By Chelsea Schmid
Staff Writer who is Special to LIVE!
December 24, 2007

It was my first time to see the man play, and I had developed certain expectations. It was like the episode of “Sex and the City” where Charlotte’s boyfriend was reputed to have a passion for eating peaches—there was just a sort of buzz about him.

The evening’s entertainment had earned himself a sort of vulgar comedic infamy, and let’s be honest: Some of us just like to talk dirty. That stigma persuades a prospective audience with the lure of taboo. Some would be attracted, some turned off, and some both at once. I was most interested in the fanatics.

I was curious as to what kind of trashy scum or religious zealot might show up to exalt or protest; I wanted to watch the reactions of those first-timers who had perhaps received a watered-down shot of what to expect from Alligator Dave. Basically, I was a voyeur of human behavior and I wanted to see shock.

I found Dave seated at The Steel Penny’s (2400 College Hills Blvd, San Angelo) bar. The guy had a sort of humorous air about him. He wasn’t abandoning his post, but Dave wasn’t concerned that the time might have been 11:30, though his show was slated to start an hour prior. It was more like he was on his own schedule and the set would be the same. The people would get what they wanted.

His story was unlike that of most musicians (“I got my first guitar when I was 10, and I’ve been playing it ever since . . . “). No, Alligator Dave began with a charge of arson.

“I got kicked out of high school for setting a fire in a trash can,” he says. “It was a senior prank, and I bought a guitar, spent two weeks in the Dallas County Jail. I got out and those [expletive] broke into my car at the time, stole all my CDs, my speakers, my amp. . . I wanted to play college football. I was a quarterback in high school, a receiver—it just kind of happened, I don’t know.”

Alligator Dave has been performing his acoustic comedy for the past 10 years. Starting with his 1998 release of “89 Bollocks Street,” Dave has put out four albums, including 2000s “Gulf Coast Honky,” “Stoned and Confused,” and his latest, “I drink.”

So what influences his raunchy, belligerent writing? “Females, marijuana, and beer,” Dave says with a smile. “It’s dirty; somebody called me Bob Dylan with Tourettes the other day.”

Bob Dylan was a storyteller, and certainly, Alligator Dave has some wild ones to tell. “[I get my material from] conversations, or stuff that’s happened. “Eager Beaver”—I was reading a “Hustler” or a “Club” magazine, and the back of it, those ads that crack me up, and there was an Asian girl in there and she was like, ‘Do like eager beaver?’ That was right around the time that my [stuff] got stolen out of my car, so I didn’t have a CD player, so I’d keep beats on the steering wheel...it just sort of happened. A lot of them are stories. A lot of them are true.”

It would seem that the foul language is what attracts people. They want to hear things they can’t say in public. Things you don’t say to a crowd of people. Several times over the past year I have worked with the band Buckcherry at live shows in the State. Many are familiar with their current single, but when they play this song live, Josh Todd goes through a whole skit that they couldn’t play on the radio. Each time I watched it the crowd went wild and wilder with each dirty word.

Those gathered at the Steel Penny seemed to know what to expect, and the more graphic and overtly sexual the humor, the louder the laughs and cheers.

But with such an “off-limits” vocabulary, one would wonder how he got his start. Obviously there are going to be those virgin ears, those who can’t quite handle what the man’s dishing out.

“After that first year-and-a-half, after I bought the guitar, I had my first show at Club DaDa in Dallas,” Dave said. “It was open mic night. I went on at like 1 a.m., there was like 50 people and I played three songs, and they all went nuts. So I came back the next Sunday, played at 10:00 for like 100 folks, and it was awesome. The club owner saw me play across the street and said I could come play over here, so I got the band together and it just kind of happened. We won a battle of the bands contest, got a free album out of it, and then it just kind of kept going.”

After the album freebie, Alligator Dave sought out famed producer Eric Delegar (Bowling For Soup, Cross Canadian Ragweed, The Feds, Space Cadet…) for his second release. The Alligator man put out this year’s “I Drink” on his Sons of the Texas Revolution Records.

Beginning with an impressive guitar intro, tables of seated patrons cheered on Dave’s skill. He was actually a pretty good guitar player, which I did not expect—now would be the perfect time for someone who had heard nothing about the entertainment to walk into The Penny and have a drink. He began with some pretty dirty stuff, but there was no public outcry; it seemed everyone here knew or had been accurately told what to expect.

Not all of it was innuendo. Dave did play the “Nintendo Song,” in which a fellow with a fresh bong tries to beat his high score. Then there was “Stoned Avengers.” Others include “Coconut Rum,” and “Another Persons Girlfriend.”

The show was hilarious, but the extremists I had been hoping for seemed to have stayed at home. Instead, I asked Dave after his first set to tell me about a time he had been perceived negatively. The story went that a girl in Lubbock had told him he was going to hell, whereupon Alligator Dave proved her hypocrisy after a series of questions revealed she was having premarital sex. “At least I know my sin, and I’m pretty good at it,” Dave said. “She started crying.”

Dave’s had a lot of opportunity to make people cry lately: “I do like 200 shows a year, he says.”I’ve got three more shows, then I’m going to Mexico for three months for vacation. [I play] Mexico and Belize, I’m going to start hitting up Europe; I want to go to New Zealand and Australia.

“Plus, we live in the Bible Belt. I kind of want to see it—I do want to see it—outside all of this stuff.”

For more information on Alligator Dave, refer to www.myspace.com/alligatordave