Book Review: Steve Wynn “I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn’t True”

This new book, the first from Steve Wynn, is subtitled “A memoir of Life, Music, and the Dream Syndicate,” and predominantly covers Steve Wynn’s early life and the first line-ups of the Dream Syndicate.  It turns out that Steve Wynn is a pretty good writer of prose – and his memory for time and place seems remarkably good.  That he should emerge as a credible writer is explained within the pages when he explains that he very nearly travelled an alternative path into Sports Journalism, fortunately for us he eventually put that aside in favour of music, although the Baseball Project albums show a continuing obsession with one sport at least.

The book starts with a description of early years growing up in various homes in Los Angeles, an only child of a single working mother – and significantly in the sixties with all the musical influences that opened up young ears.  Wynn describes a loner existence – albeit one populated with a good number of friends and early bandmates as well as interesting older children / young adult like his father’s daughters from his first marriage (one of whom would take the ten-year-old Wynn to see Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin….and the Beach Boys).  Steve Wynn is very understanding of his parents, after they divorce he got to see two worlds as he ping-ponged between two homes: his mother offering more stability – albeit with a light touch – and at the same time dating with an eye to finding a family man and his father living a bachelor pad lifestyle with an eye to tapping into the era of free love.

Of course, though, interesting as this is it’s the rock and roll story that we want – how The Dream Syndicate came together, how they came to be a defining element of the Paisley Underground, and how they helped out that up-and-coming band R.E.M.  And the story bowls along through high school bands, a baseball obsession and the side step into sports journalism linked to a move to LA for University which eventually failed in the face of the excitement of Punk Rock and a new kind of music.  As the pathway back to music opened up with a new excitement for gigs and records it was, it appears, The Boss who sealed the deal – Wynn and Kendra Smith went to a Springsteen gig and were so uplifted that they decided that they should form a band…and they followed through.

The solid central core of the book is then the evolving tale of the Dream Syndicate’s initial rise, with gigs, and a first highly feted full album.  And then the tortuous tale of the descent that followed the making of their second album – a process that was accompanied by a seemingly endless amount of record company money and an excruciatingly protracted process of recording one instrument, one guitar lick, one drum roll over and over and over until whatever it was that had made the band good had been thoroughly ground out and expunged.  It’s painful to read – it must have been beyond awful to live through, and Steve Wynn really communicates the mixed emotions and frustrations that the A&M recording approach created.  Even tours with R.E.M. (now the happening band themselves) and U2 – very much a shift into the big time – couldn’t undo friction and frustration that would lead to line-up changes.  There are honest reflections of good and bad decisions – turning down the producer who would a year late make R.E.M. the defining College Rock band of their era may qualify as a bad one, but taking a small buy-out payment from A&M and recording a new album in a matter of days was undoubtedly a good one.  And taking the offer of a European tour as a way to see Europe for free was – taking the very long view – an excellent decision, cementing the Dream Syndicate’s place in the rock world and delivering enough loyal enthusiasts for their music to build a career on.

And all the way through there’s anecdote after anecdote, with Wynn a charming raconteur throughout.  He seemed to have had the knack of being the right age (more or less) at the right time and in the right place (more or less).  There is only one thing that jars – Wynn on a couple of occasions describes his youthful self as shy.  Shy. This is attached to a young man who continually bullshitted himself into handy jobs – whether in record stores or running DJ nights – which built him connections.  He’s not always sure how things came off how he wanted them (more or less) but there are occasional clues that he was actually a pretty self-confident and, his own phrase, “pushy” youngster.  And, to play the trump card, this is the twenty-year-old who set out solo on a Summer long Greyhound bus tour of the USA having as one of the main aims of getting to Memphis and chasing down and meeting Alex Chilton.  And, yes, chase him down he did – it’s a memorable encounter and makes for a chapter that has to be read in full rather than summarised.  And since you will surely be purchasing this volume we can leave that as that.

‘I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn’t True‘ is a provocative title for what, once we are past his formative years, are rock-and-roll tales – often with a mistake or a misunderstanding that Wynn wants to put right, or put in a different light and once one becomes aware of that well there’s the temptation to add a “what I think or wish was” to that already lengthy title.  And that’s understandable – we all tend to put our own lives in a slightly better light, or give ourselves the escape route of “I didn’t realise this would cause that reaction or I would have done it differently” – so there’s no real reason to deny Steve Wynn the same leeway.  Is it a good read?  Well, it was read first time if not quite in one sitting then certainly in less than 24hours, so scores highly on the engaging and page-turning criteria.  And for a rock and roll memoir those are pretty important criteria.  If you’ve been following the Dream Syndicate or any of Steve Wynn’s other projects for a few decades then you’ll likely want to hear what he has to say about them, and if you just have a general interest in the music of those – and these – times then likewise it makes for an illuminating read.