Latest News:  Can't Steal My Fire: The Songs of David Olney was released on Oct. 25 on New West Records. Dave Alvin performs STEAL MY THUNDER with the Rick Holmstrom Trio. Other artists include Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Buddy Miller. II III   Tonight I'll Go Down Swingin': A Tribute to Don Heffington (Nine Mile Records) was released on Oct. 18 and features Dave's performance of AVENUE C. Musicians backing him include Michael Jerome, drummer for The Third Mind; guitarist Greg Leisz; and bassist Bob Glaub. Other artists on the 20-song album include Tony Gilkyson, Jackson Browne, and Peter Case. Proceeds from the album will go to Sweet Relief, which helps musicians with their medical bills. II III   Dave Alvin has provided a blurb for Down on the Corner: Adventures in Busking and Street Music by Cary Baker. The book will be published on Nov. 12 by Jawbone Press. For his blurb, Dave writes: "Reading Cary Baker's excellent book on busking brought back memories of when I was in The Blasters and how our band arguments usually ended one of two ways: either with fists and tears or with my brother Phil loudly proclaiming that he was the only guy in the group who could walk outside and make a living by singing on street corners. Cary's exhaustive research and passionate reporting show not only why my brother was proud to have been a busker, but it also makes a solid case why busking is as much part of the history of American roots music as record labels, juke joints, and lost highways." Dave told The Blasters Newsletter: "I wrote about when Phil used to do that as a teenager and he got arrested in San Francisco."   (((cont. page 2 )))

In This Issue:  Phil Alvin on County Fair 2000, Dave's AMA Lifetime Achievement Award, and World Cafe concert review.

Latest News ( Cont. from page 1. ) -  The Third Mind has scheduled some West Coast shows for December 2024. They have a live album prepared for release on Yep Roc Records in the spring. II III  Dave is among the musicians interviewed in Love at the Five and Dime: The Songwriting Legacy of Nanci Griffith by Brian T. Atkinson. The book was published Sept. 9 by Texas A&M University Press. Of her, Dave says, "I admired the way Nanci survived an incredibly difficult business as a woman on her own terms. She never sold out. Nanci had a passion for songs and songwriters." Nanci, who died at 68 in 2021, and Dave occasionally shared a concert bill and visited Cambodia together in 2001. -AM 

cut an original song called TURNIN' BLUES INTO GOLD. It's a trio between Gregory Davis a trumpet player leader of the Dirty Dozen Brass band, James Intveld and me. I'm just stoked over that song.
AM: Tell us about your L.A. jazz band called the Faultline Syncopators.
PHIL ALVIN: The Faultline Syncopators are doing a song with Fayard Nicholas called LOW DOWN RHYTHM. They're also gonna play on two of the Harlem numbers. My real intention is, with Joey Altruda and these guys, is to make a lot of good two-beat charts and get kids from colleges, good players and link them up with some of the older and more experienced players to make sure that two-beat music will be handed down properly. The one thing that has always bothered me about horn arrangements in post-1936 music is that they go for 4/4 time - It's a very lazy thing.  The hotter music called "Hot Jazz" is 2/4 time. You count one-two, one-two, one-two. This makes players have to really work. If you have four beats you can take a long time to phrase stuff. Now, music has a tradition of four beats, it's difficult to sell horn bands to youthful, energetic people. The money from this solo record will help in getting some charts up, which is what Joey and I are doing for the Faultline Syncopators. We're gonna play two-beat music to dig it into your ground. This is a side project that I hope to do for the rest of my life."
     Looking back now on
County Fair 2000, I think this is the peak of Phil Alvin's talent. I give HighTone Records a lot of credit in allowing Phil to make a record of so many styles of music that he loves. It's hard to believe that anyone could find anything wrong with this collection. But immediately following its release, Phil Alvin had many complaints with how HighTone records edited the recordings. The music business dynamic of artist vs. record company is a scenario we've heard time and time again. I'm sure we can understand that both sides of that partnership have their reasons. Often that artistic conflict results in great art. In Phil Alvin's case, I think that hearing how the artist envisioned the project, even if in the end it's not to his liking, is a worthwhile look into the creative process. This next interview with Phil was conducted in the spring of 1995 after County Fair 2000 was released.

Interview Part 2 [Spring 1995]
PHIL ALVIN ON THE MAKING OF COUNTY FAIR 2000

Phil: "I was pretty upset with a few things. They cut out most of the dialogue between songs. Fayard Nicholas was supposed to introduce the record and I begged to get the Fayard Nicholas and the Billy Boy Arnold part in. I got the most I could get.  For my experience of making records, I've gotten more on this record the way I wanted it, than any record before that I was involved in. So that in itself is a plus.
    I wrote my own liner notes but the record company didn't put them on.

