In 2002 you need a detailed map, a sail and strong winds to navigate the vast ocean of Americana bands. They take many forms, splintering into several sub-genres, but one word applies to all: roots. Roots music is everywhere now. In the 50s it was everywhere. In the 60s and 70s you could still find it, but in the early 80s it seemed to have gone the way of the dinosaur. Punk had started out as a form of roots music but by the 80s it had been discovered by the same record producers who were doing glam and prog rock just a few years before. (Whether you love or hate "Rock The Casbah," it's not roots anything.) Nobody kept their smokes tucked under their T-shirt sleeves anymore.

A few bands had been chipping away with roots music for the last few years of the 70s. The Fabulous Thunderbirds and Joe Ely and his band, all from Texas, were making some good records. Then, in 1980, along came The Blasters, led by brothers Phil and Dave Alvin. The big difference between The Blasters and the other roots rockers was that The Blasters had managed to gain acceptance in the punk scene of Los Angeles, California. Their sound was loud and rough, their stage show an energy fix to say the least. Songs like Marie, Marie and Border Radio had concert-goers dancing in the aisles. Suddenly it was okay to like straight-ahead rock and roll again. It was cool to wear a bowling shirt and grease back your hair, if you wanted to. I even remember girls in 50s-style skirts and blouses dancing on the arms of the concert hall seats, and I clearly remember Phil Alvin, that infamous Cheshire grin on his face as he breathed in the energy before him, launching into a definitive performance of American Music. Sometimes rock and roll is perfect.

From the scene that spawned The Blasters came artists who owe quite a bit to The Blasters, such as Los Lobos and Dwight Yoakam, acts that got their first gigs opening for Alvin, Alvin and Co. The beat went on over the years, more roots bands spawning more roots bands, some leaving the scene. The T-Birds lost guitarist Jimmie Vaughan (Stevie Ray's brother), but they'd already gone the commercial route and stopped making true roots music by then. Ely never has stopped. At least some things never change.

Unfortunately, the Alvin brothers had a bit of tension that escalated into something worse, and in 1985, Dave, who had become dissatisfied with writing songs for his brother to sing while he often had other ideas about how they should be sung, left to replace Billy Zoom in X. For all intents and purposes, The Blasters' chapter in roots rock and roll had come to a close. Phil Alvin continues to play club gigs with a different version of The Blasters. Dave Alvin has remained extremely busy in the music business, first as a member of X, then as a studio sideman, and then, as word spread about his musical ideas, as a producer. As a solo artist he's released 8 albums, most of them critically acclaimed.

And now, all these years later, Rhino Records comes along and asks him to produce a compilation CD that will include virtually all of The Blasters' recordings. And if that's not enough, the deal seems to include doing a handful of concerts in the Los Angeles area. Um, that would mean being a band again, albeit only for a short while. Is Dave ready for this? And even if he is, does he have the time?

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Cosmik: I have inside information on you. I hear about you all the time and it sounds like you might be the busiest man in the business.

Dave: Awwww, no! That'd be T-Bone Burnette or someone like him.

Cosmik: Okay, sure. (Laughs.) But did I hear right, that you're working on two albums at once at the moment?

Dave: Yeah! (Laughs) Well, I'm mixing a live album of mine, and at the same time I'm producing a record by these two guys who play in my band, one of whom has never made his own record. Brantley Kearns, who's an amazing fiddle player. For years he's played with everybody from Dwight Yoakam, through his first three records, David Bromberg before that, and he's played with me on my last couple records, and he's just an amazing talent. But he's never made his own records, so we're doing that, along with a guy who plays guitar with me, a guy named Rick Shea. They've been acting as sort of a duo for years. So we're doing that and I'm mixing my record, and it's two different studios, two different cities, so (laughs) I'm kind of frazzled.

Cosmik: Which two cities?

Dave: Oh, just Glendale and Burbank, you know, it's not like L.A. and Austin. It just means I work for a couple hours at one, get in the car and drive twenty minutes, get to the other one, work for a couple hours, get back to driving and work at the other.

Cosmik: With that schedule it's hard to figure out how there can even be a Blasters reunion, just based on the logistics of it all. How do you fit that in?

Dave: Well, the reason I'm sort of double-duty-ing is I'm trying to get everything done so that when I start the Blasters thing on Sunday, it's sort of all Blasters all the time. I won't have anything else hanging over me.

