Americana, bluesy rock, electrified folk, Texas snake oil swing, and hopped-up rockabilly have never sounded so good as when they’re blended together by Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. The heart and soul of a sound that lingers in your stratosphere long after it’s stopped spinning around the turntable, these two road dogs are still here, at 68 and 79, respectively, making music for anyone who will listen. With a new album, appropriately titled Texicali to represent their home states and musical styles, and an ongoing tour that kicks back in this week, you still have plenty of time to reacquaint yourselves with their music or discover them for the first time.
Alvin, known for his fiery guitar licks in The Blasters, and Gilmore, a soft-spoken, honest-speaking storyteller from The Flatlanders, first laid down vinyl together with 2018’s Downey To Lubbock. With Texicali, the music is sweet and salty, like it should be when the components are all comfortable with each other’s individuality of styles. “Broke Down Engine” and “Blind Owl” feature Alvin’s signature souped-up rockabilly guitar solos, while “Borderland” showcases Gilmore’s clear Texas rasp. And “We’re Still Here” is a fun homage to these two musical rascals with more road miles on them than many of the musicians out there today.
I was honored to be able to interview both of these gentlemen separately, allowing for a two-part feature, beginning with Dave Alvin this week and Jimmie Dale Gilmore next week. Both had a lot to say about their lives and their music. It was recently announced that Alvin will be honored in September with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Americana Music Association alongside Don Was, Dwight Yoakam, the Reverend Gary Davis, Shelby Lynne, and the Blind Boys Of Alabama. A poet with several books of poetry and no doubt hundreds of songs to his name, Alvin is a true icon. Not even cancer could stop him, the fighter spirit beating the evil disease into remission.
The California native burst onto the scene with his brother Phil in The Blasters, a punk and rockabilly band whose song “Marie Marie” gained them national attention. Tension between them helped cause a departure by Dave following 1985’s Hard Line but the guitarist didn’t sit back on his laurels. He released solo material, joined John Doe in X for their See How We Are record, two Knitters albums, and some recordings with The Flesh Eaters. More recently, he has been experimenting within The Third Mind, an ensemble featuring Camper Van Beethoven’s Victor Krummenacher, who told me in a 2015 interview for Glide that, “I learned an awful lot about music from watching [Dave] play … He’s not scared of falling flat on his face. That was very inspiring.”
Producing the new Texicali, Alvin has brought a sharpness to everything about it without leaving out the spontaneous fun and improvisational jaunts that were there in the moment. I spoke recently with Alvin about making this record, his time in The Blasters, playing guitar after chemotherapy, and his camaraderie with Gilmore.
So you and Jimmie Dale are currently on a little break right now.
Yeah, Jimmie does things every year where he teaches at this place called the Omega up in New York. He teaches a songwriting class for about a week and a half. Then we’ll all go meet up in Boston or North Hampton, Massachusetts, and start the tour back up.
Is that how the rest of your year is going to look like? Ya’ll are going to be on the road?
Hopefully (laughs). We have gigs booked through early November, and then I have this side project called The Third Mind. I’ll go on tour with them in December and do some West Coast shows.
You just don’t stop
Well, you know, it’s kind of the plan, isn’t it (laughs)
And how long have you been on the road in your life?
I’ve been touring full-on interstate/highway life since about 1981.
So what do you do when you’re home?
Well, today, I’m not doing anything except this. But I’m a cancer survivor if you want to use that word. I had stage four colorectal cancer that had metastasized onto my liver. It was a drag. The metastasized cancer in my liver kept coming back. They’d cut it out, and it would come back. But I’ve been in remission now since October of 2022. You know as a survivor, people talk about beating it but you don’t beat it, you just learn to live with the threat of it coming back. It’s the old Greek myth, you know, the sort of Damocles hanging above our heads. But I live on a hillside, and my hillside has this kind of semi-out-of-control garden of mine (laughs). Through the whole cancer and chemo, my garden became a place of a little sanity. So that’s what I do.
