Galaxie 500 was a seminal American underground band from the late 1980s.

Guitarist Dean Wareham, drummer Damon Krukowski and bassist Naomi Yang began playing together during their time as students at Harvard University. In their early years, Krukowski didn\'t own a drum kit, so he borrowed one from his Harvard classmate Conan O\'Brien, who\'d bought a kit but had recently given up playing it. This drum kit can be heard on many of Galaxie 500\'s early recordings. In interviews on the Galaxie 500 DVD Don\'t Let Our Youth Go to Waste, Wareham cites the Spacemen 3 as another key inspiration. The band\'s name comes from a Ford car of the 1960s, the Ford Galaxie 500.

Galaxie 500 leveraged fairly minimal instrumental technique with intense atmospherics, provided by producer Mark Kramer, and their distinctive sound bore an influence beyond the small audience for their independently released albums. With Kramer\'s live sound production at the mixing board at the band\'s every gig, the sound and the increasingly loyal audience grew with each release until Wareham quit the band in 1991 to form Luna.

Krukowski and Yang, devastated by Wareham\'s departure, remained inactive for two years until Kramer convinced them to return to his Noise New Jersey recording studio. They continued to record under the moniker Damon and Naomi (whose first two releases were also produced by Kramer), and additionally began the avant-garde press Exact Change.

Galaxie 500\'s records were released in the US and UK on the independent Rough Trade label. When Rough Trade went bankrupt in 1991, Krukowski and Yang purchased the masters at auction, reissuing them on Ryko in 1997.

Galaxie 500\'s music had an influence on many later indie music groups. It has been covered and referenced by several well known artists. In Liz Phair\'s song \"Stratford-on-Guy\", she sings, \"And I was pretending that I was in a Galaxie 500 video.\" In Xiu Xiu\'s song \"Dr. Troll\", Jamie Stewart sings, \"Listen to On Fire and pretend someone could love you.\" The Submarines did a cover of \"Tugboat\" in their recent iTunes Live Session EP, recorded with famed indie rock producer Adam Lasus. The Brian Jonestown Massacre And This Is Our Music was titled in reference to the group\'s album This Is Our Music (which was in turn titled after Ornette Coleman\'s album This Is Our Music).

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxie_500