Acoustic Guitar
Acoustic Guitar
Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore
We catch up with Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Dave Alvin while they’re on the road touring their new album, Texicali. Great collaborators and friends, our guests reflect on writing and playing together, defying genre expectations, acoustic guitars, and (most importantly) having a good time.
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Additional Resources:
- Visit Dave Alvin's website.
- Visit Jimmie Dale Gilmores’s website.
- Learn to play Alvin's "King of California" in the May 2007 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.
- Learn to play "Dallas" by the Flatlanders in the November 1996 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.
The Acoustic Guitar Podcast theme music is composed by Adam Perlmutter and performed for this episode by Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers.
This episode is hosted, directed, and edited by Joey Lusterman and produced by Tanya Gonzalez. Executive producers are Lyzy Lusterman and Stephanie Campos Dal Broi.
The Acoustic Guitar Podcast is produced by the team at Acoustic Guitar magazine, including:
- Publisher: Lyzy Lusterman
- Editorial Director: Adam Perlmutter
- Managing Editor: Kevin Owens
- Creative Director: Joey Lusterman
- Digital Content Director: Stephanie Campos Dal Broi
- Digital Content Manager: Nick Grizzle
- Marketing Services Manager: Tanya Gonzalez
Music is just magic and it's kind of relentlessly wonderful. It keeps on being, and playing music is a little bit more fun than talking about it, but talking about it is really fun.
Joey Lusterman:Welcome to the Acoustic Guitar Podcast. I'm Joey Lusterman, your host for this episode. I was lucky enough to sit down with Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Dave Alvin while they were on the road touring their new album 'Texicali'. I've long admired both of these artists. Each has a storied career with back catalogs full of musical treasures, On their own or with the Flatlanders or the Blasters, Gilmore and Alvin have helped shape the sounds of what we now call alternative country, but they explore many iterations of roots music Honky Tonk, folk, punk, Americana, you name it. Our conversation is wide-ranging too. Listen closely and an overall theme emerges: the joy of playing music with a friend.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:To that point. Let's start the episode with Alvin and Gilmore performing their new song "we're Still here. If you've never had trouble, never been alive.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:I've had my share. I survived. Listen, the way up ahead may not be clear, but I ain't worried, cause we're still here. I had a wild time in Houston at the Allen Parlor Inn Long, sleepless night Of temptation and sin. But when they tore that joint down, you know I shed a tear. Now the Allen Park's gone, but, jimmy Dale, we're still here. Yeah, we're still here. Yeah, we're still here. We're still here. We're still standing. No matter what, you are here, we're still here. We're still here. We just keep on rolling. We're still here. We just keep on rollin'. Well, we do, cause we're still here. Yeah, for one more, if you've never gone crazy, you've never been in love.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:Uncomplicated romance is unheard of.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:Love's a tangled tale of hope and fear, but I'm willing to try, cause we're still here. Well, the music was a spin, but the music was a smile, said. The songs I write Sound real old and way out of style, but I've been bopping these blues for over 40 years. I don't know where he is now, but I've been boppin' this little broker for a year. I don't know where he is now, but give me that. We're still here. Yeah, we're still here. We're still here. We can keep on landin', no matter what you might hear, we're still here, we're still here. We just keep on rolling, cause we're still here. Well, new York City, land of cash and concrete. We went the wrong way down a one-way street, so true, so true. We made it to that. So it's perfectly clear. If you could make it too, ladies and gentlemen, we're still here. Yeah, we're still here. We're still here, we're still here, we're still here, we're still standing. No matter what you might hear, we're still here, we're still here.
Dave Alvin:We just keep on rolling, cause we're still here. Well, we'd known each other for a couple of decades but we'd never really sat down and played music together, especially just the two of us. It was usually sing-along things at the end of a night, and then a guy by the name of Mike Leahy thought that pairing us together would be fun for a couple of gigs. So we started in Denton, texas, and it was about midway through that show I started thinking we should maybe make a record together Because we found in these shows that we were doing where it was just Jimmy Dale and me with acoustic guitars that we found all this stuff out about each other that we didn't know. One was a real important one for me.
