The curse of getting a song you don’t like stuck in your head can be absolutely maddening. I’m not even sure I can think of too many times where I got a song I do like stuck in my head and thought, “I love this song! This works out perfectly!” It’s like the hiccups: the more you think about it the harder it is to make it go away and once its gone you almost immediately forget what utter misery you were in..until it comes back. I don’t think I’d ever come across the Deep Blue Dream s/t 12″ EP until some time last year when it popped up in the new arrivals bin at a shop I frequent. It has a promising cover but upon first listen the only things I thought were “Their guitarist really likes R.E.M.”, “Their singer really likes 4AD “goth” bands” and finally “Their name reminds me of ‘Deep Blue Something’.” Sure enough, just that simple memory jog led me to find myself hearing “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” in my head for two days straight. And that led me to remembering one of the dumbest quotes from a Rolling Stone one-hit-wonder puff piece I’ve ever seen where they ask one of the band members from Deep Blue Something what the song is about and he says something like, (and yes, I’m paraphrasing), “Well, I wrote that song after watching the Audrey Hepburn movie “Roman Holiday” but, like, I didn’t think that’d be as cool of a song title.”
I saw the record in the same bin a few weeks later and it bothered me so much I took it out of new arrivals bin and filed it under misc. D just to prevent this from happening again. That day, a conversation with a friend led me to bringing the record up and eventually one of us Googling it. Turns out, the overconfident lead vocalist of Deep Blue Dream was none other than Wayne Wells, future front man for 90’s nu-metal act and OzzFest/X Games mainstays Static-X. This alone wouldn’t have interested me much but upon further investigation I learned Billy Corgan was once a member of Deep Blue Dream until The Smashing Pumpkins took off and he left to become a respected rock musician and multi-millionaire. The way Wells tells the story, Deep Blue Dream was the hot band in Chicago at the time and the Pumpkins were just starting off and not very good. Even so, guitarist Billy Corgan was obviously a huge talent and Wells invited to join his band, which he did. Wells claims that Corgan being a smaller guy than he, with shorter hair and even slightly smaller amplifiers than his led to Billy being know as “Little Wayne” among the Deep Blue Dream entourage. If you read Well’s accounts of how this all happened, he pretty much says that shortly after Corgan left the band, Deep Blue Dream broke up and he moved to LA where he formed Static-X in 1994 and then they signed to Warner Brothers and they released their debut album “Wisconsin Death Trip” in 1999 which eventually went Platinum. So, Deep Blue Dream released their s/t EP in 1988. The Smashing Pumpkins released their debut “Gish” in 1991, after Corgan had left Deep Blue Dream. There seems to be a few “missing years” in LA that Wells glosses over in most interviews I’ve found but seeing as he passed away in 2014 after suffering a drug and alcohol overdose, I’m not going to be a jerk and speculate on those years, no matter how much I hate his choice of facial hair and his appropriation of the hair style from Gary Panter’s Screamers logo:
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The four songs off the Deep Blue Dream EP are all on Youtube but if you really want to hear them as they were meant to be heard and the one copy that’s up on Discogs right now disappears, for the low price of $128.95 you can hire this guy who claims he will be able to “acquire” the record through his “network of record dealers,” record an “audiophile CD” of the record and then mail both the original vinyl and the CD to you as long as you can wait “2-4 weeks for order processing.” He’s got a 99.6% feedback rating on MusicStack.com and I can only assume that’s really good.
