Welcome to the Working week

Songwriter, singer, guitarist and producer Dave Alvin has no trouble staying busy these days

There’s somethin’ in a Sunday
Makes a body feel alone
— “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”, Kris Kristofferson

by Peter Blackstock

The calendar may portray it as the beginning of the week, but in reality, we all know Sunday is the end of the weekend. The psychological impact traces back to those early memories of childhood: Bolting out of school Friday afternoon was a radiant rush of freedom; Saturday promised morning cartoons and afternoons in the park. By Sunday, though, that feeling of impending doom was settling back in, knowing another long week of classes was just around the corner.

“Sunday nights, in some ways to me, represent death,” Dave Alvin says. “Friday night is full of hope — ‘I’m gonna go out this weekend and I’m gonna fall in love and my life’s gonna be different.’ And Saturday night’s the pinnacle. But by Sunday night, you’re like, ‘Oh well, nothing’s changed. ’…Sometimes on Sunday nights, I sit at the kitchen table, writing letters that I never send to people that I still love or that I miss.” All this is by way of explaining “From A Kitchen Table”, a song on Alvin’s new album, Blackjack David, which came out June 16 on HighTone. A quiet, reflective, melancholy tune, “From A Kitchen Table” tells the story of a man stuck in the small town where he grew up, still living with his mom and working the same job, years after his high school sweetheart has gone on to another life with another man in another place.

It’s about regrets, really. “In most people,” Alvin continues, “there’s a feeling of, ‘What if I had married this person?’ Or ‘What if I had studied harder and not been a musician and gone to Harvard; maybe I could be president now or something.’ Or whatever — ‘Maybe I could be a great bowler, if only I had taken up bowling before my muscles atrophied.”

Ruminations of such regrets echo through much of Blackjack David. In “Abilene”, a woman runs from a series of abusive relationships, wondering if she should just move to a town she’s never seen and “try to forget everything.” In “Laurel Lynn”, a man wishes he hadn’t carelessly let a woman get away, even though he knows she deserved more than he was willing to give: “I can’t say that I love you darlin’, but you cross my mind every now and then.”

In “California Snow”, a collaboration with Tom Russell that’s the album’s most poignant moment, the narrator is a border patrolman who finds a couple of illegal aliens in the mountains outside San Diego in wintertime. The woman has frozen to death; the man is sent back to Mexico. The experience makes him think maybe he should get back together with his ex-wife, or perhaps simply “drive as far as I can go, away from all the ghosts that haunt the California snow.”

Musically, much of Blackjack David also is more in tune with the mood of a Sunday morning coming down than with the alright fighting of Saturday night. Produced by master multi-instrumentalist Greg Leisz, who also helmed Alvin’s 1994 acoustic-oriented gem King Of California, the new album stresses the more delicate side of Alvin’s artistry.

Though a couple of more down-and-dirty tracks spike the record with a healthy sneer — most notably “The Way You Say Good-Bye”, a slyly worded, can’t-live-with-’em/can’t-live-without-’em love song — most of the material is carried by Alvin’s tough-yet-tender singing and the deft touch of he and Leisz on a range of stringed instruments.

On “Evening Blues”, the rolling, rhythmic picking of an acoustic guitar becomes the breeze on which a fading love affair is quietly carried away. “California Snow” is a classic folk ballad with a simple but haunting melody that underscores the tragedy of its true-life story. And on “Abilene”, perhaps the most carefully crafted tune on the record, Leisz uses “the wash between the acoustics, the electrics and the harmonium,” as Alvin describes it, to create a number that ranks with “Fourth Of July” as among the most hit-worthy tracks of his career.

Framing the album are two exquisitely hushed tunes that lend a timeless quality to the proceedings. “Tall Trees”, co-written with Fontaine Brown, concludes the disc on an eerily meditative note, churning along calmly but mysteriously, like a fog bank slowly spreading through the forest. And Blackjack David opens with the title track, a traditional song Alvin has been playing for decades but which has been around much, much longer than that.

“I’m sure it’s at least Elizabethan,” Alvin says. “Buck Ramsey, the cowboy poet and singer, says that he somehow could trace it back to Greek mythology. Most people know it from the Woody Guthrie version, [which was titled] ‘The Gypsy Davey’. The version I’m doing, we used to do it in the Blasters, in the very, very, early days. We did the Warren Smith version, which is on Sun; it’s kind of somewhere between rockabilly and Johnny Cash, and we did it note-for-note.”

Alvin stumbled upon his new, acoustic interpretation of the song while touring with slide guitarist Kelly Joe Phelps a year or two ago. “Lately I’d gotten into strange guitar tunings, and one night we were just goofing around, and I had my guitar in a really bizarre tuning, and I just started singing ‘Blackjack David’. We started doing it live on a couple acoustic tours that we had done, and it just kind of made sense.…The lyrics are still based mainly on the Warren Smith version, but I also threw in a verse from Cliff Carlisle’s version from the 1920s. And it just kind of fit with the rest of the songs on this record.”

Part of the reason Alvin’s version of “Blackjack David” works is that his interpretation breathes new life and vitality into the song; it’s not simply the customary trotting out of an old standard. “That’s kind of the whole folk process; it’s supposed to be a generational thing,” he says. “The great thing about folk songs is, after eight million people have sung ’em for 400 years, you get rid of all those words that don’t matter, and also, you get rid of a lot of intent. Like, if I sit down and write an anti-big-business song, and my sole intent is to say, ‘Down with world corporate culture’ — well, 400 years from now, if people are still singing that song, it might be about a flower.

“So the great thing to me about the song is its ambiguity. What the hell really is this song about? In the Woody Guthrie version, there’s a lot of the ‘lord’ thing in there — not god, but, the woman is the wife of a rich guy. And Blackjack David is this wandering ne’er-do-well minstrel. And in the Warren Smith version — and I guess his version came from T. Texas Tyler, and his came from Cliff Carlisle — in those versions, it’s even more ambiguous. It’s like, who is this Blackjack David, and why would this woman just up and leave him, and what happens to him? And what a weird ending; there’s a story with a beginning, a middle, and no end. That’s intriguing to me, and that’s why it can still be reinterpreted. A lot of the old folk songs can still be reinterpreted a million ways.”

Though Alvin has long been interested in traditional folk music, it’s not the way he first made a mark as a musician, or how he’s perceived by many of his fans today. As lead guitarist for the Blasters in the early ’80s, he became known for his blazing roots-rock chops and for writing rave-ups such as “Marie Marie” and “American Music”, which were sung feverishly by his brother Phil, the group’s lead singer. (HighTone recently reissued American Music, the Blasters’ long-out-of-print debut album from 1980, but Alvin says he doesn’t hold out much hope for CD reissues of any of the band’s other albums.)

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.