Tony's Picks - Dave Alvin

I saw Dave Alvin live once, though I didn't know it at the time. It was the summer of 1983 at Red Rocks. He was in a band called the Blasters, and they were opening for Eric Clapton. I had no idea who these guys were. They played music that sounded like a throwback to the 1950s. They looked the part too – greased back hair and blues bowling shirts.  KILO never played their music, so I had no clue about them. There wasn’t much of a music press back then. Rolling Stone was more interested in stuff like Duran Duran and various and sundry New Wave shit. They were no help – I still no clue. The Blasters were an unknown quantity to me. I couldn't name a single song of theirs. They played for about thirty minutes. Their music wasn't bad, but I just wasn't interested. I was there to see Clapton, who had yet to enter his Adult Contemporary Hell phase. While I didn't rush out to buy any of their music, I hadn't forgotten about them either.

About three months ago I was searching iTunes for new music when I came upon a couple of albums by Dave Alvin [Eleven Eleven and From An Old Guitar: Rare and Unreleased Tracks]. I know him by his reputation for being a damn fine guitar player. I knew he wrote Long White Cadillac [Dwight Yoakam]. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but what I did find was pure roots music gold. Alvin once wrote on his Bandcamp page “There are two types of folk music: quiet folk music and loud folk music. I play both.” This is the best description I have found anywhere that describes the music that writers classify as ‘Americana.’ Alvin’s music incorporates elements of blues, R & B, rockabilly, country, jazz, gospel, Western swing, Tex-Mex and Cajun music. Gram Parsons had a different name for it – he called it Cosmic American Music. Whatever one chooses to call it, I call it my latest musical addiction. As addicts are wont to do, I’m always searching for my next fix. Right now, Dave Alvin is the next fix that will do for awhile.

A fellow Scorpio, Dave Alvin was born November 11, 1955 [“Eleven Eleven”] in Downey, California. He and his older brother Phil [two years older] used to frequent places like the Ash Grove and the Shrine Auditorium. They would see the likes of Big Joe Turner, T-Bone Walker, Buddy Guy, Lightnin' Hopkins, and Johnny "Guitar" Watson. Not only did the Alvin brothers watch these guys, they got to be friends and hang out with them. They learned roots music from the source. They and their friends formed The Blasters in 1979. They were rockabilly but a little bit more, including blues, R&B and country. Their music could easily have come from Sun Records. The Blasters were contemporaries of Dwight Yoakam, Los Lobos and X. In the early 1980s they weren’t in the picture as far as musical interests go. English hard rock and heavy metal and American blues rock were more my speed, but as they say, better late than never. All was not well in the band, though. Phil Alvin was of the mind of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Dave wrote most of the songs and wanted to go in a more singer/songwriter direction. The Blasters lasted three albums before they imploded. Phil got his way, and Dave went solo. Of the band, Dave Alvin said: 

“The Blasters were 5 guys who all grew up together loving old blues, rockabilly, etc. So we were/are all brothers and we all played together and fought like brothers. It wasn’t just Phil and I who were fighting. We all did. That emotional intensity between all five of us is why I think we were such a tight and, well, intense live band. I left for too many reasons to go into but that intensity that I just mentioned, got to be to too much to take on a daily basis.”

Eleven Eleven and From an Old Guitar were the hook. I figured that whatever he did in between the two albums had to be good as well. He recorded two albums with Phil - Common Ground: Dave Alvin & Phil Alvin Play and Sing the Songs of Big Bill Broonzy [2014] and Lost Time [2015] – and one with Jimmie Dale Gilmore - Downey to Lubbock [2018]. All three albums were done with the same band, The Guilty Men. The two albums with Phil were blues records. The album with Jimmie Dale Gilmore, the “hippie country singer” with a high lonesome voice, was a little of everything [blues, country, folk, rock]. It’s all good and I was “all in” – I had to get the rest. Not only is the choice of material first-rate, but I like the band. Alvin plays with another guitarist [Chris Miller] who plays slide. They trade solos much like two guitar players from a band of renown from Georgia. Phil Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore are great singers. Dave Alvin isn’t as good, but he doesn’t embarrass himself, either. He does that “half-singing, half-talking” thing the way Frank Zappa did.  Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore are recording their second album together as I write this. It will be mine!

Dave Alvin’s music is fairly eclectic, and I can put it into three different “boxes”: blues rock, singer/songwriter, and musicologist/song interpreter.

