Episode 321 - Dave Alvin
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuck in ears?
Marc:What the fuck nicks?
Marc:What the fuck of medians?
Marc:What the fuck of Indians?
Marc:Is that something?
Marc:Is that what the fuck of Lovians?
Marc:I think I screwed it up.
Marc:All right, look, I'm a little tired.
Marc:I'm a little out of it.
Marc:I've just spent the last two days shooting.
Marc:The first two days of shooting.
Marc:have gone well, but I have no precedent set in my life for this type of work, for acting and doing live.
Marc:It's just all new to me, and it's very exciting.
Marc:That said...
Marc:I'm trying not to be maudlin or bring everybody down, but Boomer has not come home.
Marc:And I, you know, I'm holding on to hope.
Marc:And God, I really thank all of you for all the letters of support and the tweets of support and all the advice.
Marc:I've done what I can.
Marc:I put out flyers with his picture on it.
Marc:I put them in mailboxes up and down and around the neighborhood.
Marc:I've called him all over the place.
Marc:I don't know that people in this neighborhood would really put cats into shelters.
Marc:So I haven't done that yet.
Marc:I mean, there are cats all over this neighborhood.
Marc:I fear the worst, but I'm trying to be optimistic.
Marc:I've gotten a lot of emails from people who say they've had cats that have been gone five days, 10 days, two weeks.
Marc:I'm just trying to be optimistic, but I'm fighting sadness.
Marc:I woke up in the middle of the night.
Marc:Last night, it was a little brutal because I realized that my cat, Boomer, Boomy, as you know him, disappeared like the same day that my neighbors went out of town because I texted them to see if they had seen him.
Marc:And they said they were out of town.
Marc:And then last night in the middle of the night, I'm like, oh, my God, maybe they shut something they don't usually shut because he goes over there to eat and stuff.
Marc:And maybe he's locked in something over there.
Marc:So I woke up at four in the morning and I had a shoot today.
Marc:I bolted up in bed with this new idea that I cracked the case that Boomer was locked in something right next door.
Marc:It was like 3.48 in the morning.
Marc:I'm in my boxers, and I get up.
Marc:My heart is pounding.
Marc:I go out onto the deck.
Marc:I turn on the deck lights, and I don't even know what I'm doing out there.
Marc:I'm just standing on the deck, and I'm looking over at my neighbor's yard, just thinking he's stuck somewhere.
Marc:I'm just standing on the deck in my underwear in the middle of the night, and I hear the window open to the bedroom, which the window goes onto the deck, and Jessica says, what are you doing?
Marc:Come inside now.
Marc:I can only imagine what she was thinking.
Marc:I couldn't even explain myself.
Marc:I mean, she must have had that moment where, oh, my God, Mark is on the deck in the middle of the night wearing his underwear, staring at the wall.
Marc:But I was just beside myself, and I texted my neighbors at 4 in the morning to tell them about it, to tell them my big idea.
Marc:And they said that, well, our cat door's open, and we've got neighbors feeding the cats.
Marc:And then I thought, well, maybe Boomer's in there.
Marc:Why wouldn't he want to hang out over there, be fed every day, be inside and not on a hot deck with a cat that doesn't like him?
Marc:But I don't know.
Marc:I walked over there.
Marc:You know, I'm going on and on about this, but I'm hanging on to hope.
Marc:We'll see what happens.
Marc:That said, it was made even more difficult because part of the show that we're shooting involves Boomer, part of the episode.
Marc:So I've got a cat that's portraying Boomer.
Marc:And it's amazing what these...
Marc:what these production people are doing, what the set people are doing, the art people are doing.
Marc:They had a cat person, and I told them what Boomer looked like.
Marc:So they got this cat that's like the same color as Boomer.
Marc:And I did some scenes with this fake Boomer, and I was like, oh, this is sad, but it's cool.
Marc:It's just been a little difficult.
Marc:And the weird thing about cats is I never really thought about this way.
Marc:I mean, on some level, not unlike any other relationship, I guess a cat can leave you.
Marc:I know they're territorial.
Marc:They're not the same as dogs.
Marc:They're sweet, but I don't know.
Marc:I know they care about me, but but I guess relationships can go bad.
Marc:Maybe he split.
Marc:The best that could happen is that he's in a nice home and he's eating well.
Marc:The worst that could happen is he's suffering.
Marc:And the saddest thing that could happen outside of suffering is that he's dead, but I'd rather him be dead than suffering.
Marc:In my mind right now, he's eating somewhere else and having a nice time enjoying some air conditioner.
Marc:That's my fantasy from my cat that's missing is that he's on vacation somehow.
Marc:But I'll tell you, this shooting thing, I've never experienced this before.
Marc:They rented a house to make into my house.
Marc:Because this show is obviously about my life.
Marc:And it's based on me.
Marc:And it's an amplification.
Marc:It's a fictionalization of my life.
Marc:But they wanted to get it right.
Marc:So they rented this house.
Marc:not far from mine, and I had no idea what they were going to capture.
Marc:You know, the art people came over.
Marc:They took pictures of the garage.
Marc:They took pictures of the living room and the bedroom and everything else, and I went over to the set the first time a couple of days ago, and it was, like, fucking ridiculous.
Marc:They recaptured my house almost identically.
Marc:They rented the same furniture.
Marc:The garage looks like the garage.
Marc:It's a little different, but they decorated it exactly the same way.
Marc:It was mind-blowing.
Marc:It was almost freakish.
Marc:It was actually a bigger house than mine.
Marc:I'm like, well, if you guys can do this after the shoot, if I ever get a bigger house, could I just hire you to expand on what is already clearly an identifiable style that is me?
Marc:Pretty wild, man.
Marc:It's pretty fucking wild.
Marc:And I gave the set, I gave the production my couch because they like the detail of the arm of the couch being ripped to shreds by cats over the last six years.
Marc:And I ordered a new couch because I needed a new couch anyways.
Marc:So we made the switch.
Marc:And now I'm wondering how the hell do I keep monkey and La Fonda from destroying my new couch?
Marc:I mean, at least I'd like to get a month of it out of it.
Marc:I'd like to get like one month out of my couch before they destroy it.
Marc:Because when you have cats, like as soon as you get anything new, a rug or a couch, you're like, they're going to fuck it up immediately.
Marc:You're going to watch them do it.
Marc:They're going to do it right in front of you while they're looking at you.
Marc:Cats will dig their claws into your new furniture or your new rug and start pulling on it while they're looking at you.
Marc:Just sort of like, yeah, you going to do anything about this?
Marc:Fuck you.
Marc:I need to do this.
Marc:I'm not even aware that you're upset about it.
Marc:Look at me destroy the furniture you just got because it's mine to help me with my claws.
Marc:I don't know how much I can really say about my show.
Marc:I'll just give you one little taste.
Marc:I just don't know.
Marc:I have to figure out what.
Marc:I don't want to spoil anything about the stories or about what's happening, what the show is.
Marc:You know what it is.
Marc:I just don't want to spoil anything.
Marc:But I will say this.
Marc:I did work with Mr. Dave Foley today.
Marc:How's that?
Marc:Come home, Boomy.
Marc:I'm going to write a song about that.
Marc:That's going to be my blues song.
Marc:Boomy Come Home.
Marc:Let's talk to Dave Alvin.
Marc:So anyways, I'm dealing with this cat thing.
Marc:I picture you're a dog guy, are you?
Guest:Well, I was for years, but I've since been converted.
Guest:I have four, two of which are missing.
Marc:Right now?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Up in Silver Lake?
Marc:That's bad.
Marc:I know.
Marc:Fuck.
Marc:I know.
Marc:You can pull that mic right into you.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Awesome.
Marc:You know, I'm psyched to talk to you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Got a lot of respect for your music.
Marc:And there's that one, I think I told you about that moment.
Marc:Oh, our moment in time, yeah.
Marc:You can smoke in here if you want.
Marc:Oh, fuck.
Marc:You're kidding me.
Guest:No.
Marc:Let's do it.
Guest:Dude.
Guest:Want me to open a window?
Guest:No, I used to smoke.
Guest:I can take it.
