Master Blaster

Stephen W. Smith

Dave Alvin digs those Americana roots

By Tom Vasich

ALTHOUGH HE HAS no chart-topping CDs and doesn’t sell out arenas, Dave Alvin is responsible for some of the most enduring American music of the past 20 years. Fans of the roots-rock movement of the early ’80s recognize Alvin as the wild lead guitarist and songwriter for the Blasters, the legendary band from Southern California that continues to influence artists today like Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys.

In the fertile L.A. music scene of that time, Alvin played a leading role. He helped Los Lobos secure their early Hollywood gigs; he played with X after leaving the Blasters. Along with Los Lobos’ David Hildago, Alvin wrote some of the most enduring music of that time. His songs are featured in the films Bull Durham and From Dusk ’til Dawn, and one of his songs, “Border Radio,” inspired the Allison Anders film of the same name.

In 1987, Alvin went solo. While his late ’80s works revealed his discomfort as a lead singer, it was also marked by a growing maturity in his songwriting. This artistic growth reached a new level with 1994’s King of California (Hightone), an exceptional work that helped build a new musical format, Americana, which eschews contemporary commercial styles and incorporates different modes of American sounds. Alvin’s distinctive blending of blues, folk, and rock places him with Lucinda Williams and Steve Earle as the leading proponents of roots-revival music.

Alvin’s latest release, Blackjack David, continues in the tradition of King of California. Its songs tell a story of love, death, and isolation. The themes are often bleak, revealing the blue-collar underbelly of the American dream. A lifelong Angeleno, Alvin writes of a desperate, tarnished Golden State full of dank bars and broken hearts. He’s been called the poet of the lonely highway, and although they sell in the thousands instead of millions, the past two albums are American classics that will be referred to for generations.

Alvin is also noted for his poetry, which he’s been writing longer than he has been playing music. A compilation of his poetry, Any Rough Times Are Now behind You, shows a definite Bukowski influence and the emotional depth that drives his music.

A contemporary troubadour, Alvin tours seven to eight months a year–sometimes solo, sometimes with a band. I caught up with him at home during a rare three-day break from performing.

Vasich: Although your songs are very personal, I don’t get a sense that they’re autobiographical. You seem to take archetypal themes of folk, country, and blues music and give it a different look.

Alvin: That’s true, but there are also biographical things lying around in there. I wouldn’t say I’m a highly confessional songwriter. But it’s there. In my song “From a Kitchen Table,” if you’re going to write a song about a man who’s living at home with his mom, which is based on a guy I know in Downey [Calif., his hometown], you have to you use your experience and regrets to make it personal.

Vasich: What is the source of your songwriting inspiration?

Alvin: I really don’t know, and I don’t mean to be vague about it. I just get an idea and try it out. And if it works, it works. In a way, talking about songwriting is a little bit like those people who say, “Don’t take a picture of me, you’ll steal my soul.” I don’t like to talk too much about where my inspiration is, because if I talk too much about it, it might go away.

Vasich: How do you address writing music vs. writing poetry?

Alvin: I try to keep them separate. The lyrics for the music gotta rhyme, for one thing. And the older I get, I feel totally uncomfortable doing poetry readings. I really don’t like doing them anymore. I still enjoy writing the poetry, but reading it is not fun. Still, you can take an image in your brain and write it both as a poem and as a song.

Vasich: How has your outlook on music changed since your Blasters days?

Alvin: I still listen to the same stuff that I listened to as a kid. The nuts and bolts are still Lightning Hopkins, Hank Williams, or Big Joe Turner. What’s changed is that I’m now able to use an entire palate [of musical styles]. In the Blasters, we could mix up a lot stuff–we were basically a blues, R&B band–and we mixed in elements of hillbilly music and Cajun stuff. But now I can do blues songs, like I do on the new album, but it comes from a different perspective. And then there’s stuff that sounds like the Carter family, stuff that’s pretty hillbillyish. As a solo writer, I can avail myself to all those styles–hillbilly or Chicago blues, whatever.

Vasich: I’ve noticed on NPR and college stations that artists like you, Lucinda Williams, and Steve Earle are getting more play. Have these become good times for artists such as yourself, who really don’t fit into commercial radio formats?