Blues rock

Romeo's Escape [1987] – After Alvin left The Blasters, he joined The Knitters [recording Poor Little Critter on the Road], a country folk offshoot of X. In a “seemed like a good idea at the time” moment, he joined X, long enough to record See How We Are. But Alvin wanted to go his own way. This album was Alvin’s first as a singer, about which he said:

“I had never sung before, and I had to get drunk to do it. So when I listen to it, I hear a drunk caterwauling. Now, I'm more gentle about it. It's taken a lot of years to figure out how to sing.”

Here Alvin rearranged three Blasters songs [Long White Cadillac, Border Radio and Jubilee Train] and the one song he wrote for X [Fourth of July].

Blue Blvd [1991] & Museum of Heart [1993] – If Raymond Chandler wrote songs instead of novels, this is what they would sound like. The songs are very good, the musicianship is top-notch. I have only one complaint – the drums are too loud. If I was “king for a day” I would fix that and put them lower in the mix. Dave Alvin’s songs don’t need an arena rock sound.

Ashgrove [2004] – After two albums of acoustic music [King of California and Blackjack David], Alvin plugs back in and looks back. The album alternates between blues rock and country folk. The opening title song describes the long-closed LA nightclub where Dave Alvin and brother Phil would see their musical heroes – Big Joe Turner, Lightnin’ Hopkins, the Rev. Gary Davis and many more. Not only does he look back but he also describes his own life of being a musician and all it entails. The blues are spread out in Black Sky, Black Haired Girl, Sinful Daughter, and Out of Control. He leaves the blues of the Ashgrove and heads for Texas where he does a country tune, Rio Grande. Another country tune, Nine Volt Heart, is a nostalgic look back on the importance of the radio in peoples’ lives. The hushed, fingerpicked The Man In The Bed is a eulogy to his late father. Somewhere in Time co-written with Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo and Louis Pérez which appeared on their release The Ride, released a month before Alvin’s version here. Alvin’s band of minstrels, the Guilty Men [including Greg Leisz], are superb.

Singer/Songwriter

King of California [1994] – Alvin decided, after three records with an electric band, to cut his next batch of tunes acoustically. Relieved of the burden of having to compete with a loud band, Alvin found his voice, to which he credits producer Greg Leisz. As with Romeo’s Escape, Alvin decided to re-record several songs from his back catalog [Border Radio, Barn Burning, Fourth of July, Bus Station, Little Honey, Every Night About This Time]. These songs from loud electric bands [The Blasters, X] are done in a quiet, intimate setting. He added some well-chosen covers [East Texas Blues (Whistlin' Alex Moore), Mother Earth (Memphis Slim), and What Am I Worth (George Jones), a duet with Syd Straw].  The 25^th anniversary release also includes a duet with Katy Moffat (The Cuckoo), and a very fine cover of Merle Haggard’s Kern River. The addition of several covers goes a bit against the “singer/songwriter” thing, but it does add to a quitter, acoustic direction that accommodates Alvin’s limited singing range. He’s not a shouter like his brother Phil, but with these songs he doesn’t need to be. The quiet arrangements and his low baritone voice are a perfect fit.

Blackjack David [1998] – Blackjack David picks up where King of California left off. Like King of California,  Blackjack David  is produced by Greg Leisz and was recorded with pretty much the same team that created King of California. Unlike King of California, Blackjack David has only one cover – the title track. The two albums complement each other very well.

Dave Alvin & the Guilty Women [2009] - Dave Alvin & the Guilty Women [2009] was done with an all-female band [most of whom are from Austin], excellent musicians all. The most notable collaborator is Cindy Cashdollar on dobro and steel guitar. The drummer is Lisa Pankrantz, who replaced Don Heffington in the Guilty Men [making them the Guilty Ones] after he passed away. There are two fiddle players [Laurie Lewis and Amy Farris], one other guitarist [Nina Gerber], bassist Sarah Brown, and singer Christy McWilson. The band came together as a one-off to play San Francisco’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, but Alvin like playing with these musicians so much he wanted to cut an album with them.  The music combined folk, blues, rock and roll, Western swing,  bluegrass, R&B, rockabilly and Cajun. They change the Blasters’ Marie Marie into a zydeco number. Boss of the Blues is a Western swing nod to Big Joe Turner, with whom Dave and Phil Alvin got to know and hang out as teenagers when they would see him at the LA nightclub the Ash Grove. Nana and Jimi is about Dave’s mom dropping him off at the LA Forum to see a Jimi Hendrix concert. Downey Girl is about Karen Carpenter. They even recorded Que Sera, Sera [!].

Musicologist/Song Interpreter

Public Domain [2000] – As the title suggests, these are traditional songs that have been around so long nobody knows who wrote them  Instead of note-for-note recreations that would be museum pieces, Dave Alvin does these old folk, country and blues tunes in a most nontraditional way.

