40 Years Later, Steve Wynn Re-Examines the Tension of Medicine Show

Transmission 280: Interview with The Dream Syndicate

The Dream Syndicate is an American rock band formed in Los Angeles, California. In their songs, they have consistently examined themes of psychological tension, personal failure, and violent impulses. Fronted by singer-guitarist Steve Wynn, the group’s sound is built upon raw, extended guitar interplay. Their 1982 debut, The Days of Wine and Roses, is a foundational text of 1980s American independent rock.

Title: Medicine Show
Artist: Dream Syndicate
Release Date: 2025-10-17
Label: Fire Records
Description: In an in-depth interview, Steve Wynn of The Dream Syndicate recounts the dark making of the 1984 classic Medicine Show for A&M Records.

Their second album, the darker Medicine Show (1984), is now the focus of a deluxe four-disc reissue from Fire Records, which includes live broadcasts and early recordings with original bassist Kendra Smith. The band is currently undertaking a U.S. tour, performing the complete album. The difficult sessions for the original A&M release with producer Sandy Pearlman are detailed in Wynn’s 2024 memoir, I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn’t True. As central figures of the Paisley Underground, The Dream Syndicate’s abrasive yet melodic approach influenced numerous alternative groups.

What drew you to music when you were young, before making music, and how did you get started?

I was a music fanatic from a very young age. I was born in 1960. By the time I could speak my first words, I was in the middle of a very exciting time in rock and roll, when the Beatles were first coming out, when the Rolling Stones were starting, when Motown was happening, when AM radio played all the songs we still love today.

This is what I was hearing when I was five years old, and it just stuck with me. I just felt, I didn’t know why or how, but I was excited by this music.

From the obvious things that I would hear on the radio, like the Beatles and the Stones, I had the type of curiosity that made me want to dig deeper into more obscure bands. First would come Creedence Clearwater Revival, then The Who, and then things being played on freeform FM radio. From that love of cool music and excitement over it, somehow it translated to, “Well, now I want to play guitar and play music.” I was already playing in bands by the time I was nine.

It was just an amazingly quick dive into the deep waters of loving music and playing it.

Were you conscious of creating the Paisley Underground movement, or were you just making music at the time?

Of course, we didn’t think in terms of “Paisley Underground” when it started; those weren’t the words. At the time when our band started playing shows and being visible in the LA world, none of us knew each other. The Rain Parade, The Bangs, The Dream Syndicate, Green on Red, The Three O’Clock, Salvation Army, all these bands, we were existing in different corners of Los Angeles.

We all found each other because there was a kind of music that wasn’t in fashion at the time. ’60s-style music, guitar music, garage music, all these things were out of fashion. I think when we all heard each other’s bands, we said, “Oh, somebody out there is also doing the music I love. I want to hang out with them, I want to play shows with them.” We became each other’s fans, cheerleaders, and also each other’s comrades in getting shows and making records and things like that. We just found each other.

All those bands I mentioned became popular pretty quickly, so there was a visibility out there and journalists had to find a way to name this thing. Strangely enough, I can’t blame journalists for that. It was actually Michael Quercio of the Salvation Army who said, “Well, it’s kind of a Paisley Underground.” Boom, that was it. It stuck.

Here we are 40 years later talking about it.

‘Medicine Show‘ was recorded in San Francisco. Why did you leave L.A. and how did that affect the music?

Good question. We recorded Medicine Show in San Francisco because we had chosen to make the record with Sandy Pearlman, and Sandy Pearlman always worked out of San Francisco. He lived there. He rented a room in a popular studio in that city, so he had his own little workshop. That was the main reason we went there.

It really did affect us because it’s exciting when you get outside of your comfort zone, when you record somewhere else, because you’re not thinking about washing the dishes and paying the bills and seeing family, whatever else. You’re focused on the music. The downside in some ways, and this was a big effect on the record, is that we weren’t around our closest friends who we might go out to have a beer with at night and say, “What’s going on there, man? You’ve been making this record for three months. What’s happening?” We weren’t around anybody who could be a touchstone with reality.

Of course, this was in the days before the Internet. It wasn’t even like you could get on a Zoom call or FaceTime. Maybe you would get on a phone call, but really, we were an island, just ourselves on this island with Sandy Pearlman for many months.

Was the dark sound of Medicine Show a conscious reaction to your debut album?

It was a conscious reaction to where I was at the time. Personally, I was maybe going through a little bit of a dark time, drinking a lot and also feeling that confusion that so many musicians have felt before. When you’re young and you suddenly become successful and popular, you’re excited and even a little bit arrogant about it, but at the same time, deep down, you wonder if you deserve that and you’re afraid you won’t be able to keep that going.

