In his own time

Poetry, song, blog and 'road rhythm' blend in Ely's jottings.

By Joe Gross
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, February 05, 2007

Joe Ely has a funny relationship with time.

Thirty-five years ago, Ely and fellow Lubbock musicians Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore formed a band called the Flatlanders and recorded a debut album that almost nobody heard. The record by the three sad-eyed cowboys of the highlands, a weird blend of Texas country, spacey folk and an almost Eastern mysticism, was considered a head scratcher by Nashville power brokers. The album was released on eight-track only, the band members went their separate ways, and the Flatlanders almost immediately entered the realm of American music myth. The album eventually was rereleased in 1990 under the name "More a Legend Than a Band." Joe Ely, 1. Time, 0.

After wandering the country and building a following back in his native Lubbock, Ely released his first solo album in 1977 and never looked back. In 1979, he even toured with the Clash, smart, scruffy British punks who worshiped Ely's embodiment of American roots like younger brothers wanting in on the big kids' kickball game. Overnight, he bonded with a scene only a few years and a musical generation removed from his own. Ely 2, Time, 0.

Since then he's become an Americana icon, the country-rocker who's never left the road, cranking out album after album, some better, some worse, always solid. Ely turns 60 on Friday. Today, he releases "Bonfire of Roadmaps" (University of Texas Press), a free-verse collection of his road journals and notebooks that spans the Flatlanders days to the 21st century, and "Happy Songs From Rattlesnake Gulch," a collection of complementary songs, some dating back to the mid-'80s. In March, Ely releases "Silver City," a set of songs written between 1968 and 1972 that Ely had never gotten around to recording.

Ely 3, Time, 0. A hat trick? A strike out? Whatever it is, Ely wins.

On the road again

"The shows have been going great. All sold out except for one," Ely says and one wonders just how often he's said something like that. Dude's been semifamous for literally half his life and playing gigs for 75 percent of it.

He's talking from a hotel room in Charlotte, N.C., He's touring with fellow songwriters Lyle Lovett, John Hiatt and Guy Clark. They're all on stage, they all take turns and they try not to step on each other's toes.

"The whole intensity of a show like this is brought about by the fact that there are no thrills," Ely says. "It's a guitar and song and a story, and it's not covered up with fancy-stuff solos and lighting. It's really right in your face."

A guitar, a song and a story: Ely's been keeping to that simple yet endlessly mutable formula for more than 30 years. "Bonfire of Roadmaps" collects nearly 200 pages of ruminations on music, the road and life during wartime (the two Gulf wars, to be specific).

"In the '60s, I started keeping a notebook in my back pocket, writing down ideas and sketches," Ely says. "I didn't have a camera, so that was the way I kept a record of traveling all around."

As he would go through the notes, he found that while some became songs easily, some were neither songs nor prose nor poems. "I found I was writing in a kind of road rhythm, like that drum beat that's on 'Folsom Prison Blues.' "

Ely wrote stacks of journals and they were never expected to see the light of day. They were just another way of subverting time, keeping memory loss at bay.

Here he is just after the Flatlanders called it quits and he headed for New York:

When you leave the familiar

And cross the line to everywhere else

Your soul leaves to a higher plane and gives your body

A free ride without so much as a ticket or a hand stamp

Some of the pieces even reflect the equipment they were written on. Ely was a notorious early adopter of technology. "I was writing one of them, around '87 or '88, on a little Radio Shack computer in the van, writing in the dark, hitting wrong keys," he says. "I left all of that in there."

To wit, from the chapter (not the album) "Lord of the Highway:"

Yor never cling to anything

until you feel a dangger of losing it

By then your ffear

has made3 you weak

"Someone called them rambling poem blogs," Ely says with a laugh. Once again ahead of his time? Maybe.

Off the Rack 'Em

But there are pieces of the past Ely can do without. One of them is record labels, which is why he launched Rack 'Em Records this year, at the cusp of 60.

"I just got tired of working at such a slow pace," Ely says. "When I could not get a company to put up money for a (solo) record, I just started working on something else, which is why three Flatlanders albums and two Los Super Seven albums came out in such a short period of time," between 1999 and 2005.

Rack 'Em, then, is another way to bend time, to speed up the process of engaging in the world. Ely's new album "Happy Songs from Rattlesnake Gulch" acts as something of a companion piece for the book, a compilation of songs written and partially recorded at all sorts of points during Ely's career. There are new rockers ("Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes," inspired by the Hurricane Katrina disaster) and older songs ("July Blues," which dates from '85).

"I'm looking at things as collections, not really thematic albums," Ely says. "I'd take this track and the beginnings of that song and just finish it. It was a really fun way to work."

Ely describes it as a hellraising record, swaggering in and out of hotels and backstages and crossing borders, much like the tone he's trying to get across in the book.

This is in marked contrast to "Silver City," Rack 'Em's second release and an album of old songs never before recorded.

"Last February, Lyle was playing one of Guy Clark's songs, one of the first ones Guy ever wrote, and Guy said, 'I never recorded that.' I thought, 'I have a lot of songs like that.' " The album squishes two Elys together, the aspiring songwriter and the veteran singer.

Speaking of this time period, Ely also mentions that he and the rest of the Flatlanders rediscovered an unreleased tape the band made in 1971 three months before the sessions that yielded "More a Legend Than a Band."

"We recorded the set in Odessa at (former Buddy Holly guitarist) Tommy Allsup's studio, and we didn't think about it much after that." The late Sylvester Rice played bass on the session, paid for the recording and kept the tape. Ely says Rice happened to tell Lloyd Maines about it a few years back, and Ely acquired the tape prior to Rice's death in 2003. Ely found a three-track tape machine at Capitol Records in Hollywood, mixed the session in '04 and has contemplated what to do with it ever since.

"It's a very innocent-sounding record," Ely says. If released, the early session probably would appear on New West Records, which still has a relationship with the Flatlanders. The trio, now more band than legend, plans to perform and record this spring.

And as he conflates the present and the past, it's easy to bring it back to Lubbock, where it all started.

"There's something about growing up in West Texas," Ely says. "That horizon is 360 degrees, and I was always just wanting to go over it. And I'm still in the van doing 35 cities in 45 days. I've spent my life in movement and it really is like being in the fourth dimension, like time doesn't exist."

jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926