Excerpted
from
Acoustic Guitar
magazine, October 1999, No. 82. Read
a new Jump Street story about Dave Alvin's latest acoustic recording
in the February 2001 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.
Dave Alvin calls himself a
folk musician. His latest CD, the acoustic-heavy Blackjack
David, which features a 17th-century traditional ballad as
its title track, certainly qualifies as a folk album. But Alvin’s
definition of folk music would also include his work as the pompadoured
lead guitar player for the Blasters, a raucous rockabilly band
that raved up L.A.’s punk club scene during the early ’80s. It
would describe the music he heard as an underage lounge lizard
haunting the blues joints in his native Downey, California. And
it would encompass the songs on his earlier solo albums, on which
the guitar parts owed more to Curtis Mayfield than to Uncle Dave
Macon. "Anything connected to the blues is connected to the ballad
tradition," says Alvin, who no longer wears a pompadour but tucks
his hair neatly under a Dodgers baseball cap. "It’s connected
to Jimmie Rodgers and Robert Johnson and, by extension, to folk
music. Some time during the ’60s folk music came to mean
strictly acoustic, and that’s fine. But a lot of what is folk
music was excluded. How could a rockabilly artist like Sonny Burgess
be considered a folksinger? He’s self taught. The first song he
learned was ‘Froggy Went a Courtin’,’ and he learned it on his
back porch in Arkansas. To me, that sounds like he’s a folksinger."
As a songwriter, Alvin has
explored all avenues of Americana, from blues to rockabilly to
country to R&B. Since leaving the Blasters in 1985, his reputation
as a writer has steadily grown, with artists such as Dwight Yoakam,
Joe Ely, and Buckwheat Zydeco covering his tunes. Alvin’s first
three post-Blasters studio CDs served up a fair share of the Stratocaster-laced
rock that fans had come to expect, but there were subtler numbers
in the mix as well: songs about a migrant mother ("Between the
Cracks"), a young couple facing abortion ("Plastic Rose"), and
an armed robber ("Guilty Man"). Tunes like these required a different
audience than the ones Alvin found at rockabilly raves. Finally,
with the release of 1994’s King of California, Alvin shifted
away from Fender-drenched rockers entirely, focusing instead on
acoustic arrangements. "Because I was spending more time playing
acoustic guitar at home, practicing, trying to get good, I started
just writing more songs on acoustic," he says. "And my voice sounds
better within the acoustic framework. I’m not Big Joe Turner or
Wynonie Harris or somebody who can belt above a band."
Alvin
with the Blasters.
Not that he’s retired his
’64 Strat. Alvin still tours regularly with his band, the Guilty
Men, playing his string-burning blues leads and house rockers.
"My audience is split down the middle between the people who want
to hear the loud rock ’n’ roll guitar stuff and the people who
want to hear the lyrics," he says. Some of the new songs translate
into a plugged-in format. And some—such as Blackjack David’s
"From a Kitchen Table," a love letter to a woman long gone—require
a quieter venue. "I wouldn’t do that in a rock ’n’ roll club,"
Alvin says. "I worked too hard on it." So he serves his other
audience with acoustic tours, often with stylists such as Chris
Smither and Kelly Joe Phelps, "two guys that I think are masters."
Alvin credits those guitarists,
along with his producer Greg Leisz, for showing him new possibilities
on guitar. "For a long time I was uncomfortable playing in alternative
tunings and using a capo," he says. But he’s discovered that new
tunings offer new arrangements and that capos improve vocals.
"Now it’s like, ‘Well, maybe Eb is my key.’"
Alvin’s burnished vocals resonate
in the woody acoustic settings of his last two studio albums,
enabling the lost souls in his songs to tell their tales with
simple dignity. Back in the early days, any notions he had about
singing were scratched by his brother Phil’s booming vocal prowess.
"My brother is such a great singer," he says about the Blasters’
cofounder, who was performing dead-on imitations of Johnny Shines
and Big Joe Turner at the age of 15. "I realized that Bob Dylan
would never have been Bob Dylan if he had my brother for a brother,"
Alvin quips. Eventually, however, with the encouragement of producer
Nick Lowe ("I can’t sing either, mate, but I’ve been making a
living doing it for 20 years"), Alvin started taking the mic.
