Dream Syndicate

Been slowly going through my archive of stuff and #1 on the list is this... Dream Syndicate, July 1982 at the Tower Records in El Toro, CA (where I spent a LOT of money over the years). All five songs are on my YouTube stream but if you're going to watch one make it this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG03K1Iuazw

Also, The Medicine Show is finally getting reissued

ha, finally! i interviewed Steve in 2001 or 2002 and asked him when that record would be reissued. he said "i'm working on it!"

awesome video! did you take it?

Great news. That's a really underappreciated album - John Coltrane Stereo Blues is killer. People always say it should have been better, but we'll have to settle for really very good.

awesome video! did you take it?

I didn't take it, but I was certainly there.

would've loved to see the original Dream Syndicate. The live stuff I've got by them is sweet -- super loose, but always fun.

That slicingupeyeballs link doesn't work. I'm withholding sweaty fanboy hugs until the reissue is verified.

I have vivid memories of playing cuts from their first two albums during my first-ever college radio show. They worked perfectly in my nite-owl 2-4 a.m. slot, the studio lit with a blacklight.

Those looking for more, I didn't see Eleventh Dream Day's Prairie School Freakout (1988) mentioned. Dream Syndicate is just one of many elements (Gun Club, X, Neil Young), but it's there.

Okay, here it is -

The concerts, on May 14 and 15, will feature Wynn and his current band — Jason Victor, Dave DeCastro and Linda Pitmon — performing Medicine Show front-to-back on the first night and 1982’s The Days of Wine and Roses on the second, with “both sets fortified with many extra songs both old and brand new.”

*hugz*

It would be tempting to roadtrip to Atlanta for that except I'm planning to go see Torche in Chicago.

wynn's band these days is killer -- his solo stuff is hit and miss, but he always delivers live.

hey guys i just put together this live companion to days of wine & roses if anyone is interested. it is pretty pretty good. http://doomandgloomfromthetomb.tumblr.com/post/26425201595/the-dream-syndicate-the-days-of-wine-and-roses

oh tyler, once again filling our needs before we realize it!

did you ever see 'em back then? listening this week, seems like they were almost *too* loose. a couple of the shows are just total messes.

I did, and yup they were a mess sometimes -- but Karl's noise guitar was usually not as much of a hindrance for me as Steve's singing.

ha yeah, he sometimes sounds like he's just hollering over the din. but i think i got some of the better performances. they could kick a lot of ass, too!

Sometimes Duck's drumming was just a monotonous, super-simple snare hit, too, seemingly the anchor in the maelstrom. But yeah, I'm a fan! The intro to "John Coltrane" gives me chills the same way "Marquee Moon" does. When they were great (more in studio than live for me) they were really great.

xp yep, i agree! the version of 'That's What You Always Say' on there is fantastic. Dennis Duck = elegant linchpin as always. and i love Kendra. One time when Pell Mell played at the Anti-Club in LA Kendra came in and sat right down in front. sadly, she then got up and walked out about 1/4 of the way through our set. humiliating!

ha! oh well. seeing kendra in public at all is probably akin to seeing a rare species of bird or something.

There's a lot of their live stuff up at Archive.org. I love that early stuff from 82-3.
the lp Day Before wine & Roses is also very worth checking out. Recorded I think about 3 weeks before the studio lp for a local radio station.

Oh & the lp by Kendra Smith is pretty nice, not sure if its remotely available though.
Her on an Indian pump organ thing like Nico used to play.

yeah i got all of those live performances from archive.org -- gotta be a pretty complete collection of dream syndicate tapes.
kendra definitely needs some kind of box set thing. does anyone have her phone #.

haha, given her last address was a cabin with no electricity...

pony express stop then

Hurm. Heard a rumor that Wynn was planning on touring DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES again. Don't know if even Dunn was joining him this time around or not.

I should slot that recent live set that Tyler posted. One can never have too much early DS.

Also potentially of interest: http://highway62.tumblr.com/post/26083888051/last-days-of-may-eponymous-debut-album-released

Which is Karl Precoda interviewed by yrs truly in 1997 after the release of the first Last Days of May record on No-Fi records, a heavily truncated version of which was printed in PTOLEMAIC TERRASCOPE. So heavily truncated, in fact, as to bear little resemblance to the original behemoth.