Alvin: Part of it has to do with that those people you mentioned, and lots of others have been making good records. When we started the Blasters, we knew there were people out there that liked this kind of music; it’s how you access them that counts. There’s a lot of different ways to access them now, between radio and the Internet. I mean, the Internet’s made a major change, just because it’s an alternative way–people go to a show in St. Louis and post a review of it themselves. And some guy in Pittsburgh reads it and comes to your show that night. Little things like that, they all help create a groundswell.

Vasich: Have you a grand design for your career?

Alvin: I wish I did. I just want to pay the rent. The trick is I want to play music I want to play.

The Dave Alvin Band performs Wednesday, Dec. 9, at 8:30 p.m., at the Powerhouse Brewing Co., 268 Petaluma Ave., Sebastopol. Tickets are $10. Call 829-9171.

From the December 3-9, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Heart and Soul

Folkie Greg Brown on the simple life

By Alan Sculley

ASK GREG BROWN what he likes best about good music and the singer/songwriter homes right in on the ability of some artists to convey a sense of place in their music. “Muddy Waters, now when you hear Muddy sing, you can close your eyes and see the Mississippi Delta,” Brown says.

“It’s just right in there. Hank Williams Sr., you could see little towns, you could see a whole chain of them all down through the South. Jimmie Rogers, you can see him on the railroad train. It’s just in a lot of American music. And I think even into contemporary times, I mean when I listen to Bruce Springsteen, I can see New Jersey, that whole deal in New Jersey. I can see where he’s coming from. I can hear it. and I think that’s a beautiful thing about America.

“We have such a big country, and there are so many landscapes and different feelings all around the country, and music expresses all that.”

In Brown’s case, his music reflects his roots in southeastern Iowa and the Ozarks of southern Missouri. This makes sense when Brown discusses his musical influences, because as much as he grew up loving everything from classical music to gospel, from the rockabilly of Jerry Lee Lewis to the soul of Ray Charles, from jazz to the country songs of Hank Williams, his biggest influences were much closer to home.

“I think one reason I feel so tapped into American music is just the nature of my growing up,” says Brown, the son of a Pentecostal minister from the Ozarks and a mother who grew up in rural Iowa. “With my father being a preacher, there are so many American musicians who started in the church, it’s just endless. People, you ask them, ‘Where did you first sing? Where did you play first?’ It was the church, and that was the case for me. It was gospel music. That, and then my mother’s people–everybody played. It was really more like Appalachian or Southern folk music than it was anything. I just grew up with everybody playing and singing church music from the time I was little.

“I think another big influence was my mother’s mother,” Brown adds. “She sang old Irish ballads she had learned from her Irish mother. That whole ballad tradition of storytelling through songs, those beautiful melodies … it was just in my heart from the beginning.”

ALL OF THE STYLES Brown mentions are present in his spare, rough-hewn music. Although he is generally considered a folk artist, his music defies easy categorization. For example, on his latest CD, Slant 6 Mind (Red House), there’s a danger-filled grittiness to “Dusty Woods” and “Wild Like Sonny Boy” that seems more based in blues. The scatting rhythms in the percussion and guitars of “Mose Allison Played Here” bring a jazz sense to the song. His sound takes a gentler, more folkish country turn on “Vivid” and “Spring & All.”

In fact, Brown says, the sonic role model for the new CD wasn’t folk or country at all. It was blues great Muddy Waters’ classic 1963 acoustic album Folk Singer (Chess).

“It wasn’t so much the songs, because Muddy’s work, of course, is blues and Delta,” Brown says. “It was just the sound of that record. It had a real presence to it. You could hear every little thing. He was playing acoustic guitar, which I thought was cool. That was a different thing for him. But you felt like you were right there in that room. And it was really that sound and the kind of presence I was after.”

Slant 6 Mind (Red House), released last fall, is Brown’s 13th album over the course of a career that began 20 years ago. It’s a career that by his own admission has been spent on the fringes of the musical mainstream. Most of the time, he has received only minimal radio play or attention in the press. Perhaps his highest profile forum came during the 1980s as a regular on National Public Radio’s Prairie Home Companion.

