SOLO ALBUMS: REMEMBERING, RENEWING

“UN’SUNG STORIES.” Phil Alvin. Slash.

Before there were CDs, LPs, 78s, wax cylinders or even a sheet-music publishing industry, there were songs. Oftimes they told stories, either of events recent or long-remembered: storms, train wrecks, murders committed for love or money. In other words, the stuff that people have always talked about. Small wonder that the plots of the story-songs found on the first solo album from Blasters front man Phil Alvin resemble headlines torn from supermarket tabloids: ADDICT’S GHOST HAUNTS OPIUM DEN! TRAPPED MINER DIES ON EVE OF RESCUE! JUDGMENT DAY POSTPONED!

Accompanying himself on guitar, Alvin pulls personal favorites from his vast collection of pre-World War II country-blues recordings, including the amusing “Next Week, Sometime,” which finds the singer pursued alternately by expensive women and headless forms; the metaphorical “Titanic Blues,” and the malevolent “Gangster’s Blues.”

Alvin essays a chilling gospel number, “Death in the Morning,” and unearths the equally morbid, stone country saga of a man who loses faith just as he’s about to be rescued, “Collins Cave.” What ties these tunes together, besides their evocative, economical lyrics, is Alvin’s tense yet supple vocal style, which draws equally from black and white traditions.

While a fine, menacing version of Otis Blackwell’s classic portrait of a hustler, “Daddy Rollin’ Stone,” is the album’s sole post-World War II composition (and the only track that finds Alvin backed by an electrified rock band), the rousing “Someone Stole Gabriel’s Horn,” which features the roof-raising talents of New Orleans’ young, black, visionary jazzbos the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and legendary tenor man Lee Allen, provides the LP’s rockin’est moment.

Things get even further out on three songs recorded with jazz giant Sun Ra & his Arkestra, who reaches back to his roots in the hot jazz bands of the ‘20s to create slightly skewed arrangements for “The Ballad of Smokey Joe,” “The Old Man of the Mountain” and--best of all--Bing Crosby’s Depression blues, the heart-wrenching and still timely “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime.”

Imaginative and illuminative, this is one of the few albums to be issued in 1986 that will be worth listening to 10 or even 20 years from today. Providing people keep reading those supermarket tabloids, that is.