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 was a bit of a reggae fan in my college years. Not a fanatic, by any measure (I didn’t even smoke weed), but I would pick up the odd Burning Spear (pictured) or Dr. Alimntado record. But 18 months as the day clerk at Rhino Records (side by side with my workmate Nels Cline, but that’s a story for another place, another time) put me into a Clockwork Orange-like experience in which the store manager would play nothing but reggae white label DJ 12-inch records all day long, leaving me unable to listen to reggae music for years. All that changed when I discovered the incredible “Dynamite” (100{e5d2c082e45b5ce38ac2ea5f0bdedb3901cc97dfa4ea5e625fd79a7c2dc9f191}, 200{e5d2c082e45b5ce38ac2ea5f0bdedb3901cc97dfa4ea5e625fd79a7c2dc9f191}, 300{e5d2c082e45b5ce38ac2ea5f0bdedb3901cc97dfa4ea5e625fd79a7c2dc9f191}, etc) series on Soul Jazz Records. These collections are to reggae what Nuggets was to ’60s rock, finding the murkier, more mysterious tracks beneath the mainstream machine. I made my way out to the label’s flagship London record store, Sounds Of The Universe, and bought up almost everything on the label, an imprint that also includes some of the best New Orleans, ’80s post-punk, Nuyorican and jazz compilations. Great packaging and mastering as well—definitely a return to the days when you could buy anything on a particular label and know that you’d most likely get something very exciting.
