The Dream Syndicate
Ghost Stories

In its few years of career, the Dream Syndicate garnered far less than what it had sown. "Ghost Stories" in 1988 ends the story with a "classic" album, and not just because it was produced by Elliot Mazer who worked on Neil Young's rawer and sparser records.

If rock has its own "classicism", understood as an immortal style, then the Dream Syndicate managed to perfectly interpret all its best suggestions. The Paisley Underground movement, a return in every way to the roots of true rock, whether or not it was an invention of critics, still wrote something indelible in the history of this genre and laid the groundwork for a Californian generation of bands like Long Ryders, Green On Red, Rain Parade, True West not to play to (dis)sell their souls to the market, but to bare it through music (and come to think of it, these are all bands that broke up soon because nothing is more self-destructive than poverty). Once Steve said that perhaps it is not difficult to record a song like "The Side I'll Never Show" that opens this record in the studio, but it's a whole other thing to share it every night on stage with a bunch of people, confessing that: "...there is no light shining in my heart, just emptiness and a faded glow on the side of me I will never show".

So who is Steve Wynn? Definitely a fascinating character, perhaps nostalgic and sentimental despite life's disappointments that push to be disenchanted or worse cynical. Old companions of adventure (Kendra Smith, Karl Precoda) who leave for other destinies and record labels that, in the Reagan years dominated by the myth of financial success as the only measure of social life, only think about how many records you can help them sell.

If we listen to a ballad like "Whatever You Please", then Warren Zevon or Lou Reed’s "Coney Island" come to mind. The ballad seems to be the preferred rock form by the Dream Syndicate in their last studio album, a harbinger of the direction Steve Wynn's solo career will soon take, that acrid and slow electric song in which to pour bitterness, regret or the torment of a restless soul. But hard moments are not missing in these grooves, as is the group’s tradition: "Wheatered and Thorn" possesses the best cadences of rock blues without falling into the cumbersome burden of repetitiveness as in the classic "See that my grave is kept clean" by the great blind bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson. The raw guitars biting "Loving The Sinner, Hating the Sin" erase the sometimes polished sound of the previous unexpected return album, "Out Of the Grey" that perhaps did not turn out the way they and we expected.  The stunning nakedness of "Someplace Better Than This" features Steve’s voice playing with the sound of silence yet inundated by stonish visions suspended between a "Factory Girl", purged of any country flavor, and a "Lady Jane" with no sort of frills.

And to conclude "When the Curtain Falls", another beautiful ballad this time painted with the variegated colors of psychedelia. A clear curtain of guitars managed by Paul B. Cutler (who makes his punk dark band 45 Grave origin felt) serves as a backdrop for yet another urban confession by Steve.

It's a different sound from that of five years earlier, from the days of wine and roses, it lost that youthful, dreamy frenzy and gained maturity and awareness of daily reality.

Farewell to the old Dream Syndicate. Welcome to the new Steve Wynn.