Alvin Dahn
It's Time

THE REVIEW

Alvin Dahn or the Parable of the Talents.

There’s this story, there in the Gospel of Matthew, about a master who goes on a journey and leaves his gold talents with three servants; five to the first, two to the second, and to the third, only one. The first two run to the market, gamble, sweat, work hard and double their piles. But the third has chills in his bones. He’s afraid of the master, afraid to fail and lose the little he clutches in his fist. So he digs a deep hole and hides that miserable golden talent, and when his lord returns, he says:

“Sir, I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed; out of fear I went and hid your talent in the ground; here it is, yours. The master replied: Wicked and lazy servant, you knew that I harvest where I did not sow and gather where I did not scatter; you should have put my money with the bankers, so that when I returned, I would have received it back with interest. So take the talent from him, and give it to the one who has ten talents. For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will be in abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have will be taken away. And throw that useless servant outside, into the darkness; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew, 25, vv. 24-30).

That’s how things go with the Lord: to everyone who has, more will be given and in abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have will be taken away.

Gifts and talents are not divided equally but given at random, to some with lavish generosity and to others with cruel scarcity. And whether we’re talking about gold or attitude, genius or luck, it matters little; it’s pointless to try to make sense of it and I’ve long since stopped trying. The Lord or Fate (or whoever stands in their place) plays dice with our lives and—in my opinion—even enjoys doing so.

Something like this you can only accept if you have Faith. And Alvin Schuyler Dahn burned with faith: faith in himself, in his talent and in his Lord, and he was entirely possessed by his daimōn. Thus Alvin would put on the table even what had never been given to him, convinced that heaven would cover the rest of the check. Someone like that is either a saint or a madman. And I’ve never been able to tell the difference.

It all began when, at 9 years old, someone put a violin in his hands and, with that piece of sounding wood, came the demon that would possess him for life; Alvin claimed he could play at least fifty instruments, but it could have been a hundred or maybe none at all—what does it matter? If you hear the wind blow, you don’t ask if the wind took flute lessons.

In ’74 he released his first 45 rpm single, “I Left My Yo-Yo Back In Nashville b/w Blue Girl,” recorded and pressed on a local private label. Then, in ’76, he invented his own label—Sky-Child Records—and his own band—the Alvin Dahn Band—and tried once more: another 45 rpm, “404 b/w Free Rolling Man.” Billboard reviewed it and Big Three Music, the EMI publishing division, seemed interested in releasing a possible third single. But then, it all ended there.

Alvin wasn’t exactly the type anyone would bet on. Our Alvin was all wrong—gray and anonymous, jumbled and awkward, and on top of everything, with bronchial asthma that completely crippled his singing, making it impossible to match his voice with the instruments.

The Lord really had his fun with him! And even the unwavering faith of our Alvin eventually had to yield.

In Buffalo, the cold wind comes off Lake Erie and feels like it cuts your face, it’s a cold without mercy that reminds you of every mistake you’ve made. In Buffalo Alvin first tries working for a funeral home, then lands a job as a school janitor and gets married. In the end, he too, like that fearful servant, seems to have buried his talent in the mud and come to terms with his own demons.

But if you try to keep your balance in the wrong place, sooner or later it’s almost certain you’ll stumble. And so comes a brutal divorce and a dull rage that grows inside. And that rage rekindles the old fire; so Alvin says fuck it to everything: no more cleaning up classrooms littered with the remnants of other people’s lives, no more being invisible, fuck his wife and the person who took her away! His daimōn refuses to die; in Alvin’s head, always, a music plays—a song for the forgotten—he will be the new Lennon or the new Dylan. Alvin KNOWS IT, Alvin FEELS IT!

There’s a thin line stretched between courage and madness, and Alvin throws himself upon it. He quits his job, scrapes together all the money he has, and finds a way to borrow the rest. And with that money, on a fine day in the year of our Lord 1991, he walks into the Mark Studios in Clarence, NY.

And then, this happens: a man who can’t sing—and when I say “can’t sing,” I don’t mean out of tune, I mean he lives outside the rules of music: Alvin sings as if the world doesn’t exist. He sings ignoring time, ignoring key, ignoring even the other musicians. It’s as if he’s following a music only he can hear. An inner music, unaligned, stubborn, untamable—this man decides that such a voice, broken by asthma, deserves violins. He decides his dream deserves a real orchestra, the Buffalo Philharmonic, professionals, people who have lived and breathed music all their lives. It’s as if a guy playing soccer at the parish rec center one day decided to call up the national team. And yet, Alvin does it.

