Steve Wynn: a music and memoir grand slam

(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)

LP: I saw you a couple of times, I think at least twice—maybe your memory will be better than mine—with Golden Smog in New York. It's got to be twenty years ago now. That alone shocked me. I used to love going to see those shows. What a time.

Steve Wynn: I know the ones at Bowery Ballroom, right? Those shows with Linda on drums. That was an amazing couple of nights. She had to learn forty covers for those two shows in a matter of days. And she was fantastic.

LP: That's incredible. Going back and looking at the set lists, I think maybe I saw a little bit more of, or what I interpret as, your influence than I realized at the time. I mean, there was some Roxy Music in there and some stuff that I wouldn't have associated necessarily with the Smog at the time.

Steve Wynn: Probably not my influence, but I think we all drank from the same pool way back when, and we're all still hearing it in our DNA to this day.

LP: It has reverberated in my brain for several months. Having the opportunity to talk to you is fortuitous, which is this notion of what was happening in mainstream music in the late '70s and early '80s. What do people think they remember in terms of post-punk, the new wave coming on, the advent of MTV, and sort of that British synth-pop influence? It struck me how there was such a thing at that time—I don't want to say throwback music, but rock didn't go away, and guitars didn't go away. And whether it was the stuff you all were immersed in out in LA or even stuff that made it onto the much bigger mainstream stage like the Stray Cats or George Thorogood. The idea that a guy like George Thorogood was on MTV in the early '80s doesn't make any sense if you try to explain it to somebody now who only remembers Duran Duran.

Steve Wynn: You're very optimistic and cherry-picking the good news from back then, but for the most part, it was pretty dire. (laughter) So, I have to respectfully disagree. I mean, you're right. There were the occasional things that we would soak up. Looking back on those days, it's amazing what you would consider a brief moment of rock and roll amidst all the other MTV synthesizer stuff.

The Dream Syndicate had formed, I say this all the time and it's very true, because we wanted to be the band that we weren't hearing. We wanted to make the music that wasn't there and felt we knew how to do it. Without being too calculating about it, we filled a void that was there. And you're talking there, like, "Bad to the Bone," George Thorogood, or the Stray Cats songs and things like that. That's more like '83 or '84. And you know, at this point, we've already come along, peaked, dropped down, come back, all that stuff by then.

But in '81 and '82, it was just a weird time. I talk in my book about working in a record store around 1980 and being confined to a playlist of what the store considered to be the acceptable music we could play from current pop music. I remember the time, and this is throughout the whole summer, maybe four or five months; the three records I liked on there were Get the Knack, the second Nick Lowe album, Labour of Lust, and the Cars' Candy-O. Three good records. Those are three records I would put on right now. But after that, the fourth record I couldn't even begin to tolerate was a Ted Nugent record.

Most things, then, it's not a matter of synthesizers or MTV or dance or disco. Things were just so cleaned up, so shiny. I know I'd come along, and my bandmates would come along at a time when even the most mainstream things were still pretty rough on the edges. Think about Neil Young and the Beatles; for God's sake, you know, things were loose, rambling, and spontaneous. My favorite element in music is where music sounds like it was made one time, documenting a moment that was never to be repeated.

This is just the way you feel when you hear a great record, like, oh my God, whether it's Kind of Blue. The Rolling Stones, "Have You Seen Your Mother Baby Standing in the Shadows," you say, that was a classic moment. Even if it was labored over, you don't want to think about it. The music from the late '70s and early '80s felt very labored over. And for a reason, because it was.

LP: I talked to some other East Coast-based artists from around a bit before that, say in the mid-late '70s. There was a group, I'm not sure if you would have collided with their music at the time or subsequently, but a group called the Comateens. We had Nic Dembling on earlier this year. We were talking a little bit about this idea that a lot of it, too, like the technology, was in this weird in-between zone of still not digital, still analog, like you could play the machines, and at the time, there may have been criticism of them being machines or a drum machine as opposed to a guitar or whatever, but they weren't yet fully programmable. Like you still had to operate the machine.

Steve Wynn: Okay. Right. You still had to press the button. Your fingers were involved in doing something. (laughter)

LP: Yeah. Also, the sounds of that era are much more lasting because there was still the analog element instead of being purely digitally created. And I know that's a whole other rabbit hole. I'm not interested in impurity or purity tests, but there is something to that. As we sit now with digital music for the better part of a generation, it would be hard to deny that I don't get a certain fatigue if I listen too long or like analog sound just feels different.

Steve Wynn: I held out for a long time, insisting on recording to tape. Definitely through all the years of the Dream Syndicate, obviously. But even until ten years ago, believe me, it wasn't easy finding tape. Oh my God, it became so difficult. I'd find there's one place in the San Fernando Valley where they're selling used two-inch tape. Better get over there while they have five reels to spare. We do stuff like that. And I'm talking like 2008 and 2010, and I was still doing that. At a certain point, digital technology got better. I love talking about this stuff. I have a copy of Tape Op sitting on my side. I can read this stuff all day long. (laughter)

But I do enjoy how recording has changed over the years. I'm talking to you right now from where I live in Jackson Heights in Queens, New York, not far from LaGuardia or Citi Field. I've lived here for about twelve years. Two blocks from where I live, walk down the street to Roosevelt Avenue, turn left, turn right again on 81st Street, you will look at what I think is the most important building in the history of music, in the history of music recording.

