Passion and survival

Somewhere tonight a man straps on a
guitar to face the world. Somewhere tonight a man is pouring his all out upon
the stage. Somewhere tonight this man sings the blues. His music speaks for
those without a voice or for those who simply haven’t found one yet — the
unheralded, unsung everyday heroes just like him.

            Somewhere
tonight this man will lay his head down on a flat, too-clean pillow on an
expired mattress in yet another strange motel room. He’ll sleep a few hours
amidst the ringing in his ears before he gets up, piles his 48-year-old bones
into a van to drive to yet another destination to do it all again.

            Somewhere
tonight an audience is lucky enough to hear this man’s tales of love and death
and hope and faith come to life in a palpable flurry of well-worn roots rock.
Dave Alvin is on stage.

            This
is Alvin’s passion. The road’s allure and romance have long since faded to
black. Nobody can write a love song, rock ‘n’ roll rave-up, or lonesome ballad
quite like Alvin. Though stardom — the kind that sadly equals legitimacy in
our pop world — eludes him, the man perseveres through an endless string of
gigs.

            “I
love playing live,” Alvin says from his LA home, a place he sees roughly half
the year. “Whatever’s glamorous about truck stops and motel rooms and bad food
and sore backs… that’s gone away. Driving all night from Seattle to Dallas,
that’s sort of lost its thrill. But the actual gig, the actual playing, that’s
still the greatest thing in life. That’s the addiction.”

            Alvin
first rolled out with his brother Phil in 1979 in The Blasters. The band roared
out of Downey, California, and into the middle of the LA punk scene. And though
he’s a humble guy, Alvin readily agrees The Blasters played some of the finest
rock ‘n’ roll of this generation.

            The
band mixed all the elements of roots rock — or just “American music,” as they
called it — with incendiary energy and a remarkably reverent instrumentation
(the band even boasted Little Richard’s sax man, Lee Allen).

            But
what truly set the band above other fledgling roots-rockers at that time like
Los Lobos, The Paladins, James Intveld, The Stray Cats, The Rockats, and the
like was Dave Alvin’s songwriting. While the band relentlessly rocked on, Phil
Alvin would sing his brother’s tunes with words that were as regal as they were
blue-collar. Brother Dave hung back, preferring to beat the hell out of his
guitar.

            Alvin
left the band in 1986 and briefly joined up with X having already branched out
with X members in The Knitters in 1983. The all-original Blasters lineup
reunited last year for a tour and to record a live album.

            “The
reunion was one of the highlights of my life,” he says, adding that another
tour is “not unlikely.”

            So
it was from The Blasters’ rubble and after a few short detours that Alvin
emerged a solo artist, playing the rough ‘n’ tumble barroom rock he’d been
known for, tempered with a lean toward country and folk-tinged ballads. There
was Dave Alvin the rocker and Dave Alvin the balladeer.

            “They’re
both the same thing, they really are,” he says. “They just use different
muscles.”

            Alvin
doesn’t feel the need to differentiate. An evening in the early ’70s at the
fabled Ashgrove in Los Angeles showed him the light.

            It
was a one-two punch with The Reverend Gary Davis (who would die three months
later) and Johnny “Guitar” Watson” on the same bill.

            “So
there was Reverend Gary Davis, who was dying,” Alvin says. “And he was at peace
with himself and his life and the world and it was great, it was amazing. And
then after him was Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson who had been arrested earlier that
day by the LAPD.” Alvin’s not sure of the charge, “but he was pissed off and he
had a band and he was playing electric,” he says, laughing.

            “And
right there in one show was the whole history of not only the blues but, in
some ways, of American music. And that taught me at a very early age that there
is no difference. There’re stylistic differences, but bottom line — nah, same
notes.”

            It
was from the impact of this show and countless others (Muddy Waters, Albert
King, Juke Boy Potter, and Johnny Shines just to name a few) at this long-gone
joint that Alvin arrived at the title of his tenth and latest solo record, Ashgrove. This is an album that ought to
please fans on both sides of the Alvin fence: rock ‘n’ rollers and those who
dig his more pensive material. Recorded essentially live, the album waxes of
earth, cigarette smoke, steel, and wood.

            “The
weird paradox,” he says, “is that in the digital recording age that we’ve come
into, it’s actually easier to record like you did at Chess or at Sun or like
Charlie Patton did in the ’20s. It has actually made it easier and cheaper to
record live.”

            Ashgrove is definitely a guitar
album. It pumps and strolls and shuffles and boogies with occasional plunges
into heartaches as big as the southwestern vistas Alvin’s lyrics paint.

            Ashgrove hosts characters — or
the ghosts of characters for that matter — nobody would hear or care about
were it not for Alvin. “Nine Volt Heart” tells the story of a little boy whose
only companion amidst his parent’s indifference is a little radio. The radio
saves him and continues to do so as he grows with each verse. Alvin takes on
the role of a two-bit hooker’s shady muscleman in the dead-end noir tune “Out
Of Control.” And in classic Alvin advocate form, he sings from beyond the
grave, “I was born Everett Ruess / I’ve been dead for sixty years / I was just
a young boy in my twenties / The day I disappeared,” on “Everett Ruess.”

            “I
just try to write about people just trying to get out of bed in the morning,
you know,” Alvin says. “That’s really it. What do you do between getting out of
bed and going back to bed? The older you get, the more you realize music’s
about survival. So old folk songs or old rock ‘n’ roll songs — all those
things are the things that help you survive. Somebody breaks your heart and you
have to survive that. A friend dies or a parent dies and you’ve got to survive
that.”

            Alvin
wrote the beautiful and achingly poignant “The Man In The Bed” to cope with his
father’s death in 2000.

            “I
don’t think I’ve written a better song,” he says.

            A
bittersweet commonality runs throughout his characters. Alvin doesn’t
immediately concur.

            “I
don’t know what they have in common,” he says. “I can’t think that way or I
would never write songs. You know, I just write them. And then later on you
look at it: ‘Hey that guy’s kinda like that guy.'”

            Maybe
they’re all a little like Dave.

            “Oh,
there’s a chunk of me to a greater or lesser extent,” he says. “We all have
those characters inside us.”

Dave
Alvin and the Guilty Men with guest Ben
Arnold play Thursday, July 15, at the Montage Grille, 50 Chestnut Street,
at 8 p.m. $18-$20. 232-8380

This article appears in Jul 14-20, 2004.