Cosmik: So you're clearing the boards. A question I'm sure you're asked too often but it has to be asked: what paved the way for this reunion?

Dave: Really, just the Rhino reissue, and I got involved in putting it together. For me - I can't speak for the other guys, but I think I can guess what they'd say - to me, it was a big part of my life, and to not have those records in print was really frustrating, because I thought we were a pretty good band. In some ways, in this sort of business, the way it works is if you don't have product out there, you don't exist.

Cosmik: Like you're forgotten.

Dave: Well I think in some respects The Blasters were forgotten, and overshadowed by other things that came later. When you go way back in the time machine, it was a different world when we started. There wasn't a roots infrastructure like there is now. That's changed because of... not just us, but what we and the original Thunderbirds and Joe Ely did, and maybe Rockpile, we made this music valid again. It had gone from The Last Waltz into obscurity, where nobody was doing anything anymore that was remotely roots. I mean it was completely off the radar. We had trouble getting gigs, period. Even in beer bars, because nobody wanted to touch this kind of music then, and there wasn't a chain of corporate night clubs called the House Of Blues, and Howlin' Wolf wasn't on car commercials, and there weren't magazines and websites dedicated to roots music. It just wasn't there. And this sort of trend in avant-garde or alternative music at the time left little or no emphasis on anything roots-related, and we changed that. We made it acceptable to like older musics or use older musics. Part of that had to do not only with the fact that the band was pretty good, but also the fact that my brother was a great singer and I wrote okay songs.

Cosmik: Okay?

Dave: And because of that it was like "Oh, you can still reinvent these musics. You can still take the older forms and find something new in them." Because I think at that point everyone had just given up on them. People thought everything had been done to the blues form or rock and roll. When I say rock and roll, I mean early rock and roll. "All the variations had been done, and now we have to do whatever..." Then we came along and said "No. It's a never ending pool."

Cosmik: By the way, it's better than okay. Anything that still makes me air drum in the car a few decades down the road is better than okay.

Dave: Thanks! (Laughs.)

Cosmik: What you were saying makes me curious about how you view where it's gone. If you follow the music from what you were doing through where it was taken by others for the past few decades and into what's considered Americana now, how do you feel about what's become of it?

Dave: Well I think it's great. One thing The Blasters always knew, and people tried to tell us otherwise from the moment we started playing, was that we weren't that weird in our taste in music, and we knew that other people would like it. The problem with roots music on a business level is it's not that easy to market. It's very easy to market a death metal band. It's very easy to market N-Sync. It's easy to market gangsta rap. You know right where your audience is and you know what magazines and what radio stations to deal with and blah blah blah blah. Roots music, the audience is so diverse, and I don't know any demographic, because when I play gigs and look at my audience, I can't peg them. Blue collar, white collar, high school educated, college educated, it's all over the place. I think where it's at now is pretty good because you have so many strains, you know? You have the singer/songwriter. After the Grammys last night, bluegrass is probably more popular than it's ever been. All those things are good developments. You have the sort of bands that I've been involved in the production of, retro bands like Big Sandy or The Derailers. It's a pretty diverse, healthy scene. You have people like Buddy Guy, who made possibly the best record of his career last year, the Sweet Tea record. I think he got robbed at the Grammys, but that's another story. You know, so in a lot of ways I think it's real healthy. There's things that I don't like, but in general I think that it's great.

Cosmik: It seems that some accepted Americana is very bland, though.

Dave: Yeah, a lot of it got co-opted by Nashville. I consider myself kind of a blues-rock guy, and a lot of Americana jetisoned the blues and R&B side of Americana in some respects and went strictly to alt.country. And I like country music too, but there are little things in [Americana] I don't like.

Cosmik: I think the country music in your writing for The Blasters was some of the most fun stuff. I'm a big fan of Buck Owens, but specifically of [Owens' late and longtime sidekick guitarist] Don Rich...

Dave: Oh, yeah!

Cosmik: There was always a feeling in your music, not a copy of Rich, but that kind of spirit.

Dave: Well, you know, one of the things I loved about the Bakersfield sound was... it's very spare. It's basically guitar driven and very spare. You know, I interviewed Buck a couple years ago for Mix Magazine, and they were basically a kind of a rock and roll band, when you boil it down, and Buck told me in the interview that his two biggest influences, musically, in his whole life - and he could never say this in his heyday as a hitmaker - were Bob Wills and Little Richard. Exactly equal. He said he listened to the rhythms. Back when I was producing The Derailer's albums, I'd always talk to the drummer about "What'd I Say?" by Ray Charles, and the drum groove that's on "What'd I Say?," especially in the ride cymbal. What the drummer on the Ray Charles record played on the ride cymbal became sort of standard in a lot of the Bakersfield stuff, just because they'd be playing "What'd I Say" in the clubs for dancing on the west coast here, so that kind of groove became... So anyway, blah blah blah.

