Metro Pulse/Music/Dave Alvin

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Who:
Dave Alvin and the Guilty Men with Charlie Robison

When:
Thursday, May 10 at 5 p.m.

Where:
Market Square, part of the Sundown in the City series

How Much:
Free

Modern day rough troubadour plugs in

by John Sewell

With his work in The Blasters and subsequent career as a solo artist, Dave Alvin has embodied the Americana genre. The very title of The Blasters' 1981 debut, American Music (Slash Records) probably served as the root from which the term Americana began its application as a musical niche.

Of course, The Blasters' mix of rock 'n' roll, blues, country and roots music epitomized the Americana genre. But in their primordial days, there was no established route for a band steeped in tradition. The punk revolution hit the Los Angeles area full force around 1980, and The Blasters got out of the garage by playing with punk bands and recording for a punk label. Looking back, it all makes sense.

"American Music was a punk rock album in its way," says Alvin. "We were part of that scene. When we played live, we were pretty loud and pretty fast. So we matched up energy-wise with everybody else. "And in those days, none of the leading bands on the L.A. scene sounded the same. The Germs didn't sound like X, X didn't sound like The Weirdos, The Weirdos didn't sound like The Screamers and The Screamers didn't sound like Wall of Voodoo. In those days punk was about freedom of expression as opposed to the conformity of expression you'll find in punk rock today.

"When we [The Blasters] started, there was no infrastructure for the type of music we played," Alvin continues. "When we started, people told us we were crazy because there was no desire or need for our kind of music—and we knew that there was. So we were angry. We felt sort of cut out of the culture."

Viewed in hindsight, the top bands of first wave of L.A. punk were all traditionalists in their way—just as the early practitioners of gutbucket Mississippi blues were punks in their own right. And Dave Alvin is proud to serve as another strong link in the chain that connects several musical styles through the years.

Alvin's latest album, Public Domain: Songs From The Wild Land (Hightone Records) allows the songwriter a chance to stretch out by covering a selection of American classics that he first discovered in his youth. "When my brother Phil and I were little kids, the influence of our older cousins sort of led us into pursuing old records," says Alvin. "So most of the songs on Public Domain are things that I'd collect on vinyl—old 78s most of them. They were songs I discovered when I was 13 and they've influenced me for my whole life as a songwriter, as a musician and as a person.

"I'd always wanted to make a record like that, and last year seemed like an appropriate time because my dad was ill and he eventually passed away. He was very ill for about six months and I wasn't interested in writing then. Instead, I was trying to sort of connect with something timeless."

This connection to timeless qualities flows through to Alvin's songwriting. Following the storytelling tradition of Hank Williams, Robert Johnson and Dylan, there's an obvious literary bent to Alvin's songs. His songs often feature a cast of characters, conflict and sometimes even a denouement. With his often downtrodden protagonists and Western-American perspective, Alvin is perhaps the modern day John Steinbeck of song.

"I've been influenced by everybody from Raymond Chandler to Charles Bukowski, Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O'Connor," Alvin says. "I studied poetry with some really great teachers, and that's where I learned, more or less, how to write. We had to write sonnets and in all the traditional poetic forms. So when I began to write songs, I had a good background. I understood iambic pentameter and I knew how to hopefully create an unforced rhyme. All of the nuts and bolts for songwriting were right there in learning tradition-al poetry."

After two decades playing in bands his own solo shows (an excellent document of Alvin's solo artistry is a set on WUOT's Live At Laurel series), Alvin's current touring group The Guilty Men brings him full circle; back to the Blasters' tradition of frenzied rock 'n' roll shows.

"It's a loud band," says Alvin. "It's got bass drums, keyboards, another guitar player along with me and we make a pretty good racket.

"I kind of do a juggling act between my solo shows and shows with a full band. I mean, I have a split audience of people who want the acoustic stuff and the people that want to hear me beat up on a Stratocaster when it's turned up really loud. To me, it's the same notes on the guitar."

Alvin says that his current set includes selections from all his work, even some old Blasters chestnuts. "If I wrote it, I'll play it—or even if I didn't write it, I'll play it," says Alvin, laughing. "Basically, I try to keep things in kind of a continuum."