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Now It's Now Again with The Flatlanders
They say it's so flat in Lubbock, Texas, that the only way to produce an echo is to get one bouncing around inside a guitar. Or a train car. Or Both. And both are valuable commodities in the plains of the West Texas badlands, a place where one can learn that even the wind has a pitch. No wonder that America has hewn out some of its most praised musical sons and daughters out of the Texas Panhandle, Lubbock and surrounding areas. "I remember growing up there," says alternative country stalwart Joe Ely, who used to play Stubb's in Austin with Stevie Ray Vaughan for tips. "Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison had written some of the most amazingly beautiful melodies I'd ever heard in my life. I wondered where in the world they came from, because there were only a couple of record stores in Lubbock, and it was never a place with a lot of resources. When we got The Flatlanders together, it then became obvious. It was kinda like you had to have a good melody to fill out the space." Joe Ely, Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore are The Flatlanders. Outside of Lubbock, and aside from a cult following, few know of their legend collectively. Around the world, most have come to regard them separately as American pillars of alternative country. Now in their mid 50s, they were pillars long before the thing even had a name. It started back in the late 1960s, when longtime school pals Gilmore and Hancock met Ely in Lubbock's tiny music scene. At the time, the three were more coffee house ramblers, listening to folk, bluegrass and Dylan, exploring eastern religions, reading poetry, ruminating on the universe, turning each other on to new ideas, and turning them into music. "There's a weird story you may have heard before," says Jimmie Dale Gilmore in a conference call from Austin. "The thing that kinda catalyzed Joe and I really getting together was Townes Van Zandt. This is a true story, but you tell it, Joe, because it happened to you." "I was out driving one day when I saw him hitchhiking," recalls Ely. "I picked him up and took him to my favorite hitchhiking spot. All he had was a backpack and a guitar and he opens up his backpack and gives me an album. Nothing in his backpack except albums." "Not even clothes, ya know," adds Gilmore with a laugh. "He'd just come from San Francisco after recording it and was headed back home to Houston," says Ely. "So me and Jimmie took that record and just played it over and over and over." "That's really when we started hanging out all the time," adds Gilmore. "There was something magic about it," says Ely. "I guess it was the first time that we'd crossed paths with a kind of wandering vagabond that was actually out making records." "He was older than us," says Gilmore, "and it kind of let us in on the idea that maybe we could do something like this. We ended up being good friends with him years later. He was a huge influence on us. Not in copying his style or anything, but just his attitude. His musical freedom affected us a whole lot." What soon followed was the formation of The Flatlanders, a Lubbock staple of bluegrass-country-folk, a brilliant and occasionally zany party band that never took itself too seriously and even incorporated the musical saw as a primary instrument. Gilmore recalls that while at a party one evening in the early 1970s, some guests who had a contact in Nashville were moved by the unrecognized genius of The Flatlanders, suggesting they record an album. "We ended up going to Nashville and making this record," he explains, "and of course, those guys at this particular company had no idea what was going on in the music world at large. If they had marketed us right.... Well, who knows. We were more like The Byrds and, you know, the East Coast folk thing that was happening, but they tried to market it to country, and we were like fish in a tree. But we did make the record, which ended up becoming an underground, looming presence for our whole careers." The recording, released on the Plantation label in 1972 and including Gilmore's early hits "Dallas" and "Tonight I Think I'm Gonna Go Downtown," only came out on 8-track tape. (The album was recently inducted into the 8-track tape hall of fame.) "Only 50 or 100 copies were released," adds Ely. "It's pretty rare." It would be 10 years before the recording was re-released on London's Charley Records, and another 20 years before the album was released again for U.S. consumption on the Rounder label with the fitting title, More a Legend than a Band. After the initial 1972 release, the three Flatlanders went their separate ways, exploring the world and wearing a thousand hats while stealing each other's songs as they drifted through studios and stages, collaborating with numerous musicians and often meeting up on the road. They were friends for life. Ely, the prolific dobro Tex-Mex bandit, joined the traveling circus and apparently cared for the world's smallest horse, later heading through New York and Europe with a theater company, eventually to find his place as a budding underground country rocker, playing with everyone from Keith Richards to The Clash as he recorded over a dozen albums through the years. One of his latest, Los Super Seven, recorded with Flaco Jimenez and Freddie Fender, won Ely his first Grammy in 1999. Gilmore, on the other hand, became a sort of traveling student, moving around to study his own spirituality, even living in a local ashram for a time. In the late 1980s he went back to the studio and recorded his first of six solo country albums. His 1993 Spinning Around the Sun (Elektra) won him Rolling Stone's country music artist of the year, which put him on the Nashville map and garnered him some long-overdue critical acclaim that he enjoyed on his following two albums. You can even hear his distinct, warbling croon in the soundtrack for the new film Monster's Ball, when Billy Bob Thornton pulls up to the mailbox. Butch Hancock, the quiet drifter with distance in his eyes, is more like some colorful guitar-slinging desert rat straight out of an Edward Abbey novel. His biggest hit, "If I were a Bluebird," was recorded by Emmylou Harris. Often dubbed the last true Texas troubadour, after The Flatlanders, he went on to record nearly a dozen records of his own between being a photographer, a river guide, and building his adobe dream ranch near the ghost town of Terlingua, Texas, near Big Bend. (Hancock couldn't make the conference call since, as he explained late in the interview, "I was up on the roof installing my gutters.") The West Texas clock has a mind of its own, and it would be another 25 years until the phone rang asking the Flatlanders to regroup. The occasion was a contribution to Robert Redford's Horse Whisperer soundtrack with the song "South Wind of Summer." "We did a show in Central Park in New York after the Horse Whisperer soundtrack," says Ely, "and the New York Times wrote up a half-page story about us. Producers all around the country actually thought we had reformed as a band, so we got all these offers to go out and play. Coincidentally, we had been writing songs in the meantime, so we took the opportunity to go out and play." "This is one of those times when I'm looking forward to going on tour instead of dreading it," adds Gilmore, who's done his share of grueling road each year. "We've had so much fun together. Instead of us being like a 'working band,' getting paid a salary and per diems, we're going out with our friends and doing the thing we love most." The new Flatlanders album, Now Again (New West Records), produced by Joe Ely, is pure, raw Flatlanders through and through. Of the dozen songs, all were co-written with shared vocals and harmonizing by all three except the opening track, Utah Phillips' "Going Away," and "Julia," which was penned solely by Hancock. Swinging from the high lonesome ballad, a new version of "South Wind of Summer," to the barstool romp "I Thought the Wreck Was Over," and the Texas lullaby, "Now It's Now Again," what follows is an equally brilliant mix of truly intelligent, poetic, rocking country-folk that has come to embody the Flatlanders trademark. It's the same Flatlanders, but with 30 more years of road wisdom threaded into the texture. Those who know these musicians either separately or together know exactly what's in store at this rare live performance at the Boulder Theater, and anyone who misses this show does so at their own loss. On that West Texas clock, the next time could be a long time coming. Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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