Dave Alvin:There used to be this club in LA from the 50s to the early 70s called the Ash Grove, and that's where you could see everybody from Lennon Hopkins to Reverend Gary Davis, mance Lipscomb, ralph Stanley, bill Monroe, clarence White, johnny Shines.
Dave Alvin:You know all sorts of great blues, bluegrass, folk performers. And I never knew Jimmy Dale when he was a young man and journeyed out to California. He was hanging out at the Ash Grove and my brother Phil and I my older brother Phil and I when we were little little kids, we started sneaking into the Ashgrove and so we had this Ashgrove connection and we we you know, jimmy got to be pals with the lightening and and Sun House and Brownie McGee and stuff, and my brother and I got to be friends with lightening and Big Joe Turner and T-bone Walker and and and I got to be friends with Lightning and Big Joe Turner and T-Bone Walker and Eddie Cleanhead, benson and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee. My brother took harmonica lessons from Sonny Terry, you know, and it was all because of the Ash Grove. So we had this connection and I was just like wow.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:And I was a kid, but I already had a wife and a kid at that time.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:And we hung out, the three of us, joe, carroll and Elise and I went to the Ash Club, all we could. There was like one kind of half a year that we were in LA. So Dave and Phil are younger than me, but we eventually found out when we were doing this tour together that we both had been there at the same time. That all well, all three of us. I don't know, we drew me at that point we didn't know each other, of course but the thing is because both of us, I think, have been pretty strongly stereotyped.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:You know, we've been, each of us has been categorized in a genre or a pigeonhole, and I kind of think that even maybe both of us did that. Like Dave said, we were friends, we had met each other and Dave even wrote some stuff about me back in the days when I was being really promoted by Elektra Records and all that. Well, high Tone originally, and then None Such and then Elektra. But Dave and I we got to be friends, but I think we kind of we perceived each other's music as being way not the same, you know. And then so when this little experiment came up, I thought and I think maybe Dave thought I even was, it did. I was telling people that I was about to retire, I was telling I was gonna quit. But Mike said what do you want to do this thing? That's a sure that sounds fun.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:That's not the trouble of having a band and all that. So we went out and just immediately it was so much fun. I thought, though, I'm going to do a song and Dave will do a song, and I'll do a song and we'll tell stories. But right away it started being that the old songs that I had done solo, before I ever was a band person, was stuff like that I learned at the Ash Grove or that I learned in that period, you know, from records and uh, and it was like Dave knew all these songs. It was like we had a repertoire almost built in and somehow it worked out that the different. It seems to turn out that the kind of people that liked Dave's music but never heard of me sort of liked the combination, and then vice versa the same thing. You know people that my following that weren't into the blasters or the punk thing and all that, but when they heard Dave play and sing it was like with me it just fit.
Joey Lusterman:Yeah, it's funny you bring up genres because you have, you know, you are from a little different places with, like, country alt, country cow punk and that kind of thing, but it all is coming from similar roots and americana music. And like when you got together and did a version of stealing, the two of you, when you were putting those two records together and going back to one, traditional songs like stealing, but also you went back through your own catalogs and so what was it like learning each other's songs?
Dave Alvin:oh, fun, the whole thing's fun, you know, I mean going back and playing songs like stealing or broke down in your blues, or betty and Dupree or KC Moan, the old Memphis Jug Band number that's just going home. And I always thought that Jimmy Dale he did some blues on all of his records but I always thought that he was an underrated blues singer and he really is one of the best. And so on both albums the Downey to Lubbock album and then the new one, texacali I'm kind of like maybe you should do a little more blues there, jimmy Dale, you know you're a pretty good blues singer. Let's do some blues, you know. But you know that's also.
Dave Alvin:Genres to me are just, you know, they're a marketing tool, that's all you know. Like when musicians get together, you know they don't really, I guess Texas Playboys, miles Davis, jimmy Hendrix and I don't know, big Spider Beck and you put them all in a room together, the first thing they're going to do is, okay, let's play a blues, you know, let's get to know each other and play the blues. So genres are just things that, like I said, they're more for marketing than they are for the musicians.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:I think all the best musicians I've ever known did not have boundaries, like the categories, like that. They just like music. So some of it is there's an artificial distinction that's made just purely for totally, totally, I think, misguided business purposes. I think it's been, in a way, both a problem and a goad. It's a double-edged sword, you know, because it does produce For one thing, people love it, I think, when they discover that they actually like something that they didn't think they would like.
