Graham Reid | | 4 min read
What Were You Expecting
Popular music as we know it is 70 this year, we're seven decades on from Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock, Elvis' That's Alright Mama and Blue Moon of Kentucky, Big Joe Turner's Shake Rattle and Roll, Ray Charles' I Got a Woman and Hank Ballard's Work With Me Annie.
We're also 70 years on from Chet Baker's My Funny Valentine, the Moonglows' Sincerely, Errol Garner's Misty and Billie Holiday's Love For Sale, which shaped jazz, blues and mainstream pop.
But it was those early rock'n'roll songs which changed the landscape for young people.
As rock'n'roll grew and changed it subdivided: today we have a thousand schools flourishing.
Within metal – as opposed to heavy metal – we have death metal, speed metal, doom metal and dozens of other self-defining categories.
Sometimes these areas are sparsely populated (like gravedigger rock in the late Fifties) and some pass quickly from attention. Revivalists keep alive surf guitar music but add little to it.
One interesting sub-genre was the Paisley Underground movement out of the US in the Eighties which drew on the slightlydelic sound of 1965-1967 and bands like the Byrds (Eight Miles High), the Beatles (Rain, Daytripper, Paperback Writer) and Love (the Forever Changes album). But also with a dollop of post-punk/New Wave in the mix.
It was a fairly widespread sound, Australia's Church arrived in the category courtesy of their 1981 jangle-pop single The Unguarded Moment which cleverly appropriated its melody from the Beatles' Ticket to Ride.
Well, Paisley Underground was then and this is now . . . so Steve Wynn of the great PU/alternative rock band Dream Syndicate in the Eighties has come a long way.
He's obviously older, since Dream Syndicate has worked with members of REM, Concrete Blonde, Giant Sand and X, recorded with Dan Stuart of Green on Red, had a tribute album of his work and now looks back on about a dozen albums under his own name.
And on the journey moved further and further from the Paisley Underground into the world of dusty denim and Americana.
In fact that long preamble about the Paisley Underground – a McGuffin if you will – was just an excuse to get us to Wynn's excellent alt.country/singer-songwriter album Make It Right (his first since 2010) which gets simultaneous release with his memoir I Wouldn't Say It If It Wasn't True.
“I wrote and recorded these songs in tandem with working on I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn't True,” he says. “With each chapter, I would get ideas for songs inspired by the deep dive into my past and vice versa.
“The reflections became intertwined after a while, a mutual commentary between literal and metaphorical ruminating.
“The songs here aren’t directly autobiographical although the album does start with Santa Monica, the city and boulevard where I was born and concludes with Roosevelt Avenue, the main thoroughfare of the Queens neighbourhood in New York City that I call home today.
“You write what you know—even when you’re not aware it’s what you’re writing about at the time.
“If the book recounted a tale of trepidation and dread and questionable choices, then that tale would turn into a song of similar intent like What Were You Expecting.
“A step back for perspective and positivity, in turn, found its way into a song like You’re Halfway There.”
You're Halfway There
With assistance from REM's Mike Mills, the Bangles' Vicki Peterson, Chris Schlarb from dream-pop Psychic Temple, Linda Pitmon from their Baseball Project and others (who also appear in the memoir), Wynn delivers an album which touches on thoughtful alt.country with keening pedal steel (the title track with “Everything I did, I did with best intent. Every straight line I walked somehow got bent”) to the downbeat Cohen-like menace of What Were You Expecting.
“What were you expecting when you scorched the ground? Thought you’d change the system and the system took you down. Did you have a vision, was there a flash of light? Did it come too late to set things right? What were you expecting in the city of sin? The house holds the cards, and the house always wins”.
There's the hint of country-flavoured jangle pop on You're Halfway There, the intro to Making Good on My Promises suggests the raw, stomping soul which arrives sure enough and as a man of his generation uses the word “trannies” on Roosevelt Avenue, a gritty snapshot of his mean streets.
Wynn goes to root of a flawed personality on Cherry Avenue in a whispery voice (“People like us, we keep our distance. We're the last ones you would suspect . . .”) and locates Madly somewhere near the Mexican border: “Shall I write it in the stars, on cocktail napkins down in bars, how we run from what we are. She loved him madly”.
And in that opener Santa Monica – which includes the line that gave him the title of the memoir – he seems to deliberately put that paisley past into the rearview mirror: “Headphones on and I’m feeling great. Radio tells the story as we go, soundtrack from another time. Faded words and busted rhymes, the things we left behind in Santa Monica”.
Another Steve Wynn album of crafted, refined, diverse and memorable songs about trying to make it right, when it's not easy.
“It’s all so crystal clear but I can’t keep it near. Drifting gently out of reach. It’s so elusive, but not conclusive. On some distant barren beach.”
Then Again
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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here where his memoir also available.
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