This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen magazine #103 (December 2002 / January 2003). The magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription.

Dave Alvin
American Music
by Elliot Stephen Cohen

After hitting rock bottom in 1989 — being $30,000 in debt and donning a bandana and dark glasses so no one would recognize this scraggly bearded, well-respected artist as a guitar-tuning "down on his luck" roadie and then capturing the 2001 Grammy for "Best Traditional Folk Album" for Public Domain: Songs from the Wild Land, is Dave Alvin impressed with his own achievement? "I'm sure there were people in the audience who were thinking, 'Hey, the academy also gave one to Milli Vanilli,' " said the ex- (and now temporary) Blaster. "In fact," he admitted, laughing, "I was one of them."

Was older brother Phil, with whom his sibling rivalry is almost legendary, any more affected? "That night he called to congratulate me," he remembered, "and said, 'It's very good, but those things don't really mean anything.' He still doesn't think very much of my singing."

The battling brothers, Dave and Phil, formed a somewhat antagonistic brotherly duo that spans the tradition of Charlie and Ira Louvin, Don and Phil Everly, and the Kinks' Ray and Dave Davies, to current popular squabbling siblings Oasis' Liam and Noel Gallagher. In fact, after one particularly embarrassing flare-up in 1985 on the nationally broadcast "Today Show," their manager forbade future simultaneous interviews.

Alvin was initially drawn to music at the tender age of four, when his mom bought him a seven-inch 45 r.p.m. recording of Marty Robbins' pop country classic, "El Paso," which featured a color photo of the singer adorned in cowboy gear. "The first mechanical thing I learned how to operate was the record player," he fondly recalled. "I figured out how to stack the 45s so you could play the same one over and over. My poor mother probably had to listen to 'El Paso,' like, eight million times a day!"

With much older cousins Donna, Mike, and J.J. turning him on to artists like Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and Fats Domino, the young Alvin began his personal musical journey. Along with Phil and older sister Mary, he grew up in the sprawling suburban working-class town of Downey, California. The town was first put on the musical pop chart map in 1963 by hometown garage-surf heroes The Chantays (whose "Pipeline" served as an inspiration for Springsteen's "Born To Run") and later by the blander pop sensibilities of another local pair of siblings, Karen and Richard Carpenter. However, another huge component in Alvin's early education that would later inspire his songwriting were the journeys that he and his siblings took with their late father, Cass, a Southwestern steelworkers' union leader.

"If my dad had a short organizing trip scheduled, he would take us out of school, throw us in the car, and we'd go with him from town to town, and motel to motel. So, as kids we saw everything that he saw: Indian reservations, the Rocky Mountains, little dirt-poor mining towns, clandestine midnight rallies....things that most kids don't normally see in their formative years."

As young teenagers, in spite of their lack of exposure at that time to any black neighbors, Dave and Phil were not too intimidated to venture over to L.A's Shrine Auditorium or sneak into rib restaurants to see and meet the likes of great African-American artists like T-Bone Walker, Buddy Guy, Albert King, and Big Joe Turner, the last being someone with whom they would form a personal and professional relationship until Turner's 1985 death.

Their first big break as the newly formed Blasters came in 1980. A local entrepreneur, Ronnie Weiser — who owned a small label, Rollin' Rock Records, that waxed such rockabilly icons as Ray Campi, Charlie Feathers, and Mac Curtis — used a $2,000 budget to record 22 songs in his primitive 16-track Van Nuys garage studio for their debut album, American Music. With only 4,000 copies originally pressed, the original LP — which was reissued in 1997 on Hightone with eight bonus tracks — now fetches an average of $100 in used-record shops.

The music the Blasters played was raw and exciting. In the first half of the 80s, with three well-received albums and numerous frenetically packed concert appearances, they became part of L.A.'s club triumvirate along with Los Lobos and X (with whom they frequently shared a bill, and whom Dave Alvin would later join). The Blasters were embraced by both the spike-haired punk audience and hardcore greaser fans of 50s rock 'n' roll, both of whom equally reveled in the band's manic energy and roots-rock veneration before Alvin and pianist Gene Taylor departed in 1985.

This is an excerpt from an article in Dirty Linen #103 (Dec. '02/Jan. '03). Read the full text in the magazine, available via subscription or on newsstands and in bookstores.