Los Angeles City Beat - On the Road To Indio 4/23/08

Dave Alvin on rough-tuff creampuff Chris Gaffney

Last Thursday, Chris Gaffney – a sweet bruiser who led the Cold Hard Facts, partnered with Dave Gonzalez in the Hacienda Brothers, played accordion for the Guilty Men, and was married to his wife Julie for almost 25 years – died of liver cancer in Orange County. Gaffney was a man of smoky voice and wit, and he wrote two of our all-time favorite lyrics: “You’re looking for a man who wouldn’t love you if his life depended on it,” and “I met your brother yesterday, he’s a loser / He’s living in Fontana with a kitchen for his farm.” A benefit that was organized before he passed will still take place Sunday at Anaheim’s storied Doll Hut with the Ziggens, Big Sandy, Kid Ramos and others, and a proper memorial will be held Wednesday at the Cellar in Long Beach.

His best friend, Dave Alvin, talked to CityBeat.

–Rebecca Schoenkopf

CityBeat: When did you and Gaffney first meet?

Dave Alvin: ’Bout ’87 maybe, ’88 somewhere, at Raji’s, this club on Hollywood Boulevard – a dump where like Guns ’N Roses came out of. I was dating the bartender. I was down there, heard this band. After two songs, I started shouting requests, and we got this whole banter going between the heckler and the band. Then he says, “We’re gonna do a song about Hawaiian Gardens” – when have you ever heard somebody say “We’re gonna do a song about Hawaiian Gardens”? – and being a Downey slob, it was like, “Hey, cool!” He was one of those people that you’ve known all your life, you just haven’t met ’em yet. We were instant friends, and then within a couple of years we were best friends, till … well, whatever.

Was he with you in Ireland?

Oh, you mean the Van Morrison thing?

Yeah, when Van Morrison kicked Glen Campbell out of his dressing room … . The way Gaffney put it was, “He kicked Glen Campbell out of Glen Campbell’s dressing room, so he’d have more room not to be in.”

No, I wasn’t there. That was with the Hacienda Brothers. He told me the story though … a couple of times, as he was wont to do. He was always very sensitive about slights. So even though he and Glen Campbell weren’t exactly golfing buddies, well, he didn’t like people throwing their weight around. One reason I loved him so much was he had this great sense of right and wrong. Sometimes he was wrong, and you’d convince him of it, but he always had people’s backs. But look at this way: It was Van Fucking Morrison in Fucking Ireland – so yeah, you give up your room. Now, if it was in Branson … .

So … tell me something else.

How do I cover 20-something years? “He wore socks, frequently!” “He was partial to food.” What do you wanna know? When did we realize we were gay for each other and should get married? I will tell you one of his least proud moments. He had the Cold Hard Facts, and they were playing some hotel in Long Beach – the Breakers maybe? – a big outdoor gig. And the next band hadn’t showed or couldn’t make it, so they offered Chris like another hundred bucks or something to stick around and play another set and judge the hot buns contest. “Sure, no problem,” Chris says, but it’s the best male buns contest. And Danny Ott says, “Another feather in our hats.”

Danny Ott is a very fine guitarist.

He’s a great, great, great guitar player. He was at the Gaffney house yesterday. We were putting together our benefit for late August. You know, Gaffney, it’s not like he’s Mariah Carey, but he does have thousands of fans all over the world. I truly believe that 10, 15 years from now, it’ll be like, “You saw Gaffney at the Upbeat?” You go to Europe now, it’s like that already. But it’ll be like, “You touched Gaffney?” “You got drunk with Gaffney?” There’s gonna be an awful lot of people who never met him, saying they played with him, they were his friend.

I was his friend.

I know you were.

Whenever I’d walk in during their set, they’d launch into “Fade to Grey,” even if they’d already played it, because he knew it was my favorite.

He was a giver. When we were touring, I used to give all the guys their per diems in a lump sum at the beginning of the week, but he’d come to me like two days later: “I need another hundred bucks.” “Well, what happened to what I gave you?” “I gave it to a guy. He was in pretty bad shape.” I learned to give him like 25 bucks a day instead. The lesson is: He was bad with money. I know I’m rambling. That okay?

You know, after the chemo started, he didn’t want anyone around, except for Julie and his sister Helen. So Helen’s sitting with him in his living room, and he’s sitting there in his man-chair, and he accidentally answers his phone. Someone’s on the line going, “Anything I can do for you, Chris, anything you need, please just let me know,” and he goes, “Yeah. I want a couple of tickets to The Pirates of Penzance.” You know, he was a Golden Gloves champ, just like fucking Sinatra! “Oh, nobody wants to know about that,” he’d say. He was irreplaceable! Where do you find a guy like that, who then has a voice that gives Lou Rawls a run for his money?

