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Please welcome The Dream Syndicate.

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[rock music]

People are going to see Journey and Ozzy Osbourne

in the school I was in.

And they're like; what are you listening to?

I'm like, Dream Syndicate.

They’re like, I don't know what that is.

And I was like, thank God, you know.

It was this crazy mix of melody and noise and poetry

[rock music]

and just reckless abandon.

The combination was such that no one was doing it in that way.

They kind of created their own soundscape

and they created their own time and place.

Ultimately, The Dream Syndicate were always cool, because they were outside

the other shit that was happening.

It's just complete chaos.

Steve's going to that place where guitars kill people, and I just loved that.

Like, he could be so ferocious.

It was fantastic.

It was like dark, moody, psychedelic, jammy,

lots of feedback.

We were all so tired of this nervous, hyper formulated music that was going on.

We just wanted to get lost in sound and repetition.

I got that vibe,

that kind of Velvet Underground meets Bob Dylan kind of vibe.

I was right there with that band right off the

bat, and it all happened within six months.

The Dream Syndicate paid no dues.

It happened so fast.

They were just poised to go, you know, straight to the moon.

I can't believe how good this music is.

I loved it so much. I thought people are going

to just freak out when they hear this.

And they did. I mean, the club asked us back right away

as soon as the show was over.

From the time Dennis came to the rehearsal, to the time we made the record, to time

we were on stage playing our first show at a groovy club to 300 people.

All this happened in three, three and a half weeks. It was insane.

It was tight. It was the toughest ticket in town that night.

We played the show and people are lined around the block.

It was kind of like the first taste I had,

that something really big was happening.

[rock music]

It was the combination of everything and then having Steve

at the center of the storm that made it

such a fantastic experience.

We had gone in a short amount of time from feeling like outsiders

who had no chance of having anything happen to being everyone's darling.

I was born in 1960

in Santa Monica, California, and grew up in L.A..

[soft music]

I'm a native Los Angelino.

My father and mother of my first couple of years,

they got divorced when I was two, and I was raised by my mother

from a lot of my youth.

I've always had a love of music. I don't know what it was.

Maybe it's because it was the sixties and it was a lot going on there.

And, you know, I kind of discovered music, some combination

of my cousin bringing over Elvis records and The Beatles.

I had an older sister, Lindy, the younger of my two sisters,

and she liked going to concerts.

And she knew I liked music, so she would take me to shows with her all the time.

And we saw so many great shows.

We saw The Who and Led Zeppelin twice and Queen.

And my mother very kindly when I was,

I guess eight, got me my first guitar and I started taking lessons right away.

Played in a lot of bands from the time I was nine till I was thirteen.

Different friends, different kinds of music.

My first favorite bands were Creedence and The Who.

[rock music]

I would say those probably if I had to say the two bands

when I was that young, that really did it for me. Those were the two.

Bands I still listen to now.

I remember being maybe ten years old and walking around my neighborhood in L.A..

A couple of blocks from where I lived,

there was this house where a band was playing in the garage.

And to me these guys were the biggest band ever.

These guys are playing music together with other musicians in their garage.

Wow! Anything beyond that?

The idea that I would play in a band or would make records or go on tour

or play in real clubs. Unfathomable.

The mid-seventies were so much all about gigantic

bloated arena bands. That's why punk rock happened.

For a while I started playing a little less guitar,

doing other things. I started writing sports.

And if anything, I think my dream at that time was to be a sportswriter.

I thought it was a creative thing for me, and I probably got some of the same

pleasures from that.

I got to travel around and see what grown ups did.

But when I went to UC Davis

when I was 17 with the idea of being a sportswriter,

the timing was perfect

to get back into music, because it was 1977.

It was the magic year when everything changed in music.

And, you know, I would say punk rock saved my life.

Discovering this music when I was working at the radio station

in Davis, KDVS. Having access to all this music and learning about it

minute by minute was the greatest thing.

And I was on this radio station with

Tom Gracyk. Tom Gracyk was our guru.

I had been getting all the

good punk records like Richard Hell and Talking Heads and The Saints.

And he was reviewing stuff like

Peter Gabriel and Todd Rundgren.

He was still kind of mainstream.

And I was two years older, a year and a half older than him. So I kind of

pushed him, forced him a little into music that he didn't know about.

I was the music director, he became the program director.

And by then he knew people like Kendra Smith,

who was working in the Public Affairs Department at the radio station.

And Russ Tolman, who had been program director there also at KDVS.

In Davis, there were only fifty people who cared about this stuff.

Fifty people who wanted to know about this music.

And we all knew each other and we all fed each other's excitement.

I saw this Bruce Springsteen show

in Los Angeles on the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour.

And it was just one of those revelation moments.

He was playing San Diego the next night, and I had to see it again.

And I knew Kendra was on school break like I was.

And it was one of those classic things that happens all the time.

We walked out of there saying, let's form a band.

She said, “I've done a little singing, like in choir and, you know”.

Alright, you're the singer.

I'm not the singer. Holy cow.

I've never sung in my life.

And I knew Russ Tolman played guitar, because we had played together.

So there we are, Kendra, me and Russ.

I'd really never been in a band before.

It’s like you had to be a virtuoso player

to actually be in a band back in those days.

And so, you know, the new wave and punk rock came along and kind of freed

everyone from that. So Steve was very keen on starting the band.

I guess he had gone to Kendra and said the same thing.

Kendra Smith.

So we started this band called Suspects.

Kendra was the girl,

she also worked at college radio station.

She started off in the news department and she was that cute girl

[rock music]

in the news department.

I think everyone had a crush on her.

We put an ad in the paper and we got two guys.

We got a bass player named Steve Suchil and we also got Gavin Blair, a drummer.

With Suspects we actually started getting a lot of gigs.

We were playing quite a bit, just because we were willing

to take any gig we were offered.

We were like a classic two guitar and bubbly female lead singer band.

Actually, we were Davis's first new wave band as what we were known as.

I must have written a hundred songs for Suspects.

None.

None of which I ever played after that.

None have ever surfaced in any other band.

But I was writing like crazy. And that's how I was learning to write songs.

We made a single.

It was called Talking Loud and Walking Proud on the A-side

and on the B-side was Up To You.

At one point, Steve claimed he was just going to buy them all up

to destroy them, because he was slightly embarrassed about it.

But it wasn't a bad record at all.

I think Steve ended up with

most of them in his closet, but we did sell a few.

As a record you could hold in your hands and say, I did this.

And it was a great feeling.

[rock music]

We played around for a little while longer

and then we broke up.

As all young bands do.

I went back to L.A.,

I was 20 years old and more obsessed with music than anything else in my life.

I was getting my education by day at UCLA, but my real education was working

in this record store and talking to people about music and going to shows every

night, if I could.

I started playing in bands again.

The bands I was playing with are okay, they didn't excite me that much.

I couldn't find anybody making music that I was hearing in my head.

And I figured, you know, I still love music,

but I don't want to be a musician anymore.

I remember I had one thing on my mind

and that was I wanted to make a record that I could be proud of.

So I got a little home recording system,

I saved up and got a little four track reel to reel recorder

and recorded just kind of jam that I had built around four chords.

That became That's What You Always Say.

And I played everything myself, and I just made up words.

If you ever hear the version that I put out then, it just gibberish.

Just, you know, uh uh uh uh.

The chorus was, “but that's what you always say”.

And the rest was just nonsense.

And I called the band 15 Minutes, because that was my 15 minutes,

my joke that this be the one record

I make that is, you know, that is cool

and now I'm going to quit.

Around that time when I made that single,

I met these two sisters, Kristi and Kelly Callan.

They would shop at the record store where I worked and they said,

“Hey, you know, I know you play guitar.

Do you want to get together and jam sometime?” Yeah, sure.

So we've got together and played. And I liked what they were doing.

They played these songs

that had a million chords and would speed up and slow down randomly.

And all I could think when I heard these girls play was,

they remind me of The Shaggs.

