More Remembrances of Chris Gaffney

It was a misty day in December when I ducked into the Swallow's Inn in San Juan Capistrano to talk with general manager Cheryl Krupp about one of the entertainers she frequently booked there, the late Chris Gaffney.

“I knew him very well,” Krupp said while glancing in the direction of the empty stage that had been regularly darkened by the country/folk/R&B/soul/rock singer-songwriter-guitarist-accordion player and his various bands. “He had his own type of music, he had a great following, and he had great fans. He was laid back, easygoing. It was a shame when he got sick.”

Gaffney, a military brat who bounced around Europe before eventually landing in Tuscon, Arizona, southeast Los Angeles County and Orange County, succumbed to liver cancer at 57 in April 2008. His pal Dave Alvin has put together a Gaffney tribute album that the Blasters co-founder and Grammy winner promotes down the street from Swallow's at the Coach House Saturday night.

Asked if she could recall any Gaffney antics during her 17 years at Swallow's, Krupp got a twinkle in her eye. “You never knew what he was going to do,” she said. “He was one of the bands you always had to remind had a show to do. You had to go find him during breaks to tell him he's still got to keep playing.”

She never quite knew what he would end up playing either. She
recalled booking Gaffney to play country music one
Saturday night. “He was on a break and he said, 'Oh, I don't know what
I'm going to play. I'll do something different. I'll just play
country.' That was what he was supposed to play!”

It was worth the trouble, according to Krupp: “He would bring in a crowd that was unbelievable.”
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Gaffney's
lackadaisical attitude toward music was something I also went over with
Alvin, although there was no room to incorporate that into the Music story that appears in today's Weekly.

“Someone asked me to describe where Chris is now,” Alvin said over the phone. “If there is an
afterlife, he's in a motel room with a king-sized bed–a smoking room
with a refrigerator in it–with a six-pack, a remote control and all
the ESPN channels. And, maybe there's a guitar in there, maybe not.”

Having met so many musicians over the years on the way up, on the way
down, at the pinnacle of success or nowhere near it, Alvin said
Gaffney's attitude toward his craft was not that unusual.

“When I first met him at Raji's [a Hollywood dive bar since torn down],
he was as ambitious as he ever got,” Alvin said of Gaffney. “He
was a really talented guy, but was he the most disciplined musician I
ever met? No. I know Chris and I know a lot of really ambitious people,
and I was in between. One guy in particular I was friends with before
he got famous, and before he even had a record deal he was talking
about what songs would be on his third album. Give or take one or two,
and he was right. It was all plotted out, and he is very successful and
very wealthy. And I'm not like that and I'm not like Chris. I'm in the
middle. Chris was the polar opposite of the other guy.”

To give an example, Alvin recalls a story that is “funny to me.”

“He was staying in Nashville with a friend, and
a great singer Rosie Flores came over to visit. She said, 'Chris, do
you want to go play at the Java Hut? We can work up a couple of nights
with some people.' That's how it works there. And Chris was like, 'No.
Why the hell would I want to do that?' That was Chris,” Alvin says with a
big laugh before switching to a Gaffney impression to punctuate the thought. “'I'm
staying in a house, and I've got ESPN.'”

For someone more partial to Sportscenter than a recording studio, Gaffney sure produced some damn fine songs. This is evident on the Alvin-produced Man of Somebody's Dreams: A Tribute to Chris Gaffney on the Yep Roc label. I talked with Alvin about some of the cuts that most perked my ears.

Joe Ely, returning the favor of Gaffney recording Ely's “Are
You Listening Lucky,” blazes through Gaffney's “Lift Your Leg” with the
help of Texas accordion king Ponty Bone. When I tell Alvin the 
accordion break is “Gaffneyesque,” he corrects that it is the other way
around, that Gaffney was influenced by Bone–in more ways than one.

“They
were really close friends and herbal buddies,” Alvin said.
“Ponty has a really distinctive way of playing accordion. Chris was not
a virtuoso, but he had a way of playing that was a mix of norteña style
with a little bit of cajun and a little bit of Frank
Sinatra. When I hear him playing accordion, I know it's Gaffney. Ponty
knew he had to be true to the record so, yeah, he is playing like
Chris.”

On “Artesia,” Alvin's own Man of Somebody's Dreams cut that begins with a spoken-word introduction, he gets to share something he and Gaffney have in common: wistfulness over a Southern California that no longer exists.

“We both had similar experiences growing up when we grew up in Southern
California,” Alvin explained. “Everything changes so quickly, especially in the age we
grew up. It's in a lot of my songs. It's something Chris and I shared.
It's almost the feeling of alienation. I grew up in Downey, and when I
was a little kid there were orange groves and avocado fields. We were
both, for lack of a better word–no, nostalgic is not really the
word–alienated, because where we came from doesn't exist anymore. It's
almost like it changed that quickly. We always shared that.

“When we
talked about growing up, all those images were there, of the lost
landscapes. Now they are just dreamscapes in our heads. It's kind of
like the speech I make before the song. That's what the song's actually
about. Because most people, who are not us, would have no idea when the
wind blows out of Artesia.”

The track that most blew me away was Calexico's take on
“Frank's Tavern.” That turned out to be one of Alvin's favorites also.
“They hit it out of the ballpark,” he said.

He did not know
Calexico, a rock band that hails from Tuscon-via-LA, knew of Gaffney
until they all ran into one another during a radio show three years ago
in
Boulder, Colo. “Chris and I did
some numbers, and then at the end we all did a couple songs together. A
couple of the guys were from Tuscon, and when they saw Chris had a
tattoo that said 'Tuscon' and one that showed the Arizona flag, forget
it. They
fell in love with Chris.”

The manager of Gaffney's last band, the excellent, up-and-coming Hacienda Brothers with the Paladin's Dave Gonzalez (who
also turns up on Man of Somebody's Dreams playing “Tired of Being Me”), was the one who informed Alvin Calexico wanted to contribute to the tribute album.

“What they did was pretty astounding to me,” he said. “Chris
had this side to him, a poetic side, the side that wrote the songs.
This was a guy with an inner poetry to him–as much as he'd be beating
the living shit out of me for saying this. Calexico added a norteña
polka and made it into a huge, sprawling ballad waltz. When I first
heard it, I started balling. That was a side of Chris I never heard
Chris let anyone see. I felt he was in the room. That's the Gaffney I
know, the secret Chris, and they captured it.”