A Night Rooted in Americana

Examined through the lens of pessimism, Dave Alvin is an artist whose mission failed.

His first band, the Blasters, roared out of Los Angeles in the early 1980s, fueled with the ambition of restoring American music to its rightful throne. Concoct a mixture of blues, country, R&B; and early rock ‘n’ roll. Play it for the sake of the sound’s sheer rocking exuberance, but also play it with the highest artistic ambitions, so that “American Music”--the title of a signature number Alvin contributed as the Blasters’ songwriter and lead guitarist--would hold up a mirror to the nation’s life. It would reflect images from broad social and historical expanses as well as details visible only in the narrower frame of private life.

A decade and a half on, Alvin has gone from playing American music, as the spearhead of a movement aiming to grab the ears of a mass audience, to playing Americana music. It’s the quaint term for a radio format devoted to acts who till the old stylistic soil and keep alive the literate-songwriting aesthetic but have a better chance of hitting the lottery jackpot than the Top 40.

From a commercial standpoint--and what matters more in American life?--Americana is minority music, elite music, marginalized and defeated music. Alvin, the Blasters and such cohorts as X and Jason and the Scorchers tried to become David during the ‘80s, but their slingshot broke and that giant Philistine, the music business, stood unchanged at decade’s end.

The hit charts of the ‘90s have been so devoid of good roots-rock music, and of non-hip-hop American music with serious social intent, that Steve Earle, another leading Americana act, prays in one of his new tunes to the ghost of Woody Guthrie, pleading for his return so that he might restore social meaning to popular song.

But for anyone outside the record-selling business, judging Americana by its commercial impact is a huge blunder. It has been the most consistently rewarding genre of the decade, home to Wilco, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and many other worthy acts on such independent labels as Hightone, Rounder, Sugar Hill and Watermelon. If reaching a substantial cult audience with quality matters, then Alvin, one of Americana’s most important figures, is no failure at all.

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His show Wednesday at the Long Beach Museum of Art attracted a capacity crowd of nearly 900 to the lovely outdoor concert grounds. Treating the evening as a homecoming--Alvin wryly noted that, as a youth in Downey, Long Beach seemed like a metropolis, “that little bit of Paris that inspires you”--he and American music triumphed, ruling for two hours with fired-up blues and resonant, truthful songs about people hoping, striving, losing and coping. A listener could have it either way: flow with the force of a four-piece band highlighted by Alvin’s sizzling guitar and Rick Solem’s prolific piano or invest thought in songs that open up like little packets of literary art.

Alvin the thought-provoker offered such gems as “Fourth of July,” among the greatest rock songs of the past 15 years. With its fine anthem-rock architecture and (an Alvin specialty) knack for summoning nuances of setting, character and plot, the 1987-vintage number, first recorded by X, merits its own review. In it, Alvin ties the realization of the embattled farmers of 1775--this relationship just ain’t working and we need to deal with it--to a discordant couple in modern working-class America. The first step toward liberation, Alvin shows us, is seeing that things can change, that traps can be sprung, that freedom is possible. Few songs are as sad and as exhilaratingly hopeful as this one.

But Alvin questions hope as well. “Dry River,” with its true-believer’s vision of an mystical, apocalyptic transformation of the San Gabriel River from a dead sea of concrete into a living torrent, was fervently hopeful. But a scintillating electric jam linking his own “Jubilee Train” with Guthrie’s “Do Re Mi” and Chuck Berry’s “The Promised Land” offered a more complex scene. In this long sequence, which ranged from churning train rhythms to slow, sufferin’ blues, Americans’ freedom to pursue happiness seemed a blessed spark one moment, a cruelly illusory sham the next.

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Rather than leave weighty contradictions hanging, Alvin and his band invested American music with its most cathartic properties on the set-closing “Long White Cadillac” and “Romeo’s Escape.” They tore apart the contradictory knots with the searing energy of a band rumbling like a hook-and-ladder to a four-alarm blaze. Alvin’s rhythmically thrusting guitar was the engine, Solem’s mighty waves of Jerry Lee Lewis- and Leon Russell-inspired piano the clanging alarm.

In considering Alvin and his Americana peers, it’s comforting (although perhaps not for them) to remember how Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” initially flopped, how Van Gogh failed to sell a painting during his lifetime, how the Velvet Underground wound up in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame despite a career chart peak of 171. Maybe in 20 or 30 years, people will think of Alvin when they think of American music in the late 1900s.

His buddy and sometime songwriting partner, Chris Gaffney, lives on the commercial fringe of Americana, about as fringey as it gets. But he wasn’t suffering in the least during his ebullient, hourlong opening set. Gaffney led his band, the Cold Hard Facts, through a typically wide-ranging performance that included some of the most idiosyncratic and enlivening roots music available.