The Blasters come to Hermosa Beach
The Blasters play Saint Rocke Sunday night.
Phil Alvin cuts a large swath.
The barrel-chested lead singer of the Blasters has long had a gift for largeness. At 15, he often says, he got used to being 50 – he was big for his age, slightly wizened – and it was part of what made it possible to start touring as a teenager with legendary bluesman Big Joe Turner. It was the late 1960s, and the band of young guys that toured behind Turner – minus his brother, Dave Alvin – would eventually form The Blasters.
The Blasters are, in a real sense, more than just a band. They are a repository of American music. They are a living link that connects Woody Guthrie, Muddy Waters, and Chuck Berry to rockabilly, punk rock, and cowboy poetry.
After forming in 1979, they performed alongside such various acts as X, Black Flag, Asleep at the Wheel, The Cramps and Queen. AllMusic.com critic Mark Deming aptly described The Blasters as a wide-ranging and musically diverse group who “were a supremely tight and tasteful band with enough fire, smarts, and passion for two or three groups.”
Dave Alvin left the band in 1986 and went on to have a wondrously sharp-hewn and brilliant solo career, while his big brother Phil has held the fort together as frontman for The Blasters.
The band comes to Brixton at the Redondo pier this Friday night. On Tuesday afternoon, Phil Alvin held forth in an interview answer that likewise cut a large swath. Alvin, in addition to being a musician, has a doctorate in mathematics and artificial intelligence, and has published a thesis about a field of semantics called set theory.
Somehow, in the course, of one 20 minute answer – “Man, I can talk, can’t I?” he paused to say at one point – Alvin managed to connect a nun named Antonita, Joe Turner, the Rolling Stones, Homer, Sonny Terry, an itsy bitsy yellow polka dot bikini, the evolutionary purpose and import of music, the “so-called” music industry, and the ongoing concern that is The Blasters. The man has a gift for largeness, of music, mind, and heart.
It’s hard to know where to begin, but as good a place as any would be during the second week of first grade, on the day that the six-year-old Alvin first formally raised his voice in song, at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Downey, California. The school’s principal, a tough nun and choir leader named Sister Antonita, arrived in the classroom as the first graders were singing a song.
“Sister Antonita came in, and we were singing this song,” Alvin recalled. “She stood in front of the class, and then she started walking not down the rows, but across the rows, and standing a little bit in front of each person. She got to me and she stood there and she grabbed me by the arm. And she didn’t say a word to me and walked me out of the classroom and walked me off the campus of school, still not saying a word to me. And I am going like, ‘Oh shit, what did I do?’”
The answer was that he sang beautifully. Sister Antonita took him across the street, where a neighbor woman with a piano played some notes and she prodded the boy to sing along, poking him in the sternum with a ruler whenever he let his abdomen out. Thus began the musical education of Alvin, and he’s been singing ever since.
“I can still sing the High Mass in Latin, and I like to, because its part of my being,” he said. “So I was a singer. I always sang; they made it a conscious thing, but it was always sort of second nature to me. I sang, that’s what I did.”
His father, a union organizer, introduced him to the harmonica around this same time. Alvin first started playing Bob Dylan songs, but at the age of 12, he heard Sonny Terry playing his harp with Brownie McGee on a record. It was his introduction to the blues, and shortly thereafter, his mother noticed that Terry was playing at the Ashgrove in Los Angeles. She drove her son to the show, and the old bluesman somehow saw something in the kid from Downey – he agreed to give the kid lessons.
“I was taught how to play harmonica by Sonny Terry when I was 12,” Alvin said. “I came to know so many of those guys, and as musicians tend to do, they know the people who are coming up, and they give this stuff to you…I do not take credit for music. It was handed to me by great people.”
The Alvin brothers had their own bands by the time Phil was 15, and by the time he was 18, he was touring with another of his great mentors, Big Joe Turner, who gave him one of his greatest musical lessons.
“When I was 18 years old, Joe Turner said to me, ‘Why don’t you stop embarrassing yourself, and me, and sing in your own voice?’” Alvin recalled. “And it was crushing for a week or so, but it was a pressure from the highest level, and said with love, and I learned how to do that. I am almost crying thinking about it, because it was.”
It’s a theme that Alvin returns to again and again – the music that he and The Blasters play may be original, but it does not belong to them. The songs are vehicles, and the music encapsulates the warmth of a human beat that is older than language itself.
He has a working thesis – not published, but played, night in and night out – that concerns the origins and evolution of music as well as the life and deserved death of the music industry.
Take Homer, for example, Alvin says: his job wasn’t so different from the lead singer of The Blasters. He was carrying forth the human song.
“Homer, who is said to have written the Iliad and the Odyssey, did not write the Iliad and the Odyssey – Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey down, because it had been alive for 800 years, it was such a robust and full bodied song with all these wonderful allusions… the job that evolution had developed music for was to hold your culture and to bring forward the knowledge of those that come before you in language that has context with it. Because even the spoken word, which has much more context than the written word, does not have the kind of context that music does. If I say to you, ‘It was an itsy bitsy teeny weenie yellow polka dot bikini that she wore for the first time that day,’ there is some kind of juxtaposition of what the hell is he reciting those stupid lines for. But it becomes even more stupid if I were to recite to the tune of ‘Old Alberta’ the field holler,” he sang in a field holler voice. “Music delivers context. Sound has meaning before the particular human language you learn. Sound has meaning inter-specially. A dog understands aggressive and stern talk. Sound has meaning from evolution and it is shared for a reason. And even if you don’t think birds do it – and they do – we have passed down our cultures through song.”
There is not, in fact, enough context to present Phil Alvin. He can make you understand much more in a much simpler way: through music, cutting that large swath better known as The Blasters.
The Blasters play Saint Rocke Sunday night.