VIA PRESS RELEASE | The Dream Syndicate reveal a newly expanded 40th Anniversary Edition release History Kinda Pales When It and You Are Aligned: The Days Of Wine and Roses (4xCD Expanded Edition). Collecting 54 songs from the original line-up, including 10 hard-to-find rarities and 31 never released recordings.
An exceptional early ‘80s guitar-powered gem, remastered in full and includes a wealth of unreleased material. This newly expanded 4 CD collection includes tracks from main protagonist Steve Wynn’s earlier combo 15 Minutes, the debut EP, astounding cover renditions (Johnny Cash, Janis Joplin, The Who), recordings of the band’s first ever rehearsal, along with several visceral live concerts live concerts pre-dating the recording of their album.
Celebrating the album’s 40th year, this beautifully housed bookback edition also includes 30 pages of liner notes by band historian Pat Thomas, new interviews with Kendra Smith, engineer Paul Cutler and producer Chris D, rare photos, gig posters, and more.
Central to the hugely influential Paisley Underground scene of the early 1980s that spawned Green On Red, The Bangles, Long Ryders, and Rain Parade. With a nod to the Velvet Underground, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Dylan, packed into an incendiary slow-burn punk fuse, The Days Of Wine And Roses is a glorious, upbeat sprawl, everything that rock ‘n’ roll should be.
Steve Wynn says, “It’s funny how over the years you reinvent a fictionalized history of your past, amended, and reinforced repeatedly until it becomes a brand-new fact, ripe and ready for further revisionism. And for a band with as long and continuously revisited a history as my band The Dream Syndicate, there has been plenty of time for deviation from the original story.
The retelling of the story has hardly been willful or clever, although Karl Precoda and I used to delight in telling journalists that we met at Dodger Stadium, overhearing the other talk about cool rock bands or that we originally set out to be a party band called Hot Rocks that would cover said Rolling Stones album start to finish (the latter was true for about the time it took to consume one tumbler of whiskey at a local bar).
Instead, I’ve found myself buying the myth, investing in the easy narrative of a band that had a shockingly quick impact with a universally beloved debut EP and LP and took it from there. There are stories told in interviews over the last 40 years, songs mutated in performances in those same decades, memories absentmindedly trimmed, sanitized, remade, remodeled.
But hearing these bonus tracks of live and rehearsal performances of The Dream Syndicate, culled by Pat Thomas from the cassette collection of Dennis Duck, I remember things about that band and what we were doing in 1982 that I had long since forgotten. We would actually listen to these cassettes back then religiously, simultaneously for study and clues for what to do next but also just out of amazement that we were suddenly playing in our own favorite band, doing a kind of music we had only dreamed somebody might do someday.”
History Kinda Pales When It and You Are Aligned: The Days Of Wine and Roses (4xCD Expanded Edition) is set for release on Fire America on 23rd June. Outside of the US, this special release will be available digitally only.
