The last time the Dream Syndicate was in town, it was 1984, and REM was playing the Commodore, with the Dream Syndicate opening. REM was still only "Commodore-sized!"
The newest Dream Syndicate stuff does NOT sound like the VU played by Neil Young, mind you -- try
this post-reunion masterstroke for a taster -- but it's fun that both those artists come up in my conversation with Steve Wynn (the Velvets are obvious, but I hadn't expected Neil Young to play a role).
The album ARGH!! refers to,
The Days of Wine and Roses, was a critical darling when it came out in 1982, and a key moment in the history of the Paisley Underground scene of early 1980s California. It was actually the band’s second release, polished a bit more than
their debut EP, which had come out earlier that year. Check out the jangly guitars on the first track on that EP, “Sure Thing”, and you’ll hear what ARGH!! means immediately: it’s 100% “Waiting for the Man” territory, but with a more propulsive drive, and maybe a hint of the Buffalo Springfield’s “Mr. Soul” in the songwriting.
Speaking of which, note that the Dream Syndicate have actually
covered “Mr. Soul.” So I guess the Neil Young comparison holds. The Dream Syndicate makes its Vancouver return, 41 years since they last played our town! What follows are outtakes from the same conversation that informed
my Straight piece; maybe read that piece first? And check out the Dream Syndicate's stunning new box set,
Medicine Show: I Know What You Like,
AM: Heads up, I’m going to be buried in the past for this interview.
SW: The past is all right.
AM: Do you have connections up here? It’s been ages since you played here.
SW: That’s for sure. The last time I was there in any way was in 1984, opening for REM. I’ve only ever been there twice in my life for a day each, so it’s kind of a shame, because I liked it there. And you’re talking about John Armstrong [
see the Straight piece]; and... those guys in Japandroids, they’re from there, right?
AM: Yep!
SW: I’ve met them, and they’re super cool, and I know they like the stuff I’ve done. But it’s weird how little I’ve been there. Part of the reason was, back in the [first-gen] Dream Syndicate days, we’d get in the van and we’d go straight east, L.A. directly to Denver and then Denver on. So we never played much in the Pacific Northwest; we didn’t play Seattle or Portland, either, and the thing is, if you don’t play a place early on, it’s kind of hard to make in-roads later. That’s why I’m curious about this show; if there are ten people there or ten thousand, I won’t be surprised either way. I imagine somewhere in between!
AM: I mean, a lot of the people who know here you were actually at that 1984 REM show: I've heard a lot of people say “I saw them at the Commodore” or "I saw them open for U2."
SW: Great! It’s funny, you wrote to me about Scott McCaughey, who’s one of my best friends and my bandmate [in
the Baseball Project], and he was at shows on that REM tour and the U2 tour before that, that’s kind of funny. Those two tours reached a lot of people. If you’re going to go on tour with two bands, those are pretty good ones!
AM: Yes indeed. So who were you most connected with in the Los Angeles scene? I know you were connected with Dan of Green on Red, and I know Chris Desjardins produced
Days of Wine and Roses, but I don’t really have a great sense of who your comrades were otherwise. Like, did you play shows with the Gun Club…? You were pretty early in the Paisley Underground scene, so… who were your peers early on? Who were you hanging out with?
SW: It really was the Paisley Underground thing, as you say: the Bangs, who became the Bangles; Salvation Army, who became Three O’Clock, and Rain Parade and Long Ryders and Green on Red. We really were our own gang; we played shows together, we hung out together, we inspired each other, we were friends; we were everything a scene should be. And you could say that we were earlier, in that we were maybe two seconds ahead of the others, but we all sort of were working independently of each other, making our music and coming up with our concepts at the same time around L.A. And we just found each other! Because if you look at that scene, nobody in that scene was of any stature before that. Dennis Duck, of our band, had been in a band called Human Hands, that people knew, so that was one exception. Otherwise, for every band I just mentioned, there was no real huge awareness in LA about these musicians. So it made sense for us to find each other and unite together and say, “We are a scene.” And that worked well for us.
And it’s funny, you mention the Gun Club: right in the year before we started, the bands in LA that I was into were the Gun Club, the Blasters, and Wall of Voodoo. X as well. But they seemed like “the old guard” to me. X as well! When I look back at it now, they were just one year ahead of us. It’s so funny how time is. It was like, “Oh, the Gun Club, someday I’ll grow up and get to do the stuff Jeffrey Lee Pierce does.” He was just barely before me on the scene! But when you’re 21, a year seems like forever.
