Well-traveled Alvin is poetry in motion
Steve Dollar
* 02/28/99
The Atlanta Journal - The Atlanta Constitution
(Copyright, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution - 1999)
Successful career strategies don't appear to have much of a place
in the pop music industry anymore. The "build-'em-up, bleed-'em-dry"
approach favored by record companies chews up new acts like breath
mints, spitting out quickly forgotten hits for future K-Tel
compilations.
If you can buy that analogy, figure Dave Alvin for a jawbreaker.
The 45-year-old singer-songwriter has done his time as an aspiring
rock 'n' roller and seen the folly of certain kinds of crossover
dreams. Along with older brother Phil, he founded the Blasters, an
unlikely roadhouse band that brought a rowdy reverence to blues and
rocka-billy-influenced songs amid the self-conscious nihilism of the
late-'70s Los Angeles punk scene. Later, Alvin took his turn as a
guitarist with X, that scene's most articulate and artful act.
TD But for most of the past 15 years, Alvin's taken the troubadour
route, embarked on the proverbial never-ending tour, playing guitar
in front of small club audiences and recording a series of seven solo
albums. "I keep my overhead low," explains Alvin, who performs
Thursday at Variety Playhouse with his four-piece band, the Guilty
Men. "In order to get the word out, you've got to take your face and
pound it into the interstate."
That hard-core work ethic has sustained a career that barely dents
the pop mainstream. Stamina, and a sense of humor, underscore much
of his approach to the business of musicmaking.
Tom Russell, a friend and fellow songwriter, tells a revealing
story about the time he invited Alvin to kick back on his farm near
the Rio Grande. "I had Dave out once," Russell begins. "Fed him
steaks. But he ended up having to dig water ditches. He looked up
one time from the shovel and growled, 'Next time, get Bob Dylan!' I
told him, 'That's the way it starts, man, back to the basics. You've
got to earn your steak dinners.' "
Along with such contemporaries as Russell, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and
Lucinda Williams, Alvin's been doing exactly that, making tough,
honest music that refracts the richness of American music traditions
* --- Dust Bowl ballads, country blues, country music's "Bakersfield"
sound, Tex-Mex, folk songs --- through his own experiences and his
focus on a specific sense of place. In his case, that place is
Southern California and the semi-rural environs of Downey, probably
better known as the working-class hometown of Richard and Karen
Carpenter.
"The edge of town now . . . it's just part of a massive sprawl,"
he says, recalling the 1950s, when "there were still mysterious,
magical places like orange groves and bean fields and avocado groves.
There was a cluster of little towns, and musically there was so much
you could go see. Along that whole southeast side of L.A. County,
there were a lot of migrations from the South. The music was there,
whether it was country or R&B or blues. You could access it. I
don't know if that's true anymore.
"When you can go to sleep one day and there's a forest outside
your window and you wake up the next morning and there's a McDonald's
. . . well, I don't want to be too depressing, but a lot of the
modern American experience has to do with that: rootlessness,
homelessness, disconnectedness," continues the singer, a
fourth-generation Californian whose family settled in the Central
Valley near Fresno in the 1870s. "One of the reasons I like
traditional music is to use that as a way to underscore that
rootlessness. It's like an echo of when things weren't that way."
Alvin's albums, including last year's acclaimed "Blackjack David,"
summon that echo, but do so in a way that is neither cliched nor
dryly imitative.
"My brother and I knew there was more to the world than just what
was presented to you," says Alvin, whose father was a union organizer
who often took his sons along for summertime visits to mining camps
across the Western states. "You just had to do a little digging.
You could do a little digging and there was this whole other
underworld. You learned there were more sides to the story. We got
to see everyone from Rev. Gary Davis to Johnny Shines to Johnny
"Guitar" Watson. Think about that now and, huh? There was a time
when you could go see these guys. I talk to young musicians and they
look at me like I was hanging out with Jesus and Buddha."
In contemporary musical terms, he might have been. There's a
strong feel in Alvin's performances --- the windblown ache in his
voice, the rumbling shadows that fall between his picked notes ---
that he's like a disciple or a devotee, retelling an old story in his
own words, making it felt anew.
