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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (May 6, 1982)
Joe Ely: The Mew Pride of Lubboek by Paul Cullum “We like this kind qf music. Jazz is strictly for the stay-at-homes." —Buddy Holly “Hot dog I like it a iotT _joe ^ It’s a smoky yellow evening outside, still warm, and the Joe Ely band is onstage at some Lone Star dancehall, tuning up. John Lennon's just been shot a couple of nights ago, and the crowd’s milling around, not much spirit for the night ahead. Ely, a high school dropout from Lubbock with a passei of 5-star albums to his credit, hasn't looked at the crowd yet. So the band seems ready, and Joe faces the mike now, serious. “Y*ali heard the news?” And the crowd — as one man — thinks, “Great Whole world’s falling apart What next?” ... when Joe slams rhetorically into a Roy Brown standard: "Ya heard the news?/There’s good rockin’ tonight." Which sets off not just the catharsis, but elation bordering on gratitude. Or the time at Gruene Hall ( Texas' Oldest Dance Hall”) when the sheriff came out after 2 a.m to shut them down and Jesse Taylor, the bear-like guitarist, poured a beer in his hat (forcing them to dive into the crowd to have an escape). Or London at the Venue, when Ely and Butch Hancock were out after the show howling at the moon, and the bouncers tried to chase them down and kill them (forcing them to hide in a Dempsey Dumpster until a safe car could come around). , Joe Ely in concert is like no other— him charging and careening, flailing about, falling into the drums or climb ing up on the peeana He has more fun onstage than a white person has a right to. There’s lots of places we could meet, I’m thinking The Alamo Hotel, the sparkling and virulent Thirties brownstone where LBJ's brother de cayed from cancer. The base of the Texas Tower — count the sniper’s bul letholes out on the concrete mall. Some chili parlor or domino hall with a sense of history. Any old icon. ‘Tell ya what," — Ely speaking with that same goofy deadpan in his drawl — "you bring your tape recorder and meet me at the Austin Bowl-O-Rama” "Next up in mixed league competi tion, we got Hall’s Package Stores vs. tbe Lane Tamers on Lane 2, and Edgebrook Texaco vs the Hair Flair cm Lane 22 Parents, please keep those youngsters off tbe end lanes, we have a tournament going on down there ” "YTcnow," he’s studying the orange headpin now on the lane just in front of us, “there’s some real good sauce you can get at Tom Thumb grocery stores. It’s called Cox's Texas Hot Sauce, and it comes in a mayonnaise jar, from Dangerfieid, Texas. You try it sometime — it's de-licious.” Master of non sequitur. Joe is dres-. sed in a vintage British tweed jacket, black corduroy shirt and pants, wing tipped ostrich or something boots, silk scarf, and a blood-red bolo tie with tiny toy gun clasp That and the neo rockabilly chopped pompadour clump-swirl coiffure (compliments Yardley English Lavender). For a Lub bock boy who used to play for nothing but Rebel Tractor drivers, he looks to be out of place in any culture he could claim. Joe Ely was born in 1947 in Amarillo, Texas. His father worked for the railroad, as had his grandfather, so they shifted: from Amarillo to Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and then' Lubbock. He played from high school, tried out amps and guitars in the downtown stores, eventually starting to work in local clubs. Over the past ten years or so he's gone from being just another Texas secret to open ing for the Rolling Stones and touring with the di verse likes of Merle Haggard. Carl Per kins. Tom Petty and the Kinks, acting as Clash clown and Linda Ronstadt’s next trend to ride ("Honky Tonk Mas querade” on,her next LP), at long last putting two albums on the Billboard charts (Musta Notta Gotta Lotto and Live Shots), and bringing country music into the Twentieth Century. Peter Guralnick called Ely’s work ’’some of the hardest-hitting music of the decade” in Country Music maga zine. adding, “It has all the intensity, the singleminded drive, conviction and explosive originality of first generation rock 'n roll.” Rolling Stone found Ely's albums “Full of poignancy, insight and affection for the Southwest and its people.” The LA Times tagged him “... the most impressive male singer to enter country music in the '70s.’’ Twentieth Century-Fox approached Ely to star in Not Fade Away, a planned film biography of Buddy Holly that never got made. (Ironically, Gary Busey — later the star of The Buddy Holly Story — was to have played the part of Holly’s drummer.) Chuck Berry caught a 1978 Ely set in St Louis and, after midnight, jumped onstage to join the band on “Jambalaya” and “Moun tain Dew.” The corners in-between were packed up with a lot of his term, "col orful misery " He slept on the beach in Venice, California with a Fender Supter Reverb amplifier for a pillow, rode a lot of rails (“The Rock Island Express out of Amarillo, up east to watch the leaves turn"), played the subway cir cuit in NYC, and slept on the Staten Is land Ferry. He zigzagged around in the entrails of the continent, working as a fruitpicker, dishwasher, feeding the llamas and the world’s smallest horse for Ringling Bros., sopping up the scenery in places like Louisiana, Ar kansas. New Mexico, Old Mexico, Col orado — all those Texas outlands he’s been made responsible for. "1 helped build Angel Fire Ski Run up in Eagle’s Nest. Drove a concrete truck up and down that mountain, like to scare me to death. I was unloading hunnerd-pwund sacks of concrete and they asked could anybody drive a truck, so I said ’sure,’ anything to get out of loading concrete.” And could he drive a truck? “No, course not. But, y’know—you learn real fast, a-hurtling down the side of a mountain with about two tons of concrete right be hind you." Ely came into American radio through the backdoor of