These girls are the new Shaggs.

I got to play with them. I was so excited about it.

But we needed the bass player, so we advertised in this Recycler newspaper

for a bass player to come play with us.

And this tall, skinny guy

with a pageboy haircut shows up, that’s Karl Precoda.

He came in and played with us, and after it was over, I walked him out

back to his car and I said, “So you know what you think?”

He said, “They're terrible, but I like you!”

I like what you're doing.

Okay, so we start playing together.

He quickly changed from bass to guitar

and we would just sit around and jam in the basement.

Everything just came alive.

And the two of us playing guitars and playing,

you know, an E chord for twenty minutes in my father's basement.

For some reason, this is what I've been looking for.

At that point, I was so excited about it.

I got in touch with Kendra.

Kendra, after Suspects broke up, started playing bass.

Bear in mind, she had never played bass before.

She has picked up the bass and started playing one note,

dum dum dum dum dum dum dum. And that was all she wanted to do.

I'm sitting in the basement with Karl going, dah dah dah dah dah dah.

Playing one chord over and over again.

And that really was such a refreshing thing to all of us.

I think we were all so tired of this

nervous, hyper formulated music that was going on.

We just wanted to play.

We just wanted to get lost in sound and repetition.

You know, the obvious role model for that kind of music was the Velvet Underground.

And I would hear something like Sister Ray,

seventeen minutes of two chords and say, this is the greatest thing ever.

At a certain point, we started thinking we might be getting kind of good enough.

We could play a show someday. Who knows?

This is kind of, we like it.

Kendra said: “I'm kind of friends with Dennis Duck from Human Hands”.

[rock music]

One of our big fans,

someone who used to come see us all the time,

I remember seeing her backstage at the Whisky several times, was Kendra.

Dennis was a rock star. I saw Dennis play the Whisky A Go Go.

But, Kendra seemed to think he would come play with us.

I said: “Sure, give it a chance”.

My phone rang in Pasadena on an incredibly stormy,

rainy night, just pouring rain, lightning.

I get this call and this guy says: “Dennis, this is Steve Wynn.

I'm a friend of Kendra's.

And she told me that you play drums.

And I was wondering if you want to come rehearse with us.”

And I just thought: oh, no, no, I really I just don't want to do this.

And I'm sure I said no about a hundred times, and he just persisted.

He wouldn't take no for an answer and convinced me to pack up

all my drums in the car.

Dennis decided to drive across L.A.

from Pasadena to Westwood, where I lived,

an hour and a half in the rain

to play with us in the basement.

Drove out there very reluctantly,

set up my drums in their pool house, which was the rehearsal space,

and played through a bunch of songs.

I think we played Suzie Q by Creedence for about a half hour.

Maybe played That’s What You Always Say.

And maybe just jammed on an E chord for another hour.

He brought a boombox with him and recorded the whole rehearsal.

And Dennis, as I learned later on, doesn't always express

what's going on inside his head.

He took off and didn't say anything. Just: “Oh, okay, you know, good luck.”

[rock music]

Three days later, just out of good manners, I called him on the phone

and said: “Just want to say thanks again for coming out and playing with us.

We enjoyed playing with you. Hey, did you listen to your tape?”

He said: “That's all I've listened to for the last four days.”

This is the greatest thing.

I can't believe how good this music is.

I was utterly shocked.

That is the greatest thing I've ever heard.

I want to play with you guys.

Wow!

You got to be kidding, I couldn't believe it.

I thought I was joking with me.

Dennis was a damn near God.

We were just like: “Oh, you know, that could never happen.

We're just not good enough for him!”

It was so different than anything else that was happening at the time.

Because I was so into krautrock. I was into Can, Amon Düül, Kraftwerk, Neu.

Just all these great for European and German bands.

And I liked the simplicity of those kind of trance beats.

And I kind of felt like I was playing that kind of beat behind

the more sort of Creedence, Stones-ish guitars

that Steve and Karl were playing.

I could see in Steve right away

that he had a certain special quality as a songwriter.

[rock music]

That time in the next three weeks, things happened very quickly.

We started playing more often and we started writing songs.

Decided maybe we should try to play a show.

Decided the best way to get a show

would be to record our songs.

Found a studio that Dennis knew.

I had a friend in, actually,

in Sierra Madre. This guy Tom, that had a little home recording studio.

He actually had his living room set up as a recording studio.

And then the nursery for where his baby was, was like the control room.

So it was pretty primitive.

Dennis also said, I know a guy

who could engineer it. Paul Cutler. Do you know him?

Paul Cutler? My God. Paul Cutler played guitar in 45 Grave.

I love 45 Grave.

I think Steve's total

bill for all of it was 200 dollars.

I think it was 100 dollars for the studio and 100 dollars for me.

We set up in this guy's living room

and recorded When You Smile,

Sure thing,

That's What You Always Say

and Some Kinda Itch.

In the same first four weeks

got a gig at a great club,

a club called Club Lingerie, which was the coolest club in L.A. at the time.

But we got that gig, because Dennis had played there and knew the booker.

Human Hands in Los Angeles were very popular.

They had put out a few records.

They had a, you know, strong but small cult following.

And so the first three or four shows,

everyone said: “Hey, let's go see The Dreams Syndicate.

That's Dennis Duck’s new band.”

All this happened in three, three and a half weeks.

From the time Dennis came to the rehearsal,

to the time we were on stage playing our first show

at a groovy club to 300 people, all was that fast.

We opened with When You Smile and it just,

you know, the feedback was going and it just sounded amazing.

I loved it so much.

I thought people are going to just freak out when they hear this.

And they did.

I mean, the club asked us back right away as soon as the show was over.

We listened to the tape from that one day session.

And said, this is too good for a demo tape. We should put this out.

He put that out on his own label and it did great.

I was a fan right then and there.

First track on one was Sure Thing.

And I went: “Yes, this is a sure thing!”

It was propulsive.

The guitar work was

minimalist, but with a real drive and intensity to it.

We all had paid our dues, whatever dues we have to pay.

I paid mine with Suspects and other bands.

We all played in other bands.

We'd all played crappy shows for five people or less.

But Dream Syndicate paid no dues.

It happened so fast.

I knew it was great... but I think it took me a long time

to realize how unusual it was for that to happen so easily,

which, to me, maybe means that it was ready and meant to be, but...

just that we achieved

so many different things so quickly in one band sonically.

And then, nobody else was really doing that.

The guitar was a bit of a, you know,

embattled instrument at that point.

And the underground was definitely

reviving the use of the guitar.

Los Angeles is very funny.

There are bands that can kind of come out of nowhere and within a gig

or two become like the next big thing.

And that's what happened with The Dream Syndicate.

They were like, you know, they were stars.

They were, you know, or at least they were the putty out of which,

you know, the star making machine can make stars.

And I drank a lot in the early days of The Dream Syndicate.

And I say this not like it's some kind of boast, like, weren't we wild?

[rock music]

But it was the way I overcame my shyness,

my fear of being a frontman and a lead singer

and also a way to, as Jim Morrison said in L.A. years earlier

break on through to the other side, which was so important to me.

I want people to walk away from a show and say, I can't believe what I just saw.

I don't know if I like it.

I don't necessarily know if I love it or hate it.

But I've never seen anybody do that before on stage.

[rock music]

Steve, you know, his hair was like all sticking up and he kind of

like prowled around the stage and was very provocative to the audience.

There was no pandering or making it easy for people to like them.

You know what I mean?

And I like that. That was really influential.

Karl was definitely a rock star to me.

He was like this lanky guy on on stage with this guitar,

you know, just digging into his guitar and going nuts and getting the feedback.

Karl and Steve would just go off. They were insane.

They would do the ten minute jams or run around the stage.

Karl would jump up off his amplifiers.

He was really out there.

He was so flamboyant one with the feedback and all the moves.

You know, the guitar hero moves.

He was always out of tune.

