THE BLASTERS’ AMERICAN MUSIC!

We got Louisiana boogie and the Delta blues

We got country swing and rockabilly too

We got jazz country western and Chicago blues

It’s the greatest music that you ever knew

—“American Music” by the Blasters

First time I saw them at the Whiskey, the night they broke the club’s bar sales record and played American music so good that it almost made you forget how bad American beer is, there wasn’t a record company satin jacket in the place.

Last time I saw them at the Roxy down the road on Sunset, both shows packed and quickly sold out, there were major label A&R men sniffing at the speakers, and a TV news crew sorting through the usual punks and ’50s quiffheads to find local music critics to say a few words on the air about L.A.’s favorite sons: A little more than a year ago “we couldn’t sell pussy in San Quentin.” Now “they’re coming out of the walls; everybody wants the Blasters.”

And this is not some glam rockabilly revivalist outfit, with dinky suits and exaggerated conk cuts playing a handful of well-worn covers and that’s your lot. The Blasters look like five men on parole. Apparently, everyone where they come from—Downey, a satellite city southeast of L.A. that you reach on a freeway lined with used car lots—except the Carpenters, who come from the rich side of town, look like this for real. Downey men have worn their hair this way since ’64, non-stop, no shame, and their kids still cruise on a Saturday night for beer and girls and burgers.

Their music is purist but it isn’t pure. It’s punchy, mean and muscular, filthy, raw and fun. It’s indigenous American music— blues, rock ’n’ roll, rockabilly, boogiewoogie, r&b and devil rhythms, like it says in their “American Music” anthem. Their Slash album The Blasters has got covers— Little Willie John, Bo Diddley, Sunnyland Slim and Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman of the 20’s and one of the first white men to sing the blues. But seven songs are original, with all the commitment to and reverence for the old American music but with a spirit that makes it totally up to date. Eat your heart out Devo, what we have here are the true New Traditionalists. Songs like “American Music,” the tribute to their roots; “Border Radio,” a touching tale of a woman deserted by the man she loves, and calling a powerful radio station just south of the border to ask him to play his favorite tune so he’ll hear it and come on home; “So Long Baby Goodbye” about lost loves and lost dreams without a trace of New American Music schmaltz; and “Marie Marie,” the song they wrote and England’s Shakin’ Stevens made famous, played the way it should sound—exhilarating and sensual. The music inside’s like the picture on the album sleeve—an airbrushed drawing of the singer’s face midsong, screwed up into a grimace of sheer spirit and determination, teeth gritted and sweat jumping from every pore. It’s a great party record. If you can’t dance to the Blasters, face it, buddy—you can’t dance.

™ ■ Since World War One, English people have respected that there Is an American music that comes from here, Americans don't know It, -Phil Alvin

The interview’s held at their manager’s house in Hollywood, and they all turn up—as they’ve been doing all the time 0 since their almost-sudden 'notoriety—in | big old American cars, one by one. Phil I Alvin, singer, harmonica and rhythm B, guitar player; little brother David, lead £ guitarist, songwriter and sparring partner; drummer Bill Bateman, pianist Gene Taylor and bass player Johnny Bass. They’ve been together as the Blasters since the spring of 1979. They’ve been together as friends, rivals and colleagues—in bands like the Flying Cats, Delta Pacific, The Strangers and Night Shift—since they were 13, 14 years old. Their parents know each other’s parents. They all come from the bedroom suburb of Downey.

“There’s a rich white neighborhood on the north side of Downey with big houses where the Carpenters and people come from, and then the other places are more ethnic communities,” Phil explains. “Chicanos and blacks and Okies and Arkies (from Oklahoma and Arkansas) who came out during the dust bowl—the Grapes of Wrath people—and settled out there, mostly. There was the older black musicians who came out and made rock ’n’ roll records and r&b records in the late ’40s and ’50s that lived out here and went through all these clubs and lounges and prime-rib joints where we’d go and see people like Chuck Higgins and Richard Berry and people like that play.”

“In order not to give Downey a great myth,” Dave interrupts, “Downey is the kind of place where you could quite easily grow up not knowing anything at all of the other things around you; any sort of culture. Ninety-nine percent of the people in Downey, if they’re old they’ll listen to Kenny Rogers, or they listen to heavy metal. They just go to their homes and stay there and watch Tv and they just don’t care.

“Now there’s a little fluke when we were growing up, because of whatever reason, where there was like 75 to maybe 100 kids, guys mainly, who for some reason in this area of Downey-BellflowerLakewood-Norwalk, all wanted to learn how to play the blues. That was in the early 70’s and late 60’s, and that’s when we all come out of.”

This was a clique of cool kids who hung out in the same places. “Mostly accidental,” according to Gene Taylor. “People would come and go in and out of there all the time and a lot of the same people would just sort of see each other. Contact was always made and maintained. If somebody didn’t know where somebody was, they knew somebody who did. Somebody had a gig and everybody knew about it. I’d get a little gig in some little bar and everybody would be down there in a couple of weeks—”

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“—Trying to get the gig,” Phil interrupts.

At home the records on the family turntables would be mostly country music and blues; and in the Alvins’ case, “polka records. Our Dad’s Polish.” (his real name’s Czyzewski, a union leader from an Indiana steelworker family). Away from home, when they weren’t hanging out at the clubs, the place to go was Wensell’s music store. In the early 60’s it had a recording studio out back. T-Bone Walker cut records there, the Chantays recorded “Pipeline” and the Rumblers cut “Boss” on the Downey label. “When I was brought up almost every block had a surf band and everybody had T-birds and little V-neck sweaters and white pants and all that. And surf bands didn’t just play surf songs— they’d do crossover R&B and Chuck Berry type songs.” As did most of the Blasters at some point.

