With The Blasters And X, Dave Alvin's Career Seemed Headed for Stardom. So Why's The Singer-Songwriter Still Driving Music's Reality Road in a Ford Van He Calls the 'Lexus Killer'?

By SEAN MITCHELL

July 9, 2000 12 AM PT

Sean Mitchell's last piece for the magazine was on Los Angeles' urban legends

Dave Alvin wonders what it’s like to be Bob Dylan while I wonder what it’s like to be Dave Alvin. We’re headed up Highway 99, south of Bakersfield, Alvin at the wheel of his weathered 1996 Ford Club Wagon, pulling a U-Haul trailer full of instruments and amps, the weighty implements of artistry in a life lived on the move.

“I like to drive,” he says. Which is a good thing because the songwriter, bandleader, roots rocker and loud folk singer of increasing eminence has put 110,000 miles on the van in the past two years, venturing to the East Coast and back seven times, with points, many points, in between.

Three members of his band, The Guilty Men, are camped in back, snoozing or reading novels as their employer pilots them toward Yosemite and the annual Labor Day weekend Strawberry Festival. On low volume the stereo plays Buck Owens from a hand-labeled cassette that reads “California Country.”

“It’s been 20 years of van life,” Alvin says, the San Joaquin Valley flying by outside. “You get those gigs where you’re playing Rochester on a Tuesday night, Atlanta on a Wednesday, and you have to make it from one to the other real quick. One of my favorite things in the world is to make tapes of songwriters or old records like the Carter

family, Muddy Waters, then turn off the cell phone so no one can find me.”

Alvin is dressed for the drive in his customary outfit: pearl-buttoned Western shirt, skintight Levi’s faded to powder blue, a hand-tooled belt cinching his trim middle and dusty tan cowboy boots. Dark shades hide his pale blue eyes. He has a rounded face that says luxury has not lived here, two front teeth that protrude over a decoration of lower lip fuzz, thinning blond hair combed straight back in a diaphanous pompadour that widens into a thatch bumping his collar in a short ducktail. He might be a long-distance trucker or a rockabilly legend. Instead he is himself, a kid from Downey, born in 1955, who has managed through poetic gift, earth-toned voice and Fender-scarred fingertips to join the various traditions of Woody Guthrie, Chuck Berry, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Merle Haggard into a commanding personal synthesis of the music that changed the sound of postwar America.

ONCE THE CHIEF SONGWRITER AND LEAD GUITARIST FOR THE CELEBRATED 1980s L.A. roots rock band The Blasters, and later a member of the harder-edged X, Alvin has been performing on his own for a decade now, turning out lyrically stunning and critically applauded solo albums, including “King of California” and “Blackjack David.” He inhabits a zone of scruffy renown that is underrated in our marquee-obsessed culture: as famous as you can be without being really famous. In a way, that’s the perfect place for Alvin, a narrator of ordinary lives lived far from the Hollywood view of Los Angeles. His songs are often about love’s psychodrama, but he blots out the sentimentality, preferring to find a hard beauty in the landscape of perfidy and disappointment.

Alvin’s not one of those artists you bump into every time you turn on the radio. I stumbled into him 10 years ago on the Santa Monica Freeway. Thanks to public radio, his white blues incantation “Dry River” spilled from the stereo, powerfully mingling social realism with romantic malaise through its story of a man “who played in the orange groves ‘til they bulldozed all the trees,” finding solace for an unattainable love in a dream of a concrete river channel filling with rain.

As a headliner, Alvin has played to screaming, sold-out houses at such clubs as the (now-defunct) Ash Grove in Los Angeles and Slim’s in San Francisco, and a glance at his Web site reveals a national constituency of fans who have seen him perform in Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago, Boston, Dallas--you name it--and sent hundreds of e-mail raves (“When you coming back to Tampa, Dave?”). But with his CDs distributed by the small, independent Oakland label HighTone--they’re sold at concerts, on the Internet and in some record stores--he maintains an odd status as commercial radio nobody but public radio star. This status was never so apparent as when he opened for Boz Scaggs at the Greek Theater last summer and was subjected to the cocktail-hour indifference of a hometown audience that seemed to have no idea who he was.

“It was like being the piano player at a wedding reception,” he recalls. “A lot of people think it’s weird for me to be who I am and live in Los Angeles.” The city, he says, is not a natural habitat for a songwriter so unattuned to the hit-chasing pop industry. Not that Nashville is any more suitable. “L.A. is Nashville with better Mexican food,” he jokes.