That combined with alcohol, combined with other people, my bandmates, who felt the same way, made things a little dark. On top of that, though, I was very fascinated by dark works of art. I was reading books by Southern writers like Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner who were doing that kind of thing. I was always a fan of darker music, even Days of Wine and Roses is a dark record, too. It’s a different kind of dark record.

Those things have always attracted me and I always found those things interesting to write about, especially when I was starting out. It was more mysterious. I didn’t feel the need to write a love song, but I could write a song about a damaged person trying to find his way out of the damage. That’s my thing.

Did the pressure of being on a major label push you to make a more challenging album?

Yes, I think that we knew we’d grown as musicians. We knew we’d learned a lot of things. We had changed a lot because our original bass player, Kendra Smith, had left the band and we had a new bass player, Dave Provost. Kendra was the perfect bass player for The Dream Syndicate. She had the soul and the intuition and everything, but she wasn’t, say, a long-time, well-trained bass player. That’s no knock on her; she was a perfect bass player. But Dave was just a better bass player.

I think we felt the challenge of, “Can we take this music further? Can we do something new? Can we show all the things we’ve learned by touring so much?” I think we wanted to bring something. We just didn’t know what that meant. We didn’t have a master plan. We just said, “Well, let’s aim high.”

I think that we easily could have made Days of Wine and Roses, Part 2. I know how to write that kind of song. I still do. We knew how to play like that. But I think we felt that we’re not that band anymore. But what band are we? That was the thing we spent five months figuring out. By the time we figured it out, we had invented a new Dream Syndicate. That is the band that made Medicine Show and the band that went on tour after that. It was a very satisfying result. Getting to that result was not easy.

Beyond music, what political or social issues were influencing your songwriting in the mid-80s?

Political, not so much, and even social. If I look back at the politics of the times, it’s not like I wasn’t aware. I’ve always been a big reader and follower of the news. But what was happening? They were the years of Ronald Reagan. They were the years of the go-go ’80s, where bigger was better, richer was better, more successful was better. That was the attitude of the time. I saw that around me, but I never felt either sucked up into it or the need to comment on it.

I think there was no real element of reflecting a social time. We were all, and especially I was, very fascinated with and even a student of the history of music, of rock music for sure. I was always aware of what kinds of records had been made and what kind of record we were making and how our record might fit into other things that had happened before. I knew what we were doing. I worked in a record store. That’s the only other job I’ve ever had. I’ve had this job for 40 years, but before, I worked in record stores, and I knew a lot about things.

That was more the kind of thing that was playing into what we were doing. What kind of band are we? What do bands like this mean to people? Where do we go from here? All that kind of thing.

Over time, I think what I’ve done has become more socially conscious and more commenting on a bigger picture. But at that time, on those first two albums, the picture was me and the people in my immediate orbit. That was all I could think about.

Were there any visual artists, films, or books shaping the Medicine Show aesthetic?

Like I say, Southern Gothic writers like Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner; hard-boiled writers like James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler. These were part of it. And films, I’ve always liked things like Martin Scorsese’s works and things like that.

But I will say that the biggest influence, as far as films, was Sandy Pearlman, who was somewhat, I would say, in love with or obsessed by Apocalypse Now and Francis Ford Coppola and the process of discovering what you’re doing while you’re doing it. I think that says a lot about how we made this record. We were making our own version of Apocalypse Now. If you’ve seen the documentary about that movie, Hearts of Darkness, we were doing that. We were kind of traveling up the river to meet Colonel Kurtz.

I also, maybe somewhat masochistically, was reading The Trial by Franz Kafka for not the first time while we were making that record. That book was a reflection of what we were going through: the feeling like there was an answer just two feet ahead, but never quite getting there. It was a dumb book to read. It didn’t make me feel any better.

What do you hear now in Medicine Show that you couldn’t hear in ’84?

I can hear that I was writing about me and about the band more than I thought I was. At the time, I would have said, “I’m just telling stories about dark people and dark situations.” I would say, “Well, Burn is a song about an arsonist. And John Coltrane Stereo Blues is a song about a date that didn’t go well. Or Medicine Show is about a killer who’s trying to not get caught.” I might have simplified it to that.

