Dream Syndicate: Back to Medicine Show

An expanded reissue of the band's sophomore effort from 1984 reveals it to be as timeless as masterpiece as the previous The Days of Wine and Roses. In stores now, courtesy Water/Runt.

By Fred Mills

By1984 the Amerindie underground had mostly lost its innocence, swapping many of its occasionally quaint notions of DIY for a more professional approach to music making (owning decent gear, recording in actual studios, networking among club owners and college radio deejay, etc.) to reflect the growing realization that, hey, we might actually be able to earn a living at this. The term "careerist" no longer carried the same whiff of disdain it might have a few years earlier, and it wasn't necessarily a crime to try to land a deal with a major label, either. The majors still controlled the means of distribution and promotion, so while signing with a major didn't automatically guarantee you'd wheel into town for a gig and find plenty copies of your new album in local stores, at this point in time it was still your best option, and there wasn't a band on the planet that wanted to not sell records. If nothing else, it was a matter of pride.

Arriving stage left: the Dream Syndicate. Two years earlier the Los Angeles foursome had issued their epochal long-playing debut The Days of Wine and Roses, a record that not only pushed the group to the forefront of the aforementioned underground in terms of dues-paying, punk-rocking credibility (that it came out on L.A. punk label Slash is no trivial factoid), but also brought a measure of cerebral musicality to the dialogue that would ultimately ensure the album "timeless" status. To this day, TDOWAR pops up on music critics' best-of lists, and when Rhino reissued it in expanded format a few years ago, the critical hosannas were pretty much unanimous in locating it alongside classic screeds by the likes of Television, Patti Smith, Pere Ubu, R.E.M., Gang of Four and others from the punk and post-punk era.

As the saying goes, the band had built up a reserve of rock ‘n' roll capital: now it was time to spend some of it. The Dream Syndicate - comprising founding members Steve Wynn (guitars, vocals and the chief songwriter), Karl Precoda (guitars) and Dennis Duck (drums), plus bassist Dave Provost on loan from fellow L.A. psych/"Paisley Underground" outfit The Droogs, who'd been drafted to replace original bassist Kendra Smith - signed with A&M Records and hooked up with noted producer Sandy Pearlman, who while having made his reputation back in the dinosaur-rock era by helming Blue Oyster Cult's early ‘70s releases had also produced proto-punks the Dictators and honest-to-god-punks The Clash. It seemed like a good marriage of what's suggested in the first paragraph above: taking advantage of a decent-sized budget in a decently-outfitted studio and tapping the experience of an industry veteran while not completely jettisoning those DIY values that helped get the band to this point in the first place. The album was to be called Medicine Show, after one of Wynn's greatest compositions, and it was supposed to be the record that would put them on the aboveground radar.

As Rolling Stone's David Fricke relates in his copious liner notes to a new, expanded/remastered Medicine Show, the recording regimen, spread across five months and three San Francisco studios, "was hell." But it produced a genuine masterpiece, one which didn't necessarily eclipse its 1982 predecessor but rather stood wholly apart as an entirely reinvented Dream Syndicate - an album that, according to Fricke, "confused underground purists... [but is] actually more seditious in its charge and hazy morality... Pearlman drilling down to the emotional fury inside Wynn's songs and the rock & roll classicism in [the group's] garage-band fundamentals."

Listened to now, track-by-track, Medicine Show has, if anything, grown stronger since its original release. It's long been my favorite Dream Syndicate album, a fact I'm hard-pressed to pinpoint exactly why. There's a balancing act going on between the old-school rock of my youth and the punk-powered music that galvanized me as a young adult, and there's a sonic ambiance that alternately baffles and delights me; the record's like a foreign film that I don't fully comprehend but which leaves me deeply haunted for weeks after seeing it. It's also a bit of a period piece thanks to Pearlman's reverb-heavy production - but that's not to mean it's dated in the same sense as, say, a Duran Duran album is. (Will Rigby of The dB's once told me, in response to an observation I made about the ‘80s-specific sound their Like This sported, how they were actually eager to take advantage of the most recent studio technology, with digital reverb in particular being one of up-to-date studios' popular new toys.) The production actually lends a striking measure of clarity to the proceedings, an overt crispness that, combined with a fat, booming bottom end and precisely positioned vocal tracks (both Wynn's echo-lined leads and the massed-choir style backing vocals), creates a credibly arena-worthy vibe. Sorry, all you underground purists out there.

The album also reveals the sound of a band pushed in the studio by their producer to excel and to play outside their collective comfort zone. The Duck-Provost rhythm section is taut and muscular, while session keyboardist Tom Zvoncheck brings a crucial array of new textures contributing to that big-venue feel. (Also guesting, on vocals, are Sid Griffin and Stephen McCarthy from the Long Ryders, Gavin Blair from True West and Paul Mandl.) Lead guitarist Precoda was never better than on Medicine Show, bringing an arsenal's worth of effects and fretboard flourishes that might've had those purists going "Oh my!" at the time but, with hindsight, now come across as powered by a deeply felt jazz and psychedelia sensibility. And with Wynn operating as an instrumental foil to Precoda, chopping and slashing and unleashing terse, brittle bursts, the album's guitar sound essentially finishes the job that Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd set out to accomplish years earlier in Television.

