Alvin Escapes Factory for ‘Museum’

About five years ago, Dave Alvin was working on an assembly line.

Not the kind that produces widgets, but the sort that cranks out songs that might as well be widgets. Specifically, he was working in a Nashville song mill, the sort of place where two or three writers get together to churn out grist for albums by mainstream country performers.

It was a restless, uncertain time for him. In 1986 he had left the Blasters, the acclaimed roots-rock band in which he’d established a reputation as a songwriter with a gift for drawing memorable character portraits within the narrow frame of a rock ‘n’ roll song. He had moved on to X, the L.A. punk-n-roots mainstay, but it was just a pit stop on the way to an album of his own, “Romeo’s Escape” in 1987.

Then Alvin, who had grown up in Downey, moved to Nashville to try his hand at writing for the country market.

“I was kind of feeling my way in the dark,” Alvin, 37, recalled during a recent phone interview. In Nashville, he “lasted about three whole months. I met a lot of great people. But I had a moment when I was there . . . . I was writing with two songwriters, (working on) a positive, mid-tempo song, and I realized there wasn’t a shred of me in there. We were writing a song about a woman living in northern Louisiana, and I just couldn’t relate.”

His response was to go home that night and deliberately write “something that would never be covered in Nashville.” The result was “Plastic Rose,” a vividly imagined song depicting a young couple sitting in a coffee shop, nervously waiting to keep an appointment for an abortion.

Not quite the thing for Reba or Garth. But the song served as the germ for “Blue Blvd,” an excellent collection of dark or melancholy vignettes Alvin released in 1991.

Speaking from his home in Los Angeles, Alvin--who will play Bogart’s in Long Beach on Friday--said his goal had been to write in his most personal voice. After “Blue Blvd,” the first of his two releases for the independent HighTone label, he was more confident that he had found it.

“I wrote ‘Dry River’ (from “Blue Blvd”), which was sort of a Delta blues goes to Downey kind of song, and I realized I might be on to something. There were certain songs in the Blasters that reflect how I grew up and where I come from. They’re the ones I’m closest to. When I wrote ‘Dry River,’ I said, ‘Yeah, that’s me.’ ”

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With his new album, “Museum of Heart,” he continues to roll out sad stories of characters who have been lost, stranded and deeply hurt. True to its title, the album unfolds like an episode of Rod Serling’s “Night Gallery,” sans the supernatural element.

In “Thirty Dollar Room,” Alvin paints a seedy motel room near LAX where a lonely man tries to rationalize away the pain of being jilted, telling himself that all human contacts are fated to be fleeting, superficial transactions. In “Between the Cracks,” we see a Chicano farm laborer in prayer: Her son has fallen into a mysterious underworld of crime, and she seeks solace in religious faith.

In “Stranger in Town,” a portrait that Californians in particular ought to consider, a man begins to feel like an alien in his own community. People of different colors and nationalities are moving in, the economy is souring and the long-timers are responding with a mean xenophobia. The shocked narrator feels like a stranger not because the newcomers are different, but because the old ideals he was brought up with are curdling around him.

We were taught we’re born equal, and we can get along somehow.

But just because I still believe it, I feel like a stranger in town.

“I think there’s a lot of people with no answers finding scapegoats, (saying), ‘If we take care of (illegal immigration), we’ve got all our problems solved,’ ” said Alvin, who wrote the song after an old friend shocked him by spouting the increasingly fashionable xenophobic line. “The rising intolerance kind of frightens me. It’s always been here in America, but seeing it in this day and age is kind of scary.

“For a while I was thinking of not putting (the song on “Museum of Heart”) because all the (other) songs are love songs. But they’re all about people kind of on the edge, and to me it fit in.”

Alvin is positive that the songs he is writing now won’t fit into the plans of mainstream country producers searching for material.

“The kinds of songs I write would maybe have gotten covered in the ‘70s, when George Jones was at his peak,” said Alvin, whose Blasters-era song “Long White Cadillac” was a country hit for Dwight Yoakam. “My songs can be kind of pessimistic and down. The mood now in Nashville is ‘up’ messages and tempos.”

“Museum of Heart” actually leans more toward the blues than country. Numbers such as “Six Nights a Week” abound with stinging, blues-accented guitar work. Chris Gaffney, the roots-band leader from Costa Mesa who wrote “Six Nights a Week” with Alvin, recorded it as a honky-tonk number last year on his own album, “Mi Vida Loca,” but Alvin recasts it as a tough, Stevie Ray Vaughan-style blues shuffle.

Alvin has always been a more-than-capable lead guitarist. He credits Bruce Bromberg, co-producer of “Museum of Heart” and co-owner of HighTone, with prodding him to play even more.

“Bruce has produced everyone from Lightning Hopkins to Robert Cray. He’s done so many blues albums, he could say, ‘I’ve heard that (solo) before; you can do better.’ He was pushing me on ‘Blue Blvd’ and ‘Museum of Heart’ to play more guitar, and he kind of got the performances out of me. It’s not just (a matter of) practice and playing gigs. It’s finding your own voice and not being afraid to try things.”

On eight of the 12 songs (not counting two instrumental interludes) on “Museum,” Alvin paralleled the Nashville method by writing with collaborators. But he did it in his own way, seeking out writers he admired and making sure the results kept his own vision intact.

