Song of the Day
Luna was the rightful heir to the Velvet Underground's venerable legacy as the archetypal New York band
23 Minutes in Brussels -Luna
Luna never got their due as a band. The band had a huge following in New York City where many fans saw Luna as the rightful heir of the archetypal New York band, the Velvet Underground. During Luna's twelve year run as a band they produced a catalog of 7 studio albums and one live album that was the equal of any band of the mid 90s/early 2000 era.
Luna was a
band of formers, my own term for bands formed by ex-members of other prominent bands. The music industry calls them
super groups which is a misnomer. The super group tag operates under the specious assumption any high profile band of formers’ musical product will be “super” which it rarely is. Super group is just another music industry tag line use to sell product.
The founding members of Luna were former Galaxie 500 vocalist and guitarist Dean Wareham, former Chills bassist Justin Harwood and former-Feelies drummer Stanley Demeski. If there was ever band of formers that made “super” music, it was Luna. Since none of Luna’s albums ever charted on the Billboard 200, Luna ended up being the antithesis of the music industry’s definition of super group.
In 1999 Justin Harwood left the band to return to his native New Zealand to raise a family and was replaced by Britta Phillips. Britta Phillips was originally a talented young actress and musician who made an impressive acting debut at age 16 in the 1988 film
Satisfaction with Liam Nesson, Julia Roberts and Justine Bateman. She had a couple of minor successful film roles after that. In the early 90s she moved to London and formed Belltower a short-lived but well loved indie band.
Luna's Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips performed as a duet in a Luna side project which because a full time gig for Dean and Britt following the breakup of Luna in 2004. The photo of Dean and Britt above is a role reversal parody of a memorable film poster for the 1967 Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic art house film of swinging mod London, Blow-Up. Click here to see the original Blow-Up poster where actor David Hemmings sits astride British supermodel Jean Shrimpton in a strikingly similar pose.
As fate would have it , Britta became an integral part of the revamped 1999 edition of Luna. She married bandmate Dean Wareham and became his musical partner in the seductive and dreamy Europop influenced duo simply named
Dean and Britta which was a side project that became full time gig for the Wareham and Phillips, following the amicable breakup of Luna in 2004 A good starting point for those uninitiated to Luna's music is the Rhino Record's well selected 17 song retrospective the
Best of Luna issued in 2006.
If you're looking for a sampler of Luna's work, you won't find anything better than this Rhino issued 2006 anthology, The Best of Luna
Luna delivered the goods in their live performances which is aptly demonstrated by the 2001 release
Luna Live and the live performance of
23 Minutes in Brussels I've posted. Luna's members were all skilled improvisational musicians and rarely played any song the same way twice in live performances. For Luna, every song was a work in progress. Luna's improvised space jams made bootleg tapes of Luna's live shows an object of obsession for Luna's fans. In the same manner of dedicated Deadheads, Lunatiks amassed prized collections of bootlegged live Luna performances.
On this YouTube video Dean Wareham and 2nd guitarist Sean Eden engage in a 4 minute of ethereal psychedelic guitar crossfire that is reminiscent of the Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd's otherworldly guitar jams for another legendary New York guitar band, Television.