A Weenie Roast With THE DREAM SYNDICATE

Havin'AWeenie Roast With THE DREAM SYNDICATE

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The Dream Syndicate’s live shows are surreal, intense events, though they start out innocently enough. A clan of die-hard fans clusters around the stage, like friends gathered around a campfire waiting for the after-dinner storiesto begin.They talk amongst themselves and exchange stories about past Syndicate shows they’ve seen—kinda like Deadheads. A blond-haired figure ambles out from the backstage shadows: it’s drummer Dennis Duck. The crowd emits a collective yelp. He’s soon joined by lanky bassist -Mark Walton, then frizztopped guitarist Paul B. Cutler, who’s armed with a few bizarre props (hacksaw, golf club, plastic cucumber) he’ll be using to maul his six-string machines throughout the set. The crowd draws a little closer, waiting and whistling. In a breath Steve Wynn appears, black-jacketed, eyes darting, expression steadfast and dark. He stalks the center mike. No nonsense. The Peter Fonda of rock ’n’ roll. The audience is rapt. Wynn plugs in his guitar, pauses theatrically, and unleashes the first chords of the show. Everyone screams.

As a rule Wynn picks one of his more solid, straightforward songs to get the band and the crowd warmed up, giving everyone a chance to hoot ’n’ holler. As the set takes shape and momentum builds, however, Wynn delves into some of the Syndicate’s pithier material, mixing classics from

the 1982 album The Days Of Wine And Roses (on a good night, you’ll hear “Halloween” or maybe “Until Lately’’) with breakneck rockers such as the new “Black” or Bob Dylan’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” both from the brand new Ghost Stories. The crowd packs together, dancing like it’s not 1988, fanning the band’s flame. Without warning the jamming begins. Wynn and Cutler switch off on lead guitar or spin dual leads that shriek like drag racers careening along a quiet suburban street. Walton and Duck chase after them in vain, then abandon the guitarists to their devices. Wynn eyes the edge. He throttles the life out of his guitar and slams it against the mike stand. His vocals become an out-of-control howl.

It’s time for “John Coltrane Stereo Blues.”

No one in the dense circle around the stage knows what’ll happen from there on. The song, recorded for The Medicine Show, stretches into an epic of cutthroat feedback and improvised chaos. Wynn closes his eyes. Those close to him reach for his guitar. Time is as good as dead.

Afterwards, Wynn reflects on what goes on within the band once they hit the stage. “It gets to the point where there’s maybe ten things that could happen at any given moment, maybe the tenth being anything at all,” he says. “It’s very much on an edge. We don’t plan anything, we don’t re-

hearse any of the nuances, just the skeletons are in place. We say, ‘Let’s go out there and play our best songs— not wimp out, not play softer, but play the best way we can and not fool around too much, not do 20 minute jams.’ And inevitably it happens. From a certain point on, we don’t know what’s going to happen, and it’s a battle to get to the end of the set. And that’s great. That’s nice. That’s why we still enjoy doing it.”

Relatively speaking, the band’s intensity has cooled since they got together at the decade’s turn,when the line-up included guitarist Karl Precoda -and bassist Kendra Smith (who left after the first album to form Opal, which she also recently left). “Back then we would do one song for the whole set, stuff like that,” Wynn recounts. “We were into making big doo-doo on the stage. That was our thing; that was an end in itself. Now it’s sort of a means to an end. We still do make a mess, but before we were brats. Now we’re sort of less brats. We’re brats in a different way.”

The brattiness of the band’s youth was both a blessing and a curse. Wynn’s fearlessness, both onstage and off, matched with Precoda’s complete disdain for controlled guitar sounds, structure dr posturings, provoked a swift, idolizing response around the group’s Los Angeles home. A four-song EP, released on Wynn’s own Down There label, led to a deal with mega-indie Slash, which released The Days Of Wine And Roses. Critical brouhaha ensued, more adoring fans found the band’s trail, and soon the Syndicate were snapped up by the hungry jaws of A&M Records, who considered the signing to be quite a coup.

Karen Schoemer

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A year and a shitload of money later, The Medicine Show was released and everyone hated it. Everyone. Fans, critics, and especially the label, who rushed out a live mini-album (prophetically titled) This Is Not The New Dream Syndicate Album . . . Live and then dumped them. Wynn, who had poured his soul into The Medicine Show, broke up the band and took off.

