Steve Wynn - Here Come the Miracles

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been: Garage Rock Revisited

Double album. The words conjure images of ego gratification through artistic sprawl. The press bio for the Steve Wynn’s Here Come the Miracles calls the album his 'Exile on Mainstreet', his 'Zen Arcade', and yeah, his 'Physical Graffiti'. Even the best double albums—you could add the likes of The White Album, The Wall, and Tusk (and some others I’m not recalling right now) to those mentioned in the bio—tend to be, as Henry James said of the novels of Tolstoy, "large, loose, baggy monsters." Rather than a monolith of self-indulgent pop experimentation, though, Here Come the Miracles is a tightly-wound, stripped-down double-CD set of spontaneous, jagged-edged garage rock banged out during a 10-day stretch at a recording studio in the Arizona desert.

Steve Wynn has varied musical tastes (he frequently lists Phil Spector and Dr. Dre as favorite producers), and has never been one to follow the musical trends of the day. As the front man for the Dream Syndicate, with new wave and pop music increasingly relying on electronics in the early 80’s, Wynn rejuvenated guitar-based rock with the Dream Syndicate’s freeform psychedelic rock, kicking off the Paisley Underground movement in Los Angeles, and helping to formalize the style of music that came to be know as alternative rock. In 1995, Wynn and Green on Red front man Dan Stuart recorded (as “Dan and Dusty”) Lost Weekend, an album that pioneered the alt.country subgenre that would blossom a decade later.

By the time the 90’s rolled around, with the murky, distorted guitar fuzz of grunge swallowed up popular music, Wynn was crafting ornate, sophisticated pop solo albums like Dazzling Display (1991) and Fluorescent (1994). As bubblegum pop reclaimed the airwaves with the century winding down, Wynn rekindled a love for garage rock and vintage soul influences on 1999’s My Midnight. For Here Come the Miracles, Wynn is ahead of the curve again, choosing this time out to remove most of the pop elements from his songs, assembling a garage band extraordinaire with frequent collaborators Chris Cacavas (formerly of Green on Red), Linda Pitmon (Zuzu’s Petals), and Chris Brokaw (Codeine, Come), plus bassist Dave DeCastro.

Like its doppelganger—the other masterpiece of post-garage rock released in 2001—The White Stripes’ White Blood Cells, Here Come the Miracles reinvents a rawer, simpler form of rock, placing the classic garage rock of bands like the Count 5, the Shadows of Knight, and ? and the Mysterians in a modern context. The double album’s 19 songs combine loud, distorted garage rock, 70’s soul and R&B, lurid pulp fiction, midday desert sun, and hot asphalt into incredible songs like “Sustain,” “Southern California Line,” “Death Valley Rain,” and “There Will Come a Day.”

It’s not often that an artist produces a career defining work almost two decades into a career (the 19 tracks on Here Come the Miracles mirror Wynn’s 19 year-long recording career), but this record exceeds the reach of even the Dream Syndicate’s classic debut Days of Wine and Roses (which, coincidentally, was re-released on Rhino in 2001). Here Come the Miracles is a brilliant summation of the spirit that has driven Wynn’s career, without question one of the best albums of 2001, and, above all, further evidence of the strange power music can hold over us.

--Matt Parks (Jan. 17, 2002)