Tugboat

“Tugboat” is Track 1 on Today, the debut studio album Galaxie 500 released in February 1988. It is also Track 1 on CBGB 12.13.88, the live album recorded nine months later at the close of that same year. The band opened with the same song they had opened everything with. Producer Kramer captured the set on a board mix at CBGB on December 13, 1988. The recording circulated as a bootleg for decades before Silver Current Records released it officially in August 2025. One year ago today, the label announced it on Instagram: out now wherever great records are sold. The bootleg became a record.

Galaxie 500 formed at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1987. Dean Wareham on vocals and guitar. Naomi Yang on bass. Damon Krukowski on drums. The CBGB show on December 13, 1988 closed out a year in which the band had released Today and built a following through relentless touring. The bill that night included Sonic Youth, B.A.L.L., and Unsane. The show was organized as a benefit for See Hear, the East Village zine shop. Alan Douches later restored the recording from the analog source at West West Side Music. UNCUT rated the result 9 out of 10. The Quietus named it Reissue of the Week. MOJO called it a perfect exercise in latter-day American Transcendentalism.

Galaxie 500 released three albums: Today in 1988, On Fire in 1989, and This Is Our Music in 1990. The band split in 1991. Their total recorded output is compact and the influence it left behind is not. The slow tempos, the dissolving guitar, the vocals barely above a murmur. “Tugboat” is where all of it begins. It opens the debut album. It opens the CBGB set. It places itself at the front and waits. The best bootlegs preserve what the official record did not know to save. CBGB 12.13.88 is now on the shelf where it always belonged. It was always a record.