West of the West [2006] - Unlike his collection of traditional folk and blues songs, this one is a tribute to California songwriters. I am unfamiliar with some of the songwriters - Kate Wolf, Kevin Blackie Farrell, Richard Berry, Jim Ringer. Conversely, everybody knows the others – Merle Haggard, Jerry Garcia, John Fogerty, Jackson Browne, Tom Waits, and Brian Wilson. He also gives Los Lobos a shout. Wait! A Beach Boys song? Yes, Surfer Girl. It has to be heard to be believed. Dave Alvin the musicologist gives us a California history lesson in song.

I put the two albums with Phil Alvin and the one album with Jimmie Dale Gilmore in the Musicologist/Song Interpreter box

Just when I thought I’d heard all of Dave Alvin there was to hear, along came The Third Mind. He read a biography of Miles Davis that detailed how he made such works like Bitches Brew and Jack Johnson. Miles gathered musicians in a studio, picked a key and a groove then had the musicians play for days while he recorded the whole thing. Once recorded, Miles and producer Teo Macero would edit the music into compositions. Alvin had the same idea. He said “I had a crazy idea and was looking for musicians who perhaps didn’t think it was so insane.”  Alvin had a safety net that Miles Davis didn’t have [or need]. He picked music that was associated with the 1960s underground from the likes of Michael Bloomfield, Fred Neil, Alice Coltrane, and Roky Erikson. The musicians didn’t rehearse. They decided on a key and started recording to see what happened. They sat in a circle, watched and listened to what each other played, and improvised, as much as one can within the confines of known songs. Hearing an improvised 16-minute take on Bloomfield’s East West is well worth the purchase. It’s a tuneful psychedelic freakout.

In 1980, a guy named Chris Desjardins [aka Chris D.] formed a punk band in Los Angeles [The Flesh Eaters]. This band had three members of The Blasters [Dave Alvin, drummer Bill Bateman, and sax player Steve Berlin] and two guys from X [bassist John Doe and percussionist D.J. Bonebrake]. They recorded one album - A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die [1981]. Band members came and went with regularity. Chris D. recorded six more Flesh Eaters albums between then and 2004. In 2007, the ”all-star” lineup reformed and played shows whenever schedules allowed. They went back into the studio in 2019 and created I Used to Be Pretty. Of the album’s eleven songs, there are two new songs, three covers, and the rest are new recordings of songs from the previous six albums. Alvin gets to be just the guitar player here. Alvin gets to rip your face off on Peter Green’s The Green Manalishi, and the 13-minute finale Ghost Cave Lament reminds me of those really long Doors songs like The End and When the Music’s Over.

What about that Blasters music that I ignored forty years ago? In 2002 Rhino Records compiled Testament: The Complete Slash Recordings. I didn’t feel like paying $55 for the set on Amazon, but I found two live recordings from the reunited original band - Trouble Bound [2002] and The Blasters Live: Going Home [2004]. Of the 33 songs between the two albums, only four of them appear on both. This is a comprehensive enough overview of the Blasters, and it’s live [even better].

Here's my recommended playlist:

The Green Manalishi [The Flesh Eaters, I Used to Be Pretty – 2019]

Downey to Lubbock [Dave Alvin & Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Downey to Lubbock – 2018]

World's in a Bad Condition [Dave Alvin & Phil Alvin, Lost Time – 2015]

Mister Kicks [Dave Alvin & Phil Alvin, Lost Time – 2015]

Silverlake [Dave Alvin & Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Downey to Lubbock – 2018]

Harlan County Line [Eleven Eleven – 2011]

Johnny Ace Is Dead [Eleven Eleven – 2011]

Dirty Nightgown [Eleven Eleven – 2011]

Who's Been Here [From an Old Guitar – 2020]

Highway 61 Revisited [From an Old Guitar – 2020]

Sonora's Death Row [West of the West – 2006]

Murrietta's Head [Eleven Eleven – 2011]

Mobile Blue [From an Old Guitar – 2020]

Signal Hill Blues [Eleven Eleven – 2011]

Downey Girl [Dave Alvin & the Guilty Women – 2009]

Marie Marie [Dave Alvin & the Guilty Women – 2009]

Beautiful City 'Cross the River [From an Old Guitar – 2020]

Never Trust a Woman [Eleven Eleven – 2011]

On the Way Downtown [From an Old Guitar – 2020]

Southern Flood Blues [Dave Alvin & Phil Alvin, Common Ground – 2014]

Wee Baby Blues [Dave Alvin & Phil Alvin, Lost Time – 2015]

