The Blasters brought Alvin a measure of fame and success, playing a rollicking combination of blues, country, R&B and old-time rock ’n’ roll. But tensions—over big things, like the band’s direction, and trivial ones, such as which brother knew more about music—led Dave to quit abruptly in 1985. He joined the punk band X for a brief turn, supplying the rock anthem “Fourth of July,” then set out on a solo career.

Up until then, Alvin had always played lead guitar while someone else sang. But he grew tired of writing for other people. There were things he wanted to say and portraits he wanted to paint—and California was his canvas.

California’s burning
There’s trouble in the
promised land
You better pack up
your family
You better get out while
you can

Dave Alvin could well have been Dave Czyzewski. His mother, Eleanor, was born in the Sierra foothills and knew the state was special. She bred that belief into her children, the two boys and an older sister, Mary. “Everywhere else—Phoenix, Las Vegas even—was back east,” Alvin says, “and the accent was on that word back.”

His father, Casimir Czyzewski, lived back east, next to the railroad tracks in South Bend, Indiana, until one day as a young man in the 1930s, he hopped a freight train to join his brother, Joe, out in California.

Joe, a Los Angeles newspaperman, had shed the family surname for his middle name, Albin, in a nod to his literary hero, Joseph Conrad (Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski). But people kept mispronouncing Albin, so Joe changed it to Alvin. When Cas arrived, he did the same.

It is a typical story of reinvention, which makes it a typical California story. But Cas Alvin’s view of his adopted home state was more jaundiced than many. After scraping through the Depression, he saw firsthand the worst of mankind; as a member of the Army Signal Corps, he shot some of the initial photographs of the Nazi death camp at Dachau. After the war, he worked as a union organizer in steel mills across the Southwest, fighting the undertow of a dying industry. Summers, he took his sons with him, to strike rallies and furtive organizing sessions in frayed company towns.

When it comes to his songwriting, Alvin cites many influences: Locklin, John Steinbeck, Raymond Chandler, Charles Bukowski and, musically, performers as varied as Merle Haggard and Captain Beefheart. But perhaps the greatest influences were his parents: the pride of place, instilled by his mother; the hard-bitten worldview, acquired from his father. From both, he took away an affinity for life’s underdogs. “My dad always said there were two sides to every story,” Alvin recalls. And that is why his songs so often dwell on situations and circumstances that others neglect, and not just in the milieu of working-class whites.

“Alvin has been really good about the bumping up of whites, Latinos, African Americans on the kitchen lines, on job sites, in motels, in bars,” says Josh Kun, a USC professor who studies the social connections of popular music. “He hasn’t shied away from the cultural clash of California.”

Black clouds are rising
They’re blocking out the sun
Some folks are sayin’
The judgment day has come

Politics, however, is something altogether different: “I’m a left-leaning, meat-eating, bluecollar, independent smoker.” Which is to say Alvin doesn’t put much stock in either party, much less any politician. And that skepticism—passed down from his father—has deepened as California seems to be steadily unraveling.

Where, he asks, are the Willie Browns and Jesse Unruhs, who could cut a deal and keep things running? What kind of state lays off teachers while millionaires pay a pittance in property tax on their mansions? “This isn’t the California I grew up in,” says Alvin, who believes there’s a growing gap between rich and poor—and a shrinking in between.

He fears the trend, like so many rooted in California, is spreading nationwide and suggests nothing will change until lawmakers overhaul Proposition 13 and fix the state’s gridlock-inducing budget system.

But don’t expect Alvin to sing about reforming Sacramento. For him, topical songs rarely work. Besides, there are other ways to make a statement. His interest has always been in the life forces—hope and greed and lust and hunger—that collide and smash those caught in the middle. The closest he comes to a “finger-pointing song,” he says, is a cut on his new album, Eleven, Eleven, due out this month. On “Gary, Indiana, 1959” he sings of the nationwide steel strike that year and the slow, steady decline that followed. With howling guitar and a churning rhythm, it’s an angry song—“The factories are in ruins / decent jobs hard to find...’cause the big boys make the rules / tough luck for everyone else”—but not an “answer song.”

“I’ve always tried to write songs where there’s not an answer,” Alvin says. “I don’t have ’em—I supply questions. And what I try to do is wrap them around situations people understand.”

Granted, that has never been a formula for commercial success. Alvin has no million-seller to his name. (He did win a Grammy Award in 2001 for Best Traditional Folk Album.) He tried Nashville for a brief, unhappy stretch in the late 1980s, but all that yielded was a song, “Highway 99,” about missing home.

He’s far from wealthy, but he writes what he wants and sings what he feels and makes the mortgage on his home in the hills above Silver Lake. (Alvin is unmarried with no children, the price for a life spent mostly on the road.) “I’ve been really lucky,” he says, as Oregon’s green fields fly by outside the dining car. “There’s not a day goes by, especially in the last 15 years, I don’t feel that.”

For all the darkness, that resilience shows through in Alvin’s music. In “Dry River,” the ode to a trench, he sings hopefully of the water returning and the blossoms blooming. It’s the kind of defiant optimism that marks a true Californian—and the stuff that keeps dreams from dying.

California’s burning
No one knows when this
will end
Well, what that fire burns
down, boys,
We’ll just build it back again

MARK Z. BARABAK, a native Californian, covers politics for the Los Angeles Times.

Read Alvin’s thoughts on his iconic lyrics—and play audio clips >