Dave Alvin photo by Issa Sharp

By J.H. Tompkins

DAVE ALVIN WAS yanking an already low-riding baseball cap over his eyebrows when I hustled into the blue-collar pit stop called Phillipe the Original. Lunch hour was in its frantic last lap, and Alvin had staked out a stool near the back wall. The joint sits a couple of blocks from Union Station on the edge of Los Angeles's scruffy downtown – close enough to attract a small army of office workers and clerks. The clock read 12:50 p.m., and conversation was going hard and fast, as the salt of the earth prepared to pay tribute to an irrevocable fact of life: lunch hour ended in 10 minutes.

Alvin fit the scene so well that had I not spotted him before the hat came down, I might have sat alone and waited. This was the world he was raised in, where he finds the imagery and subtle rhythms of working-class existence he uses to create works that depend as much on lyrics as on music for their power. In the process, he's illuminated an L.A. that's hidden in the shadows of Hollywood and Beverly Hills.

Although Alvin is one of a kind, his work is energized by the same forces that shape the music of X, Tom Waits, and Ice Cube. An understated affection for the past is evident in his early work – the catchy sepia-toned romances of the Blasters, like "Border Radio" and "No Other Girl" – and his most recent, the deeply personal material he wrote for his latest album, Ashgrove (Yep Roc). He pulls out the stops on the title cut and the bittersweet tribute to his father's last days, "The Man in the Bed." His fellow travelers bring a powerful Hollywood sensibility to the city's gritty, daily melodrama, and this influence would seem to beg the label "literary" for Alvin's work, although I'm not so sure the term fits. This much, I think, is true: when Alvin joined the Blasters, he seemed to me relatively unfazed by the demands of popular culture, and the past 25 years have done little to change my impression.

Like John Doe and Exene Cervenka, his sometime-collaborators in X, Alvin wrote poetry before he became a songwriter and has published two books: Nana, Big Joe, and the Fourth of July (Illiterati) and Any Rough Times Are Now behind You (Incommunicado). Early on, X cofounders Doe and Cervenka lived in Venice and most likely could be found writing on the edge of bohemian poetry wars. Alvin, the son of a left-leaning union organizer, lived in the working-class neighborhoods of Bell, Bell Gardens, and Downey and was drawn to the gutter-brawling work of Charles Bukowski. Alvin and his brother, fellow Blaster Phil, had their world opened up by their father's job and his values, and they got an education most of their peers couldn't touch. Using it, they sparked the roots rock revival.

During the '70s I lived in the same neighborhoods as Alvin – places that my friends and I called "Land of the Licorice Pizza," honoring the world's most uninspired record-store chain. Today's strip malls are an odious form of urban blight, but they were all that was available to the men and women whose hard work helped build Los Angeles years ago. Alvin grew up among them, and his songs show a musician who can transcend surfaces and tap the region's heart and soul.

Reading L.A.

Although culture in L.A. is dominated by Hollywood, the city has spawned a considerable body of literature. Alvin's work has served as a soundtrack to my reading, which almost explains why I arrived with a couple of books I wanted to share with him. My excuse – not that I needed one – was nothing more than they were good: David Ulin's The Myth of Solid Ground, inspired by the 1994 Northridge quake, and Lawrence Weschler's Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology, which questions the line dividing the museum and the installation in order to play with popular culture, high art, and conventional notions about reality.

Alvin spotted the books as I arrived, and before I could hand them over, he asked, "Have you heard of D.J. Waldie? He's an amazing writer, just brilliant."

Waldie wrote Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, a brilliant deconstruction of the social and commercial forces that conspired to create Lakewood, the post-WWII development south of the city of L.A. where Waldie grew up and still lives. He's concerned with "the durability of ordinary things," as he wrote in a Sept. 21, 1998, Salon review of Mike Davis's Ecology of Fear – a concern Alvin and I share.

Alvin has, in his 40-some years, seen the fragility of what once seemed essential to the region. "When we lived out there in the '50s," he said, "it was the end of Los Angeles, as far as it had been developed. I mean, there was sheep ranching out past there. You can hardly explain to people what it was like to wake up and smell orange blossoms and then go to bed at night smelling cow shit. I suppose I thought it would last forever. But there was a rural culture on a collision course with an industrial culture, as well as people of different races, regions, and cultures. Change never stopped coming."

