Sat. Feb. 2

      After Big Dipper released the album “Heavens” in 1987 there were notions that the Boston quartet might be, well, some version of a big deal, at least in indie rock land. “Heavens” was aces. It showcased a smart post punk/pop band at its best. Big Dipper was the most mainstream band on the decidedly hip/edgy Homestead label. Big Dipper left Homestead for Epic – and a budget that moved from $3000 to $90,000 - and released “Slam” in 1990. Things did not go well, commercially or critically, and two years later the band packed it in. Years later, odd things happened. Singer-guitarists Gary Waleik’s encounter with Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan (who also owned Merge Records) led to a triple-CD release of old and “lost” material and a mini-reunion, of sorts, in 2008. Then, four years later came the fifth Big Dipper album, “Crashes on the Platinum Planet,” with Waleik and longtime mates singer-guitarist Bill Goffrier, drummer-singer Jeff Oliphant and new bassist Tom Brewitt. (Bassist Steve Michener was there for the first reunion, but opted out of this one.)

     Big Dipper plays the Middle East Downstairs Saturday Feb. 2. I knew Waleik back in the day (he played Peter Prescott’s post-Mission of Burma band Volcano Suns) and became re-acquainted at WBUR, where Waleik is a longtime producer and I contribute some bits and pieces. We sat down at a Brookline restaurant for a chat with Waleik about this resurgence of a band that, though a cult favorite, never had big success first time around, prompting a first thought of …

JSInk: I’m guessing this came about because of massive public clamor.

Waleik: If by massive public clamor you mean Tom Sharpling at WFMU. In a nutshell, Tom, a well-known DJ at WFMU and a TV producer (“Monk”) started lobbying for a Big Dipper reunion in 2002 . One night he called Steve Michener in Walla Walla Washington - he was easier to find in the white pages. Steve wasn’t home, but he talked to his wife. Then he talked me and talked to Bill. At the time, we were all taking care of little kids, had jobs and couldn’t entertain thoughts of a reunion. But in 2008 someone directed my attention to Mac, who’d blogged about “Heavens” and said “this is a fine indy record you should give it a listen and said some enterprising record company should reissue that.”  And I contacted Mac and said “Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is?” So we talked. It took a few weeks. It started with the idea we’d release the lost Big Dipper album Bill and I had recorded in 1990 when Steve left the band after the Epic blowout. We had some good songs, but no one wanted to touch us then – indys, majors, whoever. But we had this good material and that’s what we talked about. And all of the Homestead stuff reverted back to us. I’d gotten back all the master tapes and original layout artwork, so I had it in hand and said maybe we could do something more ambitious, so with all the CD tracks, the bonus tracks and the CD would be the ‘lost’ material. It turned out to be a pretty good package so naturally we had to play a few gigs.

That’s pretty ambitious for fairly unknown band.

Yeah, is Bob Dylan in this band? There’s 49 songs! But that’s what we were, we weren’t an indy-to-major sensation or any kind of sensation.

You were not the Pixies, who once opened for you.

Yes, on more than one occasion, in late ‘86, 87. Then they blew our doors off. Anyway, we got all these songs and it made it more obvious that we are were nothing if not a songwriters band. We had decided we’d be democratic. Everyone had ideas and would write songs. None of us are technically great. Well, Bill is a great singer, but that’s as far as you can go with the virtuoso idea. So, it didn’t’ surprise me that we were able to come up with 49 songs that we felt were good enough to put on an anthology. That’s who we were then and that’s who we are now. We played the shows, had a good time and thought of folding it up, ending happy after a miserable experience with Epic Records. 

You all have other lives.

Bill’s a schoolteacher, teaches art in Weymouth; Jeff is in high finance, selling mutual funds, he could buy and sell of us band member. Steve had gone to the West Coast and married someone in San Francisco and moved to Walla Walla to become a wine producer. And me I’m a radio producer, which I started doing before I started doing Big Dipper. I went to BUR right after graduation at Emerson in ’85. The band was starting to bubble up, and I quit in fall of ’87, did Big Dipper fulltime for five years and then the day after it broke up, I got a call from a friend at the station saying “hey we got a job for you.” Steve is not in this project. It’s Tom who’s a house-husband and chemist.

We had the shows and we became friendly with [Guided by Voices leader] Robert Pollard and his posse and they said [his other band] Boston Spaceships are coming to Boston and said would Big Dipper like to open? (Waleik wrote this about him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePraqQ27L-8 ) That went off really well. Robert and I hit it off. And it planted the seed of doing some collaborations. We did that in Mars Classroom and  I did some songs with Bob Fay of Sebadoh, started developing some studio chops and got back into the songwriting game. Bill was writing and Jeff started writing.  I had a little basement recording studio. It started rolling. And we thought these are really really good. We had no ambition to make a record, but we wrote songs, could record them easily, and before we knew it – it took almost four years – we had an album’s worth of stuff. We did it on our terms, when we could in exactly he manner we wanted to..  We didn’t think we were gonna end up with an album’s worth of good songs – and we did.

You guys are making this comeback. Yet, of course, you are not wide eyed kids in your 20s ready to conquer the world. You’re in your 50s?

Except for Jeff, who’s 47. I’m not sure how old Tom is, but probably a little younger. Bill is 55, I’m 50.

Out of the rock star demo.