AM: So how did people decide to go back to the Velvet Underground or 60’s pop bands? Because that old guard--there was maybe a roots rock or rockabilly element, and there was a lot of hardcore punk, too--but there wasn’t a lot of 60’s influence in the LA scene then, that I know of.
SW: That kind of music was largely out of favour at that time. I mean, there were a few bands around picking up on that. There were garage things like the Fleshtones, and sure enough, the Gun Club had a bit of that element, but as far as 60s jangly guitar and adding in the VU and stuff like that, that was so not really happening. I mean, I remember back in 81, if I picked up a magazine like
New York Rocker and saw a band compared to the Velvet Underground, I’d go out and buy the record, because there were so few bands doing that: I was like, “Whoa, Human Switchboard, I better buy that record, they got compared to the Velvets." It was a musical style, a terrain not being done. And all the bands in the Paisley Underground, we all were coming from different places, and over time we evolved in different ways, but we all loved the
Nuggets compilations. We all loved 60’s pop stuff. We all loved the Velvets and Neil Young. And at that time, the Velvets and Neil Young were very much out of fashion. It just wasn’t cool at all! So, y'know, it made sense. We were looking for stuff that wasn’t around, we were looking for a style of music that we weren’t hearing, so we did it ourselves.
I was listening to an interview with Jeff Tweedy last night about his new record, and he was talking about his days working in a record store. I didn't know he'd worked in a record store! But I can tell you who did work in a record store: me, Kendra Smith, Dennis Duck, from the [old] Dream Syndicate; Jason Victor, from the current Dream Syndicate; Peter Buck, Scott McCaughey, Linda Pitmon... we all worked in record stores! And I don't think the rock stars of the 70s worked in record stores. And now musicians don't work in record stores, because there aren't record stores like there used to be. But it says a lot for the kind of musicians who were making records in the moment, the 80s independent scene: we were all kinda students of music, who just used our knowledge and the way we thought things should be, to determine what we did.
Vintage Dream Syndicate (photographer James Nicholls?)
AM: So are you in Los Angeles as we're talking...?
SW: No, I've lived in New York City for 31 years now!
AM: Aha! Okay, well, I have to ask about record stores, then, since you brought that up, because there are a dozen good record stores in Vancouver right now. We have Red Cat, which has
plenty of musicians on staff; Neptoon, which has a few as well [see
here or
here, say], and others [I don't give Steve the exhaustive list but there's also Noize to Go, Audiopile, Rick Roll, Zulu, Vinyl Records, Beat Street, Dandelion, Highlife, Painted Lady, and even more if you go outinto the suburbs]. So I actually don't know how things are different where you are, but from a Vancouver point of view, we have more record stores than at any point in our history.
SW: Wow!
AM: So is it different there?
SW: There are plenty of record stores in Brooklyn, obviously, but... I can't speak to Vancouver, because I've spent two days there in my entire life, which is very tragic, but record stores are not the center, the lightning rod, the central radar station of everything in music the way they used to be. Yes, they exist, and they exist for a certain type of obsessive, and God love it, I'm glad that they exist and the fans that frequent them exist, and I'm glad that Record Store Day exists; all these things are great. But it's not like 1982, or 80, or 75 even, when I was cutting my teeth with music, where that was where it all went down. There was no internet obviously; there were a handful of rock magazines that you would pick up and try to learn from, but the way you found out what was going on, and somebody there knew what you liked, and that was it, that was how you found out stuff. Now there are many choices, and that's one of the great choices, so I guess that's the difference.
AM: Aha, okay. Yeah. There are lots of record stores here, but they're for a small percentage of the population. It's a good city to be a geek in!
SW: I don't want to sound disparaging, because I'm not; it's a great way to find out about things, but it's not the only way. Back then it was almost the only way.
AM: And whatever magazine you found at the 7-11. I'm from then too!
AM: One thing I noticed on the new box set is that there a few gun songs.
AM: The M-16 in the acoustic "The Medicine Show" was what got me thinking on it, but there's also "Bullet With My Name on It" and "Armed With an Empty Gun." So are you a gun owner, or?