[Interviewers note: This is an interesting thing about Dave Alvin. He's clearly a historian, whether he views himself as one or not. As the interview went on it became obvious he's a very humble individual with none of his own handprints on his back. "Anyway, blah blah blah" became a common and, frankly, frustrating ending to what I thought were fascinating observations and he, just as obviously, thought was just him getting too passionate about a topic he cares about. From here on in I'll leave those out. But one of these days I'm gonna pin the guy down for a longer interview and get him to just wax poetic on some of these subjects, because he surely does know his stuff.]

Dave: So yeah, there's a certain sort of spareness to the music in the Bakersfield thing that's reflected in some ways in The Blasters' music.

Cosmik: An openness that I really like, where the air between the instruments is as important as the instruments. It let the power of your guitars in.

Dave: Yeah, thanks. When you said "blues" twenty years ago, people immediately thought of Cream, Eric Clapton and those type of artists, and we were intentionally trying to stay away from that because that's just what people thought, and our thing was "No, there are a million ways of playing blues, and you don't have to just be that." I wish I could be Eric Clapton. (Laughs.)

Cosmik: I'm not sure that'd be so great a thing.

Dave: Aw, no, we did a tour with him. He's a great guy and an amazing guitar player, but he's just got another way of approaching it. We went out of our way to make things spare and short and concise.

Cosmik: I'm not a fan of most of his songs these days, but I agree Clapton's a phenomenal guitarist. I just meant it wouldn't be a good idea because then who would be Dave Alvin?

Dave: (Laughs.) Okay.

Cosmik: Have you played with The Blasters again recently?

Dave: Well, we did a thing last year that was totally spur of the moment, down at a bar called The Blue Cafe. I was down there and the old drummer, Bill Bateman, was down there at a gig of the current Blasters. Anyway, we got up on stage, the four original blasters, and we played a set just for fun for about 45 minutes or so. No rehearsal. Just got up, borrowed the other drummer's drums and I borrowed the other guitar player's guitar, and it was fun. We pulled out a lot of obscure songs that we hadn't played in twenty years (laughs). I hate to say that, but...

Cosmik: Was it easy right off the bat?

Dave: Oh, yeah.

Cosmik: Just slide right back in like no time had gone by?

Dave: We all grew up together. The bass player has known my brother longer than I've known my brother, because he grew up across the street.

Cosmik: I saw you guys a few times in the '80s and was knocked out both times by the sheer energy of the performances. Each of you were all over the place in your own ways. I'm talking physical energy expended on stage. I was exhausted at the end of your shows. Do you think the physical performance styles will have changed over twenty years?

Dave: A little bit, in that I'm a different guitar player. In The Blasters we had specific rules about those stylistic things. In my own stuff, I don't subject myself to those kinds of rules most of the time. So I have to play a different style. Maybe a simpler, more muscular sort of guitar style. But outside of that, the best analogy is this: Sometimes you do a jam session, or somehow you wind up on a recording session with a bunch of musicians who are better than you - which happens to me a lot - and you tend to play better. I was over in Ireland a few years ago, and I did this tour and had this Irish string band playing with me, accompanying me on the gigs, and they were a celtic band. Eventually, by the end, I had adapted how I played to fit in with them and they had done the same. That stuff just happens. So going back to The Blasters, you just adapt into what it was, and it comes pretty naturally. As far as the energy level, a lot of the energy in The Blasters was driven by the inter-personal dynamics of five guys who grew up together. Usually, whatever fights we had, we kept them off-stage. It wasn't until the last year of the band that the fights drifted on stage and into the stage show. But what we did was we'd get on stage and we'd put all that anger, energy and emotion into the music.

Cosmik: Did it actually make the performances more powerful?

Dave: Certainly. It's the difference between having a bunch of sidemen saying "when are we done, when do we get paid, I can play this stuff in my sleep..."

Cosmik: "...do we get beer?"

