Steve Wynn - Recurring Dream

Story by Bill Kopp

The Dream Syndicate was part of the 1980s "Paisley Underground" musical movement, a school of thought that took as influences some of the best that the 1960s had to offer. In terms of both style and substance (musical and otherwise) paisley underground bands created something new that remained firmly rooted in the finest 1960s traditions. The Dream Syndicate's Steve Wynn says that the paisley underground scene wasn't hype; it was a real thing. "We were all hanging out together: us, Green on Red, the Bangs, the Salvation Army, the Long Ryders."

Some of these bands took the aesthetic quite seriously: groups like the Bangs (later called the Bangles) would cover ultra-obscure sixties tracks on their early demos. While songs like The Merry Go Round's "Live" and "How is the Air Up There" by Australia's La Di Das are now more well known via their inclusion on Nuggets II: The British Empire and Beyond, in the 80s the only people who knew about such obscurities were hardcore music fans.

Other groups forged an identity based in part on the sixties, but also created music informed by (slightly) more modern influences. The Dream Syndicate was one of these. Unafraid to engage in longer guitar solos than their sixties counterparts, the Dream Syndicate sound harked back in some ways to the Velvet Underground (60s) and Television (70s). With a sound that incorporated a musically aggressive stance tempered with hints of Americana (though it wasn't called that in the 80s), the Dream Syndicate broke new ground while managing to sound somehow warmly familiar.

Yet when the group released its second album in 1984, The Medicine Show received something of a head-scratching response in the critical marketplace. As the current press kit for the 2010 expanded reissue of the album puts it, since its release the album has been "alternately reviled, worshipped, misunderstood, analyzed, interpreted, revisited, forgotten, revisited again, bought, sold, and bartered on eBay."

In some ways the confusion is easy to understand. The Medicine Show represented a significant musical departure from 1982's Days of Wine and Roses. Certainly groups ought to be able to change direction as they see fit, but equally certain is the risk that the fans may or may not follow. "Days of Wine and Roses was a record that touched a lot of people in a pretty intense and direct way at that time," Steve Wynn says. "People were into hearing that kind of record." He suggests that those people might have "wanted to hear more of the same; that's only natural. But that's not what we sought to do." Pressed on what exactly people found so different about the two records, Wynn suggests it might have in part been down to the production. "Days was cheaply made, raw-sounding...The Medicine Show was more 'produced' and had some emphasis on keyboards, and there were some differences in the songwriting."

"It's most exciting when your music reflects where you are at that moment," Wynn says. He points out that while for most people the difference in their lives between ages 22 and 23 his ages when making the first two Dream Syndicate albums) are not that significant. But for him, life changed in a big way, and the music reflected that. He went from working in a record store to "having been on the road for a year, and having been written up everywhere."

"I was a different person by then," he says. "To make the same kind of record would have been a lie, really."

Listening to the album in the context of 2010, it's a less jarring departure. In many ways the musical and lyrical motifs foreshadow the direction of Steve Wynn's subsequent solo career. In particular, many of the songs point the way toward Wynn's 1990 underrated solo album Kerosene Man. There's a cinematic, almost film noir quality to the songwriting and arrangements. Wynn agrees to a point, noting that "when you strip my songs down to just songs, I think that really all my stuff holds together."

Our conversation heads off on a slight tangent as we both observe how time has a way of putting things in context, of sanding off those edges which made music sound so "edgy" as it were. Wynn muses that "when you play the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks and then an Aerosmith album from the same period, they don't sound all that different now." That sentiment would not have found much agreement in the late 1970s.

In any event, at the time of its release, The Medicine Show confounded some listeners who might have wanted, as Wynn puts it, "Days of Wine and Roses Part Two." He says, "I don't think I'm attaching my old band with any additional self-importance, but I think we were kind of the Great White Hope at the time. A lot of people in the post-punk new-rock cool music circle -- the same kind of people that I was myself: music geeks -- looked at the Dream Syndicate as something very exciting, something that was 'their' band." Wynn observes that a lot of the context of the time -- what the previous record had sounded like, the fact that the band had gotten onto a major label and didn't record the album in their hometown Los Angeles -- "doesn't matter now" to people, and so the record is received on different terms. "All that matters now is that it's a great rock record. And that what time will do." He reminds that "Elvis left Sun Records to make his first RCA record. At the time it was a big deal. Now, it's just part of the Elvis story."

Producer Sandy Pearlman gave The Dream Syndicate's 1984 album The Medicine Show album a bright, clear sound that has worn well; it's not firmly rooted in a particular era sonically. "Sandy had a lot to do with helping to shape what we were doing," leader Steve Wynn says. "Actually Sandy was very involved in the arrangements. He helped us find new ways to play our songs." Wynn cites the example of "Merrittville," a song the bad had been playing "faster and faster, with no apparent reason." Pearlman got the band to slow it down, digging into the meaning of the song. In the end, Wynn believes that Pearlman's goal -- successfully achieved, Wynn notes -- was to "document where we were" musically.

