Fifteen years after he scratched a lifelong itch and moved to New York City, Steve Wynn has settled in nicely to life on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The relocation also breathed fire into a music career that already had notched landmark albums by his first band, the Dream Syndicate, collaborations with Gutterball and a slew of excellent early solo releases. Once he turned 40, Wynn rolled up his sleeves and really went to work, cranking out masterpieces like 2001’s Here Come The Miracles and 2003’s Static Transmission. Wynn, wife/drummer Linda Pitmon, Peter Buck (R.E.M.) and Scott McCaughey (Minus 5) are set to begin a U.S. tour. Read our Q&A with Wynn. (Also read our 2001 Q&A with Wynn, conducted by novelist George Pelecanos, as well as our overview of the Dream Syndicate and its fellow Paisley Underground bands.)
Steve Wynn: I love repetition. I love repetition. I love repetition. Oops, sorry. But my love of slowly evolving, undulating, hypnotic repetition is why I love bands like the Velvet Underground, Neu! and early Roxy Music. And the visual equivalent of, say, your favorite Stereolab record would be the amazing photos of Düsseldorf-born Andreas Gursky. I imagine the helpful editors at MAGNET will choose a good example of his work to sit atop this paragraph, but you really need to see his photos blown up to giant size in the museum of your choice. (Or maybe you can just put your face really, really close to your computer screen.) Anyway, I have his 99 Cent on my wall, and it’s a nice reminder that the most mundane, most simple, most obvious things can also be the most evocative. It’s also a reminder that I need to go out and buy some detergent.
