“Of all the wacky chance meetings in the world, I happened to pick Townes up hitchhiking in my old Volkswagen,” recalls Ely. “I told him that he didn’t have a chance in hell of catching a ride standing in the spot where he was. So I took him out by the strip, where the liquor stores are out in Lubbock, and he liked that a whole lot better. I used to hitchhike down to Houston a lot myself, so I took him to my lookout spot and he pulled an album out of his backpack and gave it to me. I took it over to Jimmie’s that night and we literally played it all night. We learned every song off that record. I can’t remember its name, but I think it was Our Mother The Mountain. I know it had “Tecumseh Valley” on it. But no matter which album it was, that chance meeting with Townes influenced the Flatlanders greatly.”
Gilmore agrees. “That record really did effect us musically. Here was this guy demonstrating what was possible, especially because we were so related to him, coming as we all did from a folk and country and blues background. And here he was actually making a record.”
Gilmore and Ely began gigging together shortly after that, with Ely playing bass on the demos that Gilmore recorded for Buddy Holly’s father. The two friends were also briefly in an outfit called the T. Nickel House Band and, for awhile, moved to Austin, where they sometimes worked as a duo. Even more pivotal, though, was Gilmore’s introduction of Ely to his childhood friend Butch Hancock.
“We all had returned to Lubbock within several weeks of each other,” recalls Gilmore. “This was in ’71. Joe had been in Europe, I had been in Austin [fronting the Hub City Movers, a band that played the opening of the Armadillo World Headquarters], and Butch had been in San Francisco. I was in touch with both of them, and at one point I said to Joe, ‘You know, I’ve got this friend who writes some really good songs. You gotta hear him.’ So we got together, and we stayed up all night playing together and laughing. There was just some sort of chemistry there, and that was the beginning of the Flatlanders.”
“That was kind of the beginning of it,” Ely concurs. “We were all totally involved in music, even though we came from radically different backgrounds. Butch kind of came from the folk world, Jimmie came from the bluegrass and country world, and I came from the rock ‘n’ roll world. It was a trinity that was bound to happen. So we just started playing together, not for any other reason than for the sheer pleasure of it. Soon we started sharing a house together. We only had to come up with 80 bucks a month between us.”
The house that Gilmore, Hancock, and Ely shared — on 14th Street, a stone’s throw from the Texas Tech campus — soon became something of a gathering point for Lubbock’s bohemian enclave. “There tended to be an underground culture in Lubbock,” Gilmore explains. “Through our whole period, through college and everything, there were usually three or four places that were almost always a constant party — places you could drop by anytime. So there was already like a tradition of that sort of thing when we moved into the 14th Street house.”
“Lubbock had an amazing underground arts community,” adds Ely. “Jimmie and Butch introduced me to all the old beatniks that were into folk music and jazz. And we found that once we started playing, it was almost like that whole movement found us. Before we knew it, our house had become the central place for professors and musicians and painters and dancers and poets and everything. All-night piano players, you name it. Everybody kind of gathered at our house. So we sat and played all night. We’d sit in the living room and play every song we knew until we dropped.”
“It was one of those crazy houses where somebody was always asleep and somebody was always awake” is how Butch Hancock remembers their place on 14th Street. “Sometimes the music parties would rage on ’til dawn. Actually, they were fairly mild-mannered. But we kept no recognizable hours. We slept out on the roof a lot. Usually, the gas man or mailman would wake us up. It was just one of those crazy houses; there were probably hundreds, even thousands, of ’em scattered across the country back then.”
Hancock’s song “14th Street”, available only on his 14-volume cassette-only series No 2 Alike, sums up those days in its chorus:
And the stars fell on 14th street
I was livin’ with some friends of mine
And the night sky burned in the city heat
But the fire must have been in our minds.
The lineup of the Flatlanders consisted of a fairly loose aggregation of pickers and singers, most of them regulars at the 14th Street house. The group’s core members of course were Gilmore, Ely and Hancock. But singer-songwriters John Reed and Al Strehli, as well as mandolin player Tony Pearson, fiddler Tommy Hancock (no relation to Butch), and musical saw player Steve Wesson all rotated in and out of the band as well. (Among the group’s other Lubbock compadres were singer-painter-composer Terry Allen, who was then living in Los Angeles, and Gilmore’s first wife, singer-actor-playwright Jo Carol Pierce.)
The Flatlanders gigged a lot in and around Lubbock and Austin, mostly at clubs, parties and goat roasts. But according to Hancock, their favorite place was the Town Pump in Lubbock. “It was in a little old strip mall on Fourth Street,” he explains. “It was sort of a seedy place — gambling, and they say a prostitution ring ran right out of there. But it turns out the only trouble we ever ran across down there was from the tenants next door. They met at night. It was one of those success groups — motivational training, you know. One of them stabbed somebody in the alley one time. I guess they got motivated.”
Gilmore, Ely and Hancock remember the Flatlanders playing the Armadillo Beer Garden in Austin, and at the very first Kerrville Folk Festival in 1972 (with former president Lyndon Johnson in attendance). The group also had followings in Los Angeles and Berkeley but didn’t give any thought to recording until they hooked up with Royce Clark at a Christmas party in Lubbock in 1971. Clark worked as an independent producer at Shelby Singleton’s Plantation label in Nashville. Clark made some demos with Gilmore, Ely and Hancock in Odessa, Texas; in February 1972, the four men, along with Wesson, Tommy Hancock and upright bassist Sylvester Rice, headed to Nashville to cut an album for Plantation.
The music that emanated from those sessions — a sort of hippie take on the high lonesome sound — was unlike any that came before it or followed in its wake. Granted, there were no psychedelic guitar freakouts; in fact, the only experimental nod on the group’s all-acoustic debut was the eerie whine of Wesson’s saw, a high-pitched whir more akin to a theremin than the steel guitar it mimicked. Not only that, the band’s drummerless, country- and folk-rock was downright economical, with each of the record’s 17 songs running two to three minutes.