It's the building where Les Paul lived in the '30s. And where he was the first to try sound-on-sound recording with two tape machines in front of him. He'd record on the one and play it back while he recorded on the other right in his living room in this apartment in Queens. And I've read that he said he would get to a point where he would get far along in the process, and then a plane would fly over from LaGuardia. You have to scrap that step and go back again and redo it.

And at the time, he probably thought he was reinventing the wheel, and he was. At each point along the way, people would get excited. When the Beatles went eight-track on Abbey Road … Whoa. What a thing. You can do all the things they do. You don't have to go back and forth and bounce until things sound strange.

At a certain point, I think in the late '80s and early '90s, progress, that whole stream, had gotten so out of control. Producers ran the day. There was a feeling that producers and engineers were no longer there to reflect what artists were doing. They were there to be the artists. They were there just to utilize the artists as cogs in the machine to get where they were going.

And that was a frustrating time. I'm talking probably mid-'80s to mid-'90s, where I didn't have much fun making records because it was difficult to get past that mindset. And now, where we are, it's not so bad. One thing, and pardon me for rambling, but you touched on things I think about a lot.

Of all the things in life, all the things in the world, recording studios are probably one of the few things that cost today what they did forty years ago. I remember being in my band before The Dream Syndicate, The Suspects. I write about this band in the book, the band I was in with Kendra Smith before The Dream Syndicate.

We wanted to make a single, so we traveled all around Sacramento, where we were living. And we were looking for a place to record; it's got to be a recording studio. We found one studio that said they would record our band, and what they normally did was jingles for commercials or other things like that. They said, yeah, we can get you, you know, cost you a thousand dollars a day. A thousand dollars a day, we don't have that. We're college students eating macaroni and cheese. We finally lucked out and found a guy with a home recording studio in San Francisco who did it for much less than that. But a thousand a day, that would be expensive now.

It's funny how you can go now and find a place, and I'm not giving any of them away because I want to keep them to myself (laughter). Still, there are a lot of places you can go where you can make good music—either analog music or music using digital technology with people who understand how to make it sound analog. So things are much better now than they were thirty years ago.

LP: Talking to a lot of artists on here, the idea that, in air quotes, the democratization of the ability to make music, we're all of like the commentary that says, "Oh, there's more music than ever, and that's not a good thing, and there's too much noise, and it's clogging up the streaming services." I think, first of all, if it's just bits, the bits don't come your way if you don't want them. More importantly, if there are more people able to make music, that strikes me as a net good for the world, it's certainly not on my top five list of things that are bad. (laughter)

Steve Wynn: I agree. I agree. It's funny because things have changed so much to the point now where when you go to talk about a dying beast, like a Guitar Center kind of store or a music store, you no longer see the store dominated by guitars but by podcast microphones and interfaces and things like that. Everybody makes their own music and does their own podcasts, blogs, radio shows, or any other way to be the artist themselves.

It's cool. If there's a downside to that, it's harder to cut through. I can tell you, think about music as a fan—you find the filters you need to cut through all of it. I listen to WFMU, a radio station here in the New York area. I get turned on to a lot of music from their DJs and certain other radio programs out there, the handful of really exceptional stations in the States or people who write about it online, stuff like that, say, oh yeah, that's a good record, but there's a lot more out there.

LP: Were you a radio kid?

Steve Wynn: You mean as a listener or…?

LP: Radio was super important to me growing up. And I'm always curious, like, did that box mean a lot to you? Was it a lifeline to the outside world for you? Or did it play a role in your life?

Steve Wynn: Emphatically, yes. Absolutely. Where did you grow up?

LP: I'm from the Northeast. I grew up outside of New Haven. So I had this interesting sort of media. I would draw everything from Boston down to New York and New Jersey if you draw a circle. So we had a great radio and great television. Even in the '70s, there were only two or three TV stations because we had three or four from each metropolitan area. So it was kind of fun.

Steve Wynn: And that's similar to my situation. I mean, I was born and raised in Los Angeles. Like your situation, I got a great radio. Every band came through, and we had great record stores. There was that Quentin Tarantino movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And the movie's soundtrack is the radio station I grew up with, KHJ in Los Angeles, and there were great top 30—"Boss 30," as they call themselves—radio station. I'm grateful for the time I was born because I got to be a six-year-old in the time of great Top 30 music, where you would hear The Beatles and The Stones alongside The Temptations of Marvin Gaye alongside Frank Sinatra and Sgt. Barry Sadler. And then, I became a curious pre-adolescent and teenager in the beginning era of free-form FM rock radio. I know you had radio stations here for that. I guess it would be WNEW. Was that kind of a…?

