I just play the music that I like.” Back on the roadĪfter battling cancer and being home for much of the past three years, Alvin is gratified to get back to “livin’ on dreams and gasoline” as he sings in the song, “Downey to Lubbock.” … You have a longer career working the outskirts. “There’s just no reason to play the game. “There’s just no reason to go downtown in the music industry because that’s where Britney Spears lives,” Alvin said years ago. Not fitting into a neat musical category may have made it harder for both performers to reach large audiences, Gilmore said. “I’m there enjoying what he’s doing as much as the audience is.” When they’re performing, “I’m as much a fan of Dave as I am a performer,” Gilmore said. Witnessing the joy that Dave gets out of playing is just very infectious.” Gilmore said Alvin “loves being on stage … he’s such a great showman. When Alvin and his brother were young teens “sneaking in to clubs, guys, like T-Bone Walker and Big Joe Turner, they were still in their primes.”ĭecades later, Alvin acknowledged that now, “I think my brother and I are definitely part of the tradition. In our interview, Alvin said: “We were the last generation that could learn from the founders, could learn from Big Joe Turner, from Lightnin’ Hopkins.” Pearl’s Ash Grove hosted musicians who were not commercially mainstream but whose music, Alvin writes, was “as necessary as blood.” Part of tradition I’ll set my best song against Bob Dylan’s worst, any day of the week,” he said with a laugh.įrom their early teens, Alvin and his brother, who grew up in Downey, “begged, borrowed and cajoled rides” to the Ash Grove to see shows by Lightnin’ Hopkins, Big Joe Turner, T-Bone Walker, Big Mama Thornton, Muddy Waters and “and so many more.”Īt the club, “then-youngsters like us could sit at the feet of American music giants,” Alvin writes, “hear their voices, study their fingers, listen to their life stories and maybe talk to them.” But sometimes it’s kind of frustrating because I want him to be less hard on himself.”Īlvin did acknowledge his songwriting talent, saying he’s “first and foremost” a songwriter. You have to be, to be really good, I guess. He really sells himself short,” Gilmore said. Alvin’s songs can be tender and poignant one moment, and can bowl you over the next. I’m just a guy that loves playing guitar.” “I’ve never considered myself a top-tier guitarist,” Alvin said, “but I’ll say this: I’m pretty good. Of course he can play anything better than I can.”īoth guys are highly modest, considering their wellsprings of talent. “I’d start playing some obscure thing I knew by Son House,” he said, “then Dave would just jump right in, already knowin’ how to play it better than I did. This shared love of roots music provides the foundation for their collaboration, Gilmore said. Deep rootsĪs a young man in the 1960s, Gilmore had moved to Southern California and shared Alvin’s love of down-home music, spending many nights at the Ash Grove. So when we did the album … it was less of an Americana country rock record and more of a blues album.”ĭuring the 2018 shows, it was just Gilmore and Alvin with their acoustic guitars, but this year’s tour includes Alvin’s full band, the supremely talented Guilty Ones. “We bring things out in each other that maybe we wouldn’t bring out on our own.”Īlvin said he always thought of Gilmore as “a great blues singer. “It was just so much fun,” Gilmore, 77, said.Īsked what he appreciates about Gilmore, Alvin said: “One, I love the guy. They ended up playing together for almost a year. In early 2018, they agreed to perform together “totally as a lark, a kind of experiment.” In 2018, Gilmore and Alvin made the album “Downey to Lubbock,” a reference to their hometowns, but Gilmore said they were friends long before. He made a cameo as Smokey, the bowler who crosses the line in the 1998 Coen brothers’ film, “The Big Lebowski.” Gilmore’s high-lonesome voice evokes good times passing a bottle around a campfire, and when he’s talking it sounds almost like he’s singing. Known for his work with The Flatlanders, his music ranges from country to blues, from folk rock to bluegrass. Like Alvin, Texas singer and guitarist Jimmie Dale Gilmore defies categorization. Published last September, “New Highway” is a wide-ranging collection of essays, poems, song lyrics, memories and eulogies.Īlvin tosses them all together, revealing his prowess as a writer. When asked, “Who is Dave Alvin without his guitar?” he laughed and said, “Dave Alvin without his guitar is a guy that’s like, ‘Hey, maybe we should do a book.’” Yet Alvin isn’t one to wallow in despair. “I had to start practicing beginner stuff again - it was back to square one.” “When you can’t play your own songs, that’s really depressing,” he said. This device is unable to display framed content.
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