Master Blaster: A Chat with Dave Alvin
How a new collection has renewed interest in a great American band
Dave Alvin played guitar and wrote many of the best known songs for The Blasters, the band he started with his brother Phil in 1979.
The Liberation Hall label is celebrating the band’s contributions to popular music with a reissue campaign that will release the band’s back catalogue, along with the solo albums Phil Alvin made. They’re opening the gates with the recently released Mandatory: The Best of the Blasters, a 21 track “Best of” that includes notable tunes from their entire career.
The Blasters are often credited with inventing the Americana genre, a fact underlined by the song “American Music,” the first track on Mandatory. Dave Alvin isn’t sure about that, or about the Americana category itself. “In the last 40 years we’ve been called everything you can imagine,” Alvin explained. “The current phrase is Americana, or outlaw country, but it’s the same notes I’ve always played. Is it loud folk, folk/rock? My current band, The Third Mind, plays mostly covers, with arrangements improvised on the spot. Except for one Alice Coltrane song, the songs we choose are all folk/rock standards: ‘A Little Bit of Rain,’ ‘Sally Go Round the Roses,’ ‘Morning Dew.’ We started The Blasters to be a folk music band, and destroy the stereotype of what folk music was. It’s just a guy with a guitar, be it a rockabilly band or country band or a singer/songwriter. We thought it was folk music.
“There wasn’t another band like us, but I never wanted the band, or my songs, to be limited, so it was about having the gall to play blues, country, Cajun, rock, punk and threw ‘em all into the mix. Everyone expected us to play blues, rock and R&B, so my job as a songwriter was to see how far I could push the band stylistically, before they say, “Woah, wait a minute!’ We were stretching the boundaries like Dylan and Doug Sahm did in the 60s. As for me, I’m celebrating a new album I cut with Jimmie Dale Gilmore. I can’t wait to play some of the songs from that puppy on stage.”
Alvin said he was glad to see his early work with his brother and his friends from Downey back in print, especially since they were going to be reissued on LP as well.
“I’m still a Blaster,” he said. “The band meant a lot to me then and, in some ways, even more now. You can hear all our mistakes, maybe not musical ones, but we made mistakes in our career, although we meant well. We never had the advantage, until the very end, of having a producer we trusted, outside of ourselves. Looking back, that was a big mistake.
“I’d love to be able to go back and remix everything, but everything was done on two-track tape in the ’80s. The chemical makeup decays, so you have to have them baked, ‘cause it’s all decaying. It’s frustrating, because of everything I’ve learned over the years. I’d love to remix, but c’est la vie.
“In 2000 or so, Rhino did a reissue and I went in with engineer Mark Linett, to remix. He did the Pet Sounds box and was engineer for Brian Wilson for years. We had to bake all the tapes from Warner’s cavernous facility. We had one chance to remix, then it was all digital. That’s what Liberation Hall used. It’s a new label run by Richard Foos, from Rhino. When he left Rhino, he started Shout Factory. This is his new label.”
Everyone in the band had input into the selection of the songs, Alvin said. “We weren’t the most prolific band, but the best cuts were obvious to us. The label made suggestions and we made ours, for the lesser known songs like ‘Jubilee Train’ and ‘American Music,’ which is not the greatest song I wrote, but it stated the direction the band was going in. Live, we got everything right, but we never managed to capture that feel in the studio, which was a problem for a roots music band. The one exception is ‘Kathleen,’ the last song on the compilation. The producer on that track was Jeff Eyrich, who we went to high school with. He produced stuff for the Plimsouls and Gun Club. He left the tape running and we just jammed, so it’s really The Blasters playing live in the studio and captures all the stuff we did in our live shows. When we played it for one of the guys at Warner’s, he said in his snotty little way, ‘It’s a fine song and it’ll go over well live, but it sounds too much like The Blasters.’ I never felt so much like killing anyone in my life, so it wasn’t put on our last album. That track is legendary. It’s the best of The Blasters condensed into one song.”
After leaving The Blasters, Alvin went on to a varied career. He’s been a poet, writer, actor, record producer and a guitarist in a variety of bands. He spent time in X, another hard to define band, The Knitters, the folk/rock offshoot of X, The Flesh Eaters, a duo album with Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and more than 17 solo albums, including Public Domain: Songs from the Wild Land, which won a Best Folk Album Grammy.
He’s currently planning a tour with The Third Mind, the improvisational group he put together with the help of guitarist and vocalist Jesse Sykes, guitarist Dave Immerglück (Counting Crows, Camper van Beethoven), drummer Michael Jerome (John Cale, Better Than Ezra), and bassist Victor Krummenacher (Camper van Beethoven, Monks of Doom).
VIDEO: The Third Mind “Groovin’ Is Easy”
“I knew Victor from Camper,” Alvin said. “He was a smart, perceptive kid. I was talking to him backstage after a gig, when I was caught up in the Miles Davis biography So What, by John Szwed. He made all these great albums by going into the studio, suggesting a groove or a key and playing. Then he’d edit the jams into a composition. I thought that would be a great way to record, complete freedom from lyrics. It took a long time to find other musicians who were into it. Michael, I’ve known for 20 years. Victor had played with Dave, and I’ve been friends with Jesse for a long time. I knew she liked experimental music. We managed to scrounge up some money – recording is expensive – and hit the studio. No rehearsing, no arranging, just go in and play. Yep Roc really liked it and put it out. Then COVID happened, so no tours. We did do a live debut at Hardly Strictly in San Francisco, in front of 50,000 people last year, and we have some things coming up in early next year.
“The new album, The Third Mind 2, happened the same way. Since there’s no arrangements, Dave and I agree on a key and go. We switch off leads and play off each other. Everything gets arranged as we play. You have to listen to everybody and look in their eyes, so you always want to record with everyone in the room at the same time. You have to worry about what everybody else is playing, as well as what you’re playing. If I feel something is more suited to Dave’s approach, I go with it. Everything is lyrical and melodically and tonally rich. It’s a neat job to pull off.”
- All Aboard for the Yacht Rock Revue - July 4, 2024
- Fanny: Live at Last - June 12, 2024
- Flowers for Unsung Folk Pioneers Richard, Cam & Bert - April 19, 2024
You May Also Like
-
May 2, 2020 -
May 6, 2020 -
November 2, 2018