Last I heard, Kendra Smith was off the grid in northern California. That was not long before she performed at Terrastock 2 in 1997 or 1998. If someone tracks her down, I'll drive out to talk to her about issuing an omnibus. The GUILD OF TEMPORAL ADVENTURERS disc is pretty essential, much more so than FIVE WAYS OF DISAPPEARING (the 4AD LP).

Guy Khyser still lives in Davis and last I'd heard, he was performing in a bluegrass band (with Roger Kunkel, also of TWR) after folding the Mummy Dogs. Not sure if that's still happening or not.

The upcoming _DoW&R_ tour (tourlet?) is Wynn, Jason Victor, Mark Walton, and Dennis Duck.

Will check out Tyler's set also, thanks for posting.

Duck for Dunn. Hilarious.

And hello, Jeff. Long time no see.

European tour announced (plus that 1 US date) with this lineup:

The band’s current lineup features singer/guitarist Wynn and drummer Dennis Duck, the two members who spanned the group’s entire seven-year career as well as bassist Mark Walton, who was in the band for its final two records and nearly all of their US and world tours. Guitarist Jason Victor who has played with Wynn in the Miracle 3 since 2001 will round out the 21st Century lineup.

THE DREAM SYNDICATE - TOUR SCHEDULE:
MAY 23 HET DEPOT / LEUVEN, BELGIUM
MAY 24 DINGWALL’S / LONDON, ENGLAND
MAY 25 ROCKEFELLER’S / OSLO, NORWAY
MAY 26 STADTGARDEN / COLOGNE, GERMANY
MAY 28 BEACHES BREW FEST / RAVENNA, ITALY
MAY 29 BLOOM / MEZZAGO (MILAN), ITALY
MAY 30 MYLOS / THESSALONIKI, GREECE
MAY 31 STAGE / LARISSA, GREECE
JUNE 1 GAGARIN / ATHENS, GREECE
JUNE 22 SOLID SOUND FESTIVAL / NORTH ADAMS, MA

Oops, that's the same lineup as Jeff W posted last July 2012

Been interviewing people from all the main PU groups for a piece pegged to this. During the course of which I discovered that my daughter and Sid Griffin's daughter are science partners at school.

amazing! sid has always seemed like a grand fellow when i've seen him play

i'd go see this if it was anywhere near me. even though jason victor wasn't in the band, he's been a pretty awesome guitarist when I've seen him with wynn.

I am seriously contemplating going to this. Feel a bit sad sometimes that I go to so many damn reunion gigs though.

I've heard such great things about Wynn live lately that I wonder why they even bothered calling this a Dream Syndicate reunion.

tbf they are playing the first album in full

All the more reason, if they don't have the line-up from the first album. I mean, 3/4 of the VU is still alive, but if Cale and Reed did it without Mo, it wouldn't be the VU. Or if Mo and Reed did it without Cale, etc.

from their FB:

December 27, 1981……a memory from a Sunday evening, 40 years ago

Karl Precoda and I had been meeting regularly and jamming in my father’s basement in West LA over the course of the previous months, having met when he showed up to try out on bass for a band I was goofing around with at the time. “I don’t like this band very much but you’re really good—we should get together and play again sometime.”

There was an immediate chemistry between the two of us and, most of all, we were just having fun jamming on one chord for hours or playing loose versions of CCR covers or fooling around with some new songs I had been writing. I called up Kendra Smith, my best friend at the time and band mate from when we had both attending UC Davis in the years before. Like me, she had moved back to LA and had just recently started playing bass. I knew she’d dig what we were laying down and she enthusiastically joined our aimless duo and before long we found a drummer named Randy who I believe I met at the Rhino Records store where I was working at the time. Randy was game and enthusiastic but as much as an inspired but limited amateur as me and Kendra and Karl which was just fine since we had no ambition beyond making noise in the basement.

One day Kendra said, “I was talking to Dennis Duck at a party in Pasadena and he said he might like to play with us sometime.” Now, you have to understand that Dennis was a rock star as far as we were concerned. He was 6 years older than the rest of us and had already made a mark on the LA post punk scene, drumming with his band Human Hands. They’d put out records! They’d been played on the radio! I had seen them play live several times including a great show at the Whiskey a Go Go where they opened for the Feelies and the nervous energy of both bands coupled with a 103 degree fever I was battling from the flu to make for one of the most memorable shows I’ve seen to this day (and interestingly enough, the topic of conversation with me and Dennis and the Feelies’ Glenn Mercer at a show we played together just a few weeks ago in NYC at City Winery).

