Plain and Fancy: Joe Ely - Joe Ely (1977 us, remarkable country rock, 2007 remaster)

Saturday, June 1, 2024

Joe Ely - Joe Ely (1977 us, remarkable country rock, 2007 remaster)

Driving across West Texas can feel a little like piloting a Mars rover: life signs minimal save for the stray prairie dog, an endless sky suffocating overhead. The cities of Amarillo and Lubbock appear like distant waystations on the horizon, first as hazy mirage and then as reality. Even within those denser zip codes, a profound alienation hangs in the air, a truly physical awareness of how distant your existence is from the rest of the state. Yet the isolation of West Texas has served as an incubator for a distinct kind of futurism, one best symbolized by the Cadillac Ranch installation outside Amarillo: a slash of modernism cutting against a landscape that’s flatter than Hank Hill’s ass.

This barren country gave birth to early rock pioneers like Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison, whose electrified guitars were signal conductors connecting remote listeners to the big city, like telephone wires across an empty highway. As a teenager in Lubbock in the early 1960s, singer-songwriter Joe Ely proved particularly receptive to the transmissions of rock’n’roll. Though his music might be branded Americana, Ely has always had a rockabilly soul, emphasizing the shared rhythm-and-blues roots that country and rock sprang from. In a career that stretches back more than 50 years, Ely found success as both a regional superstar and international cult favorite, even if mainstream American recognition often seemed to elude him—a songwriter’s songwriter, as they say.

Ely’s musical career formally began with the Flatlanders, a group filled out by high school pals Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock. The trio would become something like the Velvet Underground of Texas music—“more a legend than a band,” as the title of a compilation would describe them years later. Their hippie-adjacent cosmic sound, all group harmonies and neo-Buddhist koans, is a far cry from the rough and rowdy ways of Ely’s solo work. Before the group reformed in the 1990s, Ely gave their songs his own interpretation; Honky Tonk Masquerade’s version of “Tonight I Think I’m Gonna Go Do Town” adds a baritone grit where Gilmore’s voice is gentler.

After the Flatlanders’ first run, Ely would live the kind of rambling life that makes for good country music, imbuing his work with both a droll absurdity and a deeper sense of yearning—the odd jobs he kept during the mid 1970s included time as a roadie for the Ringling Brothers Circus. As a solo performer, Ely would cut his teeth on the same dive-bar circuit as bluesmen like ZZ Top and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and that raucous energy has remained at the core of his music.

With his first solo albums, Ely became a surprising sensation in Europe, where he befriended the members of the Clash on tour. If you listen closely to the Spanish-language vocals on “Should Or Stay or Should I Go,” you can even hear Ely’s drawl doing backup duty, the first of many jam sessions between the two bands. What Glen Campbell was to the Beach Boys or Dylan to the Beatles, Ely became to the Clash, kindred souls whose mutual genre-bending sensibilities fostered an organic exchange of collaborative energies. In line with punk’s primal instincts, Ely was also returning to the origins of rhythm and blues, with a delinquent spirit and mod-leaning look not too far removed from the California cowpunk of X and the Gun Club, part ranch hand and part Lynchian highway drifter.

Ely’s 1977 self-titled LP is sparse compared to the fuller sound of subsequent records, but it demonstrates the development of his hybrid style and an ear for textured production. It’s also the most Flatlander-esque of his early solo work, with tracks like “Treat Me Like a Saturday Night” bearing the distinctive wistfulness of Jimmie Dale Gilmore. The record is still grounded in acoustic guitar, but the big-band sound Ely became known for is bubbling underneath, with a cameo from the Muscle Shoals horn section on “Johnny’s Blues.”

On the Butch Hancock-penned “She Never Spoke Spanish to Me,” Ely plays with Tex-Mex flavor more for novelty’s sake. Despite the radical transformations country music has undergone in the last 50 years, Ely has somehow weathered them all. In the ’70s.

by Nadine Smith, March 21, 2023