LP: Yeah. I mean, NEW made it to Connecticut for sure. Alison Steele, all those, all the, and coming across that stuff as a kid, it was like, who are these people? It's like they're talking slowly. They're not, they're not yelling. (laughter)

Steve Wynn: Right. And they're playing what exactly? We had one called KPPC in Los Angeles, and eventually, there were other ones like KMET, but KPPC was a real pioneer. They started almost right at the very beginning. It's probably like NEW, and KSAN is out in San Francisco. KPPC, I'm like 9 or 10 years old and they're playing something called Bitches Brew by Miles Davis. Then, there is the Credibility Gap and a Lenny Bruce comedy routine, and then, it slides into Van Morrison. And it was all new to me, but to answer your question, radio got me rolling. That got me excited about things.

And I'm an only child. My parents like music. My mother's still alive and still likes music. My father isn't. My parents liked music, but they weren't musicians. They weren't music fanatics. Somehow, without that kind of influence from my parents or anybody around me, I became just a music fanatic. I would go to great lengths to find new things. I'm talking about ages 7, 8, 9. My only explanation is that I was an only child, and I made my family out of music. Those were my companions. My friends on the radio and my record collection were where I went to find everything I needed. It was great. That was lifeblood for me. Radio stations, record stores, the handful of records I was lucky enough to track down got me going.

LP: It's a fascinating medium. It's one I still admire today. The idea is that you could be anywhere on the planet, really, but certainly anywhere in America, and turn it on. And if you go far enough to the left on the dial, you'll find something.

Steve Wynn: Or even now, you can listen to radio from anywhere in the world. If somebody's doing a great radio show in Sicily, tune in. That's great. So that's wonderful. And that means the really good stations like your WFMUs and KEXPs and stations like that are connecting with people all around the world. Yeah, I tour all over the place, and I'll play shows, you know, in a small town in Denmark, and the guy will come to me and talk to me about his favorite DJ on the stations I listen to.

It's funny; I'd kind of drifted away from radio for a while because I live in New York. I moved away from LA. I didn't have a car—and this is an amazing thing for an Angeleno to say—I did not have a car from 1994 when I moved here until three years ago because I didn't need one, which meant I stopped listening to the radio. After all, when I'm home, I've got, look behind me, I've got your walls, CDs, and records around me everywhere to listen to. I don't need to listen to radio. What got me back into radio was—drumroll please—the pandemic. All of a sudden, I'm, I'm, I'm nine years old again. I'm six years old. I'm stranded at home, limited to what I'm getting from the outside over my airwaves, and suddenly I rediscovered the pandemic.

The joys of DJs and somebody out there choosing music in real time for me to listen to. One of my favorite DJs at this time was Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo, who's been a friend of mine for about 40 years. When the pandemic started, he became a regular DJ for WFMU. And his show is great. So the combination of hanging out with a friend, having the surprise of somebody turning you on to stuff, and I'm pulling back into it. I do enjoy radio again, like I did before.

LP: I had a bizarre experience. You mentioned KEXP. So, you know, I'm up in the Pacific Northwest right now. I was, I was, yeah, I'm from Connecticut. I lived in New York for a little over 20 years. Moved out here a few years ago. KEXP is sort of the local good radio station. I was down at South by Southwest this past spring and recording some episodes. There was a band from Ireland called Chalk. They emerged very quickly. They got together, and things started to happen for them. However, one of their big milestones was when they played a KEXP show in Europe. They said KEXP is the most prestigious thing when they do their sessions. And here I am, it's right in my backyard. I had no idea. (laughter)

Steve Wynn: Let me tell you something. If you look at my various things on YouTube, how many players they've had. I'll confess to doing that now and then. Between all my baseball projects, Dream Syndicate, and solo things, I'm pretty sure the video I had that's been seen by the most people was a performance I did at South by Southwest in Lance Armstrong's bike shop before his fall. KEXP was taping there at noon in the South by Southwest. Of course, we said yes because they've been very good to me over the years, especially because they're KEXP. Still, man, we had to get up and pound the coffee and barely open our eyes, and here we are, okay, okay, there were about eight people there because it was public, but it was This is me with my band, Steve Wynn and the Miracle Three.

And we played a version of my song, "Amphetamine." It just never stops getting played. I don't know where it is that half a million plays, which is a lot for me. I know that's nothing compared to Billie Eilish, but whatever. I was somewhere, I think, in Serbia, where I walked into a bar and heard my song for "Amphetamine" and went, Oh, that's "Amphetamine." Wait a second. That's not the studio version. No, no, no, no. We played this video version to KEXP. You and half a million other people hearing the thing I did in front of eight people in Austin, but that's the power of a station like that now. And it's great.

LP: That's so beautiful.

Steve Wynn: And I know Kevin Cole, when he was really good friends with my wife, Linda, from when they were both in Minnesota, in Minneapolis, in the old days. He's just a music fan. The good guys on the radio these days have kept their wits about them. And that's great.

LP: Yeah.