When did you and Jimmie Dale decide it was time to do another record?
I decided it – and I don’t know if Jimmie did (laughs) – when I was hospitalized through my treatments, and Jimmie and his wife came out after one of my hospitalizations and hung out for like a week, which was really nice. But it was just various things like, when I get out of here, I want to do another record with Jimmie Dale, and I want to do this, and I want to do that, and I want to do this. So that’s when I decided, around 2020, when I was hospitalized for like nine days.
When did you go in the studio?
Last year. You get into remission and you start getting some of your energy back and your muscles back and that kind of stuff. The first record we did out here in California, and I had friends of mine, and friends of Jimmie’s, a variety of people, playing on it. But then we went out on tour with my band and in the process of touring, we toured for about a year and a half, it became A BAND. It wasn’t just the back-up band, it was, “Oh we’re a band!” Jimmie Dale Gilmore is in a rock & roll band! (laughs)
So we decided for this record, we’ll cut it in Texas, because all my band members live in or around Austin. Lisa Pankratz, my drummer, her father was friends with this guy who has a recording studio in Dripping Springs, Texas, which is southwest of Austin, and that’s the town where she was from, and it’s out in the Hill Country, and it’s away from the city, and it’s just kind of like a peaceful place where you’re not bothered; cause Austin is not what it was thirty or forty years ago. It’s Seattle now: the terrible traffic and crowds and everything. So it was like, let’s cut it in the Hill Country and use the band. And that’s what we did.
Do you remember what were the early songs you guys picked out or had ready for the record?
“Borderland” and a song of mine called “Southwest Chief.” “Borderland” came pretty easy, but “Southwest Chief,” the way it’s on the record, is the way I wrote it, but I tried to do it in a couple of different ways. Then, as often is the case, you just go back to the idea you had when you actually wrote the song, the kind of guitar figures and things like that that you were playing. So we goofed around with that; we goofed around with a few things. I made four trips and drove out from California to Texas. I won’t fly my amplifiers and guitars and all that. Plus, I like driving through the desert. And we finally got “Southwest Chief” right. Then it’d be like, Jimmie would call and say, “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Let’s try this,” or “My wife Janet found a song called ‘Trying To Be Free’,’’ that he had written in the sixties and not only had he forgotten that he had written it but he forgot the whole song. He played it for me and I was like, “This is really great. Me and the band can do sixties radio kind of things behind it.” So there is a little bit of Motown, a little bit of Stax, a little bit of The Who. Let’s mix a little bit of everything into it. So it was nicely organic, the whole process.
And that’s the best way to do it
Kind of, yes. Sometimes, it’s alright if you have a gun at your head (laughs). “You need a song by Tuesday!” But especially when you’re really grooving after COVID and after cancer and after all these things, to kind of take our time.
You guys do a great cover of Blind Willie McTell’s “Broke Down Engine.” What about his version attracts you, and how did you most want to reinterpret your version?
Oh, I’ve loved Blind Willie McTell since I was about fourteen, and I love the way he sings, and I love the way he plays. One of the things I love about older music – like pre-war blues and pre-war rural folk music – I like one person with one instrument kind of thing, like a person with a guitar, whether it’s Robert Johnson or Jimmie Rodgers. There is just something about the intimacy and I think that is one of the reasons that a lot of that music is still as attractive to certain people, is the intimacy between like Robert Johnson or Blind Willie McTell singing to you with just the guitar.
I always felt that Jimmie was a great blues singer, even though he’s known more for folk-country singer-songwriter or Texas singer-songwriter stuff. One of the first gigs we ever did together when we did these acoustic tours, which started the process of us playing and recording together, he played a Blind Lemon Jefferson song, and his voice was so great at that. I was like, Wow! That really hadn’t been captured that much. He’s got such a unique phrasing, and there is a poignancy in his voice that is great for blues. A lot of them, we’ll call them Caucasians (laughs), when they attempt to sing blues, they try to put on the [sings growly], and then they go to the Dairy Queen and sound [different]. Jimmie doesn’t have that. Jimmie just sounds like Jimmie. There are a lot of versions of “Broke Down Engine,” and everybody does it roughly the same way – one person with the guitar, and they try to do it like Blind Willie McTell. If you’re good, then that could work, you know. But I’ve always loved the song, and I’ve always heard Jimmie singing it in my head if that makes sense.