The technicians laugh. Not out of malice—or maybe they do, at first. Because it’s too much. Too out there. Too wrong. Too everything. But then, slowly, something strange happens. They stop laughing. Because beneath all that chaos, beneath those notes that never land where they should, there’s something you can’t fake. A faith. An absolute conviction.

Endless sessions. Hours and hours of discussions with sound engineer Fred Betschen. “One more, Fred. It wasn’t perfect.” Forty years of life condensed into a request for a retake. What comes out is a chaos titled “It’s Time.”

“It’s Time” is an album that seems to go nowhere; Alvin leaps from rock to disco, from pop to classical, like a shipwrecked man with no compass. Sure, challenging genre borders is the mark of the greats, of those who embrace disorder to craft beauty; in this case, though, that chaos was a product of absolute artistic blindness. But, you see, music is a strange lady. If you court her too much with technique, sometimes she gets bored and leaves, and so, inside “It’s Time,” at least two precious gems are hidden: one is “The Devil’s Candy” and the other is “Don’t Throw Your Dreams Away.”

“Don’t Throw Your Dreams Away” is not a song. It’s a plea, a commandment. It’s the prayer of a man who takes what remains of his life and hurls it at the sky, as if to say: “I tried. I believed.” And so the question becomes another: is it more important to succeed or to give it your all?

Alvin Dahn launched his challenge at the sky and the bored Fate who plays with his dice, but the price he had to pay was immense. The money ran out—just like that, too soon. The album was not finished and it was impossible to officially release or distribute it in any way. Alvin slipped—again, but even more profoundly—into darkness. He lost everything: house, job, and all the rest; crushed by debt, he ended up sharing bread in a men’s shelter in Buffalo.

Finished.

And yet now there comes a guy named Geoffrey Giuliano.

Geoffrey Giuliano is a man of a thousand lives: from official Beatles biographer to worldwide Netflix star, someone who’s tried everything and seen many stories. And Giuliano gets it. He understands that Alvin is "the hero of his own life, an inspiration for those who had it all, because he had nothing but created a whole world."

Legend has it that a technician who was recording Alvin’s album called him on the phone while he was literally rolling on the floor of his booth, trying not to laugh. “You’ve never heard anything like this.”

Now on Wikipedia and some websites, rumor has it that Geoffrey Giuliano then decided to produce Alvin’s album. That’s not true (not surprisingly), but it’s true that Giuliano worked on a documentary about Alvin, “Let Your Mind Out to Play.” And that made the story reach the ears of Irwin Chusid, who was making a name—and also a bit of money—with his “outsider music” compilations.

It was clear that Alvin was perfect for that scene but Chusid chose one of the most improbable songs from that record: “You’re Driving Me Mad,” a hard rock number Alvin wrote while separating from his wife (a very painful separation). The most ill-fitting song, the most distant from Alvin’s own style, one could possibly pick. The effect was the usual uproarious laughter (and I suspect that, in the end, that’s what Chusid was after: creating a stir, parading the freaks, getting a few laughs, rather than really supporting these musicians); there were those who ridiculed him by calling him Dahn Halen and others who said it was “a metal track sung by Ned Flanders.”

Today Alvin no longer plays; along with asthma now there’s arthritis, though he says he’s got plenty of new songs in his head. He lives in a place called Tonawanda, near New York City, has a new partner—Rose—and in 1998 wrote and performed “Healing Miracles” for a Christian cable TV show of the same name, which aired until 2010.

In short, this is not a success story, and perhaps not even a story of failure. It’s the chronicle of a stubborn faith. Alvin did not achieve success. He had no charts, no tours, no applause. He had debts, silences, closed doors. Long nights and identical days. Alvin Dahn’s music should be welcomed just as it is: a marvelous mistake that shines with its own light. Something that can’t be defined, but lingers on. A kind of echo. Off-key, for sure. Imperfect.

That parable in the Gospel of Matthew, the one about the talents, says the master returns and asks for accounts. So what do you bring to God when your music is chaos and your voice is an off-key wail? You bring the only thing that matters: that you believed to your last dime, to your last off-tempo note. There is a dignity in failure that the saints know well. May grace be with Alvin and with all those who, despite the cold of every Buffalo in the world, continue to write their music.

And you, what will you show the Lord when he returns to ask you what you did with those meager gifts he sent you wandering the world with?

As for me, I will tell him I used them to get wine and women.

And I don’t think I wasted them.