But like Albert King, he would play it back into tune.

The first EP came out in April of 1982,

and by that time we were playing a lot of shows.

Our fourth and fifth show was opening for Wall of Voodoo,

you know, they became very popular at the time.

We actually open for the Psychedelic Furs in San Francisco and L.A.

Not too long after that, we had interest from Slash records.

Slash was the hippest label in L.A. at the time,

you just couldn't get groovier than that.

X were on that label and The Blasters were on that label.

Sure, we were getting a lot of attention. Sure, Slash was a big label.

Doesn't mean that they gave us any kind of a budget to work with.

So we had very

minimal time to make the record. Which was a good thing.

I love seeing them live.

I mean, I really, that's one of the reasons I wanted to get them

as live as possible in the studio.

You know, aside from budget constraints.

We were told, you're going to record

at the studio called Quad Tech, on these three nights back to back

from midnight to eight.

We set up, record all night long.

Starting at midnight.

Boom.

Recording. Ending eight in the morning. Finishing. Going to work.

I was still working, so I went off and just drove to work from the studio.

And the next night going in and doing overdubs,

which wasn't much. And the third night mixing it.

And it was done.

I remember going back the last day with the mixes into the record store,

into Rhino Records, and playing it over the speakers

in the record store and smiling, because we had done it.

[rock music]

When Days of Wine and Roses came out,

I think it created a ripple.

You know, people paid attention to it.

Days of Wine and Roses was the one that really

blew me out of the water.

You know, longer songs, you know, that kind of flow of conscious lyrics.

And the desperation. You know.

I was right on that record.

I just thought it was one of the most exciting and

compelling and also emotionally

forceful records I had heard in a really long time.

It was noise, but it actually had spirit and spirituality.

I didn't get it.

I honestly didn't think, you know, I didn't get it.

But as you know, as time went on, I kind of got it.

And Days of Wine and Roses is an amazing record.

It’s one of my favorites from the time period.

I guess it came out in October and in January we went on tour

for the first time.

We went out, hit the road. And played all across the country.

Got in the van and drove everywhere. We drove all the way across the

the Midwest, the East Coast, the South, all around.

We came to New York.

And as I would often do when I was in L.A., I would get The Village Voice.

I opened it up and in the center of the newspaper,

The Village Voice, in the listings for the shows

was a two page centerfold of a picture of The Dream Syndicate.

We played the show and people are lined around the block.

It was the toughest ticket in town that night.

And I remember having the executives from Geffen Records and

all the other labels flew in.

One of the greatest shows that I’ve ever seen.

And I actually did record it on my portable cassette player.

It was that good.

I was willing to risk being thrown out to have a souvenir of this show for myself.

It was kind of like the first taste I had,

that something really big was happening.

About a week after we came home,

Kendra called me up and said: “I need to talk to you.”

We got together and she said: “I'm going to quit the band.

I don't want to be in a band anymore.”

I was stunned. I couldn't believe it.

Kendra was my friend, my, you know, my oldest friend in the band.

Despite my complaint about touring, I think most of that was just

no privacy and no breaks.

I really just need to be alone a lot more time than was had for me.

You pack all your equipment and five or six people into a van.

You crowd into motel rooms all across the country.

You know, you're uncomfortable.

I think that we started evolving as a band to somewhere else.

We're kind of getting started going to a

slowly, going to more of a rock kind of sound.

We slowly started playing less of the Velvets and more Neil Young.

[band playing]

We played our last show with her in L.A.,

but things were not going to stop. Things were still moving along.

So I never considered breaking up the band. I knew we had to move along.

And very quickly after she quit the band,

we got asked to open a tour for U2.

Dave played in a band called the Textones, who I had seen a few times.

He was also in a band called The Droogs, which is kind of a garage rock thing.

Dave was nice. He learned the songs.

You're in the band. No question. There was no other audition.

I got together with Kendra.

And Kendra showed me her lines

that she was using on the songs.

And I liked them so much.

I just continued playing her lines.

And it wasn't out of lack of other things to play.

It was just that they were that good and that solid.

This was the beginning of the change of The Dream Syndicate

to a different kind of band.

And Dave, gave a little more of a of a rock sound.

More testosterone than estrogen.

It became a tougher band.

That first show when they opened for U2 was just insane.

It didn't seem like they really

were, like, feeling like there was

a bunch of pressure opening for U2 or something.

They were just kind of crazy.

And I remember Karl Precoda like tearing strings off his guitar

and wrapping him around the guitar as he was still playing and stuff.

And it was just a lot of noise, actually, but it was really, really good.

We were opening for them every night.

All across America. We played the Palladium in New York

and we played similar sized venues across the country.

And it really put The Dream Syndicate at a higher level

in terms of their live profile and their national awareness.

Bono would come in occasionally backstage and sit down and talk to us.

And I remember a couple of times, I think he even gave us a little like

giving us a few pointers about how to do things on stage.

He goes: “You know your guitar player, he represents United States.

He should paint his guitar red, white and blue, like a flag.”

And I looked at him and said: “Buck Owens does that.”

He looked at me: “Who?”

I’m like, if you don’t know who Buck Owens is, pal.

We are experiencing the adrenaline of success.

We’re experiencing traveling the country for the first time.

Driving through Mississippi and Wyoming and Idaho and places

we've never seen before and what people are like.

And all these things we're feeding into the music.

[rock music]

1983, we had worked it up to the point

where they basically became the hottest independent band in L.A..

We outgrew an independent label at that point.

There were a lot of people interested

on that last tour coming out to shows, people from labels.

Three in particular EMI, Geffen and A&M all wanted to sign the band.

At one point, it looked certain that we were going to sign

to Geffen Records, but then the A&M people were very convincing.

They loved the music.

And we just saw so much enthusiasm

coming from them that we ended up making our deal with them

So that was the label we chose to go on.

And they started the process to make Medicine Show.

We had to choose a producer.

And for some reason, we just fixed on Sandy, on Sandy Pearlman.

We knew him from The Clash.

I guess that's the one album, the second Clash album, Give ‘Em Enough Rope.

And I guess Blue Öyster Cult too, you know.

He managed to appeal

to something Karl wanted and something I wanted.

I wanted something that was kind of like, you know, just

little punk rock and strong, aggressive.

So I had the side, that he did The Dictators and The Clash.

Karl wanted this thing more rock and roll and little mainstream.

He got Blue Öyster Cult. So it worked for both of us.

I saw them at UCLA and actually I loved them.

But it was with Kendra.

It is amazing what a difference it made, substituting

Provost for Smith.

And it was kind of

amazing and dismaying, actually, because I was kind of intrigued

with the idea of making an intimate dreamy record.

We went to San Francisco, I think September of 83.

We got put up in some condos that Sandy had access to.

The Automatt was a very, very plush recording studio.

While we were in there, there were other bands.

I think we had Jefferson Starship

on one side of us and Yoko Ono on the other.

We played the songs. Spent two weeks doing basic tracks.

Okay, two weeks instead of one day.

But still not that excessive for the times.

We would do many, many, many takes of a song.

His way of working was to do all these takes

and then go back and edit parts of them together.

Try that, now try it again, now try it again.

Over and over and over.

I like to do a lot of takes, because

pretty early in my career,

my career of evil.

Quote.

I discovered that accidents were really good.

We finished the session and Dennis went home.

Dave did two weeks of bass overdubs.

Now, that's incredible. Two weeks of bass overdubs.

I can't think of how, how is that done?

Dennis and I would go back home to Los Angeles

and then we'd get called back

and it would be Sandy wanting us to repair one note.

Then Karl did his guitar parts and took six weeks.

We had a ton of fun recording guitar parts.

You know, he was happy to try any experiment.

We had good sound.

Six weeks of Karl by himself in the studio, doing guitar parts.

And it was a kind of thing where you just didn't know. We didn't know better.

Records in the eighties took two to three months. That’s what they took.