Dave Alvin:Both of our careers. One of the things that's the similarity as opposed to the differences is, both Jimmy Dale and I like to play with genres. We like to say, okay, well, let's bend this out of shape. And you know, like on the new album there's an old country song called why I'm Walking, originally done by Stonewall Jackson. You know, and you know the way he did. It was pretty.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:I got an angel in my mind that's why. I'm walking.
Dave Alvin:And I just thought, well, why don't we do it like Stonewall Jackson, you know, because Jimmy can sing the hell out of it. But you know, we don't really need another country version of it. And I just thought, well, let's make it a New Orleans R&B number and pretend that, you know we're down at Cosmo Matassa's studio in New Orleans with Dave Bartholomew and Earl Palmer and Lee Allen and the whole Fats Domino band, you know, and give it that kind of groove. So it became you know, you know, and just playing with genres, so that you know it could pass as a blues song, it could pass as a country song, it could pass as a rock song, and what's the process like for reimagining a song like that?
Joey Lusterman:I mean, you're moving up the neck, but you're thinking a different rhythm too.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:In this case I really couldn't envision it. When they brought up the idea, I thought I love that song, I love Stonewall Jackson and it's so country. His version of it is just like distilled country music from like the stuff that my father liked the most. He played guitar too and was you know my very early years were I was completely steeped in Hank Williams and like that, and then up into Stonewall Jackson was later, but he was one of my favorites and so I thought I can't do that.
Dave Alvin:I can't.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:Stonewall Jackson has already done this perfectly. I can't do that. And Dave was. He was hearing he was having a vision of this other way of doing it and then, almost immediately, as soon as the, we got the groove going and then I started singing it. And I'm singing. I'm trying to stay to the same melody that Stonewall Jackson did, but it fit it just fit and it's fun, really fun and really.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:And so some in different cases. In that case I think I was so entrenched in a way of thinking about the song that I couldn't imagine whatever dave was imagining. I think in in some other ways I I have that too. I can jump world pretty easy, you know. But that was a. And also Dave wanted me to do a Blind Willie McTale song and I had somewhat missed that. The Piedmont, he called it the Piedmont Blues thing. I sort of. I had heard maybe a couple of cuts or something, but I was really enmeshed in the time, well, in the Ashgrove time and all that Sunhouse, and of course Lightning. Lightning is uncategorizable, he's not any of those, he's just lightning.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:But Sunhouse and Robert Johnson.
Joey Lusterman:Elmore.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:James, the city version of the Delta Blues, that's more where I had been entrenched, and so I had a hard time learning to sing the Blind Willie McTale thing because I kept doing it kind of the way Omar James would have done it, and but once again it turned out that I wouldn't have thought of that to begin with, but it turned out to be just great learning experience.
Joey Lusterman:Did you push Dave into any new territory during these projects?
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:I guess only in the sense of, because some of my stuff is sort of so melodic and kind of like, I don't know, ethereal or something, and Dave is great at that, but it's not his normal uh territory I think that's a good way to say it.
Joey Lusterman:Meat and potatoes, old meat and potatoes, dave I really like the version of uh, I'm forgetting the name now, but the deportee yeah oh yeah, woody gutter woody guthrie song, although I first learned it from a John Baez record.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:John Baez was a huge influence on me and she partially led me, even though I was at the age when I started learning how to play guitar and everything was just at the time of the folk explosion. And that's what I was in love with songs, you know, with stories and melodies and stuff, and I kind of regretfully now I never did focus on learning to play the guitar like I think I could have if I had looked at it that way, but I was real focused on the lyrics, you know, and and the emotion of of the stories and everything, and but the the Joan Baez opened up.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:You know, I, I think you know a lot of the young people now don't really know what a pioneer she was, how you know, she did things like she had Fred Hellerman play. Well, fred Hellerman was from the Weavers and was blacklisted all that time and John Baez let him back in. She was, it had been long enough and she was popular enough to let that happen. But she introduced a lot of people to Woody Guthrie and, of course, to Bob Dylan, and it's interesting how the things intertwine. And it's interesting how the things intertwine.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:You know, I was steeped in country music but I became way more influenced really by what we'd call roots I guess, especially blues roots, I guess especially blues when I discovered that the blues was the bedrock of most of the music I liked most, including Hank Williams. Well, once again, lots of musicians are more interested in where their music came from and in the history in musicology than a lot of just the listening public. People just like something or don't, they don't too much care about it, but a lot of musicians are like, wow, that sounds like I can hear what you know this, this, I can hear what you know.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:Merle Haggard sang just like Lefty Frisell.
