Dream Syndicate Plays "Medicine Show," Small's Bar, Hamtramck, MI, October 6, 2026
Sorry we were late but we were just tuning
I GOT SOME JOHN COLTRANE ON THE STEREO, BABY / MAKE IT FEEL ALRIGHT
I spent last week immersed in R.E.M. because I wrote about the Michael Shannon/Jason Narducy outing for my column at Salon.com this week (gratuitous plug) and that is probably why I walked into the bar tonight and it felt like I stepped through an air lock and back into the 1980s, before I heard the pre-show tape, before the show itself even began. And then the band came onstage promptly at 7pm, the Dream Syndicate opening for Medicine Show. (From that aspect, more shows should be like this. But also in many other aspects!)
If you don't know the story, the band lost the rights to Medicine Show for like 30 years and only got it back recently under the condition that it only be released on their own record label, they couldn't license it to someone else. (I wrote about this reissue in depth last year.) So for the past year they went out and toured this, the original lineup of Wynn, drummer Dennis Duck and bassist Mark Walton, enhanced by Steve Wynn & the Miracle 3 guitarist Jason Victor.
They play a set of post-reunion material, take a break, and then come back to play the album. The opening set isn't any kind of throwaway and I kind of felt bad for the people who came late because they thought there was an opening band because it was immediate full court press, the manifestation of the very loud and particular noise that is the Dream Syndicate that dozens of other bands tried and failed to copy. So much loud, insistent, dischordant, harmonic guitar made my heart sing, immediately. I could not stop smiling. That is an achievement in this day and age, in this news cycle.
That opening set was so incredibly powerful to a room that was nowhere near full, and you just felt fully immersed. The two guitar attack prong of Wynn and Victor is formidable. The rhythm section operates on an invisible trip wire, but they're all operating on that wavelength, in a Crazy Horse-esque kind of zone, it's like that force produced by adjacent magnets where they are attracted to each other by energy but also each have a buffer zone so they don't click together.
Wynn was sporting a Boy Howdy t-shirt in honor of playing Detroit (Hamtramck is surrounded by Detroit. It counts) and informed us all that every note we heard was influenced by CREEM. (He also explained that Dream Syndicate once got to be the CREEM DREAM and that's when they learned it really isn't CREEM beer, but beer cans with CREEM wraparound decals.)
At one point during the show Jason was having technical difficulties, which is only worth mentioning because it gave Wynn an opportunity to vamp, and he is definitely skilled in that regard. He offers to start reciting Lou Reed's rants on Take No Prisoners, and I'm glad he didn't because I definitely know too much of that record by heart ("I need to grow an inch or meet a boyfriend." "MEET A WHAT?" "Meet a boyfriend, can't you fucking hear.")
This was the record nominated as the comedy record of the year by CREEM, specifically the part during an almost 20-minute "Walk On The Wild Side" where (as Wynn explained) Lou tells Robert Christgau "fuck you" because "Imagine working for a year on a record and you get a B+ from some asshole in the Village Voice." He did not get to the part about the chicken that plays basketball because Jason finished his troubleshooting but this is just the kind of thing you would expect from Steve Wynn.
They aren't playing Medicine Show in order, which is I think the correct approach for a tour where you're playing a record night after night. You don't sequence a live show the same way you sequence a record; you probably don't sequence a CD the way you sequenced a record that had two discrete sides. But in my opinion, what people are going to these kinds of shows for is the emotional experience of listening to a particular record, and as long as that core vibe is present and accounted for, they're meeting the spirit of the intent and not just the letter. And man, the spirit is the most important thing.
And, honestly, ending with "John Coltrane Stereo Blues" is the right call. I did not appreciate this then as much as I do now; back then, it felt a little too close to hippie shit, it felt a little too close to madness sometimes, at a time when I was trying to keep myself at a remove from a potential maelstrom. And tonight when the band played "Coltrane" at the end of the set, and Wynn segued into a couple of lines of "Break On Through (To The Other Side)" I thought, if this had been somewhere in the 80s and definitely if it had been at CBs I would have been standing there flipping them the bird. They're a very LA band, they are entitled to the reference... I still thought about doing it.
I hadn't really planned about writing about this show in depth but I was challenging myself during the show; anyone can write "inject this into my veins" but that's lazy, what does that actually mean. What it meant for me in that moment was that the music tonight was as dark and as vicious as it was 40 years ago, when they were the exactly right tone and depth and ferocity, but you know what, that tone and depth and ferocity is exactly as relevant and valid in 2026.
I was ready to head to the next show in Cleveland before they were halfway done.
Catching up!
Caryn Rose
Caryn Rose
