To History and Back Again: A Conversation with Dave Alvin

February 2001

Interview by David Ensminger

Calling a Red Roof Inn somewhere in Indiana at 8:30 in the morning does not necessarily put a journalist on the good side of Dave Alvin. But between forming the rockabilly-edged Blasters with his brother Phil, surviving a stint in X, and maturing during a 15-year solo career, the man has been through more rock & roll drama than this wake up call. With a voice as deep as the plumbing of a four-story-building and percolating with boundless humor, Alvin is the thinking man's garage-rock hero remade as gifted singer-songwriter.

You've said that about one in 10 shows is "blah," not in terms of your playing but in terms of the feel that night.

I said "blah"? You have some bad gigs occasionally. Whether you're road tired, or homesick, or whatever is going on. But most of the time, there's no place I'd rather be than playing live, but not necessarily eating at Wendy's.

Perhaps a more Kerouac-like notion of the road?

Instead of the McDonald's reality, yeah. I love being on the road, but what I love is playing. For a musician, playing is working and for people that were brought up with the blue-collar work ethic, when you're not working, you're not working. You're not doing anything; you're not contributing. So when you play every night, you're doing your job.

Your father's death propelled the making of Public Domain, but did his life too?

A little bit. A couple choices of the songs were more influenced by my mother. Like "Shenandoah" is her favorite song. During the time of his illness, I started hiking. I was trying to go to places in the southern-central California area that were relatively untouched, like the San Gabriels and the coastal range. I was looking for places that were timeless, or as close to timeless as we can get. There's a certain whiff of..."mortality" is not the word. You want to feel there's a continuity to life, a continuity to timeless things. I've wanted to do this CD for awhile, but it was during these hikes and feeling that life is going by very quickly, that I was like, If I want to go do something, then I should just do it. I wanted to do some songs that were out of time.

Some of your favorite songs are written by "Anonymous." Are these songs more timeless?

A lot of them get edited, especially the older ones. When you get to the real old folk songs like "Blackjack David" and things like that, they've been around three to five hundred years, and that's three to five hundred years' worth of editors. Each time it's passed down, somebody loses a verse, or they don't like a verse so they don't sing it, or they change a word here and there. Now, this is fantasy on my part, but I think it's accurate fantasy, that a good analogy is that the songs are uncut diamonds when they start, but years later they are very polished, smooth diamonds. Everything that is unnecessary has been removed. That lays open a variety of interpretations of what the lyrics are. I like narrative songs, but you can use narrative songs as metaphors.

You've said Blackjack David sales were hurt due to the Americana charts, whereas King of California did well under the old chart known as Adult Alternative. How has the new album fared under these charts?

This one has done real well sales-wise. It's done very well under the Americana charts, and we even got some AAA. My problem is that I don't like labels.

You've felt unfairly ghettoized?

Exactly. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that there's a thing called the Americana charts where people who've been making records for awhile have a place where people acknowledge it, where before they didn't notice that those records even existed. It's a double-edged sword, because I do think there's ghettoization that happens, because when King of California came out, the Adult Alternative chart...or whatever it's called…

Adult Alternative Album chart.

Yeah, Adult Album Anonymous (laughs). What it meant was that stations that were reporting to the Gavin Report charts weren't just classic AAA, Sheryl Crow, and Van Morrison stations, whose formats quickly became formulized into classic rock with new artists. When it first started, AAA was everything from folk shows to alternative country to blues shows to classic rock album stations. So with King, it did incredible on triple A because it was getting played on a variety of different formats inside of this chart definition. Classic adult rock stations added the record because it was doing so well. AAA was a more all-inclusive format.

But the same doesn't hold true for the Americana charts?

Now that Americana exists, an AAA programmer will say, Oh, we're not going to play that because it's Americana and we do Adult Album whatever. I don't want to say that major labels have co-opted, but they have become more of an influence, in both formats. A few years ago, independent labels were definitely the bulk of what was being played on Americana. They had a good presence on AAA.

So these labels are squeezing out small artists again?

Yeah, that's what's happening. A lot of Americana is becoming Nashville. Alan Jackson is good, but he belongs somewhere else. But major labels will spend money to get artists on Americana now.

And they can outspend independents?

It's also that more and more of the radio stations reporting Americana are straight country stations. They only require something like one song an hour be an Americana record, so what you tend to get, especially in Texas and the South, is a straight country station that plays one Derailers track or Charlie Robeson track. But do the charts sell records? Yes and no. Yes, if it's hand in hand with everything else-if the records are getting press, if the person is touring, if the records are in stores. If all the cylinders are moving, then, yes, Americana helps sells records.