Dave Alvin:Well, and Lefty Frisell was somebody that I loved from childhood, and now he's basically unknown, but Well, musicians are always looking for you know, if you play a good song and you play it well or whatever, it's magic right. And so musicians are like.
Joey Lusterman:How'd you do that?
Dave Alvin:Part of that is okay, I'm playing this, this, the guy's playing this, this, this and this. Okay, I gotta learn that. But then you go. Well, who wrote the song? And then, oh, I never heard it. I got to check out that guy. That's another secret of the magic trick. But with Deporte we'd been doing it in this format of just me and Jimmy Dale Acoustic on that tour.
Dave Alvin:But when we went in the studio to record it the night before, I sat up and watched and listened to 143, no, I'm not kidding versions of Deporte and I was just making mental notes of okay, don't do this, don't do this, don't do that don't do that and so we went in, you know, because it's such a great song and it just has to be those kind of songs have to be handled with kid gloves but at the same time you kind of got to push it a little to make it your own, and I knew Jimmy was singing the hell out of it, and so instead of having mandolins and accordions and sort of the things that are on every version, it was like, okay, let's make it very ethereal and ambient and kind of spooky, Like you're actually kind of there in Los Gatos Canyon at the night of the plane wreck. So you just kind of picture that stuff in your brain and try to do it differently.
Joey Lusterman:It took me back to your record Braver Newer World, which I feel like had similar kind of like otherworldly sounds and slide guitars that are really evocative and everything like that Jimmy Dale's an otherworldly guy. Did you two write together at all for this project?
Dave Alvin:We wrote the title track Downy to Lubbock together and we wrote the we're still here together what was that process?
Dave Alvin:well, we write differently. We're different kind of writers and you can tell you know like, and we're still here. You can tell Jimmy's verses from mine pretty easily. But what we did on both songs were with some songwriters, you know, when you co co-write you're there for hours oh, what's another word for tangerine? But with Jimmy Dale and I it was actually kind of more in the old folk tradition of we were just throwing out lines. I remember with Downy to Lubbock I came up with the first verse and the chorus, a little idea and then Jimmy Dale, when we were just in the studio, just started throwing stuff out. That was like wow, that's great. No, keep that.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:I was learning the song and I had no idea I wasn't thinking of this as going to be what we'll keep. I was just kind of learning the feeling and everything. I was just kind of learning the feeling and everything and then it was kind of like, okay, now I'll go, I'll go back to the hotel and I'll write some verses to it. That'll be real good here and Dave goes no, we're keeping that. It was weird.
Dave Alvin:Yeah, cause sometimes you know you get in the studio and you don't let's say, you don't know the song that well, and you're kind of ditzing around. How does this go? How does this?
Joey Lusterman:go.
Dave Alvin:And you play your best stuff and then you know, 14 hours later you might get back to where you were at the beginning. But you know, sometimes it's good just to grab stuff right. As it happens, it's the, you know. Sam Phillips, the producer and owner of Sun Records, is one of my heroes, so it's kind of more the Sam Phillips thing. Grab it, you know, Get that moment, Capture the moment, you know.
Joey Lusterman:You had mentioned that playing shows together was a lot of fun, and I'm wondering if you have any specific memories, either from this more recent tour or going way back when you were just friends, about times you spent together.
