THE MEDICINE SHOW’S HEART OF DARKNESS Steve Wynn & the Dream Syndicate Pt. 2
Sep 05, 2010
The songwriter journeys back downriver, more than a quarter century later, to probe the making of a troubled masterpiece.
BY FRED MILLS
Herein we continue our conversation with Steve Wynn, who talks some more about what went into the making of the Dream Syndicate's 1984 album Medicine Show (recently remastered, expanded and reissued by the Water label), about the ensuing six-month tour - including an extended stint opening for R.E.M. - that broke up the band, and about his current activities. (To read Part One, go here, and to read the BLURT review of Medicine Show, go here.)
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BLURT: In the liner notes to Medicine Show you write about how Karl Precoda wanted a big, panoramic sounding kind of record, whereas you were going for a kind of "beautiful loser" document. Were there discussions among the band members to that effect, about what you were going for, or was it strictly the intuitive search you suggested a few minutes ago?
STEVE WYNN: It was intuitive. It's funny, Karl's mantra was, "We're in the big leagues now." He was very affected by that. He felt this was our time to make the big move. And I guess I felt the same thing, but my big move was just to fuck with people's minds and do something really crazy. I was looking at things like Fun House and Miami by the Gun Club.
We never talked much about business or our career while we were making the record. Sandy Pearlman got very involved in arrangements, though. He had a lot to do with the arrangements on that record, and going against our safety zone. For example, "Merritville" on that record, when I originally wrote it, it was a very fast, almost country punk kind of song. Totally different from what it ended up being. If you imagine that being like something off the Gun Club's Fire Of Love - "Preachin' the Blues," " For the Love of Ivy," that sort of song. Sandy just said, "I'm not getting the song here. Slow it down." And he kept having us slow it down until the song came out. And that was very exciting. It was a new approach to us. Our approach had always been explode. Explode and see what happens. Slap it against the wall and see what happens.
That song is significant, too, for how important the keyboards are in the arrangement, compared to all the earlier Dream Syndicate material. At what point did Tom Zvoncheck come in to add piano to the arrangements? Did Sandy suggest that or was it something you'd been thinking of all along?
I think it was there almost from the start - we knew we wanted keyboards to be part of the record, the sound we were going for. And there's a lot of keyboards on Sandy's stuff too; that's a big part of his sound, the Blue Oyster Cult stuff. We all agreed that was to be part of it. And at the time, I was looking at what Green On Red was doing, what [GoR keyboardist] Chris Cacavas was doing, and I liked that element. So we had never had keyboards in any way in the Dream Syndicate, but given what we were into and the way the songs were, and knowing Sandy's sound, I don't think there was ever any question.
"Merrittville" in particular is dominated by Tom's piano, and it's a beautiful, elegant tune. Yet I can hear some punk purist and devotee of the first album sniffing, "Oh, they want to be Springsteen...."
Yeah, and that was there. A lot of things about the record were misunderstood at the time. People said it was overproduced - which it was.
"Corporate rock."
"Corporate rock," yes! Which has nothing to do with anything. So the keyboards being reminiscent of Springsteen, or the drum sound - which, admittedly, is a bit of the time.
But all those things don't stand out now when I hear the reissue. Now, it is what it is. Like a lot of records: over time, you just accept how they sound. The thing about Medicine Show that was kind of frustrating but also kind of funny at the time was the perception of the record in the States versus in Europe. I mean, the "selling out" part was ridiculous; it wasn't a sellout in any way. But in Europe there was no real history of the band. Various collectors may have had [1982's] Days of Wine and Roses, but Medicine Show was recognized as just a completely different and exciting record from an exciting new band. And the same thing happened that I described earlier: how everywhere you'd go, people are going to be writing about it and loving it. We got that [in Europe] on a year delay with Medicine Show. And still, to this day, I think that is the record that has more notoriety and more fans than Wine and Roses.
