BROTHERLY LOVE
Blasters’ Alvin brothers reunite to bring spirited live show to new generation
Dave Alvin almost lost his brother Phil to MRSA and now they’re back on the road, as lively as ever.
Dave Alvin and Phil Alvin with The Guilty Ones Tuesday, 7 p.m. | Electric Owl, 926 Main Street
Tickets: $32 at TicketFly.com, $37 at the door
The Blasters came flying out of California in the early 1980s with a killer live show and a sterling debut that included a trio of roots rock classics, Marie Marie, Border Radio and American Music.
Singer/guitarist Phil Alvin seemed to have been teleported in from another time, warbling in an old-timey blues voice that sounded like it was coming from a 78.
His younger brother Dave was the lead guitarist and songwriter, the poet behind American Music’s immortal chorus, “It’s the howl from the desert, the scream from the slums, the Mississippi rolling to the beat of the drums.”
But Dave left in 1985, when the band released its third album. He went on to a successful solo career that included more roots classics, such as King of California, Haley’s Comet and Andersonville. Phil remained with the Blasters, playing to a small but passionate fan base in North America and Europe.
They played the odd reunion gig, but it didn’t look like the brothers would ever make another record together.
Then Phil had a nasty bout with a staph infection called MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus).
“He was hospitalized for that for two, three weeks, and to kill the MRSA in him — which is a deadly, deadly infection — they nuked him with antibiotics,” explains Dave over the phone from Los Angeles.
“I mean nuked him. You know those Australian beer cans for Foster’s lager, those gigantic beer cans? I’m not kidding, he was having to do cans of antibiotics that size three times a day. And it killed all the staph infection in him, but also killed everything else, killed the good and bad bacteria.”
Phil thought he had recovered, and went on tour with the Blasters in Europe. But he got a bad tooth, which became abscessed.
“The poison inside the tooth caused his lymph nodes to swell up and basically block him from being able to breathe,” said Dave Alvin. “So he was having trouble breathing onstage in Valencia, Spain, and after the show got rushed to the hospital and died. And then a great Spanish doctor named Maria got on top of my brother and beat him back to life, and they gave him a tracheotomy so he could breathe.
“But he was dead for at least 10 minutes. So I was getting phone calls, late night, 8,000 miles away, ‘Your brother’s dead.’ ‘No, your brother is just going to be a vegetable.’ ‘No, your brother’s dead.’ ‘No, your brother’s back.’
“In the course of those two hours … I kind of thought, ‘If he makes it through this somehow, we should do something.’ I wasn’t sure what, but I knew we should do something. Because I like playing with my brother.” He laughs. “I like my brother.” When Phil recovered, the brothers entered the studio and cut an album of Big Bill Broonzy songs, Common Ground. It went so well, the brothers just cut another covers album, Lost Time, which includes songs from Leadbelly, Big Joe Turner and James Brown.
It won’t be released until September, but the brothers are doing a summer tour that begins Tuesday at the Electric Owl. The set will mix songs from the two cover albums with Blasters songs and some of Dave Alvin’s solo material.
It all blends together, because Alvin’s originals are an update of traditional forms. Some of his songs are even about his musical heroes — Long White Cadillac is about the death of Hank Williams, and Haley’s Comet is about the death of early rock and roller Bill Haley.
Haley played the first rock ’n’ roll show in Vancouver history in 1956. There are shots of the audience at the gig, looking at Haley like he was from Mars.
Alvin laughed at t he description.
“The early rock and rollers just had to be a little bit crazy,” he said. “They just had to be, to do what they did. You had to be a little nuts. You just had to be a little nuts to be Little Richard. You just had to be a little nuts to be Elvis.
“And in a way you gotta be a little nuts to still keep doin’ it now, like I do.” He laughs. “So I’m a little nuts, too.”
“The early rock and rollers just had to be a little bit crazy.
DAVE ALVIN SONGWRITER AND GUITARIST