SW: No, not at all, I'm from southern California, the free love 70's: guns weren't a part of the equation. But it was part of the literature I was reading and movies I was into. But also, when I was writing these songs for Medicine Show, it was the first time I'd really been across the country at length. Touring I saw places that weren't like where I came from; I spent time in Alabama and Georgia and Tennessee and all of that, and it was like, "Wow, this is a very different world from where I came from." I was fascinated by it. I wouldn't say I became it or embraced it but I was just fascinated, and that came out in the songs.
AM: So was that movement, that change in sound, coming from the band, the label, or Sandy? Was there a commercial element to it? And was that change in sound driving your lyrics darker, maybe, because the music was not as... gritty?
SW: Um... It's zero percent the label and zero percent commercial concerns, I'll say that right off the bat. It was Sandy and us, and the way we butted heads, then got on the same track. I talk about it a lot in
my book, how it was pretty much a six month session, and how I spent the first three months bristling and fighting against Sandy and everything he wanted to do. And he wasn't trying to make a hit record, he was trying to make a great record, and his vision of a great record, when he heard the songs and saw the band he was working with, I think he saw that kind of record, and I pushed against him for the longest time until it started to make sense to me: "Oh yeah; we're not going to make
The Days of Wine and Roses; that's not the band we are anymore. Kendra's not in the band, the songs aren't like that, so what kind of band are we?" And I think at a certain point in the process, Sandy and I found the same pathway, where we ended up.
And we spent six months making it, instead of three days, and in a much bigger studio, so it's going to sound different. And production had changed a lot from 1982 to 1983. As weird as that sounds, there were just more things you could do! So y'know, I hear records now, like, I love Hüsker Dü; I love Flip Your Wig and New Day Rising, just great records. And they sound amazing, because they were made in one day, they're just so raw and on the fly. And if you make a record in a day, it's going to sound like that! If somebody had said, "You have one day to make Medicine Show," it would have been a very different record, of course! It just would have been. But we had six months, so we crafted something that pushed our imagination of what a record could be. We just kept going bigger and bigger and bolder and more cinematic, just wide screen, wide scope, everything. It became very appealing. And y'know, the keyboards on the record really define a lot of the sound of the record. And we didn't plan on that being part of the record at first. We planned a guitar record at first, and then when we brought in Tommy Zvoncheck to play on the songs, Sandy and I and Karl, who was a little out of the process by then, went "Yes, that is what we're doing here! That is what we want!" A light went off.
Now, did it make it more--you used the word "Springsteen" in your email; did it make it more like that Springsteen sound, a little more like a heartland sound, a little more AOR radio? Maybe! That wasn't the intention. It just sounded like a big, bold, grand statement record. The Waterboys at the time--we just played a festival with a couple of weeks ago, and they're still a great band!--they were calling their music "the Big Music," I remember. They had made a record called This is the Sea, and they said, their definition was, "we play the Big Music." And I think that's what we were trying for also; we wanted something big and bold and, y'know, not the Velvet Underground, not SST, not punk rock. We were going for something as big and bold as it could be.
AM: If I could ask about Sandy, I don't know what baggage came with working with Sandy or if the BÖC enterted into things, but there's a live version of "
Tell Me When It's Over" that begins with a piano solo that sounds very much like Allen Lanier of the Blue Öyster Cult. He wasn't with you or anything?
SW: No, no, that's Tommy, but I can see that!
SW: Oh yeah. Well, not do do a spoiler alert, but we'll be doing a similar thing on this tour, doing the Wine and Roses material like "Tell Me When It's Over" in the style of that live period. We're going to have a keyboard player, Willie Aron, who currently plays in Third Mind with Dave Alvin, he's going to be touring with us on the West Coast, doing a lot of that kind of stuff.
AM: Very cool, but if we could go back a step, the version of Medicine Show that I'm hearing on the new CD set sounds a bit different, like on disc one with the studio album. The bass on "The Medicine Show," the song, seems a bit more driving, and I'm noticing background details that I hadn't picked up on, vocals I hadn't noticed before. Have you done any sort of remix or remaster here?