As he drives, Alvin reaches for the cell phone and punches in the number of HighTone in Oakland. Soon he is talking to Larry Sloven, HighTone’s managing partner, who will be driving with his family to the festival tomorrow. They discuss the logistics of getting a supply of Alvin’s CDs to the site and how they’re going to connect the next day.

As the van keeps pace with hellbent 18-wheelers, he talks about being caught between the fat corporate labels that won’t support his type of music and a lean indie label that can’t. “The problem with this type of music, whether it’s Nanci Griffith, me or Billy Joe Shaver or Lucinda Williams, is how do you access that audience? Because it’s not an audience that’s readily marketed to. You can market heavy metal, industrial rock, hip-hop, easy listening, pop ballads. But this stuff is hard because the demographic runs the gamut from mid-20s to mid-60s. I get people in my audience who like country music and hate blues, people who love blues and hate country music. I try to unite them. It can be done.”

In 1998, Bob Dylan asked Alvin to tour with him as the opening act for 16 dates in the Midwest and East Coast, a kind of validation for a guy whose commitment to playing it his way had left him, by the late 1980s, $30,000 in debt and reduced to disguising himself behind a bandanna and dark glasses while working as a guitar-tuning roadie for other musicians. Dylan was nearly invisible, each night going immediately from the stage to the seclusion of his bus. Alvin barely got a chance to say hi. “I can’t imagine what it’s like to be Bob Dylan,” Alvin says.

TOTING HIS GUITAR CASE ON HIS BACK, ALVIN HEADS ONTO THE STRAWBERRY Festival grounds to get his credentials and backstage passes. A gatekeeper stops him and asks who he is. Politely, Alvin explains and is allowed through. As he makes his way around the edge of the few thousand people listening to a bluegrass band in this mountain meadow, several do recognize him and come up to offer greetings and testimonials. For someone whose songs tend to be sharp-tongued and cold-eyed, he is unfailingly pleasant face to face. I’m reminded of something he said about the old blues men he studied as a kid, hanging around clubs in Los Angeles. “I learned that they sang and played the same way they walked. They were no different offstage than on. I still want to be like that.”

An hour before show time, he is backstage painting his fingers with New-Skin, a viscous compound that dries quickly into an artificial callus, patching the troughs dug nightly into his well-worn fingers by the friction from heavy-gauge electric guitar strings. He has changed into his stage outfit of black jeans, black Western shirt and black leather coat. He grabs a beer (“I usually have one before I go on, just to help with stage fright”) and finds the band--Joe Terry (keyboards), Rick Shea (guitar, steel guitar, mandolin), Bobby Lloyd Hicks (drums), Gregory Boaz (bass) and Brantley Kearns (violin)--seated at picnic tables, snacking on catering service stew and salad. “Anybody got paper and pen?” Alvin asks. “We need a set list.” He settles for a black marker and napkins from the catering truck.

He begins, as he often does, with “King of California,” his ballad about a prospector drawn to a tragic end in the Sierra gold fields. It has become his signature number, a 19th century story with turn-of-the-millennium orchestration. When Hicks kicks the tempo into a gallop after Alvin’s tender acoustic guitar opening, the evening seems already secure. Hoots and hollers go up from this crowd of aging hippies, campers and their kids, acknowledging the song’s being performed in the setting that inspired it. He tells them: “When people ask me, ‘Dave, what kind of music do you play?’ I say, ‘I play folk music. There’s quiet folk music, and there’s loud folk music.’ ” More hoots and hollers.

Next, Alvin exchanges the Martin acoustic for his vintage Stratocaster and rips off the first bars of “So Long Baby Goodbye.” This enduring rave-up, written for the Blasters, sends him into bravura rockabilly guitar postures that even duck-walking Chuck Berry could admire. Throughout the next hour and 15 minutes, he and the band travel between the raucous and the intricate, from his own carefully inscribed ballads--”Fourth of July” and “California Snow”--to the three-century-old legend of romantic rogue Blackjack David, the talking blues of “New Highway” and the rock ‘n’ roll Blaster past of “American Music” and “Marie Marie.”

“Sometimes a gig is a gig,” he says later. “You show up to make money and pay for your hotel rooms. But other times, gigs take on a communal aspect, when you bring together various pockets of diversity.” Spoken like the man who constructs a medley by melding his own Depression-era spiritual, “Jubilee Train,” with Woody Guthrie’s “Do Re Mi” and Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land”--pulling together 60 years of pop genres with the common thread of working-class longing for the rainbow’s end.