[rock music]

After two weeks of basic tracks,

two weeks of bass overdubs, six weeks of guitar overdubs.

Here's the hard part.

Six weeks of vocals.

Six weeks of me singing eight songs.

I really wanted to do well.

I wanted to, you know,

I started by doing what I thought was right as a singer.

Then after a while, I just tried to figure out what Sandy wanted.

You know, I don't know if Steve knew

that I was working to make him sound as awesome

as I could make him sound.

I don't think it was much of a struggle.

I don't even think the record is taking that long.

You know, you get a big producer to come in and you're

giving up some control or a lot of control.

And so, as the artist, you know, your vision maybe gets diminished a little bit.

I was so exasperated,

that I just really went deep inside myself

and I came with these weary, painful, otherworldly,

dark vocals that work great.

But it was a hard road to get there.

Steve was not as efficient.

I think it was a kind of consequence of

of other things, which had little to do

with the recording process, that just were going on at the same time.

You know, it would be fun to work with Steve now.

It wasn't that much fun to work with Steve then.

I think I'm a pretty nice guy, pretty approachable

in general, you know.

Everybody has their bad moments.

But for those six months, I became a bad guy.

Not a not a cruel guy, not a malicious guy, but just a dark,

self-obsessed, hard drinking guy going to bad places.

And I made decisions involving friends and weren't always that great.

And I think a lot of that had to do with taking that long to make a record.

All of your confidence goes away.

You know, whatever happened was

infinitely less pleasant than any other record I had made, you know?

Even recording The Clash was more fun.

Which is saying a lot.

We were in there when we were recording.

There was a lot of drinking going on and we were there involved.

And I think it was frustrating for Steve and the guys that it was taking so long.

It made me crazy.

It was five months of just feeling

disconnected, hopeless, not knowing how things were going down.

I was drinking a lot, and also,

sadly, that was beginning

of the end of the friendship with me and Karl, because Karl

was kind of enjoying that.

He enjoyed, it felt like what rock bands do.

You go in, you make a record that takes forever, because that's

that proves you're successful.

This is what Led Zeppelin might have done.

I think he was very excited by that and he was annoyed

that I would try to put an end to that.

So I think we had our first bits of really big tension making that record.

Karl wanted to be in a bigger band.

[rock music]

In other words, he wanted to be in a band

that sold records and played bigger places.

And so I think he's really pushing his sort of seventies rock sound.

By the end of the day

we had a record that we both liked.

It somehow matched that thing, which we both wanted.

He had made a very wide scope

record that was a great reflection of his talents.

And I had made a record that was dark and unsettling

and would divide people into two camps who either liked or didn't like it.

Everybody was happy.

But unfortunately, we at that point were kind of finished as friends.

It just took me a little while to get to realize,

wow, this is a different sounding band than the one I that I knew.

I was just shaken by the power of the Medicine Show album.

I was, like, trembling.

I'm like, Jesus Christ, this is some pretty heavy stuff.

I honestly, despite the fact that I was beaten to a pulp

from the making of that record,

I came out of that feeling like this is going to blow people's minds.

We knew we had changed.

We knew we'd gone through a lot of changes in one year,

but we'd forgotten then,

what I hadn't realized as a music fan is that

for other people who loved Days of Wine and Roses

they hadn't gone through those changes with us.

I think it works in retrospect.

I think at the time a lot of people were disappointed,

cause it didn't sound like The Days of Wine and Roses.

But they didn't need to make that record again.

They'd already done it.

Word got around, you know.

Oh, The Dream Syndicate

spend 250.000 dollars making Medicine Show.

It was amazing that it took so long and cost them so much to make.

And although it was a different sound,

in some ways it was a stronger record than Days of Wine and Roses.

Medicine Show

it had this reputation as

sort of a bloated attempt at,

you know, some kind of big rock and roll statement,

you know, almost like Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, which has this

reputation of, oh, my God, they spent like millions

and millions of dollars and did tons of drugs.

But Rumours is a fantastic record that holds up really well.

And what Steve was trying

to do on Medicine Show, again, it was incredibly ambitious.

[rock music]

The funny thing about Dave Provost and The Dream Syndicate is

he wasn't really a member of the band that long.

After we made the record,

we got offered the tour with R.E.M.

and we were ready to go on there,

and there was some tension there.

When we were in rehearsals, Steve looked around and goes:

“Dave, I think you're going to have to do the backup vocals.”

And at that point, I just panicked, like I'd never panicked before.

I think he was having some romantic issues and a girlfriend who kind of

was pressuring him to pressure us in certain ways.

I had a girlfriend that was being really, really horrible and, you know,

trying to snoop around the band's business and stuff like that.

We were not going to budge on this and we can't really.

And he said: “Fine, I'm going to quit.” And that was that.

So we found ourselves without a bass player,

much in a way we were before the U2 tour a year before that,

without a bass player and a big tour coming up, a tour with R.E.M.

across the country. Eight weeks.

And Karl said: “I know this guy

who's a friend of a friend of mine and I've met him.

He's a nice guy.

I think he's a really good bass player.

Let's ask him.”

So that was Mark Walton.

I owned a rehearsal studio in Van Nuys, California.

I was working. Karl came by the studio one afternoon and said:

“Hey Mark, what are you doing?”

I’m like, I'm working. This is my job.

He goes: “No, not not today.

For the next month or year or whatever?”

I'm like, what do you mean?

So he pulls out the EP and The Days of Wine and Roses

and the new album they just finished, the Medicine Show,

and said: “Could you learn all these and go on tour and a week?”

And so I said, I think about it, you know.

So next day I called him.

I said: “Sure, that sounds like fun. Let’s go!”

So he came up, showed up, play the songs great.

Seem nice enough.

He had kind of a, he wore a bandana around his neck,

kind of a Hollywood rockabilly look.

I don't know about that bandana.

Besides a bandana I like you.

He really came along at a good time,

because for one thing, and this cannot be understated,

he got along with Karl and he got along with me.

I don't know if we had the idea to have keyboards from the start,

but I think once we realized the sound was going to be so big and so cinematic

[band playing]

and so epic, we all decided keyboards would be great with this.

Sandy suggested Tommy Zvoncheck.

He was a great player and he really had the right sound for that record.

Tommy Zvoncheck ended up going on tour with us, because he'd played

so much on Medicine Show.

He'd played so many parts on those songs that we wanted to have,

we wanted to recreate that sound live.

The sound of Medicine Show

and the sound of that tour is an anomaly.

It's a sound and a style I did for six months.

Never before. Never since.

But it's a really important period for what music I made.

And I’m really proud of that. But it's such a funny, different kind of record.

It's almost like a different person stepped into my body for six months.

When we went on tour

with R.E.M., you know, we had that big old tour bus.

We were traveling in style

and we were playing with a really great hip new band, too.

We all got along really well and I was so happy to be there, my first big tour.

So, you know, to me it was a very enlightening experience.

It was a really, very exciting time.

It was strange, because while this was all happening,

Karl and I were pulling further apart.

What Karl wanted, once we got successful, was to be more successful.

And to be a rock star.

He was a lead guitarist

who played with, you know, an open vest and no shirt underneath.

It's easy just to look back in one way and say:

Well, I wasn't getting along with Karl.

And we made a record which alienated some of our audience.

But at the same time, we were playing to a lot of people who loved what we were doing.

The beautiful thing was in Europe, where we had never toured

and were Days of Wine and Roses was kind of barely known.

We were a new band that people loved.

It seems like right now that the audiences in Europe for the first time

in a while, are very excited about what's happening in the U.S.A..

And they want to know about bands like us and Green on Red and R.E.M.

and all these bands from the U.S..

[rock music]

This was a really great period of time.

It was only tempered by the fact that you're in a band of four people

and two of those people aren't talking to each other.

He's looking at me and hating everything I say or do, and I'm looking at him

and hating everything he says or does.

That's a thing I just don't like having when I'm making music.

I was designated as Karl's roommate.

I was a buffer, really, between the two of them.