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After letting four years go by between “Romeo’s Escape” and “Blue Blvd,” he figured some outside help would speed his creative process. “I get kind of anal about writing. I’m a real perfectionist. If left to my own devices, I could go another four years. That’s probably not the best career decision.”

Among his collaborators besides Gaffney (one of the best songwriters ever to rise on the Orange County music scene) and Bromberg (under his pen name, D. Amy) are Tom Russell, a respected folk-country singer-songwriter, and Fontaine Brown, a former Motown staff writer whom Alvin knew from his early days in the Blasters.

Brown “had a band in the early ‘80s called Fast Fontaine. The Blasters opened for him early in our career. He’s somebody who understands that Robert Johnson and Hank Williams aren’t different, that Harlan Howard and Curtis Mayfield are the same guy. Different styles, same soul,” said Alvin, whose own work has moved comfortably between the country, blues and R&B; styles those names encompass. Brown, he added, is “a real kind of old-school songwriter. He’d come over my house and make me write. He’d say, ‘We’re not leaving ‘till it’s done.’ If I write with Gaffney, me and Gaffney just start making jokes and that’s the end of that.”

Despite the hands involved, Alvin says “Museum of Heart” has the internal cohesion he tries to achieve on an album.

The characters who populate the songs are “all kind of the same people flitting in and out,” he said. He speculates that the failed prizefighter who seemingly falls off the face of the earth in “Between the Cracks” could be the anonymous man seen sitting alone in the “Thirty Dollar Room.” And the woman who feels strangely hollow in the middle of a lovemaking session in “Devil’s Wind” well could be the same one who skipped out on the character in “Thirty Dollar Room,” leaving behind an earring in her haste.

It isn’t hard to imagine this world serving as the basis for a film. But that’s not a direction Alvin sees himself pursuing. “If you get a camera and present an image, it ruins a lot for the listener.”

Alvin has had small acting roles recently in three as-yet unreleased films. In “Tales of the City,” a six-hour television series, “I play a chauffeur at a fat farm for rich women. That’s going to be on PBS very soon. I’m in the third hour, for either 30 seconds or five minutes, depending on how it was cut.” He will also appear as the bodyguard to a Daryl Gates-inspired police chief in a feature called “Floundering” and as a musician whose guitar is stolen by a heroin addict in “The Bitter End,” a rock-oriented film by Seal Beach-based director Bill Henderson.

But “I wouldn’t say I’m an actor. John Doe (Alvin’s friend and former X band mate) considers himself an actor and studies acting and all that stuff.”

There were reports earlier this year that Alvin would rejoin the Blasters for an album. He did play a few dates with his brother, Phil, the Blasters’ front man, but he says there is no album in the works.

“We talked about it. I wanted to go in and do old covers, kind of like the last couple Bob Dylan albums of folk songs and blues songs. My brother can sing that stuff.” But for now, “I’d rather see my brother make a record or two on his own. Then we’ll do something. I think that would be more important for him.

“He’s been playing with James Intveld (a respected roots-rocker who grew up in Garden Grove) on guitar. Of all the guys who have played with Phil since I left, that sounds like the Blasters to me. Hollywood Fats and Smokey Hormel (who succeeded Dave in the Blasters’ lead-guitar slot) are great players, but there’s a certain kind of aggression that’s needed. (With Intveld), he can build off that.”

Dave is launching a tour with his band--Rick Solem on keyboards, drummer Bobby Lloyd Hicks and bassist Gregory Boaz--that will carry into next year (ace steel guitarist Greg Leisz will sit in for the Bogart’s show). During a break in touring, Alvin hopes to complete an acoustic album that he had started recording simultaneously with “Museum of Heart.”

“Bandwagon or no bandwagon, I’m doing it,” he said, referring to the “MTV Unplugged” phenomenon.

“The plan was to do (both albums) at the same time, but it’s impossible. It became like having simultaneous conversations with two different people.”

The acoustic album, due next spring, will feature some covers, some previously unrecorded originals and remakes of three songs from “Romeo’s Escape”--”Fourth of July,” “Every Night About This Time” and “Far Away.” Alvin says they are among his favorites, and he doesn’t think he did them justice the first time around.

“I’d never sung before. I did it drunk, and I didn’t know how to sing. It’s not that I’m Pavarotti or somebody, but I get across the idea now, and I’d like to go back and nail ‘em.”

In “Dry River,” he sang about the destruction of the Southern California landscape he knew as a boy. In “Stranger in Town,” he is shaken by a souring of the social climate. Could it be time to think about moving on--as polls suggest many similarly disenchanted people here would like to do?

Alvin pointed to the name he has chosen for the acoustic album: “King of California.”

“My mother’s family goes back in California to the 1870s. My roots here are pretty deep. I’ve thought about moving to Austin, (Tex.,) at times, mainly because the music scene there is less industry-dominated” and more welcoming of a commercially struggling independent-label roots-rocker. “You get more respect, blah, blah, blah. But I’m really a California guy.”

* Dave Alvin, Southern Culture on the Skids and the Dave and Deke Combo play Friday at Bogart’s in the Marina Pacifica Mall, 6288 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach. The music starts at 9 p.m. $10. (310) 594-8975.