“It’s one thing to listen to a Lightnin’ Hopkins record and a whole other thing to see him live. If you had any soul at all, you just responded to them. I still remember the first time I saw Ralph Stanley or the only time I saw Jackie Wilson. They were who they were, and they spent their whole lives being who they were. They suffered not only because of their race and class but also because they wouldn’t change who they were. And they connected you to something beyond. When you heard Lightnin’, you heard someone who traveled with Blind Lemon Jefferson. With Big Joe, here was a guy who heard Bessie Smith and sang with Duke Ellington.”
The Alvin brothers started going back to the Ashgrove regularly. Phil was as brash then as he is today, and he would go up to anyone, even Big Joe Turner, and say, “Hi, how ya doing?” with his shy kid brother bringing up the rear. By 1969, guys like Turner had played enough folk festivals to be accustomed to star-struck young white kids coming backstage, and the 300-pound bluesman welcomed the two sandy-haired beanpoles like old friends. Before long, the gregarious Phil discovered that Turner and Lee Allen played at the York Club, an African-American joint on the East Side. When the 17-year-old Phil showed up with his guitar, Turner invited him up onstage to join in on “Wee Baby Blues”.
Phil had had his own bands since he was 13. John Bazz had become the bass player early on, and Bill Bateman became the drummer a little later. They devoted themselves to duplicating their favorite blues and hillbilly songs as well as they could. One weekend, when they were hired for a wedding, they needed a lead guitarist. Everyone they knew was either dead or in jail, so they had no choice but to reluctantly hire Phil’s eager kid brother. They became known as the Blasters and soon were playing biker bars, country bars and the few remaining blues bars for free beer.
“By early 1977, I was working as a fry cook,” Dave recalls. “I had a beard, and I had pretty much given up on having any kind of life. The Ashgrove was gone; the neighborhood joints were going. Phil was teaching math, and Bateman was working at Randall amplifiers. There was a thing on TV about the Sex Pistols and the Clash, before any of the records had come out here. The TV said Johnny Rotten was 21 and Joe Strummer was 24, and I said, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I’m 21. Am I missing the boat?’
“So we started going to see these punk-rock bands like the Weirdos, the Screamers and the Skulls. Musically it wasn’t the same as seeing Big Joe Turner, but there was something going on there, and these kids were my age. We had been raised to be egalitarian, so we could respect what the punk bands were doing. It was conformity city in those days, and here were all these people who didn’t buy into that. We couldn’t be honest with ourselves and pretend we hadn’t sat at the feet of Big Joe Turner, but we found a way to be ourselves and make it contemporary.”
Once they started getting gigs at the punk-rock and new-wave venues in West L.A., thanks in large part to the help of X and the Go-Gos, the Blasters created a sensation. Here was a band that could play as fast and as hard as any punk band but also had real instrumental chops. Plus they had a lead singer who could not only out-shout any other singer on the scene but could also stay on key. The Blasters played a lot of rockabilly, which was a significant subset of the new-wave scene, but they did it differently, because for them rockabilly meant black singers such as Wynonie Harris as much as white guys such as Gene Vincent.
“I was blown away by the Blasters,” John Doe of X told me in 2000. “I couldn’t believe that someone in 1980 was making music like that. Phil had this old rock ‘n’ roll voice, and they were so unflinching in the way they played that music; it wasn’t nostalgic at all. It was like hearing Chuck Berry or Eddie Cochran in their prime. We played together and hung out together and exchanged ideas.”
By 1980, the Blasters were itching to make a record. They noticed that this guy named Rockin’ Ronnie Weiser was releasing rockabilly records on his own Rollin’ Rock label. Phil found his number in the phone book, sang a few songs over the line, and was soon invited to Weiser’s house in the San Fernando Valley.
“Ronnie listened to our demo, which was Carl Perkins songs and Howlin’ Wolf songs,” Dave recalls. “He said, ‘This is great, but to make a record you need original songs.’ That had never occurred to us. The whole reason we started the band was to play Junior Parker and Slim Harpo songs. So we had a band meeting the next day and Phil said, ‘Everyone bring two songs to the next meeting.’ The next rehearsal I brought three songs and no one else brought any. That’s how I became the songwriter.”
The three songs were “American Music”, “Flat Top Joint” and “Barn Burning.” A few weeks later, he came up with “Marie Marie”. Not a bad start for a songwriting career.
But Alvin was already a writer. During his checkered, incomplete college days in the ’70s, he had gone to a Charles Bukowski poetry reading, and it affected Alvin the same way that seeing Big Joe Turner at the Ashgrove had. Here was poetry that was neither academic nor precious; here was poetry as rough and tumble as the barroom where it was bellowed. This was Bukowski in his razor-sharp, take-it-or-leave-it prime, before he descended into self-parody.
Alvin dived into poetry in much the same way he had once dived into the blues. Soon he was studying with such writers as Gerald Locklin, Elliot Fried and Gerald Haslam.
“Everyone I knew in those days wrote poetry,” Alvin says. “The women I slept with wrote poetry and the guys I got drunk with wrote poetry. I’d read my poems up in Santa Barbara and down in Long Beach, but Phil would have to drive me, because I needed to be drunk to read my poetry.
“So when it came time to write songs for the Blasters, I went home and said, how do I write a song? What happens if you combine Chess Records, Sun Records and small-press poetry? If Willie Dixon, Leiber & Stoller and Charles Bukowski sat down to write a song, what would it sound like?”
It would sound like “Border Radio”, which grew out of Alvin’s poem “National City 1979” (available in his book Any Rough Times Are Now Behind You, published by Incommunicado in 1995). It would sound like “American Music” — its vision of “Louisiana boogie and the Delta blues/Country swing and rockabilly too” delivered not only by the lyrics, but by the music as well. It would sound like “Barn Burning”, an arsonist’s brooding monologue that is half confession and half threat.
