They are playing June and Johnny.
There was David Kempner and Tony Gilkyson (formerly of X) and different guys. The story was, well, they were doing the stuff on the old records, so I ended up playing some of the stuff like Johnny’s guitar. . . . Redoing it, you know. These versions are very cool. It’s interesting, because they are kind of bringing it up to date. Well, if anyone can re-record the Johnny Cash stuff and make it sound cool, it’s T. Bone. He did a pretty good job of it. It’s pretty fresh sounding. It sounds good.
And Joaquin has been singing Johnny’s part?
He sounds amazingly like Johnny Cash. When I first heard he was doing the part, I wasn’t into the idea of it. But they are both singing pretty good. It’s kind of amazing. Granted, there are certain problems. I mean, they’ve only been singing for a few weeks. I don’t know how those guys do what they do. But you know, I really don’t have the energy. . . . Well, I don’t really deal with actors that much in my life. About twenty years ago, I got a call to go meet Martin Scorsese. They were looking for guys to be the Apostles in The Last Temptation of Christ.
That’s right, Michael Been from the Call ended up being one of them.
Yeah, he wanted guys from bands. He was looking for guys from bands to be in it.
But why?
He figured they knew how to be apostles. They knew how to be disciples, work for nothing for a cause, be part of a team, you know. He interviewed me, and I talked to him for a few hours, man. We sat in this room over at this agency or something and we talked for a few hours. It was pretty intense. He asked, “Did you ever want to be an actor?” and I said, “I got to tell you, I never wanted to be an actor” [laughs]. I never wanted that. To me, it just seemed like the opposite of what I wanted to do. I just never had any interest in it. I know a lot of rockin’ guys do, rock players, but I never gave a fuck about it.
There’s no crossover for you between the mediums?
To me, acting seems the opposite of rock ’n’ roll. Like movies about rock ’n’ roll are never any good, because what’s good about rock ’n’ roll is that it is not acting. Do you know what I mean? It’s spontaneous.
But for you, there’s no persona on stage?
Just get in touch with who you are and fucking rock, you know. For some people I know it’s acting, but for me it’s not, it’s the opposite of acting. It’s really being completely yourself. Just doing your thing. That’s the way I look at it. It’s spontaneous. And it’s just your own. . . . Well, you’re not trying to contrive things. What you are trying to do is put something across. I don’t know. That’s the way I look at it.
But two of the Plimsouls did go into the “business,” one into animation and the other, pyrotechnics.
Yeah, they both went into movies, but it’s not like acting. They’re just doing jobs—blowing up cars and doing cartoons. I guess acting does have a lot to do with it, because like with Bob Dylan, I guess he’s like an actor when he’s out there acting like Woody Guthrie. I suppose there’s a certain amount of acting that goes into the stuff we do. I guess I shouldn’t draw such a fine, high line between it, but that’s always why rock ’n’ roll movies always seem to fail to me, because rock ’n’ roll exists spontaneously in the moment, and the movies are this faked-up shit. Movies, just by their nature, are faked up.
So, the Jerry Lee Lewis movie, which actually starred John Doe, was a failure to you?
Oh yeah, I thought it was a piece of shit. Didn’t you?
I think it’s like having a movie about a writer like Hunter S. Thompson, who both Bill Murray and Johnny Depp have portrayed. It’s hard to capture what makes an artist interesting, because the process, for instance, of writing a song, isn’t always that interesting.
Plus, there’s just no understanding of. . . . Well, the thing that’s great about that persona is its depth in the moment. Jerry Lee Lewis just rocks, and he’s such a piece of work, but you can’t just put Dennis Quaid up there and get the same thing. It’s like a fucking cartoon.
So it ends up a caricature rather than a depthy portrayal?