“It was a very weird time,’’ he admits, though he dislikes discussing the episode. Even now, out of all the Dream Syndicate’s LPs he feels closest to The Medicine Show. He argues that in the long run, “it will stand up. I wouldn’t change anything, about it. I feel weird going and defending it, because I think it defends itself.”

Once away from the band, Wynn kept busy writing songs and playing the odd acoustic gig. At some point Dan Stuart of Green on Red approached him about throwing together an album’s worth of slapstick countryblues songs. Wynn agreed, and one whiskey-drenched weekend later, Danny and Dusty’s Lost Weekend was born. Wynn had such a great time doing it (well, what he remembered of it anyway), he got the bug in him to go back to rock ’n’ roll full time and scraped a new improved Syndicate together.

Without any record company backing, the new line-up, only a few months old, recorded Out Of The Grey, which the now-defunct Big Time label released in 1986. “We all had this attitude of, ‘We’regoing to go out there and kill ’em!”’ says Wynn. “It was us against the world. The lyrics on Out Of The Grey are pretty positive overall, even though a lot of them were about weird situations and very down, ugly things, the songs had this feeling of, ‘You can still go beyond it.’ It was a very heavy-handed, intentional record.”

Out Of The Grey was well-received, though some skeptically branded it a “comeback” record that didn’t live up to the glory days of Wine And Roses. The band toured the States, toured Europe, toured and toured and toured, then just as momentum was building, Big Time went under, the touring stopped, and the band

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sputtered back into neutral. For several months, not a sound was heard from Wynn and company. Fans waited in disbelief, thinking, “Not again.”-'

Not again. While waiting for a new record deal to come through, the band stayed trim by playing acoustic shows billed as the Steve Wynn Quartet. Not long afterwards, the Syndicate returned to the studio with producer Elliot Mazur (who worked on Neil Young’s Harvest and recorded Ghost Stories in three weeks). “It’s pretty much a live record,” says Wynn. “We wanted to get across the feeling of us right there, that immediacy.” Rougher than Out Of The Grey and more streamlined than The Medicine Show, Ghost Stories, according to Wynn, “has all the good things about the other three and something else too. It has all the things I like about Wine And Roses but it sounds new and it sounds like this band. You couldn’t fault this record for being overdone. A song like ‘My Old Haunts’ should be flat out, it should be ugly. I think this is a good late night record, which is my favorite kind.”

Ghost Stories' songs are tall tales, psychological studies, bittersweet anecdotes. The ballad “Whatever You Please,” which opens with the line, “Would you like to see something I wrote ten years ago?,” draws a character who’s past his prime; “My Old Haunts,’’.with its exaggerated macabre riff and burlesque organ grind, finds a character dressing up his past in fanciful images and concocted remembrances (the chorus is lifted out of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”). Wynn does not intend for the lyrics to be used as parallels for his own

experiences. “I really appreciate you using the word ‘character,”’ he remarks. He also insists the album isn’t a contrived collection of stories with a similar theme. “It’s not a concept album. Like Out Of The Grey and unlike the other two, the songs were written over a lop| period of time. It’s more like a movie: things set up each other.

“In a way this is the downerest of all the records. It’s a worried record. ‘Whatever you Please,’ ‘Black,’ and The Side I’ll Never Show’ are all very closed-off songs. It’s lack of caring— not an attractive state of mind. It’s a recurring theme, I don’t know how that wasn’t intentional. Whereas ‘I Have Faith’ is such a different idea from the rest of the album. Johnette Napolitano of Concrete Blonde wrote the lyrics. It’s such a simple sentiment. In the context of the album, it comes across as really stark, almost ironic. I love the sentiment of that song, and it’s something I just would not write myself. I have trouble writing things like that, I tangle myself up so much in ironies and double meanings.

“It’s really an activfe listening record. Most of the records that I like, you have to listen to them 20 or 30 times. The curse of what’s happened to music in the last 10 or 15 years is that it’s become a background thing for people. I think a lot of people don’t listen to lyrics anymore, which is weird. I don’t think there’s anybody who hasn’t had this dilemma at one point or another, thinking, should I maybe make concessions, to make what I do more viable, so more people will hear it? And I don’t, probably because I can’t and that’s, you know, just what I do.”