Wynn's songwriting hits an early peak on Medicine Show, too, serving up emotional confessions ("Still Holding On To You," "Daddy's Girl") alongside stream-of-consciousness Beats swagger (the lengthy, nine-minute "John Coltrane Stereo Blues" - the most Television-like, dueling-guitars tune on the album - which is so outrageously brash and horny that you're tempted to adopt the singer's titular come-on of "I got some John Coltrane on the stereo, baby, make it feel all right/ I got some fine wine in the freezer, mama, I know what you like" and try it out yourself on some sweet young thing down at the bar.

The album also delves deeply into the noirish character sketches that would continue to mark Wynn as a songwriter over the course of his long career (which has included, not surprisingly, a friendship and collaboration with hardboiled novelist George Pelecanos). The song "Burn," musically a blend of the edgy and the seductive (it suggests a cross between Patti Smith's "Because the Night" and Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper"), charts the darkness men find hidden within their souls - "just a few things that can't be told," sings Wynn - against a backdrop of short-story vignettes, one of them involving a guy who burned down a field one night and then, upon being questioned by the cops about his motivation, simply replied, "Guess I just don't know." Another track, the piano-fueled, Springsteenesque "Merrittville," finds the protagonist having to contend with the sorry fruits of his even sorrier labors, pursued by thugs and surrounded by shady types who may or may not have his worst interests at heart. And the bluesy, hypnotically pulsing "The Medicine Show" is even darker, lined with a bone-chilling, visceral malevolence so profound it screams to be turned into a David Fincher thriller:

"I got a Page One story buried in my yard

Got a troubled mind

Goin' down to the medicine show

If I've gotta choose between doin' penance

And doin' time

Goin' down to the medicine show...

It's hard to be a reasonable man

When you stop findin' reasons for everything

But tonight I'll get some answers, baby

Aw, at the medicine show."

Jeezus. Who is this guy? What's he hiding - who, or what, exactly, does he have buried? What's going on down at this medicine show he's talking about - drugs? sex? religion? Maybe we don't need to know.

That song, and the album as a whole, will leave you questioning yourself and your own motives. It's like a novel set to music - a white-knuckled page-turner at that, one which reveals additional layers and nuances, new pretexts and subtexts, with each successive read (listen).

The Medicine Show reissue arrives courtesy Water Records (part of Runt Distribution, specializing in key archival releases), and it corrects a long-standing sin of omission by putting the album back in the bins - A&M reissued on CD in 1989, but it's been out of print for ages - and plugging a glaring hole in the Dream Syndicate's back catalog. In addition to the 12 page booklet with Fricke's notes, it also includes as bonus material the five-song mini-album This Is Not the New Dream Syndicate Album... Live! that A&M issued in late '84 to further stoke the fires for the band, who had been making modest commercial inroads touring the U.S. (including a stint opening for R.E.M.).

Recorded at Chicago's Aragon Ballroom on July 7 for a live broadcast over WXRT-FM,  TINTNDSAL! features a proud version of Wine and Roses track "Tell Me When It's Over" (it opens with a delightfully faux-pompous piano intro courtesy Zvoncheck, who had joined the touring lineup), but the focus, for obvious marketing reasons, is on four key Medicine Show numbers, most notably the title track and "John Coltrane Stereo Blues." Both tunes are heard here en route to earning longterm tenure in Wynn setlists: "The Medicine Show" is all slash ‘n' burn, Wynn's unadorned-by-studio-effects voice taking on a trembly urgency that underscores the song's already established sense of creeping, heart-of-darkness dread. And "JCSB," with its heady swirls of organ, searing Wynn-Precoda guitars and relentless rhythm section throb (Mark Walton had recently replaced Provost as permanent bassist, and he and Duck are clearly simpatico), firmly establishes itself as a concert tour-de-force, equal parts hard-psych bop and Television-styled outré punk. As a live document of the band circa mid '84, the mini-album is absolutely essential. (The 1989 A&M CD for Medicine Show also contained several of the live tracks, but not all of them due to length restrictions for CDs at that point in time.)

"Medicine Show sounds unlike any of the other [albums]," writes Wynn, in his addendum to the reissue's liner notes. "The record is beautiful, unattainable, right and wrong in all the best ways. Karl wanted to make a big, panoramic rock record to justify our move to a major label and the plethora of attention we had received [since] The Days of Wine and Roses. I wanted to make a ‘beautiful loser,' button-pushing, over-the-top emotional catharsis in the tradition of most of my all-time favorite records. We both got our way."

That's for sure. The record IS panoramic, massive, yet it's also a soul-purger in the most primal, essential sense. And when Wynn cites as among his favorite LPs Big Star 3^rd, Tonight's The Night and Plastic Ono Band he's not succumbing to hubris by implicitly ranking Medicine Show alongside those, but getting at what a lot of us Dream Syndicate watchers have always known for more than a quarter-century.

Now it's time for the rest of you to catch up.

[Photo Credit: Laura Levine]