New music, new book: Masha Marjieh & Steve Wynn

Masha Marjieh, Past Present Future

Sometimes when I want to write about music I end up procrastinating because I’m worried I won’t do a good enough job writing about it. This is why I haven’t written about Past Present Future by Masha Marjieh yet despite it easily being my record of the end of the summer. I am making myself finish this and stop worrying about how good or not it is because I don’t understand why this record is not on everyone’s late summer lists? I cannot stop listening to it.

The record came out in mid-July accompanied by a record release show at an art gallery in Cass Corridor. Record release shows are usually dutiful affairs, you know, the artist plays five songs and you buy the record. But for this, the gallery was packed, the show was heavy. Marjieh came out with a Les Paul and with the first chord I was considering the different sounds different guitars produce, and also how very few women wrangle a Les Paul. It’s a heavy piece of wood! (That difference was one of the reasons why I was drawn more to a Strat than a Telecaster when I bought my first guitar.) 

The songs that night had a presence, they felt established, they were new but they didn’t feel shiny new. There was a solidity, a heaviness, a centered-ness.There’s this kind of garage psychedelia in Detroit that originates back from jazz and blues via the likes of the Stooges and the MC5 and it’s in the water and the air here, and everyone who makes music here manifests it differently, if that is the particular lineage they are pursuing. The ingestion, the processing, the output. This was heart chakra stuff, but it was also very rooted. 

I love this record. I mean, I fucking love this record. It’s deep and hypnotic, the right interplay of guitars and keyboards and most of all though it’s her vocals. There’s Ann Wilson and there’s Grace Slick and there’s the heat and fire of -- there’s more polish in their voices,  but it’s also about projection, the way their voices sounded -- and were -- gigantic. It’s projection in the way of creating some kind of vocal edifice. They are large voices. And on the other side is untrammeled emotion, it’s not “fury” the way women who take up space are usually portrayed in media, it’s manifesting deep immediate emotion like you hear in Patti Smith or Shirley Manson or PJ Harvey. There is so much color and texture, but it won’t let you just situate it in one place, it is doing many things, it is taking up many spaces. But it is also a woman in command of her instrument, she knows what she is capable of and she gives herself permission to deploy it. 

Here she is performing Past Present Future’s “Get Down,” the album’s opening track, in an audition for a Tiny Desk Concert. It conveys a lot of what I saw and felt that night in July. It is composed but it is also unrestrained. It is a force. Other highlights for me include the equally hypnotic “Medication,” “Remained the Same” which sounds like it’s been a song forever, and the album’s closing track, “Light Up The Sky.” It was a lovely record to put on at twilight and listen to while watching the sky fade into different colors of blue; that’s a good description of what hearing Past Present Future feels like.

Steve Wynn, I Wouldn't Say It If It Wasn't True

I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn’t True is fantastic, I devoured it in its entirety on Labor Day, sitting out on the sun porch and listening to the Dream Syndicate all day long. Wynn is smart and articulate and like so many of these memoirs coming out from people in the general vicinity of my age, they no longer have zero fucks to give. So they’re capable not just of being honest about their work and their lives, they’re not leaving anything behind and they’re also not glossing over things that they did or that happened. 

Wynn’s book especially interested me because of the Dream Syndicate’s kinship with the likes of R.E.M. and the Replacements and the rest of the New American Underground. Back in the day, despite hailing from the other side of the country, I knew who the Dream Syndicate were because the underground media I was consuming, whether it was zines or college radio, talked about them. I was a few years younger but the ecosphere Wynn describes of record stores / college radio / indie rock is so familiar and relatable and so for me the experience of reading this book was less learning about a scene I wasn’t around for than it was getting a window into what it was like elsewhere at the time. “Our side had won, we all knew it, and it felt great,” is how Wynn summarizes that golden fucking summer that Dream Syndicate went on tour opening for R.E.M. in 1984, post Medicine Show and Reckoning, respectively. 

The first time I saw Dream Syndicate live was when they opened for U2 at the Palladium in 1983. I believe my words when I saw their name on the marquee were something like, “Oh good, a band that doesn’t suck.” But it wasn’t just that they didn’t suck, but that they were -- adjacent -- to the headliner, which might seem ridiculous looking back on it but the U2 of War was still not fully mainstream. There’s a hilarious passage where the guitarist for Dream Syndicate got very suspicious of how much feedback the Edge was utilizing. “He’s stealing everything I do. Look at how much feedback he’s using in the show.” 

“My name is Steve. I just came two thousand miles on a Greyhound bus to meet Alex Chilton. Do you know where I can find him?”

This story gets mentioned in Holly George-Warren’s great Alex Chilton biography but it sounds much more straightforward than Wynn’s careful retelling of it here. Steve Wynn basically bought one of those unlimited Greyhound bus passes in the mid-80s and used it to see the country, but mostly used it to go find Alex Chilton in Memphis. He turned up at Tav Falco’s door because that was the address on a single that Alex played drums on, and it being Memphis and it being the 80s, he directed Wynn to the bar Alex hung out at. 

This is actually both a wonderful story and a terrible story -- Wynn even notes that  there is a certain amount of audacity involved -- and like we don’t want to encourage fans to do things like this, there was something more innocent and well-meaning in the gesture in the 80s, like Bruce Springsteen climbing over the wall at Graceland. And, he left when it was clear that he’d worn out his welcome (and couldn’t afford to keep buying Chilton beer and cigarettes). 

He also tells a story earlier in the book during his college radio days when they’d call directory assistance in London trying to see if there were any musicians they knew who were listed publicly, and this is how they struck up a phone friendship with the wife of one of the members of XTC. Would we do this now? Probably not! But there’s something sweet and charming about it happening back then. London seemed so far away and so foreign. 

I appreciate, a lot, how Wynn points out that while the Dream Syndicate had what seemed like very quick success, that it was the result of everything the various members had been doing over the previous years that made it happen so quickly once they got together -- it’s the usual “an overnight sensation is rarely overnight” scenario where people had actually been working unnoticed for a long time before finally being good enough / in the right place / with the right people. No one is an overnight sensation! He also gives equal time to the ways the band later fell apart, and why. 

The stories of working with legendary producer Sandy Pearlman in the studio for the latter record are heartbreaking. It destroyed that version of the band and wasted so much money, and like I know I’m not allowed to say anything negative about Sandy Pearlman because so many people absolutely idolized him but if you put all of those stories together about his unhinged behavior in the studio while he was producing bands he doesn’t sound quite like the genius everyone insists he is but another dude allowed to fail upwards, repeatedly. 

Wynn is one of those musicians who always seems to be on the road or releasing a new record and after reading this book I completely understand why, and how he got to the point that he has the talent and the discipline to be the kind of journeyman singer/songwriter/guitarist that he is. He’s someone that’s always appeared on the outside to be content with his place and his work and I don’t mean that in a negative sense – content is actually a fine space to strive for! – and so this isn’t a book to read to figure out how to make a zillion dollars or become a global superstar, but it is a book that sets an example of someone very happy about their ability to be able to continue to make a living as a working musician, writing and singing and performing in a variety of situations. It’s realistic (maybe? I’m sure someone I know will tell me why it isn’t) and it’s sustainable, and we should be more appreciative of those descriptors as end games. He’s still making art. He’s still thriving. He’s having fun hanging out with his friends doing it. That is a definition of success, just not one we're used to.