He admits now that perhaps some of his attitude was a mechanism against the rush of popularity. “I was a pretty arrogant little shit sometimes,” he says, laughing.
The Days Of Wine And Roses, released by Opal/Slash Records in 1983, topped the college charts and placed the Syndicate among the elite of an emerging college-rock class that included R.E.M., the Replacements and Husker Du, among others.
The group ascended to A&M Records for its second album, 1984’s Medicine Show, produced by Sandy Pearlman, best known for his work with Blue Oyster Cult. The pairing — a choice that confused some of the band’s fans — made for a more sturdy, towering slice of rock that rubbed out much of the Syndicate’s near-meltdown sound. Wynn still stands by the album and calls theories of A&M’s meddling “misunderstood” — the band and Pearlman were seeking new sounds, not the label, he says.
That Medicine Show didn’t make the Dream Syndicate huge was no surprise to Wynn. “A lot of people say, ‘Bands who came up with you, like R.E.M. or the Bangles, went on to great success and you didn’t. Do you feel you should have had that?’ No! We were a freaky, cantankerous, noisy, feedback-driven, contrary band. Of course we weren’t gonna have hit singles.”
The Syndicate returned to the independent ranks for two more albums — 1986’s Out Of The Grey and 1988’s Ghost Stories. By then, Precoda and Smith were long gone, replaced by guitar torturer Paul B. Cutler and, on bass, eventual Continental Drifters co-founder Mark Walton. Both albums mined Crazy Horse more than the Velvets; both lacked the luster of the band’s best work. By 1989, the Dream Syndicate was done.
Kerosene Man, released by Rhino in 1990, ushered in a solo career that can be seen in a half-full/half-empty sort of way. Every album has featured honest, inventive music — be it the bigger studio production of Kerosene and 1992’s lush Dazzling Display, or such stripped-down efforts as the stark 1994 disc Fluorescent and the caustic Melting In The Dark two years later (with backing by Boston band Come).
But The Days Of Wine And Roses always loomed large in the rearview mirror. The bar was just too high. The more Wynn albums that arrived, the more they felt like footnotes to a career that had long since peaked.
“A lot of people say, ‘I’m sure you’re sick of hearing this, but I really love Days Of Wine And Roses.’ And I say, ‘Why would I be sick of hearing that?’ My god, yeah, I’m proud of that. I’m glad people still like it. I’m glad it’s stood the test of time. I’m glad that young people, people who weren’t even born when it was made, come up to me and tell me they love it.”
But he’s not writing off the next two decades of his career. “You don’t want to be just completely defined by one thing you did 25 years ago. You don’t want to be like Chubby Checker and being told, ‘Man, do “The Twist”.'”
Overall, Wynn is quite pleased with his catalogue, save a few minor quibbles. “Out Of The Grey, I don’t like the mix very much. Dazzling Display, I’m not thrilled with the sequence. Sweetness And Light could have been played a little better. But that’s it. Those are three things I wish I could go back and change. Beyond that, I’m pretty happy with the whole thing. There’s songs here and there that I say, ‘Well, those are songs I’ll probably never play again because they’re not the best things I’ve ever wrote,’ but really, I’m pretty happy with everything I’ve done.”
He also suggests that his current resurgence, if one subscribes to such a theory, dates back to his 1999 album My Midnight, which largely sank from sight when Zero Hour Records folded a month after the album was released. “When people said that Here Come The Miracles was a comeback record,” Wynn says, “I very politely would point out that My Midnight was the actual turning point for me, a record where I felt I learned and utilized a lot of new tricks.”
Regardless of the point of conception, Wynn’s revitalization is a lesson in durability and resilience — words that remain counter to the predominant ways of the record business, where the constant search for a hit is the game and what-have-you-done-for-me-lately the death knell. Not that Wynn has played that game in years. His major-label tenures have been fleeting: after Medicine Show, there was the A&M release of Lost Weekend by Danny & Dusty, a 1985 collaboration teaming Wynn with Green On Red’s Dan Stuart and others from the Paisley Underground; the self-titled 1993 album by Gutterball, featuring former members of the Long Ryders, Silos, and House Of Freaks, issued by Elektra affiliate Mute; and, also on Mute, his 1994 solo disc Fluorescent. For much of his solo career, Wynn has financed and produced his own independently and then found a home for them. (Static Transmission is on Wynn’s Down There label — which dates back to the Dream Syndicate’s very first EP in 1982 — and is being released in conjunction with San Francisco’s DBK Works Records.)
Just as water always finds its level, perhaps Wynn has finally found his comfort zone. “When you’re around for a long time, the work that goes into what you do is second nature,” he says. “And it frees you up to get to the emotions that are involved. That’s why a lot of my favorite records are made by people that have been around for a long time.
“I’m more of a Bob Dylan fan than ever; records like Time Out Of Mind or Love And Theft, they blow me away. You couldn’t make a record like that if you’re 20 years old. There’s no way. You could make something else that could be equally as exciting in a different way, but you couldn’t make a record that comfortable, that effortless, that smart, that swaggering, that bruised and beaten all at the same time. And that’s an advantage of sticking around for a while.”
Neal Weiss is a Los Angeles-based writer and longtime ND contributor. He’s pleased that the Steve Wynn assignment didn’t turn out to be an exercise in nostalgia.