Dave Alvin:My favorite memory was playing the first time we played the Troubadour down in West LA you know, storied, legendary club right. And Jimmy Dale has been in a lot of bands. He's been in a lot of country rock bands, a lot of country bands, a lot of folk music ensembles, a lot of bluegrass bands, a lot of this, a lot of that. But he'd never been in a rock and roll band and that hadn't registered on me. Really, you know, because the Flatlanders can rock pretty hard. But my band's a rock and roll band, you know, and we were doing Downy to Lubbock at the end of the set and Jimmy was doing his harmonica solo and we're really hard in the groove, right, everybody's in the pocket. And I looked down at Jimmy Dale's feet and his feet were dancing and I was like he now knows he's in a rock and roll band and I think he likes it and that was my favorite one. That was when I said, oh, this is all worthwhile. Look at, this is good.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:That reminds me of the strange fact that when Dave and I were just doing the duet thing, one thing was it caused me I had played harmonica long, long, long ago, back in the time when I played just solo all the time and and then I hadn't for many, many years, because I always. When I started doing bands and stuff, I figured out okay, the secret to this is is having people that are better than me and everything you know, and I'll do the singing and I'll strum a little guitar, but I get real people to play the lead and play the. You know the rhythm section and everything. So I stopped. I didn't play the harmonica anymore, for golly. I mean 25 years or something. You know a long, long, long time. And so one night I pulled it out I don't remember what for.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:I remember him looking at me going you play the harmonica. Because we kind of needed it. We needed something else, you know, something that we can handle it with just two guitars and two voices, but it helped. And so Dave started making me play the harmonica. All the time I didn't think of myself as a harmonica player and then now, because of it, I've rediscovered that I can do that and that I like doing that.
Dave Alvin:Yeah, it's one of the lessons of punk rock discovered that I can do that and that I like doing that. Yeah, it's one of the lessons of punk rock. You don't have to be Little Walter or Sonny Bo Williamson or Snooki Pryor or Sonny Terry, just make some noise. And the joyous quality of that, because when Jimmy plays harmonica I think it's a constant source of discovery. That's happening right there.
Dave Alvin:It's not like a guy that's got all the little Walter Licks memorized and can do it. It's just wow, this is fun. You're a kid again in a garage playing music with your pals.
Joey Lusterman:Going back to the song, you mentioned that you were always driven by the song and not as much as by the guitar parts. I'm wondering do you remember some of the first songs you wrote and kind of what was in your head that you said I need to write a song? Well, I was first inspired.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:I kind of think that somehow all my life I was interested in a lot of other stuff. When I was younger and I was a reader, I read books all the time and I was real. I ended up actually the little bit of college I did. I studied philosophy, I studied linguistic analysis, and symbolic logic was the main thing. Those are the only things that I didn't flunk out of.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:I made A's and O's in the couple of years I did in college. But I think I always had just kind of assumed that I was going to be a songwriter, a singer, a songwriter. But when I was younger be a songwriter, a singer, a songwriter but when I was younger, I think I'm pretty certain that I had this imprint in my head that I'll be a songwriter someday. But you have to be old and experienced.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:and la la la, and I went to a at our high school there was a Halloween carnival one time and off in this one dark room there was this guy over in the corner. He was a. He was somebody that was a couple years older than me. I kind of knew who he was. I didn't really know him and we saw they're playing the piano and singing. It was Terry Allen and he Terry was Alan and he Terry was. He was doing his own songs and they were just great and they were not like anything on the radio or anything I was familiar with and but from that so I was in high. That means that I was early in high school, you know, because he was a couple years older and we were still in school together and that started me writing my own songs instead of just learning everybody else's songs.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:And that was the and in a way that was kind of it was sort of once I got over that hurdle of thinking that I wasn't supposed to be doing it because I was too young or something. It sort of came automatic to me, although not in the sense I've never been prolific, although not in the sense I've never been prolific. It's just it's only if. If an idea hits me and then if it stays with me for a while in it, then I'm not real good at like taking an idea and then just sitting down and making it happen. You know that doesn't work very well for me, but it. But if something kind of comes and then and something in some cases it's like where I've had an idea not, and I've gone this is good, I'm gonna work on this. But then finally, when a deadline comes around, that's when I go, okay, I will sit down and finish this thing.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:But it's uh, and I don't know if that answers your question at all, but that's kind of how I got, how it started out. For me, terry Allen was a real important part of my musical life.
Joey Lusterman:We actually became really good friends after that.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:So it you know. But then I didn't know him at that at the time that he inspired me so much.
