Finding Ol' Joe
By Richard Skanse
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN- STATESMAN
Tuesday, July 15, 2003
Joe Ely, "Lord of the Highway," lives right where you'd expect him to:
literally, at the end of the road. To find his 20-acre spread, all you do is take
Loop 1 out to 45 West, make a certain left and then a right about half an hour
outside of town, and drive down a paved road until it ends. Then you continue
a little ways down a dirt road until that ends, too, and find yourself before
an eccentrically modified, Marshall Kuykendall-designed "Texas Primitive"
country house that looks so much like the kind of place a West Texas- raised,
world-traveled gypsy troubadour would live, you might figure you'd happened upon
Casa Ely even if you weren't looking for it.
Inside, sunlight floods the spacious entryway and living room. But the kitchen,
where Ely sips a cup of late morning coffee, has the dim, cozy feel of a 19th-century
log cabin -- a rustic illusion spoiled only by the titanium Mac Powerbook on the
table. "It took forever to get high-speed Internet access out here,"
says Ely. "But coming from Lubbock to Austin, I always knew I had to live
in the country so I could rattle all night and not be hassled. I always hated
living in town, because I was too noisy."
The word "irony" comes to mind -- not because moving to the country
to make noise rather than escape it is ironic, but because the word "irony"
has been burned into the wood above the kitchen door. That, explains Ely's wife,
Sharon, is the handiwork of fellow Lubbock maverick Terry Allen. A few years ago,
Allen branded half the house with irony, stopping only after setting fire to the
door and ceiling of Ely's beloved home studio.
"Joe was cursing him," laughs Sharon, "and Terry just said, `You
know, some people pay me a lot of money to do this, and I branded you for free!'
"
Whatever the hazards of Allen's method, his choice of word was impeccable. "One
of the most interesting things about Joe is the fact that he's both consistent
and unpredictable at the same time," muses his longtime friend Jimmie Dale
Gilmore. "I think you could catch Joe at any number of different times and
think that he was a different kind of singer or performer. There's always been
a mystery about him, even to me."
Part of the mystery seems to be how and where Ely found the time to record his
latest album, "Streets of Sin" (Rounder), which hits stores today. For
the better part of the last four years, Ely, Gilmore and Butch Hancock put their
solo careers on hold to record and tour behind their long-awaited Flatlanders
reunion album, "Now Again" (New West). They're currently finishing up
a sequel, due later this year or early next. They've also remastered a batch of
recently discovered demos that pre-date the group's official 1972 debut album,
and Ely has been helping Austin filmmaker Amy Maner find archival Flatlanders
footage and music for her documentary "The Lubbock Lights." After three
decades of jokingly referring to themselves as "more a legend than a band,"
the Flatlanders are on the verge of becoming a franchise.
And yet somehow in the middle of all of that, Ely squirreled away time to make
his own album. "I think he's found a crack in time where there's an extra
24 hours in the day," laughs Hancock.
"I actually recorded it three different times," Ely says, now seated
in the control room of his studio, a converted guesthouse. "The first was
a full-blown rock record that I worked on for about a year. But it just didn't
feel right. So then I started one that was just me and an acoustic guitar. That
one didn't feel right, either. The way the current record turned out had a lot
to do with working with Butch and Jimmie, and going back to that time when we
were first exploring country blues guys like Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin' Hopkins.
All these different rhythms started coming out that just changed the way I put
the songs together, and finally it felt right."
As has often been the case, part of getting it to feel right involved a drive
back to Lubbock, this time for a friend's funeral. Somewhere on the long stretch
of highway, he wrote "Gotta Find Ol' Joe," the spoken-word song that
closes the album with the mantra, "I got to find ol' Joe before he loses
it all." "I don't really know who old Joe was," he admits. "It
was either myself or the ghost of this guy I was about to go bury. It was kind
of like visiting the past, just returning to the roots where I grew up. It all
of a sudden felt like it was a place to start and a place to end."
Telling `little stories'
Of course, a strong West Texas wind has always blown through Ely's music, be it
the dusty honky-tonk and Buddy Holly-inspired rock 'n' roll of his early albums
or the cinematic, flamenco-ranchero border ballads of his more recent work. But
the folksy and introspective tone of "Streets of Sin" is closer in spirit
to the Flatlanders. Ely has on more than one occasion been referred to as "the
Texas Bruce Springsteen"; with that in mind, consider "Streets"
to be his "Ghost of Tom Joad," not "The Rising."
"This is a small album, not a Cecil B. DeMille album," Ely acknowledges.
"The whole record's kind of like, not headlines, but little stories that
reflect the times of everyday people in droughts and floods or getting laid off.
The kind of stories you find way back in Section B of the newspaper." To
stay focused, he pared the music down to a supporting role, just enough to help
move the stories along.
"It's a much simpler approach to his music than he's taken in a while, and
I really like it," enthuses Sharon Ely. "It's like when I first heard
him in 1968 at Alice's Restaurant in Lubbock. He had a hi-hat drum thing, a harmonica
around his neck and a guitar. He was a one-man band, and it was phenomenal."
Ely recorded "Streets of Sin" primarily with the Flatlanders' backing
crew (guitarist Rob Gjersoe, bassist Gary Herman and drummer Rafael Gayol) and
accordionist Joel Guzman, with veteran Joe Ely Band guitar hero (and current Dixie
Chicks band leader) David Grissom making only a brief appearance. Asked about
the current lineup of his road band, Ely frankly notes that, presently, there
isn't one.
"I have a core group of guys that work with me, and different people that
I can always call up, but I'm at a different place now and looking for different
things to fulfill myself," he says. "It's helped my writing tremendously,
because I'm not just doing it to keep a band on the road or writing beer-drinking
songs so that everybody will follow me from town to town."
Of course, the folks at Rounder still have their hopes up high. Although their
last Ely album, 2000's "Live at Antone's," sold just over 25,000 copies,
a label rep notes that live albums traditionally sell less than studio efforts,
and adds that adult album alternative radio has already embraced the new record.
But with his legend secure, the success of the last Flatlanders album (95,000
copies sold to date, no small feat for an Americana record) and the financial
freedom of not having to keep a full band on the payroll year-round, Ely can afford
to release a "small" album at this point in his career, even without
a full-blown tour to support it.
"I'm still going to go out and play a few dates this year and have fun doing
it, but I don't feel like I have to conquer the world or anything," he says.
"It's really a whole new way of working in my life, but I'm digging it,"
he says. "I know I might lose some people along the way, but that's just
part of it. I'd rather be honest about my music and face the consequences."
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