There is another song on the record, an old country song by Stonewall Jackson called “Why I’m Walking,” and that’s the same thing. I’ve always heard Jimmie singing that in my head. Anyway, so with “Broke Down Engine,” I thought instead of doing a folk-blues kind of version of it, which is what people would expect, let’s do it as if it was a New Orleans rhythm section from the 1950s with Earl Palmer on drums and Lee Allen on saxophone – although there’s no saxophone (laughs). But that kind of groove, that kind of fifties New Orleans R&B groove. Then, instead of acoustic guitars, I’ll put a bunch of electric guitars on there and make it scream. Like I said, a lot of people have done the song but nobody’s done it like that.
Which guitars did you use?
The solos were done on this little high-pitched 1968 Goldtop Les Paul that belonged to my recording engineer friend. My signature guitar is my Strat.
When you first started learning to play guitar, what was the hardest thing for you to get the hang of?
Playing guitar (laughs). It’s true, it’s true. I grew up in an area that had so many great guitar players, and this is true, it’s only really been in the past like ten years that I’ve considered myself good.
Why?
Just because I grew up around these great guitar players. And I mean great guitar players. When I was a little teenager, they were all older guys. My brother Phil had a teenage blues band, so for whatever reason, our area around Downey was fostering great guitar players. So I’m still to this day intimidated. I could mention a couple of names of guys that just scare me (laughs). I’m good, I’m not great, but I’m good, and I certainly get my point across on guitar. But after the chemotherapy, I couldn’t play for seven months because my hands were so swollen. Then, I had to relearn how to play guitar after chemo.
Was it harder the second time?
No, it was just more painful. After seven months, your calluses are gone. The hardest part was you don’t know the pressure that you are putting on the strings. Your finger is on the string and on the right fret and everything but the tendons in your fingers aren’t feeling the pressure of the string. The best way to describe that is like if you’re playing a scale – da-da-da-da-da-da – but for a while there I’d be playing da-da-da … da-da. I’m playing it, my fingers are in the right spot but the pressure wasn’t, so it was really weird.
Anyway, the hardest thing for me about learning to play is the same problems I have now – when to play what. I’m all about wild abandon. That is one thing that has stayed the same since I was in The Blasters. I can summon up wild abandon at the drop of a hat. So I try when I am practicing at home to NOT play with wild abandon (laughs) and on records like the one with Jimmie Dale. I’m holding back a lot that maybe in live situations, I don’t. But in the studio, you try to be a little tasteful (laughs).
You and Jimmie Dale are both storytellers. Do you remember the first story you ever tried to tell in a song?
Oh yeah. For The Blasters, I wrote a song called “Marie Marie,” and I was trying to tell a story and NOT tell it at the same time; sometimes, cause when you are writing, and I write a lot of story songs, sometimes you want to get as much information in as you can, and then other times you want to leave stuff out and let the listener decide. If somebody actually gets to the lyrics, you know what I mean, cause most people hear the beat, right, when you’re playing rock & roll or hip hop or whatever. It’s all about the beat, and then the lyrics are secondary. It’s like you got the hook phrase, “I love you, baby,” and I love that beat, and I love that message. And then maybe you’ll get around to listening to the actual words of the song and realize, hey, maybe he doesn’t love her that much (laughs).
So with “Marie Marie,” there’s a line about a guy sitting in a car looking at a girl playing guitar on a porch, and he has to leave, and the folks say I have to go, and he’s asking her to go with him. You can take it from there anywhere you want. Why does he have to leave or why is she playing guitar and singing sad songs on a porch? So you try to fill it in enough so people get the idea and leave enough empty space so they can fill in the gaps on their own.