When you write songs, you weave alienation and other modern anxieties into traditional forms. Do the public domain songs reflect these elements too?

Even by the choice of songs on this record. One of the things I wanted to show on [Public Domain] was interconnectedness; maybe that's part of the timelessness. For one, all the styles are connected, whether it's a blues song or hillbilly ballad. All these songs grew up together, rubbed shoulders with each other. The other thing I wanted to show was those folk songs are archetypal, and those archetypes are still around. "Blackjack David" may be driving a Camaro or some other muscle car and not riding a horse (laughs). Or "Murder of the Lawson Family," which is on the new record, is a very contemporary story to me.

They are vehicles for truths we already know?

"Blackjack David" is a classic British folk song, but on this record the songs are all American, and with a lot of them, if I were an educated man, I could make the case that they were reactions to the industrial revolution, which was a very traumatic period for working-class people. So you have songs like "Engine 143" about the death of the engineer. And the case could be made, if I were better at theory, or even awake (laughs), that a lot of these songs are metaphors for people caught in the transition between the pre-industrial age and the industrial age. Right now, we're in a similar period in that people are caught between the pre-technological age and the age of new technology. And in the same way that the industrial system created new classes of people, new sets of have and have-nots, technology is doing the same thing now. Any time you have such drastic change going on, you have alienation.

Why such modesty? You did go to college, and you know poetry, sonnets, Shakespeare.

We're damn good friends (laughs). The band was discussing this last night, that none of us graduated from college. Chris Smither is opening the shows we're on, and he said that he never graduated either. I'm just not well versed in critical theory. That's a whole other language.

You consider yourself a bluesman. Does that go back to your youth, seeing Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, and Howlin' Wolf with your brother Phil?

It's part of me, but hand me an electric guitar and I'm basically a thrasher. But if Lightning Hopkins was a thrasher, then that's how I play guitar. The great thing about blues, and one of the reasons it has survived, is that it's not a monolithic thing, though some people try to make it fit into a monolithic identity. It's everything from a shuffle band playing Antone's on a Monday night to Miles Davis and Jimmie Rodgers. The form itself is a poetic form like haiku or a sonnet. It all depends on what you do with that form. You can have a Shakespearean sonnet or a modern sonnet. In the hands of the right person, a sonnet can be a sonnet without seeming like it. Adam Saroyan did a whole book on 12 bizarre sonnets, but they were all in classical sonnet form, though you wouldn't recognize it. It's just a form. There're so many types of blues. There's Texas blues, Delta blues, Chicago blues, Memphis, Chicago, St. Louis, and they're all different. I tend to be more aggressive when I play guitar, which comes from the punk stuff, and because I'm not one of the world's greatest guitarists, I just turn up the volume louder so no one will notice (laughs).

You dislike over-singing?

About a year or two before I made King of California, I did some gigs with Richard Thompson and it dawned on me after watching him two or three nights in a row. My brother Phil has a voice like Bessie Smith or Big Joe Turner; he can sing above the band. All the singers I enjoyed while growing up could sing above their bands, like Al Green and Jerry Lee Lewis, the real shouters. Unfortunately, I don't have that kind of voice, and what I noticed with Richard Thompson was that he wasn't trying to sing above, but he was laying his voice inside of the song and not straining. A little light bulb went on…Oh, that's the way you do it. I was teaching myself to sing, like a kid teaching himself a language. You have all these minor revelations that everybody else might know, but to you it's front-page news.

And when you heard Tom Russell's songs, something clicked too?

I had given up trying to write the songs I was known for writing, things like the Blasters' "Bus Station" and "Border Radio," songs that were about something to me. It's a long story. I had quit music, and I wanted to be a hack. Even though the Blasters were successful to ourselves, I was seeing people we had helped get started or helped along, like Los Lobos and Dwight Yoakum, selling gold records and buying houses. We never had that kind of thing, and I left the band and I was frustrated, so I said, To hell with music. I knew how to write, so I thought I'd be a hack. I went to Nashville. The whole idea was to become one of those Nashville songwriters, which I now can tell you is definitely not an easy thing to do. I was writing some okay songs with people, but I didn't have any feeling for anything I was writing, though there were some exceptions. Somebody out there said, Listen to this guy, you guys kind of write similarly. The first song I heard when I put [Russell's] record on was "Blue Wing," and that's when I decided maybe I should go back and write songs like I used to. If this guy could do it, I could do it too. That's what Tom did, he kinda saved my life.

