Music

Joe Ely tells stories from his vagabonding music career

By CHUCK THOMPSON

It's 11:30 at night at Joe Ely's studio in rural Texas —  "the middle of my workday" as the 62-year-old singer-songwriter calls it — and Ely is fiddling with a guitar and explaining in a dusty drawl how to find his buddy Butch Hancock's house in really rural Texas.

"As Butch tells it, you drive from Austin west for nine hours till you fall asleep at the wheel; then you turn left and drive two more hours to get to his place."

Ely laughs at the joke and then is off and running with another story of palling around with Hancock and fellow Flatlander Jimmie Dale Gilmore back in Lubbock in the 1960s, how the famed trio that officially formed in 1971 have been friends ever since, and how over four decades the band, which has been called "the Fleetwood Mac of Americana," have become legends in their own time.

Legends, and the stories that make them, are something Ely knows a lot about. Throughout a vagabonding rock-blues-country-whatever career that began with him as a teenager in Lubbock hopping trains to California with a guitar slung over his shoulder, Ely has famously collaborated with The Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, Paul McCartney, Jerry Lee Lewis, John Mellencamp, John Prine, The Clash, Los Lobos, and countless others. Along the way he's picked up almost as many great stories as great songs.

On the eve of the release of a new Flatlanders CD and tour, we caught up with the hard-playing, easy-talking guitar-slinger to pick through a dazzling catalog of music and to sit back and listen to the man tell his stories.

On playing in Mexican bars as a teenager

"When I put my first bands together as a kid, we'd go to Juarez and Laredo and Villa Acuña [now Ciudad Acuña] and sit in with the bands in the clubs. It was a definite border in those days: You didn't really go over it often and the music definitely didn't cross that border much. But we went because they would let us in to the clubs underage. We were probably 16 or 17 and the bands loved us because they had deals with the bars to play 10 hours a night. When you have to play 10 hours, you love guys coming down and sitting in and taking over a set!

"There was one place in Juarez that had this guy — he called himself Big John. He was a blues singer that played every night in the same bar [Juarez's infamous Lobby Bar]. We used to sit in with him, and the next night we would go over and sit in with a mariachi band across the street and then come back and play some more with Big John. It was just great fun. Later on we found out that Big John was actually Long John Hunter, who had lived and played in Mexico for years then came back to the States and did some recordings for Alligator Records and has since become a real border-music legend."

On singing backup on the Clash's "Should I Stay Or Should I Go"

"That song was recorded at the Electric Lady Studios in New York City, Jimi Hendrix's old studio. I had become friends with The Clash in London in 1978, and I was in New York at the time they were recording. Joe Strummer called me and said, Come on down. I want you to translate this song we're doing into Spanish and sing on the choruses.' It actually turned into the verses. So, you know, Mick Jones, the lead singer, will sing, 'This indecision's killing me.' And Strummer and me are singing, '[Esta] indecision me molesta.' Then 'If you don't want me set me free.' And we sing, 'Si no me quieres librame.' Starting on the second verse, I'm singing all the parts in Spanish.

"One part in the song is kinda funny. Right after the second verse-chorus there's a breakdown and the drums are just playing by themselves and you hear Mick shout ‘Split!' What happened was that me and Strummer had snuck around the curtain where he was singing and jumped out at Mick while he was studying the lyrics and scared the dog s--t out of him. And he said ‘Split!' Like, you know, get the hell out of here! And they left it on the tape. I always die laughing when I hear that, seeing his face in the middle of recording."

On picking up Townes Van Zandt hitchhiking

"Around the time I first met Butch and Jimmie, I was driving a little beat-up Volkswagen on the outskirts of Lubbock and I see this guy on the side of the road hitchhiking with a guitar and a backpack. In those days, that was real unusual — musicians were few and far between and you'd never see anybody out hitchhiking with a guitar case. So I picked him up and told him I played music. He told me he'd just hitchhiked across the desert from San Francisco and had just cut a record. He had a box of these records in his backpack.

"Well, I took him to other side of Lubbock and dropped him off and he opens the backpack and hands me an album. I said, 'You made this?' And he said, ‘Yeah.' What impressed me most was there was no clothes in his backpack, just record albums. I said farewell and took the record over to Jimmie's house — his daddy had a turntable — and we ended up listening to that thing over and over and over with Butch. We listened to it every day for weeks. The songs on it were incredible. I think I learned four or five songs off that album [1968's now-landmark For the Sake of the Song] within the first week I had it. It was just a record that has always stuck with me.

"He kinda became our patron saint, I guess you'd call him, and we ended up running into Townes many times after that. ... I told him that story once of picking him up. He sang with me on an encore in a theater in Italy a couple months before he died. The thing with Townes was you never knew what to expect when you ran into him. He was a really amazing guy, incredibly intelligent, and a great songwriter."

