A Short History of Dream Syndicate

Generally speaking, Steve Wynn has always followed his heart, and with the frontman of the Dream Syndicate, that meant looking back before punk hit the US and guitar-based music split into the underground hardcore scene and overground soft-rock, with its fetish for technological gadgetry and high-fidelity sound. Inspired by Big Star, the first self-consciously retro-pop band, the Dream Syndicate, along with other bands dubbed the Paisley Underground, notably the Rain Parade, the Long Ryders and the Bangles, made music which recalled the experimental music of the sixties, after the group format had been mastered but before the studio took over and started splitting the group and their sound up. To be precise, the point at which the Beatles unveiled 'Rain', the B-side to 'Paperback Writer' and the band's crowning achievement; a slow fuzz of a record that brought together the lovable mop-tops' innate sense of pop and group camaraderie and the experimental, darker sounds seeping out of America around the same time. The dream Syndicate could relate directly to it; they didn't reject all that was good about classic rock but wanted to mess about with it; punk it up a bit. Regardless of the hard punk and experimental post-punk fashions of the time, Dream Syndicate made their 'Rain', not giving a monkey's if it was out of step with everything else.

It took just five hours in the middle of the night to record 'The Days Of Wine And Roses', with each track played live in a jam. Karl Precoda plays circular guitar parts that occasionally veer towards something more free-form and are caked in feedback, while Wynn drones with both his own guitar and voice. It's rocking Velvet Underground but with droning guitars where John Cale's viola would normally have been, and it all culminates in the final seven minute title track that remains the band's finest moment, loose and assured in equal measure.

On 'Tell Me When It's Over' you can sense the spontaneity and the relaxed effortlessness of a band who are just happy to be playing their instruments at high volume, totally unconcerned about any notion of over-dubs or putting it right in the mix. The needle was apparently in the red for a lot of the recording and Kendra Smith's bass is really only felt, not heard for large parts of the album. 'The Days Of Wine And Roses' captures a mood on tape in one take (ish), the very antithesis of the slick and carefully produced music being played on Californian radio at that time, yet still sunbaked and dreamy in its own way. Having said that, the lyrics are certainly not cheerful and a couple of them hint at suicide, but it gets darker still on the later albums. Kurt Cobain was a big fan.

'The Medicine Show' was cleaner sounding but still soaked in guitar noise; 'Out Of The Grey' is willfully discordant and 'Ghost Stories' is the sound of the Dream Syndicate getting their wayward electrical excursions under control, having finally worked out what those things in the studio with knobs and faders on were all about. But then the Dream Syndicate were best when they didn't really care about all that stuff.