SW: No, mastering is just better now than it was then. Sterling Sound, who I still work with, were the gold standard back then, but you can do more now. With the limitations back then--I love talking about this stuff, I love talking about the wonky details--we had the limitations of vinyl being It, back then. Your record had to be a certain length per side, and if you went over, you risked skipping... so we edited like crazy on this record just to fit that time frame. So there was a lot of,y'know, "four bars taken out of an intro," or "one bar taken out of a post-chorus." All these things, we were just trying valiantly to make it fit the time, and even then, because of the length, there were certain compromises to the sound. Now, because of the technology we have, we can make it sound the way it's meant to be sound. So the new master sounds much more like the record we made. It's that simple. It does sound so much better. It's exciting to hear it now. I loved it then, but I hear it now, and it's like, "Yes, that's it, that's what we were making, that's what we were freaking out at at 2am from the big speakers at the mixing desk." That's it!
AM: So did you have a wide audience at the time? Was it well-received?
SW: Surprisingly, yes. That's the funny thing about it. For anyone that's paying attention, for the narrative of what happened, that this was us falling off a cliff, it wasn't the case. I'm sure it outsold Days of Wine and Roses, and, back then what barometer did you have for popularity? The college radio charts, CMJ, was the big one for following, like, "What's number one on CMJ?" And "John Coltrane Stereo Blues" was number one for eight weeks on CMJ. Insane to think about that now, wow. In Europe and the UK it was the top review in [magazines like] Sounds and Melody Maker. It was well-received, and then going on tour with REM and playing to 3000 people a night and being well-received by that audience, really in our minds... I think we were a little bit wounded by the American critical response, in some places: "Well it's not Days of Wine and Roses," but taking that out of the equation, it was really well-received. I think had we not broken up six months later, we could have dusted ourselves off and moved forward, but we were just a mess, just a dysfunctional mess.
AM: Actually, we kind of missed out on giving credit to college radio and such earlier, when we were talking about record stores. The first song I ever heard by the Dream Syndicate, the one that got me excited about the band, was actually "
Merritville" and it was either on Vancouver's
Co-op Radio, which is still active, or maybe late night on the CBC. So radio was important, too. But if I can ask about the lyrics of that song, I've wondered about the story there, being thrown in the trunk of a car and driven out to God-knows-where. What are the inspirations? What's the background.
SW: When I look back on those lyrics now... typically, in songwriting, you look back 20 years later and go, "Ah, that's what I was writing about! Now I can see what I was trying to say." And when I look back at these songs now, and play them and re-examine them, a lot of the record is about feeling just being in over your depth, and not knowing how you're going to deal with it, if you have the goods, if you have the stamina, if you have the ability to deal with these new challenges. That's what's happening in "Armed With an Empty Gun," which is a kind of figurative impotence in the face of challenges being put in front of you. That's what's happening in "The Medicine Show," there's something going down and I don't know how to deal with it; I try my best. And "Merrittville" is largely about, "Holy shit, how did I end up in this world, in this scenario, around these people, in this situation, and what the hell am I going to do to find my way out of it." All of those things we're talking about right now are pretty much metaphors for what was happening in our lives. One year before, I'd been a record store clerk making $3 an hour, trying to imitate my records, and now, I'm kind of on top of the world, to some extent, as far as critically and being the hot new thing. And I'm sure in the back of my mind, I was like, "Well, that's wonderful, but what now? Jeez, am I really deserving of it." Everybody goes through this, the sophomore slump, the imposter syndrome, it's happened to anybody who achieves early success. Or most people, anyway. I certainly had it, and it came out in these stories... You could take "Merrittville" and change all of the characters--it wouldn't be as good a song, but change "Joni with the narrow hips" to "Joni the publicist at Warners, or change "William with the pug nose" to "Bob the A&R man" or "Joe the staff writer at Rolling Stone." You could be telling the same story through very mundane "music business stories and you'd have the same tale. I just channelled all that through southern gothic literature?
AM: You're saying you felt like record executives had figuratively tied you up and thrown you in the trunk of a car???
SW: Not at all! I use that as an example. Nobody was putting pressure on us then. We just did whatever the hell we wanted, much to our detriment sometimes. But there was a feeling... the pressure I felt was from myself: "Am I good enough to be getting all this attention?" What happened in 1982 and 1983 was beyond anything I'd ever dreamt, anything in my imagination. I just never saw that coming, and it came so fast and so extremely. I don't say this with a huge ego, but for two seconds, I was some sort of guiding light of an underground music movement, in somebody's eyes, in some corner of the world, and I knew it. And because I'd been such a fan of music, and I'd been a DJ and a journalist and I'd worked in a record store, I understood what was happening. And I could see parallels in what was happening to me to what had happened to other people before. I didn't see myself as the next Def Leppard, I saw myself as the next Jeffrey Lee Pierce or Mark E. Smith or... and, "Well now what?" The pressure I felt was mostly from myself. And I think what I was writing about in Medicine Show was, "How do I deal with this pressure? How do I get through what's going on here, to something that makes sense?" And I didn't know what that was. I look back when I was 23 and wish I had the clarity I have now. Everybody feels that way, but... I had the songs, I had the band, I had the advantages of our reputation and stature, but I was so puzzled what to do with that.