But songwriting was a talent
that surfaced early. One of Alvin’s first efforts, "Marie, Marie,"
became an international if not a domestic hit. "That’s a very
intimidating thing," he says. "It was like, ‘Can you ever do this
again?’" As a working-class son of semirural Downey, California,
he did not consider his old neighborhood to be a heartland of
song. "Songwriters came from some other place," he says. Alvin
took inspiration from local writers such as Gerald Locklin and
bar fly emeritus Charles Bukowski, who held readings in a Long
Beach saloon. "When I read him the first few times it was like,
‘Oh my God! Alvarado and Western Ave.? You can write poetry about
that?’"
The southern California landscape
began filtering into Alvin’s lyrics. Songs such as "Border Radio,"
a lonely immigrant communiqué over a Mexican radio station,
and "Dry River," a meditation on unrequited love juxtaposed against
bulldozed trees and cement-filled rivers, are direct dispatches
from Alvin’s homeland. Sometimes the locale is only revealed by
the restlessness of characters who have found no place in paradise
by the Pacific. One such character checks into a seedy hotel next
to the airport in the song "Thirty Dollar Room":
I tell myself one way or
another
If it ain’t this town, I’ll move on to some other
Where I’ll believe for a while I can promise the moon
Shining through the windows of a 30-dollar room
"The thing about California,
or Los Angeles, is that there’s an underlying rootlessness about
the society," says Alvin. "People still come here, whether it’s
to be movie stars or music stars or computer stars or real estate
barons. And some people do well, but that doesn’t necessarily
make for a great song."
The dark side of California
dreamin’ is a theme Alvin visits often. King of California’s
title track is a gold rush anthem awash in claw-hammered strings,
Dobros, and dancing mandolin lines. The song’s stride invites
triumph but delivers tragedy instead for the prospector whose
gold brings violence rather than glory. Even more chilling is
Blackjack David’s modern-day variation on the them of the
promised land, "California Snow," which was inspired by newspaper
accounts of Mexican border crossers freezing to death in the mountains
east of San Diego. Alvin recalls meeting a stranger backstage
who was shaken by the song. "It was a rancher from down on the
border," he recalls. "He had found two of the bodies. It was like
meeting the character from the song."
"California Snow" was written
with Tom Russell, Alvin’s writing partner on other memorable numbers
such as "Haley’s Comet" and "Between the Cracks." "With Tom and
I, it’s hard to tell where one leaves off and one begins," Alvin
says. For "Snow," Alvin wrote a basic draft after reading some
brief articles buried in the Los Angeles Times. "Then I
called Tom and said, ‘This is one for you and me to do together,’"
he recalls. "We did that one over the phone." What they did was
turn journalism into folk music.
He took a different approach
on Blackjack David’s "1968," a song about Vietnam cowritten
by Chris Gaffney. "Chris had been in Vietnam, and the song was
loosely based on his cousin’s life story," recalls Alvin. "What
I was trying to do was make it more archetypal, less personal."
Gaffney had already recorded the song on another album with a
Rolling Stones–type groove. For the new version, Alvin broadened
the lyrics and set the song in an acoustic mountain music arrangement.
Alvin believes that contemporary lyrics often resonate when wrapped
in a traditional style. "A song about Vietnam becomes more timeless
because it sounds like it could have been a Carter Family song,"
he explains.
Alvin believes that much of
the beauty of folk music comes from its simplicity. The new CD’s
last cut, "Tall Trees," is the realization of Alvin’s desire to
write a one-chord blues song. "To me, the simpler it is, the better
it is," he says. "The great thing about old folk songs is that
there’s so much hidden in between those lines. That’s because
the language is pared down to its [essence]. I’m a massive rewriter.
I try to get rid of everything that doesn’t need to be there,
so that other people can add all those things that I’ve taken
out."
The writing process comes
slowly for Alvin. He has never found a formula or method to the
muse. "One thing about songwriting is that it doesn’t get easier,"
he says. "Your standards get higher, and you don’t want to keep
writing the same song over and over." Musical fragments come sporadically,
but when the thread begins to form, Alvin says, "I grow a beard
and I smoke too much and I don’t leave the house. All I do is
write. I get buried inside of songwriting."
These days Alvin is likely
to find the songs on his acoustic guitar. Whether they emerge
as country, blues, or rock ’n’ roll tunes is only a matter of
chance. Dave Alvin only hopes that they can live up to the tradition.
Read
about the Dave Alvin's guitars and gear in What
They Play.
Excerpted
from
Acoustic Guitar
magazine, October 1999, No. 82. That issue also
contained a transcription of "Tall Trees."
