Dave Alvin – Do look back
As he was struggling with his vocals, Alvin’s career was crumbling. The day after his first solo Nashville show, Epic yanked his tour support. Just to prove that no one was going to stop him from playing live, Alvin spent all his savings from the Blasters and X years to keep his band on the road for another year. Deciding it was hopeless to push Alvin at country radio, Epic Nashville transferred his contract to the pop division. Recording began on a second album, but it was never finished. Alvin came down with meningitis and almost died. For a moment there, he was “The Man In The Bed”.
“This was 1989, the lowest point in my life.” he recounts. “I was living in Nashville, I was broke, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to go back to the Blasters with my tail between my legs. I had moved to Nashville to become one of those songwriters, but it wasn’t working. Nashville is the modern Brill Building, which is not a bad thing, but some people are Carole King, and some aren’t. If you put a gun to Carole King’s head and told her to write a two-minute song for a harmony group by five o’clock, she could write ‘Up On The Roof’, which is a great song, and I couldn’t.
“About this time, Katy Moffatt, who had sung on my first album, told me about this great songwriter she knew named Tom Russell. I got a copy of his album and the first song was ‘Blue Wing’, and that was a life-changing thing for me. I heard that song and said, ‘I’m going back to California to write that kind of song. I’m not going to worry if Randy Travis is going to cut it or if my brother will sing it.’
“I said, ‘OK, I almost died in the hospital, so I’ll do whatever the fuck I want.’ Nobody wants to hear about a Civil War prison camp? Who cares? It’s about my great-great-great-uncle, Asa Powell, so I’m going to write ‘Andersonville’. ‘Plastic Rose’ will never be covered by anyone, but I don’t care. If Sam Cooke can write a song about being born by a river in a little tent, why can’t I write ‘Dry River’, about being born by a river paved over with cement?”
Those three songs are all on Blue Blvd, still the finest moment of Alvin’s 25-year recording career. In the four years since Romeo’s Escape, Alvin had learned how to transform his limited vocal instrument from a liability into an asset. Released by HighTone in 1991, Blue Blvd offered an anthemic brand of rock ‘n’ roll that split the difference between Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The U.S.A. and Steve Earle’s Guitar Town with songwriting of the same caliber.
To support the record, Alvin teamed up with Missouri band the Skeletons for a series of shows that distilled roots-rock down to its riff-and-rhythm essence and upped the urgency. Flanked by Lou Whitney and D. Clinton Thompson, Alvin had each listener believing that even in the twilight of the Reagan-Bush years, there was still reason to get out of bed each morning, that one could stand in the bone-dry concrete culvert of the Los Angeles River and feel as if they were “soaking wet.”
The years of 1991-92 may have been an artistic breakthrough, but Alvin still wasn’t paying the bills. So he did what every aging rock ‘n’ roll bandleader still stuck on the club circuit does: He started doing solo acoustic shows.
“I had never done that before,” he says, “but I found I really enjoyed it. If you’re not John Fahey or Richard Thompson and you’re playing acoustic, the strength you have is the lyrics. Playing with the Blasters, I was really proud of my lyrics, but most people never heard them. I said, ‘OK, I’m not a great singer; how do I get the lyrics across with the voice I do have? How do I grab the audience without rocking out?’ Silence and space had been something I’d been afraid of, but now they became pals of mine. Dynamics became a big tool. Out of all those experiments came King Of California.”
That 1994 HighTone album featured new versions of four old Blasters songs and two Romeo’s Escape songs, just to prove how much Alvin had improved as a singer. It also included a version of Tom Russell’s “Blue Wing”, the song that had set Alvin on this country-folk path.
Similar arrangements dominated his next two studio albums, 1998’s Blackjack David and 2000’s Public Domain: Songs From The Wild Land (the latter of which won a Grammy for best traditional folk album). Bookending those were two live albums — 1996’s Interstate City and 2002’s Out In California — that represented the bluesy, amplified side of his music.
“I didn’t see the difference between electric and acoustic music,” Alvin asserts. “When you’re dealing with traditional music, it’s the same notes, just played louder or softer. Lightnin’ Hopkins usually played solo acoustic at the Ashgrove, but one time he had a band and some people were aghast. It was like Dylan at Newport, only this was the Ashgrove in ’71. I didn’t see what the problem was; he was playing the same notes and singing the same songs.
“Winning a Grammy for Public Domain meant a lot to me,” Alvin admits. “It would have meant the world to my parents after all the crap my brother and I put them through. They weren’t crazy about us leaving home every night as teenagers to go hang out in blues bars with older men. They didn’t stop us, but they were worried about our safety. I know they gave a Grammy to Milli Vanilli, and I know it doesn’t mean you’re good, but it does mean that all the bad gigs, playing for the bartender on an island in the North Sea, playing Sioux City in a blizzard, all those years weren’t in vain.”
During this same period, Alvin became one of the most sought-after producers and co-writers on the Americana scene. He produced records for Tom Russell, Sonny Burgess, Big Sandy & the Fly-Rite Boys, Katy Moffatt, Christy McWilson, the Derailers, Ted Roddy, Billy Bacon & the Forbidden Pigs, Candye Kane, Red Meat and others. He co-wrote songs with Chris Gaffney, Rosie Flores, John Doe, Bruce Bromberg, Fontaine Brown and others. The new Ashgrove album features co-writes with Russell (“Rio Grande”), Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo and Louie Perez (“Somewhere In Time”), Shannon McNally (“Sinful Daughter”) and the Iguanas’ Rod Hodges (“Nine Volt Heart”). This year Alvin not only produced Amy Farris’ debut disc Anyway, but also co-wrote three of its songs.