Steve Wynn: Do your fund drives every year. I'll listen and donate because they're keeping it out of corporate hands, and that's great.

LP: I love the one-to-one idea of, like, okay, if I give my money here, it stays. And if I don't, then I'm part of the problem. I like that calculus in a world where things feel out of control. It's great.

A new memoir and a new album landing at the same time. Was the creative process done in tandem, or are these two projects in dialogue?

Steve Wynn: They were done in tandem. Yes. The main thing I have been doing for the last ten years was writing this book. I started the book in 2015 but dove in earnest in 2020, again, a pandemic thing, and started diving into it. Once I decided to write this book, I worked hard because you have to write a book. It takes some time. You need it no matter what. I can write a song and have written many of my songs in five or ten minutes. The book takes time, but while I was working on the book, I was still writing songs, collaborating with people, and recording the songs I was writing. Once the book got a deal with Jawbone Press in the UK to come out, and I knew it was coming out, I thought, "Well, it'd be nice to have a record to go with it."

And I realized I've got the record. I've been writing the soundtrack the whole time I've been writing the book without thinking about it. And I went back and looked at the songs I've been writing and recording, you know, I said, "Okay, well, what do I have? What things are drifting around here that haven't been released and I'm working on?"

When I heard them all and checked them out together, I said, "Wait a second. This feels like the book." It's very personal. There's a lot of reflection, regret, defiance, looking back, looking forward, making promises, making things right, and things like that to be either vindicated or whipped down, and it's all there on the record.

The final exclamation point once I was putting the record together was to have it start with Santa Monica, the song "Santa Monica," which is the city where I was born. And the street I was born on, Santa Monica Boulevard. And it ends with "Roosevelt Avenue," which is the main thoroughfare where I live now in Jackson Heights. So it's kind of like, well, in 40 minutes, I will tell you my life story. Bing, we're done. (laughter)

LP: You used many words just now that I wanted to ask you about listening to the record. Melancholy comes up a bit, with some nostalgia, regret, and reflection. I guess I have a two-part question. The first is, were you a fan or a reader of other music artists' memoirs before this or in preparation to write your own? And the second part of the question is, I'm curious about your experience in the aftermath of writing the book because I think back to when Keith Richards' book came out. In some of his interviews, he said it was one of the most grueling things he had ever done because he had to live it all again. And it was things that he had managed to compartmentalize and put away for years and years. And I wonder if you can speak to any of that stuff.

Steve Wynn: Wow, that's interesting. I hadn't heard him say that, but I could believe it. And his was one of the books I read. I read Bob Dylan's Chronicles, a great book. I was very influenced at a young age by Ian Hunter's Diary of a Rock and Roll Star, which is less of a memoir and more of a tour diary, but that was a revelation when I saw that. So I'd read a few. Once I started writing the book, I would devour all that I could read because I wanted to see how other people did it. If somebody had written a memoir, I would read it, but I did read some really good ones. Everything from Questlove to Richard Hell to Pete Townshend to Robbie Robertson to Charles Mingus, to, um, it's a pretty wild one, and um, many others.

Some of them, like the Richard Hell one, is, like, there's like a litany of his sexual history. Like, wow. Very bold, maybe in some ways kind of irresponsible—namey names and body parts, things like that. I'm not going to write that kind of book. And some were self-flagellating books like the Pete Townshend book or even the Elton John book. I want to be honest and talk about things, but I also don't want to use this as my, you know, confession. What I realized is that if I had to compare the book I wanted to write, maybe the Questlove book is similar to this. I wanted to write a book about what music meant to me and how music was a magical force in my life.

And I realized as I started to look at it that way that the arc of the book is a young kid falls in love with music and how that happens and how that manifests itself, and how that turns into a young kid having the actual gumption and dream of playing music in front of people and making records. Going back to what you said earlier about how everybody can and does make their own music now, and back then, you didn't. Back then, the idea of making a record, not everyone did that. You couldn't say, "I'm gonna make 40 records someday." Really? Who the hell are you? Where do you get up having ideas like that?

For the most part, you had to get signed to a label. That's not easy. So when I was growing up, to say, I'm going to be in a band that makes records and tours the world was not an achievable goal as it might be right now, where you, or even as it was 20, 30 years ago, it was kind of a wild dream. I had this impossible dream. Then, amazingly enough, I achieved what I could only dream about. And then I did all I could to sabotage it. Then, I somehow got myself back on track and salvaged the rest of my life of making music from that. And that was kind of the arc of the book. And in doing that, you're right. I kind of try to be honest with things, like why that all might have happened.

Did I feel bad at the end of it? No, because I end up where I am. I like where I am. So it's okay. I can look back and say, if there's anything right in the book, I realized that I didn't always know how to deal with other people and confront relationships, mostly with other musicians. And I look back now and say I wish I would have handled that musical breakup differently. I wish I would have been more communicative. I wish I would have taken the time to, if not salvage a relationship; I wish I would have at least given it a shot or been more talkative about it. If there's any regret, it's that, but I was 22, 23 years old, so I wasn't then who I am now.