On faking it onstage with Springsteen

"Bruce Springsteen asked me to come do a benefit at Madison Square Garden — I guess it was in the mid-'90s. One of the most frightening things that ever happened to me onstage, like 15 minutes before we walked onstage, he gave me a song to do that I'd never done before. Handed me a guitar and said, 'You sing the first verse.' The song was ‘Lonesome Valley,' which Woody Guthrie [wrote]. I'm thinking, Oh s--t. So I write some notes for the song down on my hand. But by the time it comes time for me to sing, I'm sweating so much onstage that the ink had come off! But we got through it somehow and then we did another Woody Guthrie song to close the show."

On helping launch Stubb's Bar-B-Que Sauce as a national brand

"Stubbs was born in Texas. His actual name was C.B. Stubblefield. He was the son of a Baptist preacher, and he picked cotton in Lubbock, then started this little barbecue place. His place was right downtown beside the Cactus Theater before he moved it to Austin. He was a colorful character around West Texas and just a really generous gentleman who had great food. He used to feed all the musicians who couldn't afford a nice meal. He'd have a free meal for everybody every Sunday after church, even though he was probably the brokest guy in Lubbock. So we all had a jam session at his restaurant every Sunday.

"My wife and a friend poured the first bottle of his barbecue sauce, and I made the label for it. We started the business here in our house near Austin. When I was on the David Letterman show, I got Letterman and Paul Schaffer to try it. I brought them a bottle of Stubb's sauce, and they were so intrigued they sent somebody to Texas to have me introduce him to Stubbs. Stubbs died about 10 years ago, right before his sauce really came on. The label has changed several times — I've still got the original bottles of sauce we made here in the kitchen — but there's still a picture of him in a cowboy hat and it says, 'I want to feed the world.'"

CD review

Hills and Valleys
The Flatlanders
(New West Records)

"For dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return." Although there's a spiritual current running through this latest evocative Flatlanders release — with casual asides to the Book of Revelation and crown of thorns — the dusty reference here is meant more literally. As in the West Texas grit you can feel seeping into the spaces between the steel guitars, accordions, and sagebrush vocals that color tracks covering musical ground from Tex-Mex to Americana to country rag. Whether it's nods to coyotes, wild horses, falling stars, and sad guitars on "Cry for Freedom," or the mortgage-crisis heartache of "Homeland Refugee," which follows a family from their foreclosed home in California back to the Dust Bowl their Depression-era grandparents fled, this slice of the Southwest is infused with all the terrible beauty and redemptive power of the desert sun.

— C.T.

• Visit Myspace.com/theflatlanderstx for tour dates and band information.

Joe Ely's Lubbock

Though he now lives outside of Austin, Ely grew up in Lubbock  — where his father owned a used-clothing store  —  and he maintains ties with his hometown. He shared a few of his favorite places with us.

• Buddy Holly Center With a main gallery shaped like a guitar, the museum features a permanent exhibition honoring Lubbock's most famous native, including Holly's Fender Stratocaster, clothing, recording contracts, glasses, homework, and report cards. 1801 Crickets Ave. (formerly Avenue G), 806.767.2686, www.buddyhollycenter.org.

• Cactus Theater Ely performs at this renovated movie palace once or twice a year. "I used to see movies there as a kid," Ely says, "so to play music in it has a special quality for me." 1812 Buddy Holly Ave., 806.762.3233, www.cactustheater.com.

• Bigham's Smokehouse In business since 1978, this "real pit-smoked bar-b-q" with three locations (Baby Bigham's on Buddy Holly Avenue — open weekdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. — is near the Buddy Holly Center and Cactus Theater) is an Ely standby, renowned for homey atmosphere and friendly service. 4302 19th St., 806.793.6880; 3312 82nd St., 806.797.9241; 1823 Buddy Holly Ave., 806.771.2227, bighamsbbq.net.

• McPherson Cellars Winery The winery built to honor Dr. Clinton "Doc" McPherson, a pioneer of the modern Texas wine industry, makes "about the best wine in Texas," according to Ely. Sangiovese, cabernet sauvignon, and grenache-Mourvedre are specialties. 1615 Texas Ave., 806.687.9463, mcphersoncellars.com.

• West Texas Walk Of Fame Though Ely is too humble to mention it — he was inducted along with Roy Orbison in 1989 — we'll add this short walk studded with plaques surrounding a larger-than-life Buddy Holly sculpture to Ely's "best of" Lubbock list. Waylon Jennings, Mac Davis, Tanya Tucker, and Jimmy Dean are among many fellow inductees. Near Lubbock Memorial Civic Center, 1501 Mac Davis Lane, 806.775.2242, civiclubbock.com.

— C.T.

Issue: October 2009