It was at the record store that Phil—like the others an avid collector of obscure American blues and early rock—met a blues guitarist whose mother was a good friend of T-Bone Walker. That’s how things happen in Downey. It ended up with most of what’s now the Blasters going to a club to see Big Joe Turner and Lee Allen (once saxophone player with Little Richard, more recently a guest on the Blasters album and shows; he calls them “my boys”). The 17-year-olds got drunk, got onstage, and formed a band.

“We always had jam sessions at each other’s houses. We were always playing. Only no one took it seriously that you could ever make a living off it, other than playing in bars, and who wanted to do that all their life?” At one point “everybody just quit playing music, except Bill and Gene” who always made a living playing in piano lounges or in bands like Canned Heat and Ronnie Hawkins’ Hawks. “Phil started teaching school—mathematics of all things —Johnny got a job in a spring factory, which really gave him room to stretch out, and David went back to school.”

“Everybody kind of gave up on it because there were very few places to play this type of stuff anywhere, except in lounges, or you could go once a week and play solo guitar and sing in a hippie bar, that sort of thing,” says Dave.

The Blasters originally came together to play a wedding (excepting Gene, who was working with Hawkins in Toronto). Johnny Bazz came to replace the original bass player, who fell in love with a hooker and got his throat slit in a car. David Alvin came in as a last-minute replacement for the regular guitarist.

“When we played the wedding,” Phil recalls, “we decided it sounded pretty good. We spent six weeks working up a show and went out trying to get gigs.”

Their next gig was in a gay bath house. From there they got on a bill at the Cuckoos Nest sandwiched between two heavy metal bands, “guys in spandex pants with the singer going ‘Hey, we’d like to do a real heavy song about philosophy now, man.’ ” Even though the punk scene—which they hung out on as much as anyone else—had opened up a lot of clubs in Hollywood, they were closed to the Blasters.

“No other bands were really doing it our way. There was Levi & The Rockats and Ray Campi and the Kingbees and all that stuff was slanted towards* real hardcore popabilly sound. We were like real raw. And we were so raw, and the fact that we were also doing blues and didn’t know any contacts in Hollywood and we weren’t cute—it was just like, ‘well who the fuck wants you?’ ”

“People tend to look at us as a 50’s band or an oldies band, like ‘how cute!’ A lot of people say we’re a revivalist band, thinking we’re something like Sha Na Na. Nobody thought we were commercial. If we’d have gone to England, maybe we would have been considered a more viable commerical entity, but we stayed here.”

And gnashed their teeth. Because one of their “uncommercial ” songs, “Marie Marie,” was a fucking great hit in England. And while major labels here refused to sign them (“one of the things the A&R men said was ‘well they’re great fun but you can’t play them on the radio’ ”-) one of those labels released the Shakin Stevens version of their song in America.

“I was.real upset then,” says Dave, “The frustrating thing was at that time we couldn’t get a record deal on Rhino Records or Bip Records or whatever, and here’s this guy over in England—and he cleaned up ‘Marie Marie’ a lot but here it is, our song, basically our version—and he’s got a huge hit record with it.”

Says Phil, who passed on the idea of breaking in England first, though they’d got as far as drooling over their thenmanager’s credit cards, “The problem is in America. The problem isn’t in England. Since World War One, English people have respected that there is an American music that exists and comes from here. Americans don’t know. it. And if we go over to England and come back via England and they buy Blasters imports— that’s one way we could do it, but what are we doing?

“Sq let’s go to work, drive across the country, make records, stay in the U.S., because we’re trying to talk about our culture. Not that our songs—other than “American Music”—is like nationalist; flagwaving. It isn’t that at all. It’s just that America is not aware of its culture. It’s all over. It’s rife. It’s dripping. The whole world knows about our culture and pays thousands of dollars for our records. We don’t. The problem’s here, so I figured we should stay here.”

Dave: “We don’t dislike England in any sense, but I think it’s really worked to our advantage. Because the Stray Cats went over and all of a sudden show up in England to make it big. So if we were to all of a sudden show up in England and didn’t have a name outside of L.A., like ‘here we are, make us stars, come on’—it’s a lot better we come over and they say, ‘hey you guys were in Time magazine, you were on the cover of New York Rocker’ and we come over as American music.

“But it’s not even to tell the English people that. It’s to tell the American people that. They’ve got to get the message over here.”

They have, but it took long enough. Eventually word of mouth (big mouths) got them gigs. While Gene was away in Toronto the four did a now-deleted album, American Music on Rollin’ Rock Records. That was 1979, and there was over a year of slogging the clubs and not a peep from the record companies. Roger Taylor spotted them playing and offered them the opening spot on the Queen tour. “We didn’t even know who they were—I had a vague idea. I’d seen a tape on Midnight Special, ‘We Will Rock You.’ I couldn’t imagine people would listen to that! It was like being at a high-school football game or something.” They were predictably booed offstage and offered the role of Queen’s pet rock band, Roger offering to produce them and get them a deal of Elektra. “They were wonderful. They took us from being a very very local cult band, and there was these guys and they had to come and see us whether they liked us or not,” he said referring to Elektra’s A&R men. “And they came; and they didn’t like us.”

They finally signed with Slash Records late last year—“it’s more of a strange thing; here’s the label that brought you the Germs and ‘Sex & Dying in High Society’ and now ‘Border Radio.’ ”

When The Blasters was released to rave reviews, the band set out on a swing through the deep South, along the east and through Ted Nugent country, the Midwest, earning fans and selling records and coming back to find their songs played on everything from hip radio KROQ to disco-MOR station KIQQ. “Most people in this country like this type of music,” they reckon, but never get to hear it because “they have to make up trends, tell you what’s cool. Like this year it’s heavy metal bands and horror films. The industry excludes everything.” ¶!