Steve Wynn Breaks Out of the Syndicate

The Dream Syndicate was never quite the Los Angeles institution that, say, the Dodgers are. But the band was a seminal force in the city’s ‘80s underground rock evolution.

So now that Dream Syndicate leader Steve Wynn has gone solo, he’s faced with having to redefine himself, at least musically speaking.

“That’s the main reason I went solo,” Wynn said, pondering the Dodger analogy while taking in a recent game at the Stadium. “It’s not so much redefining but undefining. With Dream Syndicate, I had to stay with two-guitars-bass-drums and with this I could break out of that.”

This is “Kerosene Man,” Wynn’s solo debut album, released recently by Rhino Records. On the album, Wynn tries some of the directions he’d only hinted at from within the Syndicate’s format.

The first two songs, “Tears Won’t Help” and “Carolyn,” are accented by a cello that evokes images of both Van Morrison’s Caledonia soul and the baroque-pop ‘60s group the Left Banke. Several other songs have a late-night jazz feel via saxophone contributions by Steve Berlin. And “Conspiracy of the Heart,” a torchy duet with Concrete Blonde’s Johnette Napolitano, explores territory pretty much new to Wynn on record.

The break with the past is hardly complete: Wynn’s new band includes Dream Syndicate bassist Mark Walton and performs several of the old group’s numbers in its live set (Wynn and band will be at the Sunset in Sierra Madre on Wednesday, Bogart’s on Thursday and Club Lingerie on Friday). But it has afforded Wynn the opportunity to reexamine the role he played in the past in Los Angeles rock and the role he’d like to play now.

“We were the second wave of punk rock,” he said of the Dream Syndicate, which was influenced by the Velvet Underground and Neil Young. “By the times things had gotten jaded in punk we were the ones who were new and hadn’t been any part of a scene and that helped open things up. A lot of good bands came out of that.”

Lately Wynn has found that the influence went far beyond Los Angeles.

“There are lot of new bands, like Galaxie 500 from Boston and Eleventh Dream Day from Illinois that come up to me and say, ‘We saw you in 1982 and you’re the reason we formed the band,’ ” he said proudly.

So now, without renouncing the past, Wynn has his attention set on establishing a new identity both at home and away.

“I feel like a rookie now,” he said, to extend the baseball imagery. “I’m going to carry the Dream Syndicate baggage for a long time, but I see myself as a guy who just made his first album.”