Dave Alvin:For me, the greatest songwriting lesson I ever got was from the blues singer, big Joe Turner, and my brother, phil, and I and our friends used to follow him around from gig to gig when I was like 13, 14 years old, and so one day, walking home from school, I wrote this song for him in my head and I had everything in my head. And I had everything in my head. I had the horn section, the horn parts, I had the lyrics, I had the melody, I had the drum beat.
Dave Alvin:I had the groove, and walking home is about a mile and a half from school, and so I'm walking. By the time I got home I had that song. So the next time I saw Big Joe Turner, a few days later, I said to him Big Joe, I wrote a song for you. And Big Joe said well, how's it go? And I just stood there going ah, ah, ah. And I couldn't remember anything. And finally Big Joe Turner looks at me and he goes well, if you can't remember it, it ain't no good to begin with. And that was my first songwriting lesson and that's stuck for ever since.
Joey Lusterman:Earlier, we were talking about Happy Tram, who recently passed away and both of you had connections to him. Is that right?
Dave Alvin:I didn't really have a connection to him outside of that was the first music book that I bought with chords, chord diagrams, and this and the other was his book on how to play the blues and it was how to play a lot of Piedmont style, reverend Gary Davis and Brownie McGee stuff, and so it just the name alone just had like oh my god you know he was a Mount Rushmore kind of guy and then, around 2018 or 19, jimmy Dale and I in my band, the Guilty Ones, we played at Levon Studio up there in Woodstock and he came to the gig because, as Jimmy will tell you, they were all friends, but I was.
Dave Alvin:Can I cuss?
Joey Lusterman:Yes.
Dave Alvin:I was scared shitless Because it was like I'm a rock and roll bar room blues basher as opposed to a machine-like finger picker, and there's Happy Trauma and we're talking and we're introduced and I was like oh god damn, why'd you have to come to this? Why'd you have to come to any gig of mine? You know you're going to leave unhappy, trust me. And then afterwards he was all like, oh, I really love the show. And I was like, wow. But yeah, my first response was happy trauma.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:God, I'm dead, you know and I've had the same thing that his books and happy and Artie, his brother, who died several years ago what that was, their books and their instruction tapes and all that. I had learned a whole lot from them. And then, many years later, I got to be friends with them and we did some shows together. By the time this happened in Woodstock, he was an old friend of mine, so I wasn't intimidated by him being there. And so I wasn't intimidated by being there. I was. So this is always comical to me, the idea that Dave gets intimidated by other guitar players.
Dave Alvin:Oh God, yeah, and I'll play everybody. No, I can't. No, I've had my butt kicked so many times by guitar players that I have no ego when it comes to guitar. But I will say this I get my point across when I'm playing.
Joey Lusterman:And that's the best thing you can do. Did either of you ever teach music to anybody? Songwriting guitar?
Dave Alvin:I taught a songwriting class. Yeah, jimmy does one every year. I did it once at your most, your McCalkin ins for peace ranch. They, they did a special whatever session of the Fur Peace Ranch but they did it out in the middle of the California desert at this old motel and it was great and I taught songwriting for a week and I had to pat myself on the back. I was pretty good at it because there was a couple guys that knew how to write songs and I sussed them out right away. It's like, okay, you've taken other classes, you know, you know what a bridge is, you know what a chorus is, you know what a pre-bridge is, you know what a pre-chorus is, you know. But the rest of the guys didn't have a clue. But by the end of the week they were songwriters and I gotta say I did a good job with them. Hopefully, if they're listening, love y'all, miss y'all, hope to see you soon, but yeah and I also did one of Yarmouth's things for a piece, but it was.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:It was with Bill Kirchhen and up, but it but the way I do it. I I have taught as a class one one week of the year for 27 years now at the.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:Omega Institute in upstate New York, so that's part of it, so it's close to Woodstock and all that. There's some crossroads. But I don't really I don't teach. What I do is I curate a situation where the class teaches itself and I stick in a lot of stuff, I stick in a lot of insights and I've said to people a lot that that it's actually about my favorite thing I've done in my music career, because what it did was from the, from the very beginning of it. It started making me think about and and kind of figure out how to articulate things that I was doing automatically, unconsciously, kind of thinking about my own process and then hearing all the different ways that other people think I remember early on in maybe the first year that I did things, there came this one point where somebody in the class something got said in one of the and they said what.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:You write the words before you write the melody. And the other person was like well, what do you mean of chorus?
