Photo credit: Linda Pitmon
The Dream Syndicate
Steve Wynn has helmed The Dream Syndicate since 1981. The following year, the band recorded the modern classic The Days of Wine and Roses.
Since regrouping in 2012, the quartet has not made a misstep. Their 2017 “comeback,” How Did I Find Myself Here, found them seamlessly picking up where they left off nearly three decades before. As the punchline goes, “That’s a long time between drinks!”
Wynn is one of his era’s great raconteurs. The years and experiences have only deepened his perspectives. He brings The Dream Syndicate to town for the new album These Times, released on the Anti- label.
Like sands through the hourglass, Wynn looks ahead yet has no problem taking the long view. “When I think about how long it has been since The Days of Wine and Roses, it is pretty incredible that I can call this my job,” he says “It is 38 years at this point. If you play the numbers game and go back 38 years from when we started, it would be 1944. Glenn Miller was really rocking at that point.
“If someone would have said back then that 38 years from now you would still be making records and developing as a band, I would have said, ‘When is the Swing Era coming back?’”
Decades ago, when it seemed like record companies had a license to print money, the circuit for alternative bands was ripe. But the record/tour/record/tour grind wore artists thin. “I think it helped that we broke up for a while,” he continues. “In 1988, it felt like a dead end psychologically and creatively. I felt like an old man at 28 years old. The solo records and side projects made it feel exciting when we got back together.”
The current line-up of original drummer Dennis Duck, longtime bassist Mark Walton and frequent foil guitarist Jason Victor makes for a versatile band that can nail the punchy tunes or ride the waves of improvisation, depending on the mood of the evening.
“We have the benefits of being a heritage band combined with the freedom to do whatever we want. I feel like we are a new band,” Wynn says.
In 1982, Wynn might have laid a stack of 20 records on the table: Modern Lovers, Big Star, The Velvet Underground, Only Ones, Creedence Clearwater Revival, as if to say, “These records add up to what we are trying to do.” Today, a young band might add The Dream Syndicate to that stack.
Instead of lamenting how tough the business side of the music biz has become and moaning how difficult it was to search out obscure music in the old days, Wynn takes the opposite approach.
“As a music fan, [the internet] is great. If you get curious about something anywhere in the world, you can hear it within minutes! And, as a musician, it is great, because when we started out, we could only be discovered by people who had a cool record store in their town or subscribed to New York Rocker or Bucketful of Brains magazines. We reached the people who knew how to reach us.”
Nowadays, anyone in the world googling “’80s psych-rock” will find The Dream Syndicate.
“It also means when we show up, people already know us,” Wynn adds. “We don’t have to say, ‘All right, here is who we are,’ and give you the two songs you know and try to help you wade into the waters of everything else. Everyone knows we can play anything!”
Wynn’s side projects dwarf many of his peers’ careers, beginning with Danny and Dusty (with Green on Red’s Dan Stuart and others), the legendary Gutterball (with members of the Silos and House of Freaks) and handfuls of others.
Then, there are solo albums as well as records with his band, The Miracle Three. As a songwriter, he may have bowed to the altar of Dylan and Cohen early on, but his characters revealed a bookshelf stocked with William Faulkner, Flannery O’Conner and Jim Thompson.
For a kid from sunny California, Wynn has evolved into a hybrid of Raymond Chandler and John Prine, using a Fender Jazzmaster as his paintbrush. Prolific? An upcoming 10-CD box set on Real Gone Records includes 40 previously unreleased tracks from1995-2005.
How does Wynn measure success these days?
“I just saw a review of the new album,” Wynn says, admitting that he sometimes reads reviews. “And it was really enthusiastic, but the perspective was ‘… and it is a shame they never made it or made money.’ Which made me think, that wasn’t the intention. It wasn’t what we set out to be when we started. We were just proselytizing this thing that excited us. And we wanted to convey that through the music. And we did that. And it worked. We completely did what we wanted to do.
“Look at it this way. Thirty-eight years later, we are on a great label; we get to travel around—in some comfort—and play to people. I think we did the right thing. We are who we were and got to do it for the bulk of our lives. That is success,” he says.
Along the way, Wynn was fortunate enough to learn lessons that he has applied to his career.
Opening for The Dream Syndicate on their current tour is Chicago’s Eleventh Dream Day. They were contemporaries of The Dream Syndicate, even serving as Wynn’s backing band at one point. Over time, bassist Doug McCombs’ work with Tortoise and Janet Beveridge Bean’s work with Freakwater took priority over Eleventh Dream Day. Emerging from the shadows every few years, the band released Works For Tomorrow in 2015.
Frontman Rick Rizzo’s thoughtfulness in conversation is the yin to the onstage yang that gets channeled through his guitar playing. “The nature of the band is not a full-time working band,” he explains. “Since 1993, everything is based on the opportunity of everyone getting together. Pretty much every year, someone will ask us to do something. If there is a record, we have gone to Europe for a short tour and a few cities in the states.”
The friendship between the bands goes way back, and the complementary sounds bode well for fans of intelligent music that rocks. Considering Eleventh Dream Day’s last trip to Milwaukee was in the early ’90s, this would be a night to circle on the calendar.
The Dream Syndicate with Eleventh Dream Day play The Back Room at Colectivo on Thursday, May 30, at 8 p.m. For tickets, visit pabsttheater.org.