In recent years, though, Brown’s star has risen. In particular, his three most recent CDs–The Poet Game, Further In, and Slant 6 Mind–have grabbed sparkling reviews in major magazines, and his songs have begun filtering onto Americana format radio playlists. Brown credits his producer, Bo Ramsey (who has played electric guitar on Brown’s recent albums), with helping him discover how to create albums that sound better, more fully realized. Consequently, his work is more accessible. “I think what separates them is having Bo Ramsey and learning how to make records,” Brown says, comparing his recent work to his early records.

“When I look back on my earlier songs, I feel just as good about them as I do of my songs now. I don’t think of songwriting as being necessarily a progressive thing where you get better and better. It’s more like circles. But making an album was a skill I had to learn.”

IF SUCCESS is gradually finding Brown rather late in the game, he isn’t complaining. “My career has always really moved by word of mouth. I haven’t had any kind of a hype machine behind me at all,” says Brown, 48. “So it’s just happened the way it’s happened. It suits me the way it’s gone. I’ve been able to make a living playing music, which is all I ever really wanted to do.

“And things have gone well and at a good pace, I think.”

In fact, in some ways Brown’s approach to career mirrors a theme that frequently finds its way into his music–shallow materialism and the need to live life based on something deeper, something closer to the heart, something that provides a sense of community and belonging. “My own father, who was doing quite well in the world after he got out of the Army in World War II, he had studied electronics and he had his own radio and TV repair shop going,” Brown recalls. “He was building those big, high broadcasting towers. Things were going good for him. But then when he felt a call to the ministry, he left that behind. He made a choice based on what he felt in his heart and not his wallet. So he was my role model.

“And also, I think having all these memories of what it was like to be with my extended family in a little farmhouse playing music, cooking supper, all contribute to this sense of belonging. I mean, to me, things don’t get any better than that. I don’t care how many swimming pools you’ve got.

“Those simple things are the things, I think, that really sustain us,” he adds. “If I was walking through an airport and I looked at all these Americans, all rushing around trying to make more money to buy more stuff, if they looked happy and engaged, I would say ‘Great.’ But they don’t. They look sad, they looked stressed, they look empty a lot of times. They look like people on a treadmill. I just don’t think it works.

“I don’t think my vision of life is really romantic. There isn’t some beautiful, perfect way to live. But there are ways that are better than others. I really think the thing about rampant consumerism is it’s destroying the planet and it’s not filling up people’s hearts and souls.”

Greg Brown performs Friday, Dec. 4, at 8 p.m. at the Sebastopol Community Center, 390 Morris St., Sebastopol. Cheryl Wheeler and karen Savoca also perform. Tickets are $21/advance, $23/ at the door. For details, call 823-1511.

From the November 25-December 2, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

The Inn Crowd

Inn of the Beginning turns 30

By Charles McDermid

IN THE BEGINNING, Greg Cochrane simply needed some rest. It was 1968 and Cochrane was holding what his close friend and fellow Sonoma State University student David McNair recalls as “a permanent party going on all summer. He said that if he was ever going to get some sleep he had to move the party.”

Simple enough. Cochrane, 22, rented the space of a defunct Italian restaurant in downtown Cotati, and on Sept. 28, 1968, his summertime bash became the original incarnation of the Sonoma County entertainment institution The Inn of the Beginning.

“I gave it the name because it was a new beginning for a lot of people who really had nothing else going for them,” says Cochrane, who does say he thought of the club’s title while on LSD. “We wanted to keep things friendly and localized and play really soulful music.”

Thirty years later, those goals remain intact. Cochrane’s core philosophy has been retained and refreshed by a string of owners leading to the current trio of Miranda Fredrick, Scott Wagner, and Scott Goree, former owner of Magnolias in Santa Rosa. “[The Inn] has always been the heart of the Cotati scene for music and art. And for its youthfulness and exploration and optimism. It’s also the social gathering place and the heart of the North Bay musical community,” remarks Frank Hayhurst, former co-operator of the Inn, member of the Bronze Hog (the first band to grace the stage at the Inn), and owner of Zone Music in Cotati. “Cotati’s personality is defined by the club.”