Guest:I'll just do a puff or two just to relax.
Marc:No, man.
Marc:Knock it.
Marc:Do it up.
Guest:Smoke him if you got him.
Guest:Who's the guy you saw the TV show?
Guest:Morton Downey?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or Tom Snyder.
Guest:Both of them.
Guest:Yeah, Tom was.
Marc:Just wheezing their way.
Marc:Tom used to smoke on camera.
Marc:Well, yeah, I've told this story on the podcast, but I'm going to tell it again just so we can start from there.
Marc:Because it was a weird moment because your recollection of it, it had to have been late 87 or early 88.
Marc:The Hard Rock Cafe had just opened down there in the Beverly Center.
Marc:And I was up at the comedy store being a doorman, just dicking off.
Marc:And one afternoon, we went over there to eat, and we'd never been in there.
Marc:And I went into the bathroom.
Marc:and i was pissing and then you came in and started pissing next to me in the urinal and there were gold records up on the wall and i said how come you don't have a record up there and you looked at me and said because i'm not a fucking whore it's it's possible it happened right i'm not making it up no i remember it i remember that because you said it was the only time you'd ever
Guest:been in there it's the only time i've ever been in the in the now now long gone hard rock cafe in the beverly center and i may have been earlier than 88 because uh i think it was like i think i was still in the blasters right and just barely though right just barely so maybe 86 85 somewhere around in there and i had sworn that i would never go into the hard rock cafe and uh and then there was some kind of like record company
Guest:you know lunch dinner thing right right right i had to go to right so i was there under protest and i remember kind of maybe um perhaps having a beverage you know or two or three or four yeah those days and uh and yeah so i remembered it because when i you know it wasn't something i woke up every morning and said hey yeah i remember that time with the hard rock and
Guest:But when I heard the story, I was like, oh my God, I do remember that.
Marc:Yeah, it was just a moment.
Marc:And to me, it was like, well, that's who that guy is.
Marc:That makes perfect fucking sense.
Marc:He's not going to take any shit.
Marc:And were you having trouble with a record company at the time?
Guest:In some ways, you're always having, in those days especially, you're always having some sort of trouble with a record company.
Marc:But when you started out, I mean, I don't know what your history is.
Marc:I know you come from around here, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Downey, California.
Marc:What the hell is in Downey?
Guest:When I was a kid, Orange Groves and Avocado Groves and Beanfields and North American Rockwell, where they built the rocket that
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And and then I woke up one morning and the orange part of that was gone.
Guest:And it was just sort of, you know, working class, suburbia.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And was your dad in the rocket business?
Guest:No, my dad was a union organizer for the United States still workers of America.
Marc:Wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Right on.
Marc:So was it a politicized household?
Marc:Was he fighting the good fight?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My brother Phil and I, we got an education very early on because what he would do is there would be organizing trips into the Southwest.
Guest:And in the west of the Mississippi, the Steelworkers Union, besides representing
Guest:steelworkers in fontana and maywood and oakland and places like that yeah uh they also they did copper miners coal miners things like uh people that worked in mining so we would go to on organizing trips through you know arizona new mexico utah colorado wyoming we we lived you know for a while uh in vale back yeah in vale colorado before it was vale um
Guest:and before they ruined it well before they whatever they did to it put that but i have a memory of you know we were staying in just one of those like shoebox motels yeah and my brother phil and i being little kids playing in the middle of the street the highway yeah that now is interstate 70 or whatever it is you know and back then it was just that's where we played right and that'll make you feel old
Guest:Remembering the days where you could play in the highway.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:That's now this massive, you know, this massive city.
Guest:But what was amazing about that was when we were, you know, in Bisbee, Arizona or Douglas or Clifton Morenci or, you know, the little mining towns in Colorado, Mintern, Red Cliff, things like that.
Guest:Those were mining towns.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:basically company towns and so there were a few times where there'd be like midnight clandestine meetings and we were you know i was like five six years old and our dad was always you know he gave us this education about there's another world besides the world that
Guest:you know is presented to you besides what you see on TV or besides what you read in the newspaper there's this other thing another side to the story basically and we learned that real early and so that was a huge formative thing on us but then back in Downey where we grew up yeah the people were told there were some of the parents you know Downey was kind of in those days it would have swung for oh I don't know Santorum
Marc:Yeah, right.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And so there were families who were like, don't play with the Alvin kids.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, go play with the Barnes kid.
Guest:But he burnt down in Orange Grove.
Guest:Yeah, but don't play with those Alvin kids.
Guest:They're commies.
Guest:They're commies, yeah.
Marc:Well, it's interesting because some of that stuff, if that's the way your brain was wired, I mean, that applies to any sort of... It brings you all the way up to that moment at the urinal.
Guest:I mean, because...
Marc:It's sort of a fight against corporate America, against insensitivity to the human struggle, and also the type of music that you come from.
Marc:I mean, it had to have speak to something.
Marc:I mean, was your dad playing Pete Seeger songs?
Marc:I mean, did you have those records and stuff?
Guest:We had a lot of Joe Glazer records.
Guest:And Joe Glazer sings the songs of Joe Hill and things like that.
Guest:And my old man, when properly lubricated, my old man liked to drink vodka straight.
Guest:yeah and uh so when properly lubricated you know he would you know solidarity forever and this that and the other or which i even what i enjoyed even more was on hot you know we didn't have air conditioning so on hot summer days uh the old man would be he'd do his yard work or whatever his chores were then he'd about four he'd hit the vodka yeah and he would uh basically be in his his boxer short and his t-shirt and he'd put on the polka records because
Guest:We're half Polish, his last name, Shazewski.
Guest:And then he'd dance around the living room like that with the Polka records blasting.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Yeah, so those are... And that's the drive shaft of conjunto music.
Marc:Yeah, in a way, yeah.
Marc:So, I mean, I'm just sort of fascinated with this idea that I don't know how you found the music that you found.
Marc:I mean, your drive on the guitar is something very specific.
Marc:You don't hear it a lot.
Marc:It's unique to you.
Marc:I mean, even though we're working with that sort of blues structure, you stay ahead of the fucking beat, and it's just nothing.
Marc:It's unbelievable.
Marc:Much to the chagrin of any drummer that plays with me.
Marc:You do, though, right?
Guest:Come on, catch up.
Yeah.
Guest:It's true.
Guest:Well, a bit, yeah.
Guest:No, but you know what I mean.
Guest:You just hit me.
Guest:I've gotten better.
Marc:No, no, I think it's a good thing.
Guest:I'm kidding.
Guest:No, it's, part of it has to do with our old man teaching us early on that there's another side to things.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So if you hear, you know, so in my brain, whatever I heard or saw, I was already thinking, well, what's the other side of this?
Guest:Right.
Right.
Guest:But then I also credit my cousins.
Guest:I had older cousins.
Guest:Thank God for the older guys with the records, right?
Guest:The main one was a gal.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:My cousin Mike, who was about 10 years older, was a folky, and he played banjo, and he played acoustic guitar, and he had Ramblin' Jack, Elliott Records, and Dave Van Rock, and Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGee, and Early Dylan, and all that stuff.
Guest:And then my cousin JJ grew up out on a ranch in the northwest San Fernando Valley up in the hills in what is now the tract homes of Granada Hills and Porter Ranch.
Guest:That's where he grew up.
Guest:So he was into Buck Owens and things like that.
Guest:And then my cousin Donna, who was the best.
Guest:My cousin Donna was maybe about, I don't know, 14 years older than us, something like that.
Guest:And she was the one, she was from Bell, California.
Guest:And Bell was as working class as you could get in Southern California.
Guest:And these are for people that don't live in California, or actually people that do.
Guest:These towns, Bell, Huntington Park, Bell Gardens, Cudahy, Southgate, Maywood, Downey, Pico Rivera, Bellflower, Linwood, Compton...
Guest:this was a different, this is a different world.
Guest:You know, when we, we would go to, um, you know, when we were teenagers and, you know, got into pot, we would get high and drive to the West side because that was like our cheap European vacation.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Cause that was like a whole other world.