What you're describing is something that one supposes has happened to a lot of bands. Howe Gelb from Giant Sand told me a similar thing, how his band was wholeheartedly embraced in Europe. Their record finally comes out overseas, and the foreign fans don't really have any context or background so they just take it at face value without any baggage that might have existed back home where people had been listening to the group a few years. Or at least this was true in the pre-Internet era.
And that follows from your local scene, where you've been playing and they think they have certain rights to you, to your country, and it expands from there. Someone like Howe has probably experienced that in Tucson. I remember the first time I met Howe through Dan Stuart's [Green On Red] perspective; they'd gone a long way back so my first impression of him was of this guy from the same scene as Dan's and they had some history.
The way a person is perceived outside the scene is totally different from the way people inside it perceive the person. What's ironic is that I first learned about Giant Sand by reading a British magazine, Bucketful of Brains. Yet later, when I lived in Tucson, I realized the whole scene there was different from the way it had been portrayed. It wasn't this mystical center of desert rock at all.
L.A. is like that a lot. I'm like Randy Newman - "I love L.A.!" But it's not a very healthy place to be a musician. In the past at least, everything was against the backdrop of the music business: who got signed, who got dropped, where you're playing, what it all means. I always hated that. You don't get that in New York at all.
And for the Dream Syndicate, you got a little acclaim, and the knives came out in jealousy from some quarters. That social climbing aspect of L.A. plays a part.
Sure. I think we "climbed" really quick and a lot of people resented that. And a lot of people who claimed to love the band didn't really know what we were all about. That's probably true of a lot of bands, where they arc and they start off as kind of a cult band, then have a little success, and finally ease back to where they would normally be. You look at that one moment when you've spiked, and it's exciting, but it's not all that realistic. Like the whole Nirvana syndrome, where all these people suddenly love Nirvana but would otherwise have hated stuff like that. It's kind of a funny thing. People would be talking about the Dream Syndicate: "Really? You like this? You like this half hour of feedback?!?" [laughs] And we made a point of testing that too! [laughs]
I bet you did. And yet then you turn around and do something so different like Medicine Show. Nowadays people expect a band not to just repeat the previous album, but for a long time it's almost like there was an orthodoxy that was a holdover from the initial punk era - so those folks who'd come to expect a half hour of feedback wound up getting this Springsteenian song with a piano. And that disconnect was expressed in a lot of the reviews too, right?
Yeah. And the funny thing, too, is that when you and I were growing up [in the pre-punk period] it was also the way where you'd expect people to change with every record - Dylan or Neil Young or David Bowie. Or even the Velvets, speaking of someone to whom we got compared to a lot: each of the four Velvets albums are radically different, and they're each definitive for what they are.
Then punk told you that you would have to dress the same way and act the same way and sound the same way or you were out of the club.
Yeah. What was acceptable and what wasn't. But also, then a lot of money got involved - a lot of money got confused in the ‘80s. The ‘80s became, sadly, the era of the producer and the studio and that kind of stuff. And it kind of got away from what you were recording. It was really weird in the ‘80s, how you saw, top to bottom, every band I knew, we - the musicians - were interchangeable random elements to be used by producers. We dodged that the best we could
Let me ask you about the songwriting. You have always had a reputation - for lack of a better term - for being cerebral. Or maybe "literate" is a better way to put it. Anyway, you stood apart from the whole punk "one-two-three-FOUR!" approach to songwriting. Were you consciously going for the storytelling approach, or consciously going against the grain? Even rebelling against the "baby, I love you" pop style of songwriting?
Well, not necessarily the "baby I love you." I think Wine and Roses is the sound of a post-teenage group of people who are in their own head, who have their own concerns about how to deal with the world and new things. It's very much an internal, neurotic record. And in the year after that came out, we went through a lot of stuff. We were seeing the world, traveling to every corner of the country, meeting new kinds of people. And I was reading a lot of things that went along with that. For example, I was seeing the South, so I wanted to read more Southern literature; I was reading Flannery O'Connor, Faulkner, things like that. So we were reflecting what was happening to us, reflecting just seeing more and knowing more and pulling out our own thoughts. The subject matter of that second record is very different because of where we were at.