Tell me about the first show that you did with The Blasters. How did the crowd like you guys?
Well, that’s hard to say because our first gig was really a wedding reception with friends. It’s how we started. Somebody was getting married, and they needed a band, so we were kind of thrown together. My brother and I hadn’t really played guitar together because my brother was a really good right-time country blues finger-picking guy, and I was more, again, wild abandon. But people really liked it, you know. We were doing blues and rockabilly stuff and a couple of country things. In the early part of our career, it could vary, you know. In the very early days of The Blasters, we used to play this biker bar in West Long Beach and that was a tough joint. But they liked us (laughs). Then we started getting into playing gigs in Los Angeles and Hollywood, and it could vary. You get people that love you, you get people that throw stuff at you (laughs).
We did this tour early in our career opening for Queen in arenas and you really haven’t lived until you’ve had like 19,000 Queen fans booing you. So you get used to rejection (laughs). But it’s good for you. For us, it really cemented our band sort of attitude and chemistry. We all grew up together; we were all childhood friends, so it was just another childhood adventure. Suddenly, we’re opening for Queen, and 19,000 people are really upset about that (laughs). But that wasn’t going to stop us. Our attitude was, well, wait for a second, Queen is paying us to be here, and they are hanging out with us in the dressing room, and you guys had to pay to get in here, and they don’t speak to you, and you’re going to boo the US? (laughs)
“We’re Still Here” is such a fun song and video. Did you and Jimmie Dale write that side-by-side or was it going back and forth?
It was going back and forth cause Jimmie and I write differently. When you co-write with people, one of the first things you suss out is, okay, what is your method? And Jimmie’s just got his own thing, and you can tell in the lyrics Jimmie is kind of a little more philosophically upfront. And mine is a little more, well, I’m going to hide it inside of this very kind of straight talk. Like, Jimmie is talking about, “Well, if you’ve never been in trouble, you’ve never been alive,” and mine is, “I had wild times in Houston at the Allen Park Inn,” which was this wild old hotel that used to be in Houston. We’re just different. So the couple of songs that we’ve written together, like the title track of the first album we did, Downey To Lubbock, we wrote together pretty much the same way – get a groove going – and they were written with the band’s musicians that were playing with us, so that was inspiring. Then Jimmie would throw out something, and I would throw out something, and it just kind of works. But this one was particularly spur of the moment; this is how we feel, you know.
What kind of truck are ya’ll riding around in in the video?
Oh, that’s an old 1949/1950 Chevy. I would love to have that, that thing was such a joy to drive; especially if they fixed the brakes, it would really be a joy. It was one of those things where if you had to stop, you had to press the brake about, I don’t know, half a block from where you wanted to stop. Once you figured that out, then you were good (laughs). But that was a beautiful Chevy. Some of the street scenes and all that stuff were shot in Austin, but then the scenes driving around were up in the Hill Country. It belonged to a guy who had some classic old cars on his property up there and he was nice enough to loan it to us. And he trusted us so much that he brought the truck over and then split (laughs). I got behind the wheel, and I was like, oh yeah, I like this.
Who was the first real rock star you ever met?
It’d be like Brian May from Queen. He was very nice; all the guys in Queen were very nice. They had seen us playing in a bar in Hollywood, and we were at this point we were getting pretty popular in Southern California, and they were out on a night off, or whatever, and they said, “Hey, we’re going on tour, you want to go out on tour with us?” And we were like, “Okay, sure.” (laughs) So that would be like the first ROCK STAR. I’ve known a lot of musicians, and in growing up, my brother Phil and I were friends and followers of various older blues musicians, like Big Joe Turner and T-Bone Walker, people like that. So we knew those guys.