So they didn't have their emotional outbursts

or anything else that might occur during the tour.

We then went to Japan. And something on that tour

and I can't even say what it was,

but it felt like he and I just really at that point

got more disconnected than ever.

I remember some of the later shows, it seemed like it was,

things weren't as friendly as they used to be.

Definitely had that sense.

I came back from that tour. And I think can't do this anymore.

I'm just not happy.

I'm not getting joy out of this.

And I'm feeling a tension and feeling a disconnect from

somebody who once was my friend.

So I got on the phone and I called

each member of the band individually and said: “That's it, we're breaking up!”

When Steve called me and told me the band was breaking up, I was shocked.

I was like, why would you do that?

When you get older, you might say:

“Hey, why don’t we get together for a cup of coffee and talk about this?”

or “What's the thing bothering you?”

Or let's, you know, a more mature way of handling it.

One person might say, “I'm through!”

The person might say: “Fine, me too!”

And that's that. And that's what happened to us.

So we went from the tour to being broken up in about two weeks.

Right after that Japanese tour.

When we came back and the band was broken up, I had something to transition into,

which was the Danny & Dusty project with Dan Stuart.

[rock music]

And we'd recorded a couple of tracks together for a compilation

around the beginning of ‘84. And we decided to make a whole record.

So we went into the studio and made The Lost Weekend

in a weekend, exactly as the title suggests, a very quick record.

And the engineer on the record was Paul.

That was a fun record. It was easy.

It's got a great spirit and it's got a great sense of humor.

That record is called The Lost Weekend for a reason.

Nobody really remembers what happened there.

It was just a great mix of songs.

We played a few shows in L.A..

Because of having such a good time

on the Danny & Dusty record, because I had a good time with Paul,

because I had really good memories of playing with Dennis and Mark as well.

I kind of decided. Well, let's get together and play some music.

After auditioning Nels Cline and Eddie Muñoz and a few other people.

You know, four people altogether.

And Paul just seemed like the best person.

As soon as we heard Paul playing with the band, we all just

agreed that he was the guy.

Hello there, my name is Paul B. Cutler.

I play in a rock band called The Dream Syndicate.

It is again that type of thing when at the time, it felt like a long time

between the two things. It was only three months.

But there was enough time to clear out the bad air.

And from the time we started playing with Paul, I suddenly felt excited about being

The Dream Syndicate again.

It was a really perfect band for me to be able to join.

It really was a good situation.

It helped me expand

my guitar playing a little bit more.

Paul, there wasn't anything you couldn't do.

If he wanted to play twenty notes in a second, he could do that.

If he wants some feedback for twenty seconds, he could do that.

Whatever he wanted to do, he was unafraid to do it.

And that was exciting for me.

If they wanted Karl Precoda clone,

they could have found one.

I mean, I tried to honor,

like, Tell Me When It’s Over,

[rock music]

there's sort of a signature part:

dah dah dah, nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah nahnah.

Right.

I tried to honor stuff like that.

Other than that,

I didn't sit around trying to learn Karl Precoda parts.

It was very much The Dream Syndicate.

But it was

The Dream Syndicate

the way The Stones were one way

with Brian Jones and another way with Mick Taylor.

You know, the guitar voice helped to transform

what was already there into something new.

Live The Dream Syndicate with Paul B. Cutler

was totally different than Karl, but equally, sometimes even more exciting.

It's Paul's postrock and jazzisms and punk rock sound with Steve's,

that really made me feel great about that band.

I really felt like that contrast was really beautiful.

I was always kind of knocked out about how he could get these crazy sounds.

I saw Paul Cutler doing all those guitar things with tools and stuff

before Eddie van Halen was doing those things.

Paul incorporated everything.

I don't know where he was coming from.

I mean, I know he's a big music listener, but to be honest,

I don't know what one thing

inspired him more than anything else.

But it fit well with us.

It really became the new sound of the band.

I think we went on tour in 1985 without a new record.

We toured the States, came back home and said: “Let's do a record together.”

So I wrote the songs for Out of the Grey.

Nothing old there. It was all new stuff.

And we started doing demos at A&M.

And we're excited by that. It felt really good.

I think we did four or five songs for them

and they just weren't that happy with them.

Oh my God, okay, we'll do it again.

Nah, something else.

Oh my God, what do you want? You know.

They wanted to hear a single

or they wanted to hear something that was going to be more accessible.

I think. We want to do this, because we like it.

And if we could somehow do something

to make you happy, maybe we try, but we don't even know what you want.

The guy is like: “Oh, these are pretty good demos.

When you're going to make the record?”

And Steve said something like: “This is the record.”

I know a couple of people who worked at the label

[rock music]

had left the label between Medicine Show and the follow-up album.

And when you start to lose people,

sometimes the base of support within the label can erode.

After the third round of demos,

I met with the guy who signed us to the label.

Very nice guy.

I sat down and said: “Look, we love touring.

We want to get out there and play. That's our livelihood.

We have a lot of fans.

We could be a band for you that can make records cheaply, a lot cheaper

than Medicine Show was. We can make inexpensive records and tour

a lot and sell 50.000 copies and everybody makes money.”

And he said: “We're not in the business of selling 50.000 records.”

We were, you know, like 400.000 dollars in debt to these people.

He said: “If you want to go, we'll let you go.”

I said: “We want to go.”

And not only did A&M let us go,

not only was a giant debt of Medicine Show

a lot of money, a quarter of a million dollars.

Not only was a giant debt of all the money we lost on the R.E.M. tour,

another hundrerd thousand dollars.

Not only was that all gone,

wiped like it never happened.

But they gave us money to go away.

It was in the contract.

We had some of those kind of clauses in our deal that allowed them to leave

and that we got a payment on the back end and things like that, that you never

would have gotten if you were only being pursued by one label.

And the money they gave us to leave the label

was the money we spent making Out of the Grey ourselves.

And we recorded the whole record on our own.

Paul produced it.

And we had a finished record and sold

the finished record to a new label called Big Time who just started up

and were thrilled to have it.

I think that I tried to

force it a little too much into a popper direction.

Not that it's pop music on any level.

I think he did a great job recording.

It's just the mixing that got everybody screwed up.

It's all this bad eighties, you know, technology that everybody was using.

We're not the only ones.

We just happened to be caught in it.

Out of the Grey was problematic,

because apparently it was not mastered correctly.

And so the original

sound of it was, you know, didn't cut through the way Medicine Show did.

I always have to watch what I say about Out of the Grey,

because there’s a side of me that feels like

it's my least favorite record I've ever made.

And when I say that,

it's a hard thing to say,

because first of all, a lot of fans really like it.

A lot of fans love it.

I meet people, it’s their favorite one.

And it feels hard to say, well you're wrong, because you know

ultimately it doesn't belong to me anymore at that point.

They're not that many songs there I’m not fond of.

There's some songs that I actually dislike, you know.

Dancing Blind is on that, I hate that song.

So, of all my records I've made.

That one has the most songs where I just feel like

I just wasn't doing that good a job.

The song Boston, which is sort of, you know, a big, long, epic song.

And I really got into it because that's a song about

Van Morrison living in Boston in the late sixties.

And so Steve and I bonded over those lyrics of nothing else.

Even that record

was a great album and I’m still on board.

Out of the Grey has a much more kind of hopeful kind of streak in it,

but it also has incredibly dark themes in it and some really dark songs.

Every day I get another sympathy card.

If you think about that, it's brilliant.

I mean, think of how dark and literary that line is.

So, Steve’s songs from that period, again even though these aren't

the albums that I think define him for a lot of people.

You know, for me, they are some of his strongest work.

[rock music]

In the States, in the U.S., and this is a funny story.

It was seen as a comeback record and a comeback tour, because the U.S.

was a little unsure about Medicine Show in some ways. Critics anyway.

We went to Europe

and critics didn't like Out of the Grey so much.

If I'm not mistaken, the reviews weren't as good.

