A Conversation with Steve Wynn – HuffPost 6.4.14

Mike Ragogna: The album Sketches In Spain collects a certain period of your music. What’s your perspective on that album’s material now?

Steve Wynn: Sketches In Spain is a compilation that Omnivore is putting together from two collaborations I made in Spain in the last decade. The first was a record with a band from Spain called Australian Blonde, we did a record called Momento in 2001. The second record is a collaboration called Smack Dab, which is me, my wife and drummer Linda Pitmon and also the leader of Australian Blonde, Paco Loco. That came out in 2005. So that’s the basic facts updated.

MR: So you like to collaborate.

SW: I get off these days more from collaboration than anything else! I like going to new places, new cities, new countries, new studios with people I’ve never worked with before and seeing how they do what they do. I still do my own solo records, I still have my various bands, but that’s the thing that’s always fun, that always gives me that rush. It’s like a first date, it’s like that kind of feel. A blind date, even. The excitement of having to come up with your best stuff quickly before the other person loses interest. This is probably one of the more successful versions that I’ve had, where I was working with virtual strangers in Spain, these guys from Australian Blonde, they were friends of friends, they were a really popular band that had a number one single in the nineties, kind of a grunge-pop-indie band that really did well over there. We got hooked up on one of these musical blind dates and it worked great. We spoke the same language literally and metaphorically, because I do speak Spanish pretty well. We collaborated on this record not by email, but by FedEx, sending tapes back and forth the old-fashioned way. It’s funny, it was just fifteen years ago but it was a very different way of working.

MR: Did you end up in Spain for creative reasons?

SW: I do a lot of touring over there, ever since my earliest days with the Dream Syndicate I’ve had a good following there. I tend to get over there at least every other year for shows. The guy who ran my label over there, a label called Astro Discos, had formerly been in Australian Blonde. He knew them really well, he knew me really well and he just felt we’d hit it off. Around that same time I was wroking on a series of song of the month installations for the website eMusic. I was trying to make each month be a new collaboration, a new setup, a new way of working with different people like I was talking about earlier. I suddenly had a whole in my schedule for March of that year and htat’s when I got in touch with this guy, Paco Loco from Australian Blonde and I said, “Let’s try something.” We did a song called “The Last One Standing,” it’s one of the songs that ended up on the record. It’s funny how these things are quick sometimes. It’s just like dating, or like a business transaction, go down to the market and look at the produce, whatever. The day where you hit it, you hit it right, and the days where you don’t it doesn’t work at all. On these collaborations in Spain it was just effortless, which is always exciting.

MR: So Dream Syndicate versus the Steve Wynn solo career… What is the creative difference between the two? How do you approach each of them?

SW: I really do what I do, period. I think that’s the best way of putting it. Each time I have a batch of songs or a project I’m working on, whether it’s a solo record or a record for whichever band I’m playing with at the time, it’s generally a collaborative situation. I’m not a tyrant in the studio, I get more excited by feeling what people are bringing to the session and what people I’m working with might be good at and the way they react to what I’m doing. That kind of gets me to respond in the moment. The more preconceived notions I bring into a session the worse it is. It’s probably not a good way to do a lot of things, I’m sure. If you go to an interview and say, “Here’s what this is all going to be about, I’m going to get this thing out-of-the-way as fast as possible” you may not get anything surprising out of it. I don’t know if that’s true for anyone, but I like to be surprised. I like to have my expectations turned upside down. So when I go into a project I kind of get my feelers out to see what people are bringing in to it.

MR: That’s really smart. That’s a good point, and that’s really true. So you’re more of a spontaneous creative person. I’m imagining however that when you have your solo projects, something like Crossing Dragon Bridge, do you get motivated to do them when it’s time to do a new album, or are you motivated because you’re getting hit by the muse and you need the vehicle?

SW: That’s changed over the years. I think say twenty or thirty years ago things were different. Back in the eighties you were expected to have your one project and hit it every couple of years as hard as you could with a new record and tour and you would focus on the idea of “It’s time to do something new,” and that was great, but I think now it’s different. If a situation comes up, I come up with songs for it. So if I know I’m going to Slovenia, for instance, for Crossing Dragon Bridge and I’m going to work with someone like Chris Eckman, who’s a really good producer there and the leader of The Walkabouts–great band–and I know what he does, I come up with songs for the situation and then show up ready to change and adapt once I’m there. I think more and more these days I’m just looking for things I want to do. At any given time, even right now there are about five or six different records that I could make in the next half-year, that I want to make in the next half-year, and whichever one I choose, that’s kind of going to dictate the bag of songs that I bring to the session.

MR: Wow. Now we’re in 2014, you surely are working on something, is it another album?

SW: Well I just put out a new record with The Baseball Project. It’s kind of the focus for me because it came out a couple months ago and we’re going to tour all summer. That’s one thing I’m doing now, I’m also working on a new solo record, and I really want to do a new Dream Syndicate record, so that’s something I think I might try to do later this year. We haven’t done a record together since 1988. It’s interesting, I think there was a time where I might not have wanted to do another Dream Syndicate record, I would’ve thought there was too much weightt on the record–for me, I’m not saying for the world–but for me, what would it mean, what would be the natural progression of the record, what would be the context?” and the more I think about it, especially since we’ve been playing together and touring lately, it’s just another step along the way, another record, another little postcard from far away.

