How the Dream Syndicate’s Steve Wynn combined music and memoir for West Coast tour

As 1981 ended, Steve Wynn was a clerk at Rhino Records, an English lit student at UCLA, and a singer-guitarist whose only stage was the basement of his father’s Westwood home where he and three other musicians met regularly to play.

One year later, the Dream Syndicate, the band formed by Wynn and his friends, were stars of the Los Angeles post-punk music scene and a movement known as the Paisley Underground. Their debut album, “The Days of Wine and Roses,” was an underground hit from L.A. to New York City to London, England and beyond.

“I mean, when you talk about a year, it was somewhat faster than that,” Wynn says of the rapid rise of the Dream Syndicate, which included bassist Kendra Smith, guitarist Karl Precoda, and drummer Dennis Duck. “By a year, in some ways, we were already seasoned veterans. Really, so many things happened.

“From the time we had our first rehearsal with that lineup of the Dream Syndicate to the time we came up with our name, recorded our first EP, played our first show, which was a sold-out show at a very popular club in Hollywood, to being kind of known in the scene, was three weeks,” he says.

“Just stunning,” Wynn continues. “To the time we signed to Slash Records and made our first album, I don’t know, maybe six, seven months. It was just so fast.”

Wynn, 64, was born in Santa Monica and grew up in different neighborhoods of Los Angeles. He’s lived in Queens, New York for many years, but returns to Southern California for a pair of shows in Costa Mesa and Santa Monica on Jan. 29 and Jan. 30.

The solo acoustic tour blends together Wynn’s 2024 memoir “I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn’t True” with songs that include covers of early influences such as the Rolling Stones, Big Star and Velvet Underground and songs from the Dream Syndicate’s four albums from the ’80s. Wynn released his first solo album in 12 years in 2024 and the title track of that record, “Make It Right,” also is in the set. cq comment=”maybe break this up into two sentences BROKE IT up here — work ok?” ]

“I do tour quite a bit,” Wynn says of his inspiration for this West Coast run of shows. “Either with bands like the Dream Syndicate or the Baseball Project” – which includes his longtime friends Peter Buck and Mike Mills of R.E.M. and his drummer wife Linda Pitmon. “But I also do a lot of solo touring.

“I talk about it in the book, but when I tour with the band, when I’m on stage with the band, the excitement is the interplay with the band, and where it’s going to go each night,” he says. “In the sense that we’re all communicating to each other, and the audience is watching us in a little goldfish bowl.

“When I tour solo, I’m jamming with the audience,” Wynn says. “I’m up there feeling the room constantly, and that’s really exciting for me.”

With the book, which ends in 1988 when the Dream Syndicate broke up, and the record, which was loosely inspired by writing the memoir, Wynn figured he would do a solo tour, but how to blend in readings from the memoir with musical numbers wasn’t clear at first.

“I didn’t really know how I would do it,” he admits. “It’s funny, the first show of the tour was in Oxford in September, beginning of a UK tour. I kind of new the sections from the book I might be reading. I had a vague set list. And I actually walked around town until showtime, nervous, like, I don’t know. I’ve never done this.

“To be honest. some people would have rehearsed it up and down for weeks and weeks. I just kind of said, ‘Here we go.’ Went on stage and it just all came together really naturally.

“I’m about 40 shows into the tour now and it’s a blast,” Wynn says. “It’s kind of become closer to doing a play than doing a concert. I know my marks, I know my lines, I know the reaction here and there. It’s been fun.”

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Wynn talked about working in L.A. record stores, what the Dream Syndicate brought to music that didn’t exist at the time they formed, the camaraderie within the Paisley Underground bands of the ’80s, and more.

Q: Your set usually opens with the Rolling Stones’ ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash,’ which you write about playing at a junior high talent show, and ‘Sing My Blues,’ which was the first song you ever wrote as a boy. Had you ever played that one live before?

A: I’d never played ‘Sing My Blues’ on stage before, and I actually hadn’t played ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ since I was 13. So it really does go chronologically at the very beginning. The book goes from the day I was born in Santa Monica in 1960 to the day we broke up the Dream Syndicate in 1988, and that is kind of the timeline of the show.

‘Sing My Blues,’ I wrote that when I was nine. When I was that age, I must have written down the words, but that’s long gone. I can’t find the lyrics. I never wrote down the chords. But I just remembered it. Oh my God, that’s going to be a daunting number, 56 years now since I wrote the song and it’s still there.

Q: How did you come up with the nightly Q-and-A section called the Hot Seat where its often someone you know who comes on stage to ask you a few questions?