So it was that kind of, there’s a weird kind of seesaw effect.

But our second European tour was better than ever.

More cities, more countries, more places, bigger audiences.

Europe was great. We were more popular there.

So we'd go over there and just have all this fun,

and then we'd be driving thousands of miles around America.

We played successful shows, but it wasn't the same.

And you got to drive a long ways to get from Boston to Chicago.

That's a long ways, man.

It's not like going from Belgium to Holland.

Now I don't know how this happened.

I don't know how with two days notice, somebody had the idea

to book The Dream Syndicate to headline the main stage at Roskilde.

But they did.

We were on tour, I think we were in Italy.

And, you know, we got a call from our

our manager or agent, I think it was, that

The Cult had canceled and they were like

a headlining slot on Roskilde. And would we like to fill in for them?

So we landed in Copenhagen, drove an hour to Roskilde, got there, showed up.

I mean, we went right to our backstage room,

had a beer and it was time to play.

That was it.

Walked on stage in front of 50.000 people.

And a guy came out, introduced us and said,

“Now I know a lot of you expect to see The Cult. They were going to play.

They couldn't play.

But we have something special for you.”

Directly from Los Angeles, California.

The Dream Syndicate.

I think they saw us kind of being heroic, because we showed up.

And on no notice whatsoever came to entertain people.

Everything was right. And we played a great set.

[crowd cheering]

So we started playing and people started throwing coins at us.

And we're kind of like, weird. And me and Mark

actually started picking them up, just putting them in our pockets.

We just thought: well, it's money we might as well take it

and go have lunch.

Steve played right before us,

and that's when I saw the band for the first time.

[rock music]

And then and I remember it really well, because

we were up next after them and it started raining during our set.

It was wonderful disaster.

To this day that's why I think I have a really good career in Scandinavia.

It made such an impression on fans from Denmark and Norway and Sweden

the lasts with us for a long time.

From the time after Out of the Grey came out,

and after that tour finished. Probably late ‘86.

I started writing a lot.

And we started playing this kind of acoustic trio shows,

and I started writing songs for those shows.

Here tonight with Chris Cacavas from Green on Red

and Robert Lloyd from the Romans and the infamous criticalist.

This combination was just a blast.

And it was the beginning of the era, that went on until this day,

of me collaborating with Steve Wynn.

Thought about doing a solo record, but decided instead it was

a good time to make a record with the Dream Syndicate.

If I complain about Out of the Grey.

One thing about it is also I didn't think we had found our sound yet.

When we made Ghost Stories, we had our sound.

We've been on tour. We knew what we were going for.

I wrote songs I liked.

And at that point we looked for an outside producer.

And somebody introduced me to Elliot Mazer.

I can't remember who.

But I knew Elliot Mazer, because he had produced

Harvest by Neil Young and Time Fades Away by Neil Young.

Steve came in and said that

Elliot Mazer was on.

You know, we didn't have a discussion about it.

He just came and said: “Can you believe that Elliot said yes?”, kind of thing.

We're like, wow, that's really cool.

While we were kind of preparing for Ghost Stories,

while we were doing the pre-production, we did a show at Raji’s.

This Club in Hollywood that we liked a lot. And Elliot said: “Let's record it.”

And we recorded directly to DAT and we're going to mix it on the spot.

So when the show's over, you got your recording.

And it was just one of our best live shows.

And a lot of people say that's the best Dream Syndicate record.

And I wouldn't say that's impossible.

Sonically, it's an amazing

document to capture a band in their prime.

[rock music]

After hearing that, I'm like, why the fuck would anyone ever go in

a recording studio ever?

Elliot was real old school.

You know, he had that vibe, which I loved from the sixties

and seventies, where create a good environment.

Make the artists happy.

Get people excited.

Capture a moment.

He's kind of this peacy Bay Area guy.

I am a redneck from Arizona.

I mean, peacy just rubs me all kinds of the wrong way.

You know? I hate it.

To me, it's fascism.

I don't see any difference.

He would stand in the studio with us, not in the control booth, in the studio

and wave his arms around.

He would stand out there like he was conducting us, like he was dancing.

Like he was freaking out.

He would jump right in my face and shake his hands in the air

and shake his little butt.

He was losing his cool, so we could also.

I think he was more in touch with what the band was all about.

I like the record.

Once it was done, I liked it.

It was produced by Elliot Mazer.

He's the guy who basically produced, help produce Time Fades Away,

one of the rawest Neil Young records ever.

Recorded live on a completely chaotic tour.

And yet it's really one of the great dynamic

documents of Neil Young as a writer and as a performer.

And Elliot bringing that to this band, which helps,

I think, connect

Steve and The Dream Syndicate with an important lineage

in American music.

We went to Europe to tour for Ghost Stories immediately,

because we had a great following there.

We had a seven week tour of Europe and the shows were great.

We've had a lot of people that came out,

sold out most shows we played.

We finished the European tour and had two or three days off

and then started a seven week U.S. tour. Insane.

That's what we did.

Where are you going to be going?

I mean, all of us are going tomorrow to Boston,

going traveling around Midwest, Canada, the South, Texas,

all the way to California, for that week in California.

And at that point it will be 14 weeks.

We'll probably just take a little time off and

we're putting out a live record next year and record a new studio album.

Just keep moving.

Well, in America at that point, people have stopped caring.

Our United States tour after Ghost Stories was a shit show.

Club attendance at the shows was getting a little lighter.

Some of our shows got canceled.

We went through so many managers and booking agents.

So by that point, we didn't have a good focus,

a good team and coordination.

At that point we had a little of the curse of a band

that’s not new anymore.

It was absolutely heartbreaking, man. Nobody came.

If you're a brand new band or starting out and you play to twenty people

you feel like, this is great, because next time it will be thirty or forty.

When your band’s around for seven years and you're playing to twenty people

and last year it was a hundred.

What’s going to be next time?

We had to do an overnight drive after a show. We were tired.

We were fed up from, you know, not great shows in attendance.

And Paul and I got really drunk on the drive.

Mark and Paul started having a pillow fight

in the van, whacking each other with a pillow.

That's fun. Four in the morning, little drunk, having a pillow fight.

[rock music]

And Paul said: “That's it. Pull the van over.”

Paul just opens the door to the van and disappears into the midnight.

Oh, that's funny.

Paul's taken this joke one step further.

And then we said: “Paul?”

We sat there for about an hour and thinking he'd come back.

He didn't come back.

Now it’s four in the morning. Pitch black.

We're in Canada and there's not

a town in sight.

There's no lights. We're in the middle of nowhere.

So finally we thought, well, let's go out there. We got a flashlight.

He actually pulled stuff.

So there is this trail, so we could follow him for a while.

And it went out into a field and disappeared. And that was it.

So we went back to the van and started driving back and forth.

You know. We went for miles. We couldn't find him.

Finally went back the other way.

And there he was, hitchhiking on the side of the road,

going the opposite direction than we were going.

And we drove up to him

and he sees us coming and he starts running to get away from us.

“Paul, what are you doing?”

Keeps running.

“Get in the van.”

He got in the car, but he wouldn't talk to anyone.

The late night, the disappointment of the tour, the alcohol.

Something just got him so angry and pushed him over the edge.

America is like the heartbreak city.

It's huge, you know.

And if you have to drive around this country, you have to drive

a thousand miles across Texas and then you get your heart broken.

This is not a good thing.

Once that first crack happens with musicians, I'm looking for the way out.

[rock music]

And I told Dennis during a tour, I think I'm done.

I wouldn't say I'd thought about doing it, but when he when he said it,

it made sense.

It didn't even, like, shock me or anything.

If Steve wanted the band over, the band was done.

And it was sad.

I was disappointed.

That was a very strong period that in a way ended a little too abruptly.

You know, the band really wasn't finished doing the business.

It’s just that trying to do the business

had just become so frustrating.

The night before our last show was San Francisco, and it was a great show.

