Consoling the inconsolable; two bands make some old bones feel less tired

"Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric; of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry." William Butler Yeats

"I long ago came to the conclusion that life is six to five against" – Damon Runyon

You have to figure that Yeats, an acerbic poet of the highest order (and quite possibly a prick of the same), knew what the hell he was talking about when he prattled off that quip. In fact, he’s right as rain on the subject. The foremost art comes not from humanity’s banal conflicts within the corporeal surroundings of everyday living, but it flows from the eternal struggle with self. Disputing others is one thing, but having war rage within self is another thing entirely. Allowing the world to see/hear/read your personal sorting of these sorts of issues is an altogether heady endeavor. Runyon, on the other hand, was a realist, a journalistic heart who knew that the scorecard was rigged from the get go. Defining yourself for your own sanity’s sake is a winged-bitch in and of itself, so why duke it out with the rest of ‘em when your biggest battle sleeps on the same pillow as you? But both are getting at the same pain-in-life’s-ass; anyway you slice the lemons you’ve gotta know that there’s gonna be a shit-healthy dose of sour for every bit of sweetness, so pucker up buddy.

"Your ghost don’t stand a chance when it’s filled with flesh and blood." – Steve Wynn

Steve Wynn, who has spent a lifetime making music from life’s lemons, whispers that line, Brian Wilson-esque, on a bewildering and beautiful song called "Morningside Heights". The song is brief, lilting, and as sharp as anything Wynn’s ever wandered into. There is very little doubt that Wynn, knowing or not, understands the conflicts of living that Yeats and Runyon seemed to ponder, and Here Come the Miracles, Wynn’s latest epic recording, is as severe and gorgeous an essay on the matter as anything in recent memory.

Oozing out of the hazy smog of early 80’s L.A. post punk Wynn’s was at the front of the punk-postpunk band Dream Syndicate, one of the more exciting rockroll noises to come along in the aftermath of (viable) punk rock’s dissolution. In 1983 the band’s full-length debut Days of Wine and Roses was an ambitious slice of wonder that refused to shy away from the glories that rock and roll had already risen a flag to while embracing a new, devolving aesthetic. Sweeping guitars soaked songs that whispered hints of Dylan, Neil Young, and Lou Reed. The Dream Syndicate approach separated the band from punk rock’s then tangled web by defining a renewed respect for rock’s past as well as driving headlong through the rubble that punk rock left strewn. Clearly these cats had listened to, and liked, some of the rock and roll that punk was noisily attempting to deconstruct. It was a queer move that seemed as startling as the anti-rock of the previous six years and it was a refreshing advance in the shadow of punk’s discontented devolving into mere noise.

As Dream Syndicate carried through the 80’s on a host of different labels ("I think, with my records here and in Europe," Wynn laughingly told Billboard’s Chris Morris recently, "I’ve been on every label in history, except Excello.") the band released a handful of records, two of which, years later, continue – along with Days – to be revelatory music and terrific listens. Ghost Stories is a driving, guitar racket of a record that edges as close to the blues as the Syndicate ever did and holds some of Wynn’s most anxious and passionate vocal performances. The other, Out of the Grey, is perhaps the most balanced and representative Dream Syndicate work; a convergence of ideas and ideals that best define this ever evolving band’s nearly indefinable art.

Here Come the Miracles isn’t Wynn’s first solo work; a handful pretty good records on which Wynn moves within and away from his Syndicate sound expanding his sonic references, precede it. The most visible of which, Kerosene Man and Dazzling Display, catch Wynn exploring the lengths of his musical reach, but neither of those records could have foreseen, or understood, Wynn’s lustrous retreat into the ragged glory of his Dream Syndicate sounds on Miracles. That said, by no means is Miracles an impatient, toe-tapping wait for the revival of a great band that once was, but rather it is a resounding and astonishing new record by a man with a past that cannot be overlooked. Dream Syndicate existed, and still exist, in the music they made, and Wynn’s main point of reference happens to be this little band from early 80’s L.A. that left its beautiful scar on the face of modern music. Miracles, in fact, exceeds the profundity of any of the Dream Syndicate records and by default becomes the defining moment in not only Wynn’s career, but also in the possibilities that post-punk rock and roll has always promised, but so rarely delivered.

But Here Come the Miracles isn’t merely a title for Wynn’s two-disc marvel – it is an announcement; a crier’s call; the final statement on a career reaching an enviable peak. It is as assured a record as anything in Wynn’s canon, and never for a moment turns away from its extraordinary influences. "Blackout", with its wonderful Chris Cacavas organ, hums like, and rivals, poetic Dylan ("show me the way to the witness stand / and you can read the lines from the palm of my hand" Wynn croons). Fuzzed out blues haunts sing-songy pop in the bipolar title tune and then aggravate the fiery "Crawling Misanthropic Blues". "Good and Bad" just simmers. Yet, most surprising though is the hardened spirituality that permeates the record. Rough and tumble tunes about worn-out stragglers, terrified survivors, down and out losers, lost believers, and burned out shells of people are rife with the beleaguered hopes of those who just carry-on. The battered and beaten, moving forward, crawling through life, in search of a well of redemption, just waiting and wanting to take their draw. On "Drought" Wynn reveals this story with such a numinous performance that the cut lifts from darkness to become the most life-affirming thing Wynn has ever done. "If they come looking for me you can tell them I’m dead," he sings, spitting the words. "I might be there watching or hiding instead."

