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

Indie darlings Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips have long been considered kindred spirits of Andy Warhol, if largely because of his association with Lou Reed, a shared idol and influence to whom they are often compared.

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.

What did you think when the Warhol Museum approached you with this?

Britta Phillips: At first we were sort of in awe and excited and said yes immediately. Then we thought, “What are we going to do?” and procrastinated and did nothing for months. Then we just watched a lot of documentaries about Warhol and the Factory, and that made us more comfortable: We could relate to what was going on then, and we felt like what we were doing wasn’t much different. Warhol was really open to collaboration and matching his name up with all sorts of other people’s work. That freed us up.

How did you choose the Screen Tests you worked with?

Dean Wareham: It was hard. There are almost 500 of them, though only about half of those have been translated to digital. But I started reading about the Factory — I read Warhol’s Popism and Mary Woronov’s Swimming Underground, Ultra Violet’s book, a lot of them. (Warhol’s is good; most of the others are not.) Anyway, the more I read, the more I wanted to focus on the people who were there every day, people who were really part of the Factory instead of some collector or actress who happened to stop by for the day. So we chose Billy Name, who managed the Factory and lived in the back in a closet, and Paul America, Edie Sedgwick’s husband. Even Dennis Hopper. He was the first person to ever buy a soup-can painting, in that first show out in California. I think that was the only one that sold, though at the end of the show, the gallery owner said you can’t have it, we’re going to keep all 32 together.

So how did you go about doing each piece?

BP: It was such a weird, almost unconscious process. Sometimes we would just sift through little ideas, noodlings that we’d already started. And sometimes we wrote something brand new. The thing is, you never know what’s going to work; you have to watch it and see what happens. Sometimes a song can be too perfect, or can be too much, or preachy. It needs to create some tension and drama. Some songs made me feel dread or made me feel like crying, and I would think, yes, that’s good.

You’ve written music for films before, including The Squid and the Whale. How was this different?

DW: Well, there’s no dialogue, so I suppose we’re freer. But they’re long — usually a film cue is only 30 or 60 seconds. There are also constraints: They’re exactly four minutes. But you can go against the picture or with it. It can be like a music video. We don’t have a director sitting there — well, the director’s dead — so we didn’t have to deal with a director saying, That’s not what I’m going for here. We had to figure that out for ourselves.

There’s really a range from instrumental to more poppy, and there are even some covers. Why did you go that way for some of the films?

BP: For subjects who are so huge, like Nico and Lou Reed, it’s hard to write an original song. If you write something about them, it just seems stupid. And if you don’t, it feels disconnected. So rather than saying we have to write something original, we’d rather have the experience of watching it be good.

What was the hardest part?

DW: Some of the characters were just difficult to do. Dennis Hopper. Ingrid Superstar. I’m not sure why. We’d keep trying things, and it was like, no, that doesn’t fit with the faces they’re making. We would try to figure out what was going on with each character but often they switch midway through — they start out presenting one thing, then break down. It’s like a psychological exercise.

Some of them are really intense.

DW: They’re more intense when you know they died too young. At least that’s the experience I have standing onstage, when we’re doing Edie Sedgwick or Ingrid Superstar or especially Freddy Herko, who committed suicide a month later.

What do you think Andy Warhol would think of the project?

DW: I think he’d be happy with the attention — though, I don’t know, he had plenty of attention. But I certainly think he would want these things to be in circulation, instead of sitting in a room in a museum.

How do you think they hold up, 40 years later?

DW: I think they’re amazing. We saw his traveling show at the Wexner in February. You’d walk into this room, and you’re surrounded by all these characters on the walls. It’s a cool way to see them, just to be there for a few minutes and watch them, because watching each Screen Test on its own is hard work. Seeing them all like that made me realize what a monumental thing he’d achieved — a kind of document of the ’60s avant-garde.

They’re like moving portraits.

DW: Yes, there’s a straight line from his photo booth portraits — I guess that was the first time he did something like this — to these, and then later to the Polaroids. He didn’t call them Screen Tests at first. He called them “stillies.”

Lou Reed was at the performance in New York. What was that like?

DW: It made us all a little nervous. It was odd to be standing there with Lou Reed in front of me, and then Lou Reed behind me on the picture, singing “I’m Not a Young Man Anymore,” which was recorded 42 years ago, the same year the Screen Test was done. I was just trying to figure out how he must have felt, seeing all his friends from when he was 22 years old, seeing their faces taken out of that room at the Factory and put on the screen at Lincoln Center.

He came backstage after the show and said, “This Warhol was a smart guy, for doing this.”