LP: I don't remember if it was something you said first person, in the press material, or a blurb on the book, but it referred to the book as a tale of redemption. It sounds like something maybe a marketer might write, but…

Steve Wynn: You're right. (laughter)

LP: But I wonder, does that phrase resonate for you in the context of the book? And if so, what needed redeeming?

Steve Wynn: Well, it does, because I feel like there is a kind of redemption in that, you know, the I write a lot about the years 1983 and 84 when we made our second album, Medicine Show, and we were touring with U2 and REM, which What a thing. We are in a big label bidding war and went to a great label, A&M Records, who gave us all the freedom and money in the world and time.

LP: You spent some of their Police money. (laughter)

Steve Wynn: We did indeed. Boy, did we. Sorry, Sting. And, uh, tour with not only two very popular bands but two cool bands, it's one thing to be asked to open for Black Oak Arkansas or something like that, to pull a name out of the hat. And we got two cool bands, you know,

Jim Dandy, to the Rescue! Actually, I like that song. (laughter)

We were in just the best possible situation. And that's when I chose to have my little, whatever was driven by fear or insecurity or alcohol or whatever else, I chose to try to sabotage it all. And the redemption, I think, is that by the time that year and a half had passed, I could say, "Okay, Do I want to keep doing this?" Because I do if you ask me, after two records and three years of being in a band, doing all these things I'd only dreamed of. Is this a life I want? I would say, "Yes, yes, yes!" If I could look back to when I was 24 25 to me right now and say, "Well, here's what's going to happen. You will make records and tour the world for the next 40 years." I'd be like, great. I'll take it. I think the redemption was in getting it together enough to get on the path, to get to work, as I say in the book, just to say, okay, it's time to get to work and start writing good songs, making good records, playing good shows, and letting that be the most important thing in the world.

Not how drunk can I get? Not how weird can I get? How confrontational can I get? Not am I on this label or that label with this agent or that agent? None of that. Just write the songs. Record them, play the shows, not only the best you can, but with that heart of a 10-year-old who listened to freeform radio and fell in love with it. Be that guy for the rest of your life and see how that goes. And that was the redemption. I embraced that initial motivation and got rid of all the other garbage.

LP: You talked about being a 22-year-old and not knowing how to communicate your needs and wants in an intraband dynamic. There's this parlor game I love to get sucked into sometimes. There are a couple of versions of it. One is like who should and shouldn't be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. You know, that's always a fun one. When I was a drinking man, that one could fuel a whole evening of excuses. (laughter) The other one is more about trying to come up with bands with all their original members.

Steve Wynn: Oh, I love that.

LP: Once you get past U2 and Phish, it gets really hard to find any other bands from the '90s back that have their original members. My point in bringing that up is that there's something beautiful about people being able to make a go of it and figure out how to grow and navigate. And especially, you know, I think about in the context of like the Stones, the fact that Mick and Keith were essentially children when they became successful, the fact that they're able to piece it together and function at all 60 years later, it's a miracle. And you could be cynical and talk about the money and whatever, but they still have to do it.

Steve Wynn: Isn't that great? Oh, you just opened up so many things I want to talk about. And you're right. Just on that point right there, when I see clips of them now, they seem to be having a great tour. And I want to see, and I do think about the two of them, and they have a secret language and history that nobody else can know. That's great. And I love that parlor game. Because I played the same one, that's one of my favorite rock trivia questions. And yeah, U2 is the only band with the same uninterrupted lineup for 30-plus years. The other one was ZZ Top, but now, you know, that was a good one for a while. That was another one, but that's passed now, too. So there's only one left, and many bands have ended up with their original lineup after returning to it…

LP: Like The Police.

Steve Wynn: The Police, well, they reunited, but yeah, they were never anybody else. Aerosmith, weirdly enough, that's a band you would not have been on to have the same lineup. It's incredible for that bunch of knuckleheads. So they are somehow the same guys who made the first record when they were touring out. That's amazing. And there are a few like that out there. I think that's great. I wish I could have had that. I play in a band, The Baseball Project, with two or arguably three guys from R.E.M., if you count Scott McCaughey, who was in the band for 20 years.

They came up from their small scene and made a point to be all for one, one for all, whether it was publishing or decisions about the band. It's very smart how they do that. It was only because of Bill Berry's aneurysm that they got driven apart. And they reunited a couple of weeks ago or about a month ago here in New York for the Songwriter Hall of Fame. And it was so beautiful. I got to see them around the time we had. I went to some parties with them that week and could see the joy, just like, here we are, the four of us. I truly believe that's a one-off that won't happen again, but it happened. And it's great. And I have that in my life in my way with Dennis Duck, who's the drummer for The Dream Syndicate.

And we've been there from back then to now. And just to a slightly lesser degree, Mark Walton, the bass player on The Dream Syndicate, joined the band in 1984. The three of us have been playing Dream Syndicate music, granted with a long interruption in the middle, but we have been doing this together for 40 years, and it's great. We like each other, and we enjoy making music together. And we like making new music. It makes me so happy. There is a side of me that wishes that I could be like U2. Not, we're not talking envy for money or success, but be like them where I say, well, here we are, same guys, same guys who, you know, who bad in that practice room years ago, and we're still here doing our thing.