A lot of songwriters go through that and turn around and write their proverbial "road album," very first person. But instead, you turned those experiences into characters, and that seemed to set you apart as well.
I think it was a very character-driven, third person storytelling kind of record. But most of the things that are happening on that record are very personal. Like, I was talking recently to someone about the song "Armed With an Empty Gun": that couldn't be more simple to figure out what that's about. What I was feeling at the time was, wow, I'm moving fast and there's all this excitement and hubbub, and I'm doing my best, but occasionally I feel like I'm bluffing and wondering how long can I pull it off.
That's something I look back now and I can actually say - [conspiratorial voice] I think I was pretty good at it. But everybody goes through that. You have that "impostor syndrome" and the feeling that people are loving you but you're not worthy of all that acclaim. You get all these self-loathing sorts of second records. Look at the difference between Nevermind and In Utero. There's so much venom sent inward on that [latter] record.
A lot of people who play music believe in themselves and like what they're doing and kinda hit that zone and are happy when they do it. But when other people start telling you, "Yeah, I love what you're doing!" - especially when you're young - you go, "Are you sure? Really? Are you gonna change your mind tomorrow?"
There is a distinctive element of someone trying to run away from a lot of stuff on Medicine Show, too.
Oh yeah.
Because Medicine Show is such a narrative-driven album, that's what draws a lot of people to it, I suspect. And much of it scans like this noirish, desperado record. Lots of guns. Violence real and implied. How about the song "Burn"? Is that a metaphorical tale, or did you read something in the news to provoke that particular imagery, of this fucked-up guy burning a field down?
Without getting too much into it... there were a few disappointing things that had happened in my life, things about my family, things that, um, didn't work out as they should've. There's that feeling of when you think you have everything figured out and you think you have a strong foundation around you, and then it gets pulled out and away from you. I think there's the key line in it: "Just a few things that can't be told." Like when suddenly things don't make sense anymore.
"Guess I just don't know." That's another line.
Yes. So then I threw all that into fields and fire and all that kind of stuff, which was written to be about that feeling, "I can't express this with words or logic, so I just have to have some very violent, explosive behavior to wash it away." And then, that's the kind of thing I still have in my songs, just that emotional catharsis for things that can't be understood.
But you know, the catharsis for that record was other people's problems. Because it's easier to write that way. I think of Randy Newman, he's always writing about himself, even though he's not. If you listen to every Randy Newman record back to back, you understand him even though they're all stories, ironic and detached. Eventually you see the connection between all of them, about life and other people and what's good and what's bad.
So - the album comes out, you and Karl aren't getting along too well, and you have to hit the road to promote it, lots of touring, including a long jaunt with R.E.M.. How did things start to unravel for the band?
I guess we just had that rift that never got healed. Looking back, I think it was us just not talking much. Me jumping on the R.E.M. bus whenever possible and hanging out with Peter Buck instead of my own band. It was too frustrating and all that. The reality is that there were a lot of good times too. But we weren't grown up enough to deal with it, and our friendship soured. We did tour a lot. We did two months with R.E.M. and another month or so in Europe, and then we went to Japan. So in the next six months we toured quite a bit, and I remember that in all that time, the one thing we could talk about was baseball. Karl was also a huge baseball fan.
Did R.E.M. fans like Dream Syndicate? I saw the Greensboro, NC, show on that tour.
It was mixed. At the time the tour was seen as a really big deal because it was two bands who were getting a lot of attention. Of course they were bigger, but we were kind of the standard bearers for the new American college rock or indie rock, whatever name it was that year! So a lot of their fans were predisposed to liking us, and a lot were kind of mystified at the very different thing we were doing from what they were doing. We went on tour and took Tommy Zvoncheck with us because we wanted to do the album, and I'm glad we did, but it probably would have been smarter to go on tour and be a four-piece band again. Just as far as not confronting people - it's one thing to confront an audience with a new record and let them settle into it, but doing it live you don't really have that chance to rethink things or reassess.