Guest:It was like,
Guest:wow look at that building you know yeah but my cousin donna was from bell california and um she was a rock and roller yeah r&b chick right in her own words right and she she was she had a bitch in like 49 you know chevy that
Guest:was tricked out yeah she had a 45 record player in it that looked like in the car in the car yeah it looked like a toaster and that's pretty advanced yeah and that's sometimes our cousin donna was stuck with me and phil and so we'd be in the she'd throw us in the back seat and she and her girlfriends and they'd be wearing the
Guest:pedal pushers and they had their hairs sprayed up in the bouffons and we'd have to sit in the back and be quiet while they go and cruise and but she'd be playing these 45s and it was everything from big joe turner to uh ray charles to jimmy reed all this kind of stuff so we were soaking that up and then when she got tired of her record she gave them to us
Guest:And so really my musical thing is really just my older cousin's taste in music just combined.
Guest:And when we would have family gatherings, which was fairly often of the huge extended family, my cousin Mike would bring his guitar and banjo.
Guest:My cousin JJ would bring his guitar.
Guest:And then Donna would be like the one prodding everybody on.
Guest:play something, play something.
Guest:And Mike would play, Michael rode the boat ashore.
Guest:And JJ would be like, well, that ain't hip.
Guest:You got, you want to get hip.
Guest:You want to hear some Buck Owens.
Guest:And I, to me, you know, when you're a kid, it's just music.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You don't know the difference between Buck Owens and Michael rode the shore or anything.
Guest:You just a good song.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You can play that.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:And so that's, yeah.
Guest:So I'm, I'm a combination of all their taste in music.
Marc:So like when you, when you started playing without, when did the blasters happen?
Marc:When did you decide to do that?
Marc:And why that music?
Guest:My brother had always had a blues band.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you guys always got along?
Guest:No.
Guest:Never?
Guest:No.
Guest:No, we go off and on.
Guest:We're brothers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he had...
Guest:uh, always had a blues band and there were a lot of great musicians for whatever reason reason in the area which we grew up.
Guest:And, um, so we started hanging out in bars because we started collecting 78s.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, because, uh, for whatever reason, I think in hindsight, I describe it as we were trying to peel back the pavement and, uh, and see what was underneath because in those days,
Guest:there was a lot of stuff underneath the pavement and it was easy to lift the pavement once you, once you knew how to do it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, um, and where we lived, um, we were near the places, you know, there was a diaspora out of the South and out of the Midwest during the, during the thirties and forties, both the dust bowl migrants and then, um, um, um, African Americans migrating out of the South, out of Texas and Louisiana, particularly for,
Guest:for better jobs, better life, less segregation.
Guest:So there were all these great musicians and they were playing neighborhood bars.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:In Downey?
Marc:In Downey, yeah.
Guest:No shit.
Guest:We could go to, yeah, there was a place two blocks from our house called Marmax.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the piano player in the lounge, you know, Barmax was like one of these all-you-can-eat prime ribs, $6.95 kind of places.
Guest:And it had a lounge with a drummer and a piano player.
Guest:And he was doing, you know, Stardust or whatever the popular songs were.
Guest:and uh but his name was lloyd glenn and lloyd had been a star in the la central avenue scene in the 40s and had produced ray charles's first records was a brilliant pianist and so we would one of the places we got our education was we would just once we figured this out phil and i and the various other guys that eventually became the blasters we would just go sit at at the table say play some blues
Guest:yeah some boogie woogie yeah yeah and he'd like look around and he'd go like you know wait just give me a minute let me appease the white people here you know and uh and uh and then we started uh yeah uh basically kind of following big joe turner and t-bone walker around like like deadheads and i guess i was about 13 14 years old t-bone walker was still alive oh yeah still alive and
Marc:Because it's wild.
Marc:You've got to be the last generation that you were lucky to have found that in California, because usually you hear those stories.
Marc:It's about Chicago or it's about the South or like all the blues that migrated up and electrified in Chicago.
Marc:And you got all these like Bloomfield and and Butterfield sitting around, like, you know, getting their chops.
Guest:But you were able to find that here.
Guest:Yeah, because there was a whole West Coast scene based out of Central Avenue in L.A.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it was, you know, so we were friends with Eddie Cleanhead Vincent.
Guest:And, you know, you could you could still go into a bar and see Pee Wee Creighton and Percy Mayfield.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, yeah.
Guest:Or Big Joe Turner, whether it's a neighborhood bar.
Guest:So, you know, you know, there were bars like there used to be a place on West Adams called Vina's.
Guest:and on a Sunday night, you could go to Vina's, and the guys from the Count Basie Orchestra would have the night off, so they would go to Vina's.
Guest:And jam.
Guest:And jam if they were in town, or the Ellington.
Guest:Yeah, of course that makes sense.
Guest:Yeah, and so there was this whole world, and like I said, the whole sort of blues, jazz scene.
Guest:There were all these great players that then, the reason I brought up Marmex was there were all these great players that started playing these lounge gigs.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so between going to clubs like the Ashgrove to see Leighton Hopkins or Reverend Gary Davis, you could go to a bar and see Johnny Guitar Watson.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Or you could go to a bar and see little-known guys like Al Morgan and Buddy Banks who played with Pats Waller and played with Basie and all that.
Guest:And now they're doing their things.
Guest:There were these lounges all over there.
Guest:Just cut them loose.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, they were doing the standards.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They were appeasing the white people making a living.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But there are these guys that were part of jazz and blues history.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And they're just right there.
Guest:And you could go, if you couldn't make it to, you know, to L.A.
Guest:to see, you know, Muddy Waters, you couldn't get the ride the 25 miles up to L.A.
Guest:You could just walk, you know?
Guest:over and see these other guys and eventually convince them hey remember that record you made 1947 on the swing time label can you play it you know and they would yeah eventually yeah once you once you know things quieted down yeah they had to play you know just whatever the top 40 of 19 whatever and how'd you guys start playing that stuff did you were you in the situation when did you start playing guitar
Guest:seriously yeah probably about five years ago yeah i really got into it it takes a while to focus sometimes uh we we always had guitars laying around the house right our old man played violin interestingly and fiddle or violin violin yeah and he played the organ and interestingly he had his own unique reproach
Guest:But part of it was our cousins and our cousin Mike being able to play banjo.
Marc:What was that moment, though, where you're on the guitar and you're like, holy shit, this is it?
Marc:Was it just like that, you know, was it a blues riff?
Marc:Because when I figured out how to do that alternating thing, I was like, it's over.
Marc:That's it.
Guest:What else do you need, really?
Guest:You really don't need anything else.
Guest:I coasted for years on that.
Guest:It's a great thing.
Guest:It is a great thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's a beautiful moment.
Guest:I had so many of those moments, and I still have them.
Marc:You know, and it's weird, as broad as my musical tastes get, that when I play, it's only going to be that, really.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's only going to be three chords.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And obviously, over the evolution of your guitar playing, I was listening to the Public Domain album, that at some point you're like, I'm going to fucking study this shit.
Yeah.
Guest:did you do that i mean because on that record i mean your attention to uh the details of of the way that stuff was played originally and then bringing it up to where you're at was definitely i could hear it well you're always studying it right that's the great thing about any kind of roots music is is you're always got to study it because there's always something to learn you know like you said when you first learned how to go yeah i'm done yeah yeah yeah you know wrap it up
Marc:I'm dialed.
Marc:You'll at least build from there.
Marc:I never really built from there.
Marc:But when you say Ruth's music, because there's this idea, and it was a reality, that when you started the Blasters, there was something happening with Los Lobos and some other cats that was really an homage, but also a movement to sort of reinvent that music.
Marc:Well, there were...
Marc:But the band kind of did it as well, right?
Marc:Yeah, well, we were all working day jobs.
Guest:I was a fry cook down in Long Beach.
Guest:Oh, God bless you.
Guest:Doing the Lord's work.
Guest:I was.
Guest:Cooking fries, throwing that shitty fish in there.
Guest:Actually, I was a cook in a Middle Eastern restaurant.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:Falafels.
Guest:Yeah, I was making falafels.
Guest:Yeah, making the balls.
Guest:For a wonderful Israeli guy named Eitan Hanani.