It was packed. We played great. The audience was great.

It was exciting.

I finished the show and tore all the strings off my guitar

in an excited delirium.

The next day we went to Santa Clara and the show had been canceled.

And I thought: that's perfect.

Our last show was a cancelation, but really our last show was

a really good classic Dream Syndicate show.

The band was, in a sense, just waiting for him to come back.

I always hoped that I get another chance to play with him at some point.

After, you know, losing my house in Hurricane Katrina

and moving to Las Vegas.

Not having, you know, anyone to play with or hang out here.

I was depressed and upset.

There was a festival in Bilbao called the Walk On Project.

It's an organization down there, started by a friend of mine

to help with the research and treatment of pediatric diseases.

And I've done some shows and recordings for them before.

And they were having a festival in 2012,

and he asked me if I would be up for playing there with one of my bands.

That would mean my solo band Steve Wynn & The Miracle 3

or The Baseball Project.

And neither band could do the show.

And I really wanted to do the festival.

So I thought.

Oh yeah, I have another band, The Dream Syndicate.

And of course, we hadn't played a show in 24 years, but we’re all still friends.

We talked about it.

We all agreed it was a good idea.

When that call came in, I was very excited to go out and do that.

And the next issue was who would play guitar?

And it wasn't going to be Karl.

I was very aware of that.

I approached Paul Cutler, who’s still a friend.

At a certain point in time,

The Dream Syndicate was incredibly potent as a live band.

We would nail your ass to the ground. We were on.

And anything short of that, I'm not interested in it.

Not to mention it would take me forever to relearn those songs.

So the obvious thing at that point was to ask Jason Victor.

I moved to New York in ‘94.

It was important to find some favorite record stores.

And there was a store on St Mark's Place.

And when I would shop there, this young kid.

I mean, to me, it seemed like this kid, working there saying:

“You're Steve Wynn, I'm a big fan of your music.”

So, thank kid!

And it was Jason.

Around that time, I'd become a really big fan of Steve Wynn,

of his solo career, and of The Dream Syndicate.

One day he said: “Hey, I'm a guitarist.

If you ever want to get together and jam, I'd love to do it.”

He probably figured, Well, I'll just do it once, and maybe

he'll give me even better deals on my CD’s.

So we got together for two hours at a place down in the Lower East Side,

and when we got there, I of course found out:

oh man, this guy is a really good guitarist.

And he knows all my songs.

He came home after that.

He was like: “I think I may have found my next guitar player.”

My biggest dream at that point was to go on tour.

I've got a band and a guitarist right now, but it's good to know

the record store kid is such a good player.

His band was about to do a European tour

and they needed our merch seller and a driver of the van.

And I told them.

Well, obviously I know how to sell merch from working in the record store.

And a van, never drove a van before, never drove stick shift before.

But I lied and said I can do it.

Right around this time

Chris Brokaw contacted me and said:

“I'm really sorry, but I can't do the tour.”

I have another tour at the same time. I have to do it.

And then the light bulb went off.

I know, Jason's already planning on the tour.

I'll ask him to play guitar instead.

You know, you're nervous.

You're stepping into really big shoes.

You're stepping into history.

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He's just incredibly versatile.

He's a real joy to play with.

He has a bit of Paul and Karl in him,

but he's got this other element that is strictly Jason.

He's, you know, paying

the right amount of homage to the textures and the intensity

of how the older songs were played back in the day.

We've been playing Dream Syndicate songs with the Miracle 3 for ten years now.

The funny thing is,

Jason and I both play very differently once were with Mark and Dennis.

It's interesting how the rhythm sections treat the songs differently,

and so then your own playing adapts to that.

So once Jason and I play with Mark and Dennis,

it's The Dream Syndicate.

It's funny how that is.

Right after we did the first original reunion shows in Spain,

people started freaking out.

They were saying: “You'll play again? Really?

How can I get you to play here?”

Book a show, you know. We'll show up.

And so we would do that occasionally here and there.

And then it just started snowballing.

And we kept doing little things

with the feeling that we're a nostalgia band.

We're happy to be a nostalgia band.

We're nostalgic too, for God’s sake.

So let's go out there and play the old songs

and make everyone happy and have some fun.

We kept playing and kept playing,

until we realized, okay, we can only do this so long.

You know, we need to evolve.

We need to make a record or something to justify us being a band.

Otherwise we're an oldie band

and I don't want to be an oldie band member if I can avoid it.

Steve was writing new material, so that allowed us to move out

of the stage of just playing old songs, into a newer period.

Well, let's see what it would be like to record a record for the fun of it.

Let's see how it turns out. Low pressure.

We booked some time in the studio in Richmond, Virginia.

The studio where I worked quite a bit, called Montrose Recording.

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And I felt like, we'll go down there

for five days, do our thing, hang out, have some fun.

And I thought maybe it would be good to have,

if not a producer, at least somebody in the control room

who knows us, who has an objective opinion,

who isn't me being the bandleader and being the boss.

But somebody who can kind of be our our guide.

And I thought the perfect person to do that would be Chris Cacavas.

He wanted me to be sort of his Brian Eno to his Bowie,

and I liked that.

I'm like, okay, I can live with this role.

One thing we found when we went in the studio

to make that record, was

not only we can

justify our existence, not only can we somehow

approximate what it was that people loved about the band,

but even better, we're a new band that does new things in a new way.

We came together and each person was like a gear in the machine.

Again, but differently.

And it all fit together. It was great.

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Jason knowing so much about my musical history

and about The Dream Syndicate.

He had his feelings about this is good, this is bad.

First and foremost,

I'm a fan of the band.

And sometimes I think that gets on the guy's nerves,

because I go: “This is not up to snuff” or

“Nah, The Dream Syndicate wouldn’t do this.”

Within the context of a band that is already

rather experimental and rather open to

improvised ideas.

Jason is a guy who took it even one step further.

He's like: “No, I'm not going to play that.

That's the obvious thing to play.

And I'm not going to play that.”

If we play How Did I Find Myself Here?, I think once a day in the studio,

which kind of along with the other songs.

We would play fast, slow, twenty minutes, seven minutes,

whatever, every kind of version, just to have fun with it.

And one of the days we were playing it and really got into the groove of it,

Chris was in the control room.

Dennis Duck was playing this sort of trip hop beat.

And it sounded, I heard this sort of funky vibe in there.

And then I thought to myself: oh, I think I might have a part for this.

So between takes, I asked the engineer Adrian

to hook up the old Wurlitzer piano that was in the control room.

So now I'm ready to play with the band.

But they can't hear me.

But I'm just jamming along with them and having a blast, you know, just trying

to find this sort of funky vibe that would fit to what they were doing.

So finally they come in to hear what they did. What they did.

And then they hear my keyboard track, which I didn't tell them about.

And Adrian puts it up in the mix and they're like: what the heck is that?

That sounds amazing! How? Where do these keyboards come from?

Chris, you're playing along the whole time?

And I said: “Surprise!”

I think we were all surprised by how it turned out.

It's what you dream about, you know?

It's when you're playing live, you hope it's going to sound that good.

The blend of the shorter songs and always one or two long songs

where we get freaky and where anything can happen.

That's who we are.

And the long song was always Coltrane

or Days of Wine and Roses.

Suddenly we had How did I Find Myself Here?

And that was maybe the best song of all of them.

We got to do that.

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Eventually I was asked to become

the fifth member, the fifth Beatle of The Dream Syndicate.

When we finished, How Did I Find Myself Here?, when that record was done and mixed

and ready to be released, we knew we were a five piece band.

I think that record really sets up

an entirely new era

for him as a writer and as a collaborator with,

you know, musicians that he's known

most of his life, if not all of his life.

I feel like How Did I Find Myself Here? was a debut album.

It was a debut with a new band.

And we went back to make the second record.

Second records were always hard.

We were, I think, kind of figuring out

how to be The Dream Syndicate of old,

Dream Syndicate of How Did I Find Myself Here?