A: It was a fun idea and I thought it might be challenging, because I’ve been to some cities where I don’t know anybody. A lot of places it was obvious choices. My wife Linda did it in Glasgow. The last show I did was in Hoboken so James Mastro of the Bongos got up.

But some nights when I just don’t know anybody I would look out at the audience and try to figure out who was the most attentive fan, and say, ‘Do you want to do it?’ I say, here’s the deal with the Hot Seat, you can ask me anything. Doesn’t even have to be about me or the Dream Syndicate as long as it’s from the timeline of the book.

If you want to ask me which Beatles’ song I can’t stand, ask me. If you want to know why I like (the Clash’s) ‘Sandinista’ more than ‘London Calling,’ go ahead.

Q: You wrote the book at home during the pandemic: What was most fun to remember and write? Most difficult?

A: It’s fun to write about all the people you’ve met and the impact they had on you, the stories you have with them. I dreaded writing the chapter about recording the second Dream Syndicate album ‘Medicine Show’ because it was not a fun experience. It was miserable.

After making ‘Days of Wine and Roses,’ our first album, in three days – which by the way, there wasn’t much to say about. That’s a record that for my entire life will define me. A record that many or most people know me from. When you make a record in three days, what are you gonna say?

Then you make your next record. It ended up taking five months, and it’s just agonizing. In the course of writing it, a lot of things came to me that I never thought about before. It was like doing my own one-man therapy session, where while I’m writing it I kind of realized areas where maybe I went wrong, or areas where I shouldn’t take the blame. Or where I see a turning point, where it all made sense after that.

I do try to understand why things happened. What was it about being a 23-year-old, my friends being 23, too. What was it that made us all do the things we did, and how might it be different now?

Q: Talk about what you and Kendra and Karl and Dennis brought to the Dream Syndicate that made your music so successful so quickly.

A: We were intense music fans. We had very strong opinions about what was good and what wasn’t good throughout music history all the way up to that moment in time in December 1981. And we really just wanted to make music we wanted to hear. Things, which by the way, were out of step at the time. Songs that went on for 45 minutes, just droned on and one and developed only in the Ouija board-style movement that came from beyond ourselves.

Jamming, but not jamming in a Grateful Dead way or a prog rock way, but just kind of what would now be referred to as Krautrock, or owed a lot to the Velvet Underground.

I remember Kendra at the time saying, ‘We’re going to be either loved or hated.’ And she was right. But we thought we’d mostly be hated. It turned out a lot of people heard the band right away and said, ‘This is what I’ve been looking for.’

Q: I wish I could have been here to see the Paisley Underground scene emerge. What was that like from the inside?

A: The kind of people we wanted to reach out to felt the same way (as the Dream Syndicate) about music. Bands like the Bangs and Salvation Army, who became the Bangles and the Three O’Clock, were doing the same thing in their corners of the city. We were geographically apart but doing the same thing at the same time, playing a music that was out of step with the scene but in step with our own thing.

Q: There’s a photograph in the memoir of members of the Dream Syndicate and the future Bangles and future Three O’Clock on a trip to Catalina Island. You can almost feel the bonds between everyone just looking at it.

A: The Paisley Underground, as they call it, that was the apex of that scene. We all knew that things were happening. We all knew we could headline the Whisky A Go Go and that we were going to make a new record. We took a weekend off from this exciting, rapid ascension to get away to Catalina. We would hang out like that, weekly barbecues and things like that. It was very supportive.

It only ended because we got successful on different levels, but enough where suddenly it was like, ‘Oh, well, we’ve got to leave town because the rest of the world is calling.’ We’d hear about each other from that point forward, but it was a fun year.

We got together 10 years ago and did a Bangles, Dream Syndicate, Three O’Clock, Rain Parade pair of shows in California. It’s kind of gratifying to know this little innocent spark that happened back then carries on in some way.

Q: Aside from all the music and band stories, I loved your chapters on going to record stores as a kid, and later working at different ones including Moby Disc in Sherman Oaks and Rhino Records in Westwood. What was the thrill of the record store like for you?

A: I mean, record stores were my favorite place to go, and I dreamed of working in a record store. To me, at 16 or 17, I wasn’t dreaming of, ‘Maybe some day I’ll be in a band and play big clubs or tour the world.’ I was dreaming, ‘Maybe someday I’ll get to be behind the counter instead in front of it. That would be something!’

Steve Wynn solo shows

Wednesday, Jan. 29: The Wayfarer, 843 W. 19th St., Costa Mesa. Show time 8 p.m. Tickets are $24.37.

Friday, Jan. 31: McCabe’s Guitar Shop, 3101 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica. Show time 8 p.m. Tickets are $28.

For more: See Stevewynn.net for details on shows, tickets and more.