Bittersweet Memories of Working-Class L.A.

The subject was blue-collar suburban Los Angeles, in all its physical, spiritual and cultural permutations. But what Dave Alvin really wanted to talk about was restaurants.

After all, it’s not every day that Alvin, the roots-rockin’ Downey-bred guitarist and songwriter, gets to reminisce with a fellow native son from L.A.’s working-class outskirts. And, in this case, Alvin’s partner in talk, author D.J. Waldie, was every bit as well-versed in the local culinary folklore.

Remember the Blue Bayou, Alvin said, or Lil’ Abner’s, a former prime-rib joint that’s now a dentist’s office? Or how about the Magic Cork, whose German-socialist proprietor offered 99-cent steaks to express his support for lumpen Los Angeles?

“Do you remember any of this?” Alvin asked plaintively. Indeed, Waldie countered with a few recollections of his own, including one long-gone dining spot, Hody’s Family Restaurant on Lakewood Boulevard, where kids ordered from clown-faced menus “that were particularly horrific” and the French dressing was an unforgettable acid red.

It was the kind of precise, oddly telling detail you might expect to find in “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir,” Waldie’s acclaimed 1996 remembrance of growing up in Lakewood, in a part of Southern California that was “not quite middle class.” On Sunday afternoon, in the Mark Taper Auditorium of downtown’s Central Library, Waldie and Alvin excavated many other similar experiences, while turning their joint dialogue-performance into a kind of meditation on the nature of change in a region where instability is the only constant.

The pairing of the two men as part of the library’s “Soundings” summer performance series was fortuitous. Though they’d never met before, Alvin told the Taper audience of about 160 that he’d come across “Holy Land” soon after it was published. “It was one of the most moving books that I’ve ever read,” Alvin said. “I’m in awe of this guy, because he can make discussions of aquifers sound poetic, and there’s not many people that can do that.”

Waldie, for his part, said that Alvin’s music forms “part of the aural atmosphere” for virtually anyone growing up in Southern California. As co-founder of the influential rockabilly band the Blasters and later a member of the Knitters and X, Alvin has fashioned numerous paeans to roughhewn lives, in a voice as ruggedly soulful as 20 miles of dirt road. He’s also a spoken-word performer and published poet.The characters depicted in Alvin’s spare, elegant lyrics, like those in “Holy Land,” tend to be the “unglamorous and unfamous,” as Waldie characterized his and Alvin’s overlapping sensibilities. They are people whose public landscape of bulldozed orange groves and rivers dammed into submission merges with a personal landscape of and longing.

The two men “both are products of this city, both are poets and prophets of this city,” said Josh Kun, an assistant professor of English at UC Riverside and the series’ co-curator, with Louise Steinman, in his introduction. But before they became either of those things, Waldie and Alvin were Catholic schoolboys and Cal State Long Beach products, trying to find their way, emotionally and intellectually, within a clannish worldview that prized tribal loyalty. On Sunday, both men were relishing the irony of performing in an auditorium named for one of Lakewood’s primary developers.

“We greet you as two guys from the great flat of Los Angeles,” Waldie told the audience at the start of the program, “two Catholic guys from a place that’s always been uncertain about its faith.”

Waldie then began reading selections from “Holy Land,” a book Joan Didion has praised as “infinitely moving and powerful, just dead-on right and absolutely original.” A dapper figure in a neatly pressed long-sleeve white shirt, black tie, black trousers and black oxfords, with wire-frame glasses that give him a donnish appearance and a pen clipped to his shirt pocket, Waldie looked every bit like the Lakewood public information officer he is. (He also is a translator of the French Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme.) Alvin, in black jeans, a white Western shirt and black boots, sat listening with his guitar in his lap, sometimes smiling, sometimes guffawing.

