13 MB is now available for digital download on our webstore as well as iTunes, Amazon, etc…

Order the CD from our website and receive a free 11″ x 17″ poster

MORE “Dean Wareham plays Galaxie 500″ shows added!

Nov. 15 - Vancouver, BC
Nov. 16 - Seattle, WA
Dec. 10-12 - ATP’s Bowlie Festival 2
Butlins, Minehead, Somerset UK
(exact date TBC - either Friday or Saturday)

ALL tour dates: www.deanandbritta.com/shows

Tuli Kupferberg, singer with the Fugs, poet, cartoonist and long-time peace activist, passed away last week at age 86. Kramer produced  and released an album (Tuli & Friends) with him on Shimmy Disc in 1989, and Kramer liked to say that Tuli was the wisest person he had ever met. My last contact with Mr. Kupferbergwas a couple of years ago when I called him about reprinting the lyrics for his amusing anti-war song “Kill For Peace” in Black Postcards. Luna had performed this song at the Knitting Factory on the night that the Iraq invasion commenced. About a month earlier (March 2003), Kupferberg and I had both performed at Joe’s Pub, part of an evening titled “Songs of the Vietnam Songbook.” The Iraq War had not yet started, but everyone in the room knew it was coming. I remember Tuli predicting that “the war against Iraq will be a short war, but the war against the United States will go on for a long time.” It seems he was mistaken with the first part of that equation; the war in Iraq has now been going on for eight long years. Maybe he wasn’t anticipating that the initial shock and awe would be followed by a disastrous occupation. Or perhaps he was only observing that what looks at first like a quick and easy war turns into something else. It seems a fundamental truth of the modern world that  most people will no longer tolerate foreign occupiers — no matter what their supposed intentions. In the 19th century European powers could control vast colonies without facing much resistance, as historian Eric Hobsbawm has observed. It doesn’t work that way any more. But enough history, here is Tuli reciting a poem about a superior billy club (this from his 1966 LP “No Deposit, No Return.”

Lifetime Guarantee

Because the wars are ongoing, they still play “God Bless America” at Yankee Stadium during the 7th-inning stretch (in addition to the “Star-Spangled Banner” at the start of the game). Yankees’ owner George Steinbrenner died this week, the day after Kupferberg, and the eulogizing has not stopped — they even observed a moment of silence at Fenway Park. “George is a great guy,” Lou Piniella once said, “unless you have to work for him.” Steinbrenner, who was convicted of making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign, and was forced out of major league baseball in the early ’90s for hiring a gambler to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield, had started playing “God Bless America” at the Stadium after 9-11, and many other cities followed suit. But after 10 years of war, the only stadiums still playing the song are Yankee Stadium and Dodger Stadium. In 2008 one Red Sox fan tried to go to the bathroom during the singing of “God Bless America”, but was detained and then ejected from Yankee stadium by two members of the NYPD. He sued Yankee stadium, and won (with the help of the NYCLU); now we are all allowed to go to the bathroom whenever we like.

Here’s another of Tuli’s songs, from Tuli & Friends, a re-recording of the Fugs’ “Morning, Morning”, certainly the prettiest song he ever wrote.

25-morning-morning

We have a redesigned shop where you can place orders for a new T-shirt themed for the Andy Warhol Screen Test show. The shirt lists all 13 Most Beautiful subjects plus Dean, Britta and Andy. Silver and white lettering on a black American Apparel shirt . . . it’s hard to see the silver in this photo but we promise it is there. July 27 will see the release of the limited edition 13 Most Beautiful double-CD - if you pre-order you will also receive an 11×17 poster designed by Frank Olinsky.  July 30 will see us performing the Andy Warhol Screen Test show at the Barbican Theatre in London.

http://deanandbritta.11spot.com/

Three quick notes:

1. We are giving away “He’s Coming Home” and “Old Toy Trains” — last year’s Christmas 7″ single. “He’s Coming Home” was written as “She’s Coming Home” by the Wailers (from the Pacific Northwest, not Jamaica). “Old Toy Trains” was written by Roger Miller (”King of the Road,” not Mission of Burma) and our version is a collaboration with Sonic Boom. Just click on the link below and enter the code!

http://promo.11spot.com/deanandbritta/holiday_bonus

code: oldtoytrains

2. We now have Galaxie 500 T-shirts available at our online store — original 1988 design by Naomi Yang, black American Apparel 100% cotton shirts. And of course the usual assortment of CDs, T-shirts, “13 Most Beautiful… songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (DVD) and signed copies of “Black Postcards.” The links have been updated so you might have to refresh your browser page for the new ones to load.

3. We are performing an early New Year’s Eve show at Southpaw in Brooklyn — doors are at 7:30p.m. and the show will be over by 10p.m. The opening band is Undersea Poem

Click here for tix

view all Dean & Britta Tour dates here

This is our record release party for Soft-Core, the new CD from
My Robot Friend.  Featuring a rare live performance by My Robot Friend
Also performing: Cheval Sombre, DJ Dean Wareham & special guests.

