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Dave Alvin performs "California Bloodlines"

When Dave Alvin & the Guilty Men take the stage at the Sportsmen’s Tavern on Monday, February 5, it will mark the first time that the small club has ever charged a cover for a show. The fact that all of the $25 tickets sold out in a matter of days with no advertising—strictly by word of mouth—speaks to Alvin’s drawing power among the diehard fans who frequent “The Honkiest, Tonkiest Beer Joint in Town.”

Alvin first made his mark as the guitarist and songwriter for the Blasters—the legendary LA band formed in 1979 and fronted by his older brother Phil on lead vocals. Often labeled rockabilly, probably more for their look than their sound, the band actually drew upon a wide array of influences and hit the ground running with instantly classic originals like “Border Radio,” “Marie, Marie” and “American Music.”

Despite building a devoted following and climbing the rungs of the music business ladder all the way to a major label deal, the record company never knew how to properly exploit an act with such gritty depth, and by 1986 Alvin left the band and embarked on a solo career.

Starting with Romeo’s Escape, released in 1987, he began solidifying his reputation as a gifted songwriter. In 1989, Dwight Yoakam had a country hit with Alvin’s “Long White Cadillac.” Along the way he’s also become a great interpreter of songs. He was recognized in 2000 with a Grammy award for Public Domain—Songs From the Wild Land, as Best Traditional Folk Album.

If you’re talking about Alvin’s personal roots, you’re talking about California. Raised in the blue-collar LA suburb of Downey, some of Alvin’s formative years were spent tagging along to LA blues clubs like the Ashgrove (later the title of one of his solo records) with his older brother to absorb sets by T-Bone Walker, Big Joe Turner and Lee Allen—who would later play sax with the Blasters.

Alvin’s 10th solo and current release, West of the West (Yep Roc), is a collection of songs written by California songwriters ranging from Tom Waits to Brian Wilson and including chestnuts from Blackie Farrell and Kate Wolf. He recently took some time to talk about the record with Artvoice.

“It’s a tribute to the native songwriters,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s really a tribute to the state, but it’s a tribute to my mom and some people close to me. My mom was a fourth generation Californian. Part of her family came out in the 1860s. My dad rode the rails out from Ohio in the ’30s during the Depression. I wanted to play with the stereotype of California. Wherever you go in the world people think of California as movie stars and palm trees. And yes, there is a 20-square-mile area where that’s true, but the rest of the state is an incredibly diverse place where parts of it, you know, are as cold as Buffalo”—he laughs—“and parts that are as hot as the Sahara. And the songwriters are equally diverse. There are vague things that connect them all and vague things that separate them. And the idea was ‘Let’s just connect all these people for an album.’”

There was a time when Alvin didn’t do cover songs. “I think I got more comfortable, maybe not as a singer per se, you know, because I’m not George Jones or Al Green or someone,” he says. “For a long time I didn’t do covers because I didn’t feel like I could do them justice. But I’ve gotten very comfortable with my voice. I can’t say everybody else has, but I have.

“I think it’s important for songwriters to do records of other stuff. For example, we were just talking about Merle [Haggard]. Merle did a whole album of Jimmie Rodgers material. He did two albums of Bob Wills material. Bob Dylan released some traditional folk and blues songs in the ’90s—Springsteen’s done it recently. I think it’s a good thing. Without sounding weird, it expands you as an artist. It’s both exploring your roots and exposing others to your roots. Part of the job description is to make people aware of what came before, you know?”

But that doesn’t necessarily mean strictly aping performers from the past, he explains: “It’s a noble tradition…there are great musicians out there that, let’s say, recreate the sound of T-Bone Walker, or Hank Williams or Charlie Patton. There are people out there who can do it note-for-note and that’s great. In the same way that there are musicians playing medieval music. That’s an important thing. When we started out in the Blasters, we were kids, and we were note-for-note guys. And then slowly when we started branching out and making records it became ‘What do we sound like?’”

Over the years, Alvin has also lent his talents as a record producer to a number of well-respected artists including the Derailers, Tom Russell, Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys and Christy McWilson. When he gets off this tour he’s going to produce another one by the San Francisco band Red Meat. But due to an increasingly busy performing schedule and personal and professional commitments, he sees it as something he’s likely to be doing less of in the short-term.

“I get involved, and then all of a sudden I’ve committed a month of my life to a project,” he says. “I’ve been asked to produce a lot lately but I’ve just been turning ’em down. I just don’t have the time.” He ponders that for a moment, and then adds another thought in his smoky baritone. “If the Stones call tomorrow, or Dylan…I’m available.” He laughs.

The cultivation of an individual style can become a lifelong journey, and Alvin has been blazing his very own trail through the Americana wilderness for 20 years now. He’ll soon be going into the studio to work on a new batch of originals. “My original songs have to pass some serious tests before we go into the studio—one of them being ‘Do they stack up against all the other songs I’ve written?’ The other one being ‘Can I stand to play them for the rest of my life?’”

When asked how he determines which are keepers, Alvin admits with a chuckle that he doesn’t know. “I make it a rule not to play new songs in barrooms because it’s not the best judge of what a good song is. There, people are dancing and they want to hear the hits. I mean, there’s no greater feeling than playing a new song and having it go over instantly. And there’s no worse feeling than playing a new song and have it not go over!”

So it’s unlikely that the lucky ticket holders to the Sportsmen’s show will get a preview of Alvin’s as yet unrecorded work. But strange things can happen. It’s not every night, for example, that a neighborhood bar in Black Rock hosts a Grammy winner.