Yet as you said, this is also the touring period where once you got to Europe you found an entire new audience that was specifically your own.
Yes, because they hadn't had American bands like us come over there. I could be wrong, but I think we were the first of that era. Maybe Television had gone over, and of course the Ramones and a couple of others. But really, if you think of the post-punk American bands, hardly anyone had been over at that point.
You were fortunate enough, too, to have the patronage of a major label so you could afford to do it.
Oh man, the best decision I ever made in my life - I remember having a meeting with the A&M head of A&R, and he said to me, "Okay, we're going to give you a choice here. We can either make a video, or go to Europe. We'll finance one or the other." I'd never been to Europe in my life, so for selfish reasons I did it! And that has turned out to help keep me going.
Otherwise you'd have been at the mercy of the whims of some MTV exec, where you'd spent all that money on a maybe - maybe I'll get played on MTV. "120 Minutes" or something.
I know. It was obscene the amount of money you would spend back then just to be seen at 2 a.m. in the morning in the middle of the week. It just didn't make any sense to me so there was no question.
So finally, after we made it all through that, even though things were going well and having great tours and success in Europe and...
...you break up. How did Karl tell you he was leaving?
He didn't. I broke up the band. By the time I'd finished that whole six months of touring... the advice I'd give any young musician is, don't ever make any decisions about your band or your life within two weeks of the tour. Go home, unplug the phone, go out and walk in the park. You're really in a different state, physically mentally and other things, when you come off the road. But I was thinking, I can't stand anymore being around people I can't talk to, have fun with. Where there was this tension and this anger all the time. So that was that. I didn't know what was going to happen.
Did you tell A&M what you were doing?
Yeah, but I don't remember how quickly I told them. But I did tell them fairly quickly. And I remember calling Karl and Dennis and just saying, "That's it!" And then it was unintentional, unplanned, that we reformed three months later. It was a matter of, I still like Dennis, I still like Mark, and I still like playing, so it's natural that I would play with them. So we looked for somebody who could come into the band. Paul [Cutler] was very much the obvious choice; he was an old friend and I loved his playing, so that was that.
The lineup with Paul was really powerful. I remember seeing the band in 1986 and watching him hunched over at the edge of the stage, tapping his guitar strings with a tuning fork to get these unearthly sounds.
To this day, I wish I could reunite that final band's lineup. I'm still friends with everyone. But Paul is very definitely retired. He wants no part of it. Mmm... it's too bad.
Yes, all that money that's being dangled in front of bands to reunite...
Ohh... you don't know the half of it! [laughs]
With the touring industry taking such a beating lately, big tours like Limp Bizkit and Christina Aguilera getting canceled and scaled back, I'm curious to know if touring remains a good proposition for you? Is it still worth all the logistics and effort?
It goes up and down. The one thing I'll say for America, as opposed to Europe, is that in America I just go out and hit the major cities and that's it, whereas in Europe, these towns you can barely find on the map, we'll have shows that are great. But yeah, in the big cities in the States it's as good as it's been in the last 20-25 years.
And you know, I've been living under the radar for so long that everything is relative. I remember talking to Mike Mills one time and he said, "What have you been up to?" And I said, "I've been touring Europe a lot; that's kind of my bread and butter." And he said, "I know what you mean - we can't get arrested in America!" And I go, "Mike. Your idea of not being able to get arrested is my idea of winning the lottery!" Last time I saw them they sold out Madison Square Garden. So you see how it is all relative. And some artists like Limp Bizkit's idea of a bad turnout, I'd be fine with.
I don't mean this in a pretentious way, but I look at what I do as more like going to see McCoy Tyner down at the Blue Note, me and 75 other people digging it. I guess we're all jazzbos.