Yeah, a band’s caricature. The best rock ’n’ roll movie I saw was Backbeat, that Beatles movie. A couple of the guys in that movie got across what it was like to be completely nuts in some stupid bar on speed. I thought that was pretty good, I did. Sid and Nancy was pretty good, but it’s not really a rock ’n’ roll movie, but some of that stuff is just crap, man. The Jerry Lee Lewis, for one, I thought was the weakest one I had seen. Because those people just don’t fucking know, man, they don’t have it, man. Being a big actor and being Jerry Lee Lewis is just a different world.
Whereas you entrust someone like Nicolas Cage, who did hang out in the Hollywood punk scene during his days of Valley Girl, to be a rocker?
Well, in a movie, you have a whole chain of command, which is the other part of it, so you have the scene. . . . There are some actors that are fucking great, but they rarely play rockers in the movies. Movies about poets are always terrible [laughs].
You grew up like a teenage Yippie, but since the 2000s, your songs teem with a sharpened sense of politics too—was it the Bush years or the overall drift of the country?
I was unpolitical for a spell, even though I sympathized with international and U.S. social justice movements, etc. Those were sort of my drunk rock ’n’ roll years. Then, the Iran-Contra affair was a drag. And there was a huge homeless problem in the U.S. These got my attention. When Bush Senior ran, and when they impeached Clinton, that all really bugged me. That was the start of the renewed political awareness that reignited it.
With your songwriting workshop, ongoing blogs, memoir, and continuous cache of songs, you offer fans a deep look into your creative process. Does this stem from a Beat Generation, candid kind of approach or something else?
I grew up on the Beats, especially the work of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. They were very open about their selves and the process they used to write. So, I like that, but it’s dangerous to speak too openly too often about songwriting; there are secrets that need to remain in the shadows. Where the real songs come from is a mystery. And just because you call it a song doesn’t make it one. Songs communicate on a higher plane, and no one really knows how that happens.
What songs compel you right now that might surprise us?
I’m listening to the first LP by Bridget St. John, on Dandelion records. I heard it last month over in Glasgow, and it’s my favorite record right now. It’s just her and John Martyn. I dig Edith Piaf’s greatest hits. Mose Allison’s songs—I dig his attitude. And John Coltrane’s work: his struggle to be a real voice is something I relate to. He’s on the turntable a lot. Hendrix’s songwriting is underrated. He’s one of the greats, when he hits it. Early Duke Ellington records—I dig the tone of the band. And the songwriting of Robert Wilkins, also the Mississippi Sheiks, reminds me of my band the Nerves’ early work, though that’s hard to explain. But there is a similarity I feel. Of the current crop of songwriters, I feel Mary Gauthier is the best thing going. She writes songs that make a beeline straight for the fault lines! Chris Smither has a great original style I really dig, combining blues with some wigged-out wisdom.
Dave Alvin: California Soul
Originally published in Thirsty Ear, February 2001.
Calling a Red Roof Inn somewhere in Indiana at 8:30 in the morning does not necessarily put a journalist on the good side of Dave Alvin. Between forming the rockabilly-edged Blasters with his brother Phil, surviving a stint in X, and maturing during a fertile solo career, the man has been through more rock ’n’ roll drama than this wake-up call. With a voice as deep as the plumbing of a four-story building and percolating with boundless humor, Alvin is the thinking man’s garage-rock hero remade as gifted singer-songwriter.
When you write songs, you weave alienation and other modern anxieties into traditional forms, so do the Public Domain songs reflect these elements too?
Even by the choice of songs on this record. One of the t
hings I wanted to show on this record was interconnectedness; maybe that’s part of the timelessness. For one, all the styles are connected, whether it’s a blues song or hillbilly ballad. All these songs grew up together, rubbed shoulders with each other. The other thing I wanted to show was that those folk songs are archetypal, and those archetypes are still around. “Blackjack David” may be driving a Camaro or some other muscle car and not riding a horse [laughs]. Or “Murder of the Lawson Family,” which is on the new record, is a very contemporary story to me.