Dave: Yeah. Uh, well, yeah, and then you get the Blasters who were like "do we get beer?" And then I suppose it's a hoary old cliche... and it is a hoary old cliche, but we really played every gig like it meant something and like it was our last gig, so yeah, we were waiting to get the rug pulled out from under us at any time.

Cosmik: Why?

Dave: Because of the type of music we were playing and actually sort of making a living doing it.

Cosmik: But you had to notice the crowd in front of you being quite entertained.

Dave: But all musicians have that gnawing thing in the back of their brain, you know, "when am I [going to be] working in the gas station."

Cosmik: I can also understand you'd be uncertain when you were put on lousy bills, bad matches like Queen.

Dave: Well, Queen was a great show in that it was a lot of great exposure, but there was lousy things about it, like dodging cherry bombs and bottles and things like that. On the other hand, it was, in some ways, validation for what we were doing.

Cosmik: I was thinking that a Queen crowd would be a crowd that wouldn't be interested.

Dave: No, you're right, but it's amazing how many people, to this day, come up to me and say "the first time I saw you was with Queen, man!"

Cosmik: First time I saw you was with Huey Lewis and the News.

Dave: Really? Where was that?

Cosmik: The Paramount Northwest in Seattle.

Dave: No, that was The Kinks.

[Interviewer's note: Amazing! He's right, of course. That was probably 16 years ago and he remembers the band, despite the fact that they played with dozens. I suddenly remember that Huey Lewis had a comedian as an opening act. After embarrassed fumbling and apologies, I get the interview back on track.]

Cosmik: I know how it feels to be a mismatched opening act, though, when the crowd doesn't want to hear you. It's like "what are we doing here?"

Dave: For us, though, at the time we did 8 or 9 gigs with Queen, and we were making 500 bucks a gig, and there were only 4 of us then, so we were making 125 dollars each per night. I mean, we were eating steak every night and we thought it was the greatest thing. And in some ways it united us as a band. At that point, we'd only made the one garage record. We hadn't gotten to make the records that have been reissued now on the Rhino thing, and it really welded us together into this fighting unit. "Okay, it's us against 17,000 people." That kind of thing will either break up a band instantly or do the opposite. Like I said, we didn't think we were weird. We didn't think our taste in music was so strange. We knew that we were odd, but we didn't think that we didn't fit in. We knew there were people out there who liked old blues and old hillbilly and old R&B and old Rockabilly music, so we just didn't think it was that weird.

Cosmik: You've only got four or five shows scheduled. Is that set in stone, or is there room for more if it feels right?

Dave: Well... I won't say that we won't ever play more. There were other gigs sort of held across the United States, and to be honest I just didn't want to do them because I don't know what the inter-personal dynamics are gonna be. The management of The Blasters wanted to do a whole month's worth of gigs, and I've got other things to do. We'll probably do something else in the future, but when and where, I have no idea.

Cosmik: So you can probably handle short thing but you don't want to get back on the merry-go-round?

Dave: Right. I have no interest in getting back on the merry-go-round. I like the idea of... You know, it's a bunch of guys who grew up together who never get to play together anymore. In some ways I miss playing with Bill Bateman and John Bazz and Gene Taylor and even my brother.

Cosmik: (Laughs.) Even my brother. I like that.

Dave: Yeah, but is it something I want to do full time? No. Do I have any intention of going into a recording studio and writing 12 songs for my brother to sing and The Blasters to play? No. That'd be insane. That'd put me right back where I was.

Cosmik: I remember reading in interviews where you'd say that it kind of ate at you that you'd write these songs and have to hand them over to someone else to sing. In these concerts are you going to get some microphone time and sort of reclaim some of the songs for yourself?

Dave: No, no. It's like when we got The Knitters back together a few years ago and started doing some shows, and John came to me and said "Well, you want to sing some," and I said "No, if people want to hear me sing they'll go to a Dave Alvin gig." People came to see The Knitters and I didn't sing in The Knitters. I didn't sing in The Blasters, so why should I sing now? The Blasters had a sound, and the people who saw The Blasters way back when are going to want to go see "The Blasters," and the people that never saw us and always wanted to aren't going there to see me sing.

Cosmik: So despite the fact that it kind of bugged you at the time, you still respect his voice and its place in rock and roll.

Dave: Oh, I think my brother is an amazing singer. You know, I can quibble and say "I don't like the way he sang THIS particular song," but I don't sing as well as my brother. Phil has amazing pitch. My pitch has gotten better over the years with practice, but my brother is a natural born singer and he's got a great instrument. Do I like how he uses it on every song? No, but on other songs it's just like "... how did he DO that?" (Laughs.) You know? A big part of The Blasters' sound was his voice, so why dilute it?

