Alvin left the Blasters in the mid-’80s, a move that fatefully coincided with the departure of Billy Zoom from fellow Los Angelenos X. Alvin had already been playing with the other members of X in an acoustic-oriented side-project band called the Knitters, so his recruitment into X was an obvious step. It turned out to be a short-lived collaboration, but resulted in a memorable album, 1987’s See How We Are, which marked the first appearance of perhaps Alvin’s best-known song, “Fourth Of July”. (He released his own version on his Epic solo debut of the same year, Romeo’s Escape, and re-recorded it for King Of California seven years later; last year, Robert Earl Keen covered it on his Arista debut Picnic.)
Alvin says “Fourth Of July” started out as a poem, and didn’t turn into a song until a couple months later. He wasn’t sure about it at first: “It was one of those songs that you think is too weird,” he says. “I was leaving the Blasters to become a member of X, and there was this liberating feeling that I didn’t have to live by the rules of the Blasters anymore. And John and Exene were feeling that they didn’t have to live by the rules of Billy Zoom anymore. So we were all kind of feeling liberated from whatever roles we’d been assigned.
“And musically, it was different from anything I’d ever written in the Blasters. It was just kind of weird, because it didn’t resolve anywhere; it just left you hanging. And it could be interpreted several different ways.” Indeed; it sounds a lot like those timeless old folk songs Alvin was talking about a little earlier.
At that time, however, he was starting to consider an entirely different avenue for his talents as a tunesmith. After he left X and released Romeo’s Escape, Alvin decided to take a shot at cracking the country mainstream. “There was a sort of bleak period in my life when I was trying to live in Nashville,” he recalls. “I was living in this little condo on 16th or 17th, down there on Music Row, trying to turn my back on everything I’d ever held dear, and hoping to write a country hit.”
His perspective changed dramatically when a friend gave him a tape of Tom Russell’s album Poor Man’s Dream. “I put Tom’s cassette in, and that changed my life. The first song was a song of his called ‘Blue Wing’, and I was just blown away. And I thought, ‘You know, if this guy can get away with writing songs like this, why can’t I? Why am I sitting here trying to hide who I am and be something else?'”
Shortly thereafter, Alvin returned to Los Angeles. The Nashville detour caused a four-year gap between his first and second solo albums, but 1991’s Blue Blvd. proved to be well worth the wait. It included “Haley’s Comet”, a memorable co-write with Russell, whom he’d met shortly after that fateful experience in Nashville; “Andersonville”, an epic tale based on his great-great uncle’s death in a Civil War prison camp; and several other excellent originals that established Alvin as one of the most promising songwriters of the ’90s.
Blue Blvd. also was the beginning of what has grown into a long and fruitful relationship with HighTone. Blackjack David is his fifth album for the label (not counting the Blasters reissue), and he has also produced a handful of records for the label by artists such as Russell, Sonny Burgess and Chris Gaffney.
Another major achievement was Tulare Dust, the Merle Haggard tribute album he and Russell co-produced for HighTone in 1994. The two songwriters began talking about the project one day during the recording sessions for King Of California. “We were pretty hot on that idea for about an hour,” Alvin recalls, “and then somebody said, ‘Well, there’s this Nashville tribute album.’ And then we were like, ‘Ah, shit, there’s another good idea gone to hell.’ But then about five minutes later, we came up with the idea of just getting everybody we know who has been influenced by Merle to do a song.”
Russell called up the producers of Mama’s Hungry Eyes, the Haggard tribute album that was already in the works on Arista, and “kind of came to a tacit understanding that we just wouldn’t do the same songs,” Alvin said. “I think we only had one slip; Marshall Crenshaw did ‘Silver Wings’, and I guess somebody did it on theirs.” Among the standout tracks on Tulare Dust were Iris DeMent’s “Big City”, Joe Ely’s “White Line Fever”, Dwight Yoakam’s “Holding Things Together”, Lucinda Williams’ “You Don’t Have Very Far To Go”, and Alvin’s sterling album-closer, “Kern River”.
“My idea was, Merle was never credited as being a great songwriter,” Alvin says. “He’s credited as being everything else — an icon, a spokesman for the disenfranchised working man, the Okie From Muskogee, and all that. But I always thought, if you take all that away, you’re left with the songs, and there’s a hell of a lot of great songs spanning a 30-year period. You could look at Curtis Mayfield and Bob Dylan and only a few other writers that can say that over a course of 30 years, they wrote great songs.”
Tulare Dust was a tremendous success, clearly one of the best tribute albums ever released, and one that helped redefine the artist. “I think a lot of people looked at him in a different light after that for awhile there, including Merle himself,” Alvin says. One direct result of the recording was a collaboration between Haggard and DeMent, who wrote a song together that appeared on DeMent’s 1996 album The Way I Should.
Between projects such as Tulare Dust, the five solo records for HighTone, his ever-growing resume as a producer (which also includes two albums for the Derailers and, most recently, a record for San Francisco band Red Meat), a book of poetry that was published a couple years ago, and frequent touring with his band or on his own as part of packages such as this past spring’s “Monsters Of Folk” Tour (with fellow HighTone acts Russell, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Chris Smither), Alvin has managed to stay plenty busy during the ’90s.
Even so, he says, “I always feel like I haven’t done enough. I mean, if you look at how many freakin’ records are there of Lightnin’ Hopkins, and how many George Jones records are there — you know, Merle Haggard’s got, what, 800 records; Bob Dylan’s got 14 million. I haven’t done enough to even deserve anything yet, really, is what I’m always kinda beating myself up with. So there’s always that pressure to keep doing something.”
Not only to do something, but to improve upon the last time around. “This might sound egotistical, but one of the reasons why I keep doing this is because I think I’m getting better,” Alvin says. “I know I’m a better guitar player than I was in the Blasters. I know I’m a better singer than when I started trying to sing. Some people may think the songs in the Blasters were better, but I think I’m probably all in all a better songwriter. And that’s what keeps me going. It’s like, ‘Well, you know, god, if I really work at this, I might be really good someday!’ So there’s always that kind of nagging voice.
“Especially on Sunday nights.”
No Depression co-editor Peter Blackstock first heard Dave Alvin’s “Fourth Of July” while spending the summer of 1987 in a sort of self-imposed exile in Anchorage, Alaska. The song meant a great deal to him then… and still does.