But now I look back at the record and I hear the songs and I realize I was writing all the songs—a lot of the songs, maybe all of them—about people who are in a predicament, a situation that’s bigger than themselves. They don’t know how they got there, they don’t know how they’re going to get out, and they don’t know if they have the skills or the social abilities to get out of a difficult situation. That was the way we felt. I didn’t think about it all that much, but I can look back now and say, yeah, we had suddenly gone from being just unknown to being the band of the moment. I think that it was scary.

If that happened to me now, I have enough perspective. Let’s say the next record I make goes triple platinum or something. I’ll say, “Well, that’s nice. I can buy a new guitar,” or “That’s nice. I guess that will give me new opportunities to do new kinds of things.” But I would never have that fear again or that nervousness about it. I just know now that things come, things go, good times, bad times. Doesn’t matter. Get down and do the work, write the songs, get on tour. That’s all that matters. Back then, I didn’t know.

How does it feel to tour this album 41 years later?

I’m so excited. I’m really looking forward to it. We’ve been talking a lot about it for several years now, and it’ll be fun. We’re going to do two sets every night. The first set will be our newer material, because we’re really proud of the last four records we’ve made, and this is the band that made those records. So we’ll start with a set of the newer material, changing every night.

But the second set is going to be Medicine Show—not just the album in order, but recreating the band as we were back then. I think with some of the attitude and the style that we would have had on stage in 1984. That’s going to be a lot of fun. I think there’ll be a little bit of method acting. A lot less whiskey, I know that for sure. But otherwise, we’re going to try to channel what we did back then.

Can you talk about the genesis of John Coltrane Stereo Blues?

It began just as a jam. I think the first time we played it was right after Days of Wine and Roses came out. We were doing shows and we always liked playing long songs with open-ended arrangements, with room for jamming, for improvisation. That was one of our favorite things to do. We decided to have a song in our set that would really have no rules. It had that riff. It started with the riff, the na-na-na-na-na, the riff that’s in the song, and the one chord. But then it had no words. It had no chord changes. It had no arrangement. It’s like, we’ll start with that, and where it goes, it goes. If it’s five minutes or 30 minutes, it doesn’t matter. We would do that on tour a lot. On this box set, you can hear all the different permutations of the song over time.

But when we went in the studio, suddenly, “Oh, I guess I need a lyric and a title,” because it didn’t even have a title. So I started writing the song, and I came up with the lyrics that you hear on the record. I said, “Well, I don’t want to call the song ‘It’s Gonna Be All Right.’ What a terrible title.” We had been calling it ‘Open Hour,’ which, ah, that’s no good. So finally, I said, “Well, John Coltrane Stereo Blues.” It’s funny, I’m glad I came up with that idea, because that title was a good one. It could have been a lot worse.

Could you describe the key guitar and amp combination that created the signature sound of Medicine Show? And how does that setup compare to your current live rig?

Oh, I love talking about this stuff. At the very beginning, I was playing cheap guitars, because I didn’t have a lot of money. So I played just a cheap Jazzmaster—a 1964 Jazzmaster, which now, if I still had it, would be very valuable. But at the time, the types of equipment and sounds we got were just based on what was lying around. The beautiful thing about guitars and amplifiers is that you can play anything, and it’ll still reflect your personality. I could play a $20,000 guitar rig or a $200 one, and it probably will still sound like me. I do like that.

I’ve gone from those days where I was limited by what I could get to now where I’m just a guitar nut, and I’m always excited to get something new. Actually, for this coming tour, I have a guitar that’s much like the one I was playing in 1984 on tour, just to get more into the mood. It’s an Epiphone Riviera. Not an original, but a reissue, and it’s fun. I like that. I’ve always loved the sounds of guitars, but as time has gone on, I’ve enjoyed collecting to a degree. I’m not an obnoxious collector, but I enjoy new guitars.

What next for The Dream Syndicate in 2026? Are you also working on new material?

We’re going to be. It’s funny, the last few tours—we toured in 2022 for a Days of Wine and Roses box set, and we did a similar thing to what we’re doing now, playing the whole album. Now we’re doing Medicine Show. It’s really fun to go back and revisit a record and compare it to where you are now. But I think after this tour, we’ll be through with nostalgia for a while. It’ll be time to just make a new record and tour that and be who we are now.

This is the end of the nostalgia run for a little while, and it’s time to see what’s next for The Dream Syndicate, what kind of music we want to make now. Like I say, we’re so proud of and fans of our last four records we’ve made since 2017. That’s who we want to be. We don’t need to be the ’80s anymore. So this is the final go-around. If you want to see us put on the ’80s—not ’80s clothes, we’re not doing that—but put on that kind of style, now’s the time. Then, who knows what’s next?

Photos courtesy of The Dream Syndicate

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others