That's a beautiful thing, but it is not easy. There's a reason Aerosmith is all together. Hopefully, they will like each other, but there is a lot of money at stake. If you're successful, it's easier to keep it going. The Dream Syndicate, there was plenty tearing it apart. It was not easy for us to keep that going. I do envy bands that do that.

LP: Well, the interesting thing though, I think is, or one of the interesting things is that, first of all, how rare it truly is and how almost unrealistic it is to aspire to such a thing, but also the sort of the counterfactual, which is there, there must be something at the very least interesting, maybe, maybe even beneficial to have new perspectives and points of view and musicians to react to and collaborate with come through your musical universe. I mean, not only through something as longstanding as The Dream Syndicate, but you pop up in these different contexts with very specific groups of people. I would imagine that's stimulating. I mean, exciting. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but could you talk a little bit about what you get from your different musical personas?

Steve Wynn: It's great. Working with new people is thrilling. On the one hand, I settled into my gang, whether it's The Baseball Project gang with my wife and Peter and Scott and Mike or The Dream Syndicate, which has now been a band with the same lineup for going on 15 years, which is just wild. And that's pretty exciting. I like the comfort of playing music with friends and people who I can, who I don't have to say anything, and just know that we have that, that a little nod here and a little movement of the hip there explains where things are going next. That's great. On the other hand, some of my favorite things I've done in my life were musical blind dates, where I got put together with somebody I barely knew, and that's inspiring.

One of my favorite kinds of records to make, and I've done this a few times over the years, is where I joined a band that already exists as the singer-songwriter. I did this with a band called House of Freaks, and we became Gutterball, the band I did for a while. And that was back in the early '90s. They were already a fully formed, four-piece band, and they had been on the road and had made a record. They had the connection of being a band. They had the chemistry, the road stories. I barely knew them. I knew Stephen McCarthy, who was part of that gang, but I didn't know the rest. When we got together to make a record, we had all the advantage of them wanting to impress me and me wanting to impress them.

And the element of surprise of new collaborators, like Brian Harvey, and having him write music I could write words to and say, "Wow, he writes music differently than I do. I'm excited by this." But at the same time, I like the chemistry of a band that already was ready like that. And I did it again with a band called Come out of Boston. A few years later when I made Melting in the Dark and toured with them. So, I have gone to this style of working a few times, and I like it. Is that the best of both worlds?

LP: When you sit down to write a song, or when it inspires you, whatever, you know, taking process out of it. Do you know at the outset, oh, I'm writing a Steve Wynn solo album song, or today I better get four songs together because Baseball Project is going to need some music, like, do you start with the intention for the song or maintain a stable of songs that when it's time to put something together you could pull from? How do you think about your projects and sort of metering out your creativity?

Steve Wynn: Whatever works is fine. I'm always writing, coming up with little bits, but these days, for the most part, I write because it's time to do a record with somebody. Now, bear in mind that writing for The Baseball Project is very specific. I wrote the song about Willie Mays, but it didn't work for that band, so I'll bring you to The Dream Syndicate. So that's very specific. However, I wrote a lot of music that ended up in The Baseball Project, which wasn't originally about a bunch of guys in cleats. When I was 19, I'd write a hundred songs in two months because it was all new, and I was learning how to do it. I was, and that's great. I'd like to say I'm still doing that, but I think most people I know were songwriters and say, you get to a point where you say, "Oh, it's time to make a new blah, blah, blah record. It's time to make a solo record. It's time to make a Dream Syndicate record. Okay. Let me think about what that record could be, and then I'll knock out the ten songs." That's how I do it now.

LP: Baseball is so interesting because, in a way, it is another marker generationally or, or, you know, it's like radio, I think, for people. Roughly in our age ranges, it has so many baked-in characteristics. It's got longevity, history, mythology, and nostalgia. I've seen people be nostalgic at their first baseball game. I was actually at a game once. (laughter)

Steve Wynn: You're right.

LP: What that field brings out in people is funny. Before I share this anecdote with you, I'm curious: We've established that you're still a music fan. Are you still a baseball fan?

Steve Wynn: I am. I am. Being in The Baseball Project is not a pose. Four of the five of us are big fans. The odd man out is Peter Buck who just puts up with us because he likes playing with us, so he's less of a baseball fan, but Linda, my wife and the band's drummer, is more of a fan than I am. She's got the games on all the time. She comes from a family where women have always loved baseball—her mother, grandmother, and, I think, her great-grandmother, too. They were all baseball fanatics, so they go way back. And Mike Mills and Scott McCaughey are fanatics as well. So yeah, we all love the game. It's no doubt about it. And we have some of the most unbearably geeky band discussions of any band you could ever imagine on the road.