Apparently, Costa Mesa.

Yeah, or Hawaiian Gardens. He was my best friend, he was a rough-tuff creampuff. I’ve known great singers, everyone from Big Joe Turner to my brother to Little Milton to Bob Dylan – “I’ve known ’em all!” – but Chris was one of the purest musicians I’ve ever met. It came natural to him. I used to think he didn’t know how good he was, but he knew way how good he was. The last few years, touring with me and then when Gonzalez put together the Haciendas, were the happiest of his life. He’d spent so many years being abused playing in shitholes in Garden Grove. You know, so many of my friends … Buddy Blue, Country Dick … I never got over Buddy’s passing, I don’t know how I’m gonna recover from Chris’s.

And Dick Cheney’s still alive. Explain that one to me, smartypants.

Published: 04/23/2008

Up From the Ashes: The Ash Grove Is Reborn on a UCLA Stage

A celebration marking a half century since the opening of the seminal Los Angeles folk/blues/world club the Ash Grove brought something home: The roots of American roots music is in rootlessness.

All night long, in the first of two evening concerts marking this milestone, artists who in more recent years shaped modern American roots music -- Ry Cooder, Taj Mahal, Dave Alvin -- reminisced warmly on the stage at UCLA's Royce Hall about teenage journeys to the Melrose Ave. music spot to worship and learn at the feet of the masters: bluesmen including Lightnin' Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee and Rev. Gary Davis, such mountain music mainstays as the Stanley Brothers, plains balladeers such as Ramblin' Jack Elliott, even Eastern European folk music revived under the direction of musicologist Mike Janusz.

"The Ash Grove," noted Alvin this night in a scorching electric blues song he wrote in tribute to the old club he and his brother Phil made regular pilgrimages to from nearby Downey, "that's where I come from."

If not for Ash Grove founder Ed Pearl, Alvin stressed, most of those blues greats would never have even come out to play in California. Folkie Arlo Guthrie, who as an unannounced guest opened the evening with a fine rendition of his dad Woody's anthem 'This Land Is Your Land,' said that his first West Coast trip was a 1965 gig at the club, when he was just a teen himself. Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger and fellow Rolling Stones mate Bill Wyman were among those who would stop by when they were in town, not as performers but as fans.

The music the youngsters heard in the late '50s and through the '60s, though, was the music of the displaced, the refugees, the kidnapped, those forced to leave their homes: Africans stolen into slavery, Jews fleeing poverty and pogroms, Irish escaping famine and oppression, English and Scottish crushed under the Industrial Revolution. The people playing the original Ash Grove were direct descendants of these immigrants, just a generation or two removed, if not immigrants themselves, caught between two worlds, not exactly as welcomed here as some myths would have it, but with no "home" to which they could even think of returning.

But for the wide-eyed kids, coming of age in a postwar, consumer-driven suburbia, arguably the most stable and comfortable situation in the history of the non-upper-classes, the yearning of the rootless somehow resonated. And it wove a thematic thread through this show, with Ramblin' Jack doing Woody Guthrie's satirical Dust Bowl migrant ballad 'Do Re Me' and Cooder singing Agnes Cunningham's comparable 'How Can You Keep On Moving (Unless You Migrate Too),' a song he learned at the Ash Grove.

Sure, it's pretty much a social anthropological cliche by now: the combo of Eisenhower-years blandness, the true establishment of a middle class and the mass-media explosion that opens up windows to other cultures and ideas sparks a new consciousness, music helps fuel awareness of civil-rights issues, a generation comes of age questioning the values of the power structure and, well, the '60s happened. Don't sell it short. The Ash Grove alone was perceived as enough of a threat to someone that it suffered three arson fires, the last closing it for good in 1973.

In the highlights of this concert, though, the tone turned personal more than political. Alvin's short set held a particularly deep note for the death a few days before of long-time musical saddle pal Chris Gaffney, with a line tossed into 'Ash Grove' and a dedication of a moving 'Shenandoah' to "my best friend." But then he couldn't wipe a big grin off his face as he and band accompanied elder statesman Ramblin' Jack through his digression-filled tales of the drifting life. Cooder, teaming with veterans Mike Seeger and Roland White for a tribute to "old timey" music, remembered nights during high school accosting Elliot and Carter Stanley as they came off stage to show him licks they'd played, and also imitating Pearl decrying any sense of commercialism even in performers mentioning albums they were promoting. Emcee Dr. Demento told of when he was simply young Barry Hansen working as a ticket taker, stage manager and everything else at the club. Unannounced surprised guest Ben Harper brought a real sense of currency and continuity by being joined by his mother, Southern California folk maven Ellen Chase, for an entrancing unplugged set with his band, including a sweet mother-son duet on Dylan's 'Tomorrow Is a Long Time.' (Word is Ben and Mom are going to make an album together, which, based on this little taste, will be a treasure.)