How far removed are you from the Blasters' early days playing the Sundance Saloon every week?

Depends on what mood I'm in. When you are onstage, and you're doing a brand new song, followed by an old, old song, there's a continuum that happens. As crazy as it sounds, when you're onstage, you're immortal and there's no time. All the people who passed away that you knew are alive again for a little while. When I'm performing a song, my brain goes back to where I was when I wrote it. And I've heard from other people that they don't have that. They're like, Oh, god, I gotta sing this again. But I'm still amazed that I wrote certain songs. I'm like, I wrote that? Wow. But there's a continuum, so if I'm playing a Blasters' song, I'm still the dufus kid in the Blasters. And if I'm doing something more recent, I'm that guy.

Were you pleased to have American Music, the Blasters' rare first record, re-released?

Oh, yeah. Typical Blasters, we had a fight with me, the drummer, and bass player against my brother because he didn't want it to come out. I would love to see the other stuff come out, but I doubt it will, because the later records are all tied up in various legal things. They probably won't come out unless we're all dead.

How did it feel to publish your book of poems, All The Rough Times Are Now Behind You, given people primarily knew your records?

At first, it felt the same as putting out a record, because I never viewed them as being different. A couple comments people made to me after I wrote the book made me feel different, and I'm a little timid now about doing another. The publisher wants me to put out another book, and I've got stuff written, but when you start writing poetry, you open up yourself to being compared to Philip Levine, who's one of my favorites.

Which is a hard?

Exactly. So it's like, why bother? (Laughs) Philip Levine is going to do it better than me anyway. I'm in that mood right now.

But you've written songs since you were four and sitting in the back of your mom's Studebaker?

I wrote a couple of good ones (laughs). Maybe I'll record them someday. Whatever was on the radio, I would write a song based on it. I had a Coasters song, a Marty Robbins song, and a Chubby Checker song. I was already writing for other people (laughs).

You've produced the Derailers, Tom Russell, Big Sandy, and many others. Do you actively seek out people to produce?

Well, it's the time and place. What it boils down to is, Can I help this person? The Blasters made a lot of mistakes while making our records, and I've made mistakes making my solo records, and I really want to help people not make those mistakes. Let's go make new mistakes. Sometimes it works. In the case of the Derailers, I walked into a bar in Austin one night and I was like, Oh, god, I could produce these guys. They didn't have a deal then; they didn't have anything. To me, they had a lot of potential to develop their sort of Bakersfield-meets-the-Beatles-in-Texas sound. With Big Sandy, it was the same thing, but they wanted to make the mistakes the Blasters made. They wanted to make records in mono; they wanted to sound as old-timey as they could, which is very quaint, but it's not going to get you on the radio. In the long run, I think it's hurt their career. So I did two records with them and then said, See you later.

You carry part of L.A. with you wherever you go?

I carry part of Downey, my hometown. You could drop me in Antarctica, and I'd still be a Downey guy, even though I haven't lived there in 20-something years. With a lot of people, whether they're songwriters, novelists, or painters, you carry those initial memories. My memories of my hometown brings our conversation full circle because it was an area in transition between the rural and urban. It's about 20 miles from LA, and when I was a kid half of it was orange groves, avocado groves, and bean fields. On the south side there were dairy farms as far as you could see. So I'm attracted to transitional zones; I'm attracted to borderlands, those places where things collide and people are caught. Usually when I'm writing a song or a poem, those are the images in my head. Something from childhood. I know it sounds loopy, but I think it's true for a lot of writers. They create their own worlds, but they tend to look a lot like what they saw when they were young mixed in with what they see now.

The LA scene between 1978 and 1985 was a great music scene because it didn't care about the music industry that much, and it existed on its own and was an all-for-one-one-for-all kind of situation most of the time. For example, the Germs were the first band on Slash; they helped X get on Slash, who helped the Blasters, who helped Los Lobos and Rank and File. Everybody helped each other. It was a social scene that revolved around everyone feeling they were outsiders and didn't fit in. There were negative sides to the scene, like the heavy drugs and alcohol, but everybody did look out for each other. When it died, like all scenes do, I was like a lamb thrown out to the lions. I suddenly realized that just because somebody plays a similar style of music doesn't mean he or she is going to be like everybody back in LA. There are some real pricks out there, and they're going to screw you over the first chance they get. I miss that about the old LA days and try to carry a little bit of it with me.