MR: At this point in your career, where are you energy-wise? You sound like you still like to tour a lot, you still like to record, where are you as far as long-range? Do you have a long-range plan with this stuff?

SW: Not really. I just like being busy, I like writing songs, I like working with people and I like being on the road. I’ve been doing this now for thirty years, I’ve played a lot of shows, made a lot of records, and the idea of a long-range, where I want to be in ten years, I hope that in ten or twenty years I’m doing what I’m doing and doing it better, and that in fifty years I’m alive and in a hundred years I’m preserved somewhere in a museum. Who know? You just can’t make plans at this point, especially given the way music is changing so much and the way people hear music and get music, I think more than ever I just take it day-to-day and project by project. That’s kind of the way it should be. You’re deluding yourself if you think you know what’s going to happen ten years from now. I was at a baseball game the other night and they were advertising on the Jumbotron a Styx and Foreigner concert at Caesar’s Palace and I was thinking, “I wonder if these guys thought thirty years ago that they’d be playing a casino in Atlantic City together in 2014.” Maybe they wouldn’t maybe it would be a horrific thought, or maybe it would be kind of exciting, but you just don’t know. I think each time you’re in one of those situations you say, “Here’s where I am, how did I get here, how did this happen? Why at this moment am I doing this? I didn’t see this coming, but what can I do with that?”

MR: If you had the opportunity to play in Caesar’s Palace, would you turn it down?

SW: I wouldn’t turn down anything that appealed to me. That’s a very obvious statement, but I just take every situation and say, “Do I want to do this?” It’s a lie when people say they don’t do things to keep doing this, especially now. Again, it’s a big change, you see lots of musicians doing commercials or doing private shows or casino shows or whatever it is and they may not even consider twenty years ago, but you’ve got to do what you do so you can keep making more music and keep surviving. You have to take each one along the way and say, “Is this something I want to do? Is it reprehensible? Is it something that I’m going to regret years from now?” There’s no hard and fast rule. All bets are off now, you do case-by-case what you want to do and what makes sense. For me, I’ve just always enjoyed being out there and playing. It’s funny, you hear people say a lot these days, “Well now that record sales are down, people have to be on the road all the time,” as if that’s a sacrifice or a hardship. It’s what I love doing. It’s what I’ve loved doing from the start. I love touring, I love playing every night, I love the nightly rebirth you get when you finish a gig and its history and you have another one to look forward to the next day. That’s great. nothing has changed for me. I’m still writing songs, putting them together in some kind of context and going out there and telling people about those songs all around the world.

MR: What advice do you have for new artists?

SW: I think that the advice is no matter what you hear, what you’ve read, what you think, what people tell you, at the end of the day you’re always right. No matter how crazy your impulse is, no matter how wrong it seems, you’re right. Trust yourself. Do it. You’re going to have to live with it and probably the more people that tell you, “Things don’t work that way,” the more you’re on to something.

MR: Is that how you did it?

SW: In a way. I think that one of the main reasons The Dream Syndicate caught on so quickly is that we were doing something that seemed like the exact opposite of what was going on; we were playing raw, feedback-laden guitar music at a time when everybody wanted to hear synthesizers and wear frilly coats. I think it seemed like the exact wrong thing to do at the time and I think that’s why people liked it. And it wasn’t even calculated like that, it’s a matter of what we wanted to hear. There was a philosophy we had back then that I still hold today: If you’re making music that would be somebody’s favorite record, even your own favorite record, you’re doing okay. If you’re trying to make music because you think, “A lot of people are going to like this, this is what people want to hear these days,” eh, you might make it, you might not, but you’re not going to have a lot of fun. It’s kind of going back to that extreme thing. I think self-indulgent is a good word. I think it’s good to be self-indulgent. It’s good to indulge yourself, when it comes to making music anyway. That’s the idea. Who else are you going to indulge? If you do that, if nothing else you’re going to make one person really happy, and that’s yourself. And maybe, maybe out of millions of people in the world you’re going to make somebody else happy, too.

MR: Yeah, and you’ve made a lot of people happy all over the world, too, because you even have a tribute album! Dude, a double-disc tribute album to Steve Wynn! How do you feel about having something like that in existence?

