In his contribution to Thurston Moore's book The Art of the Mixtape Dean Wareham discusses a tape he'd made for Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang in 1987, around the time they were starting their band. "When I look at the cassette today," he writes, "I see that it is almost a recipe of ingredients for Galaxie 500." Jonathan Richman is on it, and Joy Division and Moe Tucker and Shockabilly, all of whom would impact the band in various ways. "If you cut random bits of this tape together," adds Krukowski, "you'd probably come up with an alternate version of the first Galaxie 500 album."
Throughout their history Galaxie 500 always had a fondness for covers; from the beginning they positioned themselves firmly in the tradition of independent/underground rock. All members had good record collections and remained committed to a specific musical narrative that began with garage rock and the Velvet Underground. By plucking elements from the leftfield records that mattered to them and adding a highly personal spin, Galaxie 500 became part of the history they loved.
Galaxie 500 made two visits to the BBC studios to record material for John Peel's show and the eight tracks cut are collected here. Half are covers and, as with the many the band had recorded and played live, they manage to make them sound like Galaxie 500 songs. The way they had their sound honed at this point, with Wareham's unsteady wail and spare guitar, Yang's clean, elegant basslines and Krukowski's texture-over-beat drumming, they couldn't have sounded like anyone else if they'd tried.
This being the case, even the opening cover of Sex Pistols' "Submission" from the October 1990 has a viscous and dreamy lyricism. It's uptempo-- Galaxie 500 didn't always play slow-- but cool and controlled, and fits easily with the On Fire song "When Will You Come Home" from the same session. The Young Marble Giants' "Final Day" is, on the other hand, slowed by half, and though Yang's voice bears a similarity to YMG's Alison Statton, she finds a hint of British folk inside the song's simple melody. Buffy St. Marie's "Moonshot", which Wareham would later cover in his low, half-spoken voice on his album with Britta Phillips, is handled a third higher than Buffy herself sang it, with Wareham selling that upper register quaver like only he can.
The September 1989 session, recorded a month before the release of On Fire, had a higher proportion of Wareham songs, the only cover being the G500 concert staple and Jonathan Richman original "Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste". The opening one-two of "Flowers" and "Blue Thunder" is simply breathtaking, with every element of the Galaxie 500 sound perfectly in place. To hear these two songs one after another is to hear the best evidence on record of why this band meant so much to people at the dawn of the '90s, and "Decomposing Trees" is almost as good. Peel Sessions is allegedly the final piece of the Galaxie 500 story, the last recorded evidence of any significance that will be released. It's a fittingly strong ending for a band that did almost everything right.
