Galaxie 500 - the band and the car
So how did a beautifully other-worldly band get named after such a worldly object?
When I first heard of Galaxie 500 I had no idea where the name of the band originated… it sounded appropriately big and other-worldly that I didn’t even think to consider what it might mean. Obviously I learned soon enough of its origin… it’s a car!
I remember Hazel being disappointed that ‘Galaxie 500’ were named after something so worldly as a car, rather than something grander.
I had a work colleague who is still the only person I’ve ever met who had heard of the car but not the band.
I don’t know anything about cars but suspect that the car in this picture that appeared in Sounds in 1989, isn’t a Galaxie 500 but would have been if the photographer (Steve Double) had been able to track one down?
Many years ago I put together an FAQ for A Head Full of Wishes and in it I included the question “What is a Galaxie 500?”
For a while I actually had trouble finding a picture of the car to include as evidence of where the band pinched their name. It seems strange that in those early days of the Internet things weren’t as easy to track down as they later became. Eventually someone sent me a picture which lived as an answer to that question. I didn’t ever feel the need to go into any more detail than it’s a car.
Later I started linking to the Yahoo! category (remember, from the days when Yahoo! was a directory) I never, knowingly, saw one in real life until I went to the Goodwood Revival in 2002. The revival is a vintage car rally held at the Goodwood motor-racing circuit which is not far from where my dad lives.
I had of course unknowingly seen one before since it’s the car that Mitch drives in Hitchcock’s The Birds:
Nowadays the car is better represented on the web than the band - most (new) “Galaxie 500” pictures on Flickr or Instagram, and videos on YouTube, are of the car.
It doesn’t bother me, maybe because, despite not being the sort of person who cares about cars (don’t own one, don’t want to) I quite like looking at these gas-guzzling monstrosities from an era when a car could look individual and no one cared what damage it might do to the environment.
Anyway I do like looking, and I mostly like looking at the logos - so a few years ago I put together a gallery on Flickr of some of my favourite pictures of the varied Galaxie 500 logos.
And, here is a picture of my son Adam patiently appeasing his boring old man by posing next to a Galaxie 500 at Goodwood in 2003:
How Galaxie 500 (the band) were named after the car seems a little under-reported. I can’t find any real evidence of them sitting down to discuss what they should call themselves, no debate, no alternative ideas. In Black Postcards Dean talks about auditioning for a band called The Age of Reason where…
The bassist, Paul, drove into town in a beautiful old car -- a Galaxie 500. That was the first I had heard of that particular automobile.
—Dean Wareham - Black Postcards (The Penguin Press, 2008 - p31)
He passed the audition and played one show before quitting… but I guess Paul’s car stuck.
It’s probably not that much of a surprise that the band are named after a car, it was obviously Dean’s suggestion and Dean talks a lot about cars. Key moments in his career often seem to have a vehicular association:
I bought myself an orange 1973 Superbeetle in Newton for $500... Damon and Naomi had a yellow Fiat, so we had a sort of citrus theme going...
—Dean Wareham - Galaxie 500 box set sleeve notes, 1996
Today was released in October 1988 [...] I was living in Jamaica Plain and driving a burgundy Datsun 210 stationwagon I bought in Sudbury for $200.
—Dean Wareham - Galaxie 500 box set sleeve notes, 1996
In June [1989] I bought a blue Dodge Dart in Deadham for $170.
—Dean Wareham - Galaxie 500 box set sleeve notes, 1996
The Dodge Dart, got a name…
[In August 1989] we went back into the studio to record another batch of songs, with Kramer at the Helm [...] We had our new songs ready -- “Blue Thunder,” which was a ode to my Dodge Dart.
—Dean Wareham - Black Postcards (The Penguin Press, 2008 - p66)
In Dean’s tour diary from 2012 he talks about singing Blue Thunder on a trip to Japan:
From the stage tonight I notice three different people crying as I sing “Blue Thunder,” which is a song about the power-steering action in my old 1975 Dodge Dart and doesn’t quite seem worth crying about, though admittedly it is also a song about being alone behind the wheel, and I wail about driving “so far away,” so maybe that’s what did it.
The Dodge Dart made it to the very end of Galaxie 500, here Dean writes about the band’s last show in Maine in 1991:
I made it through the set, loaded my amplifier and guitar into the back of my blue ‘75 Dodge Dart, and drove all the way home to New York City. Was I being a shit? Should I have told them, as we packed up our cars that night, that we had just played our final show? Should I have told them before the show? None of that seemed a very good idea. I would call them from New York.
—Dean Wareham - Black Postcards (The Penguin Press, 2008 - p102)
Of course, once you’re associated with an icon, it’s not so easy to shake it off, and maybe you don’t even try.
In the Luna video for Slash Your Tires, the couple aren’t in any old car - it’s a Galaxie 500…
Pretty certain this isn’t a Galaxie 500 (maybe a BMW?) but Naomi posing in a car is cool (hope she doesn’t mind that I lifted this from D&N’s website a while back).
In Naomi’s fabulous documentary Never Be a Punching Bag for Nobody there is some archive footage of a demonstration in 1968 and in amongst it, unannounced and just for us was this shot…
You can watch the whole of Naomi’s film on YouTube (and probably elsewhere) although it has more to do with aircraft, and boxing, and trucks, oh… and cycling, than it has to do with cars.
Even last week Damon was spotting the car (sort of) on the streets of Lisbon:
I nicknamed my Dacia Logan MCV "Blue Thunder" in honour of the song, without actually knowing until very recently that the song was about a car.