We were out of the rock star demo when we first started Big Dipper. We started 25 years ago.

So, I’ve got to think you have much different goals now than you did then.

Well, right now the immediate goal is to promote this record, which we find a little overwhelming balancing that with our work lives and our family lives. In a way it feels natural, and in another way you need to do a lot of juggling to keep the balls up in the air. It’s hard to talk about goals when you’re not very ambitious anyway. The exception being the colossal  mistake of signing with Epic Records …. Why did that sink so quickly and far?

There’s no one to blame for the sound of that record but Big Dipper. It wasn’t something Epic forced on us; they bungled everything else and probably shouldn’t have signed us anyway and we should have known better. But it was our decision to make it sound that way. The songs are good – four or five are excellent – but they’re recorded all wrong -  stiff, slick, glossy. If only. We did three records with Homestead and spent around $2000 for “Heavens” and $3000 for “Craps” and we had $90,000 from Epic Records - studio, money on new equipment, a video, an amount of tour support and promotion. It was wrong from the beginning.

Did you think you were rock stars then or going to be?

I don’t think so. We were in the studio in Charlotte, NC, where REM did a record. A band that recorded for Epic was also recording there, Firehouse, and they were all rock star-ish. And we’re playing the basic tracks for “Love Barge” and the guitars are blaring and they’ree saying “That’s some kind of guitar sound!” It was a Gibson Les Paul through a Marshall stack with no pedals. Not a new idea.  C’mon man, know the Gibson, know the Marshall. … The experience of recording that record was fun. But we went way overboard and bit off way more than we could  chew.

I was talking with your former bandmate in Volcano Suns, Peter Prescott, about Big Dipper. He said, “Big Dipper always been something whimsical and wistful. They have nice hard edges for a pop band.”  One of his theories is that grunge came in and killed post-punk pop like yours.

Yes, I think that contributed. We did our last record for Homestead in the fall of ‘88 and we couldn’t come to terms with Homestead so we floundered. We had friends at record labels and they said Big Dipper would be the big breakthrough band of the ‘90s. Now that was intoxicating stuff. I never believed it because I didn’t think we had that rock star quality. I never really believed it because we were like geeky guys, but I thought if this is true … It turned out to be Nirvana and once they broke “Nevermind” it just wiped away a lot of stuff that was worthwhile. I don’t begrudge Nirvana anything and since I learned that Kurt Cobain wrote in his diary that “You’re Not Patsy” was one of his favorite songs. It’s too bad he had to destroy us! But he had other problems. After that, we couldn’t gain any sort of purchase and we gave it up.  Homestead in a way was a good home for us as it had a built-in loyal clientele. They were very sharp, but weren’t quite aligned with everything they had done with that label. We couldn’t find our records in the shop. We didn’t’ know where to go. We had three majors sniffing around and Epic was most serious about it. So we threw our hat into the major label ring, what the heck, we had nothing to lose.

Where does the band stand now in your lives?

We’re not doing this full time and it’s hard to balance. It’s a curious place, but very liberating in a way. We can put out this record and it can crash and burn and be like who cares? We’re not in debt to anybody. We recorded it in my basement. We don’t have a record label contract beyond this one.  We can do a full=blown record or nothing at all. It’s no risk and low expectation except for one thing: We never would have put out this record if we didn’t’ like the songs. When it came to putting out this record … when we were writing and recording them, we were as careful ambitious as can be, but when it comes to promoting our careers,  whatever that may be, who cares?

We were told that Conan O’Brien may be interested in booking us.  Who knows? Something I’ve learned in the past few years, I’ve learned we’ve been influential with people who are more influential than us – novelist Johathan Lethem, comic/actor Janeane Garofalo, Camper van Beethoven. Mark Lannegan of the Screaming Trees once told me “You guys write the greatest songs. You guys deserve to be famous and we don’t ‘cause you write great songs and we don’t.”

Let’s talk songwriting.

What do you want to achieve in song? And how do you know whn you’ve nailed it?

That is a hard question to answer. The easy answer is to say it’s intuitive, you just know it in your bones. To bring it to a more conscious level, it has to mean something to the writer. I could never write a song – a dance song, that only appealed to people who went to a club to dance. I have to write a song that means something to me and then if you can find the things about the songs that resonate with other people and try to maximize that without sacraficing something idiosyncratic or personal.

I can’t imagine my life without certain songs and certain albums. Music by Guided by Voices, Brian Eno records of the 70s, Monochrome Set, Soft Boys, Wire, Mekons.  Everything the Stones did from “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” through “Exile.” Pretty much every Beatles song.

Lyrically, you come from different areas. Is there a Big Dipper take on life do you think?

I think our lyrics are more sharply focused than they were before. They were more oblique back in the day. But we didn’t’ want to make all of the songs concrete ‘cause that wouldn’t be Big Dipper would it? Part of the fun of rock lyrics is you don’t have to say something at all really. “I Am the Walrus” is ingenious but it doesn’t really mean anything. “Robert Pollard” I wanted to make it the song version of “Amadeus,” I’m in love with him and infuriated with him ‘cause he’s so darn good. Bill’s songs are so beautiful, pressing the extreme metaphor and never giving up and it gets funnier the more he does it.

Tix: $18. Opening Chris Collingwood (of Fountains of Wayne) and the Zambonis. On at 9.