MR. SATELLITE MAN - (with Mary Franklin and Top Jimmy) - In my original story there is a fight between me and Top Jimmy about this girl and she ends up throwing the both of us away. It was done just the way I like it, just the way music should be. 
     At the first session for this song, I played piano and I strummed an acoustic guitar to give Top Jimmy a rhythm to sing to. Mary Franklin came in a few days later. None of the singers were in the studio singing together, but it worked out great. I took the whole thing and went over to another studio and put the Blasters on it. James Intveld found a mandolin hanging on the wall of the studio, so he played that. I already had my guitar part on it. James was trying to see if he could have more instruments on the record than me [laughs].  We're still not sure. It's close.
     Mary Franklin was our manager in a very old version of the Blasters. She was a singer, a dancer and a songwriter. Her professional name during the '40s and '50s was Mary McGill and she had some R&B hits. She wrote a lot of stuff for Murray Adams.
     I knew Top Jimmy a long time. His mother, Mary, was a good friend of mine when I was an usher at the Chinese theater. I used to let her kid in for free all the time. That was Top Jimmy.

THE FAULTLINE SYNCOPATORS SONGS


WHAT'S THE REASON I'M NOT PLEASIN' YOU - (with Mary Franklin) The song was actually written by Fats Waller. When Fats Waller needed money he would go and sell his songs. So that's why there are four names credited as songwriters. I wrote the whole second section of that, but they didn't credit me. The original version was done with Jimmy Grier's Orchestra who were the Biltmore Hotel Orchestra in New York. It was originally sung by Pinkie Tamlin.
THE TERROR - The original recording was by Cliff Jackson & His Crazy Kats. Cliff Jackson was a brilliant arranger in the tradition of Fletcher Henderson. They only made one recording session and it was very badly recorded. They were from Harlem. I'm playing banjo on here and James Intveld plays bass on all the Faultline Syncopator songs. 
LOW DOWN RHYTHM - (with Fayard Nicholas and Eddie Baytos ) - This is another song that Bob Hite introduced me to.  One day Bob Hite took me and James Harman out record store shopping. Bob said, [in Phil's best gravelly voice imitation of Bob Hite] "You guys don't know shit about record collecting. Let me show this to you. I'll let you go through all the records first and then I'll show you what you missed out on." So, me and James pulled records that we thought were the best and then Bob followed behind us. When we got back to Bob Hite's house, he said, "It was

ers stayed in the Blasters' set until the end of 1995. In a rare appearance, Phil brought Jerome Bowman on stage to play a song that would be heard on the County Fair 2000 album. Phil said, "This is a song written by one of the best singers in Los Angeles and I say that in great egotism,  Jerome "The Scarecrow" Bowman. We sang it in a duet on the record, but they yanked it and made me sing it alone." They sang KEEP IN TOUCH. Surprisingly Phil did it like the record with Bowman joining Phil only on the choruses. I would have liked to have heard the original arrangement that Phil intended for the record. Bowman sang lead on another song - a slow blues and was pretty impressive sounding just like Howlin' Wolf. What a talent - but what ever happened to the guy?
     In November, Phil played a solo show at the Mint in Los Angeles. This might have been a perfect opportunity to try out some of the acoustic songs, but instead he invited up James Intveld and Jerry Angel to do some songs. They tried COUNTY FAIR with James on bass but they had some difficulty because James normally plays lead guitar on it. Phil had to carry all the guitar riffs, which made for a very interesting and stripped down version. Next, they did THE BLUE LINE with James picking up the guitar and then KEEP IN TOUCH. A really challenging one was WHAT'S THE REASON I'M NOT PLEASIN' YOU, which came out great just based on Phil's vocal performance.
     In late December the band was in really good form playing San Francisco in front of the HighTone Records brass. COUNTY FAIR and BLUELINE were played and then OH DOCTOR in its only live appearance, What made Phil pull this one out just this one night? Could it be because his friend Gary Masi, who wrote it, drove Phil to the airport that day? Phil mentioned that to the audience. Phil always plays a song on harmonica in the Blasters' set along with SO LONG BABY GOOD-BYE. This one worked well in the Blasters' set.
     In mid-1995 The Blasters had an offer to do a proper Blasters album on Private Music/On the Spot Records so the setlist shifted away from the
County Fair 2000 songs as they added more Blasters-like songs. COUNTY FAIR and BLUELINE were the only songs that were occasionally played as 1995 came to a close.
     The songs from County Fair 2000 that made it into the live sets only became possible because James Intveld was so much involved in the recording of the album, whether it was with the Blasters, or the Dirty Dozen Brass Band or the Faultline Syncopators. 
James Intveld left the band on 12/31/95 and with him went the live era of
County Fair 2000.  .   -- AM