Marc:That's something you don't hear too often, wonderful and Israeli together.
Marc:That's a rare poetic positioning of words.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:but good for you i'm glad you had that experience um and uh so it's a long story but yeah we just decided i was what the fry cook story all stories are long right um so i was like 21 yeah and uh basically this kind of scene that we'd grown up following you know big joe and all those guys in those clubs that was dead or dying it was gone really what year are we talking we're talking about
Guest:by 76 that was all that was all gone yeah you know and the disco was here yeah it was disco and and it was um love american style or love boat and just the beginning of punk maybe yeah well that's what happened was um as um i saw on tv i got back from work and i saw on tv there used to be that great guy lloyd dobbins
Guest:And Lloyd Dobbins did this report on this thing going on in England called Punk Rock.
Guest:And this was right after the Sex Pistols had done that appearance on whatever BBC morning show.
Guest:And they said, fuck and motherfucker.
Guest:Yeah, and the Queen sucks or whatever.
Guest:And so it was this big scandal.
Guest:So he did this thing.
Guest:And I was watching it.
Guest:And they're interviewing Johnny Rotten.
Guest:And they're interviewing Joe Strummer.
Guest:And The Clash were just making their first couple singles.
Guest:And they interviewed the gal from X-Ray Specs and all this.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:And I'm watching it.
Guest:And I had a beard.
Guest:I looked like some guy that probably lives in Brooklyn now.
Guest:I had that look going on.
Marc:You're a fry cook with a beard in an Israeli restaurant.
Guest:Yeah, you did live in Brooklyn.
Guest:Yeah, we called it Long Beach.
Guest:But...
Guest:I found out watching this thing, these guys were the same age as me.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I was like, wait a second.
Guest:Cause we'd all kind of given up.
Guest:And like I said, we were all, the guys eventually became the blasters.
Guest:We were all working day jobs.
Guest:Our other musician friends and, and,
Marc:Had you tried, though?
Marc:I mean, were you doing a band thing or no?
Guest:You were just hanging out.
Guest:Life was over.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I was going to somehow try to finagle a gig at the steel mill in Fontana was my plan because my brother had worked the slag heap there for a while.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Phil did?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I thought, you know, it's either try to get a longshoreman gig or eventually try to get the slag heap.
Marc:I love that because you grew up in what you grew up in, that the options were these amazingly taxing physical labor.
Guest:Well, in those days, one, it would be great if those jobs were there now.
Guest:And they were union jobs.
Guest:Yeah, they were union jobs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So that was like, if I can nab one of those, you're dialed.
Guest:And so anyway, so I saw these guys and saw that they were my age.
Guest:And I thought, maybe before I die at the age of 24, maybe it's worth one last shot.
Guest:Let's play music.
Guest:And it just was one of these things that my brother was feeling the same way.
Guest:And Johnny Baz and Bill Babin, the other guys from the Blasters, are feeling the same way.
Guest:Because...
Guest:Literally, and my brother was kind of forced to play with me because all the good guitar players, and this is true, were either dead or in jail.
Guest:The older guys or the younger guys?
Guest:Your peers.
Guest:These are older guys.
Guest:These are all older guys, you know, five, four or five years older.
Guest:So my brother was stuck with me.
Guest:And then we played a wedding.
Guest:We got a wedding gig.
Guest:A friend of ours named Frank Frillo, a great harmonica player, got a wedding gig.
Guest:And he actually put the band together.
Guest:And he said, I got this gig.
Guest:And so it was the first time my brother and I had never played guitar together.
Guest:Until recently, until the new CD, we'd never even sang together.
Guest:yeah um so this is like may of 1979 yeah we'd never played guitar together we'd lived all of our lives he would play something on guitar leave the room i'd grab the guitar and imitate his fingerings who's older you him phil yeah yeah yeah i'm the i'm the baby
Guest:But when we played together, this like magic thing happened.
Guest:That's hard to explain because my style is rooted in, my guitar style is rooted in, in urban guys like Johnny Guitar Watson and, and, and your pal like Turner and people like Carl Perkins and Chuck Berry.
Guest:And, but it's also got elements of, you know, pre-war blues guys and, and pre-war mountain music guys where Phil is like a multi, multi-finger ragtime kind of picker.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, in those days, he was amazing at it, and he's getting very good again.
Guest:But you put those together, and suddenly you had this blaster sound.
Guest:Right.
Marc:You had the history of American music right there.
Guest:Yeah, you had this nice thing where...
Guest:yeah just the different disciplines right came together yeah totally innocently right it was not planned it was all right okay you pick like this and I'll pick like that which is what you did it was just suddenly these two brothers had this thing and so then we decided okay let's give it a shot and we'd been going to the sneaking over to the punk rock clubs
Guest:yeah and uh in la and you know there was this great era around that time of innocence and discovery where you had amazing bands that were all doing a different take on this thing so you had the weirdos and who falls into that
Guest:into the weirdos category yeah the band yeah weirdos would be eventually you would say sort of the hardcore punk scene came out of like the sound of the weirdos or the dickies right and then you had bands like the screamers yeah they were like an art you know we used to call art damage bands right it was all synthesized keyboards who were a great band that never made any records yeah and but could sell out the whiskey for three nights yeah yeah
Guest:Arthur Jay and the Gold Cups, Black Randy and the Metro Squad, and then of course X was a baby band then.
Guest:And going to see these bands, it was just like, and realizing again, these are people my age.
Guest:Now my background being in blues and R&B and that kind of stuff,
Guest:Meaning you could play?
Guest:No, not necessarily.
Guest:Just what my taste ran for, what my historical background.
Guest:Right.
Guest:In that you can't hang around guys like Big Joe Turner or Lightning Hopkins at a certain age and not acquire a certain political or mild man and not acquire a certain political kind of viewpoint.
Guest:I'm not being very clear about that.
Marc:and also cultural you know what do you mean but like you mean like um a that there was a sort of a righteousness to the integrity of the music or you actually thought there was yeah i liked the underdog the working man well all that all that there there's you know when you when you play blues good
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's with integrity.
Guest:When you play blues bad, it's just bad.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And that's the same with bluegrass or anything else.
Marc:Well, that's a funny thing where it's like, you know, when blues, like if you pick up a guitar and play blues at some point, everyone associated with just shitty bar music.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And there's that fine line between really doing it and just walking through it and playing standards.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And our take was in the late 60s, blues became synonymous with like 20-minute songs.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The noodling.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And our thing was if you pick up a Chess 45 or a 78, it's two and a half minutes long.
Guest:Right.
Guest:and so we would do the songs two and a half minutes long and then when i started writing songs it was the same thing it was like two and a half minutes three minutes done out yeah and then we when we the the whole band uh when when we got together and we were playing you know basically we were a blues r&b band but we played the songs really fast and it wasn't quite intentional it was just the way that those four guys played together yeah that we play like this yeah and
Guest:If you remove me, they would play differently.
Guest:And they would throw me in, remove my brother, we'd play differently.
Guest:But the four guys together, we had, especially in the early days, it was kind of loud and fast.
Guest:And we could, you know, we did a, I'll never forget, we did a gig, a New Year's gig at the Olympic Auditorium at the Bucket of Blood downtown LA.
Guest:Bucket of Blood.
Guest:Yeah, and it was Black Flag, Fear, Saccharine Trust, all these kind of bands.
Guest:And us.
Marc:Oh, those were California bands, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Fear Was and Black Flag.
Guest:Yeah, Fear and Black Flag.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But so you guys show up playing tight fucking rock and roll music in a world where these guys are just blowing things up.
Marc:So I understand the integrity of punk and that there was some good drumming and stuff, but there was a lot more.
Guest:but but i mean in terms of like the difference between you guys taking the stage and what they just went through i would think was was different yeah you know because we were yes and no uh the great thing about the thing i liked about punk rock especially in the early days was it was liberating right and we had grown up again you know between our old man and and going to the ash grove and the ash grove club was very politically you know um
Guest:intense.
Guest:We'll put it that way.
Guest:It was burned down two times by Cuban, anti-Castro Cubans because they thought it was a pro-Castro place.
Guest:And so we had that kind of oddball thing.
