One of the good things about Shout Factory absorbing Hightone is the resulting compilations. A recent set of releases features highly recommended best-of collections from Buddy Miller, Tom Russell, and Dave Alvin.
The Grammy-winning Alvin, who was perhaps Hightone’s signature artist, makes an appearance at the Cactus Café Friday night, so I thought this would be a good time to catch up with him. We spoke about his time at Hightone, being a flash in the pan versus having a career, the origins of the song “Fourth of July,” and his efforts to help the survivors of sometime-bandmate Chris Gaffney.
Geezerville: The show at the Cactus is listed as acoustic. What does that mean?
Dave Alvin: I’m going to have Chris Miller with me on guitar. We’ve done this a couple of times and it’s fun.
G: Why so stripped down? Are you trying something new?
DA: Part of it is that I tend to juggle things, juggle presentations.
G: I know you had an all-woman band you played with recently, and that sounded really interesting.
DA: That was a gas. In fact, we’re going to be recording in December out there in Austin. But to answer your first question, I tend to balance things out. Maybe two-thirds or three-fourths of my touring is loud with a band. Then I kind of like to do things quietly for a while. It’s a challenge for me and it’s a challenge for the audience, I guess.
G: There are lots of artists that do that and I think it depends on how good the songs are as to whether they can withstand different types of performances.
DA: I used to be a little more cocky about that. Songs aren’t any good if you can’t play them on an acoustic guitar. That is kind of true, but not entirely. A good song can withstand various treatments. I like playing acoustic.
G: Let’s talk a little bit about the new disc. Can you talk a little bit about why you left Hightone? I know you still have a good relationship with them. Label founder Bruce Bromberg wrote part of the liner notes.
DA: It just got to the end of the line. I was there for like 12 years and I had a great time. But it just got to where I didn’t see … how do I put this? For musicians and record companies, the music industry as it stands right now, how it’s going to survive is up in the air. So I didn’t see them as being able to survive, if that makes sense.
G: Well, you were right.
DA: Without getting too complicated, the bottom line was that it had been like 12 years. Like I wrote in the liner notes, I had a great time with them. I got something that not many artists ever get, which is unchecked freedom and I’m always indebted to them for that.
G: You brought them other artists as well.
DA: Yeah, we had a nice symbiotic relationship going. But I didn’t see them as being able to survive in the long run. To me, artists like me, people that kind of work on the outskirts of town town, we’re not downtown, we survive by a slow building process. One of the reasons I signed with them was because of that. I’ve had a lot of friends that kind of went for the brass ring and I’ve seen enough of what happens, the sort of devastation that can lead you to. I’ve had a couple of friends that bought into that and they aren’t making music anymore for a living. I came up with a strategy based on some of my heroes. How did Big Joe Turner survive? How did Merle Haggard survive? How did Curtis Mayfield survive?
G: It’s the difference between trying to make the big time and having a career.
DA: I could look in the mirror and know that I wasn’t going to make the big time. I don’t mean that self-deprecatingly. I mean that 100 percent honest. Even in the days of the Blasters, part of our charm was that we weren’t the best looking guys in town. Look at a guy like Lou Donaldson. He would play at the local jazz club in town and if you go to a record store and go into the jazz section then there’s probably a couple of Lou Donaldson Blue Note LPs there. That whole idea of having a catalog, of having a body of work that was available to people, was a way to establish a life on the road and life as a functioning, touring musician. You had to have a record label that understood you. That was true both for Hightone and now for Yep Roc.
G: The only thing I would liked to have seen on [the album] was more live, concert songs.
DA: There’s some live stuff that’s never been released that’s pretty good. I’m a big fan but I’m a minority – most people from what I’m told don’t like live records, where I do. Whether it’s James Brown or John Coltrane or George Jones. A live record, if it’s a real live record, separates the men from the boys or the girls from the women. I was discussing maybe doing a two-record set with one having sort of an acoustic feel and the second disc having the best of the live stuff. But Shout Factory prevailed, maybe rightly.
G: It would probably be the record I’d recommend for people who haven’t heard you before or to someone who was looking to pick up just one disc. I wanted to ask you about “Fourth of July.” It’s maybe your best known song. Does it come from experience?
DA: Oh yeah, that’s the story of my life. There’s a period in my life, before the Blasters, when you get out of your teens and you get into your twenties and some people – let’s say smarter people – move far away from where they come from. Maybe they go to Harvard and get degrees and become President instead of dumb clucks like me. We get the day job and hang around in the area that we grew up in. I won’t say we didn’t know any better, but we didn’t know how. I couldn’t figure life out if you paid me. So it’s a story about a couple of people, a period in my life when me and this gal were together and working our day jobs, and that’s the way life was going to be from then on. You’re 22 going on 60. I had written a poem about that period in my life, which was two or three pages long. Years later, I realized that it could make a good song. When I wrote it I kind of viewed it as a kiss-off to that part of my life.
G: Well, thanks for your time.
DA: Before you go, I’m gonna plead with you to mention the Chris Gaffney tribute project I’m working on. It’ll be out in March. I’ve got everybody from Joe Ely, Alejandro Escovedo, James McMurtry, Los Lobos, Calexico. The money’s going to his survivors and everybody did it for free. Some of the money’s going to this group Hungry for Music that Chris and I liked that gives musical instruments to underprivileged kids. My main idea was to give Gaffney his last shot because I don’t think people realize what a good songwriter he was. It’s coming out on Yep Roc and we’re going to do something at South by Southwest, whatever they allow us. Sorry, a cheap shameless plug.
This article appears in November 14 • 2008.