MRF’s live show is a stunning, multi-media event and is not to be missed!

92yTribeca
200 Hudson Street
New York, NY
Price: $10 advance, $12 at

We’re performing “13 Most Beautiful… songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests” at the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn as part of the Celebrate Brooklyn Festival. Support comes from Crystal STilts. The show kicks off at 7:30 pm and is free (but with a suggested $3 donation).

Afterwords, we will head over to The Bell House in Gowanus, Brooklyn to celebrate.

Check out the blurb in TIME OUT NYC

For the first time in many years the three original Galaxie 500 albums are available on vinyl — from the just-launched official Galaxie 500 store, fierybreeze.com, along with deluxe digital downloads (320k mp3 or Apple lossless files) of those recordings. Orders are being taken now and will ship out July 6.

Click below for a free download of Galaxie 500’s 1990 single, “Fourth of July”

After performing this Andy Warhol Screen Test show in museums across the country for the past six months, the DVD from Plexifilm has finally arrived and is a thing of beauty. The DVD is housed in an elegant hardcover booklet with with forty pages of notes and photographs. It contains the original Andy Warhol films, with our songs (brand new studio recordings) as the soundtrack, along with a short documentary about the making of the live show. The DVD officially hits the streets April 7, but we have copies available now.

We are playing our last 13 Most Beautiful show for a while, this Saturday night at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, but will pick up again July 2 with a show at the Ann Arbor Arts Festival, followed by July shows in Marseille, Dunfermline (Scotland), St Etienne and Paris.

Here is the official description of the DVD from the Plexifilm site:

Released in conjunction with The Andy Warhol Museum, 13 Most Beautiful…Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests features 13 of Warhol’s classic silent film portraits. Subjects include Nico, Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick, Dennis Hopper, and more. Shot between 1964 and 1966 at Warhol’s Factory studio in New York City, the Screen Tests are presented with newly commissioned soundtracks performed by Dean & Britta (and band).
This is the first ever authorized DVD release of films by Andy Warhol.

The DVD is presented in a slipcovered hardbound package. DVD extras include a behind-the-scenes documentary on the live production of the 13 Most Beautiful… Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Testsperformances, and a video interview with Dean & Britta about Andy Warhol, the music and the project. The booklet includes brief biographies of the Screen Test subjects, liner notes from the Warhol Museum’s Thomas Sokolowski, Geralyn Huxley, and Ben Harrison and notes on the music from Dean Wareham.

13 Most Beautiful: Songs for
Andy Warhol Screen Tests
13 “Screen Test” portrait films
by Andy Warhol, with songs
performed by Dean & Britta

DVD (Region 0 - World)
$30
BUY NOW

thanks,

Dean

Tuesday evening, I’m listening to Face to Face by the Kinks. This was my friend Graham’s favorite Kinks album back in high school. I had some of these songs on Kinks Kronicles but now I finally own the whole album. It’s a good one. I have also been enjoying the Crystal Stilts, Golden Animals, and Kraftwerk’s Ralf und Florian album.

We have been rehearsing for the next performance of our Andy Warhol Screen Test project, this Saturday night at the Allen Room (part of Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series). The Warhol films are going to look beautiful in this setting, framed by a giant window that looks out on Columbus Circle. Later this month we take the Screen Test project on the road, with shows in San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Chicago, Minneapolis, Boston and Mass MoCA in Western Massachusetts. Later in the year we expect to be playing European dates too. There will be a DVD of this project (likely in March), but the Warhol films look extra special on the big screen, and with the live band.
Our soundtrack EP is now available for download from our webstore for $2.99. It contains two instrumental pieces from The Squid & the Whale, my version of Pink Floyd’s “Hey You,” which I recorded to teach the song to Jesse Eisenberg (who sings it in the film), plus two other short instrumentals from Just Like the Son. Total running time is just under 14 minutes.

We are excited about the first signing to our Double Feature label –                the Sand Pebbles, Australia’s most intriguing band. February 17 we release A Thousand Wild Flowers, a compilation of the best songs from three extremely rare albums by the band. They describe their sound as flower punk –  equal parts Buffalo Springfield and Wire. We met bassist Christmas Hollow a few years back while doing an interview for their excellent webzine, Tarantula! Chris sent us their Ghost Transmissions album (now out of print) and we have been fans, and friends, ever since. I contributed guitar to one of their albums, and the Pebbles did a great remix for our Variations EP last year. These guys have an unusual pedigree for a rock band — they met, as scriptwriters, on the set of the Australian soap opera Neighbours. After long days of scriptwriting, they would occasionally spend evenings jamming in an empty Tae-Kwon-Do studio, before graduating to a chill-out room at raves.        I am not making this up. You can pre-order the album from our webstore.

Further down the road – March 31 we are releasing the debut by Cheval Sombre, produced by Sonic Boom, with musical contributions from Britta and myself. This CD contains tracks from his out-of-print 7” singles (issued on the UK label, Static Caravan), and a whole lot more.

Dean Wareham
January 13, 2009