Guest:We'd experience oddball worlds.
Guest:so that when you would go to a rock show say at the fabulous forum into some sports arena it didn't have the vibe right you know it was just like cold and antiseptic and it wasn't doing anything right but then when you started going to these early punk rock shows it was like oh here's the vibe and
Guest:And part of it's a sense of community.
Guest:The people in the punk rock scene had a sense of community because in those days they were all outcasts.
Guest:Whether they were Darby Crash from Beverly Hills High or a Chicano kid from East L.A.
Guest:They all had this thing of we're outcasts and this is the world we're creating for ourselves.
Guest:We're on the edge.
Guest:We're on the edge, yeah.
Guest:We're on the edge, and we're funny looking, and people don't like us, and we're coming together because we have to.
Marc:But there was only a few bands that did what you guys did, which was really take...
Marc:the the classic sounds of american music and jack it up yeah i mean you were doing i mean i know your hair was a little higher yeah at that time and you were sort of probably but that audience still took to you right i mean that to some extent you know yeah i mean we i in for the first couple years i booked the band
Guest:So my attitude was, we'll play anywhere.
Guest:We originally couldn't get gigs in Hollywood because of where we were from.
Guest:We were from Downey.
Guest:We knew no one.
Guest:And the deal to get a gig at the Whiskey or Madam Wong's, I would go in with a little cassette demo tape and the first thing they would say is, who do you know?
Guest:What do you mean?
Guest:What other bands do you know?
Guest:nobody okay see you later and so i you know we started out doing um we started out playing um like uh we used to play this biker bar in in west long beach right by the docks called the the sundance saloon right where i saw one night and we played for free beer yeah uh i saw a great thing where one of the guys i think i think the bar it was the heathens was the motorcycle club um
Marc:uh yeah pick up our drummer bill bateman and drop him head first through a pool table it was really good man it was a rough place and it's weird that your music like you could play either one i mean you know it was rooted enough in something people understood yeah that if you want to just kick it up and just jam yeah and do what you guys do it's not going to be it's it's the same thing could could play to either audience yeah well we we
Guest:the the um we had a couple things on our side we had youth on our side yeah and so people relate or they get off on youth like how did these young guys find this old music yeah and we had a lot of energy and so we yeah there were certain bands that took to us you know like whether they were sort of power pop bands like the plimsolls and people like that took to us and said oh great you guys are great or there was bands you know like a band that straddled both punk and power pop like the early go-go's
Guest:Great.
Guest:You want to do some gigs?
Guest:And it really just was like a word of mouth thing.
Guest:But eventually, one of the biggest things was when this gal down in San Diego booked us to open for X. And X were very cautious about whoever opened for them.
Guest:Why?
Guest:uh they were brand conscious you know or tribally conscious you know like you don't want to well one you don't have a shitty band opening up for you you know right and so we opened up for ex at this place called the shark club yeah um uh bucket of blood and uh had a great gig and they loved us and they said what are you guys doing next month you want to play the whiskey with us and we're like okay yeah
Guest:And so there was a period in our early days where, I think it was like at some point in the early part of 81, where in like a two-month period, we did shows opening for Queen, Asleep at the Wheel, The Go-Go's, and Fear.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:So that was like- Mixing it up.
Guest:Mixing it up.
Guest:So as far as like the kids, the kids that were into punk rock, yeah, some of them liked us, some of them didn't.
Marc:But I'm looking here at the Blaster's collection, just the rundown of the songs.
Marc:And it's interesting because there's a lot of songs on there that are politically conscious.
Marc:I mean, Common Man, Boomtown, Border Radio, American Music to some degree, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you wrote all those songs.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And when you what happened?
Marc:I know you get because I just listened to that song with you and your brother.
Marc:When was that recorded?
Marc:Like a year and a half ago.
Marc:What's up with your brother?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:With the with the stick at the end.
Marc:Well, yeah, but it's like I mean, that was the question that must have haunted both of you for years.
Marc:What happened to the blasters?
Guest:Early on, what we wanted to do was play big Joe Turner songs and Hallin' Wolf songs and Carl Perkins songs.
Guest:That's just what we wanted to do.
Guest:Junior Parker was a big influence on us.
Guest:And if I could do that, I would do that now.
Guest:Hey, you want to start a band?
Guest:Just do Junior Parker songs.
Guest:You got it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But to get a record deal and to get any kind of buzz going and to get out of the biker bars and the, you know, hoot night at country bars and in, you know, Northeast Long Beach.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We had to write original songs.
Guest:And so then I started writing them because I had studied how to write poetry with some great teachers down at Long Beach State in my abortive college career.
Guest:But the one thing the teachers taught us was how to write in traditional poetic forms, how to write sonnets, how to write Alexandrines, how to write haikus, how to do all that stuff.
Marc:Are there some Blasters haiku songs?
Marc:Because I don't...
Guest:No, but what I learned, what I had no idea of was syllable count, what iambic pentameter was, all that.
Guest:And so when we decided, okay, we're going to write original songs, I think it was like in, what is it, like September of 79, we said, yeah, we need originals.
Guest:Everybody come back to rehearsal next week with two original songs.
Guest:And of course, the other three guys showed up with nothing and I came with three songs.
Guest:Hey, I got an extra one.
Guest:And I'd been writing songs my whole life, but I never wrote them down.
Guest:And so it wasn't until then that I started writing down these things that were in my noggin, bumping around.
Guest:So anyway, what happened when I left the band, they lost their songwriter.
Guest:Why'd you leave, though?
Guest:Why did I leave?
Guest:Oh, a variety of reasons.
Guest:One was...
Guest:As a songwriter, you can't, you know, if you're writing songs for someone else all the time, you're going to run out of things that you share.
Guest:You know, like, for example, if Barbra Streisand called you up and said, Mark, write me an album.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You would sit down and say, okay, what do I have in common with Barbra Streisand?
Guest:Right.
Guest:What will she relate to?
Guest:And then you probably come up with 10 great songs.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That's very optimistic and I appreciate it.
Guest:Eight.
Guest:You throw a couple covers in and you're fine.
Marc:I think you should really cover this song.
Marc:That's just saying, I can't write you any more songs, but I got an idea.
Guest:Maybe the Long Guitar Souls, we could be a full album.
Guest:and i'd kind of written out basically i'd kind of come to an end of of songs that i could write that the band would play and my brother would sing yeah you know because they're you know bands whether it's the rolling stones or the the kid band down the street there are rules and each band's got its rules like you know the rolling stones have never recorded a polka so that tells you they have a rule no polkas
Guest:What were the blaster rules?
Guest:Well, to not go too far away.
Guest:Right, not to get too deep or too poetic?
Guest:No, not musically, not to leave the three, four chord songs.
Guest:My brother and I, we had a blaster song called Soul on Baby Goodbye.
Guest:That's a great song.
Guest:Yeah, it's a great song.
Guest:We had a fist fight at rehearsal over, it's these changes, the standard R&B changes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So this is the minor.
Guest:E minor.
Guest:My brother thought, and he still thinks to this day, that minor chords are fooling people.
Guest:This is true.
Guest:We just had this argument a couple weeks ago.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:I'm not kidding.
Guest:What does that mean?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:And I was saying, Phil, listen to James Brown.
Guest:It's full of minor chords.
Guest:I don't care.
Guest:You're just fooling people.
Guest:He makes this shit up and he lives by it.
Guest:Minor chords are fooling people.
Guest:But when I brought that song in, I'd write the songs and then we'd have rehearsal and I'd bring them in.
Guest:And yeah, we had a fist fight over that E minor chord.
Guest:and it's just like it's a turnaround it's nothing i mean well it's it's the melody of the friggin song right right and it gives it the the sad little flavor of the song of gee he's either happy he's leaving or he's sad he's leaving hey maybe he's both yeah it's got a minor chord right you know yeah but yeah we tears flying two brothers over that in front of the band quit fooling people quit fooling people you're lying with those minor chords
Guest:And then I'm trying to show how it's every doo-wop song structure.
Guest:It's just a song from the 50s.
Guest:Fuck you.
Guest:No, fuck you.
Marc:You don't think that could have been rooted in anything else?
