Kramer would go on to preside over the majority of the band’s work, and while it could be argued that his role in shaping the sound of Galaxie 500 has been slightly overemphasized (see entry #10), his contribution to the band’s recorded legacy cannot be overlooked or undervalued.

Noting that Shimmy Disc impresario Kramer helmed Half Japanese’s Music To Strip By, the band contacted the notoriously eccentric producer, who was impressed enough by what he heard to accept an invitation to record the band. Though the Boston music scene in the late eighties was still dominated by the post-punk, pre-alt rock sound of local godfathers Mission of Burma, Galaxie 500 broke with tradition by soliciting a collaborator outside of their circle of contemporaries. One imagines the walls of the Galaxie 500 rehearsal space lined not with bikini girls with machine guns, but with posters of Buckminster Fuller and Trotsky. In the band’s very first fanzine interview (reproduced in full in Mike McGonigal’s band biography, Temperature’s Rising: An Oral and Visual History of Galaxie 500), Krukowksi cites Greek philosopher Zeno’s theory of the infinite divisibility of time as an influence on his drumming. This was no band of boneheads: Wareham, Krukowski, and Yang were erudite, Harvard-educated intellectuals who just happened to love rock and roll. The band’s visual aesthetic - postmodern, sleek, and sophisticated - was as precocious as its music, owing largely to bassist Yang’s talents as a visual artist and designer. Like contemporaneous visionaries Sonic Youth, the Jesus & Mary Chain, or Public Enemy, Galaxie 500’s music suggested innate greatness because of this, there has always been something more than a little fluke-ish about their rise to glory. Luckily, something got scrambled in the translation, serendipitously resulting in the organic compound that is Galaxie 500. Named after a classic model Ford that none of the band members had ever actually driven, Galaxie 500 - vocalist/guitarist Dean Wareham, bassist/vocalist Naomi Yang, and drummer Damon Krukowski - began like many eighties bands reared on rock and roll radio and back issues of Trouser Press: as imitators, not innovators. If rock-critic clichés never existed, Galaxie 500 would have had to invent them.

Incubus band dissonance