Talk about your strokes of genius. Why sit around listening to the Velvet Underground when you could BE the Velvet Underground? Or so said the light bulb that went on above the heads of the members of The Dream Syndicate sometime around our Year of the Lord 1982. After all, the Velvets may have provided the template for a million bands, but not one of those million bands had followed VU down the road to the pure sonic primitivism of “Sister Ray,” which was the Velvet Underground at its feral best.
I’m probably delusional, but it has always seemed to me that what The Dream Syndicate—the Los Angeles band whose members included Steve Wynn (guitar, vocals), Karl Precoda (guitar), Kendra Smith (bass), and Dennis Duck (drums) were attempting to do was to bridge the gap between the deranged VU of the first two LPs with the cool and up-tempo rhythms of the Velvets’ later albums, as exemplified in such tunes as “Foggy Notion.”
In any event, in 1982 The Dream Syndicate went into the studio and recorded an eponymously titled EP composed of four songs, all of which combined surprisingly jangly melodies with primal grooves, tons of snarling and squealing guitar, and lots of pure feedback. I thought the EP combined the two Velvet Undergrounds then and I still think it combines the two Velvet Undergrounds now, although everybody I have shared this theory of mine with has just looked at me like I was Helen Reddy, roaring.
True, The Dream Syndicate didn’t write degenerate lyrics about dope fiends, dope fiends, and even more dope fiends, but that’s probably because they hailed from Los Angeles and not New York, and as everybody knows Los Angeles is the City of Angels and its citizens are far too innocent to sing about looking for the mainline, sucking cock, and Alabama sailors in pink and leather. Walt Disney owns LA, and in LA his values prevail. (I’m joking, of course. LA was home to both Fatty Arbuckle and the Eagles, and things don’t get any more sick and degenerate than that.)
Anyway, the EP led the Dream Syndicate to bigger if not necessarily better things, like their 1982 debut LP The Days of Wine and Roses, which was critically acclaimed but not exactly a commercial success. Once again they were following in the path of the Velvet Underground. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Suffice it to say that I actually prefer the rawer sound of their debut EP to the better-produced sound of The Days of Wine and Roses. Don’t get me wrong; the latter LP is still bloody great, but something got lost between the two recordings, and that something was The Velvet Underground.
The Dream Syndicate only included four songs, but all four are pure mad brilliant, that is if you prefer the raw to the cooked and the primal to the civilized. Opener “Sure Thing” features Wynn doing a dead-on Lou Reed imitation, as well as a relentlessly propulsive and ragged jangle that’ll have you doing an Ian Curtis death dance. It opens on a “Heroin”-like note and then takes off, switching gears only slightly for the chorus (“It’s a sure thing, baby/It’s a sure thing baby”), and in addition to the Velvets it also brings to mind The Fall. “Sure Thing” slows only near the end, when Wynn repeats, “I can hear those bells again” over and over. What bells? The bells that toll for thee? He doesn’t say.
Speaking of Ian Curtis, follow-up “That’s What You Always Say” opens on a vaguely Joy Division-like note, before the guitars come in, sharp as razors. I like my guitars the same way I like my eggs, either scrambled or over hard, and following some Wynn vocals they play ‘em both ways, and the result is some of the maddest guitar skronk I’ve ever heard; they snarl, screech, feed back, repeat themselves, reverberate, go chukka chukka, sizzle like downed power lines, and make sounds that are impossible to describe, and are far wilder than anything you’ll hear from a band they’re often compared to, Television. If this song were a fist, it would knock out your teeth. True, it’s not on the same plane as “I Heard Her Call My Name,” but that’s only because there will never be a guitar as completely unhinged as the one Lou Reed plays on “I Heard Her Call My Name.” I’ve long had my differences with the late Mr. Reed, but I give credit where credit is due, and his guitar playing on that song has never been equaled, not by Hendrix or Clapton or Robertson or Quine or Ronson or anybody else.
“When You Smile” starts slowly, with Wynn singing to the accompaniment of some high-pitched and squealing feedback, and then comes to life on the chorus. The second chorus features some great power chords, and then the song splits wide open, spilling distorted and feedback-heavy guitar noise all over the place, and it probably took the studio janitor hours to clean it all up. “Some Kinda Itch” is one very up-tempo rave up, with Wynn again sounding like Lou Reed while the drums and bass keep things going at about a thousand miles an hour and the guitars get wilder and wilder, examples of devolution in practice. Then the drums mostly drop out and you’re left with some vintage violence, guitar feedback straight from the mainline, until the full band comes back in again and the guitars truly let loose while Wynn repeats, “Some kinda itch.” My guess is he was allergic to the songs of Joni Mitchell. It’s so common an infliction in LA that pharmacies stay open extra hours to meet the demand for the vaccine.
Like I said before, I prefer “The Dream Syndicate” to the band’s debut full length, and the difference can be heard by comparing the version of “That’s What You Always Say” on the EP and the version on The Days of Wine and Roses. The latter is certainly better produced, and the guitar work on it is impressive, but it’s lacking that touch of complete madness that makes its predecessor so remarkable. That said, you’d really have to be nuts to not own both, because the full length includes a slew of truly brilliant guitar-heavy tunes that will blow you away. Why, just this second I was listening to “Halloween” off Wine and Roses and realized where The Handsome Family copped the great riff for “Amelia Earhart vs. The Dancing Bear.” And don’t even get me started on the supersonic “Then She Remembers,” or the very melodic but simultaneously punishing sound of “Tell Me When It’s Over.”
In summation, I repeat: songs like “Some Kinda Itch” constitute the genetic missing link between the early and late Velvets, and close the gap between pure unrepentant discord and groovy drone, a feat that Mr. Reed himself was never able to pull off, although he came close on songs such as “Booker T.,” a live tune from 1967 included on the Super-Duper Deluxe Edition of White Light/White Heat.
What else can I say? Except that it’s unfortunate that The Dream Syndicate went the same way as Television, to wit by going kablooey after releasing sophomore LPs (in The Dream Syndicate’s case, 1984’s The Medicine Show) that didn’t sell and weren’t as critically beloved as their predecessors. Some bands get better over time; others lose the thread or faith in themselves. And still others inexplicably walk away from the very thing that made them so great in the first place. The Dream Syndicate is such a band, because they forgot that the guitar is man’s best friend, always has been and always will be, especially if it’s vicious. Yeah. A rabid dog—that’s what the Dream Syndicate’s early guitar work reminds me of, and I don’t care how dangerous it was, I’m still sorry they had it put down.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