Get Together [Dave Alvin & Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Downey to Lubbock – 2018]

Dry River [Blue Blvd. – 1991]

Andersonville [Blue Blvd. – 1991]

Thirty Dollar Room [Museum of Heart – 1993]

As She Slowly Turns to Leave [Museum of Heart – 1993]

Stranger in Town [Museum of Heart – 1993]

King of California [King of California – 1994]

Fourth of July [King of California – 1994]

Border Radio [King of California – 1994]

East Texas Blues [King of California – 1994]

Bus Station [King of California – 1994]

Mother Earth [King of California – 1994]

Blackjack David [Blackjack David - 1998]

California Snow [Blackjack David - 1998]

Evening Blues [Blackjack David - 1998]

1968 [Blackjack David - 1998]

Shenandoah [Public Domain: Songs From The Wild Land – 2000]

Out in California [The Best of the Hightone Years – 2008]

Ashgrove [Ashgrove – 2004]

Rio Grande [Ashgrove – 2004]

Black Sky [Ashgrove – 2004]

Black Haired Girl [Ashgrove – 2004]

Loser [West of the West – 2006]

Kern River [West of the West – 2006]

East West [The Third Mind, 2020]

Ghost Cave Lament [The Flesh Eaters, I Used to Be Pretty – 2019] 

Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind

Geddy Lee [Rush] - “He sent a message to the world that we’re not just a bunch of lumberjacks and hockey players up here. We’re capable of sensitivity and poetry."

I was in California a couple of weeks ago on business. I was looking to see if I could see any live music while I was there. I don’t remember which venue it was, but I saw an ad for a Gordon Lightfoot show [and a slew of others] in Anaheim. Underneath the ad, however, was the word ‘canceled.’ I knew he hadn’t been in the best of health. Seeing such a notice didn’t surprise me, but it did make me think that something was amiss. I heard yesterday morning that he had passed, and I thought back to something I had seen on Amazon Prime a few years ago. Shortly after he turned 80, I saw this documentary called Gordon Lightfoot: If You Read My Mind. As music documentaries go I thought it was pretty good. It wasn’t a hagiography, nor was it a ‘Behind the Music’ kind of thing [but it skirted the edge]. One thing I liked about this film was the stories behind some of the songs, and insights to his songwriting process. When it comes to music, I like learning about ‘how the sausage is made.’ As told by the man himself [and a few others], here are those stories.

For Lovin' Me [1966] – “I’ll never write another song like that as long as I live. I’m not talking about the quality of the song; I’m talking about the content. That song was a very offensive song, for a guy to write, who’s married, with a couple of kids. At the time I was so naïve that it just came out of my brain. You know, like…I didn’t know what chauvinism was. I was married when I wrote that song. So what do you think that Brita thought about it? In the meantime, Peter, Paul & Mary recorded it pretty soon. So did Johnny Cash and a couple of others. And the next thing I know, I hear it on the radio. All of a sudden, boom, it’s a hit. There’s a great deal of regret there. I guess I don’t like who I am. I vowed I would never write another song that bizarre again, where I said some of the things that were said. And so, I stopped doing it about twenty years ago, because I just don’t like it.” He was the unfaithful partner in his first marriage.

Early Morning Rain [1966] – “I was living in a basement apartment which was very nice, and I loved it there. I had a little room, and I had a desk, and I had a chair. I knew that I had to sit down and do the work. Then all of a sudden, one day I popped off with ‘Early Morning Rain.’ That turned out to be one of my biggest, most important tunes. We would go to the airport and watch the planes coming and going. One time, it was a misty day. I was standing watching the approach, and all of a sudden, out from the clouds, brand spanking new, Boeing 707 just getting ready to land. One night, Ian and Sylvia heard me do Early Morning Rain and the next day Ian called me and said ‘we’re just in the middle of doing a recording, and we really like Early Morning Rain.’ In the meantime, Ian played the material for Peter, Paul & Mary. They made a damn good recording of the song. I said ‘these guys are pretty good.’

Song for a Winter's Night [1967] – ‘I quite often write with some kind of locality in mind that keeps coming back to me. When I wrote that, I was thinking about being right out in the middle of the mountains somewhere. Right out in the middle of nowhere.’

On songwriting – “Truly, it comes from the unconscious mind. I swear, it’s an imaginary process. Everything that I’ve done has really, basically, been a figment of imagination. You just want to make sure it rhymes. All I did was write songs. I was always isolated. Somewhere in an apartment, somewhere in a space I would find. It wasn’t even getting away from people. You knew that you would have to be isolated to do it. Sit down at the table and actually do it. When you’re working on the tune, and you’re sort of describing the feel that you’re getting from that. And sort of looking inside yourself for something to say, and having a melody, and having a chord structure already prepared, it sometimes, the imagination just does the work for you.

