The blues-folk-country-rock-punk-psychedelia of Dave Alvin

For Grammy Award-winning songwriter and guitarist Dave Alvin, music is more about commonalities than differences. He said his favorite music style – the Blues – inhabits the same space as all roots genres, including everything from bluegrass to rockabilly.

“Whether you’re Ralph Stanley, or Robert Johnson, or John Coltrane…it’s all the same notes. It’s all in how you arrange them,” Alvin said. “Bluegrass …blues …rockabilly …as long as you are interacting with those roots, to me, you’re part of the folk tradition.”

Alvin’s own highly regarded work draws from these traditions but also weaves in a network of wild threads that give him a cool, almost rebellious edge. It’s that edge of coolness and originality that no doubt appealed to Dwight Yoakam, who recorded one of Alvin’s songs – “Long White Cadillac,” about Hank Williams's death. Alvin shares a fiercely independent vibe with Yoakam, a fellow native Californian. It’s almost a “punk” undercurrent. In Alvin’s case, it probably came from his early experiences as a musician, when he briefly played in the scene with the well-known punk-rock outfit X, featuring Exene Cervenka. He also played with The Knitters, a country-folk-style band that was an offshoot of X, and gigged a little with the punk band The Flesh Eaters.

“I was always looking for the connections between sounds,” Alvin said, in explaining the breadth of his work across genres. “More than anything, I’m a blues guitar player,” he said, with the caveat that he always asks himself: “Where can I take this?”

Over the decades, he’s taken it …well …everywhere. Some of his earliest work was with his brother, Phil, with whom he formed the roots-rock group The Blasters. Eventually, however, he wanted to do his own thing.

From age 11 to 13, Alvin “got to see a lot of great music.” In L.A., he lived in the perfect spot for music exposure: “Out here, you hear everything!” He mentions that the influences range from Jimi Hendrix to the Flying Burrito Brothers to “West Coast blues” guitarist T-Bone Walker.

Alvin told the story of one of his favorite musical memories: “I used to live in Nashville around 1989. Every Wednesday night at The Station Inn was Peter Rowan and Jerry Douglas. That’s where I’d be every Wednesday night,” he said. “The first set would be straight bluegrass …and the second set, they’d do bluegrass-reggae and bluegrass-rock n roll.” He laughed.

Interest in those special sets echoes Alvin’s thoughts on drawing inspiration vs. getting stuck in an imitation rut. He said he learned early on that there’s a temptation—especially among people who play blues or other traditional music—to copy their favorites so closely that they essentially “ape” what they’ve seen. This keeps them locked into a genre and a style and keeps them from breaking into originality.

That being said, he explained that “the really great ones can’t be aped.” When he was young, he remembers wanting to be Lightnin’ Hopkins.

“It didn’t take me long to realize I could never be. You have to be your own person.”

Over the years, Alvin has made a number of solo records and collaborated on projects. He’s done quite a bit of gigging and recording with longtime friend and country singer-songwriter Jimmie Dale Gilmore.

“Our roots are kind of similar in that our roots are in blues,” Alvin said, “but he has a harder honky-tonk edge than I have.”

The most recent project is a new release by his supergroup of Californian psychedelic rockers, The Third Mind. Live Mind is an hour of improvisational music featuring Alvin plus Victor Krummenacher (Camper Van Beethoven, Monks of Doom, Eyelids); David Immergluck (Counting Crows, Monks of Doom, Camper Van Beethoven); Michael Jerome (Richard Thompson, Better Than Ezra, John Cale); and vocalist Jesse Sykes, from Jesse Sykes and the Sweeter Hereafter. Additional contributions come from Mark Karan (Bob Weir’s Ratdog, Phil Lesh) and Willie Aron.

While Live Mind may be different than what most bluegrass fans are used to, Alvin’s more open and less defined idea of what roots music can include might come as a refreshing – maybe even rebellious – idea.

“There are acceptable ways of electrifying roots music, and there are unacceptable ways, and we were walking a fine line,” he laughed.

That line seems to be the precise place where Alvin feels most at home and where music comes alive as something completely new.