The inspiration took many forms: Holly Near, another graduate of the Ash Grove school, showed in her segment with East Coast duo Emma's Revolution how she channeled the lessons learned into a career of women's rights, civil rights and environmental activism. Culture Clash offered up political theater in the Ash Grove spirit with an excerpt from their 'Chavez Ravine,' another work about cultural and physical displacement in its pointed satire of the destruction of a multicultural community for the building of Dodger Stadium around the time the Ash Grove was founded. And younger musical artists Laura Love and Ashley Maher brought the Ash Grove aesthetic into newer contexts with, respectively, a distinctive brand of funk folk rooted in old spirituals and civil-rights anthems and a hybrid world music/dance bridging modern America and traditional Africa. And closing this first night, a motley Eastern European jam session blasted spiritedly into the wee hours.

The musical pinnacle came in the Cooder/Seeger/White set on a number in which Seeger played harmonica and fiddle simultaneously (a neat trick) on a mournful, haunting lick, singing lyrics about slaves being transported, with Cooder coming in for an electric slide solo that echoed Blind Willie Johnson's ghostly, despairing 'Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.' This performance at once captured that intersection of generations at the founding of the Ash Grove, that passing of rootless displacement into the realm of folklore roots, though the song itself shows that's nothing new. It was 'Stolen Souls From Africa,' a piece associated with white abolitionists more than a century before the Ash Grove even existed.

Pearl himself, in a brief address to the crowd, made a call for a new Ash Grove, something he said is needed in a time of complacency he likened to that of when he started the original club. The case can be made. Punk is by and large toothless, rap is becoming a caricature. There would seem not just a need but untapped demand for something really of substance, a unifying, galvanizing musical force that would bring in stray youth in search of, well, something. But is that even possible in the blogosphere era, when every music, every opinion, every thought is instantly accessible? No kid has to go to a club to learn about folk music or blues or anything today. Never mind creating something so threatening to the power structure that someone would burn it down once, let alone three times.

Live: Ash Grove's 50th Anniversary

The long-lost club is remembered with an all-star show.

By Steve Appleford, Special to The Times
April 21, 2008

The seats at Royce Hall were still empty when Ramblin' Jack Elliott stepped onstage for his Friday afternoon sound-check and rehearsal, a black cowboy hat pulled low over his tangle of white, bushy hair. He sat on a stool and strummed his acoustic guitar, singing of coming west from the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, a musical cautionary tale written by his friend and mentor, the late Woody Guthrie.

"California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see," Elliott sang in a voice rich and fittingly rough. "But believe it or not, you won't find it so hot, if you ain't got the do re mi."

He was joined by Dave Alvin and his band, all "Ash Grove babies," musicians just old enough to have been teenage regulars at the old club on Melrose. "I can still smell it," Alvin said. "Old wood and cinnamon, with tobacco smoke." That 150-seat venue finally burned down in 1974, but only after a dozen years as a crucial West Coast room for folk, blues, bluegrass and other organic sounds of Americana.

Elliott and Alvin were among a powerful lineup at a weekend-long musical celebration of the club's 50th anniversary, hosted by UCLA Live. On Friday, they shared the stage with Ry Cooder, Ben Harper and Holly Near, along with vivid eruptions of West African and Mediterranean folk music. (Saturday's show would include Taj Mahal, Michelle Shocked and Watts Prophets.)

At 76, Elliott was ready for another gig among old friends. And watching from behind a video camera was his daughter, Aiyana, leading a documentary crew for a film on the Ash Grove's legacy.

Out back having a smoke was Arlo Guthrie, the night's surprise guest, set to open the show with his father's "This Land Is Your Land." His hair and mustache were long and silver now, and he remembered that he got his first West Coast gig at the Ash Grove when he was just 18.

"After 43 years of playing, there's a lot of clubs and venues under the bridge, but I remember that one," said Guthrie, who credited club owner Ed Pearl for emphasizing social consciousness over business.