They are vehicles for truths that we already know?
“Blackjack David” is a classic British folk song, but on this record the songs are all American, and with a lot of them, if I were an educated man, I could make the case that they were reactions to the Industrial Revolution, which was a very traumatic period for working-class people. So you have songs like “Engine 143” about the death of the engineer. And the case could be made, if I were better at theory, or even awake [laughs], that a lot of these songs are metaphors for people caught in the transition between the pre-industrial age and the industrial age. Right now, we’re in a similar period in that people are similarly caught between the pre-technological age and the age of new technology. And in the same way that the industrial system created new classes of people, new sets of have and have-nots, technology is doing the same thing now. Any time that you have such drastic change going on, you have alienation.
Why such modesty? You did go to college, and you know poetry, sonnets, Shakespeare.
We’re damn good friends [laughs]. The band was discussing this last night, that none of us graduated from college. Chris Smither is opening the shows we’re on, and he said that he never graduated either. I’m just not well versed in critical theory. That’s a whole other language.
You consider yourself a blues man. Does that go back to your youth and seeing Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, and Howlin’ Wolf with your brother Phil?
It’s part of me, but hand me an electric guitar and I’m basically a thrasher. But if Lightning Hopkins was a thrasher, then that’s how I play guitar. The great thing about blues, and one of the reasons it has survived, is that it’s not a monolithic thing, though some people try to make it fit into a monolithic identity. It’s everything from a shuffle band playing Antone’s on a Monday night to Miles Davis and Jimmy Rogers.
The form itself is a poetic form like haiku or a sonnet. It all depends on what you do with that form. You can have a Shakespearian sonnet or a modern sonnet. In the hands of the right person, a sonnet can be a sonnet without seeming like it. Aram Saroyan did a whole book on twelve bizarre sonnets, but they were all in classical sonnet form, though you wouldn’t recognize it. It’s just a form.
There’re so many types of blues: there’s Texas blues, Delta blues, Chicago blues, Memphis, Chicago, St. Louis, and they’re all different. I tend to be more aggressive when I play guitar, which comes from the punk stuff, and because I’m not one of the world’s greatest guitarists, so I just turn up the volume louder so no one will notice [laughs].
You carry part of Los Angeles with you wherever you go?
I carry part of Downey, my hometown. You could drop me in Antarctica and I’d still be a Downey guy, even though I haven’t lived there in twenty-something years. With a lot of people, whether they’re songwriters, novelists, or painters, you carry those initial memories. My memories of my hometown bring our conversation full circle because it was an area in transition between the rural and urban. It’s about twenty miles from L.A., and when I was a kid half of it was orange groves, avocado groves, and bean fields. On the south side there were dairy farms as far as you could see.
So, I’m attracted to transitional zones, I’m attracted to borderlands—those places where things collide and people are caught. Usually when I’m writing a song or a poem, those are the images in my head. Something from childhood. I know it sounds loopy, but I think it’s true for a lot of writers. They create their own worlds, but they tend to look a lot alike, what they saw when they were young mixed in with what they see now. The L.A. scene between 1978 and 1985 was a great music scene because it didn’t care about the music industry that much, and it existed on its own and was an all-for-one, one-for-all kind of situation most of the time. For example, the Germs were the first band on Slash; they helped X get on Slash, who helped the Blasters, who helped Los Lobos and Rank and File. Everybody helped each other. It was a social scene that revolved around everyone feeling they were outsiders and didn’t fit in.
There were negative sides to the scene, like the heavy drugs and alcohol, but everybody did look out for each other, and when it died, like all scenes do, I was like a lamb thrown out to the lions. I suddenly realized that just because somebody plays a similar style of music doesn’t mean he or she is going to be like everybody back in L.A. There’re some real pricks out there, and they’re going to screw you over the first chance they get. I miss that about the old L.A. days and try to carry a little bit of it with me.
