Standing Over By The Record Machine: The Blasters’ Over There EP becomes an LP!
Entire 1981 London gig from the Downey, California punkabillies becomes a definitive live rock ‘n’ roll album. Blame it on Dave Alvin.
Yep, that’s my original copy in the background! (📸Pic: Yerz Troolee)
Before we get into this record review, can we talk about how Dave Alvin is my favorite contemporary songwriter currently working at some roadhouse near you?
His songs feel older than dirt and twice as sacred. Border radio, busted knuckles, and dignity covered in dust.
You didn’t hear his songs. You felt them. You can’t not. That low hum in your spine when the song’s telling the truth? That’s Dave Alvin. He’s always lived in the static between stations, writing about quiet prophets in denim and composing torch songs that never called themselves that. He doesn’t shout. He carries.
He was the next in a lineage: Chuck Berry, Willie Dixon, Hank Williams. Hell, even Bob Dylan. But he was a part of that beat/bohemian/punk crew that revolutionized Los Angeles underground rock ‘n’ roll songwriting. We’re talking John Doe and Exene Cervenka, Chris D., Jeffrey Lee Pierce, even Darby Crash. Like them, his lens was the down-and-out streets of Los Angeles, the same terrain Charles Bukowski and Nathanael West laid bare. But with his scope expanding to blue-collar California more broadly, perhaps John Steinbeck is the better analog? They all captured the beauty in heartbreak and the quiet wreckage of the working class.
But Alvin reaches deeper. He speaks in the bones of American music, but about the now—about the broken cities and blue-collar ghosts living between rent checks and bar tabs. His songs channel all the same despair and defiance that lives in an X or Gun Club song, but they’re sung like they came from a ’57 jukebox with a cracked tube. He wraps all this urban anguish in the language of Dixon, Berry, and yes, Hank Williams. Most people don’t even know they’re being gutted ‘til verse three. That’s art.
I’ve already rhapsodized the world of hurt inherent in Dave’s song X popularized, “4th of July.” Is there a worse indictment of love-gone-bad than, “She gives me her cheek, but I want her lips/And I don’t have the strength to go”? Was this the heroine of “Harlan County Line”?
Now, when we met, we were both livin’ far from home
Tryin’ to get by and tired of being alone
For a moment I thought she was mine
‘Cause she had a voice I just wanted to believe
She said her mother was full-blood Cherokee
And her daddy was a union man down in the mines
Fightin’ the good fight ‘cross
The Harlan County line
In 2022, BMG published a mighty volume of some of the words Alvin’s scribbled between the seemingly endless one-nighters he plays in every honky tonk in America, New Highway: Selected Lyrics, Poems, Prose, Essays, Eulogies and Blues. I can think of no better testimonial to his extraordinary gifts. That is, unless you pick up the recent Blasters reissue unleashed by Liberation Hall: Over There: Live At The Venue, London–The Complete Concert.
By the time they took the stage of London’s The Venue on May 21, 1982, The Blasters were the absolute blast furnace of American guitar-based rock ‘n’ roll.
The Stray Cats had softened up worldwide audiences for a punk-informed revival of 1950s rockabilly. Certainly, the Downey, California natives initially benefited from the neo-hillbilly bop resurgence, recording their debut LP American Music for Rockin’ Ronny Weiser’s Rollin’ Rock label in 1980. A copy reached Welsh Elvis-alike Shakin’ Stevens, who plucked Dave Alvin’s “Marie Marie” for a single that slayed European charts, priming Britannia for The Blasters.
But they were beyond by-the-numbers neo-rockabilly. Notice the lack of a “Cat” surname? They were as aggressive as any punk band, as scholarly in their knowledge of Chess blues as any member of Canned Heat (where barrelhouse pianist Gene Taylor got his start), and we’ve already established Alvin’s superhuman songwriting abilities. Honestly, he’s arguably superior to any songwriter of his generation, locale be damned.
According to Chris Morris’ authoritative liners to this expansion of Slash Records' 1982 Over There: Live At The Venue, London EP, The Blasters set foot on UK soil on Saturday, April 24, 1982. They rolled onto The Venue’s stage after 27 grueling days on a four-week tour opening for Nick Lowe — a run that apparently didn’t always go well. It went exceedingly well at The Venue, justifying the decision to capture the band’s live fervor with the Island Mobile Unit, Slash in-house engineer Pat Burnette manning the faders. Slash culled six tracks from the tapes, including a storming romp through Jerry Lee Lewis’ “High School Confidential” that surely wilted The Killer’s curls. Now that we have the complete concert through Liberation Hall’s kind auspices, you gotta wonder why Slash didn’t issue the whole magilla, rather than a stopgap EP?