SW: It’s great. That’s actually one of the most flattering things that’s ever happened to me. Some of them were friends, a lot of them were bands I admired, a lot of them were both, and they did great versions of my songs with a lot of love and a lot of understanding of what the songs are all about. That was fantastic. There’s a lot of things that are great. It’s great when you make a record, when you collaborate with new people and it works, when you play a show and everything clicks, it’s great when you write a song that moves you in some way and connects that with other people, but it’s also really great when other musicians say that you inspired them somehow. That’s a very real thing, that’s a thing that everybody understands. I understand because there are so many people who I have met that can say, “I heard that record when I was seventeen and it just changed everything that I wanted to do.” It happened this week, I’m doing a show in New York next month, a tribute show to the Nuggets collection, the show is being put together by Lenny Kaye, who put that collection together, he was in the Patti Smith group and he put out the original Nuggets. I said to him, “First of all, I’m really happy you’re asking me to do this, and second I’ve got to tell you, the Nuggets compilation changed my life when I was seventeen. That just re-wrote the rulebook for me.” He’s become a friend over time, but also I have to remind him often what he meant to my life. When I meet a musician in Italy or Norway or Japan or whatever who says, “I heard your record and it made me want to start a band,” that’s great. I get that. I’m happy, I’m flattered, and I completely understand what you’re talking about because I’ve been there, too.

MR: What do you feel The Dream Syndicate’s place is in music history and pop culture?

SW: I think we were a link between all your Velvets and Stooges and Big Star and all of the bands that came after that and became the textbook for indie rock. We sort of passed the baton from the groovy bands of the sixties and seventies to what it all led to. It’s a genre, it’s several channels on Sirius Satellite Radio, it is a corner-stone of a certain kind of music. College kids plug a guitar into a fuzzbox and gettin’ loose. I think we were a nice middle point in that line. The thing is, I look at what we did in the eighties and what we meant to people in our inner circle and outside of that, but now that we’re together again I think, “What do I want to be now?” I like the idea that what we are now is kind of a living, breathing, modern band that has that connection at least in name, at least in catalog and probably in intention as well to what we did in the past but is hopefully going somewhere else as well.

MR: When you look at music now–and this isn’t a “Hey, kids, get off my lawn” question…

SW: “Get off my lawn,” that’s a good one. On certain days, I feel like that, too.

MR: [laughs] Do you think there’s something missing from the pop culture-powered education of the last couple crops of creative people?

SW: It’s just different now because there’s a lot more out there. It’s a gigantic tower of Babel with everybody shouting from different rooftops of every kind of music and you start to feel like everything’s been done. There are days where you feel like, “Well, there’s nothing that can surprise me, there’s nothing new, everything is a rehash of something, and then you’ll hear some new record with somebody doing something that has been done a million times but has been done in some unique way with a unique voice and some weird thing about the way a singer might phrase their vowels or some weird thing about the way a guitarist hits their open D chord, and you say “I’ve heard that a million times but I’ve never heard it like that,” and you get excited all over again. It happens to me all the time. You can define something by all the ingredients that went into it, the same way as when you’re cooking something on a stove top and it comes out better than you’ve ever made it before, you can define it easily, but you can’t define it because it’s a human being that did it and in some way it’s a finger print. In some way it’s never been done before. Again, the advice I give to everybody is just do your best to try to find that thing yourself and then push as hard as you can. Exaggerate your own individuality. Do your own thing. Indulge yourself. All of my stories are baseball game stories, not to hype my other band, but I was at a Boston Red Sox game at Fenway parks a few weeks ago and between innings at one point they played “Roadrunner” by The Modern Lovers. I know they’re pushing that to be the state song of Massachusetts, and it should be, and it blared out of the PA system and it sounded so beautiful and everybody in the park responded to it like it was the biggest hit of all time, like it was the national anthem, and I thought, “This band, The Modern Lovers, made that record for almost no money, almost no attention back in the early seventies.” It’s a record that by the late seventies I had and maybe five thousand other people had in the whole country, and now it’s a standard. I think of all the records that came out in the same time that were huge hits on the charts, big stadium-filling bands that are forgotten by now. Now, having said that, there are a lot of people who would rather cash in, play a stadium, count their money and be done with it. That’s fine. More power to you, but for making lasting music, making something you can do your whole life, like I have, which I think is truly winning the jackpot, if you want that you’ve got to do your own thing, go your own way and not be afraid of what people are going to say of you.

MR: You’ve had your solo career, your bands, your guest appearances… What’s left? What is it that you still want to conquer?

SW: I feel like the Sketches In Spain record is a good indication of the kind of thing I really enjoy doing most these days, finding new people and new combinations. That doesn’t mean I couldn’t sit alone in a room with an acoustic guitar and write songs and sing them that way, that’s exciting, too, but I do like working with new people. I like seeing how things work in other places. In the next year I’m probably going to do a record in Mexico with a band over there, another record in Spain and possibly a record in Italy along with everything else I’m doing. I’m not going to say those things are my favorites, but they are the most surprising, generally. Everything is going at full speed, in the next month I’m playing a show with the Dream Syndicate, one with my band, Steve Wynn & the Miracle Three, one solo show and one with The Baseball Project. They’re all different catalogs of songs and different inside jokes and personalities and all that. I love it that way.

MR: Nice. Do you blend all that stuff when you do a solo show?

SW: Depends on which solo thing I’m doing. It could be me by myself, or me with four other people. Like I said before, the beauty of it is that every night is unique and every combination is unique, which is great. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne