|
Streets
of Sin Interviews
I Heard it on the X Interviews
Story by
John T. Davis Special
to the Austin-American-Statesman
Photographs by
Rebecca McEntee American-Statesman
Staff Published: May 21, 1998
"There
was yet something boyish about him as he stood taking
leave of the family. He stood in the frame that had
always contained him, the great circular frame of the
plains, with the wind blowing the grey hair at his temples
and the whole of the Llano Estacado at his back.
When he smiled at the children . . . he gave them the
look that had always been his greatest appeal -- the
look of a man who saw life to the last as a youth sees
it, and who sees in any youth all that he himself had
been." --
Larry McMurtry "In a Narrow Grave"
You say you want drama I'll
give you drama You want muscle?
I'll give you nerve --
Joe Ely "Settle for Love"
Love is love and not fade away
-- Buddy Holly The
Kerrville Folk Festival. The early '80s: Charlton Heston,
someone said later. I knew any minute now, they were
gonna cue Chuck. . . Storm clouds, as
purple and black as bruises, were piling
up along the Medina River valley. The wind, gusting
from all quarters, sent dervishes of dust dancing
among the suddenly apprehensive crowd at Quiet Valley
Ranch. There was one of those moments of silence that
made you wonder if the weather gods were flipping a
coin. Then, a volley of lightning, a cannonade
of thunder, and torrential rain, blowing
sideways. Special effects, baby. Academy
all the way. It rained harder, if that
was possible, and lightning flashed venomously.
And the Joe Ely Band kept playing. "We
were playing, and this humongous thunderstorm and wind
came up and blew over one of the speaker stacks," recalled
Lloyd Maines, the steel guitarist who has been along
for nearly the whole of the long, wild ride. "It was
raining like crazy and we were protected, but the crowd
wasn't, and the sound equipment wasn't." With
an ozone-searing crash, a bolt of lightning knocked
the Kerrville Folk Festival off the air. Producer
Rod Kennedy came out, gesturing apologies to the
skies, the gods and the tempest-tossed audience huddling
under garbage bags and sheets of plastic. "Kennedy
said we'd have to call the show," continued Maines.
"But Ely grabbed a microphone out of his bag, and
plugged it into his old Super Reverb amp. . ." Soaked
to the bone, with the band huddled behind him under
cover, one hand clutching a live microphone and the
other an electric guitar, the rain and wind swirling
around him, Ely reared back and howled into the
eye of the storm: "I'm a-gonna tell you how it's gonna
be/You're gonna give your love to me. . ." It
was Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away," and Ely sang passion
and fury -- King Lear in cowboy boots -- while the
crowd waited for a lightning bolt to turn him into a
Broadway neon billboard. . . Years later,
the memory remains undimmed: A moment that endures
as a distillation of everything dangerous, edgy,
exhilarating, elemental and utterly alive in Joe Ely's
music. May 1998. Austin, Texas: There are no rain clouds
on the horizon as Ely invites a newspaper writer into
the kitchen of his house outside Austin. Outside a bulldozer
clanks and clatters in the distance, an ominous
reminder of the tacky suburbs and tawdry strip malls
metastasizing between Oak Hill and Wimberley. Ely
turned 51 last winter, and middle age is having its subtle
way with him; there's some gray in the tousled dark
hair, and a slight paunch beneath the Jose Greco Flamenco
Co. T-shirt. His pockmarked face has settled a bit,
but the coal-dark eyes retain their lifelong blend of
curiosity, skepticism and mirth. He sits
at a butcher block table in the kitchen with a glass
of lemonade and patiently replies to contemporary variations
on the same rote questions he has answered since
his first album was released 21 years ago. . . Yep,
he's proud of his latest, the brand-spanking-new "Twistin'
in the Wind." Yeah, it's sort of a natural progression
from the last album, the flamenco-flavored, Southwestern-spiced
"Letter to Laredo". "It sort of brings
me up to where I am right now," he says. Sure
thing, he's tickled pink to be recording again with
his old Lubbock compañeros, Butch Hancock and Jimmie
Dale Gilmore, for the soundtrack to Robert Redford's
new movie, "The Horse Whisperer." Not to mention
appearing in an incarnation of their fabled old band,
the Flatlanders, on "The Late Show With David Letterman"
tonight. "In a way," he continued,
"the whole record is like coming
back home. Whereas 'Letter to Laredo' was more about
wandering off and not being able to come home, because
the law was after you or some woman was after you.
I looked at this whole record as a metaphor for returning
and starting over." For a moment
it is as if the sun has come out from behind
a cloud. His reply lacks the metronomic quality of
rote. Ely seemed momentarily surprised at the confessional
nature of his spontaneous comment.
Joe Ely orders for his family at a
Sonic drive-in in Austin.
Even after nearly two decades in Austin, a
long-standing marriage and a teen-age daughter, coming
home is a subject which has engaged Ely creatively
somewhere the other side of seldom.
Suddenly, the conversation stops being about product
and starts being about people.
"It always seems like a period of every seven years,
you know, I have gone through this build-up and
melt-down cycle. And I look at that cycle as probably
the thing that has saved my ass. Because for me, in
order to keep alive musically, I have to go through
these periods ."
Ask him where the cycles began, and the years and miles
fall away. He laughs. "I just had to get out of Lubbock
," he is saying.
"Lubbock is so flat in every direction, that if you
grow up in it and are blessed with any curiosity at
all, your attention just naturally runs to the horizon,
the edge. . . . It's the same thing a good song does --
go straight from the heart to the heart of the matter."
-- Musician and visual artist Terry Allen
"There are two people that I think are really great
stage performers, and they're both shy. And that's Joe
and David Byrne."
Terry Allen is calling from his studio overlooking the
Ortiz Mountains outside of Santa Fe. Born in Wichita,
Kan., like Ely he grew up in Lubbock, serving as a sort
of older brother to the rollicking covey of younger
musicians who were, to a man, full of piss and vinegar
and drunk on the fumes of their own untapped potential.
"From the time I met both of them," said Allen, still
speaking of Ely and Byrne, the former Talking Heads
band leader, "and I had occasion to be in a kitchen
where they were playing a song, the intensity of it in
that kitchen was the same as it was onstage. Whenever
they play a song for you, they play all of it. Every
bit of it, and they put all of themselves into it."
"Lord of the Highway"
"You'll be miles down the road
When the toll bridge is burnin'. . .
The Lord of the Highway travels fast"
-- Butch Hancock
[line]
If home is where the heart is, then Joe Ely's home has
been a stretch of two-lane blacktop baking under a West
Texas sun, an ebony scrawl connecting two horizons,
with nothing but a line of distant, slow-moving boxcars
to delineate the skyline: the stuff that dreams are
made of.
In his music, Ely has embodied the American ideal of
the footloose traveler, as unfettered as Huck Finn, and
as carefree as Melville's Ishmael, who used to follow
behind funeral processions, he said, because it made
him feel more alive.
Everything you really need to know about that Joe Ely
can be gleaned in the first verse from the first song
of his first album, released way back when in 1977:
"I Had My Hopes Up High"
Well, I left my home out on the great High Plains
Headed for some new terrain
Standin' on the highway with my coffee cup
Wonderin' who's gonna pick me up
I had my hopes up high. . .
-- Joe Ely
Well, somebody did pick him up. And then someone else
taught him how to jump a freight, and someone
introduced him to someone who knew someone who had a
couch in Greenwich Village, where he met a girl who
used to date a guy who ran a nightclub in New Orleans
that needed a guitar player. . .
Slowly but inexorably, by the mid-'60s, Ely had evolved
into the gypsy cowboy he'd dreamed of becoming when the
distant horizons of West Texas seemed as stifling as a
prison cell.
He bummed around for a few years, living for a while in
a basement full of theatrical props beneath Astor Place
in New York, where the adjacent subway rattled his
teeth on a round-the-clock basis. On a whim, he took
off for Europe with a traveling theatrical group, and
wound up slipping through the catacombs of Paris at
midnight.
He even hooked up with the Ringling Bros. folks,
playing wrangler to a herd of llamas and the World's
Smallest Horse. He wound up soaked in llama spit, and
the World's Smallest Horse kept biting him on the knee
("I hated that little bastard ."), but Ely got at least
one good song, "The Indian Cowboy," out of the
experience, along with a line on his résumé that any
red-blooded American kid would kill for: "Ran away and
joined the circus."
The road led back to Lubbock in 1971, where Ely hooked
up with two other Hub City songwriting prodigies,
Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock. They formed a
short-lived acoustic band, the Flatlanders. The group
(which also included saw player Steve Wesson, string
bassist Sylvester Rice and mandolinist Tony Pearson)
continues to exert an improbable but undeniable hold on
the imaginations of Texas music fans and
singer-songwriter aficionados on both sides of the
Atlantic.
There was just something about the Flatlanders. There
was the combined songwriting wattage of the three
principals, and there were the musical influences
ranging from Jimmie Rodgers to the Beatles to Mexican
border radio, and there was the curious synthesis of
folk music and lyrical sophistication that marked the
group. And there was something more. . .
The stark landscape of West Texas and the ceaseless
keening of the restless wind lent an almost mystical
resonance to the band's music.
Eventually, the band recorded for Shelby Singleton's
Plantation Records, which released a few copies of a
Flatlanders album on eight-track tape in 1972. The
sessions were finally released in the States on CD by
Rounder in 1990, under the apt title "More a Legend
Than a Band."
"There's some strange mystique about that band," says
Ely today. Although he and Hancock and Gilmore have
long since gone their separate ways, they remain close
friends and frequent guests on one another's shows and
albums.
[line]
"Musta Notta Gotta Lotta"
"There's two kinds of people in this big ol' town
The early to rise and the late to go down."
-- Joe Ely
"Joe is completely restless," says Terry Allen. "It's
almost like the stage is some kind of cage for him.
Normally, he would be out driving a hundred miles an
hour in a car, or going from one pool hall to another.
But on the stage, that energy is confined and it comes
out in that music."
These days, Ely works with a crack ensemble that
includes drummer Donald Lindley, bassist Gary Herman,
flamenco guitarist Teye, accordion player Joel Guzman
and two Ely band veterans -- lead guitarist Jesse
Taylor and pedal steel guitarist Lloyd Maines.
But even now, after a quarter-century of permutations
of the band, there remains a large minority of fans who
believe that Ely has never topped the group that blew
out of Lubbock in the mid-'70s.
The first Joe Ely Band had its inception with a
two-night stand at the Main Street Saloon, near the
Texas Tech campus, in Lubbock in 1973. Though the group
played that and subsequent engagements without a
drummer, the results were, recalled Maines,
"mind-boggling."
After a year of serving as the virtual house band at
the Main Street Saloon, Ely put together the ensemble
with which Austin fans first became familiar, which
included Maines, Taylor and, later, accordion player
Ponty Bone.
There are those, myself among them, who would put that
classic Ely Band up there with any of the timeless
outfits that popular music has produced, in terms of
sheer excitement and onstage combustibility.
Part of it had to do with geographical tradition; a
band's prowess in Texas has always rested largely on
how well it comes across live. Records were something
of an afterthought. "There's nothing I love more than
having a hot band on a Saturday night," Ely says.
"There's nothing else like it."
Taylor and Maines were and are the band's two
sparkplugs, and an unlikelier pair have seldom crossed
paths onstage. Taylor bristled with blues and rock
licks, and Maines, who played sweet country notes on
his steel, seemed sonically overmatched. But the two
guitarists made an explosive team.
"They start reading each others' minds -- clouds build
up, lightning comes out, and here comes the thunder,"
is how Ely puts it.
In the early years, Ely was all over the stage,
ricocheting from the speaker stacks to the drum kit,
bouncing off the bass player, winding up with the toes
of his cowboy boots hooked over the lip of the stage as
his body vibrated like a human question mark.
"It's always like a desperation with the music," Terry
Allen said, considering Ely with his artist's eye.
"Towards the music, for the music. And I don't think
he's changed that much. He doesn't physically move
around like he used to, but the intensity is, like,
doubled. He can do more standing still now than he
could do moving all over the stage before."
As good as the band was, Ely took them all to another
level when he hooked up with the Clash to tour America
and Great Britain at the dawn of the '80s. The West
Texans and the standard-bearers of English punk rock
found themselves in unanticipated sync, as Ely played
tour guide for the bemused Brits in the Panhandle,
while the Clash pushed the Ely Band to play with even
more damn-the-torpedoes intensity. Ely's classic early
'80s albums, "Live Shots" and "Musta Notta Gotta
Lotta," go a long way toward capturing the headlong
rush of the era.
After their return to the States, they embarked on two
years of non-stop touring, opening shows for the
Rolling Stones, Linda Ronstadt, Tom Petty and the
Heartbreakers, and still maintaining their own frenetic
schedule of honky-tonk one-nighters. The music got
hotter, the nights got longer, the shows got more
frenzied, and the band played as though the road would
go on forever and the party would never end.
But then it did.
[line]
"Hard Livin'"
"You can call out the sheriff and the highway patrol
There's a fool on the road careenin' out of control
Hard liquor, fast livin', Lord, I can't leave 'em be
And I wish hard livin' didn't come so easy to me."
-- David Halley
By 1982, the music and the miles had started to eat the
Joe Ely Band alive.
"It got into sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, full-tilt,
nonstop," recalls Ely without any remorse, but without
any perceptible nostalgia, either. He speaks of the era
in the tone in which someone might recall a long-ago
car wreck.
"Jesse scared me to death one night, hanging over seven
floors of a New Orleans hotel balcony by his
fingertips, sweating and laughing so hard we couldn't
pull him up. I had to run down to the floor below and
beat on the door of the people who were in the room. I
just busted through the room and grabbed Jesse's feet
from the balcony down below."
"After 'Musta Notta' and 'Live Shots,' we went out and
hit the road solid for two years, we barely even
changed hats. And at the end of that, the band just
literally self-destructed, fried, burned out.
"It just kind of came to a screeching halt on New
Year's Eve in '82," Ely says. "I had to make some
serious adjustments. Everybody said, 'I can't do it
anymore,' and I said, 'I can't either. I give up, I'm
surrounded.' We all knew it."
Then, in the early days of 1983, Ely's drummer, Robert
Marquam, was found lying on a frozen Lubbock street,
beaten to death under mysterious circumstances. For a
long time, Ely castigated himself for throwing the
young man out into the traffic of the fast lane.
Marquam's death was the nail in the coffin of an era.
After a period of rediscovering his music through solo
shows, Ely enlisted members of the Austin jazz-rock
ensemble Passenger to serve as his backup band. He
recorded one more album in 1984 for MCA Records, the
curious, computer-generated artifact "Hi Res," before
being dropped from the label. His daughter, Marie
Elena, was born the same year. "I wonder why I thought
for years I couldn't slow down enough to have a child,"
he told a reporter at the time.
Back in Ely's kitchen, he is reflecting on cycles.
After two albums for the independent Hightone label
(1987's "Lord of the Highway" and '88's "Dig All
Night"), Ely re-signed with MCA Records and released a
second signature live album, "Live at Liberty Lunch."
He had by this time assembled another bulletproof band,
a tongue-in-groove rock 'n' roll quartet that included
guitarist David Grissom and the rhythm section of Davis
McClarty and Jimmy Pettit.
"Anytime something is different, you can't rely on your
old tricks," he said. "So it's always good for me to
throw it all away and put it back together again.
That's the only way it keeps from getting old. . . .
It's been a good lesson for me to take it back to the
acoustic thing, to boil it down to the song -- not
being driven by the tempos but driving the tempos
myself.
"In the last few years, (the music) has kind of come
around to a South Texas version of the old Lubbock
band, and the songs reflect a little bit more of South
Texas and the Mexican border. Instead of being the
dusty old flatlands, it's more towards Big Bend. It's a
little more cinematic."
Ely's current cycle, from some perspectives, began in
March of '95, when he hooked a boot heel while hopping
over a fence and broke his shoulder and hip. Hobbled by
his injuries for four months, he began to reassess his
ways and means.
"Psychologically, the fall came at a point where I
said, 'Hey, I've got to look at things a little
differently,' " he says as he drains a glass of
lemonade. "I kind of rethought everything -- about my
house, my family, my music, my band. I found that the
things I was writing changed at that point, too."
Gradually, Ely's songs began to reflect the idea of
home as a refuge and a destination, instead of a
confining departure point. In life its ownself, he
began to spend more and more time off the road,
enmeshed in his home studio and spending time with his
wife, Sharon, and their daughter. In addition to
recording in his next-door studio, he has also embarked
on a second career as a visual artist, and his
paintings and prints have been featured in several
shows around the country. The image of Ely as a
homebody is enough to conjure a laugh out of him.
"I used to hate the studio! They'd have to come in and
nail my boots to the floor. I couldn't wait to get out
of the studio and find a pool hall.
"Now I find it real fascinating. I like working in the
studio, and that probably has a lot to do with not
feeling like I'm on the run all the time."
Joe and Sharon's daughter, Marie, is 14, a tall girl
with coltish good looks. She is at the age her dad was
when the road began to command his imagination. That
realization does not escape his notice.
"I'm glad Marie has a real strong sense of a home
place, because that is something that was taken from
me," he says, measuring his words carefully.
"My family was constantly on the move; my daddy worked
on the railroads and moving van lines.
"And when he finally kind of settled in Lubbock, he got
a little used clothes store downtown. That was kind of
the time when I developed a real love for Mexican
music, because he had this place way down in the lower
part of Broadway. And all the migrant workers who came
up to chop and strip the cotton and pull the weeds
would buy their clothes there. So I just loved that
period of time, with accordions on the street, and the
smell of corn tortillas, and the dance halls and the
lights. Part of Lubbock was like a little Mexican
village.
"That," he concludes wistfully, "was about a two-year
stretch of time where I felt like it was all right to
be in one place and be home. But that didn't last long,
because he died."
The elegiac tone in his voice suggests Ely has been
making his way back to that idyllic period ever since.
He reckons he is about half-way through the latest of
his seven-year cycles. His life revolves like a
slow-motion cyclone. But revolve it does. The
border-straddling, vividly visual songs on "Letter to
Laredo" and "Twistin' in the Wind" are the soundtrack
of a man wandering out into the High Lonesome and
finding his way back again. And finding himself in the
process.
Joe Ely and family dog Bruno visit
the bird bath in their garden at home
near Austin.
[Austin 360]
© Copyright 1998, Cox Interactive Media, Inc.
Visitor Agreement
All rights reserved.
[ Austin Chronicle]
Thursday, May 7, 1998
JOE ELY
Twistin' in the Wind (MCA)
From Larry McMurtry to John Ford, the mythologizing of
the Old West has shaped and defined as many artistic
visions as it has careers. Joe Ely has spent the 20
years since his MCA debut release bringing the high plains and
vistas of Texas and the Southwest to life, and on Lucky Number 13,
Twistin' in the Wind, he's finally penned his Lonesome Dove,
filmed his Searchers. Easily the Austin legend's best album since
1988's Dig All Night (beyond the fact that the new "It's a Little
Like Love" is a rewrite of "Settle for Love," and "Behind the
Bamboo Shade" has somehow found its way onto both albums),
Twistin' in the Wind stakes the fertile Panhandle ground between
restless rocking and delicate fingerpicking in a way not fully
realized on either of his last two releases, Love + Danger and
Letter to Laredo, distilling everything that's made Ely a favorite
Texas son. It's all on the album's first cut, "Up on the Ridge,"
as good a song as Ely's ever written, and certainly a classic
opener for a songwriter who's placed a lot of importance on
powerful opening sequences. Epic in its vision and sweep, the
song's melodrama and sense of something bigger ("Up on the ridge,
I gotta tangle with my fate") ebbs and flows with Lloyd Maines'
steel guitar and Jesse Taylor's ornery leads, and when the two go
head to head, it's just plain scary, like a barroom knife-fight.
In fact, it's a small army of guitarists that helps define
Twistin' in the Wind (Maines, Taylor, David Grissom, Mitch
Watkins, and Teye), with Best Supporting Augie Meyers Role going
to accordionist Joel Guzman. All that's left, then, are 12
terrific tunes that Ely wrote or co-wrote, from the atmospheric
title track to the Spanish-flavored "Queen of Heaven," the loose
`n' funky "Sister Soak the Beans," and a trio of slow-burners, the
alternately Sir Douglas saucy "I Will Lose You," the Western
swinging "Gulf Coast Blues," and the roadhouse raucous "Nacho
Mama." In the album's press, Ely is quoted as saying, "My whole
life is kind of wrapped up in the grooves of this record." His
life, his art, and his home. And yours.
4 Stars - Raoul Hernandez
[Billboard Concerts]
Joe Ely
La Zona Rosa
Austin, Texas
March 12, 1998
Reviewed by Ken Schlager
Amid the rush and tangle of South By Southwest --
Austin's annual music festival of some 600 acts -- there
was no more satisfying experience than a late-night
concert by Texas favorite son, Joe Ely. Performing in his
hometown, Ely hit the stage with an expanded band of nine
locals, including such Texas-sized talents as guitarist
Jesse Taylor and steel guitar/dobroist Lloyd Maines. Also
on hand was the high-octane flamenco guitar player Teye,
who fit seamlessly into Ely's rock-oriented ensemble. And
when you added in the occasional accordionist, various
guitarists, and several percussionists, you had the Ely
version of the big band.
Ely's repertoire is a rich stew of story songs
flavored with a blend of rock, country, blues,
and Tex-Mex influences. His characters can usually be
found in the roadhouses, border towns, and wide-open
Texas expanses that Ely obviously knows well. Above all,
Ely's specialty is the outlaw song, several of which
provided the highlights of this gig. Early in the set, he
galvanized the crowd with "The Road Goes On Forever," the
memorable Robert Earl Keen tale of the ill-fated lovers
Sonny and Sherry, whose lives outside the law come
crashing down amid a drug deal gone wrong. Later Ely
provided a new twist to Western iconography with his own
ironic "Me And Billy The Kid."
Ely's delivery on such lyric-intensive numbers was a rare
mix of patience and power. Guided by Ely's carefully
crafted arrangements, the band backed off during the
leader's perfectly enunciated vocals and then surged
forward for one soaring bridge after another. At times,
there were as many as five, or even six guitars wailing.
Yet there was never any sense of clutter or chaos, and
even the uninitiated could follow each phrase of Ely's
songs.
Which wasn't to say that Ely and band never let go. They
provided a rousing take of "Oh, Boy!," the classic tune
by Buddy Holly, with whom Ely shares the same birthplace
of Lubbock, Texas. "Settle For Love" also packed a wild
intensity, as patient vocals alternated with pounding
drums and searing guitars. For an encore, Ely again
dipped into his outlaw bag for "Letter To Laredo," which
served as the perfect showcase for Teye's magnificent
flamenco slashing.
Although Ely flirted briefly with rock stardom in the
early '80s, he now seems to have settled comfortably into
his role as a fixture on the Austin/alternative country
scene. But Ely's music deserves a wider hearing. His
recent releases on MCA ("Love & Danger" in 1992 and
"Letter To Laredo" in 1995) are among the decade's best.
And in concert, he displayed powers that many current
hitmakers can only dream about.
Ken Schlager is editorial director of Billboard Online.
Concert Reviews Index
Copyright © 1998 Billboard Magazine and BPI
Communications Inc. All rights reserved.
Hosted by Telescan Inc.
LEGAL NOTICE
Paper: Houston Chronicle
Date: MON 08/24/98
Section: HOUSTON
Page: 1
Edition: 2 STAR
Ely rocks Aerial with homegrownsounds and style
By RICK MITCHELL
Staff
Imagine if Bruce Springsteen's mystique hadn't translated
so well beyond the borders of his native New Jersey, or if
John Mellencamp's reputation had remained back home in
Indiana.
What those rock icons are to their home states, Joe Ely is
to Texas. His music proudly incorporates such regional
flavors as country, blues and Tex-Mex conjunto into
transcendent rock 'n' roll that sounds as good in a
roadhouse as it does in a concert hall.
But unlike Springsteen and Mellencamp, Ely 's following
has never grown beyond cult-level status, which made his
semi-annual visits to Houston's now-shuttered
Rockefeller's all the more special for those who were in
the cult. Imagine if Springsteen still played in clubs.
With opening act Carolyn Wonderland, Ely made his debut at
downtown's Aerial Theater on Saturday night. While the
hall was not sold out, the crowd of about 1,300 was close
to four times the number that used to squeeze into
Rockefeller's each night.
Whether because of the big stage and the supportive crowd,
or simply because he was glad to be back in Texas after
spending the summer touring the North 49, Lubbock's "Lord
of the Highway" responded with one of his most focused and
satisfying local performances in years.
Ely 's Austin-based band came out with both barrels
blazing on Robert Earl Keen's The Road Goes on Forever.
The band was missing pedal steel guitarist Lloyd Maines,
but it featured a revamped rhythm section of bassist Gary
Herman and drummer Donald Lindley. Ely 's vocals were
dynamic and charismatic as in the days of old.
The first half of the program focused on flamenco-inspired
material from Ely 's two most recent albums, Letter to
Laredo and Twistin' In the Wind. Teye, the
flamenco-trained guitarist Ely recruited from Europe,
traded stirring riffs with electric guitarist Jesse Taylor
on Up On the Ridge.
Joel Guzman, a highly respected conjunto accordionist, was
introduced on the Mexican corrido-style epic, Ranches and
Rivers. Behind the Bamboo Shade, from Twistin' In the
Wind, demonstrated just how seamlessly Ely has integrated
the flamenco touches into his style.
Just when you started longing for some straight-ahead
rock, the band would hit a new dramatic peak that reminded
you that Ely is on to something genuinely new and exciting
with this blend.
Taylor, Ely 's longtime Lubbock compatriot, was featured
on a couple of blues tunes, including a version of Johnny
"Guitar" Watson's Gangster of Love. Guzman returned to
play an outstanding squeezebox solo that exhibited his
range beyond traditional polkas and cumbias.
The latter part of the program revisited old favorites
such as Me and Billy the Kid, Everybody Got Hammered and
Buddy Holly's Oh Boy!. Teye left the stage during these
tunes, but Guzman stuck around to sit in, adding a
border-town vibe to Ely 's West Texas rock 'n' roll roots.
The encore opened with I'm a Thousand Miles From Home and
picked up momentum through Boxcars and Fingernails. By
this time, much of the audience - which had been seated at
tables in the Aerial's cabaret configuration - was up and
dancing.
Yellow-shirted security guards attempted to clear the
crowd from in front of the stage, but they relented after
Ely announced: "I like it better when they're standing."
(Memo to the Aerial Theater: Sometimes you just got to go
with the flow and let it rock.)
Called back for a second encore, Ely opened with Roll
Again, another anthem-in-waiting from the new album. He
then launched into an extended Cool Rockin' Loretta, which
boasted a blistering solo by Taylor and a climactic
audience sing-along.
He may never be a superstar like Springsteen and
Mellencamp. But once you cross that old Red River, hoss,
you enter a different state of mind. And the Joe Ely band
is still the best rock 'n' roll band in Texas.
Copyright notice: All materials in this archive are
copyrighted by Houston Chronicle Publishing Company
Division, Hearst Newspapers Partnership, L.P., or its news
and feature syndicates and wire services. No materials may
be directly or indirectly published, broadcast rewritten
for broadcast or publication or redistributed in any
medium. Neither these materials nor any portion thereof
may be stored in a computer except for personal and
non-commercial use.
[ Reuters New Media]
Friday March 27 8:33 PM EST
FEATURE: Joe Ely Kicks Up Texas-Sized Music Storm
By Matthew Lewis
HARTFORD, Conn. (Reuters) - When Joe Ely was 8 years old, around 1960, his
parents took him to see Jerry Lee Lewis perform outside a car dealership in
Amarillo, Texas, in the middle of a howling dust storm.
The youngster, whose family did not own a record player, was transfixed by
the surreal sight of Lewis in the dust storm, pounding away at his piano as
the wind toppled his microphone.
"I've always thought that might have been the day that I decided, 'Well, if
he can do that, I can do that,"' Ely told Reuters in a recent interview.
The Texas boy grew up to become a genre-busting maverick -- part rock 'n'
roll wild man, part brooding balladeer.
Although he never achieved the status of a commercial superstar, Ely long
ago made his mark on fans of American roots music. There are some who
consider his 1980 album "Live Shots," made on tour with the British punk
group The Clash, to rank among the greatest live rock albums ever recorded.
When The Clash embraced him in the late 1970s, no one was more stunned than
Ely.
"They were singing about the problems of modern-day London, and we were
singing about dust storms and the problems of relationships in the middle of
the desert," he said.
"They were completely different worlds, but that's kind of what makes music
so interesting, when different worlds collide."
Ely's description of the Austin, Texas, music scene in the late 1960s is an
apt summation of his own style: "It was kind of where rock 'n' roll met
blues met Mexican music met Cajun music and met honky-tonk stuff," he said.
After 20-plus years of making records, the Austin-based Ely is back with two
new projects: "Twistin' in the Wind," his 15th album, set for release by MCA
Nashville May 5, and a song in the new Robert Redford-directed movie, "The
Horse Whisperer."
The movie soundtrack album, also on MCA Nashville, is due out April 7. It
also features Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, Dwight Yoakam, Iris DeMent
and Steve Earle.
Ely's "Horse Whisperer" contribution, the song "The South Wind of Summer,"
reunites him with Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, his old cohorts
from the influential trio formed in the early 1970s, The Flatlanders.
Why did it take the three acclaimed songwriters, who have remained good
friends over the years, a quarter-century to get back together in the
recording studio?
"That's exactly what we wondered," Ely laughed. "I guess we're all kind of
on our own course."
Part of the problem is that the trio have never thought in terms of career
moves, he said. "We kind of think in terms of songs."
Ely found it so refreshing to hook up again with Gilmore and Hancock that
they are now mulling another Flatlanders album. The group is due to appear
on "The Late Show with David Letterman" in May.
The first batch of Flatlanders' songs, including Gilmore's classic "Dallas,"
originally were released in 1972 only on the ill-fated eight-track tape
format. They were re-issued in 1990 by Rounder on compact disc under the
title "More a Legend Than a Band."
The brief, eerily timeless album acquired a legendary reputation, due to its
very obscurity and the subsequent solo successes of Ely, Gilmore and
Hancock.
"It wasn't an album tailored to some radio format," Ely said. "It was really
just a bunch of friends sitting in a circle, singing songs that meant a lot
to them."
Ely's recalled that his love of music was nurtured by singing in the First
Baptist Church choir in Amarillo.
"My grandfather and everybody sang in the choir," he said. "I loved singing
in the choir. I was just transported to somewhere else."
He remembers being galvanized by hearing Elvis Presley singing "Hound Dog"
and "Heartbreak Hotel" on the radio.
When he was 12, his family moved from Amarillo to Lubbock, Texas. Ely was
amazed to discover that Lubbock also was the hometown of one of his idols,
Buddy Holly.
He found it remarkable that Lubbock in those days had no visible
commemoration of Holly, who died in a plane crash in 1959.
"It was almost like it was a bad thing to have somebody that was a rock 'n'
roll singer in your town," he laughed.
One day when Ely was 18 or 19, he picked up a guitar-carrying hitchhiker,
who turned out to be iconic Texas troubadour Townes Van Zandt, then unknown.
"We got to talking about music and stuff," Ely said. "He opened up his
backpack, and I was surprised to find that there was not one item of
clothing in his backpack. (There were) about 25 record albums. He just pulls
one out and gives it to me."
The album was Van Zandt's "Our Mother the Mountain."
"I went and found Jimmie (Gilmore) that night, and we played that album,
over and over 'til dawn," Ely said.
"It's funny, that was kind of the catalyst that caused me and Jimmie to
realize that we had to do something. That was when he introduced me to
Butch, and a few years later we did a Flatlander album."
The hard-living Van Zandt, revered among songwriters but never widely known,
died last year at age 52.
Ely is scheduled to tour Europe in April and early May.
He said his new album completes a cycle begun with his debut 1977 solo
album, "Joe Ely." It uses musicians who have been with him at various stages
of his career, including David Grissom, Lloyd Maines, Jesse Taylor, and
flamenco guitarist Teye.
"It's a little rowdier and more like the early honky-tonk records I did," he
said.
The restless Ely would like to record another live album, with more of an
acoustic flavor than his previous two live ones, but he is not certain where
his muse might take him next.
"I feel like there's another change coming," he said.
Reuters/Variety
VARIOUS REVIEWS OF THE LOS SUPER SEVEN CD - HEARD IT ON THE X
"Anyone who heard the so-called X radio stations blasting raw, wild, eclectic sonic contraband across the Mexican border in the '50s and '60s will feel an immediate fondness for this nostalgic tribute...Lyle Lovett, Joe Ely, Raul Malo, Freddy Fender and other X-rayed visionaries on the disc pay homage in vibrant, greasy and romantic performances befitting an outlaw legend." -- USA Today
This supergroup with ever-changing personnel (no longer limited to seven) is less a band than a bilingual concept and boundary-crossing vision. The third and most rambunctious release under the Los Super Seven banner takes its title from the ZZ Top anthem celebrating the Mexican border radio of the 1950s and '60s...However wide the musical range, the results rarely fall short of super. -- Amazon.com
"And Los Super 7, a rotating group that celebrates the Mexican heritage of Texas music, reconvened with more than a dozen musiciansincluding the singers Joe Ely, Rick Trevio and Ruben Ramosfor twangy, tootling Tex-Mex polkas, honky-tonk, rockabilly and rhythm-and-blues from the band's new album, Heard It on the X (Telarc). For bands with their eyes on the world, it was a reminder that home truths are worth keeping, too. -- New York Times
For pure, solid musicianship, they come no finer than Los Super Seven. The group, which includes members of Calexico, Joe Ely, Rick Trevino, Ruben Ramos, Augie Meyers and Max Baca, played a private party at Las Manitas, a restaurant/art gallery/ performance space before a packed, adoring crowd. LS7, as their fans call them, performed selections from their new album, Heard It on the X, out Tuesday, on Telarc.
The album features guest shots from Lyle Lovett, Raul Malo (who joined them for two songs tonight), Rodney Crowell and many more. It's just a pleasure to hear them play as they rumble through their fine-tuned "Border" music, which combines Tejano, rock, country and Tex Mex. It seems impossible that anyone could have as a clear and angelic a voice as Trevino or as steady a tone as Ramos, and they both wowed the crowd with their performances. -- Billboard
The ever-changing Tex-Mex supergroup Los Super Seven, which began as a seven-member Los Lobos spin-off, lit up a Saturday evening (3/19) SXSW party at Austin restaurant Las Manitas, plowing through an hour of songs that focused on their upcoming album Heard It on the X, ...For this show, Calexico, Augie Meyers and Max Baca formed the core backing group for rotating vocalists. Raul Malo opened by nailing the new album's lead-off track, The El Burro Song and The Song of Everything, and Rick Trevino, Joe Ely and Ruben Ramos all took turns behind the mic. Album co-producer Charlie Sexton added some mean guitar licks. Ely's shining moment came during his cover of Bobby Fuller's Let Her Dance, also one of the highlights of "Heard It on the X," while Ramos led a raucous rendition of the title track, an old ZZ Top song. Trevino, meanwhile, especially shined on Ojitos Traidores. All in all, an incredible jam session by some of the best players in the business. -- LiveDaily.com
Los Super Seven (which started as a Los Lobos spin-off) and their A-list friends cherry-pick those early hits to provide a glimpse into the beginnings of roots rock. Delbert McClinton gives Little Willie John's Talk to Me all the pleading soul it needs; Lyle Lovett's sly drawl and the smoking conversation between Red Volkeart's guitar and the pedal steel of Lloyd Maines makes My Window Faces the South swing like mad; and Clarence Gatemouth Brown's See That My Grave Is Kept Clean is as raw and powerful as anything he's ever cut. -- Phoenix New Times
Los Super Seven is backand definitely back in form. At Sunset on the Border, an intimate concert at Las Manitas restaurant on Congress Avenue Saturday, the mutating conglomeration of musicians lumped together under that numerical moniker performed a set that was an unquestionable South By highlight...Malo started it off with The El Burro Song, a mariachi tune, and his ballad, "The Song of Everything," his silky voice setting the bar for the evening. But the other performers had no trouble meeting his level of quality with the aid of about 10 instrumentalists so tightly crammed onto the stage, the horn section had to stand next to it. Ely rocked his acoustic guitar so hard on his song, Let Her Dance, that the other players simply had to get out of the way and let him go. Before Calexico, James Brown used to be the hardest-working group. Now Calexico is,quipped the ever-dapper Ramos before his delivery of the ZZ Top-penned title tune. These guys were obviously having way too much fun performing for an equally packed room of concertgoers, all of whom knew they were darned lucky to see the show in that environment, instead of the less cozy format in which the group was to perform hours later at Stubb's. -- Austin American Statesman
Seeing the Texas-bred act Los Super 7 seemed an appropriate way to close out the 2005 South by Southwest Music Conference & Festival. The Tex-Mex actwhose SXSW incarnation included such regional Luminaries as Joe Ely, Raul Malo, Ruben Ramos and Rick Trevinowrapped up Saturday night's festivities with a 1 a.m. set at the cavernous outdoor venue Stubb's. -- Hollywood Reporter
The ever-in-transition Tex-Mex collaboration Los Super Seven return in primo form and with a great concept on Heard It on the X (Telarc). Celebrating the radical music mix available on high-watt border radio stations from the 1930s to '60s, the set stirs up spicy roadhouse blues, horn-driven R&B, mariachi, Texas country swing, rock and acoustic blues. A-. -- Philadelphia Daily News
The results of the talent mixing and matching are rarely less than stellar, and highlights are found everywhere, from the album-opening "The El Burro Song," featuring Malo's singing and Calexico's playing, to John Hiatt's take on Doug Sahm's "I'm Not that Kat (Anymore)." Lovett has never sounded better than on "My Window Faces the South," while the accordion-laced cover of Buddy Holly's "Learning the Game," sung by Rodney Crowell, is a classy homage. Grade A -- Salt Lake Tribune
Musical standouts are routine here. Personal favorites include the two Doug Sahm songs featured here, Hiatt doing I'm Not That Kat (Anymore) and Malo on The Song of Everything. Straight-ahead West Texas rock and roll is ably represented by Crowell's eloquent rendition of Buddy Holly's Learning the Game and by Ely's pedal-to-the-metal reading of the Bobby Fuller Four's Let Her Dance. McClinton resurrects the greatest slow dance song in Texas history with Sunny and the Sunliners' Talk to Me Bob Wills and Western Swing are vividly recalled by Lyle Lovett's version of Wills' My Window Faces the South. Ramos, joined by accordion legend Flaco Jiminez, grinds out a funky version of Z.Z. Top's paean to border radio, Heard It on the X. And Brown, one of the great black artists working his own intensely personal and quirky vein of country music, ends the album with a heartfelt tribute to the great Texas bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson, with his workhorse song See That My Grave Is Kept Clean. -- CMT.com
Most so-called all-star sets suffer from too many cooks in the kitchen, but Los Super Seven makes the collaboration work. If there still were million-watt stations with this broad a format, the airwaves would be much more interesting. For now, Los Super Seven reminds us of what the magic was all about. -- Newshouse News Service
Here, the songs are excellent, performed by the right musicians, and the result is a highly enjoyable record for anybody into any of the featured artists or songwriters. -- All Music Guide
The sound is big and bruising and the performances are universally on the money. As a history less or a party planner, Heard It On The X delivers. -- LA City Beat
The latest installment of the Only Supergroup That Doesn't Suck is a Triumph. -- Austin Chronicle-Statesman
There is enough talent in this version of Los Super 7 to justify, say, 50 more albums." -- Star-Ledger
...a shimmering jewel of an album, and a reminder of the time when musical and media rebels eschewed genres and songs were hits simply because of the magic in their grooves. Every track is a champion and the CD is a winner all the way down to the smart and informative liner notes. -- Houston Press
In the space of 12 tracks, the diversity sounds seamless. Los Super 7, by mere virtue of its lineup, represents a modern-day version of border radio. These guys play what sounds good, boundaries be damned." Grade: A- -- Dallas Morning News
An exuberant, utterly delightful blend of blues, rock, mariachi, R&B and western swing, "Heard It on the X" is the third and easily best release from the Tex-Mex collective Los Super 7...4 Stars -- Detroit Free Press
A genre busting celebration of Southwestern and Latin music; from rootsy tejano kickers to heart-rending ballads to primal rocknroll to varying shades of blues. -- Mix Magazine
Most so-called "all star" sets like this suffer from too many cooks in the kitchen, but Los Super Seven continue to prove that they can make their collaborative work. If only there still were million-watt stations with this broad a format, the airwaves would be so much more interesting. For now, Los Super Seven are reminding us of what the magic was all about. -- The Republican
Heard It on the X travels through that landscape with unrestrained jubilation. You get the feeling that these accomplished musicians are playing songs that they love and they're determined to make you love them, too Perhaps the most important ingredient in this gourmet Tex-Mex buffet is the musicianship of Tucson, Ariz.'s Calexico, a crackerjack band of players that's spent most of its career musically scouring the borderlands that this album celebrates. -- Atlanta Journal Constitution
I Heard It on the X doesn't try to encompass all that border radio offered American listeners. But it does capture the intoxicating joltat once sexual and spiritualfelt by those turned on by the underground sound of the time. -- Nashville Scene
Los Super Seven bring a powerhouse band into the studio to play a dozen songs for this third offering, each tune pinched from an X station playlist. Theres a zesty Tex-Mex accent and superb playing. -- Harp
Think radio sucks? Wait till you hear Heard It on the X , a tribute to mid-'60s Texas playlist-free border blasters. John Hiatt, Rodney Crowell, Lyle Lovett, and the Mavericks' Raul Malo are part of this season's Seven (the third incarnation of the group), combining for what may be the missing piece in the O Brother, Where Art Thou?/Buena Vista Social Club puzzle. -- Esquire Magazine
"If aliens landed on Earth seeking a quick explanation of what Texas music is all about, Heard It On The X would handily serve as a definitive overview. And if America still enjoyed high-power, free form rebel radio in the X mode, every song on it might well be a hit." -- Texas Music Monthly
"Los Super Seven barrels through a rollicking collection that would burn up the dance floor in any self-respecting Texas roadhouse...With alt-rockers Calexico serving as the backing band, the crew careens from one highlight to the next." -- Chicago Sun Times
|
