Friends for over 30 years, singer/songwriter/guitarist Dave Alvin and singer/songwriter harmonicist Jimmie Dale Gilmore found special chemistry in the studio and subsequent touring with Alvin’s band, The Guilty Ones, upon the release of 2018’s Downey to Lubbock. During the intervening almost six years, Alvin has battled cancer, undergone treatments successfully, and gradually resumed touring with both this group and his psychedelic folk-rock project, The Third Mind. In fact, you may have heard this band within the past year, playing some of the songs from their second release, Texicali.
While the debut involved L.A. session players, this is a full-bore rendering by Alvin, Gilmore, and The Guilty Ones. The two voices are as contrasting as can be – Gilmore’s singular high, lonesome warble and Alvin’s rumbling baritone, yet they’ve proved a dynamic force live as they swap lead vocals and occasionally join on the choruses. The band is a formidable, highly versatile engine, as those who have long followed Alvin realize, even before this phase in the respective careers of these two roots giants. The Guilty Ones are Lisa Pankrantz (drums, percussion, backing vocals), Brad Fordham (bass, backing vocals), Chris Miller (lead and acoustic guitars), and guests Bukka Allen and Skip Edwards add piano and organ.
Developing the album required several 1400-mile drives between Alvin’s Orange County, CA, home to the flatlands of the outskirts of Austin, Texas, home of Gilmore, Pankrantz, Fordham, and Miller. These songs are, in essence, a travelogue of those journeys through a wide array of American roots music. The original songs, written by either Gilmore or Alvin, including one co-write, are generally quite strong yet there are only six of those among these eleven.
The duo made some astute cover selections but would have been better served with more original fare. As good as these songs may be, for example, do we really need to hear the oft-covered Blind Willie McTell’s “Broke Down Engine” and Brownie McGhee’s “Betty and Dupree”? Also, “Death of The Last Stripper,” a co-write with Alvin, Terry Allen, and Jo Harvey Allen, appeared on Terry Allen and The Panhandle Mystery Band’s 2020 Just Like Moby Dick, and its Tex-Mex version rings better to these ears. The slow pace and melancholy of the song don’t jibe so well, especially following Alvin’s scorching standout “Blind Owl” (for the late Alan “The Blind Owl” Wilson, a co-founder of Canned Heat. Interestingly, Canned Heat just released their Final Vinyl, with Alvin contributing this same song to that record.
The opener, “Borderland,” penned by Gilmore, who sings lead, speaks to the cultural divide as the protagonist has a special meeting place for the brown-eyed girl from the other side, who can meet with him but not stay. Gilmore’s vocal finds that balance of expressing beauty for the locale and sadness in the situation. Alvin follows with his co-write with Bill Morrissey, painting vivid imagery of prairie sunrises, the land of the Navajo in “Southwest Chief,” named for a train line that emanates in Chicago en route to Sante Fe. Gilmore’s otherworldly vocals sound as strong as ever, even as he approaches eighty, especially on “Down the 285,” written by Austin songwriter Josh White, who passed in 2012 at age 28. The song is a paean to that lonely drive from New Mexico toward Texas at night on U.S. Highway 285 with its indelible refrain, “I can’t take my eyes off the moon.” While these songs bear a desert-like, sweeping cinematic musical vibe, they kick up blistering blues with those trademark Alvin guitar licks on the McTell tune and on “Blind Owl.”
Gilmore’s folk hymn “Trying to Be Free” was written over fifty years ago and evokes the feeling of his longstanding band, The Flatlanders, with Joe Ely and Butch Hancock. Gilmore honors Hancock with an inspired “Roll Around,” featuring terrific reggae-tinged percussion work from Pankrantz and some intriguing hard-edged guitar interplay between Alvin and Miller. The duo transforms Stonewall Jackson’s country hit, “Why I’m Walking,” into NOLA R&B again with blistering guitar exchanges from the two axe men. The duo and band go out in jubilant fashion with the tongue-in-cheek “We’re Still Here,” the only co-write. Catch their live show, as Alvin terms it, “live and kicking folk/blues/r&b/honky-tonk/rock and roll orchestra.” You won’t regret it.
One Response
Fantastic review