Though his work has never been overtly political ("I don't like to shove things in people's face," he explained, "and I don't like to tell people what to do"), he is a keen observer of the forces shaping the world around him. "People in America don't know their national or regional history," he said. "A lot can be learned from this area. Whatever happens here is happening everywhere else – the neglect, lack of city planning, quality of water, depleting aquifers.

"It is glamorous? No. But it's important. And of course, it will always be my home. People who hear I'm from Los Angeles think that I'm down in Malibu hanging out with movie stars. No, I'm from a place that nobody comes to see and that, as a result, no one understands."

New worlds

The upbeat, R&B-flavored "Ashgrove" doesn't unlock the doors to southeast L.A., but it offers a few clues to the influences that expanded the Alvin brothers' world.

Well when I was a young boy

I used to slip away

Down to the Ashgrove

To hear the old blues men play

There was Big Joe and Lightnin'

And Reverend Gary too

Well I'd sit and stare and dream

Of doin' what they could do.

"The song isn't really about the club," Alvin said. But it does show how the brothers got a musical education. "We were going there when we were young, and the experience was crucial – we were exposed to a rich palette of music and ideas. We lived 22 miles east, but we got there two or three times a week. And what was most amazing was that you'd have people from South Central, the Valley, the beach – all kinds of people coming together. You didn't get that everywhere then and hardly anywhere now."

The early days of L.A. punk provided another all-comers scene. The thread joining the Blasters with X, the Plugz, Wall of Voodoo, Catholic Discipline, the Screamers, the Weirdos, and Los Lobos wasn't that they sounded alike but that they didn't sound like anybody else. "Punk rock was so many things to so many people," Alvin recalled. "That never bothered me. At first there wasn't a cookie-cutter approach to things. But then bands like Black Flag, Circle Jerks came to define punk, and suddenly it meant sounding just one way."

Freedom found

As the '70s gave way to the '80s, Alvin found his freedom curtailed again, this time inside the Blasters. In a band used to constant arguing, the fights between the Alvin brothers were epic by any standards – and could break out anywhere: on the radio, on TV, and during interviews, as well as onstage. Dave felt underappreciated by his brother, who dismissed the importance of Dave's songs to the group. In 1985 he went out on his own.

His solo career started slowly; he wasn't used to singing, and on Romeo's Escape (Razor and Tie), his 1987 U.S. debut, it showed. Although songwriting was his strong suit – his work with the Blasters was proof – his lack of faith in himself showed when he covered more than a handful of tunes first recorded with his old band.

Since then, his recorded work has made a vast leap: 1998's Blackjack David (Hightone), his fifth studio album, was strong from beginning to end, and 2000's Public Domain: Songs from the Wild Land (Hightone) was nominated for a Grammy.

He began to take chances as a songwriter and performer, exploring quieter, sometimes acoustic sounds. He decided to embrace his natural baritone (he claims that too many cigarettes also helped) and as singing became more comfortable, he began to develop a deep, rich, expressive voice.

Ashgrove is as strong as anything he's done, and it certainly brings to mind legions of talented musicians who've said their piece by age 30 and moved on to other pursuits. "For me," Alvin said, "I just want to get better at making music. The thing is, I'm addicted to playing live – maybe 150 to 200 gigs a year. The touring gets tougher as I get older, but the playing has gotten better."

It's hard to say why Alvin has grown and kept at it while others have fallen by the wayside. As he says, he loves to play. I probed at the source of his songwriting, and all he would acknowledge was that inspiration is "often unexpected," that it tends to sneak up on him.

I think his work stands out for its relation to truth – bearing witness to what he's seen and how he's moved – which isn't a political stance, unless the idea that one's view of the world would be best served by an honest core is considered politics. It's enabled Alvin to write elevating, almost shattering songs like "The Man in the Bed," about his father's last days, built around this stanza.

The man in the bed isn't me

Now I slipped out the door and I'm runnin' free

Young and wild like I'll always be

No the man in the bed isn't me.

I first heard the Blasters play 25 years ago. As much as I liked Alvin's songwriting then, it strikes me how far it's come over the years. There was, early on, an almost nostalgic quality to the stories he told. He was paying tribute, but there was an implicit glamorization of lives that in fact were stunted by the forces that shaped their world. Ashgrove, by contrast, is heartfelt without being sentimental – an honest look at Alvin as he looks at the world around him.Dave Alvin and the Guilty Men play with Los Straitjackets Sat/29, 9 p.m., Great American Music Hall, 859 O'Farrell, S.F. $18. (415) 885-0750.