Cosmik: My favorite thing about The Blasters was always the variety. The genres you'd pack around the central sound. I always liked rockabilly, of course, and R&B, but I love old Gospel music, despite not being a church guy, and I love Cajun and folk and so much of what you worked in. Are you planning a set list that'll give a cross section of that? A representation of those sounds?

Dave: Yeah. We start rehearsing on Sunday, so we'll know more after that, but what I'd imagine is we're going to do everything.

Cosmik: I'd love to hear you do Samson and Deliliah.

Dave: Phil always does that. My brother is not the most religious person, but he's a huge Gospel fan. Both of us are. Everybody in the band had their idea of what the band could and should do. Basically we were a bunch of blues guys, but we didn't want to do the typical blues thing, because it had been done. For me, the common thread of American music, whether it's Muddy Waters or Miles Davis or Jimmy Rogers or Bob Wills or whoever, or even surf music, the main linkage between all those musics is the blues form because everybody's played it. Every style of traditional American music uses the blues form, so to me, I felt that gave us cart-blanche to use every American music form, whether it be Cajun or whatever, because there'd be enough of the blues in there that one of the guys could latch onto and sink his teeth into, and also that I could use for songwriting. Gospel is just a variant off of that, or spirituals, I guess, they're so closely linked. Like Ray Charles, if you take a blues song and put a Gospel progression in there or vice versa.

Cosmik: It works to perfection. It's so hard to explain to people. They say "Wait, you're not a church goer and you like this music?" and they think you've snapped.

Dave: Like I said, I'm the same way. On my last album I did an old spiritual called "Time Of Judgement" just because I think it's an amazing song, and I'm not exactly going to church every Sunday, and I'm not sending money in to Pat Robertson.

Cosmik: (Laughs.) That makes two billion of us. Are there plans for a live CD or maybe a DVD video of these concerts?

Dave: Filming, no, but there's a possibility of a live CD. The problem with a live CD is 1), we ain't gonna pay for it... (Laughs.)

Cosmik: Well, Rhino's involved here.

Dave: I don't think Rhino's going to be interested in putting out a live CD. I know other labels would be. I think our concern is that if we do it - and I think we probably will record the shows - it may not translate on the tape, and then if it does it means the five of us being in a recording studio again.

Cosmik: UH oh!

Dave: I'm thinkin' it's kinda like "uh, I don't wanna go there." (Laughs.) So I think it's going to be recorded, but where it'll go from there, I don't know.

Cosmik: What was your involvement with the Rhino CD project?

Dave: Everything from going to the Warner's warehouse - which is like that last scene from Raiders Of The Lost Ark, you know?

Cosmik: With acres and acres of crates covered with dust?

Dave: Yeah! So that's what the Warner's warehouse looks like, only it's recording tapes, and of corse it's not organized alphabetically. Here's all The Blasters' tapes spread all over the place, and I went in with one of the Rhino guys and searched out all the serial numbers and found what we could find. It was frustrating in that certain master tapes, the 2-inch, unmixed tapes, were gone. For example, there's a song on the Rhino set called Can't Stop Time that was supposed to be on the Hard Line record, and it was my first attempt at writing a Curtis Mayfield/Impressions kind of song. Warner Brothers really liked it, and I liked it, and I thought it was pretty good, but it was never used because our bass player just couldn't get that sort of 60s R&B, Impressions kind of feel to it.

Cosmik: You didn't think so!?

Dave: Oh, no, on the record it's a different bass player!

Cosmik: Oooh, okay, I had that song underlined as one of my favorites, so that had me thrown.

Dave: Yeah, it's the producer, Jeff Eyrich, who had done a lot of time in R&B bands, so he just sat down and kind of whipped it off. Then, after it was cut, we kind of decided that, well... we had a rule that all the band members had to play on all the tracks because we didn't want to become another Hollywood ringer band, you know? So it was left off. In hindsight I should have fought more for it being on the record. I would have loved to have mixed that. The sad thing is the 2-inch master tape of that is gone. All we could find was a half inch rough mix, so it's a little out of balance, and the guitar solo at the end is real low. I don't know, maybe that works, but it was the only copy we had and it was a great song, so I said "Okay, we'll put that on there." Then, with some of the live stuff, the 2-inch tapes were missing. We used to do this Otis Redding song called "These Arms Of Mine" that my brother sang the hell out of, but we couldn't find the master tapes. It definitely needed to be mixed. Then I also went around and gathered old photographs and turned them over to Rhino, so it was that kind of involvement.