Marc:It might have been older than that?
Guest:No.
Guest:Just a minor chord.
Guest:Just a minor chord.
Guest:Finally, I kind of won eventually by bringing in the gospel aspect of these are gospel changes.
Guest:You found a little leeway there?
Guest:Yeah, holding my jaw.
Guest:But no, Phil, it's like gospel music.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that finally kind of convinced him.
Guest:And the band eventually, after enjoying watching the two of us go at it, eventually said, it's cool.
Guest:We'll do it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:But it, you know, so you have those issues with writing songs for a band and for anyone else to sing.
Guest:And so on one hand, I knew that if I was going to survive as a songwriter and grow, I would have to write the songs for myself.
Guest:And then was there anybody else is welcome to sing them.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, but I'd have to write them for me thinking, OK, I've got to sing these.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know.
Marc:So, but that, like, was there, I mean, the Blasters was a successful band.
Marc:In our way, yeah.
Marc:I mean, you guys were in demand.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I, I mean.
Marc:We worked constantly.
Marc:I imagine that, what, did Marie Marie chart?
Marc:A couple of them charted, didn't they?
Guest:Well, Marie Marie was a huge hit internationally.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:It was like the fourth song I ever wrote down, maybe the fourth or fifth.
Guest:and it's a long story but there was a Welsh rockabilly singer who was a very good looking young man at the time named Shaken Stevens in England and he covered it and he had a huge hit it was like the number one hit in England and then due to that it became number one in Australia number one in
Marc:i have his version his version yeah not ours and uh his version was very well produced yeah um had albert lee playing the lead you know you can't go wrong i never knew about that guy until recently albert lee yeah yeah i mean because i had nick lowe in here and then someone drove me to a weird video of a of a rock pile uh uh recording yeah of dave edmunds watching albert lee and i had no idea who that guy was he's sort of a wizard
Guest:He sort of took the country style of picking into realms of methamphetamine.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Like the bluegrass style.
Guest:He just took it and jacked it up even more.
Marc:And that's all.
Marc:I didn't even really realize that.
Marc:But that whole sort of rockabilly resurgence alongside the punk thing sort of probably obviously welcomed your style of music, too.
Marc:You probably got lumped into that more than you did punk, right?
Guest:It depended on what part of the country.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, we had different fan bases.
Guest:So he had a big hit with it.
Guest:He had a big hit with it.
Guest:Early on in my songwriting career, I started getting these huge royalty checks.
Guest:It did nothing here.
Guest:They released it over here, but it did nothing.
Guest:His version did nothing in the States, but it was huge.
Guest:I have versions of Marie Marie in just about every language except Mandarin.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That's amazing.
Guest:And then sometimes people don't, that Marie Marie's becomes such a kind of classic in its way that people don't even believe that I wrote it.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:There was a great version, a Zydeco version by this guy, Buckwheat Zydeco.
Guest:Yeah, he's great.
Guest:And he cut it, and then when he cut it, it was in about 88, 89, he cut it and it became like a regional Zydeco hit in Louisiana and East Texas.
Guest:And so sometimes I remember running into Gino Delafoss, the great side to go accordion player.
Guest:And we were talking and yeah, we don't want to, you know, blah, blah, blah.
Guest:Somehow Marie Marie came up and he's looking at me and he's like, you didn't write that.
Guest:Yeah, I did write that song.
Guest:You wrote?
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, a guy from Downey.
Marc:That's got to be the biggest compliment you could have.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Is that like, I thought that was a traditional.
Guest:Well, that's, yeah.
Guest:And the song plays itself.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I mean, even when I wrote it, I was going, this song, this is a good song.
Guest:But there was no like.
Guest:And it plays itself.
Marc:Oh, yeah, it's great.
Marc:As a band, though, there was none of the standard sort of like, we're about to break, let's get fucked up, and there was none of that kind of imploding.
Guest:Oh, yeah, that was going on.
Guest:There was a fight going on between my brother and I, well, always.
Guest:and various other members you know we were all fighting about something but my the main thing i think was uh i i would have been i'd be dead if i'd stayed in the band because i i was drinking to excess and uh i'd lived what polite society would might call a fairly wild life
Guest:and i could feel it between you know because we were all rock and roll life yeah and we you know because you go from you know um you go from one life and then suddenly you realize a couple years later you're deep inside another and it seemed like you'd cross the edge yeah yeah and uh and so i was gonna you know
Guest:I'll give you an example.
Guest:I quit the job in January 1980 as a fry cook, and then I left the Blasters in December of 85 and joined X, and I had already been doing gigs with X. And then at some point I signed a deal to do a solo record in about late 86 with Nick Lowe's company, Demon Records, Nick and Elvis Costello's label.
Guest:And then, um, and then around, and then I got picked up by CBS Nashville.
Guest:And so around 1988, I realized that I'd lived about a lifetime in about what felt like a year suddenly.
Guest:And suddenly I wound up, I saw that I was broke and, um, you know, um, my mother had died, um,
Guest:A lot of friends had died all in this little period.
Guest:I went from one life living sort of in the axis of Downey and Long Beach between very close friends down there to people.
Guest:I never saw them again.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And suddenly I'm surrounded by these other people, and then they're gone, and then they're gone.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And so anyway, it was like I had to – I'm not going to say the word sober up because it wasn't that, but I had to not –
Guest:I was going nuts.
Guest:Yeah, slow it down.
Guest:So I had saved up maybe, I don't know, 30 grand from being an ex in the blasters.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I saved up that much money.
Guest:So I was like, you know, fuck you.
Guest:If I want to go play guitar in a garage, I'm going to go play guitar in a garage.
Guest:I'm going to play loud and I'm going to do whatever the fuck I want.
Guest:And nobody can tell me I can't start a band in a garage.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Oh, you can't go play music.
Guest:You can't go on tour.
Guest:We're not going to give you money to do that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I got my spine up and I was like, you know, fuck you.
Guest:I'll pay for it.
Guest:And so, you know, so I had a whatever five piece band and that's hotel rooms and gas and all that.
Guest:There goes that 30.
Guest:Yeah, that 30 went.
Guest:So by 88, I'm selling guitars, selling shit.
Marc:Did you have regrets, though?
Marc:I mean, like, in looking back on it now, I mean, how do you process that?
Marc:I mean, do you look back and go, fuck, I should have done this, I should have done that?
Guest:Oh, yeah, but I've got a stubborn streak.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm still the guy that was in the blasters, so...
Guest:i still have that stubborn streak of you can't tell me what i can and can't do you just can't do it because i can i'll just go do it without your permission you know so you know because in the early days of the blasters we would go and do these audition nights you know in in long beach bars or orange county california bars you know playing you know junior parker songs and then the the booker would say
Guest:Well, can't you guys do any cheap trick?
Guest:The kids love cheap trick.
Guest:If you do cheap trick, you'll make some money.
Guest:And it's something against cheap trick, who I think are a great band, but it's like, no, this is what we do.
Guest:And, you know, fuck you.
Guest:We're going to play this music wherever we can.
Guest:We're not a wedding band.
Guest:Well, we've done weddings, but we'll do it our way, you know?
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And so, yeah, my spine gets all, you know, I'm a pretty easygoing guy, but then when people tell me, we want you to do this.
Guest:You know, so then CBS moved me over to CBS Pop, and I had a very interesting A&R guy there named Bob Pfeiffer who had a band called Human Switchboard.
Guest:And Bob had gone out of the musician side and gone over to the corporate side.
Guest:And a great guy and all that.
Guest:But he was giving me Eurythmics records and said, can you sound more like this?
Guest:And I understand his dilemma because he stuck with this guy.
Guest:And it's like, well, can you sound like the Eurythmics?
Guest:Can you sound like whatever else was big at the time?
Guest:And I'm like, no, I can't.
Guest:I sound like me.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, you're lucky you didn't get into that trap where you're like, I'll try.
Marc:And they hook you up with a producer that just buries you under bullshit.
Marc:I'm smarter than that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Although, although I have to say that, you know, no big producer ever came in.
Guest:You know, I may have done it.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:No, you would know.
