To accompany today’s reissue of an upgraded version of the Dream Syndicate’s The Days Of Wine And Roses (Omnivore) with six unreleased bonus tracks, Steve Wynn has penned a heartfelt remembrance of the time when the band cut its debut longplayer with its original lineup, 33 years ago. Buzzsaw lead guitarist Karl Precoda, bassist Kendra Smith and drummer Dennis Duck made a scary sound when combined with Wynn’s relentless rhythm guitar and eerie talk/sing vocals. “It changed my life,” Wynn says of the three graveyard-shift sessions it took to track and mix the LP. Within a month, he’d quit his day job and met the rest of his life, face to face, as a touring musician.
I know how he feels. The self-titled, 12-inch, four-song EP the Dream Syndicate released in early 1982 for Wynn’s Down There label, before the band cut its album, also turned my world around. I was snoozing on the couch in my record room—something I did every day after I’d finished my postal route—when I literally sat bolt upright at what was playing on local college FM radio station KFJC. It sounded like the Velvet Underground on speed. Cranked out at a breakneck tempo the Syndicate would never re-visit, the song was “Some Kind Of Itch,” a tune that didn’t make the cut for the LP, but it shook me like a rag doll. “What the hell was that?!” I said. Fortunately, the DJ back-announced the song.
I dedicated myself to tracking down Wynn’s band and similar fiery combos that played with ’em. I caught the Syndicate at a tiny little club called Berkeley Square in January of ’83 along with like-minded outfits Green On Red and True West. In February, it was Rain Parade, the Three O’Clock and the Bangles at San Francisco’s Old Waldorf. That summer I’d see Green On Red play Club Lingerie on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip with Rain Parade guitarist Matt Piucci joining in for an explosive encore of Neil Young’s “Cortez The Killer.” It was a hell of an introduction to the outfits that would become known, against their will, as the Paisley Underground.
Interviewing these bands for indie-rock mags, both in the U.S. and U.K., earned enough credits for MAGNET to take a chance, about 20 years ago. I, too, would say goodbye to my day job and settle in to a second career that would also include penning hundreds of CD liner notes. So, for all that, here’s to you, Steve Wynn. Couldn’t have done it without you.
—Jud Cost
