DAVE ALVIN
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Maybe it’s the need to match the scope and size of Alvin’s voice that fuels his music’s great breadth. Since his early-80s days with the Blasters, Alvin’s built his songs on a musical foundation of American roots music that includes everything from blues, country, and rockabilly (his most prevalent influences) to R & B, folk, and gospel. Alvin retains the potency of these genres, neither diluting them with slick pop trappings like so many contemporary country musicians nor disfiguring them with garish excess a la most white blues singers. In return they imbue even his gentlest songs with weight, depth, and ruggedness. Alvin can deliver straightforward renditions of classic songs–as he did during his encore at Schubas, when he and guest artist Syd Straw reprised their duet version (from Alvin’s new album) of George Jones’s “What Am I Worth.” But Alvin is no mere archivist: he freely mixes styles while honoring their nuances. Consider how he’s recast “Little Honey” over the years: as Mississippi riverboat music, all high lonesome fiddles and shimmering mandolins, with the Blasters; as a blues-country ballad on the new King of California, a mostly acoustic collection of “old, new, borrowed and blue songs”; and at Schubas as gospel-inflected, Impressions-style soul music, riding a slow, taut groove to an exhilarating climax of slide guitar and church-organ flourishes.
Whatever genre he’s drawing on, Alvin invests his songs, quiet and raucous alike, with a true believer’s absolute conviction. Live–belting out songs with that grizzly bear voice, hurling his strapping frame away from the mike during instrumental passages, back arched, legs often spread-eagled–he made his songs seem occasions of great event. His commitment transported even slight material–the simple rockabilly rave-up “So Long Baby Goodbye” was thrilling for its unabashed rock and roll zest–and infused more complex songs with grandeur. “Fourth of July” remained as sweeping, heartbreaking, and inspiring as ever, with Alvin and Slocum’s guitar-keyboards coda setting off fireworks of its own. Transmitting the dark undercurrents of his elegy for Hank Williams with spine-tingling effectiveness, Alvin began “Long White Cadillac” by singing to solo slide guitar lifted from Muddy Waters’s “Rollin’ Stone,” then tore into the song with a raging vocal before concluding with a devastating guitar onslaught.
