seems to have sold pretty well. Yet probably not NYT bestsellers list, so I don't think Black Postcards can have made him rich either. If all the readers scuttled off to buy a couple of albums they didn't already have, then maybe he got a secondary income off those royalties. Not on second-hand copies of Rendezvous, though.

[Update, 22 March 2010: Uh-oh, a link to this page has been sent to the list (thanks, Andy ;-), leaving me slightly anxious about my half-baked comments being subject to scrutiny by more committed listeners (I'm somehow less nervous about Andy himself: he already knows the extent of my ignorance and questionable taste). If you arrived from there, please don't treat my lukewarm comments about Rendezvous as flamebait — I wasn't expecting you to be dropping by. Though of course you're very welcome now that you're here! Do spend a few seconds browsing around to confirm just how questionable my taste is, before you head off to the more entertaining corners of the web.]