By: Jeff Hassay

There has always been something charming and understated about Dean Wareham. You can catch glimpses of what I mean in his recent autobiography Black Postcards, or in the Luna documentary Tell Me Do You Miss Me, or in his hundreds of songs that don’t exactly all sound the same though they do all have the same vibe—something along the lines of sitting in a jacuzzi, wearing sunglasses and a smirk.

Wareham’s songs are the result of picking up where the Velvet Underground left off and throwing heavy doses of The Feelies and Spacemen 3 into the mix. His vibe and career is the result of somehow keeping this formula interesting. I always get the sense that Wareham can prove how great he is but he chooses to merely infer it instead. Summoning nutty lyrics, squalling guitar solos, beautiful melodies (that are never too beautiful or syrupy) and a drone-y sound that is almost psychedelic and almost shoegaze but somehow neither, Wareham is in some frozen limbo between alternative legend and obscure classic rocker.

That being said I am a little dismayed when I realize that Wareham isn’t the household name that he should be and that his concert at the gorgeous outdoor amphitheater in Los Angeles on the cusp of a summer night wasn’t sold out immediately. The occasion of his and Britta Phillip’s concert (billed as “Dean and Britta”) was Wareham’s new project; 13 Most Beautiful, a series of songs performed to a backdrop of projected screen tests shot by Andy Warhol. Each song/ film ran about 5 minutes. The screen tests are essentially just a single shot of someone sitting in front of a camera, usually somewhere between awkward and riveting with a heavy dose of tedious.

The songs were sometimes instrumental, usually mellow tempoed, a few covers were thrown including Dylan’s I’ll Keep It With Mine (written about Nico and played to her screen test), two Luna songs (including the gorgeous b-side Teenage Lightning which got a new verse and added instrumentation to fill out the five minutes) and a slew of new material written for the project was presented. These all formed a comprehensive song suite that was confident, focused and hypnotic. Like the films, the music took its time, flirted with repetition and very subtle variety. Both were almost boring. This is what made each work so well together; they added to each other. After a minute or four of seeing someone sit in a chair you could look at the band, listen to the swells or guitar solos, and alternately after a few minutes of a keyboard/ guitar drone you could trip out on the light shining on Billy Name’s glasses or Edie Sedgwick’s giant beautiful siren eyes or the way the Lou Reed sipped Coke from a bottle. So cool and slightly nervous. Like everything he has ever done. The song played to Lou Reed’s screen test (shot when he was a baby-faced 24 years old) was the rare Velvet Underground dirge I’m Not A Young Man Anymore (written by Reed at 25) from the bootleg Live At The Gymnasium which was possibly performed in front of a projected Warhol film/screen test. Crazy right?

Wareham would punctuate every two or three songs with an introduction or aside about the film, how the person ended up at Warhol’s Factory or what became of them. Looking at the notes that he had taped to the stage (which I commandeered after the performance) show how interesting and amusing these asides were: Ingrid Superstar (whose accompanying song was called Eyes In My Smoke) lived with her mother and one day went out for cigarettes and never came back, for Freddy Herko, Wareham wrote “mole people,” his Mary Warnow notes said “whip dancer,” and for Paul America he put down simply “helicopter pad.” I wish he talked about these but the surreal blurbs are enough to somehow have the jangly stoned-out songs make that much more sense.