His Martin D-37 is on display at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “It was only supposed to be for a couple years, and then they asked for more,” Alex Bevan says.
Let’s put it this way: if you have an instrument displayed at the Rock Hall, you’ve done something. After his exhaustive study at the altar of long-dead greats came the endless hard-road miles, the shitty club gigs, the rejections, the second-guessing, the rise of the karaoke machine, and myriad sacrifices nobody ever sees. But if you’ve moved enough people, you’ve already won. If a few recognize true greatness, you might even leave a legacy.
“One day I told them I wanted the guitar back to play,” Bevan told the Rock Hall. “They said ‘you can donate it.’” Bevan laughs on a 2026 phone call. “I said, ‘absolutely not!’” He pauses, adds, kinda ruefully, “so now I go once a year and wave to it.”
We here at Fervor don’t have the time or space for even a fraction of the yarns he could spin after releasing 26 albums over nearly 50 years and logging tour dates with everyone from Pure Prairie League, Odetta and the Earl Scruggs Review to the Beach Boys and the Clash(!).
But here’s a little of what we know.
The son of Mitch Miller fans, Bevan grew up in blue-collar East Cleveland, singing in church with his three sisters. In high school he traded his French horn for a guitar and discovered the still-subversive, literary storytelling at the heart of folk music.
Enter Cleveland’s late-’60 coffee houses, folk clubs, protest songs and college gigs. “I just pestered everybody in those days,” Bevan says. “I wanted to learn songwriting.” Twelve-string champs like Bob Gibson—the folk-revival architect of the ’60s—won Bevan’s heart, alongside Gordon Lightfoot, Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, Paul Simon, Dylan, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Janis Ian, and other guitar-bard minstrels.
He befriended one of his heroes, Steve Goodman (“City of New Orleans”), and once toured with Goodman and mandolinist-comedian Jethro Burns in a rented Lincoln. And for a white guy who’s covered Black spirituals, Bevan tackled Blind Willie Johnson’s version of traditional “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” back in ’78 with an acumen as pure as his love of the form. That ain’t easy.
Beginning with his spare 1971 singer-songwriter debut, Bevan’s growth over the years—whether alone, with a combo or even an orchestra—never strays from a highly listenable place. He aged into his work, and it aged into him.
His songs offer wry, witty and brokenhearted observations, whether drawn from his own life, his friends, or fantastic tales he dreamed up “because I loved cartoons.” For Bevan, “the currency of conversation is storytelling. It’s about communication. But,” he laughs, “you still have to learn the G chord and still make a rhyme.”
He’d shop his songs to major labels, and the response was always the same: they had no idea what to do with his music.
“I got angry for a few years,” he says. “So I put my nose to the grindstone and did it all myself.”
At the heart of his catalog is the ace ’76 release Springboard, reissued by Fervor Records. Irony, sincerity and allegory find a beautiful balance atop ringing fingerpicking, chiming acoustic guitars, or a rousing backing band and strings. His impressionistic songs are populated by colorful characters who live in the past (the acoustic-guitar chimer “Rodeo Rider”), cling to improbable optimism (the country-rock kicker “Brand New Arkansas Traveler”), or stumble into love with disarming grace (the tender “Rainbows”). Bevan’s voice alternates between a warm, reedy sweetness and a conversational, lightly syncopated delivery.
The spry “Skinny Boy,” with its spare, front-porch folk-blues rhythm, is Bevan’s satirical take on growing up a Cleveland kid. It became a Northern Ohio fave, on college radio and Cleveland powerhouse WMMS.
After the 1980 market crash, Bevan bailed on the Leo Kottke-styled concert circuit and embraced life as a regional gigging singer/songwriter, pivoting to story-driven bar sets that traded national ambition for improvisational crowd control. It worked.
“I was never good on extended travel,” he laughs. “I would wind up drinking too much.” There was a wife and a son to consider, too. He found other work in music, penning advertising jingles and theme-park music. He worked at an Ohio nature center, where he wrote and sang campfire songs with children.
His entire living has come from music. Some might call him a troubadour. “My wife made sure I took care of my teeth.”
He still lives in Ohio, about 600 yards from Lake Erie. His latest, 2024’s Watersongs Suite, was recorded live with, yes, the Akron Symphony Orchestra. That’s another story. One he’s already penned.
“The songs will be my memoir,” he says.
– Liner notes by Brian Jabas Smith