A review in Rolling Stone once said of Alvin, “As master of small-town laments, he ranks with Springsteen, John Hiatt and the colloquial Dylan.” Yet his last two albums have sold about 50,000 units each. That sounds respectable but would not get a phone call returned at a major label.

With headliner Junior Brown on next, Alvin throws the Strat case over his back and walks past Brown’s big silver bus to the merchandise tent, where he will autograph CDs and T-shirts. It’s a chore, but for an independent artist, every chance to make a sale helps the cause. “You know,” he says, “you want to come home after a gig and lie down and relax or go have a beer with some friends, but, normally, I stand in here and count the money, filling in the boxes of how many we sold of this and how many of that.”

Before noon the next day, Alvin assembles the band outside his motel cabin and opens a zippered black briefcase neatly organized into compartments for tour schedules, hotel information and tight bundles of U.S. currency. He doles out each band member’s PD, or per diem, and adds a $50 bonus, explaining that CD sales were brisk the night before. The man known to many as a rip-roaring guitar hero methodically passes out sheets of paper for each of the Guilty Men to sign in a tax accounting ritual. Then they are on the road again, headed for San Francisco and a date at Slim’s. There are no roadies to carry the equipment, no limousines or tour buses. Alvin sees the van as an inverse status symbol and has given it the loving names “Class Equalizer” and--after a particular collision in which it sustained little damage--”Lexus Killer.”

“My weekly nut is about $8,500,” Alvin says as keyboardist Terry drives. “Some weeks you don’t make that and some you do. Our average fee now is $1,000 to $2,000. The lowest I’ll do is $750, and that’s usually a Sunday or Monday night gig. There are certain parts of the country where I make $2,500. Which doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a lot to me. We all make a living doing this, but it’s not Microsoft. We do a lot of sightseeing on tour. We go hiking in national parks and go searching for petroglyphs. Then, later that night, you’ll be in some dressing room with some guy who’s vomiting in the corner or some guy who’s shooting up. But you do get to see West Virginia in the fall.”

ALVIN LIVES IN A SECOND-STORY, $750-a-month, two-bedroom duplex in Silver Lake, south of Sunset and north of the 101. It has functional furnishings and sallow-hued carpeting lined with CDs and cabinets of old LPs. But then you notice the vivid artifacts: a beautiful rug on the wall, a turquoise-colored cabinet holding a venerable kachina doll collection, a painting of blues man Blind Willie Johnson bought years ago at a furniture store in Pasadena. “Most of the kachinas I started collecting as a kid. Now they’re so expensive I’ve switched to Navajo rugs and pottery.” On one wall hangs a framed copy of the platinum album issued to country star Dwight Yoakam for “Just Lookin’ for a Hit,” a 1989 release that featured an Alvin tune. “He recorded ‘Long White Cadillac’ in the depths of my poverty,” Alvin recalls. “I am forever in his debt because it allowed me to start living on the royalty when it was looking awful close to goin’ back to the day job.”

Alvin’s last day job was as a fry cook at a diner in Long Beach when he was 23. He quit that, along with Cal State Long Beach, to play in the Blasters. His brother, Phil, was the leader and lead singer. “He was outgoing and boisterous,” says Dave--whose own first instrument was the flute. “I was a real shy kid and inward.”

The two of them had spent years studying blues and jazz. When most kids their age were only listening to Top 40 radio, Phil and Dave were venturing to South-Central to hear T-Bone Walker, Big Joe Turner and Lightnin’ Hopkins, and buying records by Sun Ra and John Coltrane. “I like pop music and all kinds of music, but my natural inclination was to be drawn to music that I thought was the other side of the story. Blues, country music, certain folk singers and songwriters were the other side of the story.”

Their father, Cass, was a labor organizer for steelworkers throughout the Southwest. “We’d talk about what was good about unions, what was bad about unions, but the bottom line is, ‘Is this the best way for working people?’ and his feeling was, ‘Yes.’ ” His constant travel, however, was not necessarily best for his family. The memory of those absences is why Alvin is hesitant to have children. “I wouldn’t want to do that to a kid, and with what I do, I’m gone a lot.” Sent to Europe with the Army Signal Corps during World War II, Cass Alvin took some of the first photographs documenting what had happened at Dachau. “So we grew up with that and the shadow of the war and what the war did to him,” Alvin says.