AM: I have to ask about Kurt Cobain, who I didn't think would come up today; do you think these are the same sorts of pressures that might have killed Kurt?
SW: Well, that's way oversimplifying what caused him to kill himself; I wouldn't say that, because... I'm sure we have all thought about what was involved with that, and we've all read the stories. So I'm not saying the same thing. But I do feel that probably he was going through that feeling of, "Oh man, I was happy just being that guy on Sub/Pop and playing shows with the Melvins. That was the dream, for me; and now all this other stuff is just confusing!" I think I had to deal with a bit of that as well. I wouldn't want to speak for the guy, but I know for me, speaking for myself, because I'm more of an expert on that, I really never thought in terms of being number one on the charts. Y'know, I hung out a lot with Vicki Peterson--with the Bangles, a lot, but Vicki and I remain great friends. And I know they really wanted to be number one! Their goal was to be the Beatles. And they achieved that. We never thought in those terms. I wanted to make Big Star's Third, or Tonight's the Night. I wanted ot make the dark records, that people would say, "Oh yeah, 40 years later they're going to be talking about that." All my favourite records sold 5,000 copies each. They're all records that had a longevity and influenced people but sold nothing. And I kinda wanted to be another one of those! And I did...!
AM: I'm really glad the Dream Syndicate back together, though I guess I should confess... I haven't followed all the new stuff.
SW: You should, you should.
AM: So where do I need to go? If I'm going to play catchup, what's the best thing you've done since you reunited, which would appeal most to a fan of Days of Wine and Roses and Medicine Show?
SW: Well, I would take these last four records over the first four, easily, and that's not a delusional, revisionist thing. I think we've made a real good run of records, but I will say,
The Universe Inside is the record that we always dreamed of making, that
I always dreamed of making. I hear that record and I go, "Oh my God, how did we do that?" I'm so proud of that record. The whole band feels that way, too. We just marvel at that one. [
Note: I bought it the next week and it really is amazing. And look at the cover!].
SW, continued: And we don't play it live; someday we'll find a way to bring that to the stage, but... it doesn't sound like Medicine Show, but it has the same feeling: that we wanted to do something bigger than ourselves, and this time we knew how to do it. It wasn't six months figuring it out! We knew what we were going for, and we did it, and it worked. I think for most people who do anything creative the greatest satisfaction is where you have an idea or a goal and you achieve it. You hit the 100% mark. I've only done that a few times in my life, where "This is exactly it, I would change a damn thing." And The Universe Inside is definitely one of those records.
AM: I haven't even checked it out. I really liked
How Did I Find Myself Here, because I thought it was consistent with the first albums, I could see the direction, and I was just so glad the band was back together... but then with
These Times, I didn't really understand what I was hearing. So I kinda stopped there...
SW: Check out
The Universe Inside. Put it on late at night with whatever makes you relaxed and happy, whether it's a candy bar or a glass of wine or whatever, and just listen to it. But I really love
These Times.
These Times is like
Medicine Show for us now, where we were trying to change and advance and move on, and we had bumps along the road. It was a difficult record to make. I quite like it though! How Did I Find Myself here was easy and fun and no difficulties, and T
hese Times had some bristles along the way. I think when you see us... we're doing a two-set thing, where the first set is going to be material from the last four albums, then we'll take a break and do
Medicine Show, and then there will be
Wine and Roses stuff in the encore. Assuming that we get an encore, that's when we'll reach into the
Wine and Roses thing... but what I was going to say, there's probably going to be a lot of songs from
These Times, because a lot of those ended up making our live set.
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Dream Syndicate now: L to R: Steve Wynn, front; rear left in the hat, Mark Walton; Dennis Duck (white hair and glases); Jason Victor, dark hair, in the rear. Photo by Chris Sikich.
Full KEXP performance here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk3IGy3wgwE&list=RDsk3IGy3wgwE&start_radio=1
For tickets to Monday's show, go here! 
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