And then, of course, there is Lou Reed. You can hear Reed all over this record, most dark corners are turned with Wynn sounding slightly Reed-like, mapping his terrain in Reed-ian fashion, and coming across as literary and as painfully haunted as Reed. Yet, at its peak Reed moment, the utterly brilliant "Butterscotch", Miracles doesn’t want to be Lou Reed at all; it shoots at surpassing Reed – being better than Reed while quietly acknowledging him. Mott the Hoople backing vocals rise to an angelic hum, covering Wynn’s speak-sung sunken words with a glimmer of befuddled light. To Wynn’s credit he backs down from the influence not one-inch. In fact, he embraces it with gusto as he creates a smoldering document on Miracles that serves California up to Wynn as New York has been to Reed. California serves as the abstract object of Wynn’s scorn, anger, fears, anxieties, as well as his amazement, his joy, and the beauty/horror at the core of his spirit. "Southern California Line", "Drought", "Death Valley Rain", "Sunset to the Sea", and "Topanga Canyon Freaks" all name names, none of them overtly pretty, but all of them necessary in Wynn’s search for salvation.

More than anything else that – salvation - is what Miracles is all about. From the outset when Wynn sings in "Here Come the Miracles" about "sunshine coming through the pouring rain" and it taking "more than faith to get through this maze" his grasps at salvation are sublimely pronounced. The best hope in life comes from the reaching -for something – whether you know it’s out there or not, because in the reaching lies belief. So as "Good and Bad" travels, loping along, on the slow beauty of Cacavas’ piano Wynn tries to sort things, saying with uncertain confidence "There’s more than just good and bad / there’s a reason / a reason for everything". The line contemplates its own implied darkness for a second or two before guitar erupts into a sudden flood of sunshine.

But in the end, in a near-perfect song called "There Will Come a Day", Wynn pours out all of the anger and frustrations that salvation seems to bring with it:

I was thinking of my troubles
As people sometimes will
Everyone who had done me wrong
And those who would wrong me still
And in a fit of desperation
I found myself on my knees
Wishing pain and suffering
On all my enemies…

Then he quickly reverses course, realizing, perhaps, that all of the fury of youth, the tumult that fueled Dream Syndicate and his punk beginnings, was somewhat in vain:

But as I made my wishes
And as I cast my spells
I stopped myself and said a prayer
And said these words to myself
There will come a day
There will come a day
When all of the evil
Will be washed away
The patient will be rewarded
And all their tormentors will pay

It’s a gorgeous tune. Upbeat, rollicking, piano and organ grinding away, rhythms swaying, and Wynn, devoid of influences, singing with clarity in his own distinct voice. It is the perfect song to close out Wynn’s most perfect record, one that will be with us for the ages.

Facing the horror-task of putting together a record under the very long shadow of your finest moment is a daunting task that would seem to only offer chances at disappointment if not disaster. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with Chuck Cleaver and the Ass Ponys that the follow-up to last years definitive Some Stupid with a Flair Gun is neither. LOHIO, the Ponys confident new disc, is a different card altogether than was Flair Gun.

The latter was a distinct and harrowing account of middling-aged realities; a brilliantly stark chronicle that took stock of people and priorities at a point when life would seem to require such ruthless assessing. LOHIO, on the other hand, is perhaps best embodied in the apparently striaght-up rock and roll of a cut titled "Dried Up". The song is the reminiscence of a survivor (or fool) who savors the sweet memories of his youth with a cynical ("we were alive or something" he sings, eyeing old photos), but yearning eye. It could be the same guy who sniffed at his own mortality on Flair Gun, finally accepting the challenge of living the rest of a now "more mature" life that he’d been questioning the value of. He is older, questionably wiser, and struggling in the learning to look back in restrained joy more than in anger anymore. It’s a seedy little moment that nestles in the heart of an unsavory catharsis that each and every one of us eventually has to contend with.

But LOHIO cuts itself loose from the shackles of Flair Gun and becomes a more loose, more joyous record by stepping out of the long shadow of paralleling despair that darkened the edges around most of Flair Gun’s songs. "Last Night it Snowed" plows wonderfully through musical Springsteen-ian dramatics, "Black Dot" is more distinct Pony sci-fi pop, songs about Donald Sutherland ("Kung Fu Reference", a broken lover’s song titled, cleverly enough, "Donald Southerland"), John Carradine (a sad television fueled life; a creepy mantra saying "if you ever gave a damn for Sunny Jim, I’m sure you must remember him") and pop culture as life ("Only") abound.

The Ponys spend much of LOHIO rolling through a country-tinged abuse of the rockroll paradigm with such verve you hardly noticed the sobriety involved. But when the hardest moments, the Ponys deep post-millennial bluez, drip melancholy from the record you cannot help but lose yourself in the gentle current. Summer songs, or better yet, August songs, desperate Ohio August songs that the Ponys – Ohioans themselves – know so well, haunt the disc like that hard, lazy, dry brown month that lays itself heavily across end-of-summer Midwestern life. "Calendar Days" is vividly fantastic; it spills its humidity, creeping through the aching fiddle that announces it, right into the "bottomless pit of your heart", the heart that, Cleaver explains, gets broken far too often. LOHIO touches the out of love with someone who is in love. It’s never a pretty scene.

While mortality still weaves a fine thread through Cleavers work on LOHIO, it is hardly the weighty behemoth it was on Flair Gun. Instead Cleaver’s characters have moved beyond the daydreams of death and have fallen headlong into seeking life’s, moreover, love’s meaning. The affairs of the heart are a dicey affair that Cleaver knows can be even more painful than extinction, and armed with a keen eye for such things Cleaver delivers beautiful heartbreak on "Dollar a Day" and the simple, plaintive, and resigned "Nothing Starts Today". Oddly enough, considering the oft misguided characterizations the Ponys endure, it is within this sort of splendid folksy acoustic guitar grace that LOHIO serves the Ass Ponys up as one of the more urgent and necessary pop bands of these fearful days.

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