photo by Jeff Fasano
For several anxious hours in 2012, the possibility of brothers Dave and Phil Alvin ever making music together again was quite literally dead in the water. But in 2014, the siblings teamed up on Common Ground, an album covering the songs of blues legend Big Bill Broonzy (1893-1958), and now they’ve released Lost Time, which features their stirring versions of a dozen blues tunes.
This sort of musical reunion might well have eventually happened on its own, but Dave Alvin said nearly losing his brother accelerated the process. Phil Alvin was on tour in Spain with the current edition of The Blasters—the band that originally included both siblings until Dave quit the band in 1986 and started a long-running solo career. Phil developed an infection that blocked his breathing. He was taken to a hospital where several times his heart stopped on the operating table before doctors revived him and re-opened his airway. At home in California, Dave mistakenly received the worst of news.
“It was nuts,” he said in a recent phone interview. “I got a phone call out of the blue, you know, ‘Your brother died.’ That whole little period is kind of a blur. I remember sitting out on the balcony outside my music room, staring out at the sky and just going like, ‘Uhhh-hhhh.’ Then you get another phone call. It was probably about a half hour later I got a phone call saying ‘No, he’s just in a coma; he’ll be a vegetable for the rest of his life.’ And it’s ‘Uhhh-hhhh.’ Then you get a phone call, ‘Nope, he’s awake,’ but he may have suffered brain damage. ‘Uhhh-hhhh.’”
“And in that period, through all of those phone calls until I finally got the one that said ‘Nope, he’s going to be OK,’ I was going down the list of regrets. ‘Oh shit, maybe I should have done this.’‘Why did I call him a jerk?’ ‘Why did I call him this?,’” Dave said. “And then that’s kind of when I decided we’ve got to make some records together. ‘I don’t know what we’ll do, but we’ll make some records together. He’s my brother, dammit.’”
The Alvins, along with long-time friends Bill Bateman (drums) and John Bazz (bass), formed The Blasters in 1979 and enjoyed a rich musical run that produced three stellar studio albums mostly made up of Dave Alvin originals. But tensions grew within the band. “Inside The Blasters was a fight,” Dave said. “And it wasn’t just my brother and me fighting. The whole band, we all grew up together.” The guitarist found it increasingly difficult to write songs for someone else, his brother Phil, to sing. Finally in 1986, Dave quit, joining the punk group X for a short time before focusing fully on his solo career.
In reuniting, the Alvin brothers found the best approach—at least for now—was to do albums of cover songs. On Lost Time, they perform a dozen songs written by various blues artists, including four by Big Joe Turner who, early in the Alvins’ music careers, befriended and mentored the brothers. The songs may have been written by outside artists, but Dave Alvin said there was a unifying concept behind the album. “It really kind of boils down to I wanted to get the best vocals I could out of my brother,” he said. “Because there are not a lot of singers like my brother; there just aren’t. I wanted to capture that. I wanted to capture what a great singer he is. It’s a unique voice and it’s a powerful voice.”
The songs that were chosen for Lost Time make for a rich album that ranges from the hard-swinging Turner tune “Hide and Seek,” to the gospel-tinged “World’s in a Bad Condition,” to the jazzy Kansas City blues of “Cherry Red Blues.”
Dave Alvin doesn’t rule out eventually writing an album of originals for a Dave and Phil album or even a Blasters project. But for now, fans will have to be content with seeing the brothers tour behind Lost Time, either as a duo or with the Guilty Ones (drummer Lisa Pankratz, bassist Brad Fordham and guitarist Chris Miller) serving as the backing band. The group will play songs from Lost Time, as well as some Blasters songs and, more often than not, a few surprises the group didn’t plan on playing. “There are parts of the show where anything could happen,” Dave said. “My brother doesn’t particularly care for that. He likes to run a tight ship. But I like to run a tight ship that’s a little loose.”
Dave and Phil Alvin and the Guilty Ones will play Shank Hall on Thursday, March 17 at 8 p.m. For tickets, call 866-468-3401 or visit ticketweb.com.
