He fronted The Hacienda Brothers and was lately a regular member of Dave Alvin’s band The Guilty Men, as well as a truly great solo performer. He combined the best elements of country, rock and roll, rhythm and blues, zydeco and tejano music to create his own sound, East LA Soul.

Here’s a clip of him performing “In The Garden” with his old band, The Cold Hard Facts

But the real guitar action was upstairs in the ballroom when DA, graying, dressed in black with a red scarf tied around his neck, took the stage. Kicking off with The Blaster’s “So Long Baby, Goodbye,” DA and The Guiltys showed the sparse, weeknight crowd just why they have a reputation as one of the very best live roots-rock bands around.

Gaffney, who’s played with DA a lot over the years, joined the Guilty Men on accordion and acoustic guitar for the entire night which made the whole thing kind of special – they’re only doing five shows together on this tour and this was one of two Texas dates together.

The bulk of the show was songs from his new CD, West of the West, a tribute to California songwriters. Now the term “California songwriter” can mean anything from Buck Owens to Snoop Dogg and that seemed to be the point. DA has a way of mixing up the genres of blues, soul, country, folk and rock and forging a uniquely American sound of his own.

He mixed them up pretty thoroughly on the new stuff; playing Jackson Browne’s classic country slide guitar rocker “Redneck Friends” as a swinging, loungy blues and The Beach Boy’s “Surfer Girl” as an ambitious attempt at blending surf rock and doo-wop. He asked the audience to sing along saying “Let’s start the new doo-wop underground scene right here tonight.”

With 25 years of consistently solid songwriting and thousands of live shows behind him; he not only has a serious catalog of songs to draw from, he also has one of the tightest bands on the road to back them up.

Between the songs from the new cd they played a healthy selection from his previous release, Ashgrove, as well as a few choice old favorites like “Abilene,” “4th of July,” and a jaw dropping version of “Haley’s Comet” that featured some of the most stunning guitar work of the night. On his second solo record, Blue Blvd, “Haley’s Comet” sounds just a bit dated, but Thursday night they played it with the kind of intensity you’d think could only be mustered up for something brand new. DA was all over the fretboard in a way that would have ripped the skin off the fingers of a lesser player. When it ended, everyone at our right-up-front table exchanged looks of utter disbelief.
Really, it was that good.

All night they kept the aging crowd on its feet. People that looked like they probably shouldn’t be up dancing when they’re trying to hold a beer just couldn’t help themselves. With drummer Bobby Lloyd Hicks and bassist Greg Boaz keeping a solid rocking beat, even through the slower tempo songs, DA and guitarist Chris Miller (the newest Guilty Man) absolutely shredded those strings as they traded fiery guitar licks and channeled feedback expertly with keyboardist Joe Terry pounding out boogie piano riffs. Hell, you just couldn’t stay down.

Another highlight of the night was when he played Merle Haggard’s “Kern River” as a prelude to his own “Dry River,” also from Blue Blvd. On disc it’s a fairly mellow acoustic slide guitar blues but they rocked it out with Chris Miller playing some Robert Randolph style pedal steel against Chris Gaffney’s accordion.

After a short break where Joe Terry had a smoke holding the door open at the fire escape, they came back and played one more “new” song before launching into an extended jam version of the Blaster’s “Marie Marie” that segued right back into an instrumental “So Long Baby, Goodbye” for the closer, bringing the night full circle. It was a thrilling, exhilarating and exhausting show, the kind Dave Alvin and The Guilty Men are famous for.

The old guys jamming away downstairs didn’t know what they were missing.

Dave Alvin’s obviously been doing a lot of reminiscing.

His latest studio effort, “Ashgrove,” released by Yep Roc Records, is full of looking back and longing: for a simpler time, for lost friends, lost love, and lost youth. And as a little bonus, it boasts another one of his patented narratives from the grave.

Let me start by saying I credit Dave Alvin with really turning me onto country music in the first place.  His 1986 release, “Romeo’s Escape,” probably influenced my own current musical taste more than any other record I can recall.  When I first heard “Every Night About This Time,” it marked a sea change in my music listening habits.

Sure, as a kid I loved The Byrds and Gram Parsons and Neil Young, all of whom were heavily influenced by country music, but when I heard that mournful baritone voice over that pedal steel guitar, that detached, sad, and at the same time opportunistic narrative, well, something clicked. It wasn’t country rock, it was country straight up, blatant and unapologetic.

He’s come a long way since that first solo album, forging a roots rock sound that’s really all his own while seamlessly blending the genres.  Ashgrove mixes sizzling blues guitar riffs with melodic acoustic instrumentation.

The lyrics are almost entirely about looking back. The title cut is a tribute to the blues singers of his youth. “Black Haired Girl” is a direct confrontation with aging – summed up in an encounter with a disinterested attendant at an all night selfserve gas station.  “Nine Volt Heart” chronicles his protagonist’s escape to the world he finds in a transistor radio.  In the most countrified song, “Rio Grande,” he’s chasing down a runaway lover through the deserts of South Texas.

The tracks that really stand out to me are:

“Sinful Daughter”- both musically and lyrically – he gets downright biblical here with this little ode to a young harlot and those who would condemn her:

“But let the one who is not sinful
Yeah, they can throw the stone.”

“Everett Ruess” is a story within a song that chronicles a free spirited drifter from a bygone era.  The dead man telling the story does so without the slightest hint of bitterness or pretension and it comes off as a celebration rather than a eulogy.  The recurring chorus of “They never found my body, boys, or understood my mind” drives home the narrator’s lack of concern with the rest of society.  It’s a song anyone who’s ever felt out of place in the modern world can surely relate to and, musically, it’s very pretty to boot.

“The Man in the Bed” is the real stunner here.  A downright beautiful melody that sounds like it could have been written as an homage to deceased older relative as well as a straight ahead look at his own mortality, the lyrics convey the helplessness and frustration of someone lying infirm and dying in a hospital bed. 

With verses like…

“Now the nurse over there doesn’t know
That I ain’t some helpless old so-and-so
I could have broken her heart not that long ago

Now the nurse over there doesn’t know.
That the man in the bed isn’t me . . .,”

this one could have easily gone over the top in false sentimentality, and no doubt would have had any Nashville songwriter taken a stab at it.  Alvin manages to pull it off with just the right amount of sincerity and never gets smarmy or sounds a false note.

That’s pretty much true of the entire album.  The only songs that don’t work almost perfectly are “Out of Control” – only because it sounds too much like a rewrite of his previous “One More Guilty Man” and “Somewhere In Time” which does manage to redeem itself with the all-too-brief, bluesy instrumentation at the very end.

It sounds kind of cliché to say so but Dave Alvin has matured as a songwriter and proves it with this one.

Like the subject of “Nine Volt Heart,” you get the idea that when he was growing up, the radio was indeed his toy.  It left me pretty anxious to hear what he does next.