The Defiant One

WHO SAID THERE ARE no second acts in American lifeor at least none that are any good?

Reports of Steve Wynn & the Miracle 3 at this year's South by Southwest conference found more than a few critics on bent knees before the quartet's scorched-earth policy. No less than Seattle Weekly's music editor, Bob Mehr, reported that Wynn and co. performed two of the "loudest, hardest, and most passionate sets of music in Austin all week . . . with a power and volume that threatened to come gleefully unhinged."

Compare that with yours truly's notes of some 17 years' vintage, describing how Wynn and his combo the Dream Syndicate systematically applied a wrecking ball to a North Carolina punk club one steamy summer night in 1986:

"The club owner is already freaked out from the volume at the sound check, so what does Wynn do during the set's very first song? After vamping over a slow, jazzy intro and announcing to the crowd that the band's been asked to keep it down ('So don't any of you talk loudly, break beer bottles, or flush the toilets,' he warns), Wynn smirks evilly, stabs at his volume knob, and proceeds to careen full tilt into the power-chord funnel of 'Until Lately.' The club owner physically recoils from the sonic blast and is furious. The rest of us surge forward and are in ecstasy. . . . This is rock 'n' roll, and it doesn't get any better. . . . "

"Yeah, we could do that a lot back then," says Wynn today, laughing at the images I've just resurrected. "We were all about antagonizing! And the South by Southwest thingwe weren't being very shy and diplomatic about it, either."

Please allow me to introduce Steve Wynn, then, a man of musical wealth and taste.

THE DREAM SYNDICATE: You at least know of the legendary L.A. outfit. Two of the four studio albums the band released during its 1982-89 tenure, 1982's Days of Wine and Roses and its Sandy Pearlman- produced '84 follow-up, Medicine Show, are nowadays deemed five-star classics. But raw stats and rating systems don't tell the tale of this tape.

First of all, consider the alternate musical milieu in which the band operated, compared to 2003: no reliable club network, no Spin or Alternative Press message boards, no corporate-sponsored Vans Warped Tours to guide aspiring punkers through the mosh pit of life.

"I remember when we first started touring back in '82, '83," recalls Wynn. "Outside of New York or L.A., the best you could hope for was to come to each city and play their 'new-wave night.' For all of us bands like the Dream Syndicate, R.E.M., Rain Parade, Sonic Youth, all the SST bands, Replacements, etc.there became a small circuit, a really kind of enthusiastic, new, naive, fan-driven, 'commerce is secondary' kind of circuit that was really exciting. Bands touring on 'curiosity and enthusiasm.'"

Certainly, the word got out about the Dream Syndicate's head-uncorking fusion of amphetamine punk and vertiginous psychedelia (keenly laced with, for good measure, Dylan/Lou Reed wordplay), and among fans who witnessed the group firsthand, there's no question that the Velvet Underground Effect applied.

Wynn acknowledges the obvious, saying, "I think we did influence a lot of musicians, and I'm really proud of what we did. Maybe we didn't sell a million records, but the level of enthusiasm, the love of the music per fan, per listener, per person who bought Days of Wine and Roses, was probably as high as any band you could imagine. I still meet people now, 20 years later, who say that record changed their life or they formed a band because of it. And that's a great feeling.

"When we formed, we went out there playing whatever you'd call it'psychedelic garage' or 'indie/underground noise'and we weren't seeing it anywhere. I think it just opened a lot of people's ears to some alternative to Duran Duran or Haircut 100 or whatever people thought was hip and groovy at the time. We just say, 'Nahh. There's another darker, weirder, deeper, creepier side of underground music. Check this out!' We were advocates for this music that excited us. And I think we had something to do with bridging the gap with what came beforethe Stooges, the Velvets, the Modern Lovers, Big Starand all the things that came afterwardsYo La Tengo, Nirvana, and bands like that."

An ironic coda marks the Dream Syndicate's story. Not long after the group disbanded in '89, a northwest outfit called Nirvana commenced the trek toward the Year That Punk Broke. Wynn, who'd embarked on a solo career by that point, remembers feeling it was a sweet day of reckoning: "All this loud, distorted, feedback guitars is now the mainstream'Hallelujah! The time has come for the music I love and for my music as well!'" But he was wrong; the time had actually come for the gormless, characterless rumblings of the Candleboxes, the Bushes, the Lives, and the Matchbox Twenties. And while Wynn continued to make records throughout the '90s, notching critical kudos for his solo records and his "indie supergroup" side project Gutterball, like many of his '80s peers, he never got to cash in.