Their mother, Eleanor, a third-generation Californian, came to Los Angeles from the Sierra foothills with hopes of becoming an actress. As close as she got was performing in vaudeville as a contortionist, something Alvin didn’t learn until he was in his teens. She died of cancer in 1984.

Dave, Phil and their older sister, Mary, all attended Pius X High School in Downey. “I could have been a great student,” Dave says, “but I wasn’t. I went through a period of ditching, getting drunk. And I look back on that now, and I’m very ashamed because it was a total waste of time. I barely graduated high school, where my brother and sister were honor students. I was sort of the dumbbell.” He credits teachers at Cal State Long Beach with awakening him to the beauty and discipline of poetry. He began to write, later turning some of his poems into songs for the Blasters.

Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, compared the Blasters to Creedence Clearwater Revival and wrote that the group, signed to Warner Brothers, had made “three of the most rewarding LPs of the ‘80s.” But the band’s album sales did not match such acclaim. Director Walter Hill wanted them to do the music for Eddie Murphy’s breakthrough hit “48 Hrs.” Dave didn’t like the script. “We never sold out,” he says, “which was both a good thing and a bad thing.”

Though he looked up to Phil as his hero (“He still is, in many ways”), the brothers fought over the band’s musical direction, and Dave left after several years. Dave and Phil remain close from a distance, but, Dave says, “I don’t think we’ll be making art together any time soon.” Phil went on to get a master’s degree in math from Cal State Long Beach, then taught there and at UCLA, all the while keeping versions of the Blasters together. “The Blasters will be here ‘til we’re dead,” says Phil, who doesn’t think much of his brother’s singing but credits him with displaying “the highest order of organizing words.”

At the high point of Dave’s tenure with the band, he remembers having $20,000 in the bank. “But I had no concept of, like, taxes, and I got killed.” In November 1985, he joined the rock band X (he was already playing with its campy, country alter ego The Knitters). Then he tried to make a go of it fronting his own band and releasing his first solo album, on Epic, “Romeo’s Escape.”

Deep in debt, he headed to Nashville, thinking he might make himself into one of those practiced songsmiths lined up to get a cut on the next Randy Travis or Reba McEntire album. He lasted three months. “It was real difficult for me to write those funny-happy songs. I just couldn’t do it. I don’t have that skill. I wanted to.”

He came back to Los Angeles in the winter of 1989, none the richer. He decided he might as well write and record to please himself, and found in HighTone a label that agreed. He drifted further toward acoustic music, influenced by L.A.-born folk singer Tom Russell and alternative country writer-performers such as Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. These Texans’ sense of place, he says, spurred him to write more specifically about the place he knew best: southeast L.A.

Then he learned how to sing. He didn’t sing a note in the Blasters, nor with X. “When I was first playing with him,” says Joe Terry, “he was a marginal singer, and now he’s not a great singer, but he’s gotten a lot better.” Alvin says: “I was always trying to sing, you know, like my brother or John Doe [of X], guys who had the kinds of voices that could soar above a loud band. I’ve got to sing underneath a loud band.”

Punctuated as it is by an unusual bass vibrato, it’s an approach that can have a hypnotic effect on the right audience. At Slim’s, the young, sold-out crowd stands for the entire sweat-popping night. Dave’s longtime girlfriend, Mary Zerkie, has arrived to celebrate her birthday, and a former women’s West Coast skateboarding champion who’s now a Beverly Hills clothing store manager, quickly moves into the throng with Rick Shea’s wife, Susie. They dance as if this is the first time they’ve laid eyes on these guys whose less-than-easy lives they’ve shared for years. Around them, people clap and shout for “Abilene” and “So Long Baby Goodbye,” then grow eerily quiet for the tale of “Blackjack David.”

An annoyance at clubs, Alvin says, is that fans don’t realize how much audience noise gets back to the stage. “You can’t really see them but you can hear them, and if there are two guys at the back of the bar talking about the ‘49ers game or trying to pick up a girl, you can hear it.” On this night the whispery climax of “Blackjack David” goes unmolested. These people have come to hear the words.

In the dressing room later, spindly fiddler Brantley Kearns has a drink and reflects on an evening when Dave spontaneously handed him more than his usual complement of solos. “With Dave, it’s an organic thing,” he says--meaning that Dave lets each show unfold at its own natural pace, as dictated by the interplay of audience and musicians. That’s not to say Alvin plays a passive role. “With his body language and his musicality,” says Kearns, “he’s quite a leader.”

