Ask Dave Alvin what day it is, and chances are pretty good he'll get it right.

It's keeping straight which band he's playing with and what songs are on the set list that night that might cause some problems. It's already been a busy year for Alvin, a fourth generation Californian who gained his initial fame in the roots rock band The Blasters.

Yet more and more, that roots rock tag has evolved into just plain roots music. There's his recurring role as the guitarist in the funky, folky, stone-cold country band The Knitters, the group he helped form in the mid-1980s while still in The Blasters with John Doe and Exene Cervenka of the L.A. punk band X.

In 1994, Alvin teamed with Tom Russell, Billy Joe Shaver, Iris Dement, Dwight Yoakam and several others for the critically acclaimed "Tulare Dust," a tribute to Merle Haggard. Alvin's interpretation of Haggard's "Kern River" has been a part of his live show for years.

And last year, Alvin took his first-ever Grammy Award not for his contributions to rock, but for the album "Public Domain: Songs from the Wild Land," a rich array of folk and blues songs from the American musical landscape. He applied his own arrangements, a wide variety of guitar stylings and his rich baritone voice to a collection of songs he discovered as a young music collector.

Alvin recently wrapped up a successful reunion tour with his brother, Phil, and The Blasters, and there's a distinct possibility more dates lie ahead. He'll also spend part of the late spring and early summer touring with the West Coast with The Knitters. There are several dates planned on the road with Christy McWilson, the singer-songwriter whose recently released second album "Bed of Roses" was produced by Alvin.

And of course, there's Alvin's solo career with his fiery rock-country band the Guilty Men. A summer's worth of tours are planned across the country to help push his recently released live album, "Out in California."

Yet Alvin seems to be keeping his schedule straight - so far.

"I'm trying to juggle everything," Alvin laughs in his rumbling, smoky voice during a lengthy phone interview from his home in Los Angeles. At the same time, he admitted it's been just a little busy.

"I've bitten off too much this year. I produced and toured with Christy to help get her going. We did The Blasters reunion, and as soon as The Knitters tour is done, I'll be going out with my band. And there are some other things coming up that I can't really talk about yet."

Yet, what he can address makes him proud. The recently concluded Blasters tour, Alvin said, meant a lot to a lot of people. Their music, but perhaps more so his relationship with brother Phil laid the groundwork for Dave's current musical bent.

"We were old record collectors," he says of his days growing up in the L.A. suburb of Downey. "When I was 13 or 14, we got a hold of these Dust Bowl ballads by singers like Woody Guthrie. As a kid, I was looking for my sense of place, and this was it."

Yet as much as the Alvin brothers became known for their straight-ahead rock, Dave said he never lost touch with those early influences.

"When The Blasters got together, bar owners told us, 'No one wants to hear that music,'" Alvin recalls of the band's earliest days. "But we knew we weren't that weird. We weren't completely out of it. The problem with roots music is there's a huge audience for it, but it's not easily marketed. It's not hip-hop, and it's not speed metal; what radio station will play roots music?

"Whatever it is, it's more difficult to sell and even more difficult to market."

Which makes the success of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" that much more of a phenomenon. Yet, Alvin may have summed up the soundtrack's unparalleled success in very simplistic, yet uncannily accurate terms.

"'O Brother' had a hit movie - a good movie," he says, lighting another cigarette. "It proved there's a market for traditional American music."

But long before "O Brother" sold its 5 million-plus copies and swept awards, Alvin and others spent endless nights on the road, toiling in the clubs unknowingly laying the groundwork.

No, they can't take credit for the current folk revival, but bands like The Knitters and artists like Mike Ness of Social Distortion deserve a certain amount of credit for presenting old time country and folk to kids who live in a world 10 decibels past pain. Ness released his "Under the Influences" album in late 1999, covering songs by several country artists as well as a very honky tonk version of Social D's "Ball and Chain."

"When they hear Mike do Hank Williams or Johnny Cash, they might check it out," Alvin said.

When X and Alvin decided to reinvent themselves acoustically as The Knitters in the early 1980s, it brought an entirely new sound to a new crowd.

"In the case of The Knitters, there weren't a lot of bands in the punk and rock genre doing folksy stuff," Alvin said. "There weren't bands like Whiskeytown or Wilco or the Old 97s that could do that kind of music. For X to do (Merle Haggard's) 'Silver Wings' turned a whole lot of people onto this kind of music."

