Wynn-ing: Dream Syndicate Founder Pens Memoir

eviewing "I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn’t True" by Steve Wynn

With Freddie Freeman and the rest of the Dodgers having gutted the Yankees hopes of claiming their first World Series title in eons, it’s mildly tempting to think of a teenaged Steve Wynn, hooked on baseball and not bothering to get back to the guitar he abandoned in junior high.

“Almost overnight, around the time I turned fourteen, my interest and focus and obsession shifted from music to sports…I was still a music fan. But following and eventually writing about sports became my focus. I barely touched my guitar or wrote songs the entire time I was in high school.”    

This was no small thing considering how far down the path Wynn finds himself at this point in his new memoir, "I Wouldn't Say It If It Wasn't True" (Jawbone Press). Growing up in L.A. with a transistor radio welded to his ear, the future Dream Syndicate singer/guitarist had been a pop music obsessive well before his hip stepsister wound up hanging out with Mac Davis and giving fashion advice to members of the Buffalo Springfield.

When the same sister married an executive at Liberty Records, Wynn became even more industry adjacent - getting to sit in on Nashville recording dates for Al Kooper and Dan Fogelberg. Wynn would shovel the dog poop from the lawn of his Bel Air home (often tossing it into TV star Ed Asner’s yard next door…) as a way of getting the pocket money he needed to buy Kinks' records and copies of Creem magazine. But his love for America’s pastime pushed him beyond all that and onto the journalism track at UC Davis. He held down the post of sports editor at the campus paper with dreams of making it in big league news. But then someone detonated the punk rock bomb.

“With the speed of a Dee Dee Ramone one-two-three-four count-off, my sportswriting dreams and ambitions quickly, completely, and forever fell by the wayside.”

That and a copy of the Lenny Kaye curated Nuggets LP helped right his musical ship, and Wynn set off on an Odysseus-styled journey that lead him, among other places, to Alex Chilton’s doorstep, a day job at the legendary Rhino Records store, and eventually to recording the one take clutch of tracks that became the first Dream Syndicate EP in 1982.

The band was quickly drawn into the SoCal swirl of musical activity that got tagged as the Paisley Underground. That scene, which included the likes of Green on Red, The Three O’Clock, and a nascent version of The Bangles, sifted psychedelia from the garage rock of the 60’s underground. And while very few of those groups achieved commercial escape velocity, The Days Of Wine And Roses album gave The Dream Syndicate the loose but enduring cred that carries that movement’s flag to this day.

As a tunesmith, Wynn credits his success to ardent stick-to stick-to-itiveness and his ability to transmute his influences into things unrecognizable.

“My secret weapon as a songwriter was (and probably still is) my inability or lack of patience or interest to accurately copy my inspirations…I can tell you the song I was trying to rip off on every track on The Days Of Wine And Roses, for example, and not have even the slightest fear of being sued.”

But despite getting anointed by the heavies at A&M Records, and scoring tour slots with U2 and R.E.M., that version of The Dream Syndicate began to crumble inside a high pH solution of Jim Beam and resentment, never to see the 90’s as a whole.

It’s a typical narrative, but one that Wynn puts down with a clear and unembellished eye. Instead of a tale pockmarked with seedy L.A. stories as the city shifted from the punk vanguard to a hair metal wasteland, his literary approach to the ragged road of college rock notoriety is thoughtfully personal and almost achingly sincere.

In terms of what might be missing, there’s an argument to be made here for having retooled the story to cover the entire arc of the band and not brake at their initial dissolution. Sure, there is a brief epilogue that covers their reformation, but considering how great the recent records are, you would think there’d be more story to tell inside these pages. Wynn has arrived in the 21st century as one of Indie’s elders, playing either solo, with the reformed Dream Syndicate, or with fellow 80’s stalwarts (like R.E.M.’s Mike Mills…) in The Baseball Project. So instead of hitting the oldies circuit and living off of package tours, he continues to tread towards relevance. And this book, while not tracking every part of his journey, is an able document of his first steps.