the English Joe Ely: Hard-hitting, fun loving Texas rocker Above, Butch Hancock and Jimmie Gilmore Head of the Balladeer Class Gilmore & Hanroek: The Hinds Behind the Songs A lot ot the hands who come through Austin, from V-2 to the Stray Cols, he lieve all those stories Joe Ely tells over in England — chicken wire across the stages to protect the bands, people shooting off guns inside of bars So in variably, they get depressed by all the redevelopment — fern bars, gentrifica tion, ossification, cartilage to bone, the spread of mellow capitalism up Sixth Street like a pastel disease After that, they generally like what they find: The Fabulous T Birds/Cobras/Stevie Ray Vaughan blues confluence The Huns/Re Cords/NorvelLs new wave exes nexus And the Emmajoe s aggregation Emmajoe's is the socialist roadhouse (named after Joe Hill and Emma Goldman* which is local home to the modem country crowd — people like Townes Van Zandt, Lucinda, Rank and File (formerly the Dils, premier West Coast punk outfit), Butch Hancock and Jimmie Gilmore. Hancock and Gilmore are always mentioned in tandem, probably a dis service, since both go back to the Flat landers, the Lubbock band circa 1970 that they formed with running buddy Joe Ely The Flat landers one album is finally on Charley Records as a British import Together they have written over a third of the songs on Ely's al bums. Jimmie Gilmore is responsible for “Treat Me Like a Saturday Night," ‘To night I think I’m Gonna Go Downtown," and "Dallas," three bal lads of subtle clarity They speak of loneliness and grey light, and the high gentle whistle of the Lubbock winds Technically, it was Jimme Dale and the Flatlanders Butch Hancock, on antxher hand, is the best songwriter in America This is not hyperbole In the folk poet tradi tion, singer-songwriter, one man/one guitar, Hancock is the best there is OttNNIS CjUUYlf. IMJBJNt, ‘Boxcars," “Pools Fall in Love," Wish in’ for You," "She Never Spoke Spanish to Me' (“All her favorite poets said/Spanish is the loving tongue .") — over and over again Perhaps his most accessible songs show up on the Ely albums, those on his own being more private, more mystical Bui there are gems like "Dominos" or “Own and Own," about Texas' rural to urban shift and things lost to progress, or the bal lad “Mario y Maria" (subtitled "Crym' Statues and Spirtin' Images”) which are shared between an audience of maybe 5000 people Hancock has five albums — West Texas Waltzes arui [rust Mourn Trot tor Tunes The Wind's Dominion (double), Dtanumd HUl, and two new live collections, 19H1 A Spare Odyssey, and htrewater (Seeks Its Own Level), with Jimmie Gilmore If he lived in Los Angeles and hustled the clubs on the Strip for five years, tie would be fa mous in more places than just Texas and Italy (where they love him) But that would probably kill whatever tt is that makes him Butch Hancock Han cock is also a practicing architect, makes video documentaries, once won an argument with the Soviet ambas sador over Afghanistan, and built the bar at Emmafoe s But those are other stories Hamuck s albums are waitable fur $7 00 from Drawer HIO, Clareruton TX 7l)2Jb press. Much has been made of his adoption by the Clash, their English tour, the oxymoron of that alliance But if the new wave was ever about anything, it was about structural integ rity -— purity of essence, reconnecting to roots of form “The first couple of Clash shows we did in England were really hilarious, the first time we were confronted with what would be a normal Clash crowd, y'know? Especially places they'd grown up, like Camden Town, were really rowdy crowds. They d be throwing stuff, and we'd throw back buckets full of ice. To me it felt about like a Satur day night in Austin That was the London Calling tour, and Joe s Live Shots LP was almost named Lubbock Calling Stateside, the Clash wanted Joe to open their Texas dates, and he ended up signing on for the rest of the American tour. (It's probably instructive to remember that the Sex Pistols said their San Antonio audience was the only one to respond with violence in kind Two thousand people in a concrete skate palace, guys with shaved heads and safety pins in their scalp, and this big cowboy saying, “If y ail'd just move about a c-t hair closer, we could get some more people in here”) “The Clash were playing Houston, Austin and Dallas on their swing through Texas, and they had a couple of days before they had to go out west, so I talked 'em into playing Lubbock They scared everybody there, it was great. Then they wanted to see the lights of Lubbock Vknow, there just aren't ux> many sights in Lubbock. So I showed cm Prairie Dog Town, the high school where buddy Holly played, that's just about it We ended up gening some six-packs and spend ing the night out at buddy Holly's grave Lubbock was where Ely came of age. where he took guitar lessons from buddy Holly's old guitar teacher, where at age 11 he saw Jerry Lee Lewis outside of Pontiac House ("There was Jerry Lee on a flatbed truck, wind blowing, dust everywhere .. .") It’s where he says he learned to shoot pool (He played a friend's wedding last year and took some Aspen devel oper types for about five hundred dol lars.) It’s where he lived through his first three LHs (Joe Ely, Hanky Tank Masquerade and Down on the Drag) The 6th LP, the one he's fast at work on at his lakehouse outside Austin, could well be the one to finally force him out of this cult gheno he's been reposing in the last four years Another Linda Roastadt LA-country album is a small enough price to pay "Bowlers, I'd like to remind you of the Diamond Jubilee next week, we'll he baving one shift and one shift only, and that wilt he the BOO shift Also, there will be a deaf tournament here It’s gonna he real quiet." “He say ‘Death Tournament'?” "I think he said deaf tournament "Oh, good Least we won’t have to hear all this racket."