For a long time, Kearns played fiddle in Dwight Yoakam’s band. I ask how that differed. “With Dwight, it got to be more of a business real fast,” he says. “Dwight wasn’t drivin’ the bus. Dave is drivin’ the bus.”

“I KNOW I’M NEVER GOING TO HAVE A HIT RECORD,” ALVIN ONCE TOLD me. “Maybe if I were 25 and looked like Johnny Depp, I could have a hit record.” He wasn’t complaining, just stating the facts. It’s not as if the former fry cook doesn’t routinely consider the alternatives. “The only other thing I can think that I’m qualified to do would be to sit in one of those cubicles at a pay-first gas station. Or sit in a cubicle with a headset on and call people up and say, ‘Hi, I’m Dave with MCI.’ ” He lets the grim picture of that day job light up the dark screen in his head for a moment, then adds: “And no view.”

This past February, Alvin’s 84-year-old father took a bad fall, broke his arm, got pneumonia and began going in and out of hospitals and nursing homes. Watching his father’s decline told Alvin it was time to reassess. “I was sitting there in his hospital room. He’s on life support. I’m listening to the beeps, and I got to thinking, ‘Life is short, and I’ve got all these projects I want to do.’ ”

The months following Strawberry and Slim’s had been busy: A solo acoustic tour of the East Coast opening for English folk-rocker Richard Thompson, dates with the band in Boston and New York, then a West Coast reunion tour with the Knitters. But he had long wanted to make an album of old folk songs, some familiar, some obscure. He called the band and booked a studio, continuing to go to the hospital early in the morning or late at night. Recording, he says, proved therapeutic. “It helped me to deal with what was happening, but it was a strange period. We did it in about two weeks. It was basically just a bunch of guys sitting in a room playing live.”

His father died May 15. Two days after the memorial service, Alvin is even more ruminative than usual. A rough mix of the new album, “Public Domain,” plays in the background at his apartment, led with a version of “Shenandoah” done R&B-style.; As he talks, he repeatedly grabs at swirls of cigarette smoke around him, trying to keep the smoke from bothering his visitor. “L.A.’s kind of a sad city for me now,” Alvin volunteers. “It’s a city of ghosts--my mom and dad, friends who have passed away, scenes that have passed away.” He names eminent singers and songwriters of his circle--Lucinda Williams, Rosie Flores, Jim Lauderdale, Buddy and Julie Miller--who spent years in Los Angeles but have moved on to Nashville.

“Your goals change,” he says. “And as you get older, it’s not so much to have a hit record as to make better records that can last a while. Because if you pick up a John Prine album from the ‘70s, it’s still a great record. A Blind Lemon Jefferson record from the ‘20s, it’s still a great record. I want to get to a point where I can make records that last like that. Where I’m at now, I don’t have to go to a record label and take major meetings with all sorts of people telling me what my direction should be. You kill yourself touring. But that’s not a bad price to pay for artistic freedom.”

Larry Sloven, who made his reputation by discovering blues guitar virtuoso Robert Cray and signing him to HighTone, told me that of all the people he’s worked with, Dave is the one who will be remembered as a legend. “People will look back and the light will go on.”

Alvin is too modest or too smart to comment on his own legacy. But he does talk about longevity. Just after his father’s death, he went to his first Bruce Springsteen concert and came away uplifted. “I mean, it just shows you how much the age thing has changed in rock ‘n’ roll. He’s 50 years old, putting on a show like that. Which would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. I came away feeling like I wanted to start a band and write songs, and I thought, ‘Wait a minute. I have a band.’ ”

This awakening to the realization of what he’s got--who he is--has been a recurring theme over the months we’ve been talking. “People wonder why Bob Dylan is still touring,” he says. “It’s because he can. It’s what he does. I don’t understand musicians who don’t like to tour. Because for me, when I’m up there, I’m in some sort of vortex where time doesn’t exist. An old song is a new song, and a new song is an old song. I’ve got the living and the dead around me. I might see my mother or Big Joe Turner. It’s hard to describe, but it’s like nothing else in the world.”

Which is why, no doubt, he will soon be back at the wheel, heading down the road toward some place where a few hundred people wait to hear him play. He’s a working musician. It’s what he does.