Dean Wareham's new memoir is called "Black Postcards," which makes all kinds of indie-rock sense. It's the title of a swirling anthem on a great record by Wareham's former band, Luna. The lyrics go: "If I had to do it all again/ I wouldn't/ Throw it all away/ Throw it all away," but the way Wareham sings it you can't tell if he wouldn't do it all again, or if he wouldn't throw it all away.
Which brings us to the book's even more apt subtitle: "A Rock & Roll Romance." People say that bands are the ultimate dysfunctional family, but both of Wareham's late, lamented musical endeavors - the seminal slowcore band Galaxie 500 and dream-pop heroes Luna - were more like doomed love affairs. Sparks flew, drudgery followed, tensions deepened, and then it ended.
Closure isn't an option thanks to those bastard children, the records, whose continued good health, in the form of reissues, box sets, and DVDs, requires tending long after the thrill is gone. Still, Wareham seems to be searching for something like a denouement with the March 13 publication of "Black Postcards."
"Writing the book was the hardest thing I ever did," says Wareham, on the phone from his New York apartment. "It was like a long therapy session, examining your own life and figuring out what things mean."
"Black Postcards" details the occasional ups, frequent downs, and eventual disintegration of two bands and a marriage. The 2005 Luna breakup still feels fresh in Wareham's mind - a bit too fresh. He says that watching "Tell Me Do You Miss Me," the documentary film that chronicles Luna's final tour, is "like watching a person go a little crazy." But for sheer trauma and enduring bitterness, Luna's saga pales in comparison to the fall of Galaxie 500, the trio Wareham formed in Boston in 1987 with his high-school friends and Harvard classmates Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang.
The trio recorded three pivotal, minimalist rock albums before Wareham left the group - suddenly, by all accounts, on the eve of a Japanese tour - to form Luna. Krukowski and Yang, who are married and now record and perform as Damon & Naomi, were personally and professionally devastated.
Wareham made the provocative choice to open his memoir with a comment from Krukowski, taken from a 1997 interview in which he accuses the band's frontman of duplicity and egomania: "Naomi and I had developed a strong distrust of Dean, which in the end turned out to be not nearly strong enough - we were blind-sided, despite our misgivings about the person he was becoming," the passage begins. Wareham goes on to spill plenty of ink recounting his version of events. He is clear-eyed and occasionally harsh about everyone involved, himself included.
"I wasn't intending to settle scores with the book but I couldn't help myself," says Wareham, a New Zealand native who moved to New York as a teen. "Somebody directed me to that interview, which is posted on Damon and Naomi's website. We can't be happy with everything everyone says, and if it wasn't out there being displayed, if people didn't still ask me about it, I wouldn't have used it in the book. But it was a pretty scathing attack on me."
Krukowski and Yang declined an interview request last week. Krukowski explained in an e-mail that 15 years after going their separate ways he and Yang have moved on, and that the duo's 1992 album, "More Sad Hits," remains the best testament to their feelings - specifically, an Ezra Pound quote included in the liner notes about the worthlessness of market-driven art, and the lyrics to "Information Age": "Our eyes will never meet again/ We're not the same/ Guess we never were/ And all the things we knew/ Even I love you/ Are not the same/ They're just nostalgia." Coincidentally, "More Sad Hits" is being reissued later this year.
The door closed behind Galaxie 500 with a resounding thud. In recent years, according to Wareham, a handful of "civil" e-mails regarding business matters have been exchanged. But odds are slim that the threesome will ever resolve lingering questions of culpability.
"To put it simply," says Kramer, the producer who was at the helm for all three of the band's albums and mixed all their live shows, "everyone was equally to blame."
"A necessary arrogance and air of self-importance is required when entering into this kind of life, and Dean was more suited to embrace it than Damon and Naomi, who perhaps carried too much of their childlike innocence into what was quickly changing from a purely artistic endeavor to a business venture," Kramer recalls in an e-mail. "Dean, with his boyish charm and tailor-made indie warble, is in business. Damon and Naomi are firmly rooted in the art world. There's little compatibility between those two worlds and when they collided a great band soon perished."
Krukowski and Yang have maintained their roots: He teaches two courses in the art department at Harvard, she works as a designer and photographer, and the pair continues to run Exact Change, an avant-garde book publishing house. In June, Damon & Naomi will hit the road again in support of their seventh album, 2007's "Within These Walls."
Wareham concedes that he regrets not getting someone to facilitate - a manager or a lawyer who could have explained fair and equitable formulas for dividing songwriting credit, for instance, and leveling Galaxie 500's lopsided voting process. "Our democracy had an inherent flaw," Wareham writes in the book. "Two of us had formed a faction that met beforehand in the privacy of their home. . . . Damon and Naomi always showed up with the same opinion, and that opinion would carry the day." But in hindsight, Wareham isn't convinced that good advice would have extended Galaxie 500's lifespan.
"All that said, I feel like three records was enough for Galaxie 500," he says.
And therein lies the essence of Wareham's message: It's hard to be in a rock band, and harder to stay in one. Maybe it's especially hard for Wareham. According to Buffalo Tom frontman Bill Janovitz, "of all the bands we played with, were friends with, and were fans of, few struck me as more miserable than Luna, except perhaps for Galaxie 500."
Wareham says that part of the impetus to write "Black Postcards" was to counter the "silly mythology" about the rock band experience.
"Other books don't seem to convey how dull it can be in the day to day," Wareham says. "You tolerate things in your friends that become trying or impossible when you're in a band. I feel like people don't understand what it's like."
Wareham now performs as a duo with his second wife, Luna bassist Britta Phillips; they released their second album last year on the local Zoe label, an imprint of Rounder Records. The pair recently returned from a co-headlining tour with Keren Ann and will be scoring an upcoming film that compiles 13 of Andy Warhol's famous screen tests. While the couple is not immune to the challenges of life on the road, Dean & Britta works, Wareham says, largely because he's not burdened by the responsibility for other people's livelihoods.
The musician and new author is, however, saddled with stress in anticipation of the book's publication - which brings him to Boston for a March 20 reading at Brookline Booksmith and a March 21 reading and performance at the Lizard Lounge.
"I'm sure there will be all kinds of vicious and mean reviews," Wareham says. "No matter what you write about, somebody will find it offensive and wrong. I don't know who. But I know someone's going to be mad at me."
Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com.