It gets pretty, pretty wonky sometimes. Unfortunately, I will confess here that three of the four of us, Linda being the exception, are as much into this horrible, despicable time suck of fantasy baseball as we are into anything. Oh my God. You're getting Mike or Scott or me going on that. Let me put it this way: When we made our last album, Grand Salami Time!, we were very happy with it. And if you say it's sold this much about as much airplay, we'd say, Oh, okay. That's good. Oh, that's too bad. But if you talk to us about our teams and fantasy baseball, we'll be crying into a towel. It's like if our team dropped two positions, it's a terrible addiction. I think I want to start a 12-step group for fantasy baseball players. It's too much. (laughter)

LP: Being where you are now. So, during my last couple of years in New York, I was in Astoria, and I used to love the ability to ride my bike to Citi Field. I'm curious: where do your loyalties lie these days?

Steve Wynn: Oh my God.

LP: Did you bring the Dodger love back to New York or like, what's, what's the story there?

Steve Wynn: I love Astoria by the way. That's great.

LP: Yeah.

Steve Wynn: How long have you been away from Astoria?

LP: Next month will be, let's see, I moved in 2016. So it's been a minute. Yeah, it's sad.

Steve Wynn: It's hipster land now. It's gradually, not quite Brooklyn yet, but it's the hipster front of Queens.

LP: I was prepared to be buried there. I lived in the Lower East Side when I first moved to New York in the '90s. I did the East Village. I lived in Brooklyn for a long time, but when I moved to Astoria, I was like, Oh, this is home. I love it there.

Steve Wynn: Yeah. Me too. It's great. I always say that my baseball fandom is very complicated, but the simple short answer is, well. And it's not simple or short, but growing up in LA, you would think I was a Dodger fan, but I actually did not like the Dodgers when I was a teenager because I was a rock and roll fan, counterculture fan, into all that kind of thing. The Dodgers were a squeaky, clean, boring, white-bread team. I said, this team is dull.

So, as a 12-year-old, I'm rooting for, strange enough, the Reds and very much the A's. More interesting teams, less boring. And it was Fernando Valenzuela who got me back into the Dodgers. Now, this is exciting. This is, you know, a 20-year-old, as he claimed, who knows for real, Mexican kid. Who came out of nowhere, who had just taken the whole city by storm. At the same time, it made people aware of the political and cultural history of the town, which was the most galvanizing thing I'd ever seen in LA. That was great. I come to New York as a Dodger fan, a born-again Dodger fan, but I love New York. I'd always dreamed of living in New York. I was a New Yorker born in an Angeleno's body.

Everything I love, all the music, all the films, all the literature, all the culture, all the taste of life, the way of existing, is New York more than LA. I always wanted to live here. Finally did in '94. I said, great. I'm a New Yorker, and I will call myself that. I got to be a fan of a New York baseball team, but it can't be the Mets because I'm already a Dodger fan. So I'll be a fan of this horrible team in the South Bronx who hasn't won a thing in 15 years, who were just a pitiful mess up there. We'll probably never play the Dodgers because they're just so terrible—the Yankees. And within a few years, they became a team that won four World Series in five years.

That was fun. At this point, I'm a Yankee fan. And that disappoints my Angeleno friends. It disappoints baseball fan friends. What are you going to do? You're a fan of where you are. Having said that, living here in Queens, I appreciate the Mets too because I can walk to Citi Field, and that's kind of exciting. But a native New Yorker, like Ira Kaplan, like my bandmate Jason Victor, for people from here to say you like the Mets and the Yankees, that's just wrong. How can you do that? I'm a transplant. I'm a New Yorker for 30 years, but I'm a transplant.

LP: I told you I grew up outside of New Haven, and I tell people that that was the Mason-Dixon line for sports. Sometimes, you'd have families torn asunder by the Yankee Red Sox thing or the Patriots, Giants, or Jets thing. As a kid, we were all Red Sox fans until Thurman Munson. He did for us what Fernando Valenzuela did for you. It was like Thurman Munson was the guy that, like, he just ripped through our little league as he was the man. And so I've been a Yankees fan. Yeah, it's, it's incredible.

Steve Wynn: Still, you're a Yankee fan in Mariner land?

LP: Yeah. I mean, the Mariners, sometimes I'm not even sure they really play baseball. (laughter)

Um, although they have a nice park.

Steve Wynn: That is a nice park. It is, yeah.

LP: It is a nice park. I'm going to say that you were a sports writer early on.

Steve Wynn: Yeah. At least in part of junior high school and high school. And even into the opening months of college, that was what I would be. When I said earlier that there's no way I could have even begun to dream of being a professional musician. I could imagine being a sports writer. I became very good at it. And it was very much what I figured my life would be. If you had asked me at 16 or 17, I would have said I love Roxy Music. And yeah, I love The Who, and I love whatever else, but what I'm going to be is I'm going to be there writing about sports for the LA Times or Sports Illustrated.