Cosmik: With unreleased tracks, usually you are grateful to have anything new to hear from a band you love but you can hear why they were left off. So many of these are just plain hot. They could have been put together into an album of their own.

Dave: Some of them, like there's a song on there called Kathleen that was left off of Hard Line because a couple guys in the band felt that it was too long at 4 and half minutes, 5 minutes, because we left the tape rolling and just jammed. To me, it's our greatest moment in the studio because it actually sort of captured what we were really like live. But the reason why it didn't make it on the album was - and I love this - Warner Brothers thought that it sounded too much like The Blasters.

Cosmik: Excuse me?

Dave: That's a direct quote.

Cosmik: Did they ever offer an explaination for that?

Dave: Yeah, that it sounded too much like The Blasters.

Cosmik: Oh, well, okay then.

Dave: Yeah, you know. My brother will disagree, but I think Warner Brothers treated us fine most of the time and gave us cart-blanche, but I always thought that was the funniest God damned thing. "Yeah, that sounds like YOU guys. We don't want THAT."

Cosmik: What did they want you to sound like?

Dave: We were trying to branch out on that record and I was trying to develop as a songwriter, and that song was sort of throwing a bone to our fans, like "we're moving in this other direction, but we're still The Blasters," and I think Warners just thought it was too much The Blasters.

Cosmik: Ho boy... Save me. I never understand these things.

Dave: I don't either. I've given up trying.

Cosmik: Is there a lot more like that hidden in your master tape collection?

Dave: A couple things. There's the worst song I ever wrote, which I wouldn't let be on this. It's a song called "Jungle Soldier." It's just awful. The band plays great, and my brother sings it amazingly, and there's a great Lee Allen sax solo, but the lyrics are just so bad. That's another thing I couldn't find, was the master 2-inch tapes so it could be re-mixed and made tolerable. All we could find was a mix that was made that was very 80s. The drums were huge and, you know... blah blah blah. I thought, "No, I don't want people to hear this... 'cause it'll probably ruin my career." (Laughs.) Then there are some songs from the session we did at the end of the band with Nick Lowe, and basically those were left off because it was problematic because there were two versions of each song, one with my brother singing and one with me singing. This is really where my solo career began and I decided to quit writing songs for my brother to sing and I was just going to write songs, no matter how they came out. Those songs aren't on there because I just think it would have been too much and would have re-opened some old wounds. But you know, probably someday they'll come out.

Cosmik: The "Jungle Soldier" track must have been an easy decision to leave off, considering you're also a poet and you're probably a bit more concerned about what is floating around out there, lyric wise.

Dave: It was a political song and it was not one of my better political songs. It was goofy. I was trying to tackle a serious subject in a semi-comic manner, and I failed (laughs).

Cosmik: So starting Sunday you get on the merry-go-round just for a little while. What do you want from this?

Dave: I just want to shed a little light... Not that we were there first, but that we were there. I got real pissed off at that PBS show on American roots music. I only watched a minute or two of the show because I was so pissed off because I saw the book in the store before the show came out, and in the last chapter, they're sort of "where it's gone from here, where it's going," it went right from The Grateful Dead to Gillian Welch, and it was like "WAIT A SECOND!! You just skipped 20 years!!" I didn't see any mention of the original Thunderbirds, I didn't see any mention of The Blasters, I didn't see any mention of the people who kept this music alive through a period when no one else was. So I got a little pissed off about that. For good or bad, whether or not someone liked The Blasters, or whether they hated us, or hated us as people or hated our hair styles, you can't deny the fact that we made this music viable again. And again, I'm including us with a group of other bands, but I didn't see them mentioned in that book. As for the show, unfortunately for it, it was airing on September 11th, so more people were watching CNN than PBS at that point, but still it pissed me off to go from The Grateful Dead to the modern alternative country scene as if nothing happened in between. That was a gross historical error. Even to not mention The Stray Cats... To not mention a LOT of people from that period was [wrong]. Hey, we may not have sold 8 billion records, but on a certain level we made it okay. So when the history books are being written, don't forget about The Blasters.

(C) 2002 - DJ Johnson