Joey Lusterman:You write the melody before you write the.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:It's like little things like that. It's like people are just different, you know, and they come at things from different angles, and the fun of discovering that music is just magic. It's magic and it's kind of relentlessly wonderful, it keeps on being, and playing music is a little bit more fun than talking about it, but talking about it is really fun. And there's one thing I'll tell you with Dave and the Guilty Ones, which is Chris Miller and Lisa Pankratz and Brad Fordham they, the three of them, and Dave, and particularly Dave it's like they all have these memories, these storehouses of memories, of knowledge of music, of all kinds of music, and I don't have that anymore.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:I have spotty memories about things that really imprinted me and everything and they remember things like who was on the sessions when this cut was done and stuff like that, and I love it. I love that. I feel like I'm getting a. I myself am getting an ongoing class in musicology, just being around them.
Dave Alvin:Well, thank you Jimmie. Well, it's vice versa. Jimmie Dale is a constant inspiration. It's hard to get tired and down because of the immediacy Jimmie lives in in the moment, and that's a beautiful thing, especially on stage, you know, because one you never know what's gonna happen. And and that's the same is true with me when you play with me, I'll curveball. Yeah, I don't mean to be, I'm not trying to be cruel, I'm just having fun. And with Jimmie Dale you, he'll throw you curveballs, but they keep you on your toes and they keep everything interesting, you know.
Joey Lusterman:Can you just tell me a little bit about each of the guitars that you have today?
Dave Alvin:I have a Martin DC. It's called a Martin DC Ara and it's an amazing guitar. It's from about 2004, 2005, when I got it, maybe earlier, and they don't make them anymore for some reason. It might have to do with something, but yeah, it's a great recording guitar, it's a great live guitar, it's just a great. You know I've got some old 50s Martins D18s and Triple 18s, but this is the workhorse. Martins start making these again.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:Well, this one, it's a guild, it's called the Bluegrass Special and it's a D50. There's a funny story behind it. My old friend James Pennebaker, who's one of the best musicians I've known at all. He was a session guy and then touring with a bunch of Nashville majors. He was part of the old Fort Worth gang, a bunch of really great musicians, and Steven Bruton had produced my first Nonesuch album and James Pennebaker played guitar, fiddle and steel guitar and slide all over that record. He's just amazing.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:But he had gotten into a situation where he had some problem with his neck and he couldn't play on stage anymore. I don't remember exactly how it all went down, but he had to go off of the road and so he got hired by Guild, which had, I believe at the time they just had been bought by Fender. I'm pretty sure that's right, but this is so he. And then Lloyd Mains, my old friend Lloyd Mains, who's a producer, musician, amazing person. He's the father of Natalie Maines of the Chicks and he produces their records and produced some of my records and a lot of the Flatlanders. Anyway, lloyd called me up and he said hey, jimmy, james called me and's he's got some guitars. He wants, uh, he wants us to try out.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:You know it's like so he had gone to work as the artist representative for guild so he sent us these guitars and I in my cynical mind kind of went oh golly, that's wonderful, that's this, that's probably just a cheap throwaway guitar. And it kind of sat oh golly, that's wonderful, that's probably just a cheap throwaway guitar. And it kind of sat in the case for a long time. But every time I picked it up I'd kind of like you know, this is kind of a good guitar. And then finally I checked into it and found out, oh, this is a very expensive top-of-the-line guitar.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:This isn't just a cheap throwaway for art to appease artists, or something. James had really done something and now it's turned out.
Jimmie Dale Gilmore:I grew up with Gibsons, playing Gibsons all the time, and there's something about the way this feels, the fretting and everything that fits my hand, kind of like the old gibsons do it. I had an old country and western it was. It's been long gone now but uh, but it also has a. It has a tone that that suits me really well. I don't, somehow. It kind of hits all. It's got a real full bass and clear treble, and so this has become the guitar that I prefer all the time.
Joey Lusterman:Great. Well, thank you both so much for taking the time. It was a lot of fun talking to you and hearing music and everything.