Sports Illustrated was my dream. That was my goal. I was like, I'm going to write a column for Sports Illustrated. You know, it was fun. It appealed to the same things in some ways that I enjoy about being a musician. There was always a new task. It's always a new challenge. It's always something new. It involved writing and being creative. Whatever you did today was forgotten tomorrow—time for a new one. Let's say you're doing the Yankees beat and writing about 162 games a year. Whatever you wrote yesterday was fun and games, but you got to write about a new game today—the same thing with my role. I play a gig in New Haven today. I got to play a gig in Boston tomorrow. Whatever I did on the stage last night, whether good, bad, or indifferent, doesn't matter—it's time for a new one. And so, being a sports writer seemed like a lot of fun. And I love the idea of traveling, which I do now. And I love being an observer on the periphery of things, documenting other people's lives.

And that, all that was very exciting to me. I loved it. I went to college, UC Davis, in 1977, thinking I would take this town by storm. And I went into the newspaper about a month before I started school there. I had a stack of clippings I'd written for my high school and regional papers in LA. I was doing it. And I walked in with my clippings and said, this is what I do. I'm ready to, you know, for you. And they looked at me like I was crazy. They're a kid. Do you want to be a sports editor? It's yours. I was like, all right. So then, the dream is on the way, man. I am living the dream. I'm a freshman at UC Davis and already the sports editor for the varsity football beat.

And then I heard the Ramones, saw the Sex Pistols, saw Talking Heads, and heard the first Clash album, and all of a sudden, baseball and football just didn't matter so much, and immediately, everything changed.

LP: Before I go down that road with you, is there a particular writer or even a seminal piece you love in that genre?

Steve Wynn: Growing up, I was a big fan of a writer named Jim Murray, the columnist for the L.A. Times, who was just poetic and was in a different league. But I mean, the John Updike piece by Ted Williams is gorgeous. I discovered that as an adult. And that and the Don DeLillo fictional piece about Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and J. Edgar Hoover at the game. Things like that are great. As a kid, it was all about Jim Murray, Sports Illustrated, and things like that. One of the things that made me want to be a sports writer, besides all the things I just mentioned, was the idea you could be creative or put your spin on things.

And at the time, that wasn't so popular. Now you look at The Athletic, for example. I'm going down a geeky road again, but I think what they do is great with the freedom of the internet and blogs, and everybody's a writer. You can have fun with baseball writing. Strangely enough, I did become a sports writer. I now write baseball stories the way I want to write them. I just do it in lyrical form for a band. So they went full circle.

LP: Do you have the Library of America Baseball Anthology book?

Steve Wynn: I do.

LP: It's a beautiful book.

Steve Wynn: You know, I can't see it right now, but I do have that.

LP: Yeah, it's so wonderful. It's so wonderful. Before I let you go, when do you hit the road and what is it? I want to make sure I represent it correctly. You're doing an evening of storytelling and playing music, right?

Steve Wynn: I, I am, do a lot of acoustic touring, solo or solo. Acoustic or electric touring, and I have gotten really into that a lot more year by year. I enjoy it because I can, like I've been doing with you for the last however long, ramble on about things. As you can see, I'm, you know, a motormouth sometimes about things. So I'm in solo shows and can talk about all kinds of things.

So there'll be an element of that in the show by nature. What I want to do with this show is have a night of stories and songs, specifically about the tie-up frame of the book. So it'll be a lot of not just '82 to '88 of The Dream Syndicate, but 1960 to '88. I'll probably work on some covers that illustrate what I'm talking about, stories behind some of the songs from Days of Wine and Roses, or Medicine Show.

It'll be a bit of something between a fan of comedy, one-man monologue, book reading, and folk singer at the Bitter End in 1961, a little bit of all that combined into one.

LP: That's great. That's great. I hope you get to work in a Creedence cover, too. That was a revelation when reading the book. And then, after listening to some of your music in the context of having Creedence in my brain, I realized a couple of things. Some of your tracks do have some of that, like swampy Creedence boogie, or I don't even know what you would call it, but they have that Creedence thing. But the other thing that struck me is that some of the stuff sounds like it was recorded loud. And I don't mean like any particular record, but like even individual songs. Like, I realized that while listening to it, like, you know what, that must have been loud in the recording studio to have that sound come across on the recording. I was listening to that, and I was like, this sounds loud.

Steve Wynn: I think you're right about Creedence. I don't know if you know they were supposed to be one of the loudest bands ever live. So I think you're right about them. Not us, though. We're pretty loud live, but I've made, I think, my last dozen albums with the same small Fender Princeton amplifier on every record. I love little amps. That's something you learn over time is, you know, even Days of Wine and Roses, Karl Precoda was using a Champ amp, and people would hear what he was playing, you know, feedback and noise of doom through an amp the size of a coffee table book. It's amazing. So, it probably wasn't recorded that loud, but we played it in our way. Our brains were loud.

LP: Thank you for your time, Steve, and thank you for a wonderful book and voice. The tone of it is really accessible, and I think people, whether they're from that era or not, will get a lot from it. And thank you for so many years of music. I appreciate that.

Steve Wynn: Oh, you're welcome. I've enjoyed this. It's a pleasure talking to you.