In 1980, Rollin’ Rock pressed up 2,000 copies of the Blasters’ debut album, American Music. Slash Records, based on the recommendation of X, not only signed the Blasters, but also snatched up the rights to American Music, leaving that album as an out-of-print collectible fetching more than $100 until it was finally reissued (with six bonus tracks) by HighTone in 1997. Two songs — the anthemic “American Music” and “Marie Marie”, which had become a top-20 UK single for rockabilly artist Shakin’ Stevens — were recycled for a self-titled 1981 album on Slash, supplemented by two more instant classics, “Border Radio” and “So Long, Baby, Goodbye”.
The critical consensus is that the first Slash album was the Blasters’ high-water mark, but to my ears the band got better with each studio release. The original quartet added pianist Gene Taylor, tenor saxophonist Lee Allen and baritone saxophonist Steve Berlin between the Rollin’ Rock and Slash albums, and the seven musicians became better players with each year of road work, even as Dave’s songwriting grew more ambitious. Songs such as “Long White Cadillac”, “Red Rose” and “Jubilee Train” (on 1983’s Non Fiction), as well as “Dark Night”, “Help You Dream” and “Common Man” (on 1985’s Hard Line), boast a narrative scope, a social perspective and a visual imagery only hinted at on the first two discs.
But it was a poorly kept secret that Phil and Dave were fighting all the time. They would rarely look at each other onstage. After shouting bouts on NBC-TV’s “The Today Show” and Art Fein’s radio show, as well as quarrels documented in several newspaper stories, the band’s manager refused to let the brothers do interviews together.
“For the first couple years, everyone would fight a lot,” Steve Berlin told me in 2000. “It had a lot to do with the alcohol; an argument would start, someone would get belligerent and they’d go at it. Then as time went on, it became all that they did. They’d fight about anything and everything. They were Dave’s songs and he had the vision, but no one gave him credit for that. Everyone thought they ran the band, and whoever screamed the loudest got their way.”
“With your brother,” Phil told me in 1986, “you’ve been fighting all your life, so you know where each other’s sore points are. At the same time, living in the same family, you leave spaces for each other. David didn’t play Little League, because he would have had to compete with me, and he would have lost; I hit too many home runs. David wrote and drew pictures, so he was the only person who wrote and drew pictures. That’s why I let him keep all the songwriting credits and did all the lead vocals myself, so we wouldn’t be stealing out of each other’s pot.”
“Some of it is brother stuff,” Dave says today. “It’s like that Bob Dylan line, ‘We always did feel the same; we just saw it from a different point of view.’ It came down to what direction was the band going to go in. My brother’s feeling is that I had very little to do with the band, that me or Bill Bateman or Gene Taylor were replaceable, that he and John had had a band going since they were 13. I tend to disagree; I think I had something to do with the Blasters.”
“The sound of the Blasters didn’t come from David,” Phil said in 1986. “The sound came from us hanging out with T-Bone Walker and Big Joe Turner when David was too young to even be in the band. We took him along and introduced him, so it’s true that he met them all, but he wasn’t in the band until years later.
“Most of what we hear about music comes from writers,” Phil continued, “and their predisposition is for the word. That created the myth of the singer-songwriter. It’s the biggest myth; singing comes from a completely different part of the brain than songwriting. Singing is all emotion, while writing is all analysis. I can go to China and make people feel sadness, joy or fear, even though they don’t understand the language. So why should the songwriter be king?”
“In the Blasters, we were trying to do songs that could have been from ’57 or ’62,” Dave says. “Someone would say, ‘You can’t use that chord; you can’t use that phrase; it’s not a Blasters song.’ I’d get halfway through a song, and I’d say, ‘Oh, the Blasters couldn’t do that,’ and I’d throw it in the trash. Eventually, I started saving those songs. When Nick Lowe agreed to produce a fourth Blasters album for Warners, I wrote ‘Fourth Of July’; it was the first song that was totally mine. My brother couldn’t sing it; it’s not that he wouldn’t sing it, but that he couldn’t.”
Steve Berlin left the Blasters in 1985. After a November show in Montreal, Gene Taylor got on the Fabulous Thunderbirds’ bus and never came back. Dave had co-founded a country-folk-rock band, the Knitters, with three-quarters of X, and Phil was working on his first solo album. When Billy Zoom quit X and Warner Bros. pulled the plug on the Nick Lowe album, Dave gave notice to the Blasters and signed on as Zoom’s replacement. But that didn’t last long either. There were a lot fewer fights, but once again he was the guitarist in a band where he had no chance to sing his own songs. (John Doe sang lead on X’s recording of “Fourth Of July” on their 1987 album See How We Are.)
Meanwhile, Lowe’s British label, Demon Records, had given Dave a contract for a solo album, to be produced by Steve Berlin and Mark Linett. In the wake of Steve Earle’s chart-topping Guitar Town in 1986, Epic Records in Nashville decided they needed a roots-rocker of their own, so they grabbed the U.S. rights for the Demon disc, Romeo’s Escape. The album boasted great songwriting, but it was hampered by Dave’s vocals; he was trying to sing like his brother and failing miserably.
“I was fortunate to have very patient fans who accepted me learning how to sing as I began my solo career,” Alvin admits. “I didn’t know how to sing; I was fighting against my natural register. George Jones, John Doe and my brother were tenor voices, but I was a baritone.
“Greg Leisz finally told me, ‘You should really use the voice you have.’ When I did some shows with Richard Thompson, I saw what he was doing; he was putting his voice right in the music rather than trying to soar over it. Instead of trying to sound like Curtis Mayfield, I said, ‘Maybe I can sing like Jerry Butler; maybe I can work down there.'”