"It was an escape valve for us," Alvin recalls of the group, which finally reunited for the first time two years ago and again is touring the Interstate 5 corridor this spring. "In the early days, we were asked to do a lot of benefits. And we said, 'Well, we won't do it, but The Knitters will. We were able to step out of our band expectations and could do folk, or Haggard tunes or whatever. But after I joined X, there was no more reason to do The Knitters."

Yet the legacy left by The Knitters - they loosely took their name from Pete Seeger's folk group of the 1950s The Weavers - not only spawned the reunion tour, but a tribute album titled "Poor Little Knitter in the Road" to the one and only album The Knitters ever released.

"It took us two days to record it," Alvin said of The Knitters' original album. "And I was drunk one of the days."

The Knitters also present Alvin with the rare opportunity to be just another guy in the band. Instead of being the front man, Alvin says he just shows up and plugs in.

"I don't have to be me," he laughs. "In some ways, it functions like it did 17 years ago. I just show up. I don't have to sing. I know how the songs go and just play. It's almost like a vacation."

Still, there's the sense Alvin likes to be too busy. With the Guilty Men, Alvin books the shows, pays the musicians, pays for the hotels and gas and is the band's manager.

The new album "Out in California" indeed is live, but Alvin didn't just let the tape roll on a couple of shows with his Guilty Men. Methodically crafted, Alvin took care to record the best from acoustic sets, all-out rockers and everything in between.

The lone new number is Alvin's rolling country song "Highway 99," which pays homage to the road that cuts through the heart of California's San Joaquin Valley.

"It's a tribute to the Bakersfield Sound," says Alvin, who actually has crafted a 13-song record that is at once a tribute to his home state and simultaneously is a retrospective to Alvin's 20-year career. "It honors Buck Owens, Merle Haggard and Wynn Stewart."

The CD's jacket is a throwback to the days of vinyl with wonderful artwork of California icons - a mission, a golden bear, the desert, Mt. Shasta and the state flower, the California poppy. Alvin and his six Guilty Men even pose with a lassoed, oversized rattlesnake.

"The cover has a semi-psychotic feel to it," he says. "We dug up old 19th and early 20th century postcards with archetypal images of California."

About the only thing missing is string bikinis and Santa Monica Pier. Alvin says he wrote "Highway 99" last year while he sat around the house. Most of the rest of the album are Alvin tunes as well, though they recall days past.

"The songs are kind of staples of the live show," he says. "We'd play a gig, and people would come up afterward and tell us how much they liked the sound. In the studio, it's gotten more and more introspective. But the live shows have stayed loud and proud."

Besides Alvin, the Guilty Men are comprised of Bobby Lloyd Hicks on drums and harmony vocals, Chris Gaffney on accordion and harmony vocals, bassist Gregory Boaz, Joe Terry on keyboards and vocals, stringmaster Rick Shea on electric pedal and lap steel, as well as guitars, mandolin and vocals, Brantley Kearns on fiddle, John Logan on harmonica and Greg Leisz, who sits in on a couple of songs on dobro and electric guitar.

Despite the title song and despite "Highway 99," Alvin maintains he's not solely focused on the West Coast.

"I'm not an L.A. songwriter," he said. "I write songs about the U.S. in total. On the other hand, I'm a big fan of Texas songwriters like Guy Clark and Joe Ely. I think wherever your heart is broke the first time is where you're from. If it was broke in Texas, you're a Texas songwriter."

Being a fourth generation Californian, Alvin nonetheless admits he's heavily influenced by the West Coast. If he's co-writing a song with someone from Louisiana, for example, then they bring their turf to the table while Alvin adds his state's values.

It goes even further. Any time a songwriter mentions a city, or any location for that matter to the lyrics, he said, listeners perk up a little more.

"(Blues and country legend) Jimmie Rodgers had a theory," Alvin said. "With songs like 'T for Texas' and 'Peach Pickin' Time in Georgia,' if you mentioned a state, people there would buy the record."

It worked with him, he added.

"On 'Me and Bobby McGee,' when they mentioned Salinas, I knew where that was," he said. "And when Frank Zappa mentioned El Monte, I was like, 'I know where that is! It's right by where I live!"

Alvin said there's a good chance more Blasters reunion dates will be added, but as of yet there are no firm dates.

"We might do a couple more gigs. It was a lot of fun onstage, but off stage, I don't know," Alvin laughs. "These are the guys who taught me to play. The reunion tour meant a lot to a lot of people to see us onstage. It meant the world to see my brother and me getting along. We love each other very much."

Now that's a folk song with a California bent that's yet to be written.