 ROCK PREVIEW Last of the HardcoreTroubadours Richmond Fontaine's Willy Vlautin chats with Dave Alvin about songwriting and the decline of the American West. BY WILLY VLAUTIN
Dave
Alvin and the Guilty Men
I get drunk all the time and listen to Dave Alvin. I have all his albums and his book of poetry. When I'm out of my mind, he's probably one of the guys I'll bring up, and he's one of the guys that everyone I know tells me to shut up about. So when I was asked to interview him, without thinking I said yes. I've never interviewed anyone; I'm a nervous wreck most of the time. But I was dead set on trying because, hell, it's Dave Alvin, and you've got to try to do this man justice. To me there's two sides to Dave Alvin. First, there's the 12-pack Saturday night with Dave Alvin and the Guilty Men: full-on rave-up Rhythm & Blues. You've got to remember he played guitar and wrote most of the tunes for the legendary Los Angeles band the Blasters. He's a great guitar player with a great band. Second, there's the Sunday morning Dave Alvin. This is the side that really shows him off as a songwriter because he's got better lyrics than most anyone out there; Blackjack David, his latest release on Hightone Records, is the perfect example of how good they really are. It's an album of sad, dark, acoustic songs kind of like a hangover: nothing much to show for the night before except uncertainty, regret, loneliness and the ghosts of the past. Blackjack David is a brooding, moody record and his most consistent and original release yet--maybe his masterpiece. I woke up in a panic at 7 in the morning I was supposed to call Dave Alvin and ask him about the new CD. The problem is that when I get nervous, I stutter, and even worse than that, I begin to ramble and go off on tangents that don't make a lot of sense to anyone. And really, I started doing both those things just thinking about it. So after a while of panicking, I went outside and started drinking beers, and finally, when they got me to where I had to be, I called him up and asked him about Blackjack David. WW: After almost two decades of music making, how do you keep writing songs and lyrics as good as you do? Dave Alvin: Well, my songs come to me in a variety of ways, sometimes lyrics first, sometimes music; occasionally they all come together. But when I actually zero in on the lyrics-- there are a couple exceptions, lyrics that I've written in a day--but in general they take a couple of months. I'm a massive rewriter. Some of the songs come out of poems; some of the basic ideas and images come out of poems. Do you have a favorite song on the new album? Not really, I don't pick favorites. I have songs that mean certain things to me. There are some songs I'm very protective of, meaning I don't play them live that much--like "From a Kitchen Table." Most songwriters will tell you that their songs are like their kids. Some kids are very outgoing and gregarious and other kids are shy, and you want to be protective of those. I won't play those that often in barrooms. What's interesting about "From a Kitchen Table" is that it's about a beat-up, middle-aged man who still lives at home with his mom, a guy who can't seem to get out of the situation he's in. You don't seem to hear a lot of songs out there with older characters like that one. Well, you know, a lot of people have some sort of regret in their lives that they didn't do something. That they didn't climb Mount Everest or clean out the kitchen sink or whatever the regret is. And for me, usually it's Sunday night when I sit around and go, "Oh, what if I would have done that?" How my life would have been different if I had. That's kind of what I wanted to do with the song. Is it easier to write more acoustic, softer numbers now as opposed to when you were playing in the Blasters and X? Well, you know the way I write, I wouldn't say it's easier. The more I practice playing acoustic, practice finger-picking techniques, things like that, the more I'm thinking about writing acoustic-type songs. There's a guy that lives up there in Vancouver, Washington, Kelly Joe Phelps. Kelly Joe and I have done a couple tours together, where we played together, and him and a couple other people have really spurred me on to practice my acoustic playing so I won't be embarrassed being on the same stage with them. Speaking of Kelly Joe Phelps, I heard he helped you arrange the title song "Blackjack David." Yeah. We were trying to come up with a couple songs to play together on tour that would be kind of special; that was one of them. There's a lot of different versions of that song. Woody Guthrie's version was called "Gypsy Davie." That introduced the husband more as a character. The version mine's taken from is different. But that's the thing about old folk songs: After two or three hundred years, any kind of needless detail has been forgotten and it just really boils down to the facts. But at the same time that creates an ambiguity; anyone can read in whatever they want. Last time I saw you, they introduced you as "the King of California" and that seems to me to be a good title. If anyone does, you seem to understand the sadness in the massive population growth of California and the West in general. How they tear down all the old buildings and landmarks and build strip malls and subdivisions. Your characters seem to live there. Yeah, one of the themes that kind of runs through [my characters] and my songs is alienation, and those things you're talking about create alienation between people in a weird way. Maybe short story writers deal with it, but that theme is not really dealt with in a lot of modern music. Maybe some punk rock. Alienation is created because landscapes disappear and you never get them back. For me, a lot of it was orange groves and hillsides that are gone forever. It's all a part of the massive sprawl of modern life. People a lot of times will build big tract homes and housing projects, and that doesn't lend itself to any sort of community or connectedness, it tends to lend itself to isolation. And they tear down all the good old bars. Yeah, man, well that's always a drag.
originally published August 5, 1998 |