Dean & Britta on Scoring Warhol

Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips

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“I often think of Warhol when I go to see Luna play. Not just because Dean Wareham stands still and shy onstage with a slight smile while his songs act out every manner of misbehavior he can think of or orchestrate, but also because Warhol is the ground zero for the New York rock & roll that Luna have taken up. Without his outsider's desire, his fakery, his honest delight in invention, his thirst for gossip, his cruelty and kindness, his parties, where would we be?”

—Music critic Joe Levy, from the liner notes for Luna Live

The pair met when Phillips joined Wareham’s band Luna — imagine the Velvet Underground at once dreamier, more playful, and more insouciant — shortly after they released their fifth album in 1999. While touring, the band made several stops at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh to do research on the Velvets, befriending staff and curators there and later even playing a show to benefit the museum.  

Luna broke up in 2005, but Wareham and Phillips stayed together both as bandmates — they record under Dean & Britta now — and as a couple, and now they are touring on behalf of the museum, with a performance conceived by its associate curator of performance, Ben Harrison, for Pittsburgh’s 2008 International Festival of Firsts.

In the show, titled “The 13 Most Beautiful… Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests,” the duo provides a live musical score for a selection of the Pop giant’s famed moving portraits — three-minute silent films of the major figures and passers-through at the storied Factory that are played back in slow motion. The title, and the conceit, comes from Warhol himself, who for parties or other happenings would create subseries of the 500-some films, all shot between 1964 and ’66, and give them a title beginning “The 13 Most Beautiful…” — though he rarely stuck to 13.

Dean and Britta were given access to the museum’s archives to select the 13 tests they would work with, and after viewing hundreds they settled on Lou Reed, Nico, Edie Sedgwick, Dennis Hopper, Paul America, Susan Bottomly, Ann Buchanan, Freddy Herko, Jane Holzer, Billy Name, Richard Rheem, Ingrid Superstar, and Mary Woronov. They scored each individually, pairing them with pop songs and more cinematic compositions, repurposed older Dean & Britta songs, and two covers: for Nico, a Bob Dylan song he wrote for her, and for Lou Reed, his own rare and poignant “I’m Not a Young Man Anymore.”

The Warhol Museum offered to tour the performance to other museums and institutions, and many booked it sight unseen. It has already traveled to Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, and New York, a performance that Wareham calls “spectacular” thanks to the stage’s backdrop — a 90-foot-high view of the city’s night skyline. (The fact that Lou Reed showed up didn’t hurt either.) This Saturday it goes to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and in March it will travel to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, and Mass MOCA. Also that month, the 13 songs and films will be released on DVD, marking the first official DVD release of any Warhol material.

The proceeds will benefit the museum (Dean & Britta will receive royalties), but Harrison said that some within the institution were wary at first about releasing the films “into the world.” In the end, though, they decided the project was intrinsically Warholian.

“He would have loved all things about the Internet,” Harrison said, “particularly in terms of mass communication. You’ll be able to download his Screen Tests on iTunes; I think Warhol would have thought that was cool.”

ARTINFO talked to Dean and Britta about the songs, the Factory, and how Warhol’s vision stands up today.