“We’re still here! We’re still standing, no matter what you might hear!”
That was the proclamation at the start of Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s generous and joyful performance at Philadelphia’s World Cafe Live to celebrate their second album together, TexiCali (Yep Roc). With an opening set from Jon Langford’s new project with the Bright Shiners, it was an evening full of history, stories and rootsy rock ’n’ roll.
Alvin and Gilmore have a long history, both individually and collectively. Gilmore got his start in Lubbock, Texas, in the Flatlanders, with Joe Ely and Butch Hancock. Their first album came out, as a limited-run eight-track cassette, 52 years ago; decades later it turned into an Americana classic. Alvin formed the Blasters with his brother Phil in Downey, Calif.; their first album arrived a mere 44 years ago, and its feverish rockabilly helped to catalyze what would be later called “alt-country.” Inevitably, their paths crossed, and in 2009, Gilmore and Alvin did their first of several “Roots On The Rails” tours together, journeying by train with a small group of patrons. They partnered for their first album, aptly titled Downey To Lubbock, in 2018.
Langford, whose own musical history reaches back to the birth of British punk in the late ’70s when he helped form the Mekons, earned him the opening slot on the tour because he did the artwork for both of the Alvin/Gilmore albums. “I get 40 minutes to do whatever I want, which is tune and drink beer,” he joked. Instead, he and the Bright Shiners focused on songs from the new Where It Really Starts (Tiny Global Productions). With Langford on acoustic guitar, John Szymanski on lead guitar, Tamineh Gueramy on violin and Alice Spencer on Mellotron and co-lead vocals, the Bright Shiners are the most recent of Langford’s myriad projects.
They sometimes have a hint of the Mekons’ ramshackle country underpinnings, although the Mellotron shifts the tone. (Langford joked that the instrument is “full of Moody Blues cassettes.”) Langford’s focus is still on punk politics, such as on the excellent “Discarded” (“about getting laid and getting laid off,” he said). The short set included enthusiastic versions of the Mekons’ “Millionaire” and Joe Strummer’s “X-Ray Style” and a new song, foreshadowing a second Bright Shiners album.
Alvin and Gilmore’s “We’re Still Here” is an amusing affirmation of life and longevity with some serious subtext: Alvin survived a life-threatening battle with cancer in the interim between the two albums. For his part, Gilmore joked about his own age: “I see a lot of old people in the audience who are younger than I am, as Dave likes to remind me” (Gilmore is 79; Alvin is 68). The show was not an exercise in nostalgia, however, with a setlist drawing heavily from TexiCali.
Backed by Alvin’s superb band the Guilty Ones (guitarist Chris Miller, bassist Brad Fordham and drummer Lisa Pankratz), Gilmore and Alvin ranged widely, through roadhouse blues, country shuffles, rock ’n’ roll rave-ups and thoughtful ballads, trading lead vocals or duetting, with almost every song featuring a dazzling, effortlessly cool Alvin guitar solo or two. Gilmore’s warbling tenor voice is still strong: tender and beautiful on “Down The 285,” gliding atop a rollicking version of Stonewall Jackson’s country classic “Why I’m Walking” (“done like the Blasters in the 1980s,” Alvin said). Alvin’s deep, resonant baritone meshes and contrasts, and they obviously enjoy singing together.
An origin story preceded almost every song. Alvin talked about Alan Wilson, the lead singer of Canned Heat who inspired “Blind Owl” (which featured Gilmore on harmonica). He reminisced about the “Roots On The Rails” trips that inspired story-song “Southwest Chief,” and he marveled that “Marie, Marie,” a track he wrote for the Blasters as a young man, has become a zydeco standard (which led to a kick-ass extended version with some amusing guitar/drums back-and-forth as Alvin challenged Pankratz to mimic his guitar lines).
Gilmore, prompted by Alvin, told the story of writing “Trying To Be Free” as a teenager in the 1960s and having Buddy Holly’s father subsidize studio time for the recording. Gilmore had forgotten the song until his wife Janet recently discovered a tape of it in their shed and suggested he and Alvin record it. Gilmore introduced “Borderland” with a discursive ramble about partisan opinions: “You can take this song literally, figuratively or metaphorically. Some people take it politically, but they’re just looking for a reason to get mad.”
Amidst the songs from the new album came a few choice career highlights: Gilmore reached back to Flatlanders classics “Tonight I Think I’m Gonna Go Downtown” and “Dallas”; Alvin sang the Blasters’ “Long Black Cadillac” and “4th Of July,” from his brief stint with X. And everybody got together to start the encore, with Langford and the Bright Shiners joining in for a singalong version of the Youngblood’s “Get Together.”
It was an apt celebration of unity, and of the fact that Alvin and Gilmore are, gratefully, still here.
—Steve Klinge; photos by Lisa Ferraro