Guest:I mean, there's a couple of Springsteen's records there that are sort of like, oh, that production's a little gnarly.
Guest:Yeah, well, you know, the late 80s got ugly for everybody, I think.
Guest:You know, it was like they all were sobering up or on their last binge, and, you know, there's that whole thing of, you know, when people try too hard to have a hit record or to be relevant to, quote, the kids.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, what are the kids listening to?
Guest:They like the big drum sound.
Guest:Okay, well, let's do it.
Guest:Let's do it, you know.
Guest:Hey, I wrote this song called Blowing in the Wind.
Guest:Put a big drum on it, you know.
Marc:Even ZZ Top, man.
Marc:Once the beards came, I was sort of like, what's going on?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Tell me about Carlos Catarras.
Guest:First night I met Carlos.
Guest:For those of you out there, Carlos Guitarros is a brilliant guitar player and a brilliant character.
Guest:And the first night I ever met him, I saw a TV that was about the big old fashioned, you know, thick ass TV.
Guest:It was up on top of a shelf that was about eight feet high and it fell.
Guest:The edge landed on top of his head just.
Guest:He was on stage?
Guest:No, this was in a joint called the Zero Zero Club.
Guest:And Carlos was hired as the bouncer, which is kind of like hiring, I don't know, the Navy SEALs to be the security at an Al-Qaeda convention.
Guest:You're just asking for trouble.
Guest:So yeah, somehow this TV got knocked off this eight-foot-tall shelf, and it landed, the pointy end landed on top of his head with this huge crunch, fell off, smashes to the floor, and he's like,
Guest:oh okay who's got the beer you know yeah yeah one time one time in those days we we there was this place was open you had to be a musician or an artist to get into this to get into this joint you could drink shitty beer until 6 a.m yeah and uh so one morning at like 6 a.m yeah we asked carlos carlos like hey can you guys get me a ride home sure and
Guest:So we were heading back to Downey, and he was living nearby here in Gliselle Parker.
Guest:And so whatever, we're driving up these little hillside roads, and finally at some point he just goes, I'll just get out here.
Guest:And we're driving like 35 miles an hour.
Guest:He just rolls out, somersaults out of the car and rolls down the hill.
Guest:He was that kind of guy.
Guest:He was kind of indestructible.
Marc:Because I bought that record, I think you had something to do with producing.
Marc:Yeah, I played on it, yeah.
Marc:But he was sort of presented, because I didn't know him, but he was presented as one of these guys, and I always have an affection for these dudes, that a lot of people thought was a great guitar player and then just lost the battle against himself somehow.
Guest:Yeah, he did for a while, and he's a really talented guy.
Guest:He was the guitar player with Top Jimmy in a band called Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs.
Guest:Bay Area guys?
Guest:No, this is LA.
Guest:Carlos is from Lincoln Heights.
Marc:And these are the contemporaries of yours.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, they all kind of came along.
Guest:They came along later, you know, once, you know, in L.A., I'll be egotistical, you know, the blasters kind of with our foreheads, you know, open the door for roots music, you know, because after we did it, then it was kind of OK.
Marc:And who were the primary bands, like Lone Justice, Wes Globos?
Marc:Yeah, they all came later.
Guest:Well, Globos existed at the time, but they were doing acoustic Central American music at weddings.
Guest:And they came backstage one night around 82, I would say.
Guest:at the Whiskey A Go-Go.
Guest:And they came backstage.
Guest:And we had seen them.
Guest:There had been like a local PBS thing on this band playing traditional Mexican music in East L.A.
Guest:So they came backstage and they had beards and long hair and everything.
Guest:And they were like, hey, do you think we could ever get a gig?
Guest:We just cut some rock and roll.
Guest:And my brother Phil and I were like, oh, you're those guys that play traditional music.
Guest:Yeah, we're from Downey.
Guest:What are you from?
Guest:You live in Whittier?
Guest:Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Guest:And so the next day we actually were driving to Colorado to start a tour and we popped in their little cassette and it was like, and it was, you know, Richie Valens, you know, come on, let's go.
Guest:And Farmer John, I'm in love with your daughter.
Guest:And then I think one like Norteño.
Guest:And it was like, hey, these guys are great.
Guest:So we started giving them gigs opening for us.
Guest:and same thing like a year or so later a year and a half later with dwight yokum you know because dwight was playing to like nobody at the palomino and then you know i walked in one night just looking to get drunk and there was there's like 25 people in this amazing band of this great singer so i was like hey you're doing gigs with the blasters and
Guest:because that's the way you know that was um when we started because of those bands like x or the go-go's or the plimsolls and countless others that gave us gigs opening we kind of like would take a share of their audience right constructed our audience and then you turn around and you do the same thing for other people yeah you would do it for everybody from you know the gun club to rank and file the green on red all these cut the bands that came after us and when you played with x i mean was that a tough transition how come that didn't last longer
Guest:Well, it was a real easy transition because we'd already done the knitters.
Guest:And you wrote Fourth of July?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's a great song.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Every time I talk to a musician, it eventually gets me going, I really like that guitar thing.
Marc:That's an awesome song, man.
Marc:I'm the same way.
Marc:I'm the same way.
Marc:I get around people that I like.
Guest:yeah exactly exactly how that was cool uh i get around people i like and i'm just like oh man 2 a.m i'm alone i'm in my car and that song came on and dude wow and then they look at me like i'm nuts so that's why i stay away from meeting the people i that i really like it's a little weird hey dave you want to meet jerry lewis no too much pressure man can't handle it man maybe in an elevator
Marc:But that guitarist guy, he's just like a street guy now, right?
Marc:He was a street guy.
Guest:He moved after the top dream rhythm piece.
Guest:I don't mean to bring it back to that, because I think it shows a lot of heart that you helped this dude out.
Guest:Was it like that?
Guest:Well, he moved up to San Francisco, and yeah, he basically kind of eventually wound up living on the street.
Guest:Getting strung out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, he had, you know, Carlos has a personality that requires patience on the part of the observer or the part of the friend because he is brilliant.
Guest:And so a lot of people don't have the patience for brilliant people, you know.
Guest:And so, and, you know...
Guest:Well, and he enjoyed a good time.
Marc:Let's put it that way.
Marc:When you listen to the record, it's interesting because I kind of just read the press material.
Marc:I didn't know who he was.
Marc:I knew you were on the record, and there was a couple other people I knew on the record.
Marc:But you could definitely hear a guy that had some pretty fucking tight chops trying to get him back.
Marc:And there was a rawness to him reengaging with a band and with that whole thing that was really raw and good.
Marc:And his voice is beat up.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He sounds like he'd been through the shit.
Marc:And it had sort of a nice integrity to it.
Guest:No, he's... Guys like Carlos have that deal where they're... Yeah, energy's a good word.
Guest:There's so many thoughts going on inside their head that they're trying to get them all out at once.
Guest:And that album, that Carlos, guitar-less record you're talking to, it's got that vibe of...
Guest:This may be the only record I make, man.
Guest:I got to get it out.
Guest:I got to get it out.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And that's great, you know, and that was, you know, that was like the spirit, you know, of 20 years earlier in the L.A.
Guest:scene was there was just so many people with ideas trying to get him out.
Guest:And he was sort of frozen in time in a way, I guess.
Guest:Well, I think that...
Marc:he had been away for so long and he had a lot of ideas you know he had 20 years of ideas to get out and so yeah it's a nice it's a nice record so now when with your solo career now i know you've had you know a few groups of people that you've played with and uh you seem to be constructing a pretty you know large american songbook hopefully yeah and the record you just gave me 11 and 11 what is that one that's the most recent
Marc:And that's just, who's the band?
Guest:Well, that was made, I was on tour with, I had a CD I did before that was called Dave Alvin and Guilty Women, which was me with women.
Guest:We were on tour and I don't write songs really on the road.
Guest:I don't know if you do write bits on the road.
Guest:It's hard.
Marc:I'm just, whenever they come.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And when you're, you know, yeah, it's hard to do any work at all.
Guest:Any work.
Guest:But for whatever reason, with the women, I could write on the road.
Guest:So I just started writing.
Guest:Yeah, I was just writing songs just for the hell of it.