Cultural landmark status aside, the Inn’s most impressive feature is its past and present commitment to live music–all of which will be celebrated this weekend when the Inn marks its anniversary with a celebration that will feature, among others, the Legendary Bronze Hog.

“We all enjoyed music and we wanted a venue for ourselves,” says Cochrane.

Citing “burnout,” Cochrane sold the club in 1970 to Ward Maillard (son of a U.S. congressman and Sonoma County artist Elizabeth Quandt). Maillard, who once spent months building a gigantic rock and fiberglass urinal, lost interest after several years and in 1974 sold the Inn to his manager, Mark Braunstein, a former roadie for Janis Joplin. “I had a lot of pride in the club, and what I really liked was presenting new music and exposing the audience to music they would’ve not normally heard,” says Braunstein, whose connections in the music industry and knowledge of production attracted many big-name acts to the local club scene.

“It’s remarkable the people that were coming through the doors in those early days,” remembers Cotati Mayor Richard Cullinen, who tended bar at the Inn in the mid-70s. “Van Morrison popped in frequently and Neil Young was there. I used to sit down and talk to Jerry Garcia when he played there with Merl Saunders.”

Considering the size of the venue, the list of acts that have taken the stage in Cotati is staggering. For instance, the Grateful Dead played every Tuesday for a while, trying out new material on a live audience. Neil Young played unannounced one night for a case of beer and some pizza. A fledgling Jackson Browne was denied an audition after he admitted he was from Orange County. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott introduced a young Arlo Guthrie, who then graced listeners with the first-ever stage performance of his classic “Driving into Los Angeles.” According to Cochrane, Janis Joplin reunited for a short set with Big Brother and the Holding Company just months before her passing.

Waylon Jennings played the Inn. So did New Age pianist George Winston, the psychobilly Cramps, Jefferson Airplane, country artists Ricky Skaggs and Hank Williams Jr., the legendary New Orleans band the Meters, zydeco king Clifton Chenier, bluegrass giant Doc Watson, R&B diva Etta James, and folk queen Joan Baez. The list of bluesmen who made the scene is remarkable in itself: Lightnin’ Hopkins, Bukka White, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, Taj Mahal, and John Lee Hooker.

Braunstein ran the Inn until 1982, when he merged with downtown rival the Cotati Cabaret to form the lengthy-titled but short-lived Inn of the Beginning at the Cotati Cabaret. He left the old building at 8201 Redwood Highway amid a leasing dispute, and the Inn lay silent for years.

AFTER FAILED STINTS earlier in the decade as an antique store, a bookstore, and a beer-vending coffehouse, the Inn is back as a fixture of downtown Cotati. A year ago, Fredrick and Goree gained managerial control of the Inn and, together with longtime sound technician Randy Teaford, have since infused the club with the same creative energy that once fueled founders Cochrane and Braunstein.

While the Inn may no longer have access to the big names it once did, it has become a vital steppingstone for local acts. Virtually no homegrown band can emerge from Sonoma County without having played the Inn.

“If people are playing in garages, it doesn’t help anyone. The main thing is providing a place for people to play [in public],” says co-owner Goree, who began coming to the Inn in 1968 as an SSU student.

Co-owner Fredrick, formerly known as DJ Lili Pond on KFGY (92.9FM), adds, “We have great nights here with local talent. The Inn is a great launching pad and it’s home to a lot of bands.”

Goree and Fredrick’s booking philosophy presents a different musical style nearly every night of the week. “Around here you simply can’t concentrate on one type of music or demographic,” adds Goree. “You have to mix it up with different shows. Places that exist as solely blues clubs or punk clubs are very short-lived.”

Indeed, the Inn is a smaller act’s dream.

“The vibe is what really makes this place work. It’s in rooms like ours where music really happens. You realize that you’re lucky to be so close you can check out a performer’s dental work,” says Teaford. “Our history and the casual yet efficient way of producing shows have made our reputation.”

The Inn of the Beginning celebrates its 30th anniversary with a local band showcase Saturday, Nov. 21, at 7 p.m. 8201 Old Redwood Hwy., Cotati. Admission is $5. 662-1100.

From the November 19-24, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.