Anyway, I was a little incredulous that Dennis would want to play with us. But I was also pretty cocky and full of beans about our cool little raggedy combo and on Sunday, December 27, I called him up on a torrentially rainy afternoon (it DOES rain in Southern California sometimes) and said, “Hey, we’re getting together to jam in my dad’s basement tonight. Wanna come over?” Dennis lived an hour away in Pasadena, it was pouring and he would have to load up his own drums to make the trek but somehow I was doggedly persistent enough to convince him to come out. I guess I made a good case or maybe just wouldn’t shut up until he said yes. To this day, he’s surprised he agreed.

Anyway, Dennis arrived, drums dripping from the rain outside, set up and started playing with us in the basement . He had brought along a boom box to record the rehearsal. We didn’t try to impress him or even say much about what we were doing. We just did our thing and he played along. At the end, he packed up and I helped him to his car. “Thanks for coming out and playing with us,” I said—I am nothing if not polite—and he didn’t say all that much in return. I figured he was probably wondering why he bothered to come out and play with kids like us and pretty much assumed we wouldn’t be hearing from him again.

A few days later I called Dennis to thank him for coming out and asked him if he had listened to the cassette he had recorded of the rehearsal. He answered, “I’ve listened to nothing ELSE since then. It’s one of the best things I’ve heard in a long time. I want to play with you guys.” And that was that. Three weeks later we made a quick four-song demo that became our first EP and only a few days after that we played our first show, opening for PIL spin-off band Brian Brain at Club Lingerie in Hollywood and we were off and running, only a handful of days after the first time we played together.

Here’s a link to that first rehearsal, copied directly from Dennis’ cassette that he still has all these years later.

http://traders.stevewynn.net/tape/5725

40 years ago. Hard to believe. Since then, Dennis and I have held the fort, first with Karl and Kendra and then, over the following years in the 80’s, with Dave Provost and Paul B. Cutler and Mark Walton and now for the last 10 years with the consistent lineup of me, Dennis, Mark, Jason Victor and Chris Cacavas. Our new album comes out next June with the first single being released in March. With any luck we’ll be out there on road for much of the latter part of the year.

But for now, happy 40th Birthday to the Dream Syndicate. Like many good and incendiary things, it all started in the basement.
—Steve Wynn

This is wonderful, thanks for the link.

Steve Wynn lives in my neighborhood nowadays, I think, but I don't believe I have ever seen him.

As annotator and singer (incl. with his other music), he's always come across as a nice guy, a little too nice (only) to be an exciting front man, but can listen around him (one o those guys)
The download link to this still works, and I still want to read Spektor's book, which has since been published:
Did yall see this?
This mind-melting curation of early live recordings by The Dream Syndicate is testimony from a witness: Los Angeles writer Matthew Specktor. He has created three live albums that carry you from the band’s first show, through “The Days of Wine and Roses,” and into a full live preview of “The Medicine Show.”

Download it from this page, which also incl. Specktor's notes (would like to read his forthcoming memoir, Always Crashing In The Same Car);
https://saveyourface.posthaven.com/the-dream-syndicate-live-1982-1983

― dow, Sunday, June 6, 2021

new out of the grey era collection coming out — https://usa.firerecords.com/products/the-dream-syndicate-what-can-i-say-no-regrets-out-of-the-grey-live-demos-outtakes-3xcd

a flawed album, but listening recently it sounded much better than I remember. the live show included here is pretty killer too.

I appreciate how the first thing you hear on the 1981 rehearsal tape is a sloppy take on the "Back in Black" riff.

"Paranoid" too, good to know that even the coolest bands noodle away at bad renditions of songs in rehearsal too.

When I was in high school in the '80s there was a stretch of time when I would put the cassette of The Days of Wine and Roses in my boom box every night when I was getting in bed so I could fall asleep to it.

I just now bought the CD of that album for nostalgia reasons and listened to it again. Funnily enough, Track 1 "Tell Me When It's Over" sounds super-familiar, like I remember every note of it. But the rest of it, I feel as if I'm hearing it for the first time. I must have consistently fallen asleep during Track 1 back in high school. In fact I'm surprised how aggro the rest of the album is, starting even with Track 2. I misremembered the whole thing as sounding kind of dreamy and drowsy, but that's only one facet of it.

Hahaha no, dreamy and drowsy it ain’t!

