Every Life About This Time

Dave Alvin, co-founder of the Blasters, briefly guitarist for X, and all-American, all-Los Angeleno troubadour, raised the roof and a few ghosts during his set Sunday night at McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. During "Run Conejo Run," a tribute to fallen bandmate Chris Gaffney, he glanced over his shoulder at the stairs leading up to the dressing room as though his friend were about to step in with his accordion. "Black Rose Of Texas," from his new album Eleven Eleven, was for another lost musician friend, Amy Farris. Introducing his first encore, his classic "Fourth Of July," he bonded with audience members over Foxy's Restaurant on Paramount Blvd. in his native Downey and Pup 'N' Taco, a born- and died-in-LA chain. And he opened with "Ash Grove," a boogie about the legendary LA folk club that he used to sneak into as a boy to hear blues legends who have died long since. The closing verses deserve to be quoted at length:

Well I can’t say I been all sinner
Can’t say I been all saint
I’ve done some good deeds and I’ve made big mistakes
I been in and out of love
Said words I regret
I been drunk, been sober
Smoked too many cigarettes
And I’m out on this highway travelin’ town to town
And the news on the radio just brings me down
Intolerance and fear
Ignorance and lies
It’s the same old same old I heard a million times
And I’m thinkin’ of friends and lovers
And how they come and go
Like look-alike houses on the side of the road
Full of everyday people tryin’ to get ahead
Tryin’ to find a reason just to get out of bed
‘Cause we all need somethin’ just to get us through
Well I’m gonna play the blues tonight man
‘Cause that’s what I do

If you've been 56 (like Alvin) or 57 (like me) and the vast ocean of loss is shimmering on the horizon, you feel that way sometimes. Kathy, while no blues hound, enjoyed the show and said it was a blessed thing when someone can make a living doing what he loves. As for me, I rely on the canon of my aging songwriters almost as much as my prayer book and NRSV -- Springsteen, Tom Russell (with whom Alvin wrote "California Snow," which he performed Sunday), John Hiatt, Robert Earl Keen. Alvin's the only one in the pantheon who sings anywhere near as low as I do. I was following the capo up and down the fretboard of his pretty cutaway Martin and staring at his fingers, trying to learn the chord shapes.

With such a prolific and eloquent songwriter and poet, one is also curious about the shape of his life. While Alvin interacts graciously with his audience, he's reticent about personal matters beyond mentioning menthol cigarettes a couple of times and sipping self-consciously from the half-finished Bud Light he carried on stage. His voice is so mellow and supple that you want to tell him to keep on medicating it however he wants. He's written songs that ache with desire, regret, and tormenting jealousy, probably bits of narrative peeking between what Mark Knopfler called the bars of a rhyme. If you want to hear social commentary, check out the powerful medley of his song "Jubilee Train" with Woody Guthrie's "Do Re Mi" and Chuck Berry's "Promised Land," all the peril and promise of living in America packed into a seven hard-rocking minutes.

Alvin performed 15 songs Sunday night and could've done a hundred. I'll be back again hoping to hear "Every Night About This Time," "Out In California," and the achingly beautiful new song, "Manzanita," which I mean to essay with the St. John's folk circle. He played acoustic guitar the whole time, with longtime collaborator Chris Miller filling in on electric. And what a treat when his elder brother, Dr. Phil Alvin (mathematics, UCLA, shown at left above at an earlier gig), joined him for three, including "Marie Marie," which Dave wrote for Phil to sing in their band the Blasters, and "What's Up With Your Brother?", in which they work out some sibling rivalry. On the album version, Dave acknowledges that he likes to have his privacy respected. "Loose lips sink ships, mi hermano," he says. Fair enough. But we do get the picture from the songs, and it does help.

"Amarillo Highway," Robert Earl Keen

Song by Terry Allen

I don't wear no Stetson
But I'm willing to bet, son
That I'm as big a Texas as you are
There's a girl in her bare feet
Asleep in the back seat
And the trunk's full of Pearl beer and Lone Star

"The Road Goes on Forever," Joe Ely

The classic Robert Earl Keen tune about the bad guys winning, performed by Mr. Ely of Lubbock, Texas.

During the first Bush administration, the National Archives invited me to a couple of presidential libraries directors' meetings, even though the Nixon library was then a nongovernmental institution. The Clinton administration put an end to all that.

My second and final opportunity to mingle with the grownups was at the LBJ library in Austin in 1992. On our evening off, I made my way to La Zona Rosa, now closed, where, just as I arrived, Ely and his band swung into this number as the UT students in in the audience held their Lone Star bottles in the air.

I think I was a Texan in a prior life.

Great Guy

Guy Clark was born in west Texas during the first year of World War II. I think we must be related. I love his sly phrasing and picking. This performance of a medley of two songs, "Old Friends" (not Paul Simon's song, but one Clark wrote with his wife and another songwriter) and "LA Freeway," was broadcast on Irish TV in 1990. Jerry Jeff Walker had a hit with "LA Freeway" in the 1970s, when I first heard and loved it.

I don't know how this music -- Clark, Joe Ely, Robert Earl Keen, Townes van Zandt, Steve Earle -- got in my blood. I've only been to Texas a few times, including once in the early 1990s, during a presidential libraries conference, when I visited a now-defunct club in Austin, La Zona Rosa, and saw Ely play the R. E. Keen song "The Road Goes On Forever" as a swirling scrum of UT students held their Lone Star bottles in the air. Plus I was with Joe at a show at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano in 1994. It was right after Paul Kelly's opening set (another cousin, from Australia), and we happened to be the men's room at the same time.

Hat tip to the good people at "No Depression"

When He Locks Into That Backbeat

Along with buddy and blues hound Gary Baker, who helped us lay President and Mrs. Nixon to rest at the Nixon Library lo! these many years ago, your correspondent is heading to Woodstock (40 years after the great event; better late than never) to see the Levon Helm Band's Midnight Ramble on Saturday night, in the legendary Band vocalist and drummer's barn. They say you never know who'll drop by. Texas songwriter Robert Earl Keen did and wrote a song about it, "The Man Behind the Drums," on his new album, "The Rose Hotel." This account of the Oct. 10 Ramble gives you the flavor:

Intimate? It really was like standing around in somebody’s living room and watching a world-class band crank out some of their favorite songs. For more than two hours, I stood no more than 15 feet away from Levon Helm as he churned through some of the funkiest backbeats I’ve ever heard. I was begoggled.

Helm wasn’t singing. He’s still on doctor-ordered vocal rest after a successful throat operation in August, but that certainly hasn’t slowed him down any behind the drum kit.
Larry Campbell – Dylan’s longtime guitarist – led the band, and what a band it was. A fabulous four-piece horn section, including the great Howard Johnson on baritone sax and tuba. Gruff-voiced Brian Mitchell behind the grand piano. Teresa Williams and Amy Helm adding not only plenty of angelic harmonies, but also some serious sass and sizzle at the microphone. And, oh yeah, there was Jim Weider – the guitarist in the Band’s post-Robbie Robertson days – firing up guitar licks that seemed to come flying in from some fifth dimension.

The songlist was sublime. There were plenty of Band classics – from the opening “The Shape I’m In” to the show-closing “The Weight,” with stops along the way at “Long Black Veil,” “Chest Fever” (with a crazy-good Campbell-Weider guitar duel) and a towering rendition of “It Makes No Difference” with Williams and Amy Helm pouring their hearts out.

And if you never paid serious attention to the latter-day incarnation of the Band, the fiery Campbell-Weider duet on “Remedy,” would definitely find you re-thinking your position.
There was a nod to the Dead with “Tennessee Jed” (also on Helm’s great new album, “Electric Dirt”) and a sweet, folksy version of “Attics of My Life.” There were blues, honky tonkers, a country waltz, soul (Amy Helm’s reading of “Everybody Loves a Winner” was one of the highlights of the night) and a heaping helping of strutting New Orleans funk, including “Deep Ellum Blues” (with Helm on mandolin and some wild hoochie coochie dancing) and “All On a Mardi Gras Day" (with the horn section parading through the audience).

Perfect Songs: "Shades Of Gray" (1997)

Robert Earl Keen, singing one of the best modern folk songs I've ever heard. What's it about?

Hat tip to "No Depression"

Perfect Songs: "Feelin' Good Again" (1998)

Robert Earl Keen

Perfect Songs: "Merry Christmas From The Family"

Robert Earl Keen (1994)