Billy Joe and Eddy Shaver: Miles and Miles of Honky-Tonk Soul
Originally published in Thirsty Ear, 2000.
Before the show at Dan Electro’s in Houston, Billy Joe Shaver, his white hair illumined by harsh porch lights, leans up against his plain white Ford utility van. He squints as ladies step up for photos. He eagerly draws them close, a kind of electricity making his cheeks wide and taut. Later, between sets, unhappy at the awkward, impromptu acoustic set, he puts a hand on a nearby fence. “I’m getting old, man,” he says, not because he can’t land the same musical punches anymore, but for other, more insidious reasons, like wrangling with record labels and fighting for recognition.
When his son Eddy, whose nimble, bluesy guitar is the core behind Shaver’s sound, ambles up with his heavy-metal hairdo drooping down over his shoulders, Billy relaxes a bit. In truth, they haven’t always been this close, but now there’s a very real sense of shared vision between them, like they’re beating around the old porch again, singing along to scratchy LPs.
And while Willie Nelson makes the front cover of Texas Monthly as artist of the century, Shaver—a legend in his own right who embodies the outlaw country subculture that gave rise to the likes of Nelson and Waylon Jennings—lives in a trailer in Waco, Texas. He is mostly alone and overlooked, without even a mailbox (he has keys to a church where he picks up correspondence). Yet, he is as candid and garrulous as a sixty-year-old maverick can be.
You first became interested in music from the kids who lived at the black settlement across from your grandma’s place in Corsicana, Texas?
Billy Joe: They were cotton pickers. There was pretty much always someone there playing music. They played a lot of bottleneck, mainly because their guitars were so beat up. I was influenced a lot by that.
Has black music influenced you in other ways?
Billy Joe: All the way, just about. You’d be hard-pressed to beat Willie Dixon or Muddy Waters. They’re about as good as it gets. We listened to more black music than anything else back then.
Are you a country band?
Eddy: They always ask us are you country or are you this because you know they want to bag you, especially since the seventies. But I like to play rock clubs, where the young guys can hear us play.
Critics and labels want to push you into a niche?
Billy Joe: That’s when you quit. We’ve quit many times, in terms of certain labels.
What’s a true honky-tonker anyway?
Billy Joe: I don’t even know where the word came from.
You’ve put out seven records in twenty years, which is not much for a country player.
Billy Joe: But when we put out the live record, Unshaven, critics noticed it and said it had more guitar firepower than most rock that year. Brendan O’Brien [the producer] from Pearl Jam recorded it. He just turned the tape on and let us play.
Eddy: That was the great thing about using him. Some producers wanted to bring in fiddles and stuff, but I’ve been playing the stu
ff for fifteen years and nobody’s going to mess with my live show.
It came out the same time that Jason and the Scorchers released their first record on Mammoth, which had a huge rock sound.
Eddy: Sure. There was a lot of influence, I believe, from people like Jason and us to get back to that sound. Each record breaks people’s expectations. You’ve done polished studio work, a live record, and an acoustic record. On Highway of Life and Victory we had a much more acoustic feel, and I felt it was time to really get out and slam again. And basically, since Tramp on Your Street, we’ve been successful in terms of getting to play the cool clubs.
But how do those clubs feel when you do pull out the quiet Victory material?
Eddy: They love it.
Billy Joe: We usually stick it in the middle, and it works well because the sounds complement each other.
Do you think when you made Victory you were taking a chance, perhaps even alienating some of your audience, because of its heavy religious overtones?
Billy Joe: I was supposed to do that record. It was a deal with God. But I wish I would’ve waited a bit, because it caused our last record, Electric Shaver, to sit in the can because they were made at the same time. It was supposed to come out first, but it ended up in the can, and everybody in Nashville listened to it because someone gets a tape every time. I’m tired of stuff like that because I wish I could make a record and put it out right then. Usually it’s fresh and different then.
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