John Bazz (L) and Dave Alvin of The Blasters in Kodachrome at the Hong Kong Cafe in Los Angeles, sometime in the early ‘80s. (📸Pic: Courtesy John Bazz’s Instagram)
Alvin admits in the liner notes that they aimed to capture the unhinged ferocity of their Club 88 or Whisky a Go Go gigs, something they felt their studio recordings never quite nailed. Well, this unexpurgated show is the Kick Out The Jams of punkabilly! Morris calculates “nearly two dozen numbers into a mere 67 full-tilt minutes.” Elder Alvin brother Phil is in fine voice, every croon and growl in place. Drummer Bill Bateman and bassist John Bazz are a turbo-blasted machine. You can practically see spraddle-legged Dave Alvin’s eyes clamped shut, his veins popping, sweat and Brylcreme dripping from his pompadour as he wrenches juicy barbecued perfection from his Fender. Taylor is hammering triplets like no tomorrow, and the horn section—Steve Berlin and legendary tenor man Lee Allen—are blasting holes in the ozone.
The material? Much of the Slash debut The Blasters—the album with the tight-closeup pop art painting of Phil Alvin’s face screwed up in concentration—including immortals like “Marie Marie,” “American Music,” and “Border Radio,” augmented with choice covers such as the aforementioned Jerry Lee Lewis staple and Little Richard’s “Keep A-Knockin’,” Allen’s signature showpiece “Walkin’ With Mr. Lee,” even an astonishing “These Arms Of Mine” featuring a blowtorch Phil vocal performance that snatches the Stax nugget away from Otis Redding cold.
It’s all presented in fidelity so true, you can practically hear the band stagger off-stage utterly spent, swimming in perspiration, needing beer and a shower, and maybe something to eat other than bangers and mash.
Over There, in its original form, was a storming little EP, a nice souvenir of The Blasters’ live power.
Expanded, it’s now a definitive live album, one of the greatest in rock ‘n’ roll history.
To not own it should be punishable with the guillotine.
(Portions of this review appeared in Ugly Things #68, available at this link.)
You Decide If The Tim “Napalm” Stegall Substack Lives.
This piece was a joy to write…but also a gut punch. Because lately, I’ve been wondering how long I can keep writing pieces like this at all.
The truth is, the numbers are down. Views. Opens. Paid subs. No one took the May subscription special. Not one. And for the first time in months, no new paid readers joined the ranks. Even some long-time supporters have stepped away.
I get it—everyone’s busy, budgets are tight, inboxes overflow. But this work? It doesn’t come easy. And it sure as hell doesn’t fund itself.
That said—I want to be clear. I’m not ungrateful. Far from it. This Substack has built a community I never expected, but always hoped for. You have given me one of the greatest gifts of my life. I can see the real ones—the readers who come back to certain pieces again and again. Not once. Not twice. Sometimes fifty times. That kind of engagement tells me this work matters. That it’s landing deep. And I’m profoundly grateful for it.
Some of you have stuck around through every memorial, every manifesto, every noise-drenched review. I see that. I value that. It’s because of you that this even still exists.
If you’ve gotten something from this Substack—knowledge, catharsis, music you never knew you needed—then please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Or upgrading. Or sharing it with someone who will. Because without support, even the loudest voices get drowned out.
No more jokes about grilled cheese sandwiches, or trying to tie this into the pieces that you’re all clearly enjoying. This isn’t about numbers. It’s about survival.
Also: This isn’t a monologue. It’s a dialogue. Leave a comment. Share your story. Tell me what this piece stirred up. You’re not just reading this—you’re part of it.
#TimNapalmStegall #TimNapalmStegallSubstack #StandingOverByTheRecordMachine #TheBlasters #OverThereLiveAtTheVenueLondonTheCompleteConcert #LiberationHallRecords #RecordReview #DaveAlvin #PhilAlvin #JohnBazz #BillBateman #GeneTaylor #SteveBerlin #LeeAllen #DowneyCalifornia #NickLoweTour #80sLiveRecordings #Punkabilly #RootsRock #RocknRollHistory #AmericanMusic #LiveAlbumClassic #VinylReissue #SupportIndependentMedia #PunkJournalism #KeepThisAlive #ThisIsSurvival #SubscribeNow