Actually, I take it back. Probably if you want to really go back to like the first rock star, it was probably Bob “The Bear” Hite from Canned Heat. Our piano player in The Blasters, Gene Taylor, we’d all grown up together but he was the first guy to get out of Downey. You know, the word got around somehow in the blues underground that there’s this guy in southeast LA that has a killer boogie-woogie blues pianist, so he was like nineteen or so, and he was in Canned Heat for like two years. We went to a couple of shows and met everybody and got to know Larry Taylor, everybody in the band except for Alan Wilson cause he had passed away before then. So that would probably be the first one, but Brian May would be like the ROCK STAR STAR STAR (laughs).
You attended university, what were you intending to be?
In those days, I had a couple of goals. If I couldn’t be a musician, and in those days it didn’t look like I would’ve been, I probably would have ended up being either a history or literature teacher or running a dusty used book shop somewhere. I love books.
What are you reading right now?
I usually read about three books at once (laughs). I’m one of those kind of guys. Right now, I’m reading a book by Guy de la Bédoyère about everyday life in Ancient Rome, based on not only the writings of Pliny The Younger but also just off of the tombstones and things like that. It’s sort of a compendium of everything we know at this point about how to skip by in Ancient Rome. Then I’m reading a book on Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. I just finished a book on the fall of Berlin.
Reading about Rome, do you know where your ancestors are from? Are you a Roman?
Oh God, no (laughs). My ancestors were the barbarians (laughs). I’m half Polish and half Californian. My dad’s family was an immigrant family from Eastern Europe. My mother’s family goes back to the Salem Witch Trials and I’m not kidding. I have an ancestor who was, unfortunately, one of the judges (laughs). I don’t know which one, you’d have to ask my sister, but it’s not one we want to talk about (laughs).
Well, you do read some heady stuff
Yeah, I don’t know what it means but I read it (laughs)
Do you get ideas from what you’re reading?
Oh yeah, yeah. I don’t read a lot of modern fiction, contemporary fiction, because like, it’s hard to discuss modern poetry of the past, say, fifty years because it’s all subjective, you know. If somebody writes a terrible poem but somebody else says, Oh, that’s great, then guess what? It’s a great poem. And it’s kind of gone that way with fiction for me. People will recommend things to me, fiction, I’ll give it a couple of pages and if you haven’t grabbed me by then, life is short, I got more to read (laughs). But the ones that really influenced me are Raymond Chandler and, to some extent, Eudora Welty and early Hemingway, things like that, things that might be at odds with each other. But every now and then, I’ll read some Fitzgerald. I’ll read Mark Twain, and you can’t go wrong there. But yeah, modern fiction is either too conceptual or it’s too commercial or it’s too intentionally obscure.
What else is coming up for you?
I have this side-project called The Third Mind that is like an improvisational band, and we’ve done two albums, and we just did our first tour early this year. We’re putting out a live record at the beginning of next year and then we’ll do some dates with that. That is a really fun and fulfilling way to play because the songs are different. It’s the same songs every night, roughly, but we play them differently every night. Everybody in the band is a great musician, with the exception of maybe me (laughs), but it’s challenging, and it’s fun, and there are moments in parts of the shows that I do on my own – my solo shows or my shows with Jimmie Dale – that are improvisational where maybe on this song we don’t know how we’re going to end. In The Third Mind, the whole show is that. That’s really fascinating to me cause it’s very different from the way I’ve grown up playing and what I’ve done throughout my career. But yeah, at some point, I’ll do another Dave Alvin record, and when my brother gets well enough, I want to do another record with my brother. So yeah, I’ve got things I want to do.
What about with John Doe? He’s going to be having some time on his hands.
We did a Knitters reunion a couple of months back at the Mojo Nixon Memorial at the Continental Club. But John’s got his thing. He doesn’t need me wrecking his stuff (laughs). We did a couple of Knitters albums, and I did one X album, and I played on like three of John’s solo records, and then we did The Flesh Eaters right before the pandemic and all, did an album, did a tour. John is great, love playing with John, he’s fun. But, like I said, I don’t think he needs me wrecking his deal (laughs).
Portraits by Leslie Campbell