You were an early adopter of how to use and encourage the fan community - your website, the message boards, being friendly towards the taping of shows, releasing mail-order only titles, the whole deal. You've been doing house parties as well. It seems like you were quick to get it - that it made more sense to reach out to, say, 1000 really supportive fans instead of putting forth a lot of energy aiming for 25,000 who are inherently more fickle and ephemeral. The idea of surviving and keeping the career going rather than going for broke: "Oh, if I can't sell out a 25,000 seat arena than I'm just not going to tour at all..."
Right, exactly. I think it's given me a lot more longevity, definitely. And it's something a lot of people have been coming around to. But I've been doing it for years. The house parties have done incredibly, for example. I'm going with Jason [Victor, of the Miracle 3] next week to Wales to play a 40th birthday party for someone. We're flying out Thursday and coming home Sunday. One shot thing. Hop of the plane, fly there, do the gig, play his favorites, and come back. It's great.
Before we wrap up, tell us a little about what else you've been up to in the recent past. I read that you just turned 50, and I know you just got back from Norway where you did a classic rock set of covers with Robyn Hitchcock. And you just recorded a new album with the Miracle 3 down at the studio in Richmond. So you've been pretty busy.
Yeah, and I think you're going to like the new record. The show with Robyn was a lot of fun, too. You're right, I am pretty busy. Balancing a lot of things. This new Miracle 3 album, which we're going to mix next month here in New York - I hate to do hype, because everyone does that, but it really is the best Miracle 3...
"It's the best thing I've ever done!"
Oh, I'm not going to say that! I've got favorites, you know. But I really like it, and I read a quote once from a guy talking about his record: "Well, it's better than our last few but not as good as the first two." [laughs] I thought that was a great quote. So I think it is a really good record, and hopefully it'll make it to the finish line as much as I like it now. It's been five years since the last one. We've been playing in the meantime, and I love the band, but I've also been doing different things and everyone had stuff going on so we didn't do it until now.
And we have the new Baseball Project too. [Wynn, Miracle 3 drummer Linda Pitmon, Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey] It's at the same point, recorded but not mixed. We're going to mix that in September and it'll come out in February. We recorded everything in Portland at just breakneck speed - it's the anti-Medicine Show! - doing the first session, 12 songs, in a day and a half, and the second session, six songs in six hours. That band works fast. I like that Rutles quote: "The first record took 20 minutes, and the second one took even longer." [laughs] We've also been doing a monthly song for ESPN, writing and recording - I just finished this month's song.
So really, it's like I've been juggling three albums. Also doing the shows in Norway, doing shows with both Miracle 3 and the Baseball Project. So it's been a pretty busy year.
Tell me about the Hitchcock collaboration. [Norway acoustic show, July 1, 2010] Was that planned out and rehearsed, the cover songs you selected, or was it more thrown together? [Wynn and Hitchcock did Dylan, Stones, the Who, Beatles, John Cale, Creedence, the Doors, Velvet Underground and more.]
We wrote back and forth with lists of stuff, but we didn't really get to rehearse it. We had a long soundcheck. We both arrived in the city that day. And I've kind of gotten to know Robyn the last couple of years, through Scott [McCaughey] and Peter [Buck] mostly. We were both playing this festival, and to be honest I don't know if it was Robyn's idea or the promoter's idea. It just came to me that we were doing an additional show together, and so we just started talking about different songs. He's better at that than I am; I don't do a lot of covers these days, so that was really bending my mind on a number of those songs. But it was really fun.
Have you considered releasing one of the live performances the Miracle 3 did covering Days of Wine and Roses and Medicine Show? [Wynn and his band performed each album on successive nights in Atlanta on May 14 and 15, 2010.]
I really liked doing that. The Atlanta performances were a lot of fun. But I don't want to say anything I can't promise. I will say that 2012 is the 30th anniversary of the Dream Syndicate, and somehow it will be commemorated. I'm just not sure how.
I do think that after this Medicine Show reissue and after doing those Atlanta shows, I'm probably going to leave Dream Syndicate nostalgia for a couple of years and save it for then.
Steve Wynn on the web: www.stevewynn.net
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