A Lively Show at World Cafe Live, Philadelphia PA
Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore with the Guilty Ones

Blasters Newsletter writer Tom Wilk on
his 40th Anniversary Interview of Dave Alvin


      In July 1984, I began writing a weekly music column for The Gloucester County Times, a daily newspaper in Woodbury, NJ, where I had started as a full-time reporter in May 1977.
     After becoming a copy editor in January, I wanted to keep my hand in writing and Entertainment Editor John Scanlon gave me the chance.
      I reviewed albums and music books and previewed concerts coming to the Philadelphia area. In early October, I did a phone interview with Dave Alvin to preview the Blasters show at the Chestnut Cabaret in Philadelphia. It was my first interview with a rock 'n' roll musician and I felt a little nervous when I called Dave's hotel room in Connecticut.
     Dave put me at ease as he discussed recording
Hard Line, the band's forthcoming album, and working with John Mellencamp. He also talked about Streets of Fire, the movie that featured the Blasters performing two songs.
      I didn't know it then, but that conversation with Dave would point me in a new direction. Writing for a variety of publications, I would get the opportunity to interview numerous musicians and musical figures, including John Fogerty, Lindsey Buckingham, Aaron Neville, Arthur Alexander, Suzanne Vega, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Jerry Wexler, and Sun Records founder Sam Phillips.
     The Gloucester County Times ceased publication in 2012, merging with two other newspapers, and the Chestnut Cabaret has long since closed.  As for Dave and me, we're still here, to borrow a song title from TexiCali.   --Tom Wilk

   "Our new album is done. It's good, but there's a difference in the sound and arrangement from the last two albums," said Alvin, who leads the band with his brother Phil, who sings and plays rhythm guitar.
   Other members of the band are John Bazz (bass), Bill Bateman (drums) and Gene Taylor (piano) The band's two saxophone players, Lee Allen and Steve Berlin, are not playing with the group on this tour.   "We're on the road to get the band in shape and play the new songs," Alvin said.
   "We would like to have a modest hit … It's frustrating when you write a good song that doesn't get heard (on the radio), he reflected.  "I wrote a song on our last album, 'Jubilee Train" that I thought would be on every truck-stop jukebox in the country," he said.  To his dismay, it wasn't.
    Alvin, the group's primary songwriter, has collaborated with John Cougar Mellencamp on The Blasters' next single, "Colored Lights." Mellencamp is one of three producers the group used on "Hard Line."  "I came up with the song and John came up with a better second verse," Alvin said of the collaboration.
    The Blasters have attracted favorable comparisons to Creedence Clearwater Revival, a pre-eminent American band of the late 1960s and early 1970s, for their sound and songwriting.  Alvin's songwriting has taken on topics not usually tackled in rock 'n' roll, such as economic hard times ("Boomtown"), memories of the New Deal and the government's inattention to the problems of the working man ("Jubilee Train"), and the death of Hank Williams ("Long White Cadillac").
    The group is branching out and made its movie debut this summer in the Walter Hill film "Streets of Fire." The movie, which is set in the future, deals with the kidnapping of a female rock star by a criminal gang and the efforts of an ex-girlfriend to get her back.
    The Blasters were featured as a bar band in one sequence of the movie, and Alvin said he enjoyed the experience.  "Playing in a club with the actors was great," he observed. "It's fun and an easy way to make money."  However, the film bombed at the box office and quickly disappeared from the theaters.  "We're hoping it will do an 'Eddie and the Cruisers' when it appears on cable," Alvin laughed, referring to the renewed life - and booming soundtrack sales - for a rock film directed by Martin Davidson that similarly came and went.
   Ironically, Alvin had been asked to do seven songs for the soundtrack of Hill's previous movie, "48 HRS," which starred Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy.  The movie became one of the big hits of 1982-83, but Alvin turned down the opportunity.
   The 28-year-old songwriter said he also has been doing recording work for other artists.  He recently played guitar on sessions for Buffy Sainte-Marie and the Gun Club.  And he hopes to play music until he reaches a ripe old age.

Pulse Magazine February 1995