I always say to kids who ask me how to go at it, first the chord progression, and then the melody, and then the words – if you can do it.”

He wrote his own lead sheets. When he was young he played drums for a local dance band in his hometown of Orillia, Ontario. This was when he started to write songs. He couldn’t write to his own satisfaction, so he went to music school in Los Angeles. He wanted to learn how to write music and how to write notation.  He began to write his own lead sheets on onion-skin paper and get his songs copyrighted.

Canadian Railroad Trilogy [1966] – 1967 was Canada’s centennial. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation commissioned Lightfoot to write a song to help celebrate the Canadian Centennial. The song describes the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

The Circle Is Small [1978] – Lightfoot lived in an apartment building in Toronto that was round, like the Capitol Records building in Hollywood. He refers to this “apartment hopping” song as an “unrequited love song.” He was living with Cathy Smith at the time. If that name rings a bell, she was the person who injected John Belushi with the speedball that killed him. Lightfoot’s relationship with Smith was “mercurial.”

Sundown [1974] – “There’s always been lots of questions about Cathy Evelyn Smith. All my life, people have always asked me “What about this?” Cathy Evelyn Smith was a wonderful lady. I really loved her. I would like to have married her, but I was just newly divorced, and I was telling myself  “I’m never getting married again.” I knew that it was not a good idea to carry out. It was one of those relationships you get a feeling of danger comes into the picture.”  Brian Good [actor] – “Gord was pretty tough when it came to relationships. But she managed to hurt him. He wrote that song referring to more than one person that might have been involved with her, and some of them were Gordon’s friends. And I think that she was part of a breaking point.” Murry McLauchlan [musician] – “Some of the best things that he’s written are from when such a disturbing thing happened in his personal life. He was just writing it out. And as a songwriter, you try to amalgamate your experiences, however destructive or wonderful they may be. Putting them in some form that they become universally understood by other people.” Steve Earle [musician] – “Sundown has this whole, sort of, spaghetti western kind of feel to it, but the details are left out to the point where you can kind of make up your own movie.”

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald [1976] – The story of this doomed Great Lakes freighter is often told. It sank in Lake Superior the day I turned 13. Not only was the recording you hear a “first take,” it was also the first time Lightfoot and his band played the song together.

Sarah McLachlan [singer/songwriter] – “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, I remember that one the most out of any of his songs, and I think because, as a high schooler, I busked that song out in front of the library in Halifax. The melodies are so powerful, and he’s such a good storyteller, and such a beautiful lyricist. And the combination of those things just really makes for a great song.”

Rick Haynes [bass] – “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Well, it was kind of the tail end of an album session, putting an album together. And Gord came in one day and he said “I’m working on a song about something that just happened. He said ‘I’ve been getting newspaper articles and looking at this stuff. It’s not finished yet but it’s gonna go something like this…’ and he started playing. I don’t know if it was the next day or a couple of days later, we came back in the studio and Gordon started singing it again.”

Barry Keane [drums] – “Kenny, the engineer, said ‘Well, you’ve got the studio booked. Why don’t we put it down on tape?’

Rick Haynes – “So, tape was rolling, so Barry said to Gord ‘When do you want me to come in?’ He said ‘I’ll give you a nod.’

Barry Keane – “We get to whatever it is, the third verse, and Gord gives me the big nod. I do a drum fill to come in.”

Rick Haynes – “We went right through the song, top to bottom. It was very elemental and raw, but it had magic to it.”

Barry Keane – “It was not only a first take, it was the first time we’d ever played the song. That’s the record.”

Rick Haynes – “After that, we tried a number of times to record it and get it better. You always try to get it better in a studio. And we never could. So it was basically a first take that came out and became a hit record, which is very unusual. Nobody ever expected that to be a single. It was too long for airplay.”

Steve Earle – “When I got to Nashville when I was 19 years old, Guy Clark and I were drunk for a week when the record, the Edmund Fitzgerald, went to number one, because, you know, we were writing these long story songs, and everybody was telling ‘no, you need three minutes and choruses.’ And then this big, long story song becomes a huge hit. So we got hammered for a week ‘cause we thought maybe there was some hope for us after all.”

The rest of the film has the usual stuff – where he grew up, how he got into the business, clips of live performances, how alcohol nearly wrecked his career and what he did to kick the habit. If you are an Amazon Prime subscriber, the cost for a rental is three dollars and ninety minutes of your time. I liked it.

RIP Gordon Lightfoot