Dream Syndicate we were developing into being.

It was a lot of growing pains on that record.

And I'll be honest, it wasn't always the most fun record to make.

You know, you did the first record,

How Did I Find Myself Here? and then,

and people had a really favorable reaction to it.

And I felt like, well, what if this one just falls flat?

There is, I felt more pressure for some reason on that second record.

It was a good group effort, because everyone contributed

and we we hadn't really worked that way fully before.

So it was very satisfying artistically.

When we know we're going to go record a record.

It’s insane, the back and forths with the four of us.

Steve loves to send thousands of emails, you know, into it.

Listen to this, this record from whoever, Miles Davis.

And like this is kind of what I'm thinking. Check this out.

This is what we make should make a record of.

It's like a North African, you know, weird music and some really great grooves.

And he would send this stuff and I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's a good idea.

You know, you get to the actual recording and sort of all those ideas fall away.

None of them actually is what These Times sound like,

but they're just ideas he was just into at the moment.

And so he'd like to share those types of ideas with the band members.

Stephen McCarthy lives in Richmond, Virginia.

He's a native of the city. So he lives two miles from the studio.

So Steve calls me up at the end of the recording

of These Times and says: “Hey, why don't you come by like 10:00?”

We're going to have dinner, we'll have a drink.

And we're cracking that first beer at 11, 11:30.

And we said: “Wait a second. What are we doing?

We're sitting here on a porch drinking beer.

There's a recording studio there.”

So we go out in the studio.

Everything's already mic’d up. The guitar amps are on. The piano.

Everything's going.

We start playing together and it feels great.

Not a word is said about,

all right, we're going to play this style.

We're going to play in this key.

Nothing.

Twenty minutes go by and we're kind of,

you know, when things are going well,

we're looking at each other from across the room.

Yeah, this is great.

At that point, everybody had had

a fair amount to drink, you know, so there's a different vibe going on.

I think we were just releasing, you know, energy that we'd

been kind of saving up during, you know, when we were just working on the songs.

And we played, you know, a good long time.

And I got up and everyone was like: where are you going?

I just ran into the house, grabbed a bottle of tequila,

a bunch of glasses, poured it out.

Hey, Mark’s got tequila.

So, strum strum, shot, boom, thanks, strum strum.

And he goes around and picks up the bass again.

So we never stopped even in those kind of seven minutes.

We played for about an hour and a half,

just continuous, and the songs morphed into other songs.

Somebody would play a riff, we'd follow that riff.

We just keep jamming and navigating, having this conversation.

Everyone wanted to keep it going, until we were going to drop dead.

It's like, this is great. This is what you dream of as a musician.

Seriously, it's like that kind of excitement.

And we end up with this ninety minute, unbroken piece of music.

And then we collapse.

The next day we come in the studio

and John Agnello, who’s engineered the

record and been my main guy for 25 years now,

he's already listening to the music we've done from the previous night.

He went: “You know what, this could be a song.”

And so he would cut it and say, here's a separate entity.

And he presented it to us.

”You know, I just made separate files for each of these

and think they sounded like separate songs to me.”

We listened back and thought, wow!

I don't know what we can do with this.

And I even tried for a while

to put words to some of the pieces to put on These Times.

I'll take those 5 minutes and make a song out of it.

But nothing was quite as right.

I don't know, out of context.

So nothing I used.

I would lay down every night and before I go to bed

I put my headphones on and I would listen to the full jam.

It was something that made me at peace and I really enjoyed.

It wasn't until a few months later that Steve admitted he was doing

basically the same thing.

I was taking a flight, I remember, from Paris to Berlin

and listened to the whole thing, looking out the window of the plane.

Maybe a little hung over, maybe looking at the clouds passing by.

And all I could think was, this is really good.

And from that point on, I kind of made it

my obsession to somehow make a record out of that.

I went back down to Richmond

for five days to take this sprawling mess of a jam and try new things.

And I worked hand in hand with Adrian Olson,

who is the engineer there, runs the studio.

And he and I tried different things out.

Stephen McCarthy came down.

I helped Steve with some of the arrangements.

Maybe like, you know, where do we think the horn would go?

And I think I played some sitar on a couple of songs.

At one point I was thinking: oh, some horns might be nice on this.

And Adrian said: “There's a guy in town named Marcus Tenney.

He understands playing improvization and responding.”

He just set up and played this 20 minute piece

and just, you know, played that great stuff you hear on the record.

Incredible.

I was walking around New York City one day

and I kind of had an idea of how I wanted to do vocals for the song.

I thought, you know, if I do it kind of in a lower spoken thing.

So I rushed home and I got up to my home recording system.

And I remember having my little cheap microphone and I said, you know,

just so I can get the idea down, I want to get the idea of this voice,

I want to have on the song. I don't know what to sing,

but I'll look at my lyric idea I have on my phone.

So I got my phone here in one hand, the microphone,

the microphone and the harmonica in another hand.

And the computer song running.

And I say, I'm going to recite all these random lyrics and titles I have.

So I'm kind of like hearing The Regulator, listening and scrolling

the phone, you know?

Have you heard? Have You Heard was just a song title, you know.

You know, Dusting Off The Rust. All these little things

just to get the voice recorded.

. That's the vocal on the record.

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I said: “Steve, what did you do to your voice?”

He said: “I just sang low.”

I said: “What? You didn't pitch shift it or anything?”

I said: “How did you do that?”

He's like: “I can do that.”

I'm like: what?

I was floored.

This was so amazing to me.

This was like, this is the record that

I think I wanted to make from the get go.

If you can get an artist to do something

and they don't know that they're doing it, that's some magic right there.

It's a record unlike anything else in their discography,

but it's based on everything they've always done.

Which is improvise,

improvise together as a unit,

as a bonded unit, and then being able to form songs

and coherent ideas

that can then be extended and expanded.

It's really a remarkable record.

It's definitely the kind of thing that will put you in a trance.

You know, turn off whatever other devices

you've got going at the time and just ride it,

because it will take you places you have not been before.

We hadn't seen each other,

let alone played music together in a year, almost a year and a half.

When we show up at the studio, we were raring to go.

We were itching to play.

And I think on this session we just had a good time.

We just played music, we had a lot of laughs,

we had a lot of fun eating together.

It felt natural to be together again.

It was fantastic.

As much as These Times

was one of the more difficult ones, this one was so much fun to make.

It felt easy, felt effortless.

The one song I had written for the new album is the opening song

Where I'll Stand.

I said, this is a new song.

Here are the chords. Let's go.

The version the first time we'd played together in all that time, on a new song,

that's the opening of the album.

Take one is the one we used. Just one take.

We kind of laughed and said: “Oh, pretty good.”

The first song is called Where I'll Stand.

And that record is exactly where he's standing.

And to have a band like this continue

to inspire me, that means a lot because I need that strength as well.

I don't think we ever think in terms anymore of

give me a three minute pop song and get the hell out of here.

But more like just drift off for a second, for ten seconds, for ten hours, whatever.

But let yourself go.

And this record is another way yourself go record.

So if you ask me, where are The Dream Syndicate going to go next?

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I can give you an answer, but I can guarantee you I'd be wrong.

Because Steve and the rest of the guys, they never repeat themselves.

I don't think we've done everything yet we can do.

You know, I think we've, even with the four records we've made

in the last five years, which is really something anyway.

We have a lot left that we can do with the same people.

We want to keep going.

We want to keep pushing forward

and doing new things, surprising ourselves, surprising our fans.

I think if this band still is having as much fun together as we have, then

I don't see why we would stop that.

I don't see why we would give that up.

If I can play to the day I die, I will.

My greatest hope for Steve and The Dream Syndicate in the future is don't quit.

I still haven't had enough and I don't think you're done.

When I first started playing music

and making records, all I could think about was; how can I keep this going?

I don't want this dream to end.

And that's the biggest change now, is I don't worry about that anymore,

because the dream won't end.

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