Dave Alvin – Do look back
“I’m a pretty hands-on producer, because I’m a control freak,” he confesses. “I’m not a phone-it-in producer, who shows up in the studio to hear the songs. I obsess over every note and how to conceptualize every song. I like arranging songs, because it’s similar to songwriting. Maybe you can take a song that’s not a great song and make it good with a great arrangement. I also wanted to help musicians I liked; I didn’t want them to make the same mistakes the Blasters did. With certain bands, I could see them reliving everything we went through.”
By 2002, all the Blasters albums on Slash were out of print except for a single-disc greatest-hits collection. Rhino offered to release the two-CD Testament: The Complete Slash Recordings, but they wanted the original quintet to reassemble for a promotional tour. This was a tricky proposition, for Phil had kept the band going; he didn’t want to foster the impression that the original lineup was the real Blasters and the current lineup wasn’t.
On the other hand, Phil had never delivered on repeated promises to release a new Blasters album after Dave left the band. Several studio albums had been started and a couple of live albums were ready to be released, but Phil could never pull the trigger.
Eventually, the always-complicated Alvin family negotiations were resolved, and the brothers rejoined Bazz, Bateman and Taylor for a short West Coast tour in 2002. The results were better than anyone expected, and two different shows at the House Of Blues in L.A. were taped and released by HighTone as Trouble Bound. That, in turn, encouraged a cross-country tour by the band.
“Playing with the Blasters again was like going home for Thanksgiving,” is how Alvin describes it. “It’s nice to see the family, eat some turkey, watch some TV and then say, ‘Bye, I’ll see you next year.’ I have no intention of writing ten new songs for the Blasters, but I was impressed by how good we sounded. Everyone is a better musician than they were before, especially me. In the early days of the Blasters, the weakest link in terms of musical chops was me, but now I was no longer the weakest link.”
Shout Factory Records then made the band an offer it couldn’t refuse: their own version of The Last Waltz, a filmed concert with hand-picked guest stars. Sonny Burgess, the wildest of the Sun Records rockabillies, was an obvious choice, because Dave had produced Burgess’ Tennessee Border. Chicago blues-harmonica whiz Billy Boy Arnold was added because he had played on Phil’s solo album and because the Blasters had done two of his songs. Two West Coast R&B vocal groups, the Calvanes and the Medallions, rounded out the lineup. The Blasters Live: Going Home was released earlier this year as both a DVD and CD.
“I want to go back to the Ashgrove,” Alvin sings on his new album, “that’s where I belong.” That night in 1969 — when he first came face-to-face with Big Joe Turner, when he first realized art didn’t have to happen in the Hollywood Bowl or a Greenwich Village tavern, when he first saw that a working-class guy could express himself in the language of the street — has fueled him ever since.
There have been other nights — singing by a campfire in the Sierras, playing with the Blasters in Seattle, hearing Charles Bukowski in Long Beach, hearing X at the Whisky A Go Go, hearing Merle Haggard at the Palomino — but they merely reinforced the original lesson. If there’s a reason to get out of bed in the morning, it’s that ability to redefine the world with your own voice, regardless of whether anyone is listening.
“Everett Ruess”, a song on the new album, describes the joys of hiking and camping in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. It’s a pleasure Alvin has often indulged, and he relishes the clarity that isolation and steady exercise can provide. “I hate your grand cathedrals where you try to trap god,” he sings on the song, “because I know god is here in the canyons with the rattlesnakes and the pinon pines.”
In 1999, Alvin was keeping a grueling schedule. He’d get up in the morning to drive out to Downey and sit with his dad in the hospital, then go to the studio from one to seven to produce Christy McWilson’s first solo album, then go home to eat and crash before going back to Downey. To refuel, whenever he had a spare moment, he’d head up into the mountains and go hiking. As he hiked, he found himself singing a lot of old folk and blues songs.
“That gave me the idea for the Public Domain record,” he explains. “It finally dawned on me that those folk songs are poor people’s therapy. From the outside, the songs might seem ridiculous, but that’s life for poor people.
“In the same way that the Ashgrove songs are about survival, those Public Domain songs are about survival. The reason they got into the public domain was they touched a nerve. You’re thrown into this world where bad things happen — tragic death and economic injustice — so how do you deal with it? Well, one way of dealing with it is in these songs. It’s a way of explaining the world.”
ND senior editor Geoffrey Himes says that two of the best rock ‘n’ roll shows he has ever seen were the Blasters (the septet version with Lee Allen and Steve Berlin) at the Bayou in Washington in 1983, and Dave Alvin & the Skeletons at Liberty Lunch in Austin in 1992.