As the night's concert began, Alvin plugged in for the rumbling, bluesy "Ashgrove," a song from 2004 that's less a tribute to the club than a lament on years lost and a changed world, sung in Alvin's fluid baritone: "All the old bluesmen have all passed on, and I'm out on this highway travelin' town to town . . . I'm just tryin' to raise the ghosts up out of their graves."

Back in the 1960s, Cooder was a teen prodigy studying the blues and folk masters up-close at the club. And on Friday, he sat in for a short set of old-timey tunes with the folk and bluegrass masters Mike Seeger and Roland White. They picked through "She's More to Be Pitied" (as recorded by the Stanley Brothers) with warmth and precision, but when Cooder slipped into a bit of modern technique, he shook his head and said, "I ought to be thrown out for doing that!"

During an intermission, Pearl watched musicians roll in and out backstage. "We're an hour behind," Pearl said, but he didn't look unhappy. "It's a wonderful show." He was soon at the microphone himself, praising the music while comparing today's grim political climate with that of the Ash Grove's founding in 1958: "Art is always the escape valve."

That political mission was fully represented by a moving and hilarious appearance by Culture Clash, as the comedy/theater troupe performed parts of its tragicomedy "Chavez Ravine." Near spoke of ending the war in Iraq, and Laura Love sang the civil-rights anthem "We Shall Not Be Moved" to cheers as she added the lyric, "Like that man in the White House, they must be removed . . . ."

It was midnight when Taj Mahal introduced Harper, who brought a band that included his mother, singer Ellen Chase, once an Ash Grove regular. Together they performed Harper originals, from the dramatic folk of "Gather 'Round the Stone" to the Dixieland of "Suzie Blue," plus a new duet, "Spanish Red Wine."

Before stepping onstage, Harper said he considered it "a very prestigious honor" to be considered part of the Ash Grove lineage. The music there represented "some of the best manipulations of silence that human beings have to offer. It's some of the best music that has come out of this country."

Chris Gaffney - Los Angeles Times Obituary

Chris Gaffney, 57; witty songwriter, Southern California bar musician

By Mike Boehm, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 18, 2008

Chris Gaffney, a roots-music omnivore whose earthy aplomb and offhand mastery of many styles made him a quintessential Southern California bar musician -- but who also earned international regard for his heartfelt and witty songwriting -- has died. He was 57.

Gaffney had been getting treatment for liver cancer that was diagnosed in February. His brother Greg said he died Thursday morning at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, where family members rushed him after a fall in his Costa Mesa home.

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FOR THE RECORD:
Gaffney obituary: The obituary of musician Chris Gaffney in Friday's California section said the song "Artesia" was on his 1990 album "Chris Gaffney and the Cold Hard Facts." It was on his 1992 release "Mi Vida Loca." —

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Gaffney toured extensively over the last nine years as a member of Dave Alvin's backing band, the Guilty Men, playing accordion and guitar and adding vocals, and as lead singer of the Hacienda Brothers, in which he teamed with veteran San Diego guitarist Dave Gonzalez.

But Gaffney had been a presence on the regional bar scene since the 1970s, playing multiple sets each night in small clubs such as the Upbeat in Garden Grove and the Swallows Inn in San Juan Capistrano. It was a hard-won musician's existence that he and Alvin captured in their easygoing honky-tonk number "Six Nights a Week."

"One of the things that may have hindered him commercially was that he couldn't turn it on; he was a hundred percent honest," recalled Alvin, who considered Gaffney his best friend. "If Chris is in a good mood, you get an amazing show; if he was in a bad mood, he wouldn't hide it."

As a songwriter, Gaffney was a peer of Alvin, Los Lobos, X and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in chronicling the life of Southern California. In "Artesia," from the 1990 "Chris Gaffney and the Cold Hard Facts" album, he evoked memories of his teenage years cruising through the San Gabriel Valley -- remembrances stirred by the scent of cow manure carried on the wind from inland dairy farms.

"The Gardens," from the same album, and later recorded by Freddy Fender with the Texas Tornados, was an aching assessment of the void that gang violence leaves in a community's heart -- in this case, Hawaiian Gardens.

But many Gaffney songs reflect the dry, sometimes absurdist, sense of humor that stayed with him in his day-to-day life: "They made a mistake and they called it me," he sang in one jaunty tune; in another lyrical self-description he pegs himself as "a dancing cretin with faraway eyes."

Gaffney sang in a tuneful yet conversational voice that was both sandpapery and sweet. He had no pretentiousness about his music. In a 1992 Times interview, he described taking part in a songwriters panel at a folk festival: "The kids were asking, 'How do you write songs?' I said, 'I'm sitting in front of the TV, having a beer, and something comes to my mind, and I go 'what the hell' and write it down."

Born in 1950 in Vienna, Austria, he grew up mainly in Cypress, the son of a telephone company executive. Tall and solidly built, Gaffney excelled at track and cross country at Western High School in Anaheim and took his licks as a Golden Gloves boxer.

"I always ascribed his cockeyed view of the world to being beat around the head a few too many times," Alvin said.

As he built a critically acclaimed recorded repertoire during the 1990s with three studio albums, including "Mi Vida Loca" and "Loser's Paradise" for Hightone Records, Gaffney was unable to capitalize on it with touring -- tied instead to his bar hero regimen on top of days spent scraping hulls at a Newport Beach boatyard.

Gaffney accepted the bar-musician's lot with equanimity: "I was a working guy before becoming an unheralded roots-music recording eminence, and I continue to do that. If they don't want to put out an album, I'll go and do my day job," he told The Times in 1999. What sustained him, he said, was "the music, and I love the people. You surround yourself with good friends, and you're good to go."

Starting in 1999, though, Gaffney got to live the life of a musical road warrior, with Alvin and then the Hacienda Brothers, touring extensively through the United States and Europe. Alvin said he soon learned not to give Gaffney a weekly advance on his meal money: "He'd give it to some homeless guy or a guy standing at a rest stop begging for change."

With the Hacienda Brothers, who blended classic country and rhythm and blues styles, Gaffney recorded two studio albums and a live release. In December, he and Alvin recorded the song "Two Lucky Bums," a mellow duet to friendship:

Let's make a toast to the times we've had

The good, the crazy, the rough and the bad.

We've survived every one, a couple of losers who won,

And when it's all said and done, we're two lucky bums.

"He might have gone out early, but he did everything he wanted to do," said Greg Gaffney, who played bass beside his brother through many of the bar years. "He loved being on the road, happy in a van with a bunch of buffoons."

In addition to his brother Greg of Costa Mesa, survivors include his wife, Julie, of Costa Mesa; daughter Erika of Houston; sister Helen of Oakland; and brother Robert of Vancouver, Canada.

Services are pending.

mike.boehm@latimes.com

Chris Gaffney 1950 - 2008

My other big brother, Chris Gaffney passed away
Thursday morning, April 17, 2008.

I really don't know what to say right now but I feel that I have to say something. First of all, I want to again thank everyone that sent messages to Chris and donated funds to his cause. It means more than you'll know to Chris, his family and me. We are still raising money at www.helpgaff.com to help with the existing medical bills and other various expenses including a forthcoming memorial service.

After twenty-some years I have thousands of memories of Chris. Through those years of songs, laughs, countless barrooms, eternal highways, broken hearts, screw-ups, bail outs, close calls, busted strings, elusive dreams, flat tires, stalled engines, hard hangovers, bad gigs, great gigs, in between gigs, tragedies, triumphs, secret jokes, bad TV, worse food and now, tears, Gaffney always had my back. I never had to worry about nothing or nobody if Gaffney was with me. I don't know what I ever did to deserve it but, God, I was blessed to have Chris Gaffney as my best friend.

Chris's and my friend, B.J. in Omaha, said it best for me in a email yesterday. She said that I now have a "wild angel looking out for me." Yeah, I do believe that's true.

I'll still see you in Cuervo, brother.
Dave

Dave Thanks Gaffney Contributors

Dear friends, fans and everyone else:

I want to sincerely thank everyone who has gone (and will go) to
www.helpgaff.com and donated to the Chris Gaffney cause. I'm really at a loss for words regarding the overwhelming response from so many people to our call for help. Beside your financial donations, your many heartfelt messages of love and support have deeply moved Chris, his family and me. I don't think Chris ever realized how much his music touches people and how truly beloved he is. These are rough financial times for many of us, but your
selfless generosity in the face of that hard reality, has gotten me a bit
misty eyed on more than a couple occasions lately.

I'd also like to thank all the people who are putting together benefit shows across the country. Shows are currently being planned in Austin, Omaha, Houston, San Francisco, Nashville and several other locations. Please let us know at helpgaff.com if you're doing a benefit for Chris so that we can plug it on the site. Later this year I plan on doing a benefit performance in southern California with many longtime friends of mine and Chris's. Check back here or at the Gaff site for information about when and where that will be happening.

My "other big brother" Chris is a fighter and having all of you in his corner have made me even more positive that he will win this fight. Thank you all very, very much.

Dave Alvin
April 8 2008

Other Links

www.helpgaff.com

Help Gaffney Myspace page

Dave Alvin Official Website

LA Times-Chris Gaffney Article