And while this writer doesn't find the sound of The Medicine Show to be at all dated, Wynn does, if only a little bit. "Since that time, I have been a little bit leery of following musically what is happening at the moment" lest he create something that is dated by that moment. He observes that "If you're on the cutting edge of a moment, you're going to be dated by that moment." In his own work, Wynn strives to be true to his "emotion at the moment, as opposed to the sound of the moment."

The Medicine Show has a strong emphasis on keyboard sounds, especially considering the group's reputation as a guitar band. Auxiliary player Tommy Zvoncheck's piano and organ -- which were overdubbed after the band finished their sessions -- are mixed prominently throughout the album. And the 1984 EP This is Not the New Dream Syndicate Album...Live! (appended to the new CD as a bonus) finds Zvoncheck's keys even more forward in the mix. "It was very exciting for the band -- to me, for sure -- when we heard him play those songs," Wynn recalls. "We were digging what we had [from the basic sessions], but when we heard what he did, it just took the music to a different place."

Wynn admits that the feel of what he considers the songs at the heart of The Medicine Show -- "Burn," "Bullet With My Name On It" and "Merrittville" -- are "epic, big, Cinemascope type songs" and that Zvoncheck's keys were just what those songs needed to "take them to that complete, wide-screen level."

The live EP appended to the new disc opens with a track originally on the first album. But here "Tell Me When It's Over" is built around Zvoncheck's piano (especially the long intro) and the result is a feel eerily similar to the Hunter/Wagner "Intro" track on Lou Reed's Rock'n'Roll Animal. Oddly, at the time of its original release, the usually spot-on Trouser Press Record Guide called the EP "a dismal document." I wonder aloud to Wynn what the hell they were listening to.

"I'm not sure which hurts worse," Wynn muses. "When the critics get it wrong, and you're frustrated that they missed the point, or when they get it so right, and you feel you've been cut to the bone." He again mentions how the context of the time affects the perception of a work, and admits that the album and EP were "an anomaly compared to what we did before or since. But," he says with a chuckle, that big 'arena rock' and dramatic sound is what we wanted to do at the time. And I think it's pretty good. Far from dismal."

With some hesitation, I mention that the album's sweeping narrative feel reminds me of the work of two other artists. I'm not at all sure how Wynn will react to the comparisons, but I cite the similarities in his approach to, first, the style of Tom Verlaine and Television. "Certainly," Wynn says. "There's no understating the influence of Marquee Moon on everything that I do."

Then, I carefully, diplomatically mention...Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits. In particular I sensed a musical kinship between Wynn's songwriting (and arrangement) and the sort of feel Knopfler brought to Dire Straits LPs Making Movies (1980) and Love Over Gold (1982). I note that Knopfler seemed to be shooting for a film-treatment-in-four-minutes style, trying to push the limits of rock songwriting.

I'm pretty well shocked when Wynn concurs. "It's funny that you mention that. I don't think I've told anyone this before, but at the time we made The Medicine Show, the Dire Straits record Making Movies was one of my favorite records. It couldn't be less hip to say that now, and even less so then. But I thought that it was beautiful, evocative. That record did something that all of my favorite records do: it created its own world, and invited you in. It took you on a trip somewhere else. Now, maybe it's not the same trip you'd go on with a John Coltrane record, but it took you to a definite place. A very romantic place." Wynn pauses, then adds: "And I think that there was that influence on The Medicine Show. But no one's ever pointed that out before."

To these ears, the track "The Medicine Show" is almost a blues, and it's not too difficult to imagine the song as performed by a Howlin' Wolf or a Muddy Waters. Asked if he aims for a particular style when he's writing certain songs, Wynn is wryly candid. "Especially with my earlier songs, I could tell you -- if I wanted to -- who I was ripping off in each song." He goes on to say that "hopefully, as the song develops, it takes you somewhere else." Wynn says that the song "John Coltrane Stereo Blues" began as "a free-form jam. But it was influenced by 'Little Johnny Jewel' by Television. The song started as a riff, and it was a Television riff. But where it went -- night after night in the studio -- is someplace else." Wynn says that the track -- which he still performs -- continues to evolve, and that what we hear on The Medicine Show version is simply "where it was in December 1983."

When Wynn uses the phrase "night after night," he's referring to producer Sandy Pearlman's modus operandi for The Medicine Show sessions. He insisted the band run through the songs many, many times before committing them to tape. "Sandy has always had repetition as part of his production," Wynn reveals. "He was looking for something that would blow his mind, all the time. And when we'd get in the studio," Wynn laughs, "he'd have us do it over and over again until he found it. And in a way, it wore us down. It was a little like the Stockholm Syndrome: you eventually break down your hostage until they're willing to do whatever you say. And," he adds, "it was a good thing."

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