DAVE ALVIN & THE GUILTY MEN

It's been 30 years since the Ashgrove burned down
And I'm out on this highway travelin' town to town
Tryin' to make a livin'
Tryin' to pay the rent
Tryin' to figure out where my life went.
—from "Ashgrove" by Dave Alvin

Like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Russell and a bevy of other road-seasoned artists, Dave Alvin has been writing and singing about the problems of working-class people for most of his long, distinguished and somewhat overlooked career. And like many graying musicians with a penchant for self-examination, that decades-long journey has led him full-circle, back to the beginning.

For the California-based Alvin, 48, who made his name as the guitarist and main songwriter in the California rockabilly band The Blasters in the 1970s and '80s and later as a member of X and The Knitters, the beginning is the Ashgrove, a Hollywood club off the beaten track that featured folk and blues artists. As a teenager, Alvin would head across town to see the likes of Big Mama Thornton, Lightnin' Hopkins and Big Joe Turner-all of whom had once flirted with greatness but ended up in smoky little clubs like the Ashgrove, largely forgotten.

"We all have a time in our lives where everything makes sense and everything is clear," said Alvin in a phone interview from his home in Los Angeles. "For me it was going to see this other world." Implicit in his statement, of course, is that we lose clarity as we get older. Alvin's latest, typically excellent record is named after the club that had so much impact on his life. It's his first collection of new, original songs in seven years. He sings about aging, mortality, survival, nostalgia, crime, hard times, love, lost dreams and just getting by. The disc is a kind of existential journey laid bare by Alvin's world-weary, one-too-many-cigarettes baritone. The record is ultimately about trying to find dignity in growing old.

Much has been made of Alvin's prodigious talent as a songwriter. The characters that inhabit his songs could have stepped right out of Walker Evans' photographs. No Depression was dead on in its recent cover story on Alvin; it called his blue-collar poetry a "tangled knot of mixed feelings," a curious mix of weariness and resilience. As he slips out the back end of middle age, it's widely agreed that he's become a great songwriter. But Alvin says penning tunes has only gotten harder as the years have passed.

"My lifestyle is not songwriting friendly. I wake up at nine, drive 300 to 400 miles, do sound check, play the gig, do the books, go to sleep, wake up, and do it all over again. I've been writing songs for a long time, and the longer you write songs, the more you understand the craft involved. But on the other hand you have all of your previously written songs staring back at you saying, Look at me. You write new songs and get halfway though 'em and realize they don't stand up. For me, the process of elimination gets more cutthroat the older I get."

* * *

Now my mother's gone
Now my father's gone
And all the old blues men have all passed on
And I'm out on this highway travelin' town to town
Settin' up my gear and then I'm tearin' it down
Turnin' up my guitar
Standin' on the stage
I'm just tryin' to raise the ghosts up out of their graves.

If there's one Dave Alvin record that has it all, a comprehensive overview of the artist's various tastes and talents, Ashgrove is it. "Let's say I'm dead and you're writing the obituary," said a rather talkative Alvin. "You want to know what his guitar playing sounds like? This is it. His vocal? This is it. I know it's a very strong collection of songs, but if you wanted to make a party mix for a bar-be-cue, you could do that too. When you get down to my core I'm basically a blues guitar player, for better or worse, but I'm also a songwriter. And both sides are here."

Indeed, for every slow burner country-folk tune that would fit nicely into a solo acoustic tour, there's a fast-paced blues-rock tune that would feel at home in a full-electric Blasters concert.

One of the most affecting songs on the new record is "The Man in the Bed," about an old man whose sickly body withers away in a hospital bed while his mind roams far away, reliving past adventures. It was inspired in part by his father's long struggle with Parkinson's disease. "When my dad died I tried to write songs and I didn't like anything. Not that "Man in the Bed" is a peppy toe tapper, but it is compared to some of the other things I was writing at the time. I needed a couple years for perspective. I'm a guy with a long gestation period. Most of what I write in the heat of the moment isn't very good. 'Man in the Bed' comes from a survival perspective rather than a defeatist perspective. As you get older, you understand more about the world. How do you survive?"

Another Alvin classic on Ashgrove is called "Everett Ruess," the story of a strange eccentric who lived off the grid. The song keeps asking how he died. The eventual answer is that it doesn't really matter. One gets the sense that it's taken Alvin a lot of years to learn a similar lesson. Just like the artists at the Ashgrove who sang to sometimes pathetically small crowds, it doesn't matter who's listening; what matters most is to sing your own song.