Time Is The Best Medicine

dream syndicate reissue paints a clearer picture

It’s almost a Hollywood cliché…promising young band signs to a major and comes out the other end pummeled, singed and largely indistinguishable. In 1983 The Dream Syndicate tumbled into bed with A&M Records, which helped cushion their fall with a $150K recording budget for sophomore outing Medicine Show. The songs were just as solid as their Indie debut (The Days of Wine and Roses) but something had broken in the process.

“We’d come out the other side of the Rubicon a very different band with very different music, and there was no turning back.” Singer/guitarist Steve Wynn said in his 2024 memoir I Wouldn't Say It If It Wasn't True. “We had made a record that was markedly different from our first, and I was a very different person…I was ultimately very happy with the record, but I was physically and mentally a mess.”

Steve Wynn had largely drank his way through the sessions for the album, while Blue Öyster Cult producer Sandy Pearlman tried to inflate the band into a similarly sized AOR creature for radio. But despite months and months of relentless takes, the man who’d recorded “Don’t Fear The Reaper” and The Clash’s “Safe European Home” couldn’t catch what he was chasing.

To be fair the band itself was morphing. They had shed original bassist Kendra Smith and guitarist Karl Precoda had finally found someone behind the mixing desk who could get him closer to his ideal of being an updated version of UFO’s Michael Schenker. At least one of Wynn’s guitar parts was re-written and by the time they wrapped, nearly six months had passed and $250,000 had been spent (roughly the equivalent to $780,000 in 2025 money). The original release materialized in May 1984 but before the year was out, the band was done.

Now four decades later, a comprehensive look at that particular chapter of The Dream Syndicate’s history has been compiled into a 42-track four CD set that collects demos, live material, rehearsals and radio performances. Additionally, a freshly remastered 140g vinyl copy produced from the original ½ inch tape is also available – the first pressing in more than a decade.

Musically the album stands somewhat outside the College Rock arena into which it was birthed – no synthesizers, no jangle, and no resuscitated psychedelia. This iteration of The Dream Syndicate flitted somewhere between the six-pack grit of the Bob Stinson era Replacements and the more reverb-y side of the early Long Ryders. Toss in a splash of Lou Reed circa “Growing Up In Public,” and you’re there.

The original release has plenty of charm to it; particularly when you arrive at the eight minute plus epic ”John Coltrane Stereo Blues” on side two. But the original eight tracks acquire another persona to them when they sit in and amongst all this bonus material. All three of the band’s bass players are accounted for across the course of the set, and you clearly hear how multi-dimensional this instance of the band was, and how the finished album is just one of its many faces.

As evidence, just take a listen to the recently discovered cuts from a 1983 CBGB’s performance. The Medicine Show songs have a completely different amped up verve to them that make you wonder why Pearlman simply couldn’t capture that instead of trying to Bohemian Rhapsody his way to an arena rock triumph.

The new pressing is immaculate – quiet with clearly defined mids and a high end that doesn’t sound so much tamed as it does organic and extremely pleasing to the ear particularly at volume. But just spend 30 seconds or so with your focus on the kick drum alone and it’s clear just how much it outpaces the digital. But to sidestep the CD would be a mistake as the finished album just doesn’t tell the complete story of this material. As Wynn would ultimately say about the project:

“On the one hand, I curse Sandy for making us slog it out for six months. On the other hand, I’m happy that he helped us get to where we had to get. By the time the record was finished, Medicine Show was a very cohesive, focused record...a portrait of a band, something we weren’t before and never were again. But I love what we did on that record.”

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Interview with Steve Wynn of The Dream Syndicate

Tracking Angle: Back in ’84 you said that to Slash Records you guys were just another quirky, strange band, but A&M kind of viewed you like Martians. You still think that was true?

Steve Wynn: That’s the kind of snarky thing I would have said back then. In a way we fit in naturally with Slash because we were there with bands like X and the Gun Club…bands you would associate us with. But A&M had a real reputation for having oddball bands too. They were a real artist label. They had things like The Police at the time, who were still, at that point, just before their biggest hits. And they had IRS on the lot. So, it wasn’t like…that outside.

I just saw today a review in Uncut of the reissue that said, “Oh, they dropped us a year later.” They actually really liked us there. They really did like the band and really supported us and really believed in the record a lot. It was kind of amazing because by all means, we shouldn’t have been the kind of band that a label like that would have been enthusiastic, let alone tolerant of, because we were such a weird band. We weren’t...we were never designed to be a mainstream pop band. And I think they knew that.

TA: Listening to how different some of the earlier versions of these songs are now that they are collected on the CD version of the reissue, do you now have a better appreciation of what Sandy Pearlman brought to the record?

SW: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I’m really glad that this box set exists because it shows what really wasn’t shown before. It shows the progression that took us from Days of Wine and Roses to Medicine Show. When you hear those two records without hearing anything in between...if you hadn’t seen us live back then or hung out with us at a rehearsal...you’d think, “How did they get from that to that?” The box does show the progression.

Sandy kind of went into it, by his own admission, thinking he was going to get the Days of Wine and Roses dream scenario. He knew Kendra wasn’t in the band, but he thought, “Well, that’s kind of the band we are.” And we weren’t. So I think we were all looking for what we were. For those first few months in the studio, we all had different ideas of what that was. My idea was, “We’re going to be a weird, dark, confrontational band.” Carl’s idea was, “We’re going to be a band going for the brass ring because we’re on A&M...we should.” And Sandy’s was, “I’m going to somehow bridge those two things and make it a band.” And it took a while.

TA: You mentioned in your memoir (“I Wouldn't Say It If It Wasn't True”) that a lot of the Medicine Show tapes were lost.

SW: There was a fire. The Automatt burned down a couple of years after we recorded there. It was a great studio with a lot of history, but it burned down to the ground. That’s where the two-inch tapes were...so they’re gone. The mixes...the half-inch tape...survived, and that’s how we did a lot of the reissues over the years, including everything in this box set. But yeah, the two-inch tape is gone. It’s really too bad because there’s probably some really great stuff on there.