Oh, how sad:

https://thedreamsyndicate.bandcamp.com/album/the-days-of-wine-and-roses-expanded-edition

The Dream Syndicate reveal a newly expanded 40th Anniversary Edition release History Kinda Pales When It and You Are Aligned: The Days Of Wine and Roses (4xCD Expanded Edition). Collecting 54 songs from the original line-up, including 10 hard-to-find rarities and 31 never released recordings.

An exceptional early ‘80s guitar-powered gem, remastered in full and includes a wealth of unreleased material. This newly expanded 4 CD collection includes tracks from main protagonist Steve Wynn’s earlier combo 15 Minutes, the debut EP, astounding cover renditions (Johnny Cash, Janis Joplin, The Who), recordings of the band’s first ever rehearsal, along with several visceral live concerts live concerts pre-dating the recording of their album.

Tracklist:

Disc One: Original Days of Wine and Rose album + Down There EP
Tell Me When It's Over
Definitely Clean
That's What You Always Say
Then She Remembers
Halloween
When You Smile
Until Lately
Too Little, Too Late
The Days of Wine and Roses
Sure Thing (Down There EP Version)
That's What You Always Say (Down There EP Version)
When You Smile (Down There EP Version)
Some Kinda Itch (Down There EP Version)

Disc Two: Even More Hot Rocks (no hits & out of phase cookies)
That's What You Always Say (15 Minutes / 7 inch Single Version)
Last Chance For You (15 Minutes / 7 inch Single Version)
Too Little, Too Late (Rehearsal Version, 1981)
Definitely Clean (Rehearsal Version, 1981)
Is It Rolling, Bob? (Rehearsal Version, 1982)
A Reason (Rehearsal Version, 1982)
Like Mary (Rehearsal Version, 1982)
Outside the Dream Syndicate (Rehearsal Version, 1982)
Last Chance For You (Rehearsal Version, 1982)
Unknown song with lyrics (Rehearsal Version, 1982)
Some Kinda Itch (Live at KPFK, 1982)

Disc Three: Crackling Noises Ok - Do Not Correct
Until Lately (Live at 1313 Mockingbird Lane, CA, 1982)
Sure Thing (Live at 1313 Mockingbird Lane, CA, 1982)
Then She Remembers (Live at 1313 Mockingbird Lane, CA, 1982)
It’s Gonna Be Alright (Live at 1313 Mockingbird Lane, CA, 1982)
Halloween (Live)
That’s What You Always Say (Live)
Sure Thing (Live)
Definitely Clean (Live)
Too Little, Too Late (Kendra vocal) (Live)
When You Smile (Live)
Some Kinda Itch (Live)
That’s What You Always Say (Rehearsal Version)
Road Runner (Rehearsal Version)
Instrumental (Rehearsal Version)

Disc Four: Live'r Than You'll Ever Be
Tell Me When It’s Over (Live at the Country Club, Reseda CA, 1982)
That’s What You Always Say (Live at the Country Club, Reseda CA, 1982)
Sure Thing (Live at the Country Club, Reseda CA, 1982)
Then She Remembers (Live at the Country Club, Reseda CA, 1982)
Halloween (Live at the Country Club, Reseda CA, 1982)
Definitely Clean (Live at the Country Club, Reseda CA, 1982)
When You Smile (Live at the Country Club, Reseda CA, 1982)

haha, how many times have they reissued this record? that said ... this looks awesome.

Every 10 years or so? The Rhino was a 20th Anniversary version, and iirc the other expanded one was for the 30th (and the OG CD was in the early '90s).

I was at the 1313 Mockingbird Lane show, it was a goth-ish jewelry and clothing store in Pasadena.

With a name like that I'd hope so!

I only ever had the Rhino reissue with the EP and single track on it, so I'll be fine with this being my second copy of the album (and last, I hope).

LOL, but yeah this looks amazing. I already have the original Slash CD and the Omnivore CD reissue. (Amusingly I was debating whether to get rid of one of them just a few days ago when I was reorganizing the shelves.)

Actually I just learned in this thread that Wynn had an offshoot band called 15 Minutes. When I got the Rhino CD many years ago I saw "(15 Minutes)" after two of the song titles and I thought I'd be in for a couple of long rave ups. Imagine my disappointment.

Steve Wynn and Dennis Duck from original band and Mark Walton from a later line-up, plus Vicki Peterson from The Bangles, are/were touring UK. And Matt Piucci from The Rain Parade supported

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZOmwpmq7mY