Structured as a thematic and chronological narrative in 316 segments, some only a sentence long, “Holy Land” uses simple, declarative prose to tell the story of how the city of Lakewood was created from sugar-beet fields, subdivided into identical lots along an exact grid, and sold off to aerospace workers and their families eager to share in the California Dream. Starting in 1950, some 17,500 homes were raised in 33 months, including the house Waldie occupies today, which his parents bought in 1946. While Lakewood is the kind of place outsiders often dismissively describe as “white-bread,” Waldie writes and speaks with enormous humor and unsentimental affection about the place he’s lived in for a lifetime and the variety of experiences and unusual personalities he’s found there.

“Seen from above, the grid is beautiful and terrible,” Waldie read in an emphatic tone, gesturing with his hands while standing at a wooden lectern on the curved parquet stage. Skipping from segment to segment, he described the ways in which a community collectively suffers, thrives and is redeemed. He spoke of workmen laying rafters and conveyor belts lifting shingles onto roofs of new houses, 46 to a block. Of ambitious developers, restrictive racial housing covenants, a shopping center that was once the world’s largest, and of his father dying slumped behind a bathroom door so well-made that it wouldn’t budge.

“What is beautiful here?” Waldie read. “The calling of a mourning dove, and others answering from yard to yard. Perhaps this is the only beautiful thing here.”

Several people in the audience nodded and smiled in apparent recognition. A young man in a ‘50s-style bowling shirt reached up his left hand to wipe his eyes. Everyone grew very still when Waldie described how his pregnant mother had baptized a neighbor woman’s dead baby with tap water, after the baby had stopped breathing and the woman had shown up “in tears, helpless.” Neither woman could drive, and neither had a telephone. It was 1946.

Alvin then took over, launching into “Dry River” from his 1991 release “Blue Blvd.”:

I was born by a river / but it was paved with cement / but I’d stand in that dry river / and dream that I was soaking wet ./ Someday it’s gonna rain / Someday it’s gonna pour / Someday that old dry river / won’t be dry anymore.

The son of a union organizer, Alvin said he never could identify with chat-show characterizations of L.A. as a place where everyone was working on a screenplay and living lives of pampered glamour. That wasn’t the city of his youth, which he said was shaped by “the diaspora” of Dust Bowl immigrants, Mexican Americans and other suburban pioneers. He fondly recalled epic bouts of pub-crawling and being able to sample blues, jazz, R&B;, country or nortena at clubs scattered around his neighborhood. “The hidden side of American folk culture, for lack of a better term, was right on the southeast side of Los Angeles,” Alvin observed before firing up “The Story of Wanda and Dwayne,” a song about a hapless couple looking for love off the 605 Freeway. Throughout the musical numbers, Waldie kept up a steady backbeat of grins and toe-tapping.

There was just enough time for a couple of questions and comments from the audience before Alvin closed the show with another bittersweet ballad, “Border Radio.” Sandy Mrvos, who was crowned Miss Lakewood in 1976 but now lives in Sherman Oaks, described the eerie sensation of seeing a cow in the fog once, in the days when her childhood home was surrounded by dairy farms. Later she recounted another chilling memory of a neighborhood woman who had set herself on fire. But on balance, she said, the afternoon had “brought me back to all the good stuff” of her youth.

Backstage after the show, Alvin talked about the difficulty of preserving memory in what Waldie had called “the landscape of amnesia.” Premature aging afflicts many native Southern Californians, Alvin had said earlier, “because most of the landscapes you grew up with are gone at a still relatively youthful age.”

But that landscape, both men said, is constantly being rediscovered and transformed by new generations and new arrivals with their own dreams. “I try not to fall into the history of regret,” Waldie said. He added that he hoped events such as Sunday’s would help inspire his goddaughter and her sister, who were attending, to connect with their place of origin, their ancestral home.

Alvin nodded. “If you can’t go back to that landscape, the orange groves or the stands of oak or whatever, the stories you tell can fill in some of that landscape,” he said. “I think people are looking to tell those stories. It’s like ripping up cement.”