Guest:And then I would, you know, I'd have a week off and I'd call my engineer in L.A.
Guest:and then and he'd say, yeah, I got the time.
Guest:And I'd say, fine.
Guest:And then I'd call friends of mine.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Hey, what are you doing Tuesday?
Guest:I got a song.
Guest:You want to cut it?
Guest:Okay, see you there.
Guest:Then we cut it, then I go back out on the road, and then I'd write another song.
Guest:And in the case of the song with my brother Phil that's on there, What's Up With Your Brother, I was on tour, and there was a great club in Madison, Wisconsin called The High Noon.
Guest:And the one drawback to the club is there's no bathroom in the dressing room.
Guest:which is always a drag because they get to go to the bathroom and you got to do an in-store yeah you do a meet and greet in the bathroom walk through the crowd yeah and you're standing there and you're you're standing at the urinal and so some guy goes why don't you have a gold record exactly exactly and some guy says to me before the show yeah you know i go and i'm standing at the urinal and the guy comes stands next to me hey dave how you doing you know
Guest:okay hey what's up with your brother yeah he's doing his thing go up play the gig and then wait like you wait get off the stage and wait a half an hour yeah and then it's like okay i'm gonna make the run to the bathroom now yeah and i ran to the bathroom go in there and then a different guy this is true yeah different guy comes up stands next to me hey dave yeah how you doing yeah
Guest:So your brother, what's up with him?
Guest:And then I was like, OK, and went back to the hotel and basically wrote the song.
Guest:And so, yeah, you take it where you can get it.
Guest:And then I call Phil and said, you want to sing a song together?
Guest:And he was like, yeah.
Guest:So then went and recorded that and then went on the road.
Guest:so um um well that's just because they love you man they love the blasters i mean that's what that is yeah the band certainly had its effect you know because there are people that have still never forgiven me for leaving right you know uh and i know who they are because because i see them you know when i do sit in with my brother or something or or do a quick you know every now and then we'll do some quick reunion gigs just for fun you know that's funny because the story i heard blamed him
Marc:Blame Phil?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:For what?
Marc:When I heard years ago, they said that Phil was out of control and you had a split.
Marc:We were both out of control.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:He said diplomatically.
Guest:But we were, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, you know, we were, you know, again, it's hard.
Guest:You know, we weren't the Jackson Five, right?
Guest:Or we weren't the Rolling Stones.
Guest:We weren't a huge- You mean there was a million dollars a day coming- Yeah, it wasn't anything like that.
Guest:But-
Guest:you know i was a fry cook in long beach yeah and and then you know two and a half years later you're in time magazine's top 10 records of the year yeah and you're going to exotic locales like kansas city oh yeah and uh you know and and buffalo and and these places and you're meeting crazy girls and you've got all these new crazy friends and and and because they're
Guest:you're getting paid to jump up on, jump up and down on stage and play real loud and like an amateur.
Guest:Hey, this is great.
Guest:And it'll fuck with you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It'll fucks with your brain, you know?
Guest:And you know, so like when, when, um, you know, well, all right, we take these athletes when they're, you know, Andrew Bynum or something.
Guest:He's 24 years old.
Guest:And, and you just, you just think, God, I have, you know, if I was, if I had Andrew Bynum's money and all that,
Guest:at me at 24 yeah fucked up in the head i would be rolling around with eight million dollars a week or whatever right you know that shit will fuck with you and it kind of fucked with us because what you mean pussy and drugs and beer coast to coast anywhere you want it'll fuck with you it'll fuck with you
Guest:It'll fuck with you.
Guest:It's addicting.
Guest:But, you know, we never lost perspective or anything like that.
Guest:It was just, you know, because I never really got into drugs or anything.
Guest:I certainly did them, but then...
Guest:one day i think it was like early 82 yeah i hated the sound of birds in the morning yeah oh yeah and i you know just hated it and then you're laying in bed and you go why i don't want to do this and so it was really it's just like okay stop yeah and um you know but other people maybe didn't you know
Guest:That's exactly the story I heard.
Marc:Well, you want to play a song, will you?
Marc:Sure, if you'll sing it.
Marc:I don't know how to sing.
Marc:What are you talking about?
Guest:I heard you sing one of my songs in San Francisco.
Marc:I did, but I'd have to look up the words.
Marc:Oh, we could sing it together.
Marc:Yeah, all right.
Marc:What key did you do it in?
Marc:I think I did it in like an E or something.
Marc:An E?
Marc:Oh, now I'm nervous.
Marc:I don't know how to fucking sing.
Marc:What's the worst that can happen?
Marc:I fuck up your song.
Guest:You sang along.
Guest:Did you learn it off the record?
Marc:I, like, what I did was, like, I just loved the song.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, you know, I just, you know, kind of, you know, made it my own.
Marc:I didn't try to, you know, because I, you know, I learned the chords and, you know, I just, I did what I could.
Marc:I'll release in the room.
Marc:I can't do it.
Marc:You do it that fast?
Marc:No, you do your song.
Marc:I don't know how to do it.
Guest:I did it once.
Guest:Kind of on the blasters, you kind of did it.
Guest:Beautiful.
Beautiful.
Guest:Well, is this seat taken?
Guest:Would you mind some company?
Guest:You've been alone all evening Would you like to talk with me?
Guest:Now do I come here often?
Guest:Well, you might say that I do And is someone home waiting?
Guest:Honey, I was just gonna ask you Cause you're the prettiest woman
Guest:I think I've ever seen Until tonight If you let me I'd like to help you dream
Guest:You got the nicest brown eyes Still got your little girl smile You know you should have been in movies, honey You say you haven't heard that in a while You sound just like Faith Hill Singing on the radio You know someplace quiet
Guest:Where both of us could go Cause you're the prettiest woman That I think I've ever seen And tonight, if you let me
Guest:I'd like to help you dream to the fire.
Guest:Cause I think I know what it looks like when you get back home.
Guest:Baby, dreaming is all that you've got left.
Guest:And I could tell you sweet lies like you've never heard before.
Guest:You see, I haven't stopped dreaming yet.
Guest:All right, Brother Bart.
Guest:I think I know what it looks like when you get back home Baby, dreaming is all that you got left I can tell you sweet lies like you never heard before
Guest:You see, I haven't stopped dreaming yet.
Guest:Let's see.
Guest:What's that?
Guest:Oh, wait.
Guest:What's the next line?
Guest:Do you remember the last one?
Guest:Do you come here often?
Marc:No, no, no.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:Hold on.
Marc:It's, well, how about another drink?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Certainly.
Guest:How about another drink?
Guest:What's that?
Guest:You gotta go home.
Guest:You say it's been nice talking.
Guest:Honey, why are you leaving me alone?
Guest:Cause you're the prettiest woman that I think I've ever seen.
Guest:And tonight, if you let me, I'd like to help you dream.
Guest:And then he walks across the smoky bar in 1984, sits down next to the next woman and says, Do I come here often?
Guest:You might say that I do.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You sounded great.
Guest:That was fucking awesome.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, that was fun, dude.
Marc:Thanks for indulging me.
Guest:You got it.
Guest:You got it, Mark.
Marc:And thanks for talking.
Guest:Thanks for asking.
Marc:All right, man.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Okay, that's our show.
Marc:I hope you enjoyed it.
Marc:What else?
Marc:You know the drill.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com for all your WTFPod needs.
Marc:Get on that mailing list.
Marc:Kick in a few shekels.
Marc:Buy some of the new merch.
Marc:Check out the episode guide.
Marc:See which ones you want.
Marc:Maybe pick up the app.
Marc:Get the premium app.
Marc:You can stream everything.
Marc:There might be a couple more of those first 100 episodes on DVD, MP3 files.
Marc:Pick up some JustCoffee.coop.
Marc:Knock yourself out.
Marc:Leave a comment.
Marc:Try to be nice.
Marc:Boomy, come home.
Marc:Boomy.
Marc:Ah, it's fucking heartbreaking, man.
Marc:I'm going to try to work through it.
Marc:Again, thank you for your support.
Marc:I have to memorize lines now and figure out what choices I would make if I were me acting like me.
you