Dave Alvin: Still 'King' after 25 years
“The King of California” was the album that introduced Dave Alvin as a singer/songwriter.
That sounds wrong, since he’d been playing guitar and writing songs for years, first as lead guitarist in The Blasters, the rock band fronted by his older brother, singer Phil Alvin. Later, Dave Alvin spent about a year in the Los Angles roots-punk band X, where his tune “The Fourth of July,” sung by John Doe, became X’s closest thing to a hit in the mid-1980s. By 1987, Alvin had left X and released his own solo debut, “Romeo’s Escape,” but, as good as his songs were, he was basically fronting a rock band.
It is a remarkable watershed that Alvin’s fourth solo album, in a format his record company was not thrilled about, turned out to be, not just his biggest seller, but the work that awakened much of the music community to the fact that he was a songwriter of immense skill and power.
Alvin’s tour celebrating the 25th anniversary of “The King of California” arrives at City Winery in Boston on Friday where he’ll have the album’s producer, multi-instrumentalist Greg Leisz, and vocalist Christy McWilson in tow.
The anniversary album came out June 28 and is a remastered re-release with three bonus tracks, including an instrumental romp, “Riverbed Rag,” a cover of Merle Haggard’s “Kern River” from the “Tulare Dust” tribute to Haggard album that Alvin helped produce, and a duet with Katy Moffat on “The Cuckoo,” from a 1999 album of hers that Alvin also produced.
The original “King of California” album included several cuts of songs Alvin had previously recorded, including “The Fourth of July” “Every Night About This Time,” and “Border Radio,” but they were done in much different formats than their first rocking incarnations. But when Alvin went to the studio, the day after the Northridge earthquake of 1994, Leisz had a vision for what he wanted to do with the songsmith.
“I think the biggest change was that when I wrote for a rock band, that means the band decides what the song will sound like,” Alvin said, from his California home just before this tour began. “The biggest difference here is that I was able to let the songs decide what they were going to sound like. You take a song like ‘Border Radio,' which I always felt was a ballad when I wrote it, but with The Blasters it had to be changed around and made into a rocker. And also, singing was always problematic for me. My brother Phil is a great blues shouter, and I always felt that’s how you had to sing — above the band. That’s the way the really powerful vocalists my brother and I loved growing up always sang, the Muddy Waters and Big Joe Turners. But my voice is not that powerful, so I had to learn how to use it.”
Alvin continues: “On this album, the whole idea was to have the band, or the other musicians, play around me, instead of having me on top of everything. I credit Greg Leisz for helping me figure out how to do it with my voice as just another instrument in the mix. He told me he wanted my voice to be intimate. The way he’d explain things to me was to imagine you’re sitting around your house singing to your friends. There’s a certain way to do that, to make it intimate, so that you can make the audience believe they’re in the house with you. “
Perhaps for the easiest way to appreciate that shift in tone, fans ought to compare the original Blasters or X versions of “The Fourth of July” with the one on the ’94 record. In the tune, the singer is a hard-working man in a difficult relationship and he just wants his girl to come out to celebrate the holiday. It worked marvelously as an exuberant rocker. But in the acoustic version on “The King of California,” there are added layers of meaning, subtle nuances that hint at the love affair unraveling and the man’s frustration and weariness of squabbling. (Alvin has said he was working as a 21-year-old fry cook when he wrote it, and it reflected how hard he and his girlfriend were working to make ends meet and how that struggle led to the relationship’s gradually fraying.)
“Yes, there are songs on that album that I had done before, and some, like 'Fourth of July' are songs that I still do almost every night,” said Alvin. “I think it did change the meaning when we did it acoustically and my voice is probably deeper now. I think over the years what the song means to me has changed. When I wrote it, I did it as a breakup song — they’re breaking up and don’t exactly know why. Over the years, turning it over in my brain, my view has morphed into thinking maybe they didn’t break up, maybe they did save it and stay together.”
Alvin said the song "Every Night About Time" was "written about this older woman we saw all the time in this bar we went to near Bakersfield. I think that song really worked better in the acoustic treatment, one of my first character studies type of song.”
The title cut for Alvin’s ’94 album is more of a folk ballad than almost anything he’d ever written, a classic tale of a man striking out west to make his fortune and then send for his lady love. And, like many folk songs, it takes a tragic twist in the last verse. The re-release has been accompanied by a new video, which is a heady succession of scenes of Californian landscapes.
“The hardest thing for me as a songwriter has been to write a happy love song,” Alvin said, with a soft laugh. “The truly great songwriters like Cole Porter or the Gershwins could do it and I guess it takes a certain genius quality I may not have. I have written a couple of happy ones but I tend to lean toward those kind of ‘King of California' stories that don’t end so well."
Another standout song on the album is “Bus Station,” a riveting portrait of a couple on a cross-country bus, “getting tired of love.” There’s a nod to the Woody Guthrie tradition with “Barn Burning,” which hauntingly notes “the rich get richer, and the poor stay poor.” And there’s a poignant cover of Tom Russell’s “Blue Wing,” which is a jailed man’s dawn reverie.
“The King of California” album also includes some excellent duets with Rosie Flores on “Goodbye Again,” which she co-wrote with Alvin; with Syd Straw on George Jones’ “What Am I Worth?”; and now the Katy Moffatt extra cut on the re-issue. McWilson will be doing those vocal duets on this tour.
“The duets certainly helped make me sound better,” said Alvin. “Rosie took the bullet for all the duet singers I’ve worked with since, because she was the first. I had never written a duet before, so recording that was fun. The way Rosie and I did that song as kind of a conversation was a new idea at the time and a good way to show that no-good, rotten guy she was leaving. The song I did with Syd Straw was a George Jones cover and he was a real early influence on my brother and me,” said Alvin. “To me, George Jones was a pretty good rock ‘n’ roll singer. I like pretty broad definitions in my own music and am not at all concerned with any one perception, and I think George was like that. “
We suggested Alvin is like Delbert McClinton, who might be described at various times as a rock ‘n’ roller, country singer, blues singer or soul singer.
“Delbert, again, the bottom line is probably a rock ‘n’ roller,” said Alvin. “But the basis of that is being a blues player. You could put Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson or Lightnin’ Hopkins with the Boston Symphony and what they’d be playing would still be basically blues.”
Alvin has had a busy year touring with Jimmie Dale Gilmore and with the rejuvenated ‘80s roots-punk side project The Flesh Eaters and now this tour with Leisz and McWilson.
“It has been a bit crazy,” Alvin said. “It’s a case both of I enjoy the challenge and I love to play. Of course they’re all different things, some of the same licks but in different formats, acoustic to electric, sideman to frontman. But whatever I’m doing on guitar I’m just playing Lightnin’ Hopkins.”
Alvin has also been recording with Victor Krummenacher of the band Camper Van Beethoven, who was doing a solo album with David Immergluck of Counting Crows, Michael Jerome and singer Jessie Sykes. That album should be out early next year and involved some laidback studio jamming.
“I was just the guitar player, which was a nice change,” said Alvin. “We all came, no rehearsal, turned on the machines and started recording, mainly covers. I’d never recorded that way before and never had that kind of budget and it was really nice to work that way.”
Alvin pointed out a lot of his touring is about the finances. “Early on in my solo career I noticed that when I went out electric with the whole band, we didn’t make any money, but when I played acoustic in smaller groups, I came home with some bread. Eventually, I also noticed I sing better acoustically. But the label we were on in ’94, Hightone, was not sold entirely on the idea of an acoustic album so we did 'King' on the cheap. We couldn’t come in with 35 songs so we brought in 14 songs for a 14-song album. I always feel like this is the last record I’ll make; Bob Dylan could make an album of all polka tunes and it’d probably sell, but if I don’t make a good one I’m not sure I’ll ever get to make another.”
Music preview
Dave Alvin
8 p.m. Friday, July 19 at City